I Are What I Et

by Dennis Green

After six heart attacks, bypass surgery, and five stents, including a “stent sandwich,” (a stent within a stent), I got the message. I’m also an old, stove-up cowpoke so don’t run, ski or even manage to do my T’ai Chi anymore. So I changed my diet, radically.

I don’t eat beef, pork or chicken anymore. Only “Wild Alaskan Salmon” and occasionally Rainbow Trout or Dungeness crabmeat. I avoid processed food and limit myself to potatoes, beans, fresh sweet corn, crisp lettuce and cucumber sushi. Yummy!

My cholesterol numbers are way down from an unhealthy 220, to under 80 points, ten points below my partner Diane, who runs several miles every day. I got a congratulatory email recently from my cardiologist, and feel better than I have in years, with all that Omega-3 and fish oil, even walked the other day several miles to, from and around the Tut Exhibit.

I still indulge in some sinful foods and snacks — love Kit-Kat wafers, Dreyer’s “Fun Flavors” Mocha Almond Fudge ice crème, and a pint O’Guinness just about every day. But I also drink iced tea and V-8 and plain old spring water. I don’t think of myself as “Vegan” or even as being on a diet. I just don’t care for certain foods.

I was teasing a playwright friend the other day, as he scarfed into a big piece of fall-off-the-bone chicken, with that old saying, “You are what you eat!” and he made a clucking sound. I thought he was going to lay an egg. And I’m sure those salmon I devour once had intelligent life within them, as you know if you’ve ever tried to coax one with live bait or a lure…

So I’m not getting up on some moral high horse here. But then, a report comes on PBS about what the fast food industry has done to the whole food system in America — not just the industrial feedlots and farming, nor the toxins and food poisoning that actually kills people, but how completely unregulated the whole thing is. The FDA has very little power, and less now than it’s had in decades.

The number one subsidized crop that so many of our tax dollars are going to support? Corn. And corn is processed into almost everything else we eat or buy, including the little fiber plate you get your burger on at McDonald’s, the company that buys more ground beef and more potatoes than any other company in the world.

Salmonella is only the most frequent and obvious offender when it comes to sickness and even deaths from food poisoning. It has been found on everything from spinach, (“I yam what I yam and I likes what I yam!”), to grapes and apples. An apple a day? Depends on where it’s been…

Slow food, local farms, organic farming and other movements against the big, industrial agribusiness practices create a rare patch of common ground among food lovers who also are willing to pay a little more for wholesome and delicious food. I’ve switched my own buying from Safeway, (and how “safe” is that?), to Trader Joe’s, where the fish is mercury-free, or the Farmer’s Market, and buy very carefully.

There are even more reasons today to watch what we eat than there were in the Sixties, when these questions began to be asked for the first time. For me, it’s not a religious or spiritual matter at all, but just uncommon sense.

©2010 Dennis Green

The Afterworld

by Dennis Green

The tomb of King Tutankhamen was discovered in 1922 by Howard Carter, sparking a huge interest in Egyptian mythology, symbols and artifacts. I have acquired a few relics from that surge of interest, an old 1920s mirror in the shape of an Ankh with images of Isis upon it, (a slightly smaller replica of the one in the current King Tut exhibit), and two friezes from the old Grand Lake Theater in Oakland — one of Isis upon her golden throne and another of her son Horus sitting on his, the falcon-headed god who helped her find in the Underworld, and resurrect, his father, Isis’ consort, Osiris.

Many misunderstandings surround the Tut Exhibit, which we just saw at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco Friday. One is that Tut’s father, Akhenaten, was a monotheist. (He merely put the Sun god it the ascendant, a move which Tutankhamen rescinded). Another is that the “Afterworld,” the “Next World,” the “Other World” was somehow comparable to our notions of heaven and hell.

But for the ancient Egyptians, this world, all of existence, is positively infused with magic and mystery. The “Afterworld” is not out there somewhere, or in the distant future, but right here, right now, underlying all of what we experience with our more prosaic five senses. Their symbols are envisioned as a means of enabling us to see that parallel reality.

The two serpents emerging from Tut’s forehead, the Cobra and the Asp, are merely examples of the “Serpent Power” he exercised.

Like all religious symbolism, it is very esoteric to someone who doesn’t share the culture or the belief system. The ubiquitous Cobra, representing Serpent Power, is a reminder that given proficiency in the discipline of meditation, borrowed from the yogis of India, one can unleash and manifest a primal reptilian force most people never know.

The Ankh itself, that “cross with a handle,” which combines the symbol for “life,” and for female and male energies, also represents infinity, eternity, but especially, as William Blake puts it, “To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour.” The ineffable, it precedes the cross later adopted by the Christians.

I am convinced from hours of meditation upon the symbol, wearing several versions, including the Peruvian Ankh, which features the loop without an opening, that the loop itself represents the female sex organ, and the “stem” represents the male’s, while the crossbar, or horizon, is the place where heaven and earth meet. If the closest most humans will get to eternal life is procreation, then the symbol makes all the more sense.

And the Egyptian religion, unlike the Judaic, glorifies sexuality, celebrates it, doesn’t fear it, honors the female in Isis, rather than demonizing her as the “Whore of Babylon.” She was, in different eras, consort to Osiris, to his brother Set and even to her own son Horus. “Incest is best,” or “It’s all in the family..?” Whatever.

Half-sisters, brothers-in-law, mother doers…no wonder the Israelis, sex-phobic in some ways, recoiled in horror. “Captivity” meant being subjected to such values and cultural norms. No wonder Moses parted the Red Sea to get them the hell out of there!

©2010 Dennis Green

Casual Fridays

by Dennis Green

There’s an interesting theory abroad that “business casual” dress in the office has undermined our culture and our values as a civilization. These pundits ignore the fact that American workers, especially in Silicon Valley, are more far more innovative and productive in the past 30 years — U.S. productivity up 70% since 1979, while wages have risen only 26% — than in all the years before that.

Steve Jobs is often mentioned as the paragon of casual dress for success — in his Levis and turtleneck sweaters and running shoes. Such apparel is ubiquitous in technology firms like Apple and Google, at Lucas Films and Skywalker Sound. And it marks a cultural shift, indeed, but not the one deplored by fusty old conservatives.

It isn’t simply that casual dress is more comfortable than suit and tie, but that many of us, especially in more creative fields, distrust the Suits, regard them as phonies, authoritarian, emblematic of an Establishment of another time. Their uniforms, their conformity, the “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” syndrome — all reek of narrow-mindedness.

Someone gave me a subscription once to GQ Magazine, thinking I would enjoy the fiction and maybe even submit to the editors some of my own. I was appalled by the conformity — of the clothing, of the ideas, of the snarky tone of voice that permeated the magazine. My God! You pick up any woman’s magazine, and no two women look or sound or seem to think alike.

What’s wrong with my gender, anyhow? In a recent exchange among readers of Reason Magazine, (a Libertarian pub), we saw the following: “I don't get it. Dockers are no more comfortable than ‘dress pants,’ and unless you don't know how to size your shirts, buttoned collars with a knotted tie shouldn't feel any more restrictive than anything else. (The only thing that would actually be quantifiably more comfortable would be shorts, but I sure as hell don't want to look at my colleagues like that.) So suck it up and put on a tie you goddam hippies.”

So there it is, the great cultural divide, the old (or young) fogey telling us to just get with the program. And like most bullies, he sounds very insecure. But I also suspect that he regards himself as a paragon of male virtue, the very embodiment of what it means to be a man.

But no more. “Free to be you, free to be me” applies to us all, not just women and little children.

I quit being a wage slave in 1981, started my own business, and never looked back. And a big part of what I left behind was the dress code. Like Jobs, I adopted turtlenecks and open collared shirts, often under a leather jacket or corduroy sport coat, or even velour. But I also grew a beard and gladly gave up the necktie, the noose. I stopped going to corporate lynchings and “necktie parties” at about the same time.

And in the new culture, in the world of entrepreneurs, your skills and creative abilities, your knack for connecting with clients and “users,” is much more important than appearing in the uniform of the supposed professional, “Sharp Dressed Man.” Sometimes, thinking outside the Suit is even more important than getting outside the box. Or, as Warren Buffett says, “What box?”

If dress is really all about costuming, and self-expression, or adopting a new persona, then it might be true that more innovative people will find costuming that is a little off the standard stage set. Even Sgt. Pepper wore those uniforms only for the album cover photo shoot!

©2010 Dennis Green

Honest Reporting

by Dennis Green

While it is obvious that honest reporting means you don’t just run the latest press release verbatim, it is perhaps less obvious that simply telling your readers what goes on at a public meeting is also a short cut that short-changes their understanding of the issues at hand. Those meetings are orchestrated, staged, and no one except the occasional maverick ever gets off-script.

So you need to go deeper, and that’s obvious to anyone who has ever dabbled in journalism as I have. At the very least, if you’re doing a story about the Alameda schools, you need to interview Kirsten “Person of Interest in an On-going Investigation” Vital, and ask her a few questions:

1) If State money is being taken away from the schools, where is it going instead?

2) What forces in Sacramento are so powerful that not even the teachers unions have the strength to go up against them?

3) Why don’t you, and the AUSD Trustees, lobby the county and the state for more equity in funding for Alameda schools?

4) Why is there so much money apparently available for re-development and not for education?

5) Is it really easier to go to the local voters and taxpayers for more parcel taxes, new and larger taxes every few years?

6) Are you stacking the election in your favor by doing it by mail and by exempting seniors from paying the tax while allowing them to vote?

Unless you at least pose such deeper questions, you’re merely scooting along the surface of the pond like a June Bug. And your more thoughtful readers will have those questions on their minds and wonder why they don’t apparently occur to you, the thoughtful editor.

The problem with many of the new blogs and “news web sites” is that they are driven by people without any experience as journalists, as true reporters, asking deeper questions, the tougher questions to think of and to answer. Such probing journalism is so rare online that when it happens, word gets around.

Unfortunately, it’s also all too rare these days in print journalism, where corporations have taken over and are driven more by the need to show a profit than to tell the truth. When the threat to cancel advertising, by, say, a restaurant, prevents an editor from running a food reviewer’s critique of the menu, journalistic integrity goes right out the window.

Even some smaller publications suffer this advertising trepidation, but it is almost universal in the corporate journalism mindset. Many readers hungry for deeper coverage of the news, and especially stories that might be somewhat controversial, will remain ravenous. I wish this were not the case, but apparently we’re stuck with the extremes of tepid shallow journalism or the rabid shouting of talk news shows.

©2010 Dennis Green

The Appearance of Impropriety

by Dennis Green

“And let us not talk falsely now,

the hour is getting late!”

— Robert Zimmerman

Colleague David Howard, who headed up the “Action Alameda” opposition to Measure B, and publishes the “Action Alameda News” web site, is hot on the trail of apparent inconsistencies in school district practices. Knowing my interest in AUSD’s upcoming proposal for a huge new parcel tax, he’s keeping me posted.

As even the Bible says, “The mere appearance of impropriety” can taint a person’s reputation, and these apparent improprieties Howard has uncovered come at a time when the AUSD needs all the credibility it can get. What’s going on?

Well, one school board “Trustee,” (title not ironic), Mike McMahon, has a wife and a daughter both employed by the district. The wife works as a secretary at Paden school, and the daughter was hired last May as Webmaster to “Design and Manage the AUSD Website.” (Or something. Her story is still unfolding, and now she says she’s been employed by AUSD since 2004…)

But in August, School Superintendent Kirsten Vital signed off on an invoice for “Website Redesign” performed between May—August by an outside firm, Erwin & Muir, which bills itself as a “Public Affairs and Political Consulting” company, with no apparent expertise in website design or computer programming, an invoice for $14,000.

There is no breakdown on the invoice, but even at $140/hour that amounts to a bill for at least 100 hours of Erwin & Muir’s time! On the face of it, that invoice is very suspicious. I operated Lazzari & Green Advertising for more than 20 years, and know how massive such charges are.

The school district trustee’s daughter says that the work had already been done when she started in her position as webmaster, but in my review of changes to the AUSD website, I see no plausible outcome of 100 hours of labor — no matter who was hired to do it. The county auditor signed off on this invoice and payment approval, but only to verify that the funds were there to cover the charges, not that the invoice is genuine. Some other auditor will have to verify that fact.

Meanwhile, there is, apparently, no paper trail, no contract, no cost estimate, no detailed charges to back up that invoice. So what’s the big deal? What’s the mystery?

Well, by law, the AUSD — its Superintendent and its trustees — are prohibited from campaigning to pass that upcoming parcel tax. Erwin & Muir, on their website, take credit for passing the last Alameda school parcel tax, Measure H, but so does a firm calling itself now “A-Plus,” formerly KASE. Another AUSD trustee, Ron Mooney, president of the school board, had some personal involvement hiring KASE. And his son, William, also serves on the board as “Student Representative.”

The California Education Code 7054 (b) (2) reads that any information produced for the citizens must adhere to certain standards, and is illegal unless: “(2) The information provided constitutes a fair and impartial presentation of relevant facts to aid the electorate in reaching an informed judgment regarding the bond issue or ballot measure.”

Meanwhile, Superintendent Vital nominated Maggie Muir and Maureen Erwin to an “advisory group” to aid her in developing the AUSD “Master Plan.” Apparently without any compensation for such service…which might well be illegal and unethical.

If all this begins to sound like a can of…conflicts of interest, you might be right. Trustees who don’t recuse themselves from voting on matters that impact family members…a Superintendent who skirts the letter of the law, perhaps, while apparently scoffing at its spirit…only one Trustee, Trish Spencer, who appears to vote regularly against such irregularities… where does it all end?

It ends when we the voters defeat the parcel tax initiative and then vote the offending Trustees out of office.

©2010 Dennis Green

Learning & The Virtual Classroom

by Dennis Green

Very young children learn more readily from social interaction, a live teacher, than from a TV set. But by the age of five, those same children display an amazing aptitude to learn from a video or computer screen. The first evidence of this phenomenon may be observed in the aptitude children show in learning to play video games, from either the handheld sort, computer-driven, or on a TV screen.

Young children are also notoriously better at performing tasks on computers than grown adults are, the reason that person on the Help line often asks, “Do you have a child under 12 in the house?” But fogies old and young will say, “These kids of today spend too much time playing video games, or texting on their smart phones or fooling around on social networks instead of playing outside like we did when we were kids!”

Tut-tut.

And many educators — especially classroom teachers — feel very threatened by the notion that new technologies can not only enhance the learning experience, but in some ways revolutionize the classroom model that hasn’t otherwise changed in centuries. But I suspect that even Plato, Aristotle and Socrates would applaud the virtual classroom.

Pedagogues don’t have to be pedantic. Their resistance is understandable, a fear that computer learning will replace the live teacher, or somehow weaken his powerful dominance of the classroom, his fiefdom. But the economies of scale insist that in school districts where staff and faculty salaries and benefits equal 94% of the total budget, and deficits loom, some innovations in the classroom must come about.

Already, computerized lessons and supplements are enriching the learning experience for many students in America. Private, entrepreneurial geek squads are creating, for example, math lessons that can be streamed to laptops and, for students who need it, can be repeated and reviewed. Most of these lessons are distributed free of charge to school districts, and the companies that create them make an income offering special, tailored tutorials to students who fall behind, at a lower cost than conventional tutoring.

There are even online technology classes where students from across the country, or the globe, can study together.

Why shouldn’t students even in the poorest school districts enjoy the performances of the very best classroom teachers via satellite or computer networking? There will never be enough of such teachers to go around, and outmoded teachers’ colleges and programs aren’t turning them out fast enough. But the so-called teaching “shortage” is part of the mythology that says great teachers never burn out and begin phoning it in, let alone those who were mediocre to begin with.

The “15% Rule” — the one that says only 15% will excel at any trade, skill, craft or profession — is just as true of teaching as it is of medicine. You probably don’t want your kid getting a teacher from the bottom 15% any more than you want a cardiologist from that portion of the medical school graduating class performing your bypass.

But only 15% of the classroom teachers nationwide could educate ALL of America’s students if we gave the virtual classroom half a chance. Online education is becoming ubiquitous, and Phoenix University is only the best known of many such institutions, probably not even the best, but graduating thousands of students nationwide every year.

So as an old-time bikhu and former classroom teacher myself, I welcome all the new technologies and advances. And as a member of the top 15% of my graduate class, I never needed tenure or a union to survive!

©2010 Dennis Green

Stuck On Stupid

by Dennis Green

“I prefer that bartender,” I said, “because she doesn’t talk a blue streak.” And my lady friend knew exactly what I meant. “Better,” she said, “than being stuck on stupid.”

All my life, I’ve fought against becoming cynical, thinking such an attitude is corrosive to the soul. But I’m afraid I’m losing ground these days. Too late the Misanthrope! Where I’m going, there aren’t any helmets.

For the longer I go, the more I see that the species, the entire human race, is simply stuck on stupid. Even the best of us, the most genius and creative, spend more moments in a trance of un-lucidity than we do in perfect harmony with the universe, let alone ourselves.

And some folks, or many, so far as I can tell, spend most of their lives in that state, and maybe only a few seconds in a world that might be regarded as lucid, let alone brilliantly lit up. They’re simply taking up oxygen, food and space. Example: I learn from the local police blotter that many people leave “clothes and electronics” in their cars worth hundreds of dollars. Dumb!

There are many ways, I’m sure, to get stuck on stupid. Let me count the ways:

One: You’re just born that way. You don’t know any better, and never learn. No matter how hard the teacher tries, you just don’t get it. You drop out of high school in the 10^th grade. And become a general in the Air Force, serving in the Strategic Air Command.

Two: You grow up in the Deep South, or in Alaska, where intelligence is distrusted, where something resembling “common sense” is highly regarded but rarely achieved. Sort of a rarified value, like chastity. “Sometimes I relieve myself just to lighten the load.”

Three: You grow up in the Inner City, where, ditto, getting good grades, doing your homework, studying, are all regarded with suspicion. What the hell are you, anyway, some kind of dark-skinned Honky? Didn’t you hear about the first black astronaut? The Jig is Up!

Now that we’ve seen, rhetorically, how much the Homie and the Redneck have in common, let’s move on.

Four: You graduated high school but by that time had way too much book larnin’, enough to last you a lifetime. If you were a girl, you just got knocked up and married, probably in that order. If you were a guy, you either went into the service, or got a job at the local gas station or pizza parlor. Enough already! Give that brain pan a rest!

Five: You went to junior college and got your two year AA degree. That was good enough to get you a better job and a higher salary at the Airport, doing security checks, and your union gets you a good salary and perks, long vacations and many coffee breaks during the day. So that Richard Reed guy got through, and maybe a couple of those 9/11 perps, but wot the hell..!

Six: You scored your bacheloriate from UC Berkeley, and went to work in your father’s factory, but in the front office. He went broke and took the whole company down, so you went into real estate instead, and made a fortune. And somewhere along the way, you stopped reading books and focused instead on the listings, and the emails from your agents in the field. You dimly remember some of the philosophers, somebody named Seneca or something like that, but when you get a spare moment, you watch Fox News…

Seven: You got your PhD in chemistry, but you have very bad taste in women. Tasty women. But you will do anything to impress them, even register Republican if that helps. But all it helps is making you more stupid. Or you’re a woman with the same advanced degree, and its chemistry — alcohol or menopause or both — that’s makes you stuck on the way you are.

As you can see, there are many ways to get stuck on stupid, and very low odds that you won’t. But even though the odds are against it, it’s never too late to get loose!

©2010 Dennis Green