tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54748892783452054282024-03-13T19:00:12.332-07:00Tales of the City's StreetsDispatches from the Front Lines: The War on Poverty in San Francisco
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-16821165999797342872016-11-16T23:29:00.002-08:002016-11-17T22:40:11.600-08:00It Has Begun<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">I was on my way to City College this afternoon, hurrying to the BART Station at 16th and Mission. Walking briskly toward the stairs, I saw that the curved wall which usually displays works of art or community information notices was instead covered with post-it notes. I stepped closer, read a few, and then, because I was about to be late for class, I hurried on toward my train. At the bottom of the stairs, I turned around and climbed back up, taking my phone out of my backpack as I did. I was afraid that the notes might be gone by the time I could return, taken away by wind or the city.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">I had to record what I could to show it to you here. The close-ups all together show about a quarter, perhaps a third, of all the notes. Post-it pads, pens, and tape had been left along the ledge at the base of the wall. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif; font-size: medium;">I thought, "This is the city talking to itself." I thought of the Freedom Wall in Tiananmen Square. I thought of that guy standing in front of the tank. And I remembered Leonard Cohen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong>It's coming to America first<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
cradle of the best and of the worst<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's
here they got the range<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
the machinery for change<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
it's here they got the spiritual thirst<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's
here the family's broken<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
it's here the lonely say<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
the heart has got to open<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a
fundamental way<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif; font-size: 12pt;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><strong><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Democracy is coming to the USA<o:p></o:p></strong></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Sail on, sail on<o:p></o:p></span></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Modern No. 20",serif;"><strong><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oh
mighty ship of State<o:p></o:p></span></span></strong></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;"></span><br />Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-86028601581258055772016-04-07T17:08:00.002-07:002016-04-07T17:09:15.082-07:00Socialist London<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I was surprised to learn recently that Jack London, like me
a native of Oakland, California and, unlike me, the first person ever to become
a millionaire by writing (and a million in 1900 was a fortune indeed) was an
outspoken and dedicated socialist and that his name is known around the world for
his socialist writings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not
surprised that the American educational system has emasculated his literary
reputation by teaching only his early works ("White Fang" and
"Call of the Wild") and relegating him to the category of adventure
writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[You gotta love this guy:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he is also responsible for introducing
surfing to the U.S.]</div>
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<br /></div>
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In 1908 Jack London published "The Iron Heel," an
odd little novel of the genre I would call Social-Science Fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Bellamy's "Looking Backward",
it purports to be a future history in which events in our future are recounted
from the perspective of an even more distant future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In London's book, the conceit is that an
account of a socialist revolution begun in our time was written by one of the
participants and that this account has come to light only in the 27th
century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus we have a first-person
narrative of a revolution with commentary and footnotes provided by a scholar
700 years from now.</div>
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<br /></div>
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What astonished me most about the book is that it so
accurately describes the major geopolitical and economic events of the 20th
century even though it was written before any of them happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London seems to have foreseen the Stock
Market Crash and ensuing Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, the labor unrest of
that period, the strategy by which FDR co-opted the union movement and saved
capitalism, the economic basis of the two World Wars, a U.S. foreign policy
intent on keeping the country permanently at war, the development of the
suburbs, the creation of NAFTA, and even the rise of the Christian Right as a
political power.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>What lends weight to
the remarkable similarity between events that London imagined and events as
they played out over 100 years is that London presents all of these developments
as the inevitable result of observable facts about capitalism in the United
States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London does not argue for
socialism on moral or political grounds:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>he argues that an empirical observation of the society in which he lived
would necessarily lead one to conclude logically that a nascent revolution of
the working class would be crushed by a capitalist class that co-opted the
political institutions of democracy to establish its own plutocracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London believed that the only possible
outcome of conditions in his day would be that liberty and justice for the
worker would be crushed under the Iron Heel of the oligarchy, and such is the
story the novel tells.</div>
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The story revolves around a revolutionary leader who bears a
striking resemblance to London himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
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a meeting of a secretive group of the most powerful capitalists and politicians
in the country, something like the Bohemian Club of San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here is his indictment of capitalism:</div>
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"If modern man's producing power is a thousand times
greater than that of the caveman, why then, in the United States today, are
there fifteen million people who are not properly sheltered and not properly
fed?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why then, in the United States today,
are there three million child laborers?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is a true indictment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
capitalist class has mismanaged.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>. . .
you have mismanaged, my masters, . . . you have selfishly and criminally
mismanaged." </div>
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be overthrown by the power of the working class:</div>
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"There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is
greater because it cannot be taken away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our
hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers."</div>
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The working class revolution, London believed, would
eventually establish a more just and peaceful social order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But before that resolution can come, we must
pass through a period of increasing domination and oppression.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story describes the overwhelming power of
the oligarchy, using as it does all the types of power available.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Police and military, universities and
intellectuals, the news media, publishers, the churches and the clergy all
cooperate with the oligarchy, reinforcing the self-justifying ideas and values
it formulates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because the myths and
propaganda of the oligarchy are so aggressively propagated, and the general
population so relentlessly indoctrinated, only a prolonged suffering will
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males will not give up power easily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
workers may have history and justice on their side, but the oligarchy has the
military, the courts, the banks, the media, and the police to support and
enforce its hold on power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
oligarchy's dedication to the maintenance of its power is made clear when a
member of the Capitalists' club answers the revolutionary hero thus:</div>
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<br /></div>
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"This, then, is our answer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have no words to waste on you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you reach out your vaunted strong hands
for our palaces and our ease, we will show you what strength is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In roar of shell and shrapnel and in whine of
machine-guns will our answer be couched.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk
upon your faces."</div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
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The new book "Dark Money" by Jane Mayer reports in
detail about the network established by the Koch brothers to take control of
all levels of our government (municipal, state, and federal) and to control who
is elected to all legislative and executive offices, from the small-town mayor
to the President of the United States.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
know that many scoff at the idea that this country is being taken over by the
extremely wealthy elite (just as many of the characters in London's novel
refuse to believe the hero.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many will
reject books such as "Dark Money", calling it alarmist and portraying
its author as a "conspiracy theorist" who is not fully in touch with
reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many will think such things
about me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they will say something to
the effect that Jack London lived a long time ago and that things are surely
much different now than they were then.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But before you dismiss all the talk of an oligarchy scheming
to control our government at every level, consider what Jimmy Carter had to say
in a speech he gave to a meeting of the Atlantik Bruecke ("Atlantic
Bridge"), a non-profit that fosters better relations between Germans and
Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The former President said in
his speech that "America does not at the moment have a functioning
democracy."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carter's remarks were
not reported by a single mainstream news agency in the United States, but they
were reported in Der Spiegel, the leading German news magazine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The report, by the way, did not appear in
the English language version of Der Spiegel either, but only in the German
one.)</div>
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<br /></div>
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*</div>
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<br /></div>
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In the final chapters of "The Iron Heel," the
oligarchy does indeed bring its Iron Heel down on the people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It walks on their faces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And all that the revolutionary hero can do is
to repeat the following again and again as bloody events swirl around the
revolutionaries: </div>
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<br /></div>
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"How many rifles have you got?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you know where you can get plenty of
lead?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it comes to powder, chemical
mixtures are better than mechanical mixtures, you take my word."</div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-22199171504220618862016-04-02T19:31:00.000-07:002016-04-02T19:37:02.336-07:00Disruption<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For the last six months or so of the two years that I drove
nights, I often began my shift by driving Tito, who had been driving cab for more
than thirty years, to his home in an apartment building on Bush at
Stockton.<span> </span>The beginning of my day and
the end of his was a twenty minute conversation while driving downtown from the
Luxor yard.<span> </span>I asked him questions about
the business, and he generously gave me some advice.<span> </span>He also paid me $20 at the end of each ride,
another bit of generosity, one that embarrassed me but which I could not afford
to refuse.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Most often we spent the time talking about politics in the
broadest sense, that is, about whatever affects the life of the <i>polis</i>.<span>
</span>We talked about the declining quality of life in San Francisco, the declining
value of the dollar, the declining earnings of cabbies, and about the
corruption rampant in the City's current administration.<span> </span>I always talked too much, blabbing on with no
editorial filters about the inhumanity of capitalism's drive for individual
accumulation of wealth and about my longing for a shared sense that we are all
in this together and must rely on one another.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">As he got to know me, Tito asked the scheduler to assign me
to his cab every night that I worked.<span> </span>He
appreciated the care I took to keep the cab clean and to monitor its
performance in case it needed maintenance.<span>
</span>I think (or hope) that he appreciated other qualities in me, too.<span> </span>I remember an off-hand comment he made one
day:<span> </span>"I like your politics,
Howard."<span> </span>As for me, I just plain
liked Tito.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Tito suffers intense back pain constantly, a condition that
has been aggravated (if not in fact caused) by the decades he spent sitting in a
car for ten to twelve hours a day.<span> </span>I
have watched Tito take five minutes or more just unfolding himself from the
driver's seat and trying to rise to his feet.<span>
</span>Still, he never complains, and even on days when I could see that the
pain was cutting deep, Tito always had a smiling greeting for everyone he
encountered.<span> </span>He seemed to know everyone
at Luxor and to have a bit of repartee ready for each.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I no longer drive nights.<span>
</span>I switched to driving what is called a "ramp van," a cab
fitted with equipment allowing it to carry a person in a wheelchair.<span> </span>I miss my conversations with Tito.<span> </span>So I was excited when, a couple of weeks ago,
Tito pulled up next to me as I was walking from the bus stop to the yard.<span> </span>He offered to give me a ride the rest of the
way.<span> </span>He was ending his shift early just
as I was beginning mine late.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I got in the cab and asked Tito how he was doing.<span> </span>"Not too well," he said.<span> </span>Then he told me why.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Tito is what's called a "medallion holder."<span> </span>Any vehicle used to transport passengers for
a fee (called a "commercial livery vehicle") used to have to display
a medallion, which looks like a miniature license plate, on the dashboard of
the car, making it visible from the front of the car through the windshield.<span> </span>By limiting the number of medallions issued,
the city was able to control the number of livery vehicles on the streets, to
limit traffic congestion, and to enable the quick identification of any cab and
its driver should the cab be involved in an accident or be the scene of a
crime.</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The medallion was a license to operate a transportation
business and hence a license to make money.<span>
</span>They were valuable.<span> </span>Every cabbie
had to own one or rent one when its owner was not using it himself.<span> </span>Cabbies put their names on the waiting list
for medallions the minute they were hired and waited twenty years or more to
get to the top of the list.<span> </span>Then they
were able to buy a medallion from the city for prices that eventually reached
two hundred and fifty or three hundred thousand dollars.<span> </span>The medallion system is still the law, and
every day that I work, part of the gate fee I pay to use a particular cab goes
to the person who owns its medallion.<span> </span>So
when I was driving nights using Tito's medallion, he received part of my gate
fee.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">When Tito gave me a lift to work that day he told me that he
used to get a check for $2400 from Luxor each month for the use of his
medallion by other drivers.<span> </span>At some
point last autumn, the check was cut to $1900.<span>
</span>Now it has been cut to $1000.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Tito has worked hard for thirty years and invested $300,000
in his medallion, expecting the income from it to provide for his
retirement.<span> </span>He played by the rules, paid
with his health and his life savings for a position in the business that should
have taken care of him in his old age.<span>
</span>His body is broken.<span> </span>He has
neither the youthful energy nor the time to start over.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This is what the Tech enthusiasts gleefully call
"disruption."<span> </span>I call it an
injustice, and I curse the lives and the fortunes of those who have brought it
about.<span> </span>The lesson is clear: <span> </span>you can take all that crap about playing by
the rules, obeying the law, working hard, and being loyal and toss it all out
the window.<span> </span>None of it has any place in
the new millennium.</span></span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-87669479381383509322015-11-08T19:23:00.000-08:002015-11-08T19:23:18.082-08:00Another Cup of Coffee<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
A few days ago I sat down in the mid-afternoon to have coffee
with a recent acquaintance, G.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I met G
at my friend J's house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G and J are old
friends, and G, who has lived in New York for the past ten years, has been
staying with J while he looks for work here in the Bay Area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G has been here looking for work for over six
months now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In that time he has interviewed
for over fifty positions, one of which encouraged powerful hopes as he had sixteen
interviews with that company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
end, they hired internally, and except for a couple of short-term contract
jobs, G has not been able to find work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>G is 49 years old.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As we sip coffee, and stir it, and sip a little more, we get
to talking about the current job market, the economy in general, and our
personal experiences in trying to find work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What strikes me about G's story is that he has done everything
right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look back at my own long slide
into poverty and see the errors of my ways:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>bad relationships, procrastination, laziness, magical thinking, over-confidence,
and spendthrift habits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G, however, has
managed to support his wife and daughter as the family's sole breadwinner, to
save money, to buy a house in Warwick, New York, and to build a sizable
retirement nest-egg, all at the same time.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
G graduated from college with a degree in design and went
into marketing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When computers first
entered the business arena, he immediately devoted himself to mastering the new
way of doing things, and he has stayed current with technology for over two
decades. At the height of his fortunes, during the period from 2005 to 2009, G
was Executive Creative Director for a digital marketing firm in Greenwich,
Connecticut.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the beginning of this period, in December of 2004, G
suffered a massive heart attack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Luckily, he did so in front of a cardiologist who saved his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luckily, too, he had just purchased a 20-year
life insurance policy which he has managed to keep in effect to this day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So even despite that huge piece of bad luck, G
had every reason to believe that he was managing his destiny responsibly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although the heart attack in December might
have led him to worry about the fact that he had purchased his house just two
months earlier, in October, G did have unemployment insurance and health
coverage to see him through the six months that it took him to recover.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soon thereafter, the job in Greenwich came
through, and G was once again sailing along a rational, responsible, and
honorable course.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Not far from Greenwich and Warwick, and some 25 years
earlier, I began my first full year of teaching at Union College in
Schenectady, New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the first
term, I taught, among other things, a course in the foundational literary works
of Western Civilization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I vividly
remember teaching Sophocles's play "Oedipus", a work with which I
thought I had been familiar for a decade by then.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it was only then that I understood the
heroic virtue of Oedipus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like everyone
else, I knew that he had saved the city of Thebes from the ravages of the
Sphinx and that he had ruled the city-state as a good king.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But on that reading I realized how hard he had
struggled to be good.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Having heard as a young man a prophecy that he would kill
his father and marry his mother, he ran away from home, not knowing that the
father and mother he left were his adoptive parents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in sacrificing his home and family and
position in society in order to be a good man and avoid his terrible destiny
that he finds himself at a cross-roads killing a stranger with whom he has
quarreled and proceeding to save the city of Thebes and marry that stranger's
widow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in the very effort to
remain good that Oedipus sets out on the path that leads him to kill his father
and marry his mother.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The tragedy of
Oedipus is that right action, undertaken for the best of motives, with true
moral integrity and a heroic heart, leads the best of all men to the most
horrible loss and suffering.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As
Shakespeare's Gloucester says in "King Lear", "As flies to
wanton boys are we to the gods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
kill us for their sport."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so my friend had done everything right, and yet 2008
came along, and the financial system imploded, and the company in Greenwich
lost its major clients, and in 2009 G lost his job.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Half of the men living in G's neighborhood in
Warwick lost their jobs too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So G knew
that it was not a matter of personal failure.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I heard Hillary Clinton say, after Bernie Sanders had
criticized a capitalist system in which the rich suffer no penalties for their
misdeeds and only grow richer while the majority of citizens descend deeper and
deeper into poverty, that she celebrates small business entrepreneurs, who have
created most of the new jobs in our country for the past few decades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This bit of proverbial nonsense is the
nostrum offered up by the quacks of both parties:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it relieves the government and the society at
large of having any responsibility for the economic well-being of us
citizens.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">la Clinton</i> is saying is "Let the little people take care of
finding employment for one another."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A couple of years into his ordeal, G sank a good piece of
his savings into starting up a new marketing company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He developed an app which would allow those
who had food to sell that was near or at its "sell by" date to offer
it at hugely discounted prices to nearby buyers who could make use of it before
it spoiled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Realizing that much of this
food ended up, at the time, in the pantries of various charities and
non-profits that feed the poor, G built in an automatic donation of cash from
the sale of this food to those charities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Despite great enthusiasm from all sectors that would potentially be
affected, the business failed to take off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>G did not have and could not get access to the capital necessary to
develop this business to a point where it could survive and succeed on its own
merits.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so G went into debt for the first time in his life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has had to draw down nearly all of his
retirement savings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was able to
refinance his house, lowering his monthly payments by getting a new mortgage at
a lower rate, but the length of the mortgage was extended from thirty years to
forty years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As G pointed out, the banks
lose nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>G has lost his savings,
his retirement, and, by the way, his marriage as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has not lost his house -- yet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But unless something changes soon, even that
will go.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Jamie Diamond remains at the head of J.P. Morgan/Chase and
continues to rake in hundreds of millions in "compensation"
annually.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has become big
buddy-buddies with President Obama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alan
Greenspan, Henry Paulsen, Tim Geitner, and Ben Bernanke remain at large.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>"Everybody
knows the fight is fixed:</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>The
poor stay poor, the rich get rich.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>That's
how it goes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>And
everybody knows."</div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"What really gets to me," G says, "is having
to wake up in the morning and do another round of applications and interviews,
to smile and act enthusiastic and energetic about these prospects that remain
only prospects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sixteen interviews -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sixteen interviews</i> -- and they hire
someone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or they decide not to fill
the position.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or most often they don't
even tell you what they are doing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You go
to interviews -- I had one with the CFO of a company, supposed to be the final
green-light moment, and she seemed to really like me, we were scheduled for a
half-hour and she kept me there for over a full hour, and then you hear
nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These companies don't even have
the courtesy to let you know that they are not going to hire you.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"And if you are hired, they expect you to work for them
24/7 but there's no loyalty from them in return.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember when I was just starting out and I
was working at a big corporation in New York, a global marketing firm, and at
one point they let all these senior people go.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I saw these guys who had given thirty years of their lives to this
company filling cardboard boxes with all the personal stuff from their desks
and crying.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I saw that and right then I
knew that you couldn't trust any of them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They'll throw you out like trash any time they want.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"But harder than that -- let me tell you a story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So my marriage has fallen apart, and I'm out
here dealing with all this stress, and I've already had a massive heart
attack.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I just don't know how long I
can take it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can stay on J's floor on his
air mattress, or I can stay at my sister-in-law's apartment when she's out of
town, and J's a great guy but I need some more human contact than just that.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"So I go on a date with this woman, really beautiful
woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I met her on Match.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she's going through a similar thing where
she and her husband are separated but they're still living in the same house
because real estate is so crazy out here.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And on her profile are pictures of the house which is really big and
beautiful, and she's wearing beautiful clothes that are obviously really
expensive, and she's driving a Lexus.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"And we had great conversation, really connected,
talked about all kinds of things, but, you know, I took her out for drinks at
this place in the Mission -- and she offered to pay but I'm old fashioned and
insisted on paying for us both -- and we had two drinks each and the bill was
$60.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When it ended. she offered to give
me a ride home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tried being evasive
but she insisted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I had her drop me
at J's place and, you know, the front door is under the stairs to the flat
above, the original house.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"We got together again and had a good time, but I could
tell she was wondering about my situation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She knows that I'm not currently working and she was asking about J's
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She wanted to know if that was
the basement or something.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I told her
that it was a ground-level flat, but still I could tell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she knows that I don't have a car and I'm
staying with a friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So at the end of
that date I said something about getting together during the week and she said
that she was busy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
"I said, 'I know, I know, I get it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Listen, you're a very attractive woman, and I
enjoyed our time together a lot . . .' and I said goodnight and I'll never see
her again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I've always supported my wife
and daughter, just a one- income family.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But people don't know that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That's not what they see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I
get so depressed and even suicidal . . . ."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
G's eyes looked wet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We were silent for some minutes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I don't know what banalities I muttered then, to bring our conversation
to a close.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt honored by his
honesty, by the trust in me it evidenced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And I felt moved to share his story, or rather this ragged approximation
of it, with you here.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Listening to G, I felt my rage at the moral bankruptcy of
this America in which we live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought
of the hordes of young people who have no idea what is going on as they order
their Uber cars, condemning hundreds of thousands of good men all across this
country to fates like G's.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought of
the politicians and the pundits who assert that the solution to such woes is to
provide educational opportunities so that the unemployed can learn new skills
and find work in the information economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All of which is not just bullshit but elephantshit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can see in my mind's eye the lines of men
and women who enroll in and complete the re-training courses offered by county
services and non-profits filled with utterly false hopes and coming face to
face with those disappointments when they enter a job market where even those
with decades of experience and up-to-date knowledge, intricate expertise, in
technology cannot get work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I shudder to
think how, when they have been sold false dreams by callous civic leaders,
their inevitable disillusionment may break their spirits and even end their
lives.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And then I think too of those hordes of young people who
believe that they sit atop the world and that they have earned the tremendous
sums they are paid, who believe that the labor market that pays them so
handsomely is proof of their worth, and who believe that they will always be
worth -- and be paid -- what they are receiving now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think of their disdain for unions and their
refusal to identify with their elders, like G.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He understood, all those years ago, that one day he might be cast aside
as were the men older than he who were clearing out their desks on that sad
morning in New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have doubts that
the present crop of (blissfully unaware) wage-slaves understand their position
at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suspect that they believe in
their cohort, the Millennials, as a highly aware, highly creative force that is
giving birth to a whole new world, the digital world, which will itself bear
fruit as a whole new way for human communities to flourish.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Their generation is likely to be brought up short by the
cruelty of America's deified market economy at an even earlier age than my
generation has been.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite having
studied "Death of a Salesman" and "Grapes of Wrath" in
school, we failed to understand our own lives as re-enactments of those
stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We thought that organized labor
was irrelevant to the shiny and brave new world that we were building.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We thought that Apple was liberating us from
Big Brother when in fact Apple has developed even more effective means of
totalitarian control than any that Orwell imagined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a culture that reveres youth and the new, the
wisdom of age goes unheard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
generations repeat the same mistakes just as the generations of a dysfunctional
family repeat the same abuses endlessly.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And a dark corner of my heart is gladdened to imagine the
Millenials suffering when their companies and their technologies and their children
abandon them in turn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such is the solace
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">schadenfreude</i>.</div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-38199266446082710082015-10-28T20:56:00.001-07:002015-10-28T20:56:10.568-07:00The Housing Crisis<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Why has the real estate market failed to serve the people of
San Francisco?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The chattering classes proclaim that the San Francisco real
estate market is "excellent," "healthy," and
"strong" because the market has enriched owners of real estate. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet it has also failed the majority of San
Franciscans, who must pay exorbitant rents that are currently the highest in
the country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More significantly, the
real estate market has failed an alarming number of San Franciscans whom it has
left many without any place in which to live at all.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
One can hardly take seriously the idea that free markets
provide goods and services efficiently, balancing demand and supply
automatically, in the face of this failure to supply one of the most
fundamental -- and universal -- of demands:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>shelter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reality for most of
us is that this particular "free market" is infecting the whole life
of the city with envy, rancor, rage, resentment, and an explosive degree of
social tension.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Driving a cab, I hear or over-hear the opinions of people
from almost all segments of our society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Riding buses, living in an SRO Hotel, shopping at thrift stores, and
walking the streets, I hear or over-hear the rest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have heard an attorney complain that she
and her architect husband, both hardworking and fully employed, cannot find an
apartment that they can afford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People
who have service jobs, such as bartenders, retail clerks, house painters,
mechanics, and hair stylists, share their homes with roommates not always to
their liking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the rich say,
"Don't blame me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My taxes pay for
all the poor people's social services, and I'm the one creating jobs
anyway!"</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I certainly cannot blame any person or group of people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The enemy here is clearly institutional,
historic in origin, and susceptible to remedy only through legislation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cite these examples of discontent to make
the point that what many consider to be an economic problem is in fact the
source of dangerous animosities, among individuals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People are feeling pressured at every level
and are increasingly angry at other people, those "above" them on the
social scale and those "below."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their anger frequently erupts in little sparks of violence, verbal and
physical, and it is building so rapidly that it may erupt in large scale mayhem
before long.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the real estate market
functioned efficiently and supplied housing that met the demand, most of what
San Franciscans find wrong with their city would disappear overnight.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
These animosities bear no relation to the healthy
competition among athletes or among rival businesses that may spur each on to
greater achievements by adding the secondary motivation of pride to the
original motivation to perform the task well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No, these animosities are the beginnings of hatred, of class warfare,
and potentially of violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The social
friction caused by the failure of the real estate market is wholly destructive.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The ideology of "Free Market" capitalism must be
seen for what it is:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a myth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the markets for ordinary consumer goods
function adequately, such is not the case in markets for the most important
aspects of our economic life:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>employment, housing, and medical care.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In functioning markets, one finds a range of goods of the same
type.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people buy Porsches and
Mercedes, others buy Camrys or Passats, and still others buy Kias and
Fiestas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the supermarket one finds
luxury brands, name brands, store brands, and generics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In San Francisco, however, the real estate market
is creating only "high end", i.e., extremely expensive luxury
housing.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, people like John Daly
John Foster were mass-producing housing priced for blue-collar workers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fifty years later, no one is developing
supply to meet similar demand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So what
has gone wrong? [Note:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although Daly
and Foster built their eponymous cities outside of the city limits of San
Francisco itself, most of the people who bought those houses were the middle and
lower-middle class people who worked in San Francisco and regarded
themselves as San Franciscans.]</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is it a matter of space?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Daly and Foster, and the Stone family as well, were able to purchase
large tracts of land that had been in agricultural use and convert them to
neighborhoods (or "subdivisions") so that they realized economies of
scale in producing hundreds and thousands of homes at once.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mass production brought down the cost of
construction as surely as it had the cost of an automobile.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now, since everything but the
rightly-preserved parks and open spaces that dot the cityscape, the entire
northern end of the peninsula is developed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Are housing costs high because mass production is no longer possible?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I think not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First
and foremost, while the last agricultural enterprises disappeared from the city
and its environs in the 1960s and 1970s, the same period saw the collapse of
the Port of San Francisco and of the light industry and warehouse services that
had surrounded the waterfront, resulting in acres of unused industrial and
warehouse structures comprising South of Market area.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is surely enough land for a Daly or
Foster City.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, the vast railroad
yars that stretched from Mission Bay to Potrero Hill have become the China
Basin and Mission bay developments -- luxury housing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the question remains:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>why does the real estate market not supply
the demand for lower cost housing?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For a time in the 1960s and 1970s, when the wealthy had not
yet decided that they wanted to own the inner cities once again, an ad hoc
real-estate market whose legality was sketchy did develop organically, meeting
the needs of people who wanted to live in the urban core and who made homes and
neighborhoods and communities of their own without attracting much attention
from government and the press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As in
every other major urban center at that time, the decaying buildings of the
inner city were occupied by squatters, musicians, homosexuals, artists, sex
workers, and other marginalized people and businesses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Dance clubs, gay bars and sex clubs, and
inexpensive living quarters were created by people to meet their own demand for
affordable spaces in which to live and work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These marginalized people made use of a decaying but nevertheless
existing infrastructure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Theirs was a
truly free market response to the demand for housing and not a matter of banks
and developers chasing profits for the purpose of their own enrichment.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Eventually the city government, like the governments of
London, New York, and other major cities, tried to prevent the squatters from
taking over these unused resources, and even after the squatters had fixed the
up the empty buildings tried to take the homes they had made from them by legal
force.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I remember living in New York in the late 1970s and hearing
about the "fixture fees" that people paid when they moved into a loft
in SoHo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The landlords who owned the
empty buildings, which they had neglected entirely, leaving them to fill up
with garbage, rats, used needles and filthy mattresses, went to court fighting
to evict the squatters who had rehabilitated these buildings, installed
kitchens and bathrooms, cleaned and painted and created huge, light-filled
interiors in which to live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While the
legal battles went on, any squatter who decided to move out of the home that
she or he had created charged the person who wanted to move in for the
improvements, the "fixtures," such as electrical wiring, plumbing,
toilets, tubs, sinks, and kitchen appliances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They could not sell the real estate because they did not hold title, nor
could they transfer a lease because none existed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in a fair, orderly, and reasonable way
these people developed a civilized real-estate market <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">without benefit of courts, police, or any of the other apparatus of
control exercised by governments.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
the end, the courts for the most part sided with the squatters and
"legalized their property rights, because the law recognized that the
landlords, in neglecting to maintain the property, had forfeited their right to
claim ownership.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Again, these were marginalized people to begin with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And at the time, people of the upper middle
and upper classes had no interest in living in the inner cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Content in their far-flung suburbs,
untroubled by the poor, the "colored", and the immigrants, the
well-to-do were happy to let the cities decay, burn in race riots, and, as in
the case of New York, go bankrupt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The history of the period is interesting, but the creative
efforts of those who took possession of those properties did not amount to the
production of a housing supply such as that which is needed today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are talking about the ad hoc appropriation
of abandoned resources by people unable to afford participation in the regular
market.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
At the same time, individual builders were producing housing
on a small scale in many parts of the city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For example, you can find this house <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GOaymgK83RE/VjGYcuEyyZI/AAAAAAAAATw/Tu2YB4dQW8E/s1600/House%2B01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GOaymgK83RE/VjGYcuEyyZI/AAAAAAAAATw/Tu2YB4dQW8E/s320/House%2B01.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VokBk3MrlKc/VjGYl1xG0fI/AAAAAAAAAT4/_NYrXK_jGUw/s1600/House%2B02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VokBk3MrlKc/VjGYl1xG0fI/AAAAAAAAAT4/_NYrXK_jGUw/s320/House%2B02.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
all over the Mission and
in Bernal Heights. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently a General
Contractor found that he could buy run-down houses, demolish them, and build a
new house on the property and sell it at a profit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He saved the expense of an architect by reusing
the plans he had already paid for, building the same house again and again in
these neighborhoods.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since he may in
fact have built fewer units than he demolished, I cannot cite the houses as a
proof of the market efficiently providing supply, but I can point to them as
proof that demand, i.e. buyers, did exist even in the midst of the white
middle-class exodus to suburbia.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
*</div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The brave souls residing in the no-man's land beneath the
elevated roadways that braid Bayshore Boulevard, Potrero Avenue, Cesar Chavez
Street, and U.S. Highway 101 were lodging, until about a month ago, in lean-tos
constructed of cardboard, plastic sheeting, and shopping carts, or they took
their rest in sleeping bags under -- well, not the starry sky -- under those
elevated streams of roaring traffic, of tons of steel and glass hurtling along
at lethal speeds, spewing noxious fumes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You may remember<a href="http://streetlifesanfrancisco.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2014-06-01T00:00:00-07:00&updated-max=2014-07-01T00:00:00-07:00&max-results=3" target="_blank"> my description of this wasteland</a>, for it is
where the rats used to come out of the ivy and run alongside my bike when I
pedaled through in the dark of the early morning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the year or so since I last rode through
"La Calle de Raton", I have noticed that the police came through and
cleared out the encampment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is,
they rousted the people living there and then swept those people's homes and
possessions into garbage trucks and took it all away from them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The few things that these people owned were
stolen from them ("stolen" is not a strong enough word) by the state
which, no doubt, justifies this outrage with sanitary and aesthetic reasons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rage is the only humane reaction one can have
to this injustice.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Lately, however, I have noticed that the residents of this
neighborhood are returning, and this time they have tents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well over a dozen large, attractive, and
clean tents are spread across the site.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I grin and practically laugh aloud each time I pass those tents, for to
me they are proof that in the darkest and most powerless corners of this city's
life, the human spirit remains indomitable.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
If the City cannot or will not (the latter being, I believe,
the case) provide real housing for these folks, then why not let them live in
peace in the place that they have chosen, a place that is not anybody else's
neighborhood, not "my back yard" or yours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as for public health
"concerns", why not truck in a dozen portable toilets and have one of
those trucks with showers come round three times a week.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The land itself must be property of the state since it is a
freeway right-of-way, and if it belongs to the state, doesn't it belong to all
her citizens?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Doesn't that land belong
to those urban campers as much as to anyone -- and more so by right of
possession.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I say that if a building stands empty, people who need homes
should move into it and make it their own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If land stands empty -- those vacant lots surrounded by cyclone fencing
or old parking lots similarly fenced -- people should build on it.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Title to land is
nothing but a monopoly for use granted by the state to an individual it
favors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If that individual is not making
use of this government handout, then the title should be considered forfeit and
the land be free to anyone who will use it.</b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shame on those who would dispossess the poor of what little
they have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shame on those who would
drive them from their homes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And to hell with those who hold land unused in hopes of
selling it later for a higher price without making any use of it for the
benefit of the community.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Read Henry George!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Read Tolstoy's last novel, "Resurrection"!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Awake!</div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-71179747134364706322015-10-23T02:21:00.001-07:002015-10-23T14:02:45.929-07:00Mission Heats Up<div dir="ltr">
Spotted on light poles near the intersection of 16th and Mission:</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NdFM_s-qcP4/Vin7_qs8hNI/AAAAAAAAATc/kGD39WkBclM/s1600/20151022_082741.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="http://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-NdFM_s-qcP4/Vin7_qs8hNI/AAAAAAAAATc/kGD39WkBclM/s640/20151022_082741.jpg" /> </a> </div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-66200874228729406262015-09-06T16:13:00.001-07:002015-09-06T16:13:32.508-07:00What Remains<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">I felt
good yesterday afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My friend S
and I had spent a couple of hours going over the application for a two-bedroom
Below Market Rate apartment that was available in Dogpatch.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was glad to have seen a property that I
might realistically afford, but I did not feel excited in the way that I used
to feel about any number of places that I had found to rent in years past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember that I would fall asleep thinking
about all the great things in what was to be my new neighborhood and picturing
where various favorite pieces of my furniture would go in the new place with a
giddy sense that it was just perfect and that I was meant to live there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">There
were a couple of reasons not to feel giddy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>First, S and I were applying for this apartment together because neither
of us has enough income to qualify for the Below Market Rate (BMR) studios and
one-bedrooms that become available from time to time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The rent on such units is $950 to $1050 per
month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The market rate for a
one-bedroom apartment is currently $3500 to $4000.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The discount is good, but the Mayor's program
requires that one show proof of income that is at least twice the rent, and on
apartments with really low rents, the program usually requires income of two
and a half times the rent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Since
many San Franciscans pay considerably more than 50% of their income in rent, it
seems unrealistic to restrict the poor in this way. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The underlying assumption is that one needs
50% of one's income for other expenses, but such may not be the case.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing, food is available free in many
places throughout San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So even
for less expensive apartments, it is not true that a tenant would have to spend
$1000 a month on food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if we are
talking about a place renting (below market) at $2,000 a month, it would be
hard for most poor people even to imagine spending $2,000 on food and other
expenses.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Furthermore,
since many poorer San Franciscans work at informal jobs (e.g. house painting,
gardening, cleaning, running errands as a personal assistant) for which they
are paid in cash that goes unreported, the Mayor's Office again discriminates
against those whom it is supposed to help by requiring them to prove their
income by showing pay stubs or a copy of their tax return from the previous
year.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Luckily,
the unit for which S. and I were applying was a two-bedroom renting for $1084
and requiring only $2168 in combined income, which together we could show.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
second factor keeping our animal spirits from optimistic volatility was the
fundamental fact that we were applying to be in a lottery for the
property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our application would, along
with many hundreds or even thousands like it, be merely tickets in a game of
chance, and the chances that our application would win were so slim that they
would (as my father used to say of skinny people) have to stand twice to make a
shadow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What's more, my personal experience
has been, I am sorry to say, that the only lottery I would ever win is the one
Shirley Jackson describes in her short story of that name.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Still,
S. and I felt good because we were taking concrete steps toward a better life
in better housing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We have both been
homeless in the recent past, and living in that kind of poverty takes its toll
on one's ability to do anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Poverty, like incarceration, drains the will out of a person, and being
released from either condition does not restore the will power that has been lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even though I am no longer homeless, it is still
easy to leave important tasks undone from day to day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Day to day becomes week to month -- and
longer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you have endured for a long
time without a place to set your feet, it isn't easy to start taking steps
again, no matter how small.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But there we
were, huddled over the stack of papers we had to assemble, Xeroxing extra
copies of everything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We felt happy to
be making some headway on our wobbly little legs.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Then this
afternoon what little hope we had for this spin of San Francisco's "Wheel!-of!-Housing!"
dissolved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>S. had taken our papers to
the designated office while I was at work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The girl at the counter rejected us immediately.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She said that our application lacked the
proper documentation establishing residency.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">As
proof of residency, I had included a letter from the Housing Authority
addressed to me which stated the amount of my monthly rent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This official letter was not good enough
because it was not one of the three documents listed on the application as
establishing residency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nowhere on the
list could one find "Official Letter from the City's Housing Authority."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Acceptable forms are (1) a utility bill for a
San Francisco address; (2) a paystub showing a San Francisco address; or (3) a
completed lease for a residence in San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the first option, I live in an SRO and
utilities are included in my rent, so I receive no utility bills.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the second, I drive a cab and as an
Independent Contractor receive no paychecks and have no stubs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do have a lease, but I will need hours to
search through the dozens of boxes in my storage unit for a copy of that lease
which, after all, covers the room to which the Housing Authority letter was addressed
and for which that letter stated the current rent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">You
might think that given the depth of The City's housing crisis and the appalling
spectacle of thousands of people sleeping on sidewalks and in doorways every
night, the "Mayor's Office on Housing" would think its mandate
included working with applicants such as myself whose particular lives do not
fit so easily into a few bureaucratically defined boxes, but such is not the
case.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">God
forbid that anything should be provided for the poor easily!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Handouts lead to moral depravity!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make the lazy sons of bitches work for their
food stamps and their SRO rooms, even if the work consists of shuffling papers
and meeting arbitrary deadlines, waiting in endless lines in dreary offices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ronald Reagan taught us all about those
Welfare Queens and Kings, and thank God the Clintons ended "welfare as we [knew]
it."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We</i> have got to do everything we can to keep <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">them</i> from getting their idle hands on our money! </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Why
can't they just get a job!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">It
seems to me as though what is unraveling is the illusion of America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The myth and the propaganda originate in the
Declaration of Independence, Jefferson's rallying cry designed to sell the
lower classes on the idea of going to war against their king for the benefit of
a landed aristocracy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The actual
founding document of the nation-state, the rule book setting forth the
operations of the federal government, is the Constitution, which in its
original form (i.e., before the first ten amendments) mentions no rights or
liberties belonging to individuals but instead concerns itself with property
and the interactions between the various state governments, through which the landowning
aristocrats already ruled each colony.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Declaration's blather about liberty and about the rights of man was
forgotten in the formation of the government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The government concerns itself only with power relations and property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The "American Dream", it turns out,
has been just that -- a dream.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
reality is property. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is real is
real estate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">But
every revolution that stirs up the common folk to fight and die on behalf of
the upper classes ends up suffering the consequences of the rhetoric it used to
do that stirring up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so we live in a
plutocracy whose stability is threatened by the promises its founders made and
never delivered on.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
promises of the Declaration live on, inspiring the people to keep pushing the
government to realize the powers which the Declaration says belong to the
people by divine right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Despite
institutional resistance, "we the people", organized and willing to
sacrifice even our lives, as has often happened, keep moving the United States
closer to its promise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We expanded the
electorate to include men without property, members of minority races including
former slaves, and women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless,
the full realization of the Declaration, the dream that called the masses from
around the globe to these shores, the American dream, continues to be deferred.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">We
must ask with Langston Hughes, "What happens to a dream deferred?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To Martin's dream?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To my dream?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To yours?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">In
these United States, there is a level to which neither charity nor common
humanity descends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>America has its
Untouchables, as is necessary in any society whose goods are not shared
unconditionally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What little
"safety net" still exists in this country is not available to those
who are most in need.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Mayor
Lee, like so many of the tech industry's other cheerleaders, touts "The
Sharing Economy" (a bit of Orwellian doublespeak) as an example of technology
opening new opportunities for work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
suggests that it may provide a remedy for unemployment and under-employment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the "sharing" companies do not
benefit the poor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They benefit the middle
class, which is rapidly being driven into poverty, but not the untouchably
poor. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have to have money to earn
anything in this new economy:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>you have
to own a car to drive for Uber and you have to have a place to live to make any
money through "Airbnb".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
so-called "Sharing Economy" has no place for the homeless.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
sharing economy does not offer an alternative to regular work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead it allows the increasingly pressured
middle class to monetize assets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although
I personally suffer from the decline in the taxi business due to the (I think)
illegal operations of Uber, Lyft, and other "ride share" companies, I
cannot blame the people who are ferrying rich kids around town in their own cars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt that they are following their passion
by doing this work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt that they
would be giving up their homes to Airbnb or working extra hours driving for
Uber after their regular jobs if they could make a comfortable living without
doing so, in other words, if they were paid a living wage.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Class
trumps all other considerations in this town, and at this point class has come
to determine one's eligibility to call oneself a San Franciscan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our avaricious and mendacious Mayor, a true
Gollum*, fawns on the rich and casts the poor aside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In his San Francisco, those who can least
afford to lose their home, those most dependent on social services both private
and public, are being evicted left and right, by Ellis Act, by fire, and even
by neglect.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
Mission neighborhood's bi-lingual newspaper, "El Tecolote", in Volume
45, Number 16, tells the story of 20 people evicted from a boarding house
because the landlord had failed to make repairs mandated by abatement orders
dating back to 1995.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually the
city's building inspectors ruled it uninhabitable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The landlord who failed to make the repairs died;
his daughter inherited the two unit structure and sold it to a developer who
has also failed to make any repairs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Instead he evicted the 20 residents, giving them no time to pack their
possessions or find new accommodations, and then chained and locked the doors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The following day he removed the front
staircase, which allowed access to the building, without bothering to get a
permit for the work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He then sent checks
for $1800 to each of the evicted residents, but the day after mailing them
stopped payment on them all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The various
parties involved, the former and the present owners and the city, argue in
court about who is responsible for what, but still none of the repairs have
been made and the 20 people who used to live in the building are unable to gain
access to retrieve their belongings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Ignored by the government and the land owners, they continue to live on
the streets. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">In Ed
Lee's San Francisco, the poor are not wanted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If there were a newspaper in this town that was not owned by the same
bosses who own City Hall, we might see headlines such as this:</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 28.0pt;">MAYOR TO POOR:</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 36.0pt;">DROP DEAD!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or perhaps</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face","serif"; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">CITY
CLOSED</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Baskerville Old Face","serif"; font-size: 26.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">TO
WORKERS EARNING UNDER $30,000</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">[*I
heard Lee interviewed on the radio a couple of weeks back and noted that he
pronounced sibilant terminal consonants with a prolonged quiet hiss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I almost thought I heard him muttering under
his breath, "My Precious, My Precious."]</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"> </span> </span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">One of
the cruelest things about poverty is the havoc it wrecks on your will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It galls me when I hear people suggest that
the poor are lazy and have rightly earned their poverty because they don't have
the will to work hard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These people have
got it backwards:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they have confused the
cause with its effect.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is simply not
the case that hard working and motivated people make money and that lazy people
do not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If poor people are lazy at all,
it is because poverty has made them so, and not the other way around.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Poverty
erodes the will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not having resources means
that you gradually give up on things, give up on your hopes to do X, Y, or
Z.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A musician who cannot afford the
equipment necessary to offer her music for sale online must soon lose her
motivation to create music altogether.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She may even have to pawn her instrument to pay for food or a month's
shelter in an SRO.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The more difficult a
thing is to do, the easier it is to give up on doing it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">I
cannot allow myself to think about how far I have to go before I will have what
I used to consider a "normal" life again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I think about that distance, I want to
throw in the towel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I have to break
things down to the smallest steps and focus on doing those things one by
one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People say "Don't sweat the small
stuff," but often that is precisely what you must do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do the small stuffs and let them accumulate over
time to become the big deal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">"Them
thats got shall get.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Them thats not
shall lose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So the Bible says, and it
still is news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Momma may have, and Poppa
may have, but God bless the child that's got his own."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">I hear
much enthusiastic talk about "disruptive" businesses and
technologies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The talkers imply that
this wave of "disruptive" products and business practices is something
new, born from innovations that computer technology has made possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nonsense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The invention of the steam engine or of the internal combustion engine,
the development of the electric power grid, the introduction of the telephone,
of railroads, of literally thousands of products of the industrial revolution
were just as disruptive to the ways people lived and the ways they made their
living as mobiles, mega-data, and "The Cloud" are now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And all the disruptions of the last 300 years
have not been progress:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the have only
manifest the capitalist industrial social order that ignores human values and counts
only profit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an order that chews
up and spits out individual lives.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">I
heard a history program on KALW a couple of weeks ago which included a
discussion of the history of containerized shipping.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is told in Marc Levinson's new
book, "The Box".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Levinson
talked about the unintended consequences of containerization, among them the
disappearance of large factories from the United States and the emergence of
China as the workshop of the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
was truly a disruptive technology.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Levinson did not talk about the disappearance of the men who worked
along the shore, the "'long shore men", who unloaded cargo by hand in
the days before containers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Actually,
I should not use the word "disappearance":<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>those Longshoremen did not
"disappear" any more than the middle class in this country has
"disappeared".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>True, the once
powerful Longshoremen's Union may have disappeared (only a vestige remains),
but the men did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those Longshoremen who
lost their jobs stayed on in San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They became an invisible community of impoverished souls who stuck
together, supporting and caring for one another, living in SRO hotels south of
market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These proud workers who had
struggled for a decent wage and decent working conditions, having lost their
jobs to a "disruptive technology", found themselves disparaged as
"bums" and their community looked down on as "Skid Row".</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
men remained in SROs south of Market Street until the same elites who had
"disrupted" their livelihoods and the work in which they took pride,
got the city to exercise eminent domain and scrape clear the blocks where those
hotels, those men's homes and community, had stood. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The capitalists called this brutal
displacement of people "Urban Renewal", and where the SROs had stood
they built Yerba Buena Gardens and the Moscone Convention Center.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Economically broken and separated from each
other, the scattered individuals lost the power that they had had in solidarity
with one another, the power that they had used in 1934 to win decent living
wages for workers all up and down the west coast of the United States.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
Longshoremen's jobs were exactly the kind of jobs on which the foundation of
the American middle class rested.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today
the "disruption" of those middle class jobs continues apace, as
corporations continue to drive down wages and cut payrolls. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And again the workers whose jobs are lost to
increase corporate profits are abandoned by the society at large.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Politicians propose strengthening the middle
class by granting tax cuts for education and by instituting programs of
"reeducation" and "retooling", responses that are entirely
beside the point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The jobs that paid a
decent wage are gone, and the jobs being created are mostly low-paying service
jobs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few high-paying technology jobs
are being created.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">So the
people who made up the middle class did not "disappear" like honey
bees and Monarch Butterflies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The middle
class was a cohort of individuals, and those individuals live on as the newly
poor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We buy groceries with food stamps
and live in whatever marginal housing the State is still willing to
subsidize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we too, like the
Longshoremen before us, are now being subjected to the second step of the
program:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>we are being driven apart from
one another, and our communities (the Mission, the Tenderloin) are being broken
up by gentrification, while we ourselves as individuals are scattered in a
general diaspora.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Communities
are being broken up and the nexus of relationships in each of them
destroyed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Evicted and driven from our
homes and neighborhoods, we are forced to move to places where we do not know
our neighbors and are not known by them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thus are we prevented from coming together in trust and solidarity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus are we kept from organizing and from resisting.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">A
viable resistance can only grow up among people who know each other and know
that they can trust each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such
trust and such knowledge are possible only among people who live together in
one place and can observe one another day to day and month to month and year to
year.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The much heralded new
"connectedness" that people think they find online cannot replace the
connections people make by living in a shared public space.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Online, you can never be sure who the person
with whom you are chatting really is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Men create online personalities as women, and women as men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pederasts pretend to be teenagers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The person with whom you are planning
political action may be an officer of the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The person may be a robot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
online world is one of smoke and mirrors, not one of truth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The revolution will not be
televised.</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The resistance will not be organized
online.</span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">We have
become commodities consigned to trash bins of remaindered items.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I don't care what industry you work in,
what company you work for, or what things you own, you too will be tossed aside
for a newer model long before your spirit or your mind are ready.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In our economic system, nothing about you
specifically is unique or uniquely valuable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You can easily be replaced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
you will be.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;">Dis</span></i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;">rupt</span></b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"; font-size: 22.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Inter-</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 10;"> </span>rupt</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Britannic Bold","sans-serif"; font-size: 26.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Corrupt</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Cambria","serif"; font-size: 18.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: major-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: major-latin;">Abrupt</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Arabic Typesetting"; font-size: 48.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 6;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Bankrupt</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 22.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>E</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 22.0pt;">rupt</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Ravie; font-size: 18.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 7;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ir</i></b>rupt</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif"; font-size: 72.0pt;">Rupture</span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";"> Work
is first and foremost one's means of surviving.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Genesis tells us that labor, whether woman's in childbirth or man's in
earning his bread by the sweat of his brow, is Yahweh's curse on humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like any curse, labor is something to be
endured.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What is more, one cannot endure
without labor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As they say, there is no
free lunch -- or breakfast or dinner for that matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No free shelter or clothing or regular dental
care either.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">One
of the fundamental injustices in "free" market capitalism,
specifically in the handling of labor as a marketable good, is that the
relationship between employer and employee is completely one-sided.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The boss holds the power of life and death
over the working woman or man who is powerless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If I quit my job, my employer faces the minor inconvenience of hiring a
replacement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If my employer fires me
from my job, I face possible homelessness and starvation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Believe what I am telling you because I know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have spent nights walking street after street
through the city because falling asleep in a park or on a sidewalk or in a
doorway leaves one terrifyingly vulnerable to predators.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">I
have been hungry enough to experience the struggle between hunger's weakness
(the body's fuel spent, the lamp flickering out) and hunger's deep, visceral,
aching pain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted only to surrender
to my fatigue and stay in my makeshift bed, however uncomfortable, and let the
cold and the darkness rise like water around me, lapping at my sides, yet the
knife and the rack and the thumbscrews of hunger drove me to stumble out and search
for food.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the condition in which
humans subsist when we cannot find work.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Those
who know this condition, those who know poverty, know also that rising above
such a level, acquiring housing and food, is not the same as a cure, that a
reprieve is not exoneration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those who
have lain in their bed listening to poverty scratching at the doorway, heard it
pacing on the other side of the cardboard box in which that bed is made,
smelling its rancid hot breath in the cold night air, know that the relative
safety of climbing a step or two up the ladder is just that: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">relative</i> safety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those of us whose parents struggled through
the Great Depression know that the behavior poverty necessitates does not
change with subsequent wealth and comfort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My mother and father spent their retirement touring the world by air and
by sea, traveling first class, and yet they still scraped every last bit of jam
from each jar, kept every rubber band, used and repaired and reused everything as
a way of life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">Once
poor, one cannot breathe freely or live without a debilitating degree of
anxiety until one can feel secure in having a regular income that is sufficient
to one's immediate needs and additionally includes enough to pay for the
unforeseen necessities, to cope with accidents, with disease, with upheavals of
society and of nature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People need a
secure predictable wage in order to enjoy physical and mental health and to
have at least a chance at happiness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">The
"gig" economy, piece work, the treatment of employees as
"independent contractors", in short, the "Uberization" of
work, is nothing but vicious oppression of the working man and woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This new economy of "disruptive"
businesses is celebrated by the capitalist class, who are made richer by this
aggravated exploitation of labor, and by the media whose mouths are fed by the
capitalist's checks, and by politicians, who are on the payroll of the rich as
surely as anyone else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But here in San
Francisco, under the heel of this booming tech economy, as that heel grinds
down on us harder and harder, the talk about having the "flexibility of
making my own schedule" and "being able to work when I want to,
allowing me to pursue my other interests as well" is the rhetoric of a
macabre Doctor Pangloss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those phrases
are a cruelly disingenuous pretense that "All is right with the
world."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The reality is that we
struggle to find opportunities to work, and when we find them, we exhaust
ourselves working every minute that we possibly can trying to afford the
minimum necessary for subsistence -- and working just as hard trying not to
collapse in despair.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS","sans-serif";">And
the attitude toward those of us who cannot find work -- because of their age or
race or gender or the educational system that neglected them in their youth --
is, as a young man in my taxi said one night, that "they'll die off soon
anyway."</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-64377505905919706712015-07-04T03:13:00.001-07:002015-07-04T03:23:22.635-07:00The New Poor<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">I sometimes think that the burdens of poverty fall most
heavily on the new poor, that is, on those who were until recently middle
class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Neither their education nor their
many friends (or "contacts") provide any meaningful help.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their education included no lessons on how
best to use the resources of a social worker; or on the protocols that apply in
the lines for St. Anthony's Dining Room or for the meals served at Glide
Memorial Methodist Church; or on keeping one's person and one's clothing clean
and presentable when one is living on the street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as I learned quickly and much to my surprise
(how naive I was at almost 60!), once you have no money, those "contacts",
the fellow board members and the buddy-buddy major donors who might have helped
you find a job, suddenly don't know you at all.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">The new poor have no idea how to negotiate daily life
without money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is all new to
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their problems are compounded by
the bourgeois habits and the middle-class ideas that they cannot seem to give
up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, I recently met a man
who has been homeless since declaring bankruptcy four years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I asked him whether he had applied for GA
(General Assistance, a $400 per month cash payment, which is all that's left of
welfare).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He said that he had not
because he would not qualify because he owns a car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe that my mouth actually fell open in
the moment of silence it took before I could gather my wits together again and
ask "Well, why don't you sell it?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His answer:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I need reliable
transportation to get to work."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
hasn't worked in four years.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">It gets worse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
car is a Jaguar for which he paid $42,000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"I would only get, like, $5000 for it, and I can't do that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It's stupid."<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">Four years of enduring the vagaries of street life have not
relieved this man of his crippling attachment to possessions and to the social
status which those possessions denote.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of
course even the rich are owned by their possessions, a fact that runs counter
to thee belief that money buys freedom and happiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And this man's case reveals how deep the
servitude to objects can run.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He clings
to that Jaguar as if it were a life raft that will keep him afloat until he can
be rescued or until he washes ashore on a habitable island.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thinks -- I am quite sure -- that if only
people could see him driving around town in his Jag, he would no longer have to
begin every new acquaintanceship by explaining himself, by trying to make every
new person whom he encounters see that his current situation is not part of his
"real" life..<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">The new poor have the tendency to think that the solution to
their problems is to return as quickly as possible to the life they used to
lead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They cast about for a job that
pays what they used to earn so that they can have the kind of house, car, and
wardrobe that they used to own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
soon find that no such jobs are forthcoming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They tally their losses and worry over them like rosary beads (Jaguar,
Chief Operations Officer, luxury condo in Laguna Beach, NYU, flying from New
York to Paris for the weekend, season tickets for the opera).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When you meet the new poor, they very soon
recite the list of their possessions (which they no longer possess) and the
positions they held in their past career, noting their professional
achievements (e.g. Number One in Corporate Sales for Apple in the Southern
California Region) as if these were the Stations of a Cross which they now
bear.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">What they cannot bear is the sense they have of their own
invisibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They want those who look
at them to see a success, a valuable member of society, who despite recent
losses is still the same person -- the same middle-class person -- as before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This attachment to a lost middle-class
identity cannot help these people in their new life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, their inability to cast off the husk
of bourgeois identity hinders them from discovering the possibilities of their
new appendages, those soggy, limp growths on their backs that -- if they could
only wriggle free from the shell of their old personhood -- could be spread out
in the sun and become a power that would allow them to fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Caught up in who they used to be, they cannot
accept who they are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;">They cannot accept that the poor on whom they used to look
down are their brothers and sisters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Instead they become more prejudiced -- more racist, more classist --
than ever.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They trumpet their disrespect
for the Have Nots because it proves the truth which they have been trying to
explain, namely that they are "really" Haves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so they alienate themselves from their
true community and inevitably from their true selves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Encased in memories that now function as
nothing more than delusions, locked up in the prison of middle-class values,
they cannot enter fully into their new -- their real -- life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-37975923854999176762015-06-25T22:16:00.000-07:002015-06-25T22:17:03.216-07:00Memorial<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">[Note:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Until now I have avoided identifying
individuals about whom I have written here and have confined myself to using
only their initials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have decided,
however, that in the case of individuals no longer living, I will use their
full names.]<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: large;"> </span></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">My phone rang one Thursday morning, and seeing my friend Franz
Wright's name displayed as the caller, I smiled and answered
"Hello!"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I heard a woman's
voice -- not his wife's -- asking whether I was who I am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I answered "Yes", she told me
that Franz had died a couple of hours before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I said just enough to say nothing and thanked her for the call.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Thursday being the first day of my weekend, a day on which I
mostly catch up with sleep, I began the weekend like any other by sleeping all
day and into the night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Throughout the
weekend I did not mention his death to anyone, either in emails or in
conversations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Early the next week I
received an email from another friend, M. P., telling me that Franz had died.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Franz and I had been friends in high school but had not
communicated with one another in the four decades that followed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>M.P., also a poet, was the man who got us
talking and writing to each other again after all those years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had to respond to M.P.'s email, and doing
so put an end to the silence in which I had managed to keep the news at bay.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I needed to begin thinking about the disappearance of my
friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read various obituaries, including
the passages from Franz's poems quoted in them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Yet when I opened one of his books to read his work in full, I could not
do so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could not hold his voice in my
head knowing that I would hear him no more.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I knew two Franzes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the first, with his long hair and soft face, shy, gentle, was already
deeply serious and committed irrevocably and without hesitation to poetry at an
age when the rest of us were fumbling through a variety of imagined futures;
the second, his visage craggy and his manner outspoken, defiant, and critical,
was clearly secure in his status as a poet, proud of his accomplishment and
jealous of its value.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Between them lay forty years untold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We had lived in worlds wholly apart.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet when we were reunited in the last few
years, what a special joy it was to find the same man I had known as a
boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was not just that we understood
one another's references and touchstones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Any of our contemporaries would make those same connections (Patty
Hearst; Suzy Creamcheese) and would understand one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, it was much more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only way I can describe it is to say that
when Franz spoke, I heard my own words, my thoughts, coming out of his mouth.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yet of course Franz wasn't me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have stumbled through life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Franz pursued a path that, if not always
clear, nevertheless always pointed at a clear destination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This clarity of purpose in his career was
matched by an inward assurance of righteousness, not some cheap belief that one
is always right but the moral certainty of knowing right from wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Franz was able, despite knowing his own
weaknesses and failures (or rather because he knew them), to judge with clarity
the people and events he encountered in his lifetime.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I loved him for referring to his Pulitzer Prize as "the
Putz Prize."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also loved him for
quoting another acquaintance of mine, Richard Howard, who said, "We have
now come to the point in this country where there are more poets than there are
people who read poetry."<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I boarded a bus one day a week or two ago and saw two boys,
high school students I would guess, probably about 13 or 14 years of age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They spoke with great energy and seriousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now and then, they burst out in
laughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without hearing any specific
words, I could tell by their affect what they were saying, what kinds of things
they were saying.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Their youth was almost shocking.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their skin seemed translucent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their shared looks, by turns conspiratorial,
sarcastic, enthralled, showed how thoroughly they understood each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wondered whether, forty some years ago,
some old man riding a bus had looked at Franz and me, unobserved by us, and had
seen what I now beheld.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">An awareness of growing old has come upon me quickly in the
last year or so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had felt myself to be
unchanged in age since early adulthood and took little notice of differences in
age among others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What differences I
observed between people in their thirties or forties or fifties were
superficial matters of getting or not getting references to popular songs or
old news.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But lately I feel dissociated
from much of the society around me and particularly from the future that seems
to be unfolding.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I feel this alienation most sharply in the unquestioning
acceptance of -- and the belief in the goodness of -- what is called "technology",
that is, new electronic devices.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I
stop to count up the things lost to technology, I realize that the change has
been going on for decades, especially since the widespread adoption of personal
computers and the Internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Travel
agents, telephone books, maps, bookstores, and record stores were among the
earlier losses.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More recently the pace
has accelerated:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>gone is real, physical
mail, books, movie theaters, records and CDs, pay phones, and soon enough, I
fear, taxi cabs.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">My reaction is visceral in part because I know personally
what the loss of these objects and institutions has meant when considered as
the loss of jobs, and the subsequent ruin of individual lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>American society has not made provision for
the bookstore clerks, travel agents, postal employees, et al. who have lost both
their incomes and their places in their communities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The politicians, social scientists, and
business leaders, to the extent that they pay heed to the problems that these
people face, talk about the "need to retool", about providing
educational programs so that these people can work at new jobs being created in
the "information economy."<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Such talk is a glib obfuscation of the reality that these
unemployed people live daily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a
cruel hoax to pretend that tech companies will hire them, "retooled"
or not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[And look at the disrespect in
that word "retooled", which speaks of people as if they were
inanimate machines.].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Technology
companies simply do not hire people over 40.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nor will most other companies, since they assume that older workers will
retire at 65, just as they once assumed that young women would leave careers to
have children and so did not hire them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Furthermore, those who do get hired and begin a second
career find that any one job is the not the same as any other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are not pegs that can be pulled from one hole
and stuck into another equally well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
spend a great deal of time and energy identifying the work that we want to do,
at which we can do well, and of which we can be proud.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So even if our national economy were creating
new jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb all those displaced by internet based
automation (now called "disruptive technology"), the people who would
be forced to take those new jobs would still have lost much more than could
easily be replaced.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">A job is not just a job:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>it is an identity; it is a role in one's community; it is a life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The American mythology declares that an
essential part of our "freedom" is that we can choose what kind of
work we do, and the positive thinking self-help gurus tell you to "follow
your passion" in developing your career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Leaving aside the complete falsehood of the myth that "the money
will follow,"(which I shall take up in a later essay), I want to make the
point that the myth itself implies that jobs are not interchangeable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Those who worked as travel agents, booksellers, etc. now
find that the expertise, understanding, and skill which they developed over a
lifetime no longer hold any value.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
job that defined them and gave them a source of pride has been taken by
machinery that juggles 0s and 1s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
is the worst aspect of their unemployment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They have been tossed into the trash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>People who worked hard, played by the rules, and believed the culture's
promise that their efforts would be repaid with respect and prosperity in their
"golden years," are instead expected to learn new skills and adopt
new identities doing work which they do not have sufficient years left in their
lives to master.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The skilled worker, the
lucky one that is, has been forced to take up a new line of work at which he or
she will never have time to reach the level of competence, of pride, and of
compensation they once had at their previous work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The unlucky worker is simply abandoned to live
out her or his final years in the useless and meaningless struggle merely to
survive that is poverty.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I know the truth of what I say because I live in the middle
of it every day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember an afternoon in 1978 (I think) when my first
partner (we called them "my lover" in those days) Tom and I went to
see a travel agent in Wellesley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Living
in the Northeast, we liked to go somewhere sunny and warm every winter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The travel agent told us about Negril,
Jamaica, where five small hotels, each having only about 20 rooms, were strung
along seven miles of perfect white sand beach at the western end of the
island.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He booked us into a hotel run by
delightful German woman who made sure that we knew the best spots to visit at
that end of the island.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our vacation was
idyllic, and my memories of it are vivid to this day.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I do not think that we would ever have considered Negril if
we had been searching the internet on our own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For one thing, the then-current political turmoil and violence in
Jamaica would probably have led us to skip the island entirely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as the travel agent knew, that unrest was
taking place in Kingston, at the other end of the island, and Negril was
peaceful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What's more, enough tourists
were put off by the political news that those five hotels were all only half
full, meaning that only about 100 people at most were vacationing along seven
miles of beach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We spent whole days
naked in the sun without seeing a single person along the endless horizon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On that westward facing pristine beach, we
watched overarching sunsets each night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>None of these joys would live with me today without that travel agent.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">During our week there we saw workmen beginning to survey and
to bulldoze a piece of land just north of our hotel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They had begun to build the Negril Beach
Village, a Club Med resort which today, I imagine, brings many thousands of
people who book their vacations online to over-run that once pristine
beach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I imagine the beach littered with
plastic cocktail glasses and little paper umbrellas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope that sweet German woman made a fortune
selling her hotel and got away to parts then and now unknown on the
Internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But how sad it must have been
for her to leave such a paradise, driven out by the fiery swords of the angels
of commerce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope that she never
looked back.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">And I wonder what became of that travel agent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have never been good at estimating people's
age and have no idea how old the man was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have the impression that he was not much older than we, so it is
likely that he could be living now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of
course, like Tom, he may have died of AIDS decades ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if he lives, it is certain that he no
longer works as a travel agent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His job
most likely disappeared fifteen to twenty years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With it went the possibility of his sharing
his vast knowledge of the world and its delights with any more than a handful
of personal acquaintances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His expertise
lost all monetary value too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So much for
a "sharing economy" -- a phrase that I detest for its
misrepresentation of businesses by which "them thats got shall get",
imbuing those businesses with an aura of benevolence that belies the fact that
more often than not they are ruining the lives of "them thats not."<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I doubt that the travel agency sold for a fortune.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I doubt that it sold at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More likely it folded, and he left with his
personal belongings on the last day, perhaps casting a wistful glance over his
shoulder at the posters of exotic and historical places that hung on the wall
behind the desk where he had labored for many years.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">Was he able to retire to one of those distant places he knew
so well?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If he was indeed our age, he
was probably too young to afford that.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Maybe he got a job at one of the nearby tech companies then flourishing
along Route 128.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so, I doubt that he
earned anything like what he did as a travel agent, when you factor in the
flights and accommodations and meals that airlines, hotels, and restaurants
offered all travel agents, and I doubt that he could ever enjoy his passion for
travel again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The witch Winfrey and the
smug Wayne Dyer should think of him next time they dispense such platitudinous
advice as "follow your passion, and the money will come."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Oprah shit.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">[I cannot resist
noting that when I could not recall Dyer's name, I googled "pbs guru self
help" and his was the first name that popped up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God bless the Internet!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now let's try "Idiot President United
States" and see what comes up!]<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">*<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">But now back to me.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">(I am reminded of the diva who, in the midst of an
interminable monologue about the glories of her career, turned to her companion
and said, "But enough about me!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What do you think of me?")<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I have been writing about those who lost their jobs, lost
their lives, due to economic changes which were for the most part brought about
by technological changes and the development of new infrastructure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I live among these people but must admit to
having arrived here by a different route.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was not forced out of my position in life by economic change, by automation,
or by what is called "Disruptive Technology."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just never found my place to begin with.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I am a very good student and have been blessed with an
exceptionally good education.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I believe
that I think clearly and that my conclusions are sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope that I write well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>I am physically presentable, and I think
that people do, on the whole, enjoy my company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I communicate easily with other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But none of these elements of my character are easily monetized in this
economy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I spent almost all of my adult
life in sales positions, and I am not a good salesman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An elusive aspect of my character,
"temperament", is at fault:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
am temperamentally unable to make people buy things that they are not sure they
want, and the ability to do just that is what defines sales.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As a result, I never really succeeded in
business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I merely scraped by.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I am also not good at managing other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am in particular incapable of disciplining others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For that reason I have no place in any
managerial or supervisorial capacity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That incapacity is also the reason that I was not a good teacher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I struggled painfully to grade student's
work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I could not separate their errors
from my failure to teach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As far as I
was concerned, inadequacies in their work resulted from my failure to
communicate clearly the nature of either the subject matter or the assigned
task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was miserable.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 12pt;">
<span style="font-family: Garamond;"><span style="font-size: large;">I was not tossed from my niche by some
"disruptive" iconoclast.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
was rather that in all the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the
cloud-capped towers, yea the great globe itself, I never found the corner in
which I was made to stand.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-17220881632783358342015-03-15T14:30:00.001-07:002015-03-15T22:09:59.824-07:00A Window Dresser's Comment<p dir="ltr">on the witlessness of techies? Or mindless Slaves of Fashion? </p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-wiX1BoNw9Sc/VQX543IAQgI/AAAAAAAAARE/X7PZTPxOHXM/s1600/Mindless%252520Techies.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"> <img border="0" src="http://lh5.ggpht.com/-wiX1BoNw9Sc/VQX543IAQgI/AAAAAAAAARE/X7PZTPxOHXM/s640/Mindless%252520Techies.jpg"> </a> </div>Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-55683315469583530812015-02-15T00:49:00.001-08:002015-02-15T00:49:29.467-08:00Joan Rivers<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I occasionally get off a witty remark or quick rejoinder,
but I stand in awe, slack-jawed really, at great satirists.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am only now realizing that I grew up in an
age of brilliant satire -- which was tossed out to the public free of charge on
broadcast television, mostly on daytime talk shows such as those hosted by Mike
Douglas, Merv Griffin, Dick Cavett, et al.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was not these men, the "stars", who possessed genius -- no,
it was the women who were their guests.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Phyllis Diller. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joan Rivers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Totie Fields.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Betty White.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">\ </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">An example of the complexity of their art:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recently heard a clip of Joan Rivers on one
of those talk shows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was some time in
the early 1970s, when even the word "gay" was taboo on
television.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The conversation went like
this:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Joan:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"O -- and
my Grandson! Stupid! Stupid!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Stupid!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wants to be a football
player when he grows up!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stupid!</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Host: "So?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
do you want him to grow up to be?"</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Joan:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>"Gay!"</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">At this the audience exploded in laughter -- shocked, disoriented
-- whereas if the same idea had been brought forward in a serious mood they
would have been both offended by the mention of homosexuality and dismayed that
any woman would want her child or grandchild to be homosexual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they are not in a serious mood because
they know that Joan's business is to make them laugh, and Joan herself is
laughing too.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Even so, a lot of tension was nevertheless churning around
the room and the appropriateness of laughter needed to be confirmed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joan had just said something dangerous and
everyone needed reassurance that she was "just kidding." So the host
gave Joan a prompt, in the form of the question you know is on every audience
member's mind.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Host: "Why?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Joan: "Who else is gonna care that I knew Judy
Garland?"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The audience again roared with laughter, this time relieved
laughter, because the revolutionary idea now floats harmlessly in a general
atmosphere of comedy. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet the idea has been
"entertained."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joan has dared
to suggest that having a gay man in the family is desirable, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and she has not backed down from that
suggestion at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can tell you that somewhere out there in TV
Land, a shocked and relieved and grateful little boy of ten or twelve, without
even knowing why yet, loves this funny lady who makes everyone laugh so hard.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Here is what amazes me:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is, at the time, very dangerous material.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is revolutionary at the most threatening
level because this is overturning the patriarchy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such things cannot be said seriously without censorship
and quite likely prosecution of the speaker for obscenity and corrupting public
morals (compare Socrates).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Joan used
the ancient -- literally the "classic" -- satirist's trick:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>she turns the joke against herself,
undercutting her own persona, rendering herself an object of ridicule and
therefore harmless, not worth punishing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Who would listen to her?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But
everyone just has, and she has let loose the revolutionary idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Having dared to say that she wants to live in a world -- no,
more -- in a family that includes gay men, she gives as her reason a motive
that is infantile, narcissistic, hopelessly shallow, and ridiculous.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Everyone talks about Rivers's self-deprecating humor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn't self-deprecation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is camouflage for an advance operative
softening up the enemy and preparing the way for the troops to follow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Phyllis Diller did the same thing telling jokes that
described the oppression of women in the 1950s and 1960s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And she was completely conscious of the
danger she was in and knew how to protect herself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember those outfits?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember one in particular: a dress of
feathers, a huge ball of feathers on top of her skinny little legs, her little
arms (with that outrageous cigarette holder) flapping around in all that
fluff.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You know what else she wore?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>White gloves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Always white gloves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who wears
gloves like that? Emmet Kelley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mickey
Mouse. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In short, clowns. Diller turned
herself into a clown, a fool, an idiot, to get away with speaking dangerous
truths to power.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Those women were as much the founders of the Feminist
movement as Friedan, Steinem, et al.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-91469780257208327702015-02-11T00:36:00.000-08:002015-05-09T21:26:36.778-07:00The New San Franciscans<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The children are drunk most every evening.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or at least so it seems on the nights that
they congregate on my street, Valencia Street, among the bars and restaurants
and music venues.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">They are drunk, and I am appalled at their language.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Not having had children, I have missed out both on a
fundamental part of the majority experience of life and on a vantage point from
which to observe societal changes at the personal level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of watching subsequent generations
develop their habits, their fashions, and their mores day by day and year by
year, I find myself confronted by a world full of people whose ways of living
are foreign to me -- foreign and confusing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Their behavior often seems witless and self-defeating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They also often seem stupid, arrogant, and
casually cruel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Needless to say, I am
puzzled by them and endeavor to understand them rather than being merely
resentful, even angry, which are my reflexive reactions to their behavior.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I often say that whereas in youth I thought it tragic that
everyone has to die, I now find the thought of my own death comforting:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would rather not see what this world will
be like in another fifty or sixty years' time, given the rapid disappearance of
the courtesies and the self-restraint which I was taught constitute good manners
among the new San Franciscans who surround me.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Parents, as I mentioned, observe their children arriving at
new ideas and adopting new norms of behavior daily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Change occurs incrementally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The journey from one world to another is
taken one step at a time so that the transition, seamless, from world to world
can appear to involve no major change at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Indeed, life observed continuously appears as continuity, something very
like stability. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But having lived among adults
who were my cohort for the last four decades, I suddenly find the world around
me peopled by adults of a different nature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I embarked on an ocean crossing with my friends and spent the voyage in
their company; now I have disembarked on alien shores.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Among my observations of this youthful crowd, one in
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packs.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Last night on the corner of 16th and Valencia I came across
a clot of a dozen or so young men and women all in costume -- some as animals,
some as stock characters such as a Victorian gentleman, a ballerina (a young
man, by the way, in tutu and holding a magic wand), and as what we used to call
an airline stewardess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were talking
energetically among themselves, laughing and bouncing around one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wound my way through the little crowd to
the corner where I waited for the light to change so that I could cross.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When it changed, the kids all poured out into the street, me
bobbing along in their midst, until they were stretched out in a line the
length of the crosswalk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They all
grasped each other's hands and the whole line of them bent forward in unison
and shook their butts at the traffic stopped behind them for the red
light.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then as the light changed, they
ran giggling back to the corner where they had started, and I noticed that one
of them had been apart from the line, in front of them in the intersection, and
that he was holding a camera -- probably a mobile phone but clearly being used
to record the event for -- pardon the pun -- posterity.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I often see groups of young people walking down the street
together in costume.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first couple of
times I thought that they might have been rehearsing a play somewhere and were
making their way home together.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I even
wondered whether there might be some holiday or celebratory event of which I
was unaware.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I have seen such groups
so often that I now assume that they are an epiphenomenon of "social
media", like flash mobs.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Whatever the case, I have to say that I have no memory in my
own past of socializing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">en masse </i>this
way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember myself, with or without
a partner depending on when and where, going out to dinner or even -- rarely --
the theater with two or three friends but almost never with a crowd of eight or
ten and certainly never in costume.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The exception
that I do recall is from my childhood, when birthday parties often involved ten
or twelve or more children going bowling or to a swimming pool or to a park
with some kind of amusement -- a train to ride, say, or a zoo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So I have to admit that such hijinks as those
described above seem childish to me, and the giggling chatter of the
participants sounds infantile.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Feeling a bit like Father William, I venture to say that I
remember being on the other side of this cultural divide in an era which had
newly coined a name for it: the Generation Gap.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[And O dear me, I cannot refrain from mentioning, for the edification of
the youngsters in the audience, that this then-new name for the then-newly conceptualized
phenomenon quickly underwent an apotheosis (since branding is, after all, the
highest sphere of activity -- indeed, the celestial manifestation -- in our
consumerist culture) as an empire of chain stores called "The Gap".]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Not wishing to deny at least partial continuity between the young
man I was and the old man I am, I must make the following two assertions:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First, that despite the paragraphs above, I
am not someone who belittles those who are thirty or forty years younger than I
as uncouth, uneducated, unaware, and uncivilized, for while I wish to describe
my observations and my reactions forthrightly, I claim no categorical or
objective validity for them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Second, I
believe my memory to be true when I say that in my youth I did not believe my
elders to be unable to keep up with a rapidly changing world because they clung
to old-fashioned ideas (i.e., superstitions) old-fashioned mores (i.e.,
repressed Victorian neuroses), and their own old-fashioned bodies, whose
subjection to decay was clearly visible.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In fact, I believed then as I do now that the essential
nature of human life, including the subjective experience of living, has not
and will not change, at least not in as short a time as that encompassed by all
human history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did not and do not
believe in History as a Force or a Process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I do not believe in Progress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
I always knew that the apparent "rapid change" which people then and
now took to be characteristic of the natural world and of humanity itself was
in fact characteristic only of some technological and mechanistic activities in
which humans indulge and of the toys (trains, planes, automobiles, tele-phones
and -visions, rockets and lunar modules -- all baubles and toys) which humans
have created for their own amusement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Human nature remains what it was for Shakespeare, as he well knew that
it was for Antony and Cleopatra, Lear, and Titus before him.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I want you to know that I am aware of the ironies, if not
paradoxes, I embody when telling you how the new world looks and feels to
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want you to know that I do not
wonder "What's the matter with kids these days?" or believe that the
world is going to hell in a hand basket.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While mulling over these thoughts today in preparation for writing these
words tonight, I heard in my mind's ear a youthful Neil Young singing "Old
man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you."</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But I digress.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Even while young I questioned the value our culture places
on youth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[See my post
""Questioning Youth" posted on 23 July 2014.]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My skepticism has been constant; it is, I
think, of a piece with my melancholy humor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Wherever I observe a general enthusiasm among the other inmates for any
particular idea, belief, invention, or innovation, I expect to find something
quite mundane, unimpressive and anything but new.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A quick example:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>internet commerce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
"innovation" is nothing more than the old catalogue-and-(800)-number
kind of retailing:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>one looks at pictures
and reads descriptions and then places an order long-distance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lillian Vernon and thousands of other
merchants have been operating the same way for decades, except that this time
the old girl has been gussied up like a mining camp whore and paraded along the
muddy main street to choruses of "All Hail the Divine Steve Jobs."</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Is this the much-vaunted change that we are told is
proceeding at such a rapid pace?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
only change I see is the reduction in the time it takes the merchant to get
funds debited from your account.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if
the time taken for fulfillment of orders and for shipping has been reduced, I
dare say that has more to do with Japanese innovations in "on-time"
delivery of inventories than with the O-so-glamorous internet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Frankly, all the hoopla makes me want to shout "The CEO
has no clothes!"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I awoke this morning to a conversation on "To the Best
of Our Knowledge", broadcast by KALW.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anne Strainchamps was interviewing Julian Keenan, a neuroscientist who
managed in six minutes to confirm a number of my pet "Laws of Life" and
to cite the scientific research relevant to establishing the truth of these
ideas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, Keenan said that
whereas we used to think that people who were clinically depressed were trapped
in an unrealistically dark view of reality, we now know that people who, as I
like to put it, have a melancholy humor in fact see the world more realistically
than do optimists, who make their way through life with self-deception and
willful blindness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[See my post "An
Excess of Black Bile" published on 8 May 2013.]</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Keenan also said that recent research proves fairly
conclusively that we do not have free will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[See my post "The Second of the Paradoxes" published 13 August
2013.]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We act and then make up reasons
for our actions, deceiving ourselves into thinking that our reasons preceded
the action and gave rise to it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
experiment he cited involved using sophisticated monitors of brain activity
whereon researchers saw that it was only after the subject moved his arm that
the areas of the brain associated with rational thinking and making choices lit
up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, the person's arm moved and
only after it moved did the person's brain begin to reason about moving her or
his arm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The implication, said Keenan,
is that the so-called reptilian brain, our most primitive neurological
structures, determine our behavior and that the thinking self which we so
proudly insist is the source of our thoughts, feelings, actions, and indeed the
source of our individual identity is itself a fiction, a delusion whose purpose
is to reconcile ourselves to living in the world.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Furthermore, Keenan went on to mention research showing that
our memories are more often false than true, providing another nail in the
coffin of the "self" we claim to have (or rather to be).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We wish to believe in our "selfs"
as mysteriously non-physical parts of our individual being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We call them "mind" or "spirit"
or "soul" and think of them as invisible parts of us that are
absolutely private, i.e., that we can each perceive only our own mind or spirit
or soul and not the content of anyone else's mind or spirit or soul.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We go so far as to believe that this
invisible self is in fact our essence and manifests the authentic person that
each of us is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This essence, we believe,
is the unchanging truth about us that provides the continuity of our
experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By reflecting on this inner
truth we can understand who we are and see that we have always been that person
whom we know ourselves to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We think
that we remember who we were in the past and that we can therefore see that we
are still that person.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We can and do
thereby engage in the great work that Socrates commanded as the source of true
wisdom:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Know Thyself" the
ugly old lecherous toad said to Plato and all the other beautiful young Greeks
who sat around him completely naked.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So if all those memories we have in our private minds (or
whatever you call it) are lies we tell ourselves in order to create for
ourselves an image of ourselves as consistent, i.e. true, throughout the course
of our lives, perhaps we should give up the idea we have of ourselves as
individuals:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I" and
"me" are preposterous stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That "self" of yours (and mine) is nonsense.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>O come on, doesn't the fact that this thing
is invisible, and not just invisible but imperceptible by any means except the
inexplicable perception that you deceive yourself into thinking you have by
"reflection" -- which is a hell of a lot like day-dreaming -- doesn't
all of that sound like one of the worst pieces of fantasy fiction ever written?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">O yes! Yes!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am the
only one who can perceive this thing that I have, and I can only perceive
mine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no direct awareness of any
others in other people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cannot
describe what it is or how it operates, but it is attached in some way I cannot
understand to my body, and through that mysterious attachment actually controls
my body (except for all the basic things a body does like breathe, pump blood,
digest food, fight off alien life forms that invade it, etc.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So while I cannot understand anything about
it, I can see it by looking inside myself (!), and when I do, I see that it,
unlike everything else in the world including my own body, is unchanging, and
that its continuity connects all the things I remember in my past and therefore
is what I truly am.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This empty idea is
the essence of me.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Admit it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the whole
business is the silliest nonsense you have ever heard -- at least as far as you
remember.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I suppose that this herd instinct among the young might not
be dangerous, but then I remember a great deal of talk about "group
think" when the Bush Administration needed to slither out of its
culpability for invading a country not our enemy, a country that threatened us
with no harm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prior to the adventure,
George W. Bush and his co-conspirators sought to persuade the Americans that
the war was both necessary and just, the justness of a war being essential to
God's forgiveness of the combatants for slaughtering their fellow men --
remember that pesky "Thou Shalt Not Kill" business? -- since at least
the Fourteenth Century, at which time the King or Prince in whose interest the
war was to be fought presented the argument for its justness before a gathering
of priests and scholars who passed judgment on the proposed bloodbath.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After this 21st-century adventure, no Weapons
of Mass Destruction being in Iraq, except of course the ones the Americans
unleashed on the Iraqi people, Bush, Cheney, et al. excused the failure of
anyone working in the White House, the Pentagon, the Congress, or even Cheery
Cheney's "undisclosed location", to question the lack of evidence
concerning the hypothetical weapons or to move to stop the rush to war.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Apparently a blanket of "group
think" had settled like a down comforter (so warm on a snowy night) over
the sleeping minds -- and consciences -- of everyone involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That thick warm blanket of "group
think" muted the sounds both of reason and of morality that might have
disturbed the blood-soaked dreams of any individual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And now that it was over, it was clear to
everyone that no individual could be blamed for what had been done by
"group think".</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I used to think that my inability to get work for five years
had resulted from either MRM's postings of libelous material online or from age
discrimination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But now I am beginning
to think that the various potential employers who interviewed me decided
against me because I have no experience working on a team.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I taught college courses, built a business as
a stock broker and then as an investment advisor, and I have a small amount of
retail experience selling exercise equipment and working in a gift shop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have not worked as part of a team.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, I have since my undergraduate days
proudly declared myself, like Dr. Johnson, to be "resolutely un-clubbable."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, when dinosaurs roamed the
earth, I was taught that great danger lay in "Conformism", that the
conformist was dangerously close to the ideal member of a totalitarian society.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In order for civilization to flourish,
we were taught, individuals must have the ability and the courage to challenge
the status quo, to challenge received opinion, whether economic, moral,
scientific, or anything else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Individuals must think independently and originally or humanity will
sink into a dull grey world of ignorance and superstition.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our heroes were Galileo and Socrates -- the
one persecuted by the Church and the other put to death by the Athenians.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now I find myself undone by this code of
self-reliance.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I was born when my mother was 40 years old, after she had
already given birth to and raised three other children, and she said that she
was exhausted throughout the early childhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She used to tell a story about having awakened from a nap, and, coming
into the kitchen, finding that I had used a chair from the kitchen table to
climb up on the counter and then reached up in the cabinet for a box of cereal,
which I was eating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She laughed and said
that she no longer had to worry about me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>If she dropped dead, I would be able to fend for myself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My parents had lived through the Great Depression and the
Second World War, and they instilled in me a belief in the importance of
self-reliance, so as not to become a burden to others, and of generosity toward
those who for whatever reason could not fully take cate of themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I will be grateful to the end of my days for
having been taught these lessons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[Please note that this ethic of self-reliance is not the
same as the deification of The Individual by the Ayn Rand and Ronald
Reagan.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In my writings here I have been
critical of that deification, seeing therein the loss of societal bonds, the
rejection of responsibility to and for our fellow human beings, and the
unapologetic greed that drives our economic system these days.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">At the beginning of this essay I mentioned being appalled at
the language I hear being used casually and constantly by people who are
younger than I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am old enough to
remember the emotional thrill, the sense of power and of liberation one felt in
defying the old constraints of propriety by using "four letter
words".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As I remember it, we used
them to express the extremity of our feeling about whatever argument we were
in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We used them to express disgust at
people we found hateful, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, or to express
our rage at our country's purposeless violence toward the people of Southeast Asia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was that fucking war and our asshole
President whom we reserved as targets for those verbal hand grenades.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now I hear bourgeois, well-heeled, and presumably
well-educated women and men talk about that fucking manager with her fucking
memos or the shit that happened in the meeting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Especially when they have been drinking, these Millennials have mouths
that we would have attributed to fishmongers or sailors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember one handsome, dark-haired woman
sitting in a pizza parlor talking about her fucking friend who fucking did this
and fucking did<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that or didn't fucking
do anything about some fucking thing else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I remember standing at a bus shelter and hearing kids who had just left
school -- I would guess eighth graders, approximately twelve or thirteen years
of age -- using every copulative, genital, scatological, and religious term of
abuse peppered throughout their conversation.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="color: windowtext;">The young never know when to
stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They think that more is always
more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember my elders saying that four-letter
words, being used as often as we used them, would lose their "shock
value" and therefore their meaning.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Believing our anger and our need to disrupt to be limitless, we let 'em
fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turns out that the grown-ups
were right.</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And it goes beyond those terms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The one most taboo word in 21st century
America, a word so terrible that even journalists must refer to it only as
"the N word", is bandied about freely by these kids.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the bus to work one day I saw a group of
four boys who were somewhere on the cusp of puberty -- one side or the other --
calling each other "nigger" at least once and often two or three
times <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per sentence</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Furthermore, one of the four was white, two
were Asian, and one was Latino.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
was no powerful emotion in their conversation: it was all banter and bravado,
as one might expect from boys of that age.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And yet to them, they were all "nigger", a term that in their
mouths was not without affection and a sense of some brotherhood.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">About the same time, I heard an older black man, probably
about my age, complaining loudly to a middle-aged black woman, about the use of
the "N" word by younger blacks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I could not hear everything he said clearly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was already eating my bagel and sipping my
coffee at a table near the back when he entered El Cafetazo, the cafe at which
I often stop for breakfast on my way home from work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"We fought" I heard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And "civil rights movement";
"you could get lynched for saying"; and finally "I'm a black
man, but I never sold no drugs; I'm a black man, but I never sold no drugs; I'm
a black man, but I never sold no drugs" the triple repetition burdened
with frustration, resentment, and the great loss felt by the old:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the disappearance of respect in a world that
comes to regard us as relics, as shadows of a world that is gone, as cobwebs
waiting to be swept away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A couple of weeks after I witnessed those boys talking on
the bus, I was listening to a BBC broadcast on which some famous footballer
(i.e., soccer player) was discussing his campaign to ban the word from sport.
He was white, but he felt so strongly about the disrespect and the hurt carried
by that word that he wanted severe punishments to be meted out to any athlete
who used it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remembered England's
sumptuary laws of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, which
attempted to regulate what clothes people could wear (only clothes appropriate
to their class and occupation).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Needless
to say these laws were impossible to enforce, and their passage served only to
mark a societal change that had already been accomplished.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This sportsman was trying to build a dam against the
inevitable -- more than that, he was trying to build a dam on a river that had
already shifted its bed and whose waters no longer ran along that course at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The sportsman in fact was oddly endowing the
word with a power no longer held. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trying
to obliterate the word, he was in a way maintaining or preserving, its negative
connotations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The boys on the bus had
already moved beyond that meaning and had gutted the emotional power of the
word.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The boys on the bus were in fact
ushering in a less racially volatile future for all us fucking niggers.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A couple of years ago I was talking with a psychologist who
has a Marriage and Family Counseling practice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He told me that he was working with a couple who were trying to cope
with the husband's affair with another woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The husband had taken the woman on a romantic vacation in Mexico,
telling his wife that he was on a business trip.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And he
had posted pictures and comments about the wonderful time they were having on
Facebook.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His wife had seen his
postings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She felt devastated, and she
had confronted him when he got home.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I could not imagine what kind of man would do such a thing
(though I did get a glimpse of "that kind of man" leaving the therapist's
office one day:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he was quite attractive
and moved with a kind of sexual grace).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Was he an idiot?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Did he
subconsciously want to end his marriage?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>What the hell possessed him to post those pictures and write those
comments?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I truly could not -- cannot --
understand such a person.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But thinking as I have been these last few days about the
group instinct I observe among the new San Franciscans, I have begun to wonder
whether their lives are not real until they are shared.</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Now comes Facebook, a virtual billboard on which over 1,310,000,000
users create advertisements for themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Facebook is a hybrid of the high school yearbook, the old-fashioned
slide show (remember the dread that gripped you as a child when your parents'
friends showed up with carousel after carousel of slides of their trip to
wherever?), and the family Christmas letter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>While there is nothing inherently interesting about Facebook, the
particular use to which most members have put it is interesting: people use Facebook
to portray themselves as celebrities are portrayed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The form of discourse that the common person
adopts to represent himself or herself on Facebook is the discourse of gossip
magazines.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The things about themselves that people post on Facebook are
exactly the things that gossip magazines print about celebrities:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what restaurants they frequent; whom they are
dating or marrying or divorcing etc.; whether they are pregnant; and so
on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pictures people post on Facebook
are also like the pictures in those magazines:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>they are either carefully posed shots that illustrate the good lives and
good works that their subjects have, or they are paparazzi photos of
pseudo-scandalous moments (a “wardrobe malfunction” at the beach; a shopping
trip made <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">en dishabille</i>.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have long been appalled at the willingness – no, the
eagerness – of such a large number of people to go on television shows such as
Jerry Springer or Dr. Phil to reveal inappropriate and shameful facts about
themselves and their loved ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Consideration of the vast number of such people who must seek places on
these shows without success can lead only to dismay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have come to think that people experience
their own commonplace lives as less real than the lives represented in the pages
of gossip magazines and on television and, therefore, they will make any
sacrifice, including their reputations and their dignity, and debase themselves
utterly, in order to appear on television and so become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">real</i> at last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For the
millions who cannot get cast on an episode of a television show, Facebook
allows them the next best thing.</span></div>
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<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
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<br></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Gore Vidal, entering the Kennedy Center through a stage door
before the ceremony at which he was to receive that institution’s highest award
and trailing a five-person television crew from Germany, turned to his
companion and said, “The untelevised life is not worth living.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The moment was quintessential Vidal:
brilliant in its wit, humorous in its wordplay, and, underlying these, a
profound statement on the difference between the values – including even the
existential sense of personhood – held by modern Americans and those held by
the Athenians of the Golden Age.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-43309219904769803692015-01-16T01:24:00.000-08:002015-01-16T01:24:14.320-08:00Driving Miss Tipsy<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Last night I quit work three hours early, at midnight rather
than 3:30.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I reached home before 2:00AM
and was asleep by 3:00AM, rather than the usual 6:00AM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did so for two reasons: the night before and
the following morning.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The night before, I had reached a new low of exhaustion and
despair.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found myself screaming at a
woman who was too drunk to remember where she lived.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had braced myself for something bad when I saw
that the address to which Dispatch had sent me was a bar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When a bartender guided her to the car and
told that Castro and Chavez was her destination, he handed me $15 to take her
home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I tensed up and then drove her as
quickly as I could to that intersection.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">All the way there, she kept falling asleep in the back seat,
waking up only when I opened all the windows and left the frigid night air blow
through the car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then she would wake up
and ask me to close the windows, complaining loudly about the cold. Then, when
I did, she would immediately fall asleep again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By the time she was making her fourth or fifth request to close the
windows, I merely ran them up, which quieted her, and then immediately ran them
down again.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When we got to Chavez and Castro, I stopped the car and
asked her where to leave her off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
didn't respond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I asked her loudly,
"Where do you live?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
directed me to drive up the block.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When
we got there she told me to turn right.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She told me to turn right again in another block.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the end of that block we were right back
where we started.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was furious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Every minute spent with her was another
minute in which I might have found my next fare.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The $15 was hardly worth any of this
behavior.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I finally thought of a different tack to take with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead of asking for directions I told her
to tell me her address.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure enough, despite
the havoc that alcohol has wrecked on her spatial awareness and understanding,
she easily, automatically I should say, retrieved the required alpha-numeric
data, which she was able to recite, sounding like a little child reciting multiplication
tables with her eyes closed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I drove to
the address.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Once we reached her address, she was again asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I yelled at her to “get out of my cab!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She started to do so but was suddenly asleep
again, with her legs hanging out the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By the end of it, I had gotten out of the cab, walked around to the rear
passenger door, opened it and was screaming at her, shaking all over, my face
mere inches from hers, demanding that she get out of the cab so that I could
continue working.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually, she did
rise to her feet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as I tried to back
out of the drive, she kept leaning on the side of the cab, saying “You’re
mean!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are so mean!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shaking, I slowly backed away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She righted herself and stood on her own
feet, continuing to call out after me that I was "so mean!" as I
drove away.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I had three more fares after that, but I was still so
off-balance that, when I had returned the cab and made my way home, I was too
upset to fall asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I didn’t go to
sleep until 7:00AM.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then some idiot in
my building pulled the fire alarm at 8:30. After that, I got no sleep at all. So last night I began another all night shift but with almost no sleep.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And that is why I quit early and came home to bed by 3:00AM.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[Note:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where I have
said that she "fell asleep" and "woke up", I should more accurately say that she
"passed out" and "came to".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a world
of difference between the two pairs of events.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-51106511892408853732015-01-16T01:18:00.000-08:002015-01-16T01:18:12.956-08:00The Conformist<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I was born just seven and a half years after World War Two
ended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Korean War was, however,
still being fought, though it was nearing its climax, with the cease-fire and Armistice
only months away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I say that the Korean
War ended before I was born, but one week before my 60th birthday, on 13 March
2013, North Korea officially withdrew from the Armistice, meaning that the war,
which never actually ended, is technically "hot" again.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Cold War was raging in earnest while I was growing up,
and like all children raised in times of war, my classmates and I were
indoctrinated with a world view and set of values that justified our country's
on-going, albeit cold, war. We were taught that we were "free" and
that people governed by our enemy ("communists" in general) were
brutally repressed and lived in conditions tantamount to slavery.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"Totalitarians" (another term for our enemy) spied
on their own people, coerced them into informing on one another, and controlled
every aspect of their lives, telling them where to live, what jobs or careers
to pursue, and with whom to socialize.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Totalitarian states sought to destroy the family as the fundamental unit
of society, pitting brother against brother and child against parent, claiming
a loyalty that superseded these family ties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We were taught that the essence of our "freedom" lay in the
political supremacy of the individual and a concomitant rejection of the
"group".</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I was young, one of the most often talked about social
and intellectual concerns was "Conformism."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We were taught that the greatness of our
society lay in the respect it held, both socially and legally, for The
Individual.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This Individual was allowed
Freedom, a right recognized as God-given and beyond the power of the state to deny.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The existence of "freedom" was never
questioned.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, there was major
debate about which if any circumstances might limit our presumed absolute
liberty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some argued forcibly that
liberty could be limited, that "Liberty is not License," pointing out
that neither society nor government would sanction "shouting 'Fire!' in a
crowded theater."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The common sense
notion was that "You can do anything you want as long as you don't hurt
anybody else."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[I must note that this
is an absurd, if not ridiculous, formulation, since you cannot know in advance
the eventual consequences of anything that you do and that anything you do has
the potential to cause harm to others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Furthermore, such ethical niceties have never been applied to businesses:
their freedom to do things that harm millions upon millions of people, and to
do them not just accidentally (being unforeseen consequences to other actions)
but knowingly, has, on the other hand, been absolute.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">During the 1950s, when I was growing up, the empirical fact
easily observed by even the least inquisitive was that upon returning from the
war(s) American men continued to behave as they had been trained to do by the
military.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They wore uniforms to work:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>blue collar workers actually called their
work clothes uniforms, whereas white collar workers used the term ironically to
refer to the nearly identical dark suits, white shirts, neckties, leather
shoes, and, in certain climates, overcoats which they wore.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This conformity of dress extended to conformity
of address as well:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these returning
soldiers were the generation that built the suburbs, huge communities of nearly
identical houses, which they preferred to the houses, mostly unique structures
built on small lots, in crowded cities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those cities were left to the Others who were
"different":<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"Negroes",
Jews, Latinos, et al.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead they
preferred the suburbs which were full of "People Like Us" or
"Our Kind."</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I remember the use of the word "different" to mean
suspect, morally or possibly mentally unstable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Disapproval of someone was often expressed by saying something like
"Well, I don't know -- he's just kind of 'different', you know?"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These days, what used to be a vague form of
social snobbery or discrimination has become an element of political
policy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our government now tells us to
report any suspicious behavior among our neighbors, friends, and family and
that it frequently harasses the family and friends of citizens who resist its
abrogation of the constitution and its pursuit of illegal forms of domestic
surveillance and population control.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A couple of weeks ago, I went to see the movie "Citizen
Four", which tells the story of Ed Snowden's efforts to expose to us all
the level to which our government, in clear violation of the Constitution, is
spying on us all in everything we do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Many of you will ignore me and ignore the movie because you think that
you know about this surveillance and it does not really worry you. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You do not feel immediately threatened by it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of you who do worry about it will ignore
me and the movie because even though government surveillance worries you, you
feel that you cannot do anything about it and that seeing the movie would only
upset you to no purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But if you do
not see this movie you will remain ignorant of the true nature of
"our" country's government.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you do see this movie, you will find yourself realizing,
as I did, that it is probably time to get out of this country, before the
repression becomes intolerable, at which time emigration will no doubt be
impossible.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you do not see this movie, you will not be dealing with reality when making the most basic decisions in your life.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-49154450446396516982014-12-07T01:04:00.000-08:002014-12-07T21:25:27.815-08:00Memories<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My sister MW once told me that when we were teenagers she
had walked in on me while I was masturbating in my bedroom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her mention of the incident some twenty years
after it had occurred shocked me twice:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>once because I felt, even twenty years later, exposed and ashamed, and
twice because I had absolutely no memory of it having happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One would think that such an emotionally
charged moment would be burnt into one's memory, but no:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in that place is only oblivion.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Much of our identity consists of the story we tell ourselves
about our past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story is built of
two types of materials.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One type of
material is the memory of particular events, of our actions and reactions and
the consequences thereof.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The other type
of material of comes to us from family lore and the memories of others: it is a
collection of traits which we share with our forbearers and which we believe we
have inherited from them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To learn that I had no memory of an event that must have
shaken me deeply -- I can imagine the combination of humiliating shame and
painful surprise -- throws doubt on the things that I do remember.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I have forgotten that, what else happened
that I do not remember?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And given that
uncertainty, how can I rely on the story that I have constructed about who I
am?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How can I possibly know myself?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I puzzle over this instance of forgetting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I can understand why one would forget having
done something which one regrets, something foolish or cruel, but in this case
I was innocent.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I do not think
masturbation to be a moral failing or to be harmful in any other way.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If anyone's behavior could be judged wrong in
this case it would be my sister's opening the door of my bedroom and entering
without warning or any consideration for my privacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet she remembers, and I do not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have in the years since her revelation come to think that
I have a faint, shadowy memory of the event, but I cannot be sure whether I
remember it or only remember having been told about it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So how can I begin to tell the story of the past six or
seven years of my life, the story of my involvement with MRM and the havoc he
caused me, with any confidence?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">MRM would not, I believe, feel any such compunction in
telling the story of those years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
would gauge what kind of story would be most likely to get his audience to do
what he wanted them to do, and he would construct his story with a few somewhat
modified actual events and with a few completely fictional elements, i.e. lies,
thrown in.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would avoid making things
up out of whole cloth, since they could be easily found out and also because
they would be harder for him to remember if he should find it necessary to
repeat his story later.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would alter
things only slightly to serve his purpose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And he would avoid using too many details, since doing so would be a
sure sign of falsehood, the fear of not being believed leading the amateur liar
most often into over-compensating by piling on details meant to convince.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No, MRM would lie masterfully.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I know that he would operate in this way because he once
bragged to me about his skill at lying and explained these principles -- and
others -- with pride.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I hated P.E. class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It was the only part of the school day that filled me with dread.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I felt -- I was -- hopelessly awkward and
uncoordinated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was always the last
person picked for any team.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would
stand in that line trying not to look at anyone, keeping my eyes down on the
gray macadam of the basketball court or the struggling little blades of grass
on the playing field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then I would be
out in right field, counting the seconds up to sixty and then the minutes that
remained in the period.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I prayed that
the ball not come to me, please God don't let it come this way, and when it did
I felt sick to my stomach as I tried to pretend to be trying to catch it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I ended up having to run after it as it
rolled away on the grass and, once I had picked it up, throwing it ineptly in
the general direction of the pitcher and the basemen, watching it never
actually fly directly toward any one of them and seeing it always -- like so
many of my efforts -- fall short.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">There I am, standing in right field or shifting from foot to
foot while I pretended to guard a basketball player or never looking at
teammates who had the ball so that they would never choose to throw it to
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If some fool called my name, and the
ball shot straight at me from his chest and arms, I always failed to catch it,
or if I did, I could neither hold on to it or dribble it or pass it without
seeing it fall into the hands of the opposing team.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It is 6:30 in the morning as I write, the end of a long
night driving a cab, and I realize as I tell you these memories that I have not
looked at them in detail ever before now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I have referred to them obliquely in conversation with other men who I
know had similar childhood experiences, but I have never taken the time to get
this close to that shy and embarrassed little boy until now.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">His memory makes me very sad.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I played right field because the ball is seldom hit
there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So despite my anxiety anticipatory
to every swing, I did, on the whole, have little to do while standing out
there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My imagination was free then, and
I would daydream about having magic powers, like the ones my favorite hero,
Superman, had.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I devoured each issue of
the Superman comic books when they appeared on the rack at Sam's Market.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I recall the smell of those pages now, as I
write these words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And as I lay in bed,
waking from a dream or perhaps beginning to dream before having fully fallen
asleep, I saw myself swooping upward, actually flying, as I caught a high fly
ball to right field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With all the
desperation of my clumsy, ball-fumbling shame, I wanted to fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ever-unsatisfied yearning hurt.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">That right-fielder's aching heart may go a long way to
explaining my lifelong interest in the occult, in mysteries both spiritual and
scientific, and my insistence on rejecting simple, material, mechanical,
measurable accounts of phenomena.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have
a hard time accepting the obvious explanation of anything as a complete
understanding of it. Ironically, my attitude is both skeptical and
credulous:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I always doubt
"facts" and am always willing to believe conjectures and appearances.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I had a neighbor in the Tenderloin who used to complain
about tiny bugs that were all around him and attacked him ceaselessly, jumping
and crawling and biting him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes
when we were talking, they would attack him, and though I never saw or felt
them myself, I never doubted him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From
what I could tell, everyone else with whom he interacted -- medical personnel,
social workers, friends and acquaintances -- told him that there were no bugs
and that he was crazy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, I instinctively
sympathized with his plight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I told him
that the bugs sounded awful, and I asked him how he dealt with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Though we don't see each other very often
now, we have remained friends, and I have noticed in the past year that the
bugs have deserted him entirely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
has not been lost is the easy and open conversation and friendship that we share.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Throughout my youth we spent summer vacations at Lake
Tahoe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By "summer vacation" I
mean the weeks that my father had off from work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had the entire three month period that
school was out of session as my summer vacation, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we</i> had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> summer
vacation, when the whole family packed up and left home in Walnut Creek to
reside temporarily in a different house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When I was very young, that house was a small trailer that hitched to
the back of the station wagon and served as our home in one of the California
State Parks along the western side of "the lake" as Tahoe was called
by my parents and their circle of friends, just as Hawaii was called "the
islands."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was still young --
maybe five or six -- when my father started renting a cabin on the shore of the
lake from one of the secretaries in his office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>By the time I was eleven or twelve, my parents had bought a house on the
same street as the secretary's cabin, and we now had "a place at the
lake".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By then my father's vacation
time had stretched to four weeks, and we spent the entire month of August
there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Lake Tahoe was as yet unpolluted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed, our drinking water came directly from
the lake through a pipe that stretched a hundred feet or more under the
pristine water and pulled that water directly into our faucets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The lake was icy cold; the days burnt with
the summer sun pouring through the thin air of a mile-high elevation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Later I would learn to appreciate lying in
the hot sun until I was almost panting from the heat and then diving into the
shock of frigid water, coming up gasping for air.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But when I was very young, say seven and eight and nine, I
spent my days at the lake reading in my little attic room, the sunlight
reflecting off the water and up through the tiny dormer window, its shifting in
arcs flying around the ceiling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember
the chill air, the heat of the sun, the ink and newsprint smell of the comic
books and the endless yearning to be Superman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Think of it!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What relief!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What enormous burden of weakness and failure
would be lifted!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even if I remained
disguised as myself, and without any higher social standing or public pride, I
would have the satisfaction, the confidence, of my secret powers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would no longer feel ashamed in my self.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I remember a night in Yosemite Valley during a family
vacation when we all stayed in tent cabins in Camp Curry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was in my late twenties or my
thirties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Specifically, I remember doing
a Tarot reading for my sister, MW.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
asked her to begin by thinking of a question that she should not tell me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I then began laying out the cards and
describing the circumstances that gave rise to the question.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the method by which I always began a
reading:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if what I said did not seem
applicable to the querent, I would stop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I would know that I was not at that time able to give a valid reading.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I do not know what year it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel fairly sure that my sister's second
son was on the verge of adolescence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
do not remember whether her third son had as yet been born, but I believe
so.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She may have been holding him on her
lap as I worked the cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If so, the
year was about 1987 or 1988.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I do
remember that when the reading ended, she told me that her question had been
about her second son's health.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had
been experiencing seizures and she wanted to know how serious they were and
whether more difficult problems might develop from them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My method with the Tarot begins with a ritualized shuffling of
the cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are divided into four
piles on the basis of which I describe the question as one of four different
types.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the querent agrees, I proceed
to lay out the cards in a way that selects a limited number of them and places
then in a sequence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes there are
lots of cards in the sequence; sometimes only two or three.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I look at the sequence of cards and try to
tell a story made up of the figures and actions portrayed in the cards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I like to compare what I do to reading a
comic book in a foreign language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With
no clue what the text says is going on, you try to discern the story by reading
only the pictures.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Some of the cards seem to me to represent people; some to
represent actions or events; and some to represent forces or spiritual and
psychological attitudes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When some
particularly negative or even threatening image appears, I usually try to
ameliorate the sense of it by taking it as symbolic of spiritual or
psychological processes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On this
particular occasion, I remember turning up the card for Death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I dwelt on the symbolic sense of the card as
indicating a process of change and renewal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I had no idea, of course, that my sister's question was one regarding
the future for her son, specifically whether the seizures he was experiencing
were the symptoms of a serious and perhaps life-threatening problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have still not mastered the truth of that
card, of Death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I shy away from its
meaning and fudge any reading in which it comes up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As you can see, this memory is like a shard from a broken
piece of pottery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I vividly remember the
presence of that card and my difficulty in speaking forthrightly about it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The context -- what year it was, who was
present, etc. -- is vague.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So little of
this memory is clear that I might not have remembered even the bit that I do,
except that within another year or two my sister's son died -- not the second
son who had been having the seizures, but the third son, who was or was not seated
in my sister's lap at the time of the reading.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This is the same sister, MW, who remembered walking in on
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the thirty years since her son
died, I have never had the courage to ask her whether she remembers that Tarot
reading.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">During the fifteen years that I lived on the east coast, I
made a point of telephoning my parents every Sunday afternoon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The regularity of the schedule meant that we
could talk to each other without the annoyance of calling to find no one home,
leaving messages, and playing "phone tag" over a number of days,
pushing the weekly conversation into the following week.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Although answering machines had come into
use, the things we had to say to one another could not be reduced to a few
words on a tape hissing with background noise, and even if they could, we would
end up only talking at each other in little bursts, like armies firing at
each another from trenches hidden in the blackness of a moonless night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Conversation is not onanistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One speaks, the other or others reply, the
one responds to the reply, or one or the other corrects something said earlier,
and the collaboration gives rise to living communication, the essence of our
common humanity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I remember being struck, in the early and mid-eighties, by
the startling similarity of my parents' lives with my own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They were in their seventies, and I in my
thirties.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet we seemed almost to be
contemporaries in that the events we talked about each week frequently and
persistently included funerals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My
parents' cohort, the friends and neighbors with whom they had grown up,
survived the Great Depression and World War, raised children, and grown old,
were dying off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And my cohort, the
energetic and ambitious and creative homosexuals of the east and west coasts,
were dying of AIDS.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I remember in particular one white-knuckled cab ride down
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">old</i> West Side Highway from the
Upper West Side to Chelsea during which I thought not only that all six of us
(including the driver) crammed into this little tin can barreling down the
length of Manhattan island, bouncing through potholes and sliding from lane to
lane were about to die but also that, if we survived, the rest of my life would
be the same thing anyway, over and over and over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The future I saw for myself was one of
attending funerals, sometimes as many as three or four a weekend, as the years
stretched into a lifetime.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Of all that I saw and felt through the two decades of the
scourge, I now find myself most affected by the realization that I am the only
one who remembers so many things: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>six
good looking men drifting through the Delaware Water Gap in an inflated rubber
boat, with a fully stocked bar in coolers and ravishing delicacies in baskets
(with the requisite plates, flatware, and stemware) laughing uncontrollably at
nothing because of the excellent LSD we had taken, being suddenly swamped and
driven to frantic efforts to reach the river's banks as an unexpected rainstorm
dumped its flood upon us, scrambling onto the bank and pulling the overturned
boat up so that we could all huddle under it for protection from the deluge,
and looking at one another only to see that the elegant David somehow still
held his lighted cigarette in one hand and his unspilled vodka and tonic in the
other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our whoops and howls of laughter,
the great pleasure of our camaraderie, persists now only in me, in my mortal
flesh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We six are together here still,
but within only one of us.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All perish
with me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">My first lover, TS, the medieval scholar, talked about the
oldest piece of written English that we have.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is an account of a battle known as "The Survivor's Lament", and it appears in the middle of "Beowulf".</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The hero has defeated the monster Grendel w</span><font face="Trebuchet MS, sans-serif">ho had been attacking Anglo-Saxon settlements and devouring livestock. Everyone is enjoying the huge banquet served in honor of Beowulf. But among all the carousing warriors and civilians sits an elderly man who does not join in the revelry and instead speaks solemnly about a battle decades before in which he fought and which he and his people lost. So in the middle of an heroic epic, at the moment of victory and salvation, the voice of defeat and of suffering brings the celebration to a halt with the reminder of failure and of the inevitable loss of everything. </font><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">The old
warrior ends his recollection of lost
youth and lost glory and beloved friendsalso lost -- heroes all -- with a line that has
haunted me throughout my adult life:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">"And I alone am
escaped to tell thee."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-16300669093383362132014-11-24T18:38:00.001-08:002014-11-24T18:40:47.234-08:00A Brief and Important Video<p dir="ltr">What puzzles me most is The City's support for ride share companies and its clear intent to run traditional taxi companies out of business. The only explanation apparent to me is that the city government has been bought. I wonder how many spouses/partners/children or other relatives of local politicians have been given jobs at Uber. </p>
<p dir="ltr">http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XT8Kv7Et0OI</p>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-65733033461094326062014-11-11T14:42:00.000-08:002014-11-11T14:42:50.375-08:00Money in Politics<div class="MsoNormal">
I am not the first to note that our country
has the finest congress that money can buy.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I have heard many people whom I respect and admire complain of “the corrupting influence of money” on our politics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I used to make the same complaint
myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The huge amounts of money spent
by individual campaigns, by the parties, and by other
groups and organizations, along with the largess afforded politicians by lobbyists, all seem to mean that
our government responds primarily to the needs and desires of the rich.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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I have recently, however, come to doubt the premise that our government
is being corrupted.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The idea of corruption implies that something innocent (or,
if not innocent, at least something virtuous) existed at one time and that this
good thing has been or is being spoiled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the case of the government of the United States, complaining about corruption suggests
that our Federal institutions were established to ensure equality among all
citizens in their relations with the state. The fact that the wealthy have
a greater say in how the country is run than do ordinary folks is therefore called corruption.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I see no evidence in our history or in
the constitution itself to suggest that things were ever different or ever
meant to be different. The Founding Fathers clearly believed that government was properly the business of wealthy men.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Indeed, what is government for if not to function as a mechanism for the protection of
property?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think
that most Americans would agree that government should set and enforce the
rules governing economic interactions but that it should not meddle with our familial and our social interactions.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Government establishes
weights and measures and issues currency. For example, i<span style="font-family: sans-serif;">t is often said that “possession is 90% of the law,” which means that 90% of our laws are devoted to defining who possesses what.</span><span style="font-family: sans-serif;"> </span> Disagreement over ownership has led to violent conflict throughout history, and we want these thingsto be strictly controlled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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But Americans also believe that government should have little to say about most social interactions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are free to love whom we choose, hate whom
we choose, and play cards with whomever we wish, and we can worship the god of our choice.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Since governments exist to set and enforce rules governing
economic relations, and since in this country,
those relations are mediated through the exchange of money, the U.S. government’s reason
for being is to make and enforce the rules governing interactions that
involve money.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> After all, o</span>ur constitution
explicitly denies to government the right to regulate most other social
interactions, such as speech, assembly, religious affiliations, etc. So what else would the government be for? </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Our government was
instituted by people who had money, and never in our history have the
people who have money instituted a government that would take it away from
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Founding Fathers clearly
intended the government to be an exclusive club:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>their “democracy” was means-tested, and only
those who had a penis and a certain amount of land could vote.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I find it hard to believe that they did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> intend money to influence politics.</div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-24265866750966827892014-11-11T14:40:00.003-08:002014-11-11T14:41:54.494-08:00Shannon Alley<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I discovered this alley, which connects O'Farrell to Geary between Taylor and Jones, while walking in the Tenderloin early one morning during my dark days. I later returned to take pictures and here, on Veteran's Day, I share them with you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br /></span>Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-75046700009652267582014-11-06T14:28:00.001-08:002014-11-11T14:41:23.042-08:00Blog Posts as Email<div dir="ltr">
A couple of months ago I noticed that Google had stopped sending my posts as email to those of you who signed up for the service. I kept writing and kept posting in the hope that you would check the site from time to time.</div>
<div dir="ltr">
Now, it seems that Google has fixed the problem and is sending my posts to you as email again. Please keep reading as there are probably many posts that you have missed.</div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-21121670915880988752014-11-04T22:41:00.002-08:002014-11-04T22:41:36.753-08:00The Law and The Profits<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<b><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Rules of Life #4 :<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Willingness to Break the Law is both a Tactical and a Strategic
Advantage</span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Anyone who has courted investors, whether raising capital to
start a new venture or soliciting investment in an ongoing enterprise knows
that one of the most fundamental considerations as to the value of a business
is whether there are "Barriers to Entry" which will effectively
prevent or at least limit competition.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The shibboleth of the law is such a barrier.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, no business could be easier than
selling illegal drugs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Buyers will seek
out the seller, pay any price, and return <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>again and again no matter what the quality of
the product.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No advertising, no
promotional effort, and no quality control are necessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only thing that allows the seller to
command high mark-ups, often in excess of 100% to 150%, the only thing limiting
competition, that is, is the law.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most
people are too afraid of the consequences of getting caught to follow such a
career.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Those too timid to break the law
can only sit on the sidelines and watch with envy as the courageous rake in
fortunes without any serious effort or skill.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Similarly, anyone with a two-bit piece of software developed
for a smart phone can take on an entire existing industry which is itself bound
by laws and regulatory bodies, capture their business, ruin them, and condemn
their workforce to unemployment:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>governments,
whether municipal, state, or federal, refuse to enforce the law against new
companies that use mobile phones connected to the internet to effect
transactions formerly effected in person, by correspondence, or by
telephone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shortly after I began my
career as a stockbroker in Manhattan, businesses began using a new technology, "fax
machines" to send documents over telephone lines, rather than sending them
physically through the mail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a while
we were forbidden to accept a fax in lieu of a signed document; then we could
accept a fax and act on it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as long as we
were assured that an original was to follow by mail immediately.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finally laws were amended to allow us to
accept a faxed document as if it were an original.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Such coy legalities are ancient history now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New companies blithely violate all manner of
laws and are allowed to proceed by acquiescence on the part of government.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today I heard on the BBC an interview with a
man who has started a business transferring funds among countries all over the
world, completely circumventing existing financial institutions by charging
money against one mobile phone and crediting it to another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you thought the "mortgage
meltdown" of 2008 brought the international banking system close to
catastrophic failure, wait until money moves freely around the world without
paying any fees.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">No business or industry is immune to this threat of outlaw
internet raiders.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It began, so far as I
know, a couple of decades ago when Napster destroyed the recording
industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How quaint that its founder
had to face trial and eventually punishment for violating copyright and other
rights belonging to an artist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nowadays
piracy, theft, corruption, and all manner of lawlessness are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">de rigueur</i> for any young entrepreneur.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Don't be a sap:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>if
you want to succeed, turn to crime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, why be a man when you can be a
success?*</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">After all, with enough money, you can easily get away with
murder -- just ask O.J.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have seen this
rhetorical question attributed to Bertold Brecht, but cannot cite a specific
source.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Note that the word for man in
German is "mensch" and that it denotes not just a gender but a noble
sense of righteousness and honor as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That sense, though largely lost from the English word, survives in such
phrases as "be a man about it" or more currently, "Man up!"</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-84136269952958142172014-11-01T16:33:00.003-07:002014-11-01T16:33:57.394-07:00The Mayor of Money<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">San Francisco has a long and rich history of
corruption, and the current administration, that of Ed Lee, is no exception.
The machinery of city government is up for sale -- or rather, has been sold to
the highest bidder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I thought that
being a San Franciscan should be a matter of pride, I would be outraged at the
hypocrisy and the venality of His Honor and those who benefit from his
patronage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But a city as deeply
avaricious, as superficially self-absorbed, and as blithely ignorant as San
Francisco does not even have enough of a moral foundation to make it worth
calling the city out on its multitude of sins against the woman, the man.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The Mayor at the time of the Great Earthquake in
1906, Eugene Schmidt, was a paragon of greed and graft.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My favorite example of his leadership is his
selling of "French Restaurant licenses", which allowed the holder to
operate a brothel unmolested by the SFPD.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The more things change, the more they remain the same.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mayor Ed Lee's panegyric on the "Sharing
Economy" is rhetorical nonsense. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The "Sharing Economy" is anything but.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Remember learning to share with others?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You probably don't, as I don't, because that
lesson is one of the earliest we are taught.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You don't remember toilet training either.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They both happen so early in life that we
have no concrete memory of learning those lessons.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Parents and teachers, however, know that both
lessons are crucial to the development of human beings as social animals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And sharing in particular is fundamental to
the most basic virtues humans profess.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You might say that all morality begins with sharing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Sharing is not trading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I have a peanut butter sandwich in my
lunch box and trade half of it for your cupcake, we are not sharing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I give you half of my sandwich because you
have no lunch at all, then I am sharing my sandwich with you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If you are homeless, and I let you sleep on my
couch, I am sharing my home with you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
I sublet my apartment or a room in my house to you through Airbnb, we are not
sharing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">If I rent my car and myself as driver to you
through Lyft, Uber, or Sidecar, we are not sharing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The "sharing economy" so eagerly abetted
by our corrupt city government has nothing to do with kindness, charity,
generosity, or hospitality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The business
leaders and their lackeys, such as the Mayor, try to wrap their activities in
the mantle of those ancient virtues, but their business is not the sharing of
things at all:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>their business is the
monetization of things.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Airbnb hosts and Uber drivers are not sharing
anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are making money off
their assets -- a car, a room, or even their time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">No politician concerned with the people of his
community would champion the ability of some people to earn a return on their
assets over the opportunity for other people -- people who might have no
assets -- to find work or housing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
city officials clearly do not care about people:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they care about money, which they call
"the economy" and which they credit with "creating jobs." According
to their mythology, the assets of the rich "trickle down" to the poor
through the mechanism of "job creation."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You might say that this "Job
Creationism" has about as much validity as that other kind of "Creationism."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The problems with this false logic are
manifold, but I want to be very clear about one.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Capital does not "create jobs." <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Money is not necessary for people to work. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, it is labor, people working, which
creates capital.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This truth is obvious to anyone who knows what has
happened in this country since the "Reagan* Revolution." The
increased concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people,
Reagan's goal and legacy, has not created jobs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The idea that the rich invest in companies that create new jobs has been
decisively disproved in a real-world experiment that has ripped American
society apart and is leading to social tensions that may well erupt in
violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in this atmosphere that
we live today.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The living San Francisco will either rise up
against the powers that be, as it did in 1934, or, having already been drained
of so much of its life blood by the exodus to Oakland, Richmond, and beyond, it
will die.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In place of the Grand Old
Dame, of the Paris of the Pacific, of Baghdad by the Bay, will stand a very
wealthy gated community, at whose gates tolls are charged to cross bridges into
a jumble of towering architectural monstrosities, the soulless hive of worker
bees tending to the bloated queens of capital.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>That shadow city, the hulking ghost of the city that was will stand,
that is, until the next big shake.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I used to say that "Willie Brown is not Mayor
of San Francisco:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he is Mayor of Real
Estate."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Ed Lee is not Mayor of San Francisco:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>he is Mayor of Money.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*Actually, the old hack actor does not deserve to have his
name attached to such a wrenching change in policy since all he did was shill
for the business interests and wealthy individuals who wanted to Thatcherize
America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-38512669383833460682014-10-25T15:56:00.001-07:002014-10-25T15:56:22.488-07:00Food for Thought<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">In the months between finishing my undergraduate work at
Berkeley and beginning my graduate courses at The Johns Hopkins University, I
waited table at a restaurant called "The Deli", which was on Union
Street in the Marina district of San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I had not worked there long when I realized one of the ironies of my job:
people came to me hungry and irritable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I gave them food that satisfied their appetites and comforted them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And just when the food I served made them
happy and relaxed, they left. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And then I
had to deal with another group of hungry and irritable folk.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This morning I woke up hungry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had not eaten as much as I should have last
night because I was having a fruitlessly busy night driving my cab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The huge "Dreamforce" conference occupied
the center of downtown for five days and caused traffic jams throughout the
Financial District, Chinatown, Union Square, SOMA, Nob Hill, and the
Embarcadero.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I answered numerous calls
from Dispatch only to find no one there wanting a cab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Either the passenger had caught another cab
because, given the traffic gridlock all around, they had had to wait longer
than they thought they should have, or the call had been placed by an Uber
driver in order to knock a cab out of the competition -- in other words, as a
Nixonian Dirty Trick.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Furthermore the fares I did get were either short
ferry-rides between one downtown hotel and another, yielding maybe six or seven
dollars, or treks to a hotel out by the airport or out by the ocean, which then
necessitated a return to the city empty, i.e., a "Dead Head."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I made no money at all last week, and by the
time I got home last night, I was angry, frustrated, anxious, and
depressed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I had no food in the house
and since I got off work at 5:00AM , no restaurants were open nearby.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So I went to bed hungry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was so exhausted that I barely knew that I was hungry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I registered the fact when I woke up during
the night (well, morning actually) but each time I quickly went back to
sleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I awakened for good in the
early afternoon, however, I felt the kind of hunger I had known during my most
penurious days on the street a little more than a year ago.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The experience of hunger calls into question the Darwinian
hypothesis, or at least the most common understanding of that theory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The early stages of hunger, the jittery
sleeplessness and the anxious, restless waking, can be understood as prompting
one to hunt for food and therefore as factors that increase the chance of
survival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These incitements to action
are fleeting, however, and quite soon they are replaced by a lethargy that
overwhelms any motivation to action at all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Within the body that lies on the bed one senses only an
emptiness void of both substance and energy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>You are aware of yourself as an empty sack, and the cool absence at your
center brings on a sense of relief.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
imagine yourself lying where you are for hours and then days, the body cleaning
itself out and then beginning to shut down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The sensation is seductive, even luxurious, as you release all effort
and all the tension in which you have bound yourself for a lifetime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You imagine them finding your body in a few
days, clean and empty on the white sheets, and all the ambitions and all the
shame that you have carried all your life have disappeared, leaving you pure in
death, peaceful, even happy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Such hunger cannot be understood as enhancing one's chances
of survival.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Among human beings, the commandment to share food, to share
it with anyone who appears at your door or at the opening of your tent or your
cave, is both prehistoric and absolute.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The most ancient myths and the most sacred rituals celebrate this
imperative as the founding principle of humanity, as the cornerstone of all
morality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>True communion is the sharing
of food, simple bread and wine, which are themselves the Divine Substance, the
body of God.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Zeus and Hermes, always fond of dressing as impoverished
mortals and roaming the countryside (in modern terms, appearing as homeless men
wandering the streets of an inner city) knock at the door of a rude hut,
isolated in a remote countryside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
aged man and woman who live there invite the strangers into their home, insist
that the visitors sit at their table, and serve them the meager meal of watery
soup and dry bread which they had prepared for themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hosts go because hospitality is the
obligation that defines being human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To share
food and shelter with another, especially a foreign and unknown other, an immigrant,
an outsider, is perhaps the most fundamental virtue of all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">These days, one often hears about "the problem of
homelessness."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let me say
this:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there is no problem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is nothing to figure out, nothing to
discuss.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is not a matter of problems
and solutions:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is a matter of people
who are hungry and people who have food, people who wander the open spaces of
the world unprotected and people who have shelter, people who have money and
people who have none.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We should all be ashamed before the two old peasants who
open their door to, and share their food with, Zeus and Hermes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are truly good, and they appear again
and again in the most ancient stories of human cultures everywhere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the Good Samaritan is but a variation on
these two.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">And as we admit our shame and our failure to live as
courageously and as honestly and as generously as the peasant couple, see how
the Gods themselves react to the truly human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The old man and woman, and the ruler of Mount Olympus and his messenger,
go to sleep in the little hut, the Gods in the bed and their hosts on the
floor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the morning, the Gods reveal
themselves to the couple and in honor of their virtue, the virtue of
hospitality, in which all moral strength is rooted, the Gods offer to grant them
any wish they might ask.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And the wish of
these aged lovers is as simple, as pure, and as achingly beautiful as their
hospitality the night before:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>they wish
only that they would die at the same moment so that neither will ever have to
live on without the other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Their wish is granted.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And some years later, in the late afternoon of a golden day, as the
evening stretches across the sky, preparing to settle down into the relaxation
of oncoming darkness, the two stand side by side on a hilltop looking out over
the fields and forests spread before them, and their stillness takes on a
subtle change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then bark begins to form,
curling around their feet and ankles, their legs and torsos, their arms and
necks and faces.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their arms become
branches, twigs stretching out from their fingers, until at last they stand
together as two trees, a linden and an oak, both growing out of a single trunk,
together.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Put food out.</b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">When people come to get it,</b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">organize them.</b></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">[This last quotation appeared on bus shelters in New York City in the mid-1980s. I believe that Barbara Kruger might have been the artist responsible, but I have been unable to find a definitive source.]</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"></span></span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-1095601036554850822014-10-12T15:47:00.001-07:002014-10-13T06:12:26.265-07:00How to Use a Taxi Cab<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have said that in the past I myself never used taxis in
this town because they were never available.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One never saw an empty cab glide by nor did they come to pick one up
even after having telephoned the dispatcher time and time again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Now that I drive a cab, I realize that <a href="http://streetlifesanfrancisco.blogspot.com/2014/08/new-mexico-and-old-germany.html" target="_blank">the failure of the taxi industry to serve the public</a> of this city in the past has
had an ancillary effect:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>San Franciscans
have no idea how to hail a cab or how to behave when riding in one.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I therefore offer the following words of advice:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">1.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When hailing a
cab, step to the curb, hold your right arm outstretched at an upward angle over
the street, one finger extended as if pointing at a cloud on the horizon, and
shout the single word "Taxi!", with an emphasis on the second
syllable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do not whistle:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am not your dog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do not shout "Hey!":<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no way of knowing that you are calling
to me and not to a friend across the street.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Besides, hay is for horses.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">To make this action most effective, perform it with utmost
confidence:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>think of yourself as
Claudette Colbert or Cary Grant, an unutterably beautiful star of Hollywood's
Golden Age, back when they made movies for and about adults rather than
overgrown children.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, you are
trying to attract attention to yourself, the attention of someone who is
already fully concentrating on variables that include but are not limited to
pedestrians, bicycles, parked cars that may pull out into traffic, signal
lights, and oncoming cars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You have to
compete against all other factors for notice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Do not be shy!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[NOTE:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wonder
whether a preference for using apps as opposed to encountering people directly,
or even encountering them telephonically, comes from a lack of self-confidence,
a shyness fearful of doing something wrong or doing it the wrong way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Machines, after all, provide the cold comfort
of being non-judgmental, even if that means that they are also unsupportive.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">2.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make yourself easy
to see.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, if you are hailing
a cab at night, stand under a streetlight, or in some other well-lit
place.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Remember that the driver you are
trying to hail has the lights of all those oncoming cars in her or his eyes,
and their dazzling effect can make you difficult to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">especially if you are dressed in dark clothes.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Didn't mother teach you all to wear white at
night?)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">3.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Make yourself easy
to get to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do not stand at a corner,
where traffic is flowing in four directions (or on Market street sometimes six)
thereby causing the cabbie who wants to pick you up to risk hitting or being
hit by multiple other drivers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stand
away from corners and if possible at an empty parking space (oops -- I almost
forgot that this is San Francisco and such spots are merely mythical) or at a loading
zone, a fire hydrant, or a gap in the line of parked cars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This placement gives the cabbie a place to
pull as far as possible out of traffic and allows other cars opportunity to
change lanes and go around the cab without worrying about how they are going to
make a turn at the same time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">4.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enter the cab only
from the curb side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do not walk out into
traffic lanes and open the door into said lanes to get in the cab.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">5.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do not, unless you
are in a large party of passengers, sit in the front seat.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The cabbie's dignity, stretching back through
history to the drivers of horse-drawn carriages and wagons, rests in large part
on the mutual recognition of the terms of his or her hire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just as the hackney driver sat on the raised
bench at the front of the carriage and the patron sat in the cushioned seats
behind, the cabbie has his or her workspace or office, as it were, in the front
of the car.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are the patron, she or
he is the teamster.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(One who steers a
team of horses is a teamster.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Americans have a hard time with service relationships.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> (<a href="http://streetlifesanfrancisco.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-visible-and-invisible.html" target="_blank">Remember Auntie Lee?</a>) </span>We like to pretend that there are no
differences of class because we believe that differences of class would be
barriers that separate us from one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But the hypocrisy -- nay, the outright lie -- of equality erects an
impenetrable barrier of silence between us, the silence that encases all taboo
subjects, and thereby prevents honest dealings among people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of those who work for you in service
positions have a perspective of which you have absolutely no idea because of
the barrier of false equality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">You the passenger have hired me, the driver, to take you to
the destination you name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My job is to
carry you there safely and quickly, in that order.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no authority to drive to a place of my
choosing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is your right to request
music or, if I have the radio on, to request that it be turned off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You decide whether the car is too warm or two
cold, and I adjust the heater or the air conditioner accordingly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I may ask something to indicate a willingness
to converse, but you decide whether or not we have a conversation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In all of these considerations, the power is
yours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To pretend otherwise is to
enforce a lie.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Indeed, to pretend otherwise is grossly unfair to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want only to perform my duty of transporting
you and to make your ride as comfortable as possible.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want you to tell me if you are too hot or
too cold.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Otherwise you leave me
guessing whether you are or are not happy, and that guesswork makes me
anxious.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, what I want most of
all is a generous tip, which I can earn only by pleasing you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Any clue you can give me as to what you want
gives me an opportunity to do my job well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">At a meeting of transportation workers last July during
Laborfest, I heard a panel made up of drivers from traditional cab companies,
drivers from Uber and Lyft, a union member, and a graduate student studying
labor issue in the taxi industry in San Francisco.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of the most interesting comments came
from a taxi driver who had switched to driving for Uber and then switched back
to driving a cab.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"When I drove for
Uber," he said, "what I missed most from driving a cab was the
conversations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can't talk about
anything serious with Uber customers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>All they want to hear is how wonderful everything is.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a cab you can be honest about your work
and about the city and about life."</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">That remark gets to the corrosive effect of the myth of equality. I want my passengers to think of me as a good driver and a pleasant person to pass the time in a car with. If they ask my opinion on some controversial topic, I will be honest but not argumentative. The last thing I would want to do would be to offend. Such behavior is normal. At the extreme, how many would tell Hitler that his plan to invade Russia was stupid. And how many husbands want to be scrupulously honest when asked whether that dress "makes me look fat." Relationships of power require different standards of honesty. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">[The word "truth" comes from the word "troth" -- a quality of a relationship between two individuals. Truth is measured by the relationship between the speaker and the audience. ]</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We adjust our opinions based on the company we are in, and the adjustments are shaped by the dynamic of power among the members of that company. To pretend equality blinds everyone to that reality and can lead to distortion and conflict. See what Nietzsche had to say about "the pathos of distance".</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Pretending that we are all just friends helping each other
out denies and makes invisible the facts of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The passenger (or at a restaurant the diner,
in a barber shop the customer in the chair, and so on with other commercial
relationships) is the employer and the holder of power.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is in the employer's power to improve the
employee's life by paying wages or tips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is also in her or his power to make the worker's life more difficult
by withholding payment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the former
case, the worker feels happy, feels proud of having done the job well, and
feels respected for the effort.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the
latter, the employee feels disappointed, feels like a failure at the job, and
feels as though reprimanded for having failed in some way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Do not let an ethic of false comradery blind
you to the power you hold and lead you to disrespect another person or to
ignore your server's needs.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Please remember that these reflections apply to all service
workers who aid you in accomplishing the tasks you face every day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A NOTE ON LANGUAGE</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have often wondered at the curious fact that when the
self-consciously democratic Americans dropped the distinction between the
formal and the informal second person (that is, between "thee and
thou" and "you and you") we kept the formal term and lost the
informal one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In earlier times, one
addressed close friends and family members as "thee", thereby showing
a tenderness of feeling and intimacy in the relationship.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One used "you" when addressing
strangers or those of a higher class.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But in America people started using "you" for everyone.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I suppose that the usage is a little like to Communist use
of "Comrade" as a title of respect for everyone equally, whether
husband, wife, elder, child, stranger, or best friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The newly "equal" (though falsely
so) citizens of the young democracy began addressing everyone with a term of
respect:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"you".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nowadays I think that most people think
"thee" and "thou" are terms for a superior person because
the only place they are still used is in addressing God.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I think the whole change rather sad.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I cannot now indicate a level of friendship
or love or warmth of feeling to someone by addressing her or him as
"thee".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would, dear reader, that
I could here so simply show thee such kindness.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-25045273918985952732014-10-05T02:03:00.001-07:002014-10-05T02:03:14.915-07:00Jobs and Reagan<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Because I drive a cab, people say, “You must have a million
stories to tell.” I don’t.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this
morning I realized that I have one story that needs to be told.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the history of the taxi industry in San
Francisco.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Once upon a time there was a chauffeur's union (and before
that a union of "hackmen" which ended with a strike in 1904 during
which one driver was killed), but now we are "independent
contractors" and technically not employed by anyone. So cabbies have no
set wages, no medical or dental insurance, and no retirement benefits. Instead
we guarantee the business owners a fixed income -- fixed, that is, until they
decide to raise it. And on the other side of things, web-based apps such as
Uber and Lyft have cut our ridership by more than half. (We're not likely to
get much help from the city in fighting those completely unregulated and
unlicensed businesses:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>too many local
politicians have family members who have been given jobs or places on the board
of Uber and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lyft.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A book about the history of the taxi industry in San
Francisco could enlighten many about the realities spawned by the triumphs of
Reaganomics and the internet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Few people
realize that Steve Jobs could have been a founding member of the Tea Party,
with his ruthless pursuit of wealth couple with a Libertarian attitude toward
social issues.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Silicon Valley companies
have dazzled everyone with their whizz-bang technologies, and they have charmed
Liberals and Progressives with their libertarian attitudes toward homosexuals,
with their willingness to allow flexible work schedules, to provide daycare on
site, to treat women equally (or appear to), and to foster casual dress and
informal corporate etiquette in their operations.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have allowed employees to form “affinity
groups” that create good will toward management among various groups of
employees who share personal, religious, or social concerns.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The companies also provide free restaurants
and all manner of games and amusements to allow (force?) their employees to
work endless hours.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">But such window-dressing aside, they have been ruthless in refusing
to allow their employees any real power by forbidding the formation of unions, by
fighting any government regulation of their businesses or their products, and
by promoting the “celebrity CEO” culture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As class-oppressors they have triumphed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I remember a long conversation I had one evening a couple years ago when
I was homeless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">A friend had invited me to stay with him for the night, the
weather being cold and wet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While my
friend did his laundry after dinner, I sat with one of his roommates who told
me about the horrible injustice that was being done to him at work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He had been a very early hire at Twitter, had
worked hard and received great evaluations, while the company was developing
and scaling up its systems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then, when
the big venture capital money came in, he and his peers began to get bad evaluations
and to be forced out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fired.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He still had his job but could see that the
process was grinding on for him, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The problem with these earl hires was that by law they would have to
receive the same stock and stock option benefits that the upper management
received, and management did not want to share the spoils of the upcoming IPO.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">This man’s experience has been repeated over and over
throughout corporate America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember
when companies like General Electric were suddenly giving bad evaluations to
previously model employees because they had learned through their insurance
carriers that these men had HIV or AIDS.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>No individual worker can fight such tactics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Indeed individual workers are always
powerless because as long as employment is governed by a “free market” for
labor, there is always someone else to take the job of any employee who
com[plains of injustice.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">During the Great Depression, workers driven to desperation
by poverty stood together for fair pay and safe working conditions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They struggled through protests and strikes,
some of them dying at the hands of police and such thugs as the Pinkerton
men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their heroic efforts established
labor unions in this country and led to the passage of laws limiting the work
week to 40 hours and setting requirements for workplace safety, overtime pay,
etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But by the late 1970s Corporations
and Capitalists had gained enough influence in politics to begin turning the
tide against unions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 he signaled that the
government would no longer support the rights of working people by busting the
Air Traffic Controllers union within days of taking office.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since then a steady campaign of
misinformation about unions, of political and legal oppression, and of the reclassification
of workers as “independent contractors” has castrated the union movement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We are back to the injustices of the 19<sup>th</sup>
and early 20<sup>th</sup> centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Steinbeck told stories of the injustices done to farm workers in the
agricultural industry in the 1930s that expose the same tactics and the same
ruthless greed of the owners that we see in every industry today, tech
included.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Nothing has changed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Senior
managements pay themselves outrageous amounts through sleazy stock and stock
option deals while at the same time constantly trying to cut labor costs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without unions, workers have no recourse when
they as individuals are forced out by such tactics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The false ideology of Individualism – the
myths of meritocracy and of free market entrepreneurialism -- <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is used to establish Fascism.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Mussolini defined fascism as “the perfect marriage of the
corporation and the state”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that defines
the high tech industry in a nutshell.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Just ask the NSA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(See the
Frontline Report <span style="color: red;"><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/united-states-of-secrets/" target="_blank">“United States of Secrets.”</a></span>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Maybe someone in Hell is planning a gay wedding for Jobs and
Reagan just to make the point.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m sure
they are both there.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5474889278345205428.post-51133649153211932082014-09-28T23:01:00.001-07:002014-09-28T23:01:37.526-07:00The White Man’s Burden<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">When I was small, movies were black and white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is to say, serious movies, movies that
purported to be realistic and to address adult themes, were black and
white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Comedy, romance, fantasy, and
especially musicals, might be in Technicolor, but not thoughtful movies, movies
that aspired to be art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In fact, color
images were considered to be, and actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>,
unrealistic compared the black and white images, more like dreams than like
recordings of actual events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Serious,
adult stories about war, for example, or about heroic accomplishments appeared
in black and white.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Perhaps the generation that had fought World War Two did see
the real world as a place divided clearly into black and white; perhaps for
them to see things realistically was to see them as black and white.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember that people who wanted to affirm
the veracity of a statement pointed to an authority such as a newspaper or a
book and said, “It’s all right there in black and white!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, of course, there was that other way in
which the world really was sharply divided into black and white.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">By the time I was born, in 1953, the world was beginning to
change or was at least preparing psychologically for change.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For example, one still heard the phrase “the
white man’s burden”, but its use was always ironic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One recognized its imperial arrogance but continued
to use it as short-hand for a colonial ideology, for the belief that European
conquerors were spreading progress and enlightenment to a backward, primitive
world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Compare to G.W. Bush spreading
democracy through the Middle East by invading Iraq.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See also my description of the Spaniards
moving into <a href="http://streetlifesanfrancisco.blogspot.com/2014/09/whose-neighborhood.html" target="_blank">the neighborhood</a> where I now live.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">As I approached puberty, David Lean made an epic film in
Technicolor:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Lawrence of Arabia.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is interesting to note that while the film
dealt with serious geo-political themes, it was also highly romanticized, much
of it either inaccurate or wholly fictional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Even so, if the portrait of T.E. Lawrence was not objectively accurate,
it was probably very close to the way in which Lawrence saw himself: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as the man who, in the years between World War
One and World War Two, showed the Arab tribes that they could become fully
modern, independent nations.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The British Empire’s victory in the Sinai and Palestine
Campaign of World War One ended with the partitioning of the Ottoman
Empire:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>France got Lebanon and Syria,
and Britain got Mesopotamia and Palestine. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The British already had India to the east of
Mesopotamia, and they had Egypt, including the Sinai, to the west of Palestine.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the decade following the war, European
colonial rule ended.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The departing
powers created of the Kingdom of Iraq in 1932, Lebanon in 1943, Syria in ’46,
Israel in ‘48, and Jordan in ’49.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These
countries were all carved out of parts of a sprawling region called since Roman
times “the Levant”, which comes from the Latin word that means “the rising”,
i.e., the east, where the sun rises.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Levant was roughly equivalent to the area we call the Middle East.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I suspect that most Americans, if they think of it at all,
think that Iraq and Syria are the modern names for ancient kingdoms, perhaps
Babylon and Mesopotamia, and that Iran is just the modern name for Persia.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suspect that they think the same of
Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And I
suspect that the tribal affiliations that cross all of these national borders,
Sunni and Shia and Kurd, just confuse the hell out of them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">Americans know little about the Middle East because we are
not – or were not when I went to school – taught the history of World War One
in any detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What we are taught is an
entirely self-absorbed view of events.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We learn that the Constitution forbids “foreign entanglements” and that
therefore the country paid no attention to European and global affairs before
World War One.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We know only that we
entered the war in its final year and having won it for the tired old
Europeans, we came home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for the
origins and results of that war, we know only the puzzling fact that the
assassination of some Grand Duke in a little town in Serbia started it all and
that it did not really end but just took a break for twenty years until World
War Two, which we know a little more about, namely that the United States then
had to go in full force and end all that European bickering for good.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">It seems that instead of knowing the history of the two
World Wars, their causes and their results, we know the history of how
Americans viewed events and how they felt about them at the time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>While this history of the mind of the nation
may tell you why certain politicians were elected, it tells you nothing about
the government’s actual policies and the real reasons for its actions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is as if what the general public does,
i.e., vote, is what matters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thus the
educational system has kept American’s eyes on themselves and diverted their
attention from what they think is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">their</i>
government.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">The nattering nabobs on both the left and the right have
been saying that we ought to have a national debate about entering our latest
war, the one against the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But how can we when we have no idea what our
enemy remembers and is trying to undo? The other day I heard Terry Gross ask
her interviewee on “Fresh Air” why the Administration keeps referring to our
new enemy as “ISIL” when the rest of the world calls it “ISIS” or “Islamic
State.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He, Dexter Filkins, who writes
for the New Yorker, said that he had no idea.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">I have long thought that every newly elected President,
immediately upon leaving the inauguration ceremony, is led into a small room in
some government building, told to take a seat, and then told what is really
going on, what the United States really is and really does, and what that new
President will and will not do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“All
that stuff you said during the campaign was fine,” the instructor says, “and it
sounded just fine, but forget it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this
is the way things really are.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How else
to explain the changes which take place immediately in the President’s apparent
principles and plans?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How else, in
Obama’s case, to explain the continued existence of the Guantanamo Bay prison?
Or the continuation of the Bush policies of domestic surveillance and
unconstitutional renderings, and murder by drone or by Special Forces units?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">So in my novel, a piece of speculative fiction, of fantasy
really, in which (get this!) a black man is actually elected President of the
United States, he insists on having everyone in his Administration refer to the
enemy group as “ISIL” because he wants that word, “Levant”, before the people’s
eyes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That word is the only way he has
to signal from behind the mask that Power has affixed to his skull, covering
his face, that this enemy is the avatar of ancient peoples native to that land
and is ranged against us not because of anything we the people consciously did
but because we are the heirs to the colonial European powers, just as we were
heirs to the French in Viet Nam (formerly French Indochina) and to the Spanish
in Central America.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our corporations have
taken over trade with these lands from entities like the British Levant
Company, formed in 1581 to trade with the Ottoman Empire and it is against
their actions, supported by our military and by the regimes we prop up in these
countries, that the insurgents fight.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">*</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;">We have no idea what has been done and is being done to
people all over the world in our name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We benefit from the appropriation of their natural resources and even
their labor for which we pay a mere pittance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We are kept ignorant of the day to day oppression that people suffer at
the hands of the institutions that nurture our consumption of resources and
manufactures all over the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our
ignorance convinces us that we are innocent and that the violence directed at
us is unreasonable, sheer madness and barbarism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We fear what we do not understand and that
fear makes us lash out in further aggression which we consider “defense of
Americans and American interests.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Next
time you hear that phrase demand to know what those “interests” are and what
they are and have been doing abroad for decades.</span></div>
Howard Tharsinghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07431001860503889238noreply@blogger.com0