... Leavin' on a Jet Plane...

This is the saga of our attempt to return from our summer vacation in England and Wales. I wouldn't normally start a vacation story with the end, but this is the worst airline mess I've ever personally suffered through; and it was complicated by the way the travel agent set up our lodgings.

Friday morning we started from York, in northern England, and hit the M1 for London. All was smooth until after we stopped for lunch in Leicester; it started to rain then, and rained continually for about 70 miles, until we reached Luton, just north of the M25 (London ring road). This was world-class rain, too - so bad the M1 traffic slowed under 30 MPH (think of I-80) because the windshield wipers couldn't keep up. The water couldn't drain off the roads fast enough. The only other place I've seen it rain that hard was in the Arizona desert. It had quit by the time we got to the M25, but that was no help: it took us an hour and a half to go about 25 miles to our exit. We now knew why our first London cabbie had called it "the biggest car park in the universe". We inched our way down to exit J13 for Staines, where we had a hotel reservation; this is 2 exits past the M4 junction, which is (among other things) how you get to Heathrow.

By the time we got off the motorway, checked into the hotel, luggage unloaded, it was 5 PM; and we still had to return the rental car to Heathrow. We now know that you can get to Heathrow from Staines without going on the motorway; but we didn't know that then, so back we went into the meat grinder. It took us another hour and a half to get to the car rental return (the directional signs at Heathrow conform to the general English road sign assumption that if you don't know how to get somewhere, you probably shouldn't be going there; but I assumed the car rental firm wanted their Mercedes back). By this time my husband had been driving in appalling traffic for something like 7 hours since lunch, and was fraying badly. It took us almost an hour to return the car, since we had managed to remove the passenger side mirror early in the trip and they had to do a detailed damage report (the extra insurance fees just paid for themselves). The car rental shuttle got us to the terminal around 7:30 PM, when we found that the line of people waiting for taxis was longer than the line of taxis.

We gave up and went into the terminal to eat dinner. If the taxi situation was still bad after dinner, at least we'd be fed and somewhat relaxed. After dinner the line was still long, but at least now there were taxis stacked up; at which point we discovered how badly our travel agent had placed us. Heathrow taxi service only does metered delivery into central London. Staines, where we were staying, is an outer suburb and there is no standard taxi service there from the airport (because they couldn't count on a return fare); it's a "fixed fee" of £55! (At the current Exchange rate of $2.05, that's almost $113 to go about 6 miles!) And in cash, which fortunately we had. We managed to negotiate it down to £50, including tip. We probably could have gotten a cab, or a shuttle, to one of the hotels in the airport, which was where we had wanted to stay; but the agent hadn't booked us into any of them.

During the cab ride, we learned from the cabbie that Heathrow had also had torrential rains the day before: the runways were flooded, multiple afternoon flights were cancelled, and in fact the single tunnel that allows ground transport access to the terminals was also flooded. (Can you spell crummy access engineering??) In addition to the Heathrow problems, the M4 itself was down to 1 westbound lane about 15 miles west of the airport, due to landslides from still more rain. All this may explain why the traffic at the M25-M4 junction was so ghastly around 4 PM, added to the fact that it was Friday at 4 PM. (Mem. to self: next time, fly on Wednesday.) We got back to the hotel around 9 PM, and spent the rest of the evening packing everything into 4 suitcases and 2 backpacks, since travelers leaving Heathrow can carry on one and only one bag (and this DOES include women's purses).

Next morning we had a 10:50 AM international flight, so we got to the airport at 7:30 AM (taxi fare in that direction? £16), to find a howling crowd on the access road in front of the terminal. A British Air person asked us for our flight and directed us to a queue that was about a block long; before it was over it was almost 3 times that. We stood in that queue, refused entrance to the terminal, for an hour and a half, while BritAir let in people with earlier flights (including, I think, everybody whose flight the day before was cancelled; other people who got into the airport without standing in this line included everyone who took the train, which goes directly into the terminal. Only people who came by road were blocked this way.). The howling crowd included abnormally large numbers of children and adolescents, accompanied and not, because 7/21 is the first day of the British school summer holidays. (Mem. to self: travel earlier or later next time...)

At 9:00 AM they finally allowed in the people on flights after 10:30 - they had a big flight out at 10:30 - so we went into the terminal and found another howling crowd, all trying to check in at once, in at least 14 languages. The self-service check-in kiosks hadn't worked for us the night before, and they still didn't work. The BA rep suggested we were late checking in for our flight and I snarled at her. We stood in line for another hour and a half (my husband had been freaking out spectacularly ever since we got in the terminal, but by this time even I was beginning to wonder if we were going to get on a plan that day at all), in front of a plaintive German woman, on her first solo flight, whose plane was leaving at 10:45. We finally (in the nick of time) discovered that they had an emergency check-in station for people whose flights were leaving Real Soon Now, so we first shoved the German woman to it, and then we used it.

It was now 10:35; our flight was scheduled for 10:50; we had boarding passes and had checked our bags, but we hadn't cleared security. We got through security in the fastest time I've ever seen by telling the few people in line that our plane was leaving in 10 minutes (they let us cut in; actually, due to the massive backups at check in, security had almost no line at all; I've never had a faster pat-down); then we ran for gate 52. It wasn't the farthest possible gate, but by God it wasn't much short of it. And as we panted up to the gate, desperately waving our passports and boarding passes, the attendant said, "Oh, you're fine; take a seat. I haven't called the flight yet."

After that, everything else was anticlimactic. We even sat together, and my husband had the window seat he likes. The plane actually boarded around 11:30, and lifted off at 11:50. British Air serves you the least amount of liquid they possibly can, as infrequently as they can; the air conditioning didn't work (my husband was carrying an altimeter that also shows temperature; it was 78 degrees Fahrenheit at our seats); you couldn't get a cup of water from the dispensers because the water pressure was so high it splashed out of the paper cups; and one of the lavatories smelled of stale piss and had a nameless liquid sloshing around the base of the unit. I was not impressed with the service; but nothing else actually went wrong until we landed at SFO and discovered - wait for it - that our luggage had not made it onto the plane. None of it.

We have a tracking number; British Airways insists they have our luggage; they just don't know exactly where it is. It might be still at Heathrow, waiting for a flight; it may be somewhere at SFO; the U.S. Customs may be going through it. I wish them joy of my dirty underwear; at the moment, those bags contain almost all the underwear I own. I've talked to BA twice, and it's clear that they are completely overwhelmed and may not get this sorted out until mid-week; and that even our bags do arrive today, it may still take hours for someone to get around to updating the file that tells BA knows where they are. But at least we're home.

Deja Vu at Lake Tahoe

Here we go again. Residents of South Lake Tahoe, the residents of the Oakland hills salute you. In 1991 we too watched helplessly as the wind lashed the flames toward our houses; some people died because they couldn't get out. At least no one has died at Lake Tahoe.

I live in the Oakland hills - in a normal urban neighborhood, not a forested glade. But every time something like this happens, I marvel again at humanity's desire to live in dangerous places, because they're pretty. Dry climate forests, where fire has been a part of the landscape for thousands of years, until we moved in and started suppressing it to protect our houses, because we like them to be nestled among the trees. Earthquake country. (Yeah, that's me - half a mile downhill from the Hayward Fault. But: our house is earthquake braced.) Flood plains. Hurricane tracks. Tornado Alley. We seem to think that because we live there it won't happen again; but it will. The only question is when.

And yet, think one more time: what constitutes a "safe" place to live?? For that matter, define "safe". We all have to live somewhere; offhand, everywhere I can think of in America has some disastrous phenom that happens at regular intervals (blizzards; droughts; heat waves). Maybe what we need is not to be safe, but to be aware that we aren't safe, and take the necessary precautions; and if the precautions aren't enough, maybe we should live somewhere else. Yes, I'm talking about you, the people who live in the Sacramento Valley subdivisions, below water level, behind 100 year old levees. What were you thinking of? The houses were affordable; but if those levees go, replacing everything you own won't be. The people who live around South Lake Tahoe are in the process of learning this right now.

I Wish I'd Been Wrong

Every time I look at the mess in Iraq, I want to scream, "I told you so." It would be so nice to have been wrong. I'd love to have been wrong. I just reread the posts I put up on this mess last October, and then again in January.

In October I said (along with a whole lot of other people) that this was a civil war, and anybody with half a working brain could see it was a civil war, and we didn't have a the chance of a plastic cat in Hell of stopping it.

In January I predicted (again, along with a lot of other people) that the surge was not going to work. Well, here we are, almost in July, and we have more soldiers in Iraq than we've had since 2005, and the carnage is increasing daily. It isn't just that we can't control it (although we can't); it's that the Iraqis can't control it, even if they wanted to. I see no evidence that they want to. Every faction is jockeying for personal power, and revenge on the other side (with the possible exception of the Kurds who are simply trying to hold their borders).

I wouldn't change a single word of either post if I wrote them again today; so I'll just suggest that you go read them again, and tell me if I wasn't right.

The worst thing about the situation is the comment I heard on NPR, from a senior U.S. military logistics officer, that if we started a pull-out today it'd take 12-15 months to get everybody out, because every single piece of equipment has to be taken apart and cleaned to get the sand and junk out, so it will pass inspection by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. That's right - every Hummer, every rifle, every walkie-talkie, has to be inspected for pests by the U.S.D.A. before we let them back into the country. I'm speechless. This is just insane. And they're going to clean the equipment while people are shooting shaped charges at them, and suicide bombers are blowing themselves up?? And how many U.S.D.A. inspectors will that take, and do we even have that many, given they way Dubya has been cutting funds for everything but the military??

Gen. Petraeus keeps saying the surge will take time to work. Gen. Petraeus knows, I'm quite sure, that the surge will never work. The purpose of the surge is to stabilize the situation so the Iraqis can negotiate an equitable government. The Iraqis don't want an equitable government; every single faction wants to be in control of the oil reserves, and is quite happy to kill everyone else to make that so. I read today that when the British pull out of Basra, they expect fighting to break out among 3 rival Shia groups; there aren't even any Sunnis in Basra, so the Shias fight each other.

We could be in Iraq until the children of today's soldiers are old enough to be inducted and shipped over to fight, and the surge still won't work. We have to get out of there.

RETIRED!

Today is Der Tag - The Day! I turned in my BlackBerry/cell phone, my laptop, my corporate credit card, and my badge, and walked out of the office a free woman. I feel - light. I feel free. I'm not really sure how I feel, but I met with a friend this afternoon (also recently retired), and she said she'd never seen me look so relaxed. The garden is blooming, the weather is gorgeous, and we're going out to dinner tonight. Wheee!

Carbon Offsets

Reading the news coverage of everyone's response to climate change, I've noticed that the hot new thing is carbon offsets. Everyone knows, of course, that we can't be expected to turn our busy, high-impact lives on a dime and suddenly stop emitting all those greenhouse gases - after all, we have to get to work, and public transit doesn't go anywhere near the office. (It does go by my office, actually, and I ride it; but I'm in the minority. In any case, I'm retiring in 5 days.) But - we have money! We can buy into other people's efforts to sequester carbon or reduce pollution or plant trees, and that will make it all better. Sort of. I was arranging a planned airplane trip on British Airways, and their online web site for managing your flight even includes a link labeled Buy carbon offsets.

This may not sound as familiar to you as it did to me, unless you are also a student of medieval history; but the human race has been here before. In the 15th and 16th centuries (that's the 1400s and 1500s), those of extreme sinfulness could get indulgences from the church, which would cleanse them of sin for specified periods of time. They had to do this so they could attend church and receive the Eucharist.

Indulgences occur when the Church, acting by virtue of its authority, applies existing merit from the Church’s treasury to an individual. The individual gains the indulgence by participating in certain activities, most often the recitation of prayers.

I'll confess to being charmed by the notion of an existing treasury of merit; especially considering the general moral condition of the Catholic Church in the period in question. The church said that no money could change hands in exchange for indulgences, of course; but, also of course, it did; and the scandals associated with the sale of indulgences were part of what brought on the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism. Martin Luther's 95 Theses were all about the sale of indulgences.

The difference is interesting here: the medieval indulgence buyers were trying to save their souls, or at least reduce their stay in Purgatory. The carbon offset buyers are trying to do - what? Save the world? I'm afraid all they're really trying to do is appear "greener than thou" to their neighbors. But we've changed the definition of "sin" rather substantially, haven't we?

Random Thoughts

I have only 9 working days left before I retire. This is an extremely strange space to be in, with frequent recurrences of the thought, "Why do I care about this?" A firmly rooted Protestant work ethic, however, keeps me focused on the last clean-up tasks.

The Oakland City Council can be pretty odd, and pretty annoying, but at least we haven't elected anyone equivalent to San Francisco Supervisor Ed Jew. The whole incident is giving me second thoughts about instant runoff elections, since it's pretty clear that he would never have been elected in a first-past-the-post contest.

As dangerous as XDR-TB is (that's extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, in case you were in a cave last week), I think we're over-reacting to it as a society. The case of Andrew Speaker disturbs me deeply, particularly since the head of the CDC is now saying that "we need to have confidence we can take action absent documentation of intent to cause harm" (quoted in the Detroit Free Press). Presumably she means forced quarantine, as they have now imposed on Speaker; or as in the case of Robert Daniels, who is being held in solitary confinement in Arizona because his XDR-TB (which is in the process of killing him, by the way) makes him "a public menace." He was ordered to wear a mask in public, because he is infectious; he didn't do so; and the court locked him up. He is in a medical isolation unit in a jail. He hasn't been outside in 10 months. He hasn't seen a human except his medical attendants. The windows on his solitary cell are frosted; the lights are always on. Interviewers have to talk to him through the door. His wife and son are in Moscow; he may never see them again.

Neither of these men has committed a crime. As far as I know, it's not criminal to go out in public without a surgical mask, even if you do have XDR-TB. It's not criminal to fail to follow your prescribed medical regimen. It's true that to fail to do so causes drug resistant diseases; but then you die of the disease, which could actually be considered enough punishment. The ACLU is suing on Mr. Daniels' behalf, and more power to their elbow; as this man goes, so could we all go.

I don't take tuberculosis lightly. In 1929 my Aunt Margery, whom I know only by repute, died of it; my Uncle John's entire life from the age of 3 was made miserable by it (he got it from his sister, in his hip joint); my mother grew up in a household with two incurable invalids, and she herself had it and recovered, but she always registered positive on the skin test. It is inhumane - it is inhuman - to lock people away like criminals merely because we can't cure their contagious disease. Nobody locked my Aunt Margery away, and her disease was contagious and incurable. Yes, people can die from XDR-TB that they might catch from these patients - but they are all going to die anyway. Can't we show these people some compassion, instead of allowing our fear of catching their disease to turn us all into Nurse Ratched? Whatever happened to, "There but for the grace of God go I"??

Our increasing tendency to criminalize anything we don't agree with or can't control is a very disturbing and dangerous trend; we must stop this.

Citizen Josh

Encouraged by the anonymous commenter to my May 18 post, I got tickets, and my husband and I went to see Josh Kornbluth last Sunday, which included a post-monologue discussion on democracy with two political science experts whose names I (regrettably) don't recall. But they were very interesting, and I have to concede that the commenter was right: there was no profanity, there was no put-down humor, and I do cherish the mental image of Josh Kornbluth, perched precariously on the top of the Structure in Ohlone Park, because it's best Verizon signal in his neighborhood and the only place he can get "four bars". As a Verizon customer, I can relate to that, and I don't have a Structure to climb. As I recall, though, he didn't use the phrase that so impressed me; but the discussion overall was very thought-provoking (and has been extended for 2 more weeks in case you're interested).

Having watched him for 2 hours, I have concluded: Josh Kornbluth is a Hobbit. Maybe a little tall.

And then there was the crab incident. We arrived at Fort Mason early, on a sunny, boisterous day, and walked out to the end of the nearest pier to look at the bay (and, hopefully, not get blown off the wharf). About halfway down the pier, I saw a dead crab, lying on its back on the walkway. I poked it with my foot, I don't know why, and it waved its little feet in the air - not dead after all. I flipped it over and it began to scuttle down the boardwalk. I didn't see how it could live long and prosper on a boardwalk, so I talked my husband into picking it up and heaving it off into the water; our karmic deed for the day.

I just hope it stayed there, because when we got to the end of the pier, there was a guy with a bucket and a net, crabbing - he had an identical critter in the bottom of his bucket. Oh, well.

Lay Off Pelosi

OK, the Democratic leadership in Congress has handed the President what he wanted, a war funding bill with no deadlines for bringing the troops home. And everybody on both sides of the argument is lambasting them for wimping out.

First of all, give them credit for trying. They sent him a funding bill with withdrawal deadlines (the first one since this mess began) and he vetoed it. They tried for over a week to negotiate something better; our Fearless Leader laid his ears back, planted his front feet, and brayed at them. I agree with them that they couldn't allow combat troops to run out of money; and nobody knows better than Pelosi and Reid that they don't have the votes to override the president's veto unless they get a large number of Republican defectors. Right now, the Repubs are standing firm.

Second, the Democrats aren't done with this. Note that Pelosi did not vote for the final bill she took to the floor. Note also that this bill funds the war only through September; a mere 4 months. The issue will be back; and next time, there'll be 4 more months of disasters to make the Republicans nervous about continuing their support for this fiasco. The closer we get to the 2008 elections, the queasier the Republicans up for re-election will become. Some of them are already queasy. Get enough of them nervous enough and a veto override begins to look possible; I'm sure that's what Pelosi and Reid are aiming toward.

Frankly, if the troops in Iraq can bring this mess to a stable, successful conclusion by the end of September, Bush almost deserves to claim his "victory." But if they can, I'll pick out one of my hats and eat it.

Liars' Loans

After reading this AP article on some of the victims of the subprime loan industry's poor judgment, I've about concluded that, of all the different volunteer opportunities I'm considering doing in retirement, the single most socially useful thing I can do is teach basic financial literacy through Operation Hope. The people who were suckered into these loans did things I've known were stupid since I was about fourteen - like, signing blank loan applications and returning them to the mortgage broker. Some of the people interviewed for the article didn't see the applications again until after they had signed up for loans - at which time they discovered they were credited on the loan applications with income they didn't have, jobs they didn't have, and assets they didn't have. These people have now lost what little they did have, and ruined what credit they had, to boot.



[Ed. note:] Checking back on this post 10 years later, I find that the link to an AP article in the first paragraph is no longer valid.  This 2007 article in the Washington Post covers the same incident:  Neighborhood Swayed by 'Liar's Loans'

The other characteristic of the group covered in the article that left a very nasty taste in my mouth was the fact that the loan brokers who screwed over this particular group of people, mostly low-income women in Boston, operated out of the basement of the Victory Chapel Church. I don't recall the article noting that they made any particular point about being associated with the church; but I'm quite sure that the people in the neighborhood assumed that, if the church rented the basement to them, they must be OK.

Speaking of basic financial literacy, let me remind us all about the word "assume" - it's the word that "makes an ass out of u and me".

The Victory Chapel Church isn't the first religious institution that has been used as the operating base for a scam artist, by any means. In the early eighties, a firm called Lendvest operated out of Napa, California (my home town), and eventually became the center of a massive scandal surrounding bankruptcies and unsecured loans, as well as drug trafficking and at least one suspected murder. All this data is from a very brief Google search, I haven't researched it in detail, and I wasn't living in Napa at the time. However, some of the neighbors I grew up with in Napa lost a large portion of their life savings in the Lendvest mess, and my recollection is that they bought into it because their contact at Lendvest was a member of their church and a "good man." Of course, they also bought into it because it was promising ridiculously high rates of return.

Speaking of basic financial literacy again, they forgot the basic TANSTAAFL principle: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

To put it another way, the world is not full of people standing around waiting to give you money out of the goodness of their hearts. If it looks too good to be true, you have to assume it is too good to be true. The people pushing the loans discussed in the AP article were falsifying loan documents in order to make big transaction fees on high interest subprime mortgages; the fact that the borrowers were going to lose their shirts in about 18 months when the loan rates adjusted was irrelevant to them. Frankly, I hope they all go to jail.

R.I.P. Jerry Falwell

I'm not sure I have much to add to the numerous comments on the life and contributions of the late Rev. Falwell. But it always bothered me that someone whose primary public comments always centered on hate, vengeance, and punishment, had the chutzpah to call himself a Christian. I no longer consider myself a Christian, for reasons I won't go into here; but I grew up in the faith, and I remember principles like, "Love your neighbor as yourself", "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you," "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" - I could go on, but you get the idea. Jerry Falwell seemed to me to belong to an entirely different religion. I certainly wouldn't bet money that he had ever read the New Testament.

If you look back over American history, though, you'll see that from time to time the country, or parts of it, goes through these fits of religious fervor. The first one, of course, was the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which the Puritan fathers ran as a theocracy, after leaving both England and the Netherlands because they were insufficiently moral and pure. I firmly believe that the memory of the Puritan rule in Massachusetts has a great deal to do with the separation of church and state in the Constitution.

These episodes weren't all bad: we owe the end of slavery to one of them. We also owe Prohibition to one of them, a very mixed blessing; and I'm convinced we also owe the current "War on Drugs" and "Right to Life" movements to the same turn of mind, which says, "you can't do that because we believe it's wrong, and because we believe it's wrong we're also going to make it illegal." Adherents of this position don't usually state the "we believe", either - they just say, "this is wrong."

The late Rev. Falwell fits right into this tradition. I wonder what he found when he finally go to the great Other Side. Speak no ill of the dead; which really means I have to stop right here.

Comments on Democracy

I don't go in much for stand-up comedy. The likely incidence of profanity, vulgarity (I get so tired of the "F word"), and humor based on the humiliation of others, is too high for my taste. So I've never see a Josh Kornbluth show; and probably I never will. But Jon Carroll quoted him on Wednesday, from a new show called "Citizen Josh", and his comment on democracy is one of the best descriptions I've ever heard or read. Here it is:

"In a democracy, you have to be both the ruler and the ruled. You have to fight the man, and you have to be the man."

That is just about where it's at.

Triumph

I just realized that I have an anniversary of sorts coming up. On Memorial Day weekend in 2000, I turned to walk across the room to the table for dinner, and something went "pop" in my left knee. That was the last day until sometime in 2006 that I could walk without any possibility of pain. We had planned a 3 week tour of New England in the fall of 2000, and I did it on crutches, with my left knee in a brace. A hideously uncomfortable brace, let me add; even custom leg braces do not fit well on fat thighs.

Three surgeries, two painful rehabs, and five years of weight training and water aerobics later, I have two working (artificial) knees, I can walk better than I have in years (even before the "pop", my knees were compromised - the first X-rays showed advanced osteoarthritis in both knee joints; the "pop", although painful, was actually incidental, a torn meniscus). And, by the way, I'm in better shape than I think I've ever been in my life.

Does this count as lemonade? I think it does. Strangely, the state of California still considers me permanently disabled; I got my 2007-2009 handicapped placard in the mail this week. I don't need it; I wouldn't dream of using it now; but there it is. I'll have to ask my doctor about it.

I think what I'm trying to say here is, we never know what's going to happen, or when; and all we can do is cope with it as best we can. Am I proud of how I've coped with this? You bet!

In the Bowels of Christ

A well-known remark of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentary New Model Army in England's 17th century Civil War, comes from a letter he wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1650:

I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken.

I remembered this as I read a recent article in the Economist about the current travails of Paul Wolfowitz. ("Wolfowitz agonistes," May 3, 2007 edition) I'm not linking it since the Economist, online or print, is a fairly expensive subscription, but it's worth looking for the copy in the library.

This article quotes Mr. Wolfowitz to the effect that he is

the victim of a “smear campaign” designed “to create a self-fulfilling prophecy that I am an ineffective leader.”

He claims that he didn't want to be involved in the details of his girlfriend's compensation, but the directors made him do it; the charges against him are "unfair and untrue"; and on and on to the effect that he is right and everyone else is not only wrong but is wrongly conspiring against him.

I realized that Mr. Wolfowitz is a man who is cannot think it possible he may be mistaken. In fact, this is a characteristic of the entire neoconservative inner circle. Think about them: Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Feith. The architects of the war in Iraq, believing their own convictions in the face of every fact, every implication to the contrary; manufacturing evidence to support their beliefs when the real evidence failed them. It never occurs to them that they may be wrong, and this is why they are dangerous.

I have deliberately left President Bush out of this list. I don't believe he is a member of the neoconservative inner circle; he is virtually the only member of his original administration who did not sign the Statement of Principles of the Project for the New American Century. Read the list of signers. His brother Jeb signed it; but he didn't. He holds his position because the neoconservatives judged, rightly, that he was malleable enough to take direction as long as he was allowed to appear to lead.

Most of us, who know we're capable of making mistakes, will stop to reconsider the situation occasionally and see if what we're doing still makes sense; not the man who knows he is never wrong. If you are never wrong, you can fall into the dangerous trap of assuming the the ends (because you are Right) justify the means: and so we come to Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib; warrantless wiretapping in America, and sectarian murder in the neighborhoods of Baghdad - because the neoconservatives are never wrong.

It's probably unreasonable to require that no one be elected to high office unless he has publicly admitted at least one major error of judgment; but it might be safer for the country. Harry Truman had gone through bankruptcy; and although he took a lot of flack while he was in office, in retrospect, his judgment looks pretty sound.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

I seem to have developed a sleep disorder. To be exact, I've been tested for sleep apnea - for those of you who haven't met this personally, you quit breathing for various (brief) durations during sleep, and then start again with a gasp. You don't usually wake up, although you may wake your bedmate up, as this is often associated with snoring. It does interrupt your sleep; you don't always realize it.

The day-to-day effect of this is that you're tired, all the time; you never feel as though you've had enough sleep. A secondary side effect, for me, is that I get uncontrollable urges to fall asleep whenever I'm mildly (or more) bored. Falling asleep in meetings is merely embarrassing. Falling asleep at the wheel while commuting to work is potentially fatal. I spent several months literally fighting to stay awake at the wheel, fortunately never coming to grief. But it's a very unpleasant feeling.

Then I had to attend a meeting in San Francisco (driving was completely out of the question; do you know how much parking costs there??), and discovered by accident that my exercise program has brought me back to the point that I can walk to the BART station in under 20 minutes. (Not much under...) This is the breakeven point that says, hey, you can ride the train to work, and you get another 40 minutes a day to read the paper. Also, with the new in-ear earphones I got, I can listen to my iPod on BART. The downside is an extra half hour of commute every day (15 minutes at each end).

But I was still tired all the time, so I sent my doctor an email (thank you, Kaiser, for secure email) asking, why am I so tired all the time, when all the blood tests come back normal? And my doctor said, have you been having trouble sleeping? Has your partner noticed anything? So, I asked my husband, and he said, "Oh, yeah, you have sleep apnea; I've had to shake you a couple of times." (He claims he told me this, but if he did, I don't remember...)

I reported this to the doc, and the next thing I know I have an appointment to be tested. Being tested entails wearing a small computer unit on your arm all night (as the nurse said, we don't care if you sleep all night or not but we insist you wear the box for at least 8 hours), hooked up to an oximeter on one finger and a blood pressure cuff on another. This wasn't especially easy to get used to, and the day after I was even more tired, but I caught up the next night.

I haven't heard the test results; this isn't like blood tests where you get an email sometimes the same day. But depending on the results, I may have to learn to sleep with a mask on - attached to a CPAP machine. (Google it; there are lots of sites.) The best of these masks looks like a dust mask; the worst looks like a full-face gas mask; and it's attached by a hose to a machine on the night stand. And they're all kept on with a sort of harness of straps. They don't look at all comfortable to sleep in; but I'm told the result is worth it. I'm hoping this will all just go away.

Traffic Jam

Most of the country must know by now that we've had a - well, an incident - here in the S.F. Bay Area. Here's the short account (excerpted from today's www.sfgate.com):

At around 3:40 AM, a gasoline tanker truck, loaded with 8,600 gallons of unleaded gasoline, was passing through the MacArthur Maze, on its way from a refinery in Benicia to a gas station on Hegenberger Road in Oakland. The driver was a 51 year old man from Yolo County; the current police account is that he was going too fast in a 50 MPH zone and rolled his truck. He was also, I'll add, negotiating one of the worst-designed freeway interchanges in the country. It was never good; and when they rebuilt the interchange after the Loma Prieta earthquake, they made it much worse. It's so bad that I refuse to drive it: I get off the freeway and take other routes.

The overturned truck burst into flames, estimated 200 feet high; the temperature reached 2,000 degrees; the freeway supports melted; and something in excess of 250 yards of the freeway (I've seen it called 275) slumped down onto the freeway connector underneath. You can see photos and video at the linked site; it's really impressive to see a huge section of freeway, draped like a Dali watch.

There isn't much to do about this but boggle. The first boggle: nobody died. The only injury was the driver, currently hospitalized with second degree burns; but he got himself out of the truck on his own and took a taxi to the hospital on his own. They say he'll be out in a few more days. A cat that did this would have blown about 4 of his 9 lives.

The second boggle: oh, what this will do to the commute traffic. You can get to San Francisco just fine; but you can't get back if your destination is on highways 580 or 24. Well, you can, but you'll have to take the West Grand exit and travel for better than a mile on city streets. With stop lights. And you can't get directly from Berkeley to the Coliseum (and points south) any more. You have to loop through a series of freeway connectors; at least it's all freeway.

I can't draw any brilliant conclusions from this, except that all the world loves to gawk at a disaster, and this is an eminently gawkable disaster. Don't speed with a truck full of gasoline? Don't assume you can make that curve?

And thank God my personal commute doesn't go this way.

Counting Down

As of today, I have eight weeks left in my working life. My last day in the office is Friday June 22. (Yes, I know I said June 30; I'm burning some vacation.) I'm beginning to feel very weird; the words "lame duck" occur to me regularly. At least one of my colleagues has said to me, "I can't give you anything new to do."

I'm trying to clean up (or at least document, so someone else can clean up) all the weird little messes I know about, that I've never had time to take on. My team has decided that the guy who will "take over" most of my critical stuff is a newbie to the group, who lives on the other coast. I'm not arguing with their decision; in the long run, or even the medium term, it's not my problem. However, one of my problems with my current job is that I never get to do anything technical; and this same guy was complaining to me recently that he never gets to do anything technical; so my prognosis for the long term of this arrangement isn't good. I have a feeling that I'll transition everything to him, and then he'll bag the whole business for a job as a sysadmin somewhere.

My boss also wants me to "teach the engineers" how to do what I do as a technical consultant. This is a very odd request, which I don't think I can satisfy in a mere 8 weeks, since a good deal of what I do is a side effect of the fact that I'm (a) an English major, so that I enjoy writing and do it well, and (b) an outgoing people-oriented type, who likes to talk to people about what they are trying to do (and then turn it into technical specs). The engineers he wants me to train are nice guys, to a man; but every one of them is also a techie to the core, which means he doesn't like to write, doesn't write well, and doesn't know how to talk to people - or, more accurately, to listen to them and understand what they're saying. The other problem with this is that my preferred method of communicating is to write stuff down, in great detail; and all the engineers hate to read, and mostly don't read my doc because it's "too long."

But there's nothing I can do about all that. I think I'll just have to do the best I can, and then walk away from it. Someone asked me yesterday whether I care that there "won't be anybody" to clean up "all the little messes". Well, I do care; but I also understand that there will never be a time without a bunch of little messes to clean up. You have to put a stake in the ground; and I've done so.

But I still feel very strange.

Quack, quack

No, this is not about ducks. In fact, in the interests of full disclosure I will tell you up front that if you are a devotee of homeopathic medicine, I am about to piss you off.

I am annoyed at my gym. In general it's pretty good; clean, well maintained, new equipment; so I'm giving them a pass by not including their name. In the interests of Earth Day they published their own version of (in this case) 40 "small things each of us can do" to help the earth. I was browsing through it to see if they included the one I've been doing for 35 years (cloth dinner napkins instead of paper - they missed it; they did get the cloth towels for spills), and when I got to #32 I'm afraid I blew my stack. Number 32 said,

"Use homeopathic remedies rather than synthetic drugs - it's healthier for you and the planet."

Well, I can't deny that homeopathic remedies are healthier for the planet. Being composed entirely of water, you could pour them into storm drains with no visible impact on the environment. But - healthier for you?? I don't understand how an organization that regularly sends me emails about exercise, good nutrition, etc., can possibly suggest to me that I should stop taking the "synthetic drugs" which are currently managing my thyroiditis, my rheumatoid arthritis, and my osteoarthritis, and replace them with expensive homeopathic remedies compounded according to the "law of infinitesimals" (I am not making this up), which suggests that the less of something there is, the more powerful an effect it has.

Homeopathic medications are composed along the principles used by the man I once read about who liked his martinis extremely dry - he locked the gin in a closet at the back of the house, and walked past it once a month, carrying a bottle of vermouth. The dilutions commonly used in homeopathic remedies are so extreme that it is physically, chemically, impossible for any molecule of the advertised substance to be in the bottle they sell you. But because they shake it up really hard before diluting it again (and again, and again...), they argue that

the vigorous shaking or pulverizing with each step of dilution leaves behind a "spirit-like" essence—"no longer perceptible to the senses"—which cures by reviving the body's "vital force." Modern proponents assert that even when the last molecule is gone, a "memory" of the substance is retained.

Sure it is. This is pure medievalism: as above, so below. I shudder to think of the effect should some innocent take this advice seriously and quit taking something they really need, like blood pressure meds, or nitro for heart trouble. Or prednisone for any of the really nasty conditions that appalling drug gets prescribed for. The idea that homeopathic remedies are "less harmful" comes from the fact that they were developed in the 19th and early 20th century and, because they have no effect at all, were less harmful than many of the 19th century's orthodox medical practices, thereby allowing patients to recover naturally, in some cases, from conditions where the medical doctor's standard treatment would have killed them.

You don't need to take my word for all this. I've found a wonderful site called Quackwatch, which I recommend in general; and in specific, I recommend their feature article on homeopathy. The author, Stephen Barrett, is a retired M.D., a man of impressive scientific credentials, and a fellow of CSICOP. All the details above (except the story about the martini drinker) are excerpted from Dr. Barrett's excellent feature article; please go and read all of it. And don't, if you ever did, pay the prices charged for what is effectively a small bottle of water.

Oh, and the "evidence of wonderful results"? Just remember, double blind studies have shown that the placebo effect, from a sugar pill, can produce a recovery rate in the 30-40% range. Homeopathic remedies are placebos, nothing more.

I have filed a (signed) comment card with my gym suggesting that it was irresponsible of them to include this suggestion in their list.

Crummy Raptors

I saw something very odd, leaving work the other day; odd to me at least. The data center where I work has broad expanses of lawn, punctuated with willow trees (which I always thought were an unreasonable choice for a water-challenged climate); it also has little decorative fountains with ponds. The willows are always full of birds, including crows, which have become more common in the last few years; and we've recently had a pair of mallard ducks enjoying the lawns.

I saw a crow attacking a smaller bird; and not very efficiently, either. I was maybe 40 feet from all this and couldn't see details clearly; but the smaller bird seemed to be all white (unusual in a wild bird); it looked like a parakeet. It was about that size and had sort of a rounded silhouette; it was walking along the lip of the fountain pool, peeping. The crow was standing on the lawn, several feet away, and as I watched, it flew over, pounced on the small bird, and picked it up in its beak. The crow carried the small bird, peeping wildly, to the lawn, and dropped it. The small bird seemed to be trying to defend itself (I'm anthropomorphizing wildly here) - it waved its wings at the crow, peeped wildly, and tried to scuttle away. The crow watched for a bit and then struck again. It looked like nothing so much as a cat toying with a mouse.

This sequence repeated itself three or four times while I watched. By then I had decided that I wasn't enjoying this very much, and in any case I had a train to catch and was already late. So I went on and didn't see the end.

I asked my husband about the incident later; he's not a birder as such, but he hikes and backpacks, and has seen a lot in the back country. He's the source of the phrase, "crummy raptors"; crows, he says, will try to be raptors but they aren't very good at it. They certainly aren't; an owl or a hawk would have killed that bird with one strike. I refuse to anthropomorphize to the point of thinking the crow was playing with the bird for fun; I assume it was trying to kill it with inadequate equipment.

The other thing that puzzles me is where the little white bird came from. I've never seen a bird like it anywhere near the data center. It almost looked like a released domestic bird. It met an unhappy end, wherever it came from.

Fundraising

Anyone who has ever spent any time working in, or with, a nonprofit arts organization (a community chorus, a local theater group, etc.) knows that they are chronically short of funds. Their volunteer officers spend hours working on fundraising. I've been considering joining such a board, after I retire; and it's beginning to dawn on me what I may be letting myself in for.

My problem is, I hate fundraising. I hate asking people for money; it makes me actively uncomfortable. I dislike being asked for money; and when I don't like people to do something to me, I try to avoid doing it to them. This is called the Golden Rule. I even have trouble selling concert tickets, although I believe that our chorus is a talented performing group that produces excellent music; because I believe people have a right to decide what to do with their own Friday nights.

I wonder if I can persuade the group to let me do routine back office stuff, while somebody else goes out and hustles for funds. I'm happy to stuff envelopes. I'd enjoy working on the web site, or learning to use the sound equipment: anything but asking people to donate money.

Jon Corzine

I expressed my amazement in my last post, that Jon Corzine, the governor of New Jersey, should have been riding in a vehicle without a seat belt, which decision led to his current hospitalization. I find myself musing over this incident. We are told not to "blame the victim." In the case of a woman who has been raped, I fully agree. In Mr. Corzine's case, however, his current state of health is a direct result of a decision that he made, presumably, all by himself. I don't, he must have thought, need a seat belt for this short trip.

Jon Corzine is not a stupid man. He's been highly successful: a banker; an investment banker (believe me, not the same breed), the CEO of Goldman Sachs; a U.S. Senator. The only conclusion I can draw here is that he was convinced "it can't happen to me," even though he was riding in the front passenger seat, sometimes called "the death seat." The facts clearly indicate he was wrong.

Assigning blame is pointless; Mr. Corzine's present physical state is ample, possibly excessive, punishment for his lapse in judgment. I do wonder about the police driver of that vehicle, however. It's too bad he didn't have the cojones to make the simple statement, "I'm sorry, Governor, I can't start this car until everyone has buckled up." I regularly make that statement myself, when carrying passengers. Apparently he either didn't notice that his passenger wasn't secured, or didn't have the temerity to challenge him.

The latest ABC News article on the incident suggests that the vehicle's air bags may not have deployed. I'm not sure I believe that. This was Gov. Corzine's normal secure transport, chosen for protection. For all the jokes about New Jersey, one assumes the governor's security detail takes care of the car that protects his, and their, lives. But the Philadelphia Inquirer points out that the 2005 Suburban doesn't have side-impact air bags.

Whatever happened (and I'm sure we'll be reading follow-on articles for weeks yet), I've seldom seen such a clear case of cause and effect. It's not as though we haven't known for 50 years that seat belts protect passengers in a crash, even without air bags.

Speechless

One of the reasons I haven't blogged this week is music: the Oakland Symphony Chorus is performing next Friday, and our director has scheduled extra rehearsals. Since I haven't retired yet, this brings the schedule down to eat, sleep, work, rehearse, and exercise if you can make time for it. Blogging does not make the cut.

The other reason I haven't blogged is the absolute overload of insanity in the news. I can not believe what's going on.

Don Imus calls a college women's basketball team "nappy-headed hos." (At least he made no references to "jungle bunnies.") Mr. Imus has apologized, and has lost his job. Some people have observed that when African American gangsta rappers use the same words in their offensive productions, nobody says boo, and they are perfectly right. If it's wrong for Imus to say it, it's wrong for NWA to say it (or whoever is hot this week). Or are we simply assuming that black rappers are inferior beings who can't be held to a civilized standard, which is even worse?

The governor of New Jersey, riding in a police car to an interview between Imus and his targets, is seriously injured when the car swerves to avoid an out-of-control vehicle and crashes, because he isn't wearing a seat belt. There's a great public example for you. And in a police car; that's what floors me.

In other news, Paul Wolfowitz, of neoconservative fame, is about to be drummed out of his post at the World Bank because he arranged for his girlfriend to be posted to the State Department and given two outrageous raises. She now makes more money than the Secretary of State. It is doubtless unfair of me to feel that these are the homeliest two people I have ever seen pilloried for sex related peccadilloes. (I can't find a photo of both of them together to link, but just check the Google News files.) I don't think it's at all unfair of me to wonder why President Bush would appoint the man to head up an organization that "desperately needed shaking up", when even Wolfowitz' friends admit that "management was never his strong suit." (See David Sanger's article in the NY Times.)

And finally there is the astounding mess surrounding Karl Rove and the missing emails. Now, I support email for a living; and the amount of plain garbage flying around here is incredible. But the simple fact that the White House is trying to camouflage behind a barrage of possibly deleted emails, is that White House staff, including Rove, may have been using email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee for official government business. This violates the Presidential Records Act, which requires all official documents to be archived. I don't know if it violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits using government facilities for politicking; but it seems as if it should; the reverse behavior would. And the claim that Rove assumed that deleting email from his inbox did not delete it from the server is outrageous. I don't believe that Karl Rove gave one moment's thought to whether the server was archiving his deletes or not. I do believe he deleted emails he knew perfectly well should be archived.

Which brings me to a question I ask regularly. How many laws does this administration have to break before Congress realizes they are committing impeachable offenses?

The Secret is Out

At last, I can blog about this. I've decided to retire. My last day of work will be June 30.

I've been sitting on this like a hen on an egg since the beginning of the year, when I stomped into the office intending to tell my boss I wanted to retire, and couldn't find him. It took 3 weeks for our schedules to mesh to the point that we were both in the office at the same time; and I refused to do this by email, or phone, or (God forbid) instant message (which is how an awful lot of work gets done around our office). Trouble is, there are people at work who know about my blog; so I couldn't even hint at it here until I had made the official announcement to the boss. And then, he wouldn't tell anybody until I had formally called the retirement people and started the process, and then come back and asked him, when are we going to tell other people. I wonder if he thought I'd change my mind if he gave me time to think about it. However, the immediate team has known for about a month now, and the word is beginning to spread to the rest of the department; so I can post it here for the amusement of my 3 readers.

I've been working for a living since March 1969; that's 38 years. With a few interruptions, of course: 8 months or so after the divorce in 1976; a month off between jobs in 1988; two 3 month sessions in 2001 and 2005 while I replaced one and then the other knee. The rest of the time, on the job: seventeen years as a librarian; two years running a small mail-order surplus business; nineteen years as a systems programmer. In the office every day at 9 if I could manage it, 8 if I had to; I'm not really an early morning person, although I can do it. Home as early as I could manage, not always very early. Going to bed early so I could get enough sleep, which meant I never had any time to read books. I can nibble at magazines and stop when it gets late; but with books I want to follow the story all the way out, and the next thing I know it's 11:30, and my tomorrow is shot. I could argue that I'm retiring so I can catch up on my sleep, I never seem to get enough; I'm tired now, my eyes are scratchy.

Soon, now, I get to answer the Great Question: who am I when I'm not working? As Satchel Paige might have said, who would you be if you didn't know who you was? If you think about this even a little bit, you realize how much we define ourselves by what we do for a living. I read a book or article once, I forget where; but someone was comparing the English and the Americans, and they said that when an Englishman wants to know who you are, he asks what your family is, and when an American wants to know who you are, he asks what you do. I've been a technician, a good one if I say so myself, for a long time now; what do I do next? "Retired" is an acceptable description for "what do I do", but it's sort of like, "out of here" - it isn't a destination.

I began to come to terms with this when I realized that what I really do next, is to figure out what to do next. It's time to reinvent myself again. The majority of those 38 years have been spent "working for the man" - for companies with a bottom line, mainly in the financial industry. Yes, even the library work: Google "Special Libraries Association" to see what kind of library job I had. (And imagine telling your accountant boss, in 1976 or so, that you were attending an SLA meeting after work...) I still don't know what I want to do next, but I have a list of possibilities, and not one of them involves working for anybody who makes a profit. I don't hate people who try to make a profit; I just want to try something else.

More Jules Verne

We're having a Jules Verne fit here, after the article on the subterranean body of water (see my post, Jules Verne was right!). So we thought we'd rent 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from Netflix. Well, the search on Netflix turned up a treasure which I highly recommend. Did you know that in 1916, there was a blockbuster movie version of 20,000 Leagues, containing the first underwater photography sequences in movie history?? They're fabulous - it's too bad they aren't in color but you can't have everything, and they are clearly live underwater sequences of coral reefs.

The movie is a total hoot. Apparently Verne's plot wasn't enough for the filmmakers, so they incorporated another whole story, about an evil ship captain, a bereaved Indian prince (not Native American), a Child of Nature (female of course, and wearing a sort of leopardskin dress) living on a Mysterious Island, and four American Navy men in a balloon, also marooned on the Mysterious Island when the balloon blows off course. I spent about half the movie asking, "Who are these people??" They tie it all together in the last reel, sort of.

And the submarine! The submarine looks amazingly like a modern submarine. I guess form follows function, although Captain Nemo's cabin seems to have more wood paneling and hangings than the U.S. Navy would provide. They even have diving suits, and "self contained oxygen tanks" which allow them to stay under the sea "indefinitely" (they look about the size of a small propane tank). You scuba divers, quit giggling. This was 1916. There are a number of sequences of people in diving suits with lead shoes, walking around on the sea bottom, and one where a couple of guys suit up, climb down to the bottom, and walk ashore, and then help each other take the suits off. It's obviously quite real, this was much too early for trick photography, and I have no idea how they did this with a hand-cranked camera. They have wonderful footage of circling sharks and barracuda, shot from below.

The best of it is - you don't have to listen to Kirk Douglas singing "A Whale of a Tale."

Been There, Done That

I thought I'd written on this subject before, but as I look back, the last time I quoted George Santayana ("those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it") had to do with Prohibition and the war on drugs, not real estate. However, it's real estate - specifically the current melt-down in the so-called "sub-prime market" - that brings the quote to mind now. I guess when you're right, you're right all the time.

Everyone is now freaking big-time over the fact that the housing market has flattened out, and you can no longer buy a house for a mortgage you can't afford, wait 4 months, and sell it for enough to cover the outrageous amount of money you borrowed and put a little extra loot in the bank for yourself. Apparently everyone thought the housing market was going to continue heading skyward indefinitely. Let me repeat another old saying that's still true: what goes up must come down. Isaac Newton only dealt with physical objects; but this also applied to skyrocketing markets. In fact, to date in human history there has never been a skyrocketing market in anything in which the bubble hasn't eventually popped, causing a large number of investors to lose their shirts and everything else. But every time a new bubble comes around, everybody convinces himself that "it's different, this time." No, it isn't.

The infuriating thing about the looming massive defaults on sub-prime home loans, which have already taken down a number of

• Lenders who specialized in sub-prime loans because they're so profitable
• Investors who bought "securitized" sub-prime loans because the interest rates are so high

is that we have been here before. Recently. In fact, we were here in my adult lifetime, in the late 1980's, when that iteration of the housing bubble popped, doing exactly the sort of damage this one is doing, and incidentally bringing down the entire savings and loan industry in the U.S., which had to be bailed out at great expense to the taxpayer. That would be you, and me. I wonder who we'll be bailing out this time.

Yes, I remember all of this from the '80's: the negative amortization loans. The low-to-no down payment terms. The adjustable rate mortgages where nobody bothered to ask if they could afford the payment after the adjustment. The desperate scramble to buy a house on any terms, for any price, just to get "into the housing market." I even think I remember "no doc" loans, where the lender just asks how much you make and writes it down; I understand these are called "liar loans."

The real tragedy is that the loan companies, investors, possibly the U.S. economy itself if things get really bad, are all secondary victims. The primary victims are the people who took out these loans, which they couldn't possibly afford, which a rational lender would never have offered to make to them, in order to buy a house to live in, which they assumed would be an investment to protect them in retirement. These people will now lose the house, ruin their credit rating and their personal financial position, and probably never be able to retire in comfort at all. And all because of the bubble madness.

You can say, they should have read the fine print; and they should have. But if you aren't very well educated (and there's a whole generation or two of Americans who aren't), the fine print may or may not have made it clear to you that you were not going to be able to make the payments on this loan. The lender certainly did not. And the housing market is now going down and sideways, and you can't refinance, because you owe more than the house is now worth; and besides, interest rates have gone up, although not as much as your adjusted rate has. In short, you the borrower are screwed, and you're going into foreclosure Real Soon Now. And it's only poetic justice that the lender who loaned you more money than you could rationally expect to be able to repay is also screwed.

166 years ago, in 1841, Charles Mackay wrote a book called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It's still in print; it is regularly reissued with new material. The latest edition I see on Amazon was reissued sometime in the mid-90s. It should be mandatory reading in every school in America. Assuming American schools still teach students how to read; but that's another rant.

Great Minds Think Alike

The synchronicity is delightful here. Just about the time I was drafting the last post, on the well-known evils of the passive voice, Kyrie O'Connor was on WWDTM discussing the "passive exonerative"!

I haven't heard it yet - I was at a rehearsal this morning during the broadcast, and my husband told me about it. I'll have to download today's podcast. But what a WONDERFUL term for it! I Googled the phrase and find it's used quite a lot and has turned up on DailyKos and in William Safire columns. The latest relevant use, actually about Awful Alberto, is a very similar post last Wednesday in Jeff Weintraub's blog, So It Goes. It's also called the "past exonerative" and "past passive exonerative."

The So It Goes post ends with a summary that is better than I could have written:

Politicians who use it think they're dousing a fire. They should all remember the teachings of their composition teachers. Because when the rest of us hear "mistakes were made," we know the fire has only begun to burn.

Hiding Behind the Passive

"Mistakes were made." That's what our Fearless Leader has to say about the U.S. attorney mess. Let's set aside the implications of the Attorney General of the United States firing U.S. attorneys because they were insufficiently politically pure and zealous. That's too obvious to bother with.

The point here is the appalling obfuscation caused by - the passive voice. Anyone who has stayed awake in English class knows the difference between the passive and the active voice, but for those of you who slept through it, here are examples:

Active: I hit the ball.
Passive: The ball was hit by me.

A little thought will tell you that you can't write a sentence in the active voice without making it crystal clear who is doing what to whom. I hit the ball.

When you write in the passive voice, though, you can obliterate responsibility entirely, merely by leaving off those last two words, "by me". The ball was hit. Who hit the ball? We don't know. A man was killed. Who killed him? We don't know, unlike when Bob Marley sings, "I shot the sherriff."

This is why politicians adore the passive voice. It's very rare that you'll find one speaking - and certainly not writing - in the active voice. You'll know when you do find one because ... they will be more interesting to listen to. Writing or speaking in the active voice, you tell a story. Writing in the passive voice, you produce a government report, or a political speech, in which no one is responsible for anything. This is why you'll never see Alberto Gonzalez stand up on his hind legs in front of cameras and say, "I blew it."

And of course, if you never have to admit responsibility, you also never have to repent for any errors that "may have been made". You never have to look inside your soul, or your karma, or whatever you have, and consider that you might possibly not have handled that last incident in the best possible way. Because you didn't make the errors: they "were made."

The other two groups who dote on the passive voice, and use it almost exclusively, are academics, and business management types. The business management types, of course, operate under the same imperatives as the politicians. No business executive ever wants to come out and admit that he screwed up, big time; "mistakes were made." Also, neither business executives nor politicians (two groups which interbreed regularly) ever ever want to report bad news up to the next level. The boss must only hear good news. The boss wants to know that the situation is completely under control; so that's what his juniors tell him. In the passive voice. Regardless of the actual facts on the ground.

It's that nearly universal business practice that makes me almost willing to believe that the board members at Hewlett-Packard genuinely did not know what their underlings had commissioned the private investigators to do. Nobody wanted to tell the boss anything but what s/he expected to hear. (Almost willing to believe...)

I haven't been around academics enough to know why they use the passive voice. Maybe they want to sound like people in power. But it seems very odd to me that the most powerful people in both business and politics, deliberately express themselves in a way that makes it impossible to tell what they actually do, or whether they ever do anything. Maybe they don't, and that's the whole point.

This is a selective phenomenon, by the way. Not all politicians do this. Read the Gettysburg Address. Or any of FDR's fireside chats. Or Winston Churchill's speeches.

Jules Verne Was Right!!

I knew it! In Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne's characters go down through endless caves and finally come to a huge underground sea (which, remarkably, they can see to navigate around...). Well, in today's Yahoo News, we see an article entitled Huge 'ocean' discovered inside earth. There is apparently a huge body of water deep in the earth's mantle, under east Asia. In fact, it appears to be centered under Beijing.

They don't say anything about the giant whirlpool Verne described in the middle of his underground ocean.

Rocking and Rolling

It's funny, just today I was discussing the USGS Earthquake web site with a colleague at work. Then this evening (about 40 minutes ago), I was sitting peacefully reading the newspaper when the whole house started to rock and the windows rattled. This quake was located 16 KM deep and 2 KM NE of Lafayette, CA - which is about 10 miles from my house. Maybe 12. It was magnitude 4.2, which is a healthy shake, enough to make the house creak really well.

If you've never sat through an earthquake, they're very unsettling, because your house isn't supposed to shake under you like that. Also, they create a weird form of time dilation - the seismograph traces (available on the USGS site) show that the shaking lasted for 12-15 seconds, but it felt like about 5 years. And this was a relatively minor shake; I remember the Loma Prieta quake (6.9) which I would have sworn went on for 30 seconds or longer (but Wikipedia says it was 15 seconds; I'm still not sure I believe that). There's always a point in a quake where you ask, "Isn't it done yet??" and it's not.

With all that, it's over now, and nobody was hurt, and nothing even fell off the shelves (at least not here). At least we don't have tornadoes.

The Candidates

It's sad but true that the 2008 Presidential election campaign has already started. Like many liberal feminists, I'm torn between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The trouble is, I feel I ought to support Hillary to become the first female president; but I have the feeling that she is running, not because she thinks she can do things better (although she may think that too), but because she wants to be the First Female President. She's nothing if not competent, and would undoubtedly do a good job. I just get bad vibes from her.

I get really good vibes from Barack Obama, and I don't think it's because he's a youngish, good-looking guy. (You have to be my age to call a 46 year old a "young man", sigh...) It is unfortunate that he's a smoker (and I think he's raving crazy to commit to quitting smoking at the same time he's running for President). But what would you rather have: a competent, intelligent guy with one bad habit, or Dennis Kucinich? What I like about Obama is that he seems to have a sense of proportion; even better, he has a sense of humor. My husband commented the other day that no one at that level of politics has used humor the way Obama does since Ronald Reagan. Nobody in the current administration has a sense of humor, and unfortunately, neither does Hillary Clinton.

I'm trying to stay uncommitted, and see what happens. We'll all see more as the campaign unfolds; but for now, I'm leaning strongly toward the guy who can laugh at it.

Librarians and Bad Words

I'm somewhat boggled by the recent flap over The Higher Power of Lucky, the recent Newbery award winning novel which contains several repetitions of the word "scrotum." Apparently a librarian from Durango, Colorado, complained about it on LM_.net, a librarians' listserv; and the whole thing blew up from there.

Mind you, it's been wonderful for sales; the book went from the 600s on Amazon to the top 40. Just for evidence, here is the (first) offending passage, about a man

who had drunk half a gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked '62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

Apparently this incident is mentioned several times in the book, necessarily repeating the word.

Here are the things that bother me about this:

Numero uno: I think that incident is funny. It's my crude nature, or my upbringing as the daughter of a Missouri farm boy, or something. Also, I want the next sentence; I may have to borrow the book from the library so I can find out what happened to the dog.

Numero two-oh, as Molly Ivins used to say: "scrotum" is not one of those "you can't say that word in polite company" words that George Carlin used to have so much fun with. It's a scientific term, dammit; it's in Gray's Anatomy (the book, not the TV show); it's in the encyclopedia. True, it's a body part that isn't normally discussed except by men with prostate problems; which is why, if you want to refer to it, you don't have one of those handy, "we all know what it means" synonyms to use. You have to say, "scrotum."

Finally, the whole business is completely out of character for librarians; and I was a librarian for 17 years. Most of the librarians I know would rather have a kid read a book that contained the word "scrotum" than not read at all. In fact, most librarians know that the kids already know all those "bad" words, and reading a book containing them will not corrupt them any further. It's much more important to get them to read at all.

Having read the article on Yahoo News, I'm relieved to find that it was mainly this one woman in Colorado, and a few like-minded souls; and most of the library community is perfectly fine with the book, which is what I would expect. We would all be better off if we worried about genuine problems, like global warming and whether Dubya really is crazy enough to bomb Iran, and quit expending energy on the reference in a children's book to a male body part; and not even "that" male body part.

Not Black Enough

This is last week's news but that's how it goes sometimes: I'm befuddled by the arguments among leading black political figures about whether Barack Obama is "black enough."

The facts aren't in question. Barack Obama's father was a black Kenyan, his mother a white Kansan. The old southern word for this genetic mixing was "mulatto." In the peculiar classification of American society, where your ancestry is sometimes more important than your actual skin color, Barack Obama is clearly identified as African American, or (as we used to say in the sixties), black, despite the fact that I've known Indians who make him look like Michael York. The issue, of course, is that Kenyan father, a man who grew up a free man in a reasonably free country and came to the U.S. to attend college. A man, in short, with no personal connection to the American experiment in slavery, or the Jim Crow laws.

Obama's run for the presidency, however, has sparked this sort of reaction:

Some African American leaders came out against Obama because he announced his candidacy Feb. 10, the same day as the State of the Black Union, an annual event organized by Tavis Smiley to gather prominent African Americans. It drew 10,000 people and would have been a perfect venue, those leaders said.

Author and Princeton University Professor Cornel West said Obama's decision to announce in Illinois instead shows he "speaks to white folks and holds us at arm's length."

The Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, who ran for president in 2004, was also upset.

"We cannot put our people's aspirations on hold for anybody's career, black or white," said Sharpton. "Just because you are our color doesn't make you our kind."

I don't know what has the "black leadership" more annoyed, the fact that Obama grew up either in Hawaii (known for its cosmopolitan race mixing) or outside the U.S. altogether, thereby missing out on the essential racial injustices which everyone else had to put up with, or the fact that he's the first black candidate for President in the history of the country who actually has a sporting chance to win it. Or could it be because he never talks about the issues of black America, but only about the issues of America? I assumed he announced his candidacy in Illinois because that's where he was elected to the Senate. The people of Illinois are his employers; they have a right to know he's applying for a new job.

No one has mentioned this, but I wonder if the traditional black leaders also resent the fact that, when you hear Barack Obama speak but can't see him, you can't tell he's black. You certainly can't say that about Rev. Sharpton. Obama speaks pure midwestern American, without the "black accent" that even many well educated African Americans have. I'm not talking about "ebonics"; just a distinctive, not quite southern twist of pronunciation and phrasing. Not all blacks have it; northern blacks in particular have northern accents; but almost all the people who have it are black. People underestimate how much they are judged on their speech patterns.

I thought that both Professor West and the Reverend Sharpton did themselves a disservice with these public remarks. They sounded envious; they sounded petty. They sounded like children bullying an unpopular new kid. I wonder what they will say when President Obama takes the oath of office, as I'm quite sure he will one day, whether it's in 2008 or later. He has plenty of time; he's only in his middle 40's.

You just don't get it

My dad used to say, "I buy you books and buy you books, and still you don't learn nothin'." According to an article by a New York Times writer, our Congressional representatives are inventing new and clever ways to get lobbyists to pay for their entertainment, this time using the representative's "personal PACs" as conduits. Apparently these PACs can pay for anything up to and including dental work and house repairs; so, the lobbyist makes a big PAC donation, the PAC buys the legislator tickets to an expensive outing, and the lobbyist goes along, paying his own way.

When will our brilliant elected representatives get the point that: We. Do. Not. Send. You. To. Washington. So. You. Can. Party. You are elected to study public issues, draft and vote on bills, and things like that. Being elected to Congress doesn't give you any kind of a right to take relaxing little outings on the lobbyist's dollar. Maybe what we need to do is make it illegal for Congresspersons to go out socially at all. Either that or require public funding of all campaigns. But who would vote for that?? (Apart from me...)

The quote that really got to me, though, was this one:

Some members of Congress said it would not bother them if the upshot of the new rules turned out to be more contributions.

"I am not going to hide from the fact that we have to raise money," said Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Alpaugh (Tulare County), who has invited donors to his political action committee on a wine-tasting tour in June, modeled after the movie "Sideways." "Only a moron would sell a vote for a $2,000 contribution."

So, Mr. Nunes - how big a contribution would you sell a vote for? After all, as the old joke goes, we've already established what you are. Now we're just dickering over the price.

Mayor Newsom and the Man Code

I don't normally pay a lot of attention to San Francisco politics - Oakland politics is enough trouble for any normal citizen. It's been impossible, though, to miss the brouhaha going on over there about the mayor's, um, experiment in intra-office personal relations.

The short story is: during his divorce, Mayor Newsom had an apparently short-lived affair with his appointments secretary Ruby Rippey-Tourk, who was (and still is) married to Alex Tourk, who was (and no longer is) one of the mayor's primary aides.

I'd say that sleeping with his secretary was sooo Fifties, if I didn't know from personal experience that it was still going on in the Eighties (no, it wasn't me, but I knew the participants); and obviously, here we are in the 21st century and it's still going on, in defiance of common sense, common courtesy, and every personnel code in existence. I wondered if the City and County of Ess Eff had a personnel code, but the answer (from one article) seems to be no:

"it does not appear Newsom violated any of the city's ethics laws by having a sexual relationship with a subordinate..."

The part of this which really boggled my mind, though, was C. W. Nevius' column yesterday about "The Man Code." Apparently Nevius' phone mail and inbox are full of horrified responses from his male readership, to the effect that by sleeping with his friend's wife, Newsom has committed the Ultimate Sin.

Many said they would never trust Newsom again as long as they lived.

Nevius' women responders, on the other hand, generally said, so what else is new? The men compared this to stealing from a friend, or framing a friend for a crime. It is Betrayal, they say - you don't betray your loyal ally, any more than the Mafia would. (They would, of course, if there was something in it for them, but let that pass.)

All these men are acting as if Ms. Rippey-Tourk had nothing to do with this. It takes two to tango, folks. Keep in mind, although the lady was working for the mayor at the time, nothing I've read indicated the incident was anything but consensual. Also, of the two participants, he was in the process of getting divorced; she wasn't. In fact, she's still married to the guy (although not still working for the mayor). But the whole tone of the male response seems to be, not that Tourk's wife betrayed him, but that Tourk's friend betrayed him. I can only assume that all these men are operating on the basic principle that Ms. Rippey-Tourk is her husband's property and has no independent existence and no will of her own.

And that attitude is a whole lot older than the Fifties...

The "Elder"

I had one of Those Incidents at the gym today. I'd finished my weight training and was pulling my stuff out of the locker, and I said, "Oof." Not for any reason; I just felt like making a noise.

The young black woman toweling herself off next to me jumped and said, more or less, "What was that?" (Background here: we didn't go into biography, but based on her manner and slight accent, this was an African woman, not an African American; also probably a Muslim, assumption based on the head wrap.)

"I said, 'Oof'," I replied, "no particular reason."

"I guess you said that because you are an elder." Now, I'll confess that this young woman was, oh, maybe twenty-something; so yes, I'm older than she is. But...

Ouch. I remarked that I don't think of myself as an "elder", although since I'll be 61 in less than 3 months, I suppose I have to admit it. And she was extremely polite (if a little startled by this odd woman), saying that I was, at any rate, her elder. It's a remark that an American wouldn't have made; and it made a point that, frankly, I'd rather wasn't brought up. I guess I have to get used to it; if anyone anywhere has figured out a way to turn that clock back, I haven't heard about it. But I prefer to think of myself as "well seasoned," or maybe "experienced"...

Hang In There, Molly

A small sidebar article in yesterday's paper said that Molly Ivins, the columnist, was going into the hospital; Molly has been fighting breast cancer. I just want to say, Molly, that our thoughts are with you, and we want you to keep fighting. There are very few people who speak truth to power the way you do, and we need your columns, and we miss your wonderful humor. Come back to us, Molly, hale and healthy!

"Don't Judge Me"

In yesterday's Letters to the Editor, one Mr. David Woodworth, of Walnut Creek, complained that teenagers don't get "much respect or appreciation for our troubles." They have to work all the time at school, he says, and they don't get paid; school is hard and colleges are a nightmare. Furthermore, he says, adults "think lowly of me because of the way I dress," although they know nothing about him.

This letter was apparently sparked by a recent excursion to the mall with friends, in which some adults gave him and his friends the hairy eyeball. He objects to being judged on his appearance, by people who don't "truly know me."

Mr. Woodworth, you lay claim to a 4.0 GPA, which implies that you have something resembling a brain, but you are allowing your sense of grievance to keep you from using it. If people don't know you, sir, how else are they supposed to judge you, except based on how you look and dress? (Don't suggest that they shouldn't judge you; that one is hopeless.) Everyone in society is judged based on how they look and dress, from the CEO down to the janitor, by people who don't "truly know" them. Happens every day.

I doubt seriously that you plan to take these snarky people aside, buy them a cup of coffee, and spend time persuading them of your worth; so you'll have to get used to being judged by your looks. If you don't like the judgment - try changing the way you look. If you and your friends were shambling through the shopping center dressed like gangstas from the 'hood, because you think it's cool, you'd better get used to a negative reaction from the adults you run into. (Note: I have no idea what you were wearing...) Adults have been looking suspiciously at adolescents for at least 2,500 years, and they aren't going to stop because you don't like it.

You should also consider the possibility that the people you thought were giving you dirty looks were actually thinking of something else altogether, and you just happened to be in front of them. When you're twenty, you worry all the time about what people think of you; when you're forty, you don't care what people think of you; when you're sixty, you realize that no one was thinking about you at all.

And your grievances would be more impressive if you didn't sound so much like Rodney Dangerfield. Life is tough, young man, for all of us: you, me, the CEO and the janitor. Very few of us get much respect these days, partly because very few people give much respect. You may have been glared at by adults who thought you were glaring at them. You'll never know.

As a matter of fact, I agree that many teenagers do have it rough these days. Without knowing any more about you than your letter in the newspaper, I don't know if you're one of them or not. I do know you're wasting your time complaining about something that's probably beyond your or anyone's ability to change, because it's rooted in human nature.