CORRUPTION

A few weeks ago, in a discussion about corruption, a highly educated Philippine-American challenged my schoolboy sense of morality.

When the Philippines were ruled by the Spanish (1565-1898), my friend explained, the laws and rules of the economy were simple:

In such a situation, he asked, is it really corruption for the native Philippinos to disobey the law and engage in shadow economics?

Especially when the straight and narrows leads to world-famous Smoky Mountain.

Sometimes I wonder about the legality of the backyard building projects on my block.

I know that this big white extension went through a permitting process, but all the other outbuildings?

Check out the piping. My naked eye saw it as electrical conduit, to power the outbuilding. Closer inspection shows it to be a downspout from the roof of the little extension emptying onto the roof of the outbuilding, which has it's own downspout on the other side.

Not that I'm complaining. The low density nature of this neighborhood couldn't persist through population growth and the real estate boom. Many of these houses were originally owned by city workers--firemen, policemen, my best friend's dad was a building inspector.

And each house was occupied by one nuclear family, with one car, parked overnight in the basement. The average number of occupants per house was maybe 4.

Our house was built with about 1100 sqft of living space, which ain't gonna cut it for a current buyer paying 50-60 times the original selling price.

Most owners built (non-permitted) in-law units in the otherwise empty basement. In recent decades some owners have turned their entire basements into living space, and some into apartments that they rent out, also non-permitted, with revenue, I imagine, unreported.

I can handle the increased density. What bugs me is that these backyard projects are ongoing and will be for the foreseeable future, which means that on any nice day, especially on weekends, when I open my windows wide to let in the beautiful ocean air, it's all hammers and buzz saws.

There's one guy, not in these pictures, who has a commercial (I assess) carpentry operation in a backyard lean-to. On nice days he likes to bring his sawtable outdoors.

It's like a tenement, sort of.

So, do I want to sic public officials on any of these people? Hell no!

I'm thinking Ed Jew isn't the only Ed Jew-type in city government.

BTW: According to wikipedia, Spanish explorer/culturefucker Ferdinand Magellan was killed by native Phillipine warriors led by Rajah Lapu-Lapu in the Battle of Mactan.

----- o -----

WET MORNING

Early morning court conditions can be iffy.

If it's pouring down rain I don't even get out of bed, but frequently I can't tell by looking out my window whether the courts in GGP might be playable.

Sometimes, since I'm up anyway, I'll take the trip, even though the chances of playing seem slim, just to get out of the house and get the day going.

One morning last week seemed impossible, but I went anyway, and there was my partner with undampened spirits.

Yukiko had a little cut above her lip that she wouldn't let me photograph.


We spent an hour volleying across the net, trying to keep the ball in the air. When we missed and the ball got too wet, we'd retire it and get a dry one.

We had the courts to ourselves. Only an occasional dog and owner would stroll by.


And the trees, of course, constant spectators.

----- o -----

MAR VISTA

One can’t expect perfection. At best one can avoid victimhood. With this mindset I suffered through twice- or thrice-daily autoupdates for McAfee’s security suite. While these updates are supposed to happen in the background, they made other programs so jerky that I’d just wait, and suffer till the updates completed.

Despite this I got infected with a couple of Trojans, which pop-ups told me McAfee had removed or quarantined. Not so.

The nice lady in India told me that an infection that had progressed as far as I described required the help of McAfee’s “virus removal team.”

To get with McAfee’s “team,” the nice lady told me, I’d have to purchase a “peen” for either $70 or $90. The peen gets me one-time virus removal: for $70 I do the keystrokes at their direction, for $90 the team does the keystrokes themselves.

So, finally, I had to ask the nice lady to spell the word that sounded to me like “peen.”

“P-I-N,” she said. She wanted to sell me a fucking pin number!

It became clear, and she confirmed: I pay McAfee for protection, and when McAfee fails to protect me, I pay McAfee even more.

My XP machine had worked ok for four years, about two years longer than I expected, so rather than spend $90 for a one-time fix, I spent $400 for a new, and much faster, Vista machine.

The Trojan, I guess this is what they do, took over my internet connection and blasted out email spam. The Trojan rendered my internet connection unusable, but it isn’t doing additional damage to my old computer, such as replicating files until the hard drive bursts, so I can access the information on it.

Rather than buy a new monitor to go along with my new computer, I figured I could get a splitter/switch to allow both my old (infected) computer and the new one to access the one monitor I already had. I know it’s stupid, but even that much contact between old and new made me paranoid.

So I checked my cheapo flat panel TV and found a socket labeled “PC” and “VGA” and used a $24 cable from Radioshack to hook up my old computer to my TV. Amazingly it works!

During this, I had to get my car smog-checked, for what I was told might be $90. We’ve all heard stories about unscrupulous stations that fail cars on purpose to get the repair work.

I guess I’m just a worrier.

So I asked around and was told to go to a particular test-only station in my neighborhood. The young guy, a number-one-son type, who wrote my service order was all smiley. First thing he asked was who had referred me, and was happy to hear my answer. $54.95 out-the-door, tout compris.

Frying crullers.

On the way home I stopped at the office of my insurance agent to meet him face to face after a seven year relationship, and to meet his assistant who had recently done some admin shuffles to get lower rates for me and my brother. Of course he acted glad to see me.

I paid the latest installment, so I’m good to drive for another six months.

I’d like to sell my car and get back on Muni where I can get some reading done, except for grocery shopping. I really enjoy having a car to get groceries home from the supermarket, which is more than a mile away. If there were reliable cab service I’d gladly pay six or seven dollars, or ten, for a ride home with my groceries. I’m talking about a gallon of milk, two half gallons of juice, and four two-liter bottles of Diet Coke, per trip. This is not something one does on Muni. And that’s just the beverages.

[Click on pic for source.]

I guess a true San Franciscan dines out and/or eats hand to mouth from the corner mom and pop.

At the big Safeway by the Mint on Market Street one used to see older Negro gentlemen in their full-size sedans parked by the exits waiting to take neighboorhood housewives home with their groceries. I wonder if they still do that.

Obama, smog certificate, new computer, if I score some socks and pjs for Christmas I’ll be all set for 2009. Best of all, economic trends will be providing me with plenty of company in my poverty and unemployment.

----- o -----

HOMO RUN

Here’s an illustration of why I’m glad I’m gay.

It was a collegiate women’s softball game maybe six months ago (or six years given my spongiform memory) that ended with a walk-off home run, or, at least the ball was hit over the fence.

But, fluke of flukes, the batter-baserunner tripped rounding first base and broke her leg—she was unable to continue rounding the bases as required to actually score the run.

The normal course would be that the injured player would be helped off the field and she would be called “out” and the run would not be scored. Within the rules there are only two ways she could score the run: by hobbling or crawling by herself and touching the bases, or, if there had been a runner on base ahead of her, that runner could have helped her around the bases.

The rules didn’t anticipate what actually happened: members of the opposing team carried the injured player around the bases so that her run would score.

This was touted in the news as an example of extraordinary sportsmanship, actually, “sportswomanship,” because men would never have considered the possibility of assisting an opponent in that way.

In my opinion the coach of the team that assisted their opponent should have been summarily fired: he or she failed to teach the basic goal of the game—to win.

I would be happy to argue this issue with another man. If I failed to convince, I’d dismiss the other guy as a pussy*.

But arguing this with a woman would be way dicier. Whenever a man and a woman argue there’s a chance that both are right, that there’s a male point of view and a female point of view.

At least that’s what a man who wants peace (or its homonym) must pretend.

There’s a whole lot of male cognitive dissonance that’s required for a successful heterosexual marriage.

Many men prefer the company of other men, only the sex thing draws them to women. It’s common these days to hear straight men say they wish they were gay, but they’re just not attracted to men.

So, when gay men insinuate that their relationships are “equal” to heterosexual marriages, it’s like George Bush saying that his wearing the uniform of the Texas Air National Guard was “equal” to seasick, seasoaked, scaredshitless soldiers storming Normandy.

As far as I’m concerned heterosexual men are real heroes, especially those who hang around to support and raise the kids, which in many cases are the women’s idea, and to accept the screeching dissonances of living with a member of the opposite sex.

BTW: I reluctantly voted against Proposition 8. I’d prefer an amendment establishing marriage for heterosexuals and domestic partnerships for everyone else, including heterosexuals who don’t want to get married, AND an amendment declaring that no tangible benefit of either status be denied the other.

That way, penis-in-vagina sex remains the only type of sexual activity that is explicitly approved by society, while everything else (adult, consensual blah blah) is allowed.

I think it’s too much to expect society to explicitly approve anal intercourse as equivalent to the kind of sex that has the potential for making babies.

The passage of Prop 8 was viewed by some as a setback for Gavin Newsom’s political ambitions. Good.

* “pussy” short for “pusillanimous (person)”

----- o -----

UNIFIED FEEL THEORY

I’ve been reading the Greek tragedies. This is my second time. One Christmas vacation during college I determined to read the complete Greek tragedies, which is less formidable than it sounds.

There are only twenty-nine of them extant, and they average maybe 1300 lines. Back then I got bogged down in Euripides and left two or three of his unread. The same thing is happening this time.

I told myself I’d read everything else before doing the Oresteia and the Oedipus cycle, but I couldn’t hack it and am now in the middle of the Eumenides.

Anyway, I’m impressed this time with the centrality of emotion in all the plays. There is never a dearth of “alas, I am ruined,” “woe is me,” “life is nothing but pain.”

We must accept our fate, i.e., death, but we are definitely not happy about it. How we go about dealing with anger and frustration creates our life stories, but in the long run we aren’t much different than goats being led to the sacrifice: we bleat then we bleed.

So, a couple weeks ago I’m driving to the tennis courts in Golden Gate Park for my usual morning session (poor me!) and I’m totally steamed about the bailout news—like, this guy Paulson is fucking me and I never said yes and he ain’t even my type.

The usual bicyclists were annoying but there were a couple of egregious near-death encounters with spandexers whipping through stop signs out of a blinding rising sun. Readers here know how pathetic I find the bicycle movement as an expression of left wing politics.

Why do these guys (and gals) risk their lives pitting their flimsy frames against evil death machines?

[Click picture for source.]

Looking at my own boiling rage I understood their need for physical confrontation. Young people (more than old people) yearn for it. Warfare, gang warfare, and individualized violence are the undesired forms of confrontation. Political action (which is basically the threat of warfare) is the alternative, and physical confrontation is part of it.

Civil rights in the fifties and sixties wasn’t about constitutional law, or some Marxist theory. It was about fire hoses, and police dogs, and martyrdom. The white kids (and not-so-youngs) who went south for Freedom Summer were in the same kind of peril that soldiers experience.

Similarly, the bicycle activists are putting their own lives on the line.

The felt need to confront, and if necessary die, seems better than suffering in silence and feeling like one will explode.

The evil perps in this country who deserve to be confronted have so well insulated themselves that the enemy, for bicyclists, has become anyone who drives a car.

Meanwhile Pelosi and Newsom and the building trade unionists will be spending more than a billion dollars on a three-stop subway that was cooked up as a payoff to Rose Pak for her support in some pissant political race, long forgotten.

This time through, my favorite play is Philoctetes, which is about political conniving. In it, Neoptolemus (son of Achilles) responds to Odysseus’ advice to employ deceit against the blameless man:

Neoptolemus
…I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating. …Do you not find it vile yourself, this lying?

Odysseus
Not if the lying brings our rescue with it.

Neoptolemus
How can a man not blush to say such things?

Odysseus
When one does something for gain, one need not blush.

BTW: It was Neoptolemus who eventually killed Priam, king of Troy. He also killed Astyanax, the infant son of Hector and subject of the “the most touching scene” in the Iliad.

----- o -----

HEALTHY DEPRESSION

Rudolpho Austria organizes tennis matches for old folks at Golden Gate Park every morning of the year. It’s referred to as “Rudy’s Group.” It’s strictly volunteer and there’s no money involved except standard court fees. [email me for more info on Rudy's Group.]

Rudy, or “Rudolpho,” as he prefers, performs a service that we might expect of a playground director. Such services are called “programs.”

I once asked a playground director about the “programs” he was required to run. He said,

“Willie, my boss at Park Lodge doesn’t care about programs. I could conduct a hundred programs, or zero… my boss doesn’t care.”

Anyway, the upcoming economic depression will put increasing stress on the public health system. Out-of-work people tend to get depressed and have more physical illnesses.

One cheap solution would be increased recreational programs at our public parks. Instead of staying home consuming pork rinds and Oprah, the out-of-work could get out of the house, get some health-promoting exercise, and socialize with people like themselves.

The only difference between the out-of-work and the folks in Rudy’s Group is that Rudy’s Groupers are unemployed voluntarily.

I think this would be a terrific use of City resources. But it ain’t gonna happen. Why?

Because the Rec and Park employees who would actually do the programs will all be laid off. The remaining Park-Lodgers mostly suffer from a work related partial disability—fat assedness—which renders them unable leave their deskchairs (except for breaks.)

It’s just like City road repair crews, if you’ve ever seen them “at work”: there’s one guy digging in the ground, two guys watching the one guy dig, and two supervisors, who haven’t had a callous in twenty years, watching it all, “supervising.”

So, with the City budget cuts, which member of the road crew gets laid off?

Answer: The guy who actually does the digging. Those remaining now have an official excuse for doing nothing—staffing shortage.

Happy depression!

----- o -----

THE GUPPIES ARE COMING!

Review: Island Song

Synopsis: A-Gay takes vay-cay to Hawaii, screws the flower of the big island’s youth (male), and turns some native shamanic mumbo jumbo into a worldwide pop-religion whose adherents pilgrimage to the source (and overrun the island).

Alan Chin's first novel, Island Song, (Zumaya Publications, 2008) is competently written, which puts it above Robert Ludlum and Cornell Woolrich junk. It seems a little too well written to fit in the (GLBT) trash-romance sub-genre where its publishers think it belongs. Here’s their blurb:

Two years after the death of his lover, Garrett Davidson sits in a Hawaiian beach shack, gazing out over the vast, empty Pacific. He has nothing left. Despair has robbed him of his elegant home, his lucrative job and his sanity. The single thread holding him to reality is the story he has come to this shack to write: Marc's story, the story of his lost love.

Then Songoree breezes into his life.

Songoree, a Hawaiian surfer and Garrett's new cook, is not gay, but he can't help being captivated by Garrett. He has always been attracted to broken things, like the crane with a broken wing he once mended and cared for. He is drawn to anything that reminds him of the broken image he has of himself. When he attempts to heal Garrett's spirit they become entwined in an extraordinary relationship.

The stakes are raised when Songoree's grandfather, a venerable Hawaiian kahuna, frees Garrett's mind from anguish by using ancient shamanic methods to induce altered states of awareness. Garrett and Songoree struggle to transcend their differences in age, race and life experiences. They soon discover that some of the islanders will stop at nothing to destroy their unique bond, while Songoree's grandfather is hell-bent on bringing them together to fulfill an ancient Polynesian prophesy. A clash of wills erupts between grandfather, grandson and hostile islanders, with Garrett caught in the middle fighting for his life and plunging headlong to a moment that will brutally test the boundaries of the human spirit.

Not that there’s anything beautiful about the writing. It’s all present tense. This gets annoying after awhile. Screenplays are written in all present tense, since they describe what’s happening on the screen. So, I figured, Island Song is a crypto-filmscript.

As a movie it makes total sense: attractive main characters, spectacular settings, shark attacks, frenzied luaus, fire walking (!), and plenty of mano-a-mano violence. Oh did I mention flashbacks to gay sex scenes.

So, what is 275-page Island Song after we subtract the 102-page screenplay? Description. Lots and lots of description. Lots of colors and smells e.g. there are many verbs specifying exactly how particular smells combine.

Lots of meal menus. Lots of physical sensations.

None of the description seems to have any purpose, no particular meaning. The description of sunlight sifting through green fronds is no more or less important than the description of the protagonist’s nervous system as he walks on burning coals.

Nothing makes the reader sympathize or identify with the main characters, Barrett Davidson, an ex-Navy Seal white gay guy from San Francisco, and Songeree (no last name) a Hawaiian youth who is heir to a fading shamanic tradition.

Does the white guy have an interesting story? Not really. Does he ever have an interesting thought? If so, they’re not recorded in this novel. Does he have any interesting aspirations? No. Does he look good in a tuxedo in the flashback to his now dead boyfriend’s art opening? He looks great.

And so does Songeree. Besides being a dutiful student of his shaman-grandfather, Song is a pillar of his family. He’s a great hula dancer who loves to strip down to his loincloth and wriggle for an audience. Plus, he’s a surfer who hangs with his regular-guy small village contemporaries (who don’t like the idea that some rich haole foj wants to fuck their pretty-boy compadre).

Song is not only beautiful, and servile, he has (supposed) deep understanding which he shares with Garrett. There’s nothing particularly interesting about the mystical knowledge Song has inherited, at least not as reported in the novel, except it seems to be heavy on warrior-spirit stuff, Earnest Hemingway stuff, for instance the fire walking.

So, Chin gives us nothing in the religion to root for.

The eventual mating of Garrett and Song is opposed (violently – Chin’s writing comes alive in the Hollywood-perfect fistfight scenes) by the local youth-trash, so I guess we’re rooting for the gay guys.

The gay guys win. Plus, the book Garrett writes to promote Grandfather’s shamanic delusions (wisdom) becomes the hottest thing since Dianetics.

And they all live happily ever after, in their alternate versions of Architecture Digest and Gourmet magazine, all simple yet elegant.

Do we care? Not at all. And that seems to be the (extremely) subtle point. In a world devoid of meaning, does it really matter who is and isn’t successful? Do we care which Roman emperors were gay?

The satire is so deadpan it might be missed entirely. For instance, in the dénouement, Song and Garrett take a rich guy on a fishing daytrip (that’s their new business) and after the rich guy’s three hour aneurism-popping (almost) fight with a magnificent sailfish, Song cuts the fish loose. He explains to the irate rich guy that in the struggle he and the fish became one, that the rich guy actually experienced love with the fish.

This completely assuages the rich guy and seems to give him some deep insight or peace of mind or something. This crap supposedly exemplifies the religion that is taking the world, and the island, by storm: you can love a fish by making it fight for its life.

Alan Chin gives us only two little hints that he doesn’t necessarily endorse the happy ending.

The book begins with a quotation from Buddhist scripture about happiness and geography, cautioning against the thought that one place is happier than another.

Then, at the end of the fishing trip day, the book ends with Garrett writing in his journal:

But he has a nagging feeling there was something frightening about today. He searches his feeling the way Songoree taught him to do, but he can’t quite see it. He has the vague feeling it has to do with life being out of control, and he’s reminded of the poem Grandfather once quoted, the one about the falling leaf showing front then showing back.

The hell with it, he decides.

There is something frightening about every day. Sleep well and pick up the rhythm of your life in the morning, make love to your man again, go to town and pickup your son, and do what you can to make them as happy as they were today.

To summarize, Island Song is a subtle critique of materialism, taking on not the worst of it but, ostensibly, the best. It seems aimed at people who would never read “The Stranger,” yet it imparts the same sense of pervasive emptiness.

Coming soon (I predict) to a theater near you. It could even spark a spate of Gay-Buddhist-vigilante movies.

----- o -----

ELECTION EMOTION

For me the most touching reports about Obama’s victorious campaign regard generational interactions. Who knows how true, but we heard many anecdotes of old folks voting for Obama because their kids were so adamant that they do.

As Chris Matthews said, “The parents and grandparents sacrifice to send their kids to college, so they must think a college education is important. So when their kids, who went, or are going to college, ask them to vote for Obama, the old folks listen.”

It makes sense, the kids will be paying the price for Obama’s decisions, the old folks have already enjoyed a standard of living that won’t be seen again for many generations.

In the 1960’s we heard a lot about “gaps.” Much of the 1960 presidential campaign concerned the “missile gap” between the US and USSR. Kennedy was the hawk. He contended that during the previous eight years of Eisenhower/Nixon, the Russians had deployed more ICBMs than had the US. This was total bullshit, and Nixon had the (secret) U2 photos to prove it, but Kennedy knew Nixon couldn’t reveal such.

Anyway, among the various gaps was the “generation gap,” between boomers and their parents, The parents had survived the Great Depression and World War II. The boomers were surviving, well, large class sizes.

My dad was 44 when I was born so he was 60 when I got my drivers license. My favorite toys, as a kid, were cars, I paid close attention to my dad’s driving and asked a lot of questions, so I was ready for my license years in advance. My 16th birthday fell on a Saturday, so I had to wait till Monday for my driving test, which I aced without question, having prepared my entire life for it.

[Click on image for source.]

Of course I was wild to drive, and I was surprised how much my dad let me. Things like going to the store, or church, or even longer family trips, my dad was happy to let me drive.

Having reached 60 myself, I understand why. My dad glad to have a competent kid take over a task which for him had grown less and less fun. These days I’m always happy to let someone else drive.

So when a really competent young guy says he WANTS to govern, some of us are more than happy to let him have a try.

I had predicted a McCain victory that would follow an apocalyptic trajectory, the question being “Do we pay off our foreign debt, or do we go to war with our creditors?” I thought for sure Americans would opt for survival of the fittest.

By simple calculation, our ten trillion dollar debt divided by three hundred thirty million Americans equals $30,000.00 per person, $120,000.00 for a family of four.

McCain’s ilk could argue that much of America’s national debt was incurred in furtherance of our role as protector of international order since World War II, and that the rest of the free world should indemnify us, i.e, forgive us our debt.

It wouldn’t even be a forgiveness of debt. We could prepare invoices to other countries for their previously unbilled debt to us, and enter our borrowings from them as “payments on account.” While our foreign debt is only part of the overall, we can charge other countries for the whole ten trillion, because, whatever America was spending, it was all about protecting the world.

This has a kind of Hitlerian ring to it, which will sound better and better as we slog through years of depression.

It looks like, for the short term, Obama wants to borrow more, with no repayment plan except a belief in never ending growth. If America will eventually renege on our foreign debt, then we might as well max-out all our credit cards first. The change promised by Barack wasn't regarding direction, but rather a somewhat slower rate of acceleration toward World War III.

For me, the honeymoon is already over.

Even a slave labor camp, populated by innocent political prisoners, can have better or worse management. The inmates might indeed rejoice when a new commandant is installed. The old commandant was terrible, and the incoming commandant has promised to increase daily rations from "slow-starvation" to "slightly-slower-starvation."

An improvement?

----- o -----

IN & OUT URGE

The little American boy asks the little French girl, “Would you like a ride in my new red wagon?”

“Oui, oui,” the little French girl responds enthusiastically.

“Not in my wagon you don’t,” the little boy says.

Speaking of which. What kind of toilet facilities are provided for voters who must wait in hours-long lines? This is a horrible scandal.

Polling officials cannot impose any additional requirements or tests for voting beyond those defined in state constitutions, and those cannot be discriminatory. Clearly, a four hour line imposes a test of physical stamina as a requirement for voting.

I have voted only in San Francisco, and only once in a precinct other than the one I grew up in and currently occupy. I always vote. Only once have I encountered any wait at all, and that was maybe five minutes tops.

Today was typical, with election workers outnumbering voters. It might be stereotyping, but they always put two young asian student types doing the sign-in paper work.

This amiable gentleman’s job was to help feed the marked ballot into the optical scanner.


This man seemed to be a supervisor, who dropped by to make sure everything was going ok.


The lady in the background was voting before I arrived (I pride myself on speed), and the lady with babe in arms was just signing in. Five poll workers (one not shown), three voters.


If San Francisco can do it, what’s Virginia’s problem? Or Ohio's?

----- o -----

I'M VOTING FOR (Michelle) OBAMA

This morning Michelle Obama speaking to a crowd in Nevada issued the usual praise for the young volunteers with their tremendous enthusiasm.

Then she addressed at length the “not so young” volunteers, praising their focus and determination. And tenacity

Mrs Obama said she’s never felt a grip stronger than that of a ninety year old who won’t let go her arm until she gets their picture snapped. She was completely uninhibited in talking about old folks, none of that “eighty-years-young” crap.

Of all the people appearing on the tv screen in connection with the presidential campaign Michelle Obama has been the most appealing.

She’s very smart and she’s down to earth. Her kids seem pretty normal. What a great first lady she will make.

Michelle is obviously more gifted than is Sarah Palin in just about any regard, except maybe hair.

Michelle will do her damnedest to see that neither of her daughters gets knocked up prior to high school graduation.

Imagine a discussion, about almost anything, between Michelle Obama and Sarah Palin. Then imagine Sarah Palin talking to Vladimir Putin.

With a wife like Michelle, Barack can’t be all bad. So I guess I’ll vote for Obama.

I feel strongly that McCain will pull it out. Too many Americans have a “fuck it” attitude. They support McCain’s commitment, couched as a joke, to bomb Iran. It’s not the anti-black, it’s the anti-rational that survey-ees won’t admit to pollsters.

Sarah Palin, in her first few appearances used “American exceptionalism,” as a slogan. She thinks our country is exceptional. For instance, in her recent energy-policy speeches she mentions the great energy resources that God has given to the United States, as if indicating divine favor.

God, she failed to extrapolate, must really love Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Columbia, and of course, Russia.

It’s moronic and irrational. Exceptionalism is an example of magical thinking, the kind of thinking that said we’d be greeted as liberators. Or that maybe America could actually survive a nuclear war, with God’s protection. It could even be good for business.

----- o -----

IRREGULARITIES

Four years ago I was staying in Ventura, CA, providing homecare for my newly bedridden mother.

The call had come ten days earlier that she was in the hospital with a condition that would kill her within a day or two. When I arrived at her bedside my mom was dictating her voting choices to my cousin, Barbara.

Barbara was quite amused that my mom’s greatest concern was to get her absentee ballot filled out and mailed before her demise. By my mom’s way of thinking, if she had only one minute left to live, she’d use it to vote against George Bush.

It turned out that my mom lived another seven weeks, during which she had to witness Bush’ reelection.

So I was thinking about death and politics, and I had an epiphany about democracy.

Of course, there were reports of voting irregularities, and I found the reports disturbing. Efforts to suppress voter turnout, or to expunge qualified voters from the rolls, or stuffing ballot boxes, or hacking touchscreen results, all are attacks on democracy, or so it seemed.

The essence of democracy, or so I thought, was that people affected get to vote. The vote is sacred, and to be respected as thoroughly as manners at a Garden Society tea. People who suppress votes, or send crappy machines to black neighborhoods, I reasoned, really don’t believe in democracy, all they believe in is winning.

And, I had to admit, the skullduggery wasn’t particular to any party. The Kennedy victory was corrupt as hell. Kennedy was succeeded by “landslide Lyndon” whose first election to public office was made possible by the discovery of a “lost” ballot box, the contents of which changed the outcome.

Even saintly (ahem) Bill Moyers apparently committed numerous serious felonies when he and Lyndon Johnson had J. Edgar Hoover (blackmail was his game) dig up dirt on Barry Goldwater operatives prior to the 1964 presidential race. This was, at the very least, theft of government services and conspiracy to do so.

I’ve always felt queasy about Moyers. As a confidant of LBJ’s Moyers hasn’t come clean on the JFK assassination, which propelled LBJ’s career and as a result, Moyers’ own. Moyers certainly has Vietnamese blood on his hands.

There’s no statute of limitation on murder. Hoover was criminally liable, at least after the fact. What was Moyers’ role in the cover-up?

Anyway, politics, whether in democracies or otherwise, is not a Garden Society tea. Humans have long been willing to kill for power, so lesser offenses shouldn’t surprise. The USA is likely no better or worse.

My insight, coming strangely in the heightened state of waiting for a loved one’s imminent death, is that democracy isn’t about process and procedure, it’s about dramatis personae. It’s about who gets to participate in the skullduggery.

In America, anyone with ambition and smarts can get involved in the corruption and intrigue. In other societies participation in government is limited to a subset of the population.

Here it’s possible for the likes of Sarah Pallin to occupy the oval office, if not wield actual power.

And Bill Moyers, a poor kid from Oklahoma, certainly went far.

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TONGUE BITING

During the first meeting of an SF City College music class titled simply “Woodwinds,” the teacher asked us, “Does the flute have an octave-key?”

The other two instruments to be taught are Sax and Clarinet, which do have special keys that facilitate movement between octaves (actually “registers”) but the flute simply doesn’t.

The simple answer is No.

But one of the students took the bait and suggested that a particular right-hand pinkie key might be what he meant.

“No,” the teacher said, “where is the octave key on the flute—anyone else?”

No one else spoke so I answered, “In your imagination.” This apparently was also wrong.

Then an experienced student, (one can take the class four times) piped up with what he knew would be the answer—“In the embouchure [lips].”

And that’s what the teacher said. … which is a correct answer to “How do flutists change register since the flute has no octave-key?”

I bit my tongue, as per my mom’s story from five decades earlier.

In the late 1950s I was about eight when my mom took a class at LA City College, some English thing.

One of the questions on her first homework assignment was “List five words that can be used as both a noun and as a verb.”

One of the words my mom listed was “see.”

The teacher marked that answer wrong, explaining that the noun was spelled differently, S-E-A.

My mom told us kids that the teacher was wrong. The noun “see,” as anyone should know who wishes to be thought literate in English, is the common name of a Catholic bishop’s jurisdiction. If nothing else, we’ve all heard of the pope’s jurisdiction as “The Holy See,” which is not, repeat not, a body of water.

My mom explained that the embarrassment the teacher would feel and any resulting backlash were not worth correcting such a small injustice.

At the time I dismissed her attitude as mere timidity—if a teacher mistakenly marked one of my answers wrong I would have raised Cain. I would have gone to the mat, hell, to the gallows, insisting that “see” is a noun.

Higher education prepares us to work for large corporate and governmental bureaucracies in which it is essential to agree with one’s superiors, even if they are dead wrong, unless disagreeing would somehow be a positive career move.

Theobald Boehm developed the modern flute that we see in western orchestras these days. There are flutes from various cultures, as well as historic flutes, such as the recorder, from European culture.

The first level of distinction, when a flutist is asked what type of flute he or she plays, is Boehm versus non-Boehm.

A major impediment to this discussion is the pronunciation of Mr Boehm’s name. Here in California it’s pronounced simply “bame,” rhyming with game lame tame same and name.

Anyway, next class maybe I can impress the teacher by announcing the flute octave key’s true location—in the trash heap outside Theobald Boehm’s workshop.

It's kind of strange to think that I'm going to get a grade for this.

Then I can really get on Mr McCarthy's good side, our teacher's name is Charlie McCarthy, by inquiring about the welfare of Mortimer Snerd.

----- o -----

OBAMA IRRELEVANT

Early yesterday morning I saw workers setting up temporary chain link fencing in the west end of Golden Gate Park.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

Fencing within Golden Gate Park is erected for events that require paid tickets. Such events, in my small mind, are antithetical to the idea of public parks, but nobody seems to care any more about that—everyone’s grabbing what’s left.

The area being fenced for a three day rock concert, which includes unprecedented nighttime performances, is a huge part of the park that includes the Polo Field.

Radiohead and Tom Petty seem to be the headliners. For such as they you pay $85.00 per day or $225.00 for all three days

I’m reminded of a previous concert at the Polo Field that included:

The Grateful Dead
Jefferson Airplane
Quicksilver Messenger Service (lead singer Janis Joplin)
Santana
Steve Miller Band

Additionally, there were appearances/speeches/readings from:

Dick Gregory
Allen Ginsberg
Timothy Leary

According to Wikipedia, Owsley made a special batch of LSD and distributed it for free at the event, which was billed as “A Gathering of the Tribes for a Human Be-In.”

I didn’t get any of the acid which is probably a good thing. I was only three months past my eighteenth birthday facing enormous pressures regarding the draft, and just beginning to confront my gayness. My senses were already sensitive enough.

The word Be-In has entered our vocabulary without its pun value.

There were maybe twenty or thirty thousand people there, though I recollect that the venue seemed too large for the crowd. It was a brilliant winter day. There weren’t any particular problems.

It was free of charge. There was no temporary chain link fence. No tickets. This was in January 1967, five months before the “Summer of Love,” which began the conversion of hippie into a commodity.

Anyway, I got a mailer recently from Barack stating that a core Democratic value is that we want to give our children more prosperous lives than we had ourselves.

Besides the idiocy of this perpetual-motion idea, we all know that American prosperity reached its peak in the mid 1960’s, when state-college tuition was free and so were the Dead, the Airplane, and QMS (which legendary groups were billed on the above poster simply as “San Francisco Rock Bands”)

No one in this presidential race has uttered the words “human population growth.” Hell, in all the Olympic coverage we’ve heard nothing about China’s one-child policy.

The kind of prosperity experienced by regular Americans in the 1960s is largely an outcome of World War II. Unfortunately, short of the world finding a humane way to control its population, such prosperity will come again only on the other side of a major Malthusian event.

So it doesn’t matter who-the-fuck’s on the Supreme Court.

----- o -----

CASTRO PRICE WAR

I resolved to report/comment on any good news as soon as I hear it.

It may not be news to you, but I just found a source of cheap Nag Champa in Eureka Valley (“the Castro”).

I thought the price was pretty standard, around $0.13/gram, a little more for the 15g box, less for the 40g box.

Then, the Bead Store near the Castro Theater raised their price for the 15g box from $2.00 to $3.00.

This is still incredibly cheap when you consider that the raw ingredients and the packaging, not to mention labor, all have a cost that is greater than zero, and then the shipping halfway around the world, then the merchant’s markup. I wonder what the price could be FOB/factory.

I was unaware that Planetweavers with their glitzy uckteen-dollars-per-square-foot façade [pictured below] on Castro was the same group as the funky erstwhile shop on Haight, or I would have tried them.

So I saw some moving-in activity at a storefront next to sfmike’s favorite dildo emporium on 18th Street and checked it out. Turns out it’s Planetweavers. I guess rent is an issue. [They haven’t updated their website yet; to find them follow the directions to Autoerotica.]

Planetweavers has a large selection of incense including the most popular Nag Champa at $2.99 for the 40g box. This works out to $0.0748/gram. At the counter the guy even gave me a 25% discount.

Good news has been rarer than sunshine in the Sunset District lately. And there’s no escape. Gas costs too much. Biking or walking burns unaffordable food calories.

But, hey, incense is still cheap.

I light up a stick of Nag, close my eyes, and it’s like I’m in India.

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OBAMA BOMBS

In a dichotomized system, voters get only one more

choice than they would under a totalitarian regime.

Wikipedia, "Two Party System"

In his Unity, NH, unity appearance with Hillary Clinton (who repeated her Goldwater-girl omission* yet again) Obama stated his Iraq policy as “responsible, gradual withdrawal.”

These are obvious weasel words that carry no clear promise. These words actually endorse the status quo in Iraq, since the status quo is something to be changed only “responsibly” and “gradually.”

Amazingly, this grim outlook is omitted from the list of Obama’s policy shifts to the right (NAFTA, FISA, guns, death penalty). Arianna breaks it down as well as anyone.

For instance:

In an interview with Nina Easton in Fortune Magazine, Obama was asked about having called NAFTA "a big mistake" and "devastating." Obama's reply: "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

Overheated? So when he was campaigning in the Midwest, many parts of which have been, yes, devastated by economic changes since the passage of NAFTA, and he pledged to make use of a six-month opt-out clause in the trade agreement, that was "overheated?" Or was that one "amplified?"

Because if that's the case, it would be helpful going forward if Obama would let us know which of his powerful rhetoric is "overheated" and/or "amplified," so voters will know not to get their hopes too high.

Conventional wisdom is that Obama needn’t worry about his party’s left wing because those people (we) have no other choice. For us Obama’s message will be monotone: the awful consequences of a McCain presidency.

This is not unlike McCain’s main argument.

Fear itself.

So I’m voting for Nader, even though he can’t figure out Obama’s background.

Obama is not, as Nader so awkwardly stated, half African American. He’s half white-American and half black-Kenyan.

Whatever ancestral stories Barack Obama heard around the dinner table, they didn’t include American slave experiences, or Jim Crow experiences, because none of Barack’s ancestors were victims of either.

I gave up on Barack when he gave up on Reverend Wright. Barack wants us to know that he personally shares none of the Reverend’s anger and bitterness. Why should he? Obama can "turn the page" on historical wrongs much more easily than those who actually suffered them.

One of his rightward moves took place on Fathers Day when he chided black fathers for abandoning their children, as if this accounted for the disparity between US blacks and whites.

How ironic! Barack’s father cut out when Barack was only two or so. Yet Barack grew up to be a presumed Democratic nominee for president. It helps to have white grandparents who can provide entrée to white society, private schools, for example.

Anyway, I agree with 95% of everything Ralph Nader says about economic, social, and foreign policy. The difference between Obama’s policies and Nader’s are infinitely greater than the differences between those of Obama and McCain.

Neither McCain nor Obama promise any significant resistance to the corporatization of all human experience.

Two rudderless rafts are carried by powerful currents toward the edge of Niagara falls. One of the rafts is captained by Obama, the other by McCain.

* Hillary has been repeating her “four decades of political involvement” fib, so she can claim that her husband had two of the three democratic presidential elections victories in that period. Of course, Hilary’s political involvement began four years earlier with her work for Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, won, incidentally, by a democrat, which she continues to omit.

----- o -----

CATHOLIC TEST

Floating in the smarmy effluence that is the Russert death coverage are attestations by Chris Matthews on MSNBC of the importance of the Catholic faith, which he shares with the deceased.

Then we cut away to the public viewing at St Albans School (where Russert sent his only son). St Albans is a private Protestant prep school for the ruling class and for those eager to serve the ruling class.

[Click on picture for source.]

When I was a kid the nuns taught us that even entering a non-Catholic church or synagogue was “giving scandal” and should not be done.

When it comes to young Catholics eager to serve the ruling class (thinking perhaps that a “gentleman’s gentleman” is actually a gentleman), distinctions about religion tend to blur.

Chris Matthews has been one of the louder voices ragging on Obama for “sitting in the pew Sunday after Sunday,” listening to extremist views without objecting.

Then he touts his own Catholicism as if it’s views were uncontroversial and mainstream.

I wonder if Chris Matthews is a real Catholic.

Here’s a quick test. The three statements below are ironclad Catholic doctrine. To call oneself a real Catholic one must agree 100% with all three statements (and a whole lot more).

Catholic Test:

1. Homosexual orientation is a grave disorder and all homosexual acts are gravely disordered.
o Agree 100% (Catholic)
o Don’t agree 100% (non-Catholic)

2. Willful, therapeutic abortion is murder.
o Agree 100% (Catholic)
o Don’t agree 100% (non-Catholic)

3. The use of condoms or other artificial contraception is always a mortal sin.
o Agree 100% (Catholic)
o Don’t agree 100% (non-Catholic)

Many people (me) would say that these are “extreme views.” Actually, when it comes to extreme views I prefer those of Reverend Wright (but not that awful white priest), to those of the ex-Nazi Pope Benedict.

The difference is black and white.

Anyway, Chris Matthews should tell us if he’s a real Catholic, or if he’s a St Albans Catholic.

btw: It’s hard for me to consider the RCC these days without thinking about the Mayan Codices, which conquistador-priests destroyed almost four hundred years before Hitler burned his first book.

----- o -----

HPIT: MUNI METRO

HOW PATHETIC IS THIS!

Not the fact that Muni Metro had an accident with itself (SFGate story). We’ve come to expect such. And with current operator-contract negotiations stalled we might expect more such.

We keep reading about Muni deploying exotic rolling-stock (ancient restored streetcars, double decker buses) all in an effort to support and cement San Francisco's role as a tourist town.

The problem with Muni is poor human performance, not boring buses. Muni management knows how to spend money on rolling stock, but they don’t know how to manage human performance.

One problem is that the performance standards for other City employees are so low that Muni drivers feel singled-out. So that part is intractable.

Not intractable are English-usage errors. With the Chronicle downsizing and all, you’d think they'd have a few competent copy editors eager to keep their jobs. Yet we get this (emphasis mine):

At 2:03 p.m., a westbound one-car T-Third train rear-ended a two-car N-Judah train, which had stopped at a light on King Street between Third and Fourth streets.

Let me shout to the world: there is no such thing as a “one-car train.” A single car is a single car. You don’t get a “train” until two or more cars are coupled together. Sheesh!

Webster's Online:

Main Entry: train
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from trainer to draw, drag

7 a: a connected line of railroad cars with or without a locomotive

And stating the fact correctly wouldn’t have been that difficult, like:

At 2:03 p.m., a single westbound T-Third streetcar rear-ended a two-car N-Judah train…

I guess the editors figure that anything that rolls on tracks is a train, regardless of the number of cars.

So this would be called a “one-car train”:

Or this:

Or this:

----- o -----

KUDOS, KAMALA

Kamala Harris has been such a terrible District Attorney that it’s hard to imagine anything good coming out of her office.

Most recently she failed to prosecute a cousin of Mayor Gavin Newsom for what looked like a tight DUI-drugs case. (Mayor Newsom, like DA Harris, gained his present office mostly through the influence of Willie Brown.)

She herself is the subject of a Federal false claims investigation.

[Click on image for source.]

So I was prepared to rag on Kamala when she announced she would pursue criminal sanctions against parents of chronically truant kids (SFGate story).

Great! Murder is out of control, so let’s crack down on hooky.

Upon consideration, this move shows her true concerns and points to a possible gracious exit from her current position in which she is way over her head.

Wikipedia says she has a history of involvement in child welfare legislation and enforcement.

And chronic truancy (more than one-third of school days missed) is almost always the result of a home environment that is not good for children.

I know, from various war stories I’ve heard over the years, that for many children who are growing up in chaotic or abusive family situations the hours spent at school are the safest, most supportive, most predictable and orderly hours in the day.

My Education Informant knew one third-grade boy who had to stay home two or three days a week to watch his infant sister while papa went to the methadone clinic.

In this country, at this time, a child has a right to a primary education. Keeping a child out of school is a crime. This means that a family that’s unable to organize itself well enough to get the kid to school regularly shouldn’t have custody of the kid.

The families need help, but the kids can’t wait. So we applaud DA Harris.

Go Figure:

Summer vacation from school, in this country, came about because children’s labor was needed on the farms. Now, the children are out of school but the law forbids their employment as farm laborers.

Some local commenters seem to think that Barack, if elected, might appoint Kamala Harris Attorney General. This seems like a little hometown grandiosity. Her paltry record and her unsavory associations should prevent such an ascension.

But she could probably handle and enjoy an appointment to head some child warfare branch of the Justice Department.

You go, Kamala! To Washington. And see to it that all the children get a good education.

----- o -----

CARV

Representative Eshoo (per SFGate) wants to regulate the sound volume of TV commercials.

What will I do with my stains if I can’t Shout them out?

When Eshoo succeeds with her volume campaign she can do something a little more serious, about misleading content.

Recently a young man died near the Giants’ ballpark in an episode of violence that included just one punch. Not a long, sustained fist fight. Just one punch.

When is the last time you saw such an outcome portrayed in fictional TV or movies?

There was a similar incident out here in the Avenues a few years ago that involved racial stuff, plus bicyclist vs motorist stuff, but there was just one punch, head hits curb, RIP.

It seems the reaction to the recent ballpark death was one of simple surprise. There were no racial or other social-issue overtones, just a death resulting from “normal” male adolescent/young adult behavior. (Contrast: the Golden Rule.)

There was shock that one punch could so change the prospects, not only of the dead victim and his family, but also of the perp and his.

It seems that not much malice is imputed. It was more like a freak accident.

The Greeks would have attributed it to mischief of the gods.

People get punched in the face all the time, maybe get knocked down, but they get right back up. We see it repeatedly on TV, everyday. Heck, if you believe TV, punching is a major and constant component of human interaction.

The Committee for the Accurate Representation of Violence wants to require TV and movie producers to accurately portray the consequences of all violent incidents.

For instance, the cop who subdues a suspect with a knockout punch to the jaw, must go directly to the hospital to have the broken bones in his or her hand set and put in a cast, and he/she must wear that cast for the next six weeks of the narrative.

And the suspect has to show up with his jaw wired.

We shan’t hold our breaths.

Among the most famous pictures in the history of photography are those by Mathew Brady of U.S. Civil War dead.

Those brave and unfortunate Americans who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan can not be pictorially represented even as flag-draped coffins. TV news shows them in pictures taken when they were alive—as if the transition from live fighter to dead hero is as painless and antiseptic as turning off a light.

The fact that our poodledog-press accepts such restriction might indicate how close to the end America is in the lifecycle of empires.

I assume that the young man accused in the ballpark incident can honestly say he had no idea that one punch could result in death. This is the fault of our inculturation system, which includes schools, media and individual family values.

When CARV gets its way, boys and young men will know what one punch can do.

----- o -----

THE KAMALA KONNECTION

Kamala Harris, San Francisco’s District Attorney, currently under Federal investigation for submitting millions of dollars in false claims for border-protection funds, was a prominent endorser of victorious Proposition G, which gives hundreds of acres of San Francisco property to Lennar Corporation in exchange for one dollar and some promises.

In an apparently unrelated story reported this last Saturday, Ms Harris has struck a deal with “politically connected” concrete contractor, Ricardo Ramirez, who allegedly sold substandard concrete to numerous public works projects, The deal is that the contractor pleads guilty to one count of some environmental violation and agrees to stay home for a year (so-called house arrest). In return Harris dropped 14 felony and other charges.

According to the SFGate story:

Harris' office had no explanation for why it dropped the concrete case. It issued a statement stressing that Ramirez had pleaded guilty to the "most serious environmental charge" he faced and that he would pay restitution.

So we are left to speculate, is Ms Harris protecting one sadsack contractor, or is she protecting that contractors’ political connections?

Notable for our story is that Mr Ramirez allegedly sold substandard concrete for use on the new (disastrous) T-Third streetcar line, an albatross originally promoted as a boon to Bayview Hunters Point.

So, the fraudulent sale of substandard concrete to a project promoted as benefiting the mostly black population of BVHP, is not something Ms Harris chooses to prosecute. It’s as if it never happened.

The major promoter of the T-Third line, (a major infrastructure investment with no demonstrable benefit) was then Mayor Willie Brown.

We shouldn’t forget that Ms Harris was once a mistress of Willie Brown, per this SFGate copy regarding her first run for public office against incumbent lefty Terrence Hallinan, who had actually indicted SFPD brass for corruption. According to an SFGate story at the time:

But, because a large number of her contributors also have been donors to Harris' onetime boyfriend and political sponsor, Mayor Willie Brown, Hallinan is painting his challenger as a machine candidate who would be obliged to ignore local government corruption once in office.

"People don't give you money for nothing," Hallinan said. "One of the responsibilities in the next administration is to clean up the corruption that Willie Brown is leaving behind him. If Willie Brown is raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for her -- and has really created her -- that means she's indebted to him."

Also, we should remember that Gavin Newsom achieved his first elective office via Willie Brown appointment.

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