Who Cleaned the Bay?

If you are drinking in a sports bar, you might need to know the answer to this question: which NBA coach had the best mother?

Back in the 1960s, San Francisco Bay was an open sewer. You could flush your business directly into the water, which became unsafe to swim in. Also about a quarter of the bay had been filled in by cities and developers, intent on making it possible to walk from Berkeley to  Coit Tower. 

At that point three women with no experience as activists founded an organization and asked for one dollar dues. They set out to stop filling in the bay and to start cleaning it up. They went from city to city, organizing, and that is why today you can jump in the water without encountering poop.  One of the three women was Kay Kerr, the mother of the Warriors coach, Steve Kerr. Welcome home, Steve Kerr.

The Last Native Speaker

In the March 30 NEW YORKER, Judith Thurman discusses how some of our 7,000 human languages die out each year. I'm not sure about that number--it used to be 6,000 human languages. We may be inventing new ones faster than the old ones can disappear. Or, more likely, we keep redefining the word "language."

Thurman discussed the curious case of  Yanten Gomez, who is the last speaker of a language called Selk'nam, a tongue native to Chile. As a very young and linguistically talented person, Gomez had learned the language from its final native speaker, and he had learned it over the phone. He wanted to preserve it. Yet, at one point, Judith Thurman asked, "How can I be sure that he really spoke Selk'nam if no one else did?"

The answer is that Thurman can't be sure that Gomez is speaking Selk'nam correctly.  There's no way to check. What's more interesting is that Gomez can't be sure either. 

I don't want to exaggerate. Gomez can make tapes in an effort to fix correct pronunciations, as he remembers them, and he can write down the rules of Selk'nam grammar, including the meanings of words, and hope he recalls them correctly. Unfortunately one of the curious things about using language correctly is that it takes two. You need someone to tell you when you've made a mistake. (And this shoots down any number of weird speculations about the origins of language by major egos like St. Augustine and Chomsky.)

California's Grandest Poem

This may not be acceptable in the post-postmodern era, which came on the heels of deconstruction, but we once thought that the most profound poem written in California had emerged from the pencil of Gelette Burgess, who lived in a shack on top of Russian Hill. Nearly every Native Son could recite his poem from memory. Later poets like Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder had the uncommon advantage of standing on the shoulders of a giant in the field of American literature. Jeffers and Snyder became known to a grateful readership, but they no longer manufacture the fellow who can write like this:

I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.
 

the empty state

California today has four times the population that it had when I was in high school in Redondo Beach.  I used to ride my $50 horse down to the surf. Many of the gaps of open land and vacant lots have been filled with houses, apartments and rancheritos.  Of course, I moved north.  There's plenty of open land in Sonoma County. Things may stay that way for a while, until our local political bodies get bullied, frightened, sued or bought by international developers with bottomless pockets.

The Perfect Proxy War

As you know, in Iraq we are supporting the Shia in their struggle against the Sunni (ISIS). In Yemen, we support the Sunni against the Shia rebels, while in Syria we oppose both the Sunni and Shia in their conflicts with Muslims. Jon Stewart has pointed out that we have at last found the perfect environment for our Military Industrial Complex: proxy wars against ourselves. We supply both sides. What could be sweeter?

The Dark in "Zero Dark Thirty."

When the movie ZERO DARK THIRTY came out, I read that it justified torture and claimed that CIA torture had helped us find Bin Laden.  Susan and I decided not to buy tickets to see a propagandistic distortion of reality. I don't go to movies that muck up history (if I am aware of the problem). 

People have different opinions about a movie, but you can't reasonably have a different opinion about where the support for writing and producing ZERO came from. Last December the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report on all this. Support for the writing and production of ZERO DARK THIRTY came in secret from the CIA.

Dear John

 My brother Tim and friend Mowry and I grew up at a time when people got to see many World War II movies. Many had a minor but important Dear John theme. Some wholesome nice guy would show his charming fiance's photograph around and talk about how they were planning to buy a farm in Wisconsin. Then, midway through the movie, just before a crucial battle, he'd get a Dear John letter. Once the battle started, the poor guy, driven mad by grief, would suddenly jump up and charge the enemy, shouting racist slogans, and a machine gun would cut him in half, ending his suffering.

This week my wife and I are selling our house and downsizing, packing stuff, and I came across a parody that Tim, Mowry and I wrote (or borrowed?) in the 1950s. We'd get three guitars going and sing:

Dear John, oh how I hate to write.
Dear John, I must let you know tonight
That my love for you has died away,
And now I love another.
Tonight I marry your father.
Signed: Mother.

 

Please, god, don't talk to me about race.

"Please, god, don't talk to me about race," said Melissa Harris Perry on her two hour program this Sunday morning.  That was her reaction to the Starbucks' campaign to open a discussion on race relations. About half the African Americans I've seen on TV have said something similar. The other half think that having a giant corporation interested in a conversation on race might be a start.

I watch Perry's program regularly. As an academic she brings something different to television. The difference ranges from her commanding skill at analysis to a concern about exactly how many angels can dance on the pinhead of a dean. Her guests are human beings, not professional network talking-pointers. In short, you get something fresh from her, and I recommend the discussion.

What troubles me is the fact that our racial attitudes and divisions are so complicated and painful that many black leaders have rejected with outrage Starbucks' awkward attempt to begin a conversation. That's not helpful. Racism is America's original sin, central to our national problems. Racism, sexism and elitism corrupt us. We need to talk, even if it hurts.

Why People Don't Vote

Jill Lepore, in a recent NEW YORKER article, brought the veto theory to our attention. She was discussing why some advanced nations have much wider gaps between the rich and poor than others. In terms of income disparity, the two worst nations are the USA and Israel.  Experts have proposed a number of reasons for this, and we can assume that the gap is caused by a number of factors, not just one, but one factor did catch my eye.

You can rate a political system by how many institutions in it have a veto on change. Some advanced nations have one veto institution, usually a parliament that makes all decisions. In these nations income disparity is small. In countries with four vetoes, little that is good gets done and the income disparity gap is huge: see the Senate, the House, the President and the Supreme Court. 

It gets worse. Let's say that you live in California and you want to tax oil companies the way they do in Texas.  You face the following potential vetoes: the Assembly, the State Senate, the State Supreme Court, the Governor, the referendum process, and perhaps the federal four vetoes as well. Why bother to try? Many conclude there is no point in participating in a process that was designed, from the start, to frustrate commoners. That was and is deliberate. Faced with a system with nine ways to block change, most people will give up. But the swanky class can hire thousands of lobbyists and buy most of what they want. And half our population doesn't bother to vote in elections.

A Winter's Tale

According the AP, homeless people have been sleeping in the alcoves and doorways of St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco for two years. The archbishop responded by installing sprinkler systems above the alcoves and doorways and drenching the homeless at night at 30 minute intervals, washing away debris, feces, etc. The church did this, in part, to tidy the poor up for the elderly who passed by in the morning on their way to worship Jesus. 

Water has become a common resource used to address homelessness in our nation. Holy water adds a blessing, of course, to the usual cleansing message.

Dogpatch

Last week I was watching one of the news/comedy programs I enjoy, and a right-wing guest began to insist that all political correctness comes from the Left.  That's a dumb thing to say, of course, but it's easy enough to confuse your own political correctness with the Truth. 

Some examples--it is politically incorrect on the Right to call the Democratic party by its name. Call it "the Democrat party."  But the obvious example of right-wing political correctness is their demented worship of the American flag. It is incorrect to run for political office without a flag pin in your lapel. They insist on pledging allegiance to the flag rather than, say, to Jesus or Buddha or Allah. Yet few of them understand or follow proper flag etiquette. My neighbors leave flags up all night without putting a spotlight on them. Is this America or Dogpatch?

Daisy at 80

Daisy, my granddaughter, is a tremendous learning machine, as are children in general. Her parents are college teachers, and her gommy is a retired teacher and librarian. They--and Daisy's school-- have been doing such a full job of teaching Daisy at 100 mph that I can't really squeeze much in.  I decided that I'd better come up with something I could teach the child. I'd probably get only one chance, so what I taught her ought to be the most important thing I had learned in my first 80 years.

The last time I saw her--I usually have trouble getting her attention--I told her that she was now eight and old enough to learn the family motto. That motto was, I said, "Live in the present." She was not impressed. Kids already live in the present. But I'm going to keep repeating the motto, because some day she'll be 80.

The Blather of David Brooks

My wife can't stand the columnist David Brooks. She can't stand many talking heads on television, most often because she dislikes the unmusical sounds of their voices.  I like Brooks better than she does. He's often interesting and not mean-spirited and doesn't hate President Obama, which is rare among Republican talk leaders. He's smarter than George Will and much saner than Charles Krauthammer. Brooks can be witty at times. But he doesn't understand ordinary people--he's particularly thick when writing about folks not among the nation's elite.

On March 11, our newspaper reprinted a recent column by Brooks on families. In the column he claimed that what is missing from dysfunctional families is norms.  "There are no basic codes and rules woven into daily life, which people can absorb unconsciously and follow automatically." 

The people he has in mind here are those who did not go to college and are (this goes without saying, of course) usually one-parent families, probably African-American.  He would never say out loud that they were black people, because that would be racist. 

In the world of Brooks, lacking the robotic good behavior of college graduates, the lower classes have no rules and behave in random ways.

I see a problem with that argument. There is no class of people who live without norms, rules, whatever. Even people in federal prisons have their own sets of norms, which might be different from the norms of David Brooks. (I have not compared them, to be honest.)

Brooks believes that America's norms were "destroyed in a plague of nonjudgmentalism, which refused to assert that one way of behaving was better than another." Yet I have never met anyone of any economic or social class who took that position. This basic assertion by Brooks (I have to say) is bullshit.

Arms for Iran

 

According to Jane Hunter, during the six-year war Iran had with Iraq (in which the United States backed Iraq), Israel sold Khomeini's Iran government huge quantities of weapons that Iran needed desperately to keep from losing.

Yet people call Israel "America's greatest ally." 

 

 

 

Blue Poles

Natural selection has resulted in our being among the mammals who look at the universe, using our brains and eyes, which are windows to the skull. The universe we stare at is made up of everything that is the case, uncountable events in uneven flux. Our brains and eyes simplify parts of the flux into objects like acorns and bears. 

Armed with a sharp stick, you hope to see the bear before the bear sees you.

BLUE POLES began as one of several similar paintings made by Jackson Pollock at his peak. Pollock was, some say, the most interesting of the world's abstract expressionists. You can find BLUE POLES on the Internet. He made it in a little shed in Sparks on Long Island. There the painting was flat on the floor. Pollock bent over it, gesturing at it, making multitudinous uneven lines, creating layers of colors crossing one another. Unlike earlier artists, he made lines that were not edges and pointed to nothing. I doubt if anyone really knows what he was up to. He himself may not have been able to put that kind of complexity into words. We are uncertain how to read what he created.

We can't be sure what Pollock intended. A woman noted that you can't look at BLUE POLES from one vantage point. No matter where your  eye enters, it skitters to god-knows-where. The complexities of the crossing lines and blobs of paint are unfathomable, which led me to the speculation that Pollock was not painting objects but painting the context in which we find objects (the unmediated universe). An astute friend wrote that apparently Pollock added the poles fairly late in the process, coating lengths of lumber with Prussian Blue and slapping the wet lumber down on the painting to leave eight diagonal marks. He later overpainted the poles in places, building visual ambiguity. The poles are objectlike, set against or in a chaotic and limitless context dribbled in front and behind and beside them, a complexity that words cannot replicate.

One Shade of Grey

I have not read or seen the film made of 50 SHADES OF GREY, apparently a bondage and spanking movie, mostly because I came across a film critic who complained that there had been little to spank. I am left with the original spanking movie, THE QUIET MAN, where John Wayne innocently spanks his way into the heart of Maureen O'Hara. Those were the days.