Anza-Borrego

For the most part so far, our trip has been distinguished by bad weather, or rather, probably normal weather which has often been less than pleasant. We left Klamath Falls in bitter cold and with a foot or so of standing snow on the ground. We had to have a tractor tow our truck and trailer out onto bare gravel so we could even get under way.

We had heavy rain our first two nights at Shasta Dam. When we got to Mount Madonna County Park in the redwoods between Gilroy and Watsonville it was raining again and wet and densely foggy when it wasn’t raining. In fact, so much water was incessantly dripping off the trees.

After two days of driving, we finally arrived at Anza Borrego Desert State Park in the California desert east of San Diego. It was a beautiful desert after noon as we were setting up, but in the late after noon, a wind came up that hit us without warning as if we’d stepped in front of a train. The wind lasted three days, strong enough rock the trailer and make it difficult to open and close the door. The noise was intense, and after hours and days of it, it felt like the trailer was being ripped apart.

In fact, only minor damage was done. I’d estimate the wind at about forty miles per hour, not that much in the comfort of your home, but in the trailer we began to feel we were adrift in a small boat. And three days of it. It left us ragged, right up to the moment just before bed last night when it suddenly stopped like a switch had been thrown. This morning I was up at dawn for the usual spectacular desert sunrise, and at the moment, I’m outside with the laptop and thinking it’s time to go back in for a few minutes to make a second cup of coffee.


Despite the initial difficult weather, we’re happy to be back on the road. We’re camping on private land about five miles outside of Borrego Springs, surrounded by mountains on three sides. There are about a dozen RVs out here, spread out over maybe a square mile. Our closest neighbor is over a hundred yards away, a nice guy from Idaho staying by himself in a small older trailer. Behind him sits Larry in his truck. Larry is one of the odd fellows you expect to meet in the desert. After him sitting up there for two days, never leaving the cab that I had noticed, I went up and introduced myself. Larry lost his mother and the apartment they shared about eight months ago, and he’s been living on the road since then, sleeping in the cab of his truck since he doesn’t even have a canopy on it. He talked for some time and twice mentioned suicide—in rather graphic detail involving a .45 caliber pistol—but I told him it would be a better idea to get a canopy so he’d have a more comfortable place to sleep and see how he feels then.

I’m worried about the guy but there’s nothing I can do for him.

We’re getting to know the wildlife. We were sitting outside our first afternoon here and had to lift our feet up to let a tarantula walk by. Brazen coyotes call to each other and hunt kangaroo rats just a few yards from our trailer. We have to be careful with our dogs, small dogs being a coyote’s favorite food. Rats are gamey, and rabbits are tough and stringy, and not that easy to catch.



If you look on Google Earth, you can see us here: N33.17.915; W116.17.011. Or not. I’m not sure how often the photos are updated and it’s been cloudy, but that’s where we are, and you should be able to get a feel for the terrain and see some widely scattered trailers, ours possibly being one of them.

The Great Escape

Winter came early to the Klamath Basin this year, with record low temperatures and heavy snow in late November. We had sub-zero temperatures and plenty of packed snow and ice on the roads. The prospects for getting out of town with our trailer weren’t looking good any time soon. Finally, on December 2nd, we had a break in the weather; we finished packing and prepping the trailer, grabbed the dogs, and, like last year, made a break for it. And like last year, as soon as we got out of town, the weather improved considerably. Still, we were in Redding at a modest RV park waiting out a heavy rain and taking an extra day to organize things.

This roadside RV park is just one piece of evidenceof how bad the economy is. More and more, parks that used to cater to travelers have converted to mobile home parks that accommodate full-time residents, mostly in old trailers and beater cars and trucks. Pit bulls are the pet of choice. This park was still well-cared for, but with fewer travelers on the road and plenty of people looking for the cheapest place to live where they can still stay warm and dry and cook their own food, many RV parks make for a vivid snapshot of how real people are being affected by the economic downturn. Once again, Mary and I feel lucky to enjoy our good fortune and glad that we can be out there spreading our limited bounty around.

After we left Redding we drove down to Mt. Madonna county park in the coastal mountains between Gilroy and Watsonville. I’ve stayed at Mt. Madonna several times when I’ve come down for the Moto-GP races at Laguna Seca, and it’s a nice little park, situated in mixed redwood and oak trees. In the summer, it’s full of families enjoying the cool setting above the heat of the valley to the east and the persistent fog along the coast. In the winter, as is often the case, we have the campground to ourselves. With improving weather coming over the next week, we plan to enjoy some of the hiking trails and dramatic views of Monterey Bay. We’ll also visit some old friends in Santa Cruz and some of Mary’s family in San Jose. Then it’s on to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in SoCal just above the Mexican border.

I don’t really consider our winter travels to have begun until we actually get down to the desert.

Btw, as I’m writing this I’m sitting in the customer lounge of the Watsonville Dodge dealer while I have the truck transmission serviced. When we started up the long hill into the campground, I remembered from my motorcycle trips how steep and winding the road is. Of course, it’s a quick zip up on a bike, but pulling our 9000-pound trailer, even our Dodge Cummins Diesel bogged down to the point I was only holding at five miles per hour and not at all confident we would make it to the top. Had I thought about it, I would have shifted down to 4WD low, but I wasn’t about to stop and try to make the shift on that hill.

We finally made the top with the red transmission light on and the smell of overheated fluid. The light went out just like it should as soon as I pulled over and let the truck idle in neutral for a minute, but to be on the safe side, I’m laying out $300 dollars to tune up the tranny. Just one more opportunity to make a little contribution to the local economy.

(Oops: make that $350. The service tech just told me the transmission fluid looked a little dark from over-heating, so they're going to do a complete flush. If I stay around much longer, they'll sell me a new truck.)

Prudence

Maybe tomorrow. . . .

God of Winter and the North Wind

Last year, Mary and I planned to leave for our Southwest winter safari on December 15th. It seemed a safe bet since even if we got some snow before then, it usually doesn’t start to stay on the roads until sometime in January. Not that you can’t pull a trailer over a snowy pass—big-rig drivers do it all the time—but given a choice, I prefer bare and dry, even with our itsy-bitsy 10,000-pound trailer.

Of course, you can always chain up, but no real man would ever willingly chain up no matter what the conditions. I’d rather ask directions.

But winter surprised us with a series of early storms arriving back to back. I had the trailer at the house and the truck and trailer chained up, if only to get down our steep hill to the highways. But then we saw a brief break in the weather on December 12th, not anticipated in the forecasts, so we threw the dogs in the truck, took off the chains, and made a run for it. It was windy going around Mt. Shasta before we got to I-5, raining and the temperature only 34 degrees, but we had only wet pavement and made it out of the mountains on I-5 without incident and only moderately sweaty palms.

So this year we decided to get an even earlier start and leave December 8th to be safe, but again, Boreas surprises us with his early arrival, and we’re looking out the window at conditions like those in the picture. Nuts.

So it looks now like our best shot is tomorrow, the 2nd, with more snow in the forecast but daytime temperature forecast to rise to 38. By afternoon, there’s a good chance the pass will be clear down to Weed and I-5. (For some reason, highway 97 to Weed is often clear when 140 to Medford has packed snow and ice, despite them both being at about the same elevation, 5500 feet.)

If we don’t get out tomorrow, the forecast is back to more snow and temperatures at or below freezing. We might have to wait who knows how long, and I might even have to chain up.

Dammit. I’m thinking next year, November 15th.

Vexed!

George Will has found another indication that—well, here he quotes Bill Buckley, who was inconvenienced one day by having to endure a train commute during which he suffered a long delay:

“Buckley, who was gifted at discerning the metaphysical significance of the quotidian, thought that he saw civilization tottering on its pedestal. He was not mistaken:

‘It isn't just the commuters, whom we have come to visualize as a supine breed who have got onto the trick of suspending their sensory faculties twice a day [they probably read a book or the newspaper] while they submit to the creeping dissolution of the railroad industry. It isn't just they who have given up trying to rectify irrational vexation. It is the American people everywhere.’”

Okay, a long delay on the train is now civilization tottering on its pedestal. What would George or Bill have done to rectify these irrational vexations? Would they have lobbied the government to invest more money in infrastructure? Insist that government get completely out of the mass transportation business so it can be privatized and run more efficiently by private enterprise? Buy a helicopter (the latter probably being the only real solution to this problem and available only to the super-rich, so I’m going with 3)?

George doesn’t say. He just knows he’s vexed.

Of course, George is writing today about the invasive new pat-down procedures at airports for those who refuse to go through the full body scan which allows screeners to see through our clothes.

First of all I’d like to say, it’s finally arrived! The x-ray glasses that allow me to see through people’s clothes, advertized in all the comic books and reputable periodicals like Mad Magazines I read as a kid, are here! Oh, how I dreamed of being able to look through the clothes of all my little female classmates in junior high school. (In grammar school I was still dreaming mostly about a new bike. In high school, well, in high school my sexual fantasies had evolved in directions I’m not yet prepared to discuss publically.)

Me, I can’t say about the pat downs. Apparently the threat of carrying on explosive devices taped to your penis or hidden in a lady’s butt crack is real, so the TSA is doing what it thinks necessary to keep us safe. Let’s face it: if someone gets through and brings down a plane, it won’t be a sign of civilization tottering, it will be just one more example of the monumental incompetence of the Obama administration. Remember, Bush kept us safe, at least if you’re not in the military serving in Afghanistan or Iraq, and he did it through a few noninvasive ways such as tapping our phones, screening our email, and waterboarding the occasional actual suspect.

The solution to the airport vexation, though, is obvious in three parts: get in the boarding line and either walk through the scanner or let some stranger of the same sex (damn it!) pat you down; turn around and walk away from the security checkpoint and stay home for Thanksgiving; or charter your own plane.

Again, for George, I’m going for 3. I'm staying home anyway.

For another perspective on the subject, Kathleen Parker today is more amusing and instructive than Will while being far less popinjay. And I'm with her, really. I'd rather fly and assume the small risk that another passenger has mastered the technology challenge of the TNT butt plug than have a complete stranger with no medical training check me for hernias and prostate cancer (although I can get a note from my doctor testifying that both have been remedied.)

But that's the trade off, and interestingly, the same people who found the Bush-era concessions to security to be reasonable and necessary find the same errors on the side of safety to be excessive under Obama. Something about black men with Muslim names wanting to put their hands on our white women, I suppose.

Tweet

I used to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy on PBS when his show was on in the 90s. I don’t even like science, but his delivery was so entertaining that I didn’t care if the subject was asexual reproduction in newts or the birth of black holes, between which there is probably some connection. I even taped several episodes and took them with me when I went to Japan to teach English, expecting that Japanese students would think he was as funny as I did.

They didn’t.

So it was interesting to read just now that he still does public appearances and speeches at colleges. Yesterday he was speaking to an audience of hundreds at USC when he collapsed at the podium. He made it to his feet and even joked about it a little before he collapsed again.

The most interesting part of the story to me was that one student reported nobody went to his aid because they were all busy posting tweets about what was happening: “Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy just died!” Except it probably looked like, “BN SciGuy xxx!” I don’t actually speak tweet.

Thus does the next generation confuse digital life for what we used to call real life. Imagine what George Will would say since he first said that digital watches marked the end of civilization. Then it was the designated hitter rule. Then blue jeans. Most recently John Stewart calling Barack Obama “Dude.”

No report yet on how Bill’s doing. Can’t we get a tweet from somebody in the hospital?

And he died in a fiery crash. . . .

My friend Broschat [ http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/ ] is buying a new Miata after fifteen years without a car. This is not a midlife crisis since we’re neither of us midlife anymore, (we're more like “zesty sexagenarians”: I mean, who wouldn’t want to be a sexagenarian?) And why put a negative spin like “midlife crisis” on a spontaneous exaltation of the life force? Not that anybody has, but just in case.

The second comment to his blog announcement, though, while well-meaning I’m sure, is exactly the kind of response I often if not usually get when I mention that I ride a motorcycle: “I think the closest I ever came to dying in a car [his respondee responds] was in a Sprite when I was 16. I wasn't driving. The throttle stuck and we went over the edge of a road with a 5' drop off. We ended up on top of and in line with a stone fence that was below the drop off. If the car had rolled we would have had our heads driven into the ground.”

People can’t seem to not make statements like this about motorcycles and apparently sports cars. It’s a curious, almost instinctive response. If I say I take frequent showers, nobody ever responds that showers are one of the most dangerous things you can do in your home. If I say I have to get out my ladder and clear out the rain gutters, no one asks if this scares me more than the thought of a home invasion by Islamic terrorists looking for evidence that I eat pork and read Salmon Rushdie. (Yes and no.)

So I just say something like, “I try to be careful.” I’m very superstitious, so I would never mention that I’ve ridden since I was seventeen without an accident or injury, which wouldn’t be exactly true anyway but too complicated to explain further. (Knock on wood.)

I don’t mention that my wife rides horses and has had numerous accidents, one serious enough to put her in a hospital and wheelchair, followed by months in a cast and on crutches. But no one ever says to her, “Oh, horses are so dangerous. My husband has been in a coma for eight years, ever since he fell off his horse and hit his head on a fence post.”

I never point out that when these folks pick the kids up in the minivan after school and drive them to karate lessons, they’re risking the whole family’s life and are at far greater risk of calamity than I am on my motorcycle. Not mile for mile, but over the course of their lives. Yet I think almost no one puts their kids in the car with a sense of impending doom. They’re more like, “I hope nobody says “Happy Meal” before we get to karate lessons."

Not to mention karate lessons.

None of these fatalistic responses to riding bothers me particularly; I just find them peculiar. But I would like the world to know that if I get squashed like a bug under the wheels of an eighteen-wheeler, I’d rather it happen on two wheels than four. And that I consider horses to be four-legged killing machines, secret carnivores that will run you into the low branches of a juniper tree and feed on your broken corpse until the paramedics arrive, but I’m glad my wife rides and has so passionately enjoyed it these several decades. And I hope Broschat loves his Miata to death (I could have chosen a better expression here) and drives it safely without a scratch on either it or himself for a long as he can still pass the vision test when he renews his license.

But if the unthinkable should happen, I’ll feel better on learning that he was out driving a little too fast on a beautiful spring day with the top dangerously down, rather than getting jostled on the Metro platform and pushed in front of a train. Also, I’ll hope he was with a beautiful woman, no older than forty-two, and miraculously uninjured.

Now rock climbers, though, those people are fucking nuts.

No comment

I have nothing to say about last Tuesday’s election. Nothing.

It’s all been said by the zillion pundits of the many media, including the blogosphere, and since I’m just a freelance pundit, I don’t feel a need to jump in.

Not one word.

(Bunch of assholes.)

??!!

Back when I taught writing, I told my students to avoid nine out of ten of their rhetorical questions. They get annoying, don't they?

Also, give yourselves ten exclamation points for the rest of your life and use them wisely. Don't use them all up in your next paper! Never be wasteful and use two in the same sentence!!

So I don't know what's come over me. I need to take an oath. I need to get myself into rehab!

Lazy blogging

I try not to post too many links to other stuff on the Web. People can find their own stuff on the Web. My job--which I take on with the utmost seriousness--is to publish my own content and make it available to my fanbase in an easily accessible format. Letters to the editor, I can't even get one for ten into the
Oregonian.

But here's a particularly good piece on immigration, which I mentioned in my last post some eight minutes ago.

My comments to Shumacher-Matos, other than you really have to do something about your name:

"My god! a rational critique of immigration policies, complete with concrete suggestions for workable solutions? Are you mad?

And then what would you do about all the Martians? Amnesty for Martians, too?"

Decide for yourselves here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102803904.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

The blur

Mary and I thought Barack did a terrific job on John Stewart last night: assertive about his accomplishments without being strident. Confident. Relaxed. Engaging. I think he knocked the ball out of the park with one of his core constituencies that need to be knocked on the head: younger voters.

I'd read two reviews of the interview before I even saw it. One was critical, saying the president lowered himself by appearing on a comedy show and sneering that Stewart actually called him Dude at one point. The other said mostly what I said above, but took his alloted 500 words to say it. I'm guessing the reviews pretty much reflected the author's previous attitudes.

Mary and I were talking about how unable Republicans and conservatives in general are to say anything the least positive about Obama. I absolutely can't stand George Bush, but we both recalled that we thought he put forward a very good plan for immigration reform. If anybody had bothered to ask, we would have had no problem saying so at the time.

I also thought he was unusually good at clearing brush for a president, and I wasn't afraid to say so. For a Texan, though, he looked decidely uncomfortable on a horse.

A large majority of Democrats worked with him on getting immigration reforms passed, but they were defeated by his own party. These days, though, it's political suicide for a sitting Republican to say anything remotely in agreement with Obama. Even some Democrats are running on how much they opposed his initiatives. I can only hope people will grow out of this all-or-nothing politics and get back to an era when cooperation and comity were considered to be virtues, not vices.

In any case, as the blur of the last four days before the election gets more and more crazy, Mary and I are heading out for a few days in our new trailer. (Built in Oregon and bought in Klamath Falls: once again, we're doing our part for the recovery, but do we get a huge tax break? No. Damn you Top Two Percent!!)

I'm glad we'll be missing out on all the news and commentary, though I'll miss the ongoing coverage of the various Tea Party crazies: Christine O'Donnel! Who needs parody?

When we get back, it will all be over but the year or so of post-election parsing. Then we can start the campaigns for the next election, including the presidential. Sarah Palin says she's in unless someone else wants it. Hell, make that two of us.

Can't wait.

(Eugene Robinson is very good today:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/28/AR2010102805899.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

)

Why Dinesh D' Sousa is a neo-colonialist

Talk about irony: Dinesh D’Sousa accuses President Obama of being anti-colonialist, his evidence being that Obama’s father was an anti-colonialist from Kenya. Never mind that Obama’s father deserted the family when he was two. In his autobiographical Dreams from My Father, Obama writes, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself."

There you go.

Also, Obama's father wrote an article defending socialism.

We knew it all the time.

The result, says D’Sousa, is a president who evidences all the basic attitudes of the socialist anti-colonialst: “Do the views of the senior Obama help clarify what the junior Obama is doing in the Oval Office? Let's begin with President Obama, who routinely castigates investment banks and large corporations, accusing them of greed and exploitation. Obama's policies have established the heavy hand of government control over Wall Street and the health-care, auto and energy industries.”

Also, he wants to raise taxes on the rich.

Those of us not in the know might have confused these policies and attitudes with those of, say, a moderate Democrat coming to the presidency in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression—let’s call it the Pretty Good Recession—brought on in large part by the greed and lack of regulation on Wall Street. How this amounts to anti-colonialism, D’Sousa does not quite make clear.

I think the more interesting question is why, since he clearly opposes everything Obama believes and does, D’Sousa is such an advocate for colonialism, an –ism that pretty much died out in the mid-last-century when Britain and France lost the fight in places like Kenya and Algeria. The answer lies in the small italicized print at the bottom of his column in today’s Washington Post: “Dinesh D'Souza is president of King's College in New York City.”

King's College! Talk about a smoking scepter.

Also, let’s just ask ourselves how a native of India got the name “of Sousa” if he was not named for the famous composer of rousing pro-colonialist marches such as “The Stars and Stripes Forever”?

Coincidence? I think not. There's your irony.

If one of my students back in freshman comp had handed in an essay as logically weak-kneed as D’Sousa’s, I’d have required a rewrite that goes beyond Superman-scaled leaps of reason based on five or more of the logical fallacies covered in our textbook. In fact, I used to use D’Sousa himself as a good example of bad reasoning from a few crumbs of evidence found on the floor since his essay criticizing Rigoberta Menchu's’ book I, Rigoberta was the first selection in the anthology I used for the class.

Menchu, an indigenous Guatemalan, had written a book detailing some of the horrific crimes committed by the Guatemalan government during that county’s civil war from 1960-1996. American anthrolopoigist David Stoll discovered that a few of the claims in the book were dubious since, for example, Menchu said she never went to school when in fact she had finished 8th grade.

As it turned out, most of Stoll’s charges proved to be false, although Menchu did acknowledge that she fudged a little and included a few experiences of her brothers and sisters, a crime never equaled in the long tradition of “nothing but the facts, Mam” truthiness to be found in all previous autobiography.

D’Sousa regurgitated the claims of Stoll and wrote an essay claiming Menchu was a fraud and therefore none of the terrible things she said about the Guatemalan army were true. That’s why it were no crime that the U.S. trained and supported the Guatemalan army. The whole thing, D’Sousa said, was a cleverly constructed fantasy designed to discredit the U.S. and its wholly owned subsidiary, the United Fruit Company.

When the dispute was submitted to an independent fact-finding agency, it ruled in favor of Rigoberta and gave her the Nobel Peach Prize.

Wait. Typo. “Nobel Peace Prize.”

D’Sousa’s current essay first appeared as the cover story in Fortune magazine and was instantly trounced by just about everybody but Christine O’Donnell for its self-levitated reasoning, so apparently D’ thought he had to defend himself by saying the same thing all over again in a brief column that even the liberals over at the Post could understand.

Anyway, since I'm also named after my father, you’re probably wondering what clues can be discovered about my own anti-colonial bias. Here’s your answer:

"Ross

Gender: Male
Origin: Latin
Meaning: Red Rose"

Red rose!

A good day to get sick

Most Americans have little or no idea what’s actually contained in the health care reforms successfully passed despite fierce and unanimous Republican opposition. Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation reviews a few provisions:

“Since the bill's passage, the Department of Health and Human Services has set up a program to help people with preexisting health conditions get coverage through state or federal high-risk pools; established a program to help employers provide health insurance to early retirees; issued rebates to help pay drug costs for Medicare beneficiaries stuck in the "doughnut hole"; provided tax credits to small businesses to provide insurance coverage; and created a consumer-friendly Web site, http://HealthCare.gov, that rivals anything coming out of Silicon Valley (where our organization is based).

“Several popular provisions take effect Thursday [today]. They include allowing adult children up to age 26 to be on their parents' insurance; banning lifetime benefits caps and loosening annual limits on insurance coverage payouts; prohibiting insurance companies from kicking people off of their policies when they get sick; and requiring that newly purchased insurance policies cover preventive services at no cost to patients.”

Individually, Altman points out, these provisions have overwhelming support among the public. Many other provisions don’t go into effect until 2014, a concession that was made toward controlling budget deficits. Most of those are also widely popular, the one exception being that most people will eventually be required to have insurance, even if they have to buy it themselves. But universal coverage is the greatest cost saver in the plan, and I can see no real difference between requiring drivers to have auto insurance and everybody else to have health insurance. Besides, the cost of such coverage will be keyed to ability to pay and in fact will be minimal.

Almost all of the voluntarily uninsured today are young people who never believe they can get seriously ill or injured. They’re almost right, statistically, but those who do quickly convert to a public liability when they lose jobs and go on unemployment or welfare and become eligible for Medicaid. In other words, all the rest of us are involuntarily subsidizing their health care in the current system. Talk about socialism.

Altman notes that expansions of benefits in the past, including Medicare itself, were widely unpopular at the time they were passed, but opposition evaporated quickly as the programs began to take effect.

The Republicans’ “Pledge to American,” released today, promises to repeal Obama’s health care reforms. Not a chance. And when we begin to ask specific questions about things like why they want to repeal the exclusion of preexisting conditions for health coverage, they’re going to have a hard time answering.

Look for lots of prevarication and a quick return to talking points:

Talk about socialism.

[P.S.
Liberal elite media watch:
Neither NBC nor PBS ran a story on the changes in health care policy which went into effect today. Both covered the Republican Pledge to America.]

Four thoughts of autumn

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
John Donne
Elegy IX--The Autumnal.

The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold
I see your lips, the summer kisses
The sun-burned hands I used to hold
Since you went away the days grow long
And soon I'll hear old winter's song
But I miss you most of all my darling
When autumn leaves start to fall.
Johnny Mercer

[There are so many fine versions of Autumn Leaves. An unlikely favorite of mine is Nick Brignola's, medium-tempo on a baritone sax, from his album Live at Sweet Basil.]

Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.
William Cullen Bryant

A few facts

An article in today's Washington Post announces that for the first time, women are now earning doctoral degrees in greater numbers than men. We've reached this point in a trend that has been developing for decades. There have long been more undergraduate women than men. It just took a few years for the female majorities to move up the educational ladder.

It takes an average of seven years to earn a Ph.D.

Men are now underrepresented in higher education for several reasons: they are less likely to finish high school, more likely to join the military, and more likely to go to jail. Although at seven years, jail wouldn't be a bad place to earn a Ph.D. It's that or lifting weights.

Once in an academic position, women's salaries lag men's, mostly because careers conflict with having children. Pursuing tenure takes a full six years, and those are the prime childbearing years. (The actual pursuit of childbearing takes only nine months, which is well-known.) But while men are busy doing research and publishing articles and books, women are changing diapers, though I know a few women whose careers have left their male colleagues far behind.

The average salary for male tenured professors is $89,000. For women, $70,000. It's hard to persuade a public whose average salaries are closer to $30,000 that faculty are underpaid, but compared to other professions, many of which require less education, those salaries are on the low end. At Oregon Institute of Technology, where I taught for twenty years, it wasn't uncommon for new graduates just entering the workforce to earn higher salaries than faculty at the peak of their careers. I thought we should earn a small percentage of each graduate's salary for their first five years of employment. That would only be fair.

We should also get a company car. I always wanted a Porche but ended up driving a Mitsubishi. I mean, come on.

I never earned more that $50,000, a member of the lowest-paid department at the lowest-paid institution in the lowest-paid system in the nation. Still, I never felt much resentment about salary. In my field when I started, there were on average over a hundred applicants for every new position. I felt lucky to break into the field at all. Talk about landing on your feet.

Today, there are on average three applicants for every position, and two of them still have a year or so to go in jail before they complete their Ph.D. We try to hire candidates with the fewest felony convictions, though it takes more than just one assault to get seven years. Not to mention time off for good behavior.

Despite relatively low salaries, Mary and I were both able to retire at 55. Chances are high that this benefit will become completely extinct starting about next Tuesday, what with the aging population, worries about Social Security, and shrunken retirement savings resulting from the implosion in the value of investmens.

Again we were lucky based on a few happy circumstances, like double-income/no kids (DINKs). This is the quickest path to early retirement. For every baby you don't have, you can retire five years earlier. If you don't have only nine babies, you never have to work at all. And because of compound interes, the earlier you start not having babies, the earlier you can retire

Also, we lived in about the least expensive housing market in the country. When we moved here in the early eighties, they would just give you a house. You had to agree to keep the lawn mowed.

And we had a generous state pension system (Gone now: one of the reasons I retired early was to minimize major cuts in pensions that are now in place). Finally, modest personal savings that sounded like a lot of money at the time. Once you do retire, though, you remember that you have to divide those savings by the rest of your life. You realize it's not all that much money and start saying things like, "I'm living on a fixed income!" Most people would kill today to be able to live on a fixed income.

The main factor in a happy academic career is a congenial department, which means that few to none in higher education are all that happy. My own department consisted of two or three members with diagnosed major mental problems, including myself, and all the rest who needed to get to the mental-health emergency room right now but never did because they were convinced they were the only sane person in the department. Some of them were also convinced they could fly.

I've now been retired eight years, which amazes me to think about it. I'm glad I got out early, though. My remaining mental health required it, and my current condition has recently been upgraded to just "eccentric." I'm very happy, relatively.

Also, my former colleague Jim Etchison just died of a heart attack while on vacation in Maui. His wife was taking his picture and he fell over dead. Jim was sixty-two; I am sixty-two.

It saddens me. Jim was a sweet guy who was always laughing. If there's an afterlife, I picture him laughing at the irony of dying on Maui at age sixty-two while your wife is taking your picture. This is how I would like to go, too, but in maybe twenty years. Or thirty. I'll try to give Mary a heads-up a minute or two before.

If I had it to do over, I wouldn't change a thing.

Yes I would. Who could ever say that? They must have bad memories.

Crater Lake Ride

Mary and I took a ride today, met some friends for lunch, then rode up to the Crater Lake north entrance and around the Rim Road. It was a perfect day, cool up on top but still warm enough for a late summer ride. The lake was especially beautiful.

I like this picture because, of course, Mary looks beautiful, too, but also because I accidentally caught the lake in the bike's mirror.

And why not another. . . .

>

A day that will live in. . . .

Anyone not living in a cave knows that today marks the official end of American combat operations in Iraq. In fact, the last of the designated combat troops left last week. According to journalist Richard Engle, who accompanied them, they were greeted by exactly two American soldiers, who saluted them as they crossed over the border into Kuwait. Of course, 50,000 troops still remain indefinitely, and five of them have already been killed by rocket attacks and roadside bombs, but never mind.

President Obama is giving a speech today to mark the occasion. He’ll express gratitude to the troops, point out that he met his promised deadline concerning the withdrawl, and express concern about Iraq’s future, like for example how it doesn’t actually have a government right now. But he’ll be optimistic for the long-term.

What I’d like to see, though, are some speeches by the original architects of the war. The only one still on the scene and mouthing off from time to time about how soft Obama is on terrorism is Dick Cheney. I wonder if Dick will have any words to say about how the war turned out, whether he had it right when he declared many years ago that the evidence for Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction was a slam dunk, or that the insurgency was in its last throes.

We should line them up like in a high-school speech contest and demand a ten-minute address: Dick Cheney, George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice, Paul Bremmer. And from the lesser luminaries from the Project for a New American Century, now defunct, all of whom later became members of the Bush administration: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams.

We should demand an apology.

But count on it: We won’t hear a peep from any of them with the possible exception of Cheney, who will comment that Obama has made America less safe.

Credit, however, goes out to columnist Anne Applebaum, who wrote today, “I supported the invasion of Iraq, I think the surge was a success and I believe that an Iraqi democracy could be a revolutionary force for good in the Middle East. Yet even if violence abates, even if all American troops go home, we have still paid a very high price for our victory -- much higher than we usually admit.”

Never mind the word “victory,” she acknowledges that things didn’t go so well in Iraq. Here’s a look at her list of unintended consequences. Briefly, we seriously damaged:

“America's reputation for effectiveness.

“America's ability to organize a coalition.

“America's ability to influence the Middle East.

“America's ability to think like a global power.

And finally,

“America's ability to care for its wounded veterans.”

She expands nicely on each of these. She fails, though, to mention that the two major premises supporting the invasion in the first place turned out to be errors at best, outright lies at worst: That Sadam had WMD that threatened his neighbors and the United States, and that Sadam had ties to Al-Qaeda.

And she missed a few consequences: The invasion of Iraq destroyed any hope of a favorable outcome in Afghanistan, which seemed within reach when we turned our backs on that conflict, and it led most of the Muslim world to believe that the United States is at war with Islam. These two outcomes will haunt us for the next generation and more.

Bummer.

Anyway, even if we didn’t yet see all of the outcomes, millions of us Americans knew that the invasion was a terrible idea and no good would come of it. We said so at the time, some with more evidence and authority, some with less.

We were roundly criticized for it. We were all but called traitors.

And so, on behalf of all of us, as the Mission Accomplished banner, now badly tattered, goes back up, I’d like to humbly say,

I told you so.

Post parto

Spanish class is over for the summer. I was still enjoying class and working very nearly full-time-squared up to Tuesday, when I bailed out after our instructor’s fifth absence. I had only a brief oral presentation on Wednesday and the final exam on Thursday, and since I’m auditing the class, there was no reason to stick around to earn the points.

Despite the poor showing from the instructor when he showed at all, I count the class a terrific success and would sign up for another this fall if one were available.
The instructor was a likeable guy and generally used class time well, but he’s the worst deadbeat I’ve ever had as a teacher, and in the end I was mostly fed up with him.

Despite all the problems with him (a long list of which I just deleted because who really cares?), I loved the class and made a huge amount of progress, though I still consider myself a beginner in Spanish.

I’m signed up for a Spanish lit class this fall, which meets two days a week, so I’ll commute the seventy miles one-way instead of living over there. I’m also probably going to volunteer in a local school working with ELL students (“ELL” meaning English Language Learners and replacing all prior acronyms). For now, there’s plenty of work to be done around the house after being gone for so long, and after a few days of mental rest, I’ll get back to studying two or three hours a day, my goal to continue to make a little progress and not immediately forget everything I’ve learned.

It’s good to be back home, although I’m having a little trouble adjusting to the change of pace that comes with not having something I absolutely must be doing right this minute. That might be a drain after awhile (and it is), but it’s also a form of structure. Take it away too quickly and one feels a little adrift. At the moment, I’m somewhat adrifting but should adjust to things fairly quickly.

Progress Report

We changed instructors at week four since the course is actually three consecutive three-week sessions. Monday was the 4th of July holiday, so it was already going to be a short week. I was a little concerned because we cover a chapter a week, and four days has been barely enough to keep up. I spend most of the weekend before getting a head start, so much of the homework, “tarea,” is ready to hand in and I’m reasonably familiar with all the content of the chapter. It’s been a full-time effort, but I’m keeping up and getting A’s on all the assignments and tests. Not really important since I’m auditing the class, but a good indication that I’m doing satisfactory work and making progress.

But Tuesday when the new instructor arrived, we watched the film The Motorcycle Diaries, which I had already seen and which is well worth watching again. After the film, the new guy assigned a composition, then said he wasn’t feeling well and was going home early.

Wednesday I arrived for class and there were only four other students of the fifteen or so still remaining. One of the guys checked email and found a message that had gone out the night before from the instructor saying he was quite ill but would get out an assignment sheet soon.

That night, the same message, so we had now lost a full week, and still no study guide. By Saturday night back home, I wasn’t sure we still had a class. I thought the instructor might have died at home and nobody even knew ityet. Or possibly he’d been able to contact the department chair who was looking for a replacement, but I know that during the summer, faculty disappear like cockroaches when the lights go on, and finding a replacement was not likely. There are only so many cockroaches. I guessed there was better than a fifty-percent chance the class would crash and my summer experience would be over.

Monday morning, though, our guy was there, and I learned that an email had gone out Sunday afternoon with a short study guide. I don’t have computer access in the RV park where I’m staying, so I didn’t get the message.

For the next two weeks, life was crazy. He had to cram three chapters into two weeks, and I was now working from behind the curve instead of ahead of it. We also had a new composition to write, a skit to prepare with a few other students, and a chapter test every two or three days instead of at the end of the week.

It was brutal. By the night before the last test, I had given up on anything more than a quick review of new grammar and readings that I didn’t really understand.

In the end, the test last Thursday wasn’t so bad. He included useful aids, such as a list of verbs to choose from and notes on when and how to use them, so I think I did reasonably well. The best part, though, is that this weekend I’ve been back to my usual routine, with only one chapter to prepare and a sense that I’m going to be ahead when we start class tomorrow.

More good news: Mary is down in Santa Cruz for a wedding I was able to beg off from; though it was the son of some very old friends, I generally don’t like weddings or funerals, and I was glad for the excuse. I’ll do the occasional birthday party.

Bad news: today is the Motorcycle Grand Prix at Laguna Seca in Monterey, and it’s the first time I’ve missed the race in many years. I’m watching it this afternoon on TV with a friend, so that’s some compensation.

I’m making good progress in class, but it’s slow. I know a lot more than I did before, but speech, such as it is, is still halting at best. Listening comprehension is getting a little better, but when I watch a Spanish-language movie, I still have to rely mostly on subtitles, catching only parts of the dialogue here and there.

Note: Sin Nombre is an excellent film, and I highly recommend it. It should be required watching for all the virulent anti-immigrants, though it probably wouldn’t change their thinking much. But still. . . .

So this morning I keep working for a few hours. Then I have to take the dogs to the kennel because Mary will be gone a few more days and I’m heading back to the trailer after I watch the race. There I’ll spend most of the afternoon and evening studying some more. Tomorrow, back to class for the last three weeks of the program.

I’m so glad I was finally able to do this, and I’m already thinking ahead to ways that I can continue to study when the class ends.

I have some ideas.

Laca laca laca

I just wrote to Broshat that I’m three weeks into my nine week Spanish-intensive summer program, and it feels like Spanish boot camp. But a few guys actually liked boot camp because what are they gonna do, send me to Vietnam? (This was back when I actually was in boot camp and they did send everybody to Vietnam. I wasn’t one of those guys because this is a metaphor which starting getting away from me about three lines back. Who enjoyed boot camp? is what I’m saying. They did send me to Vietnam, and I didn’t enjoy that either.)

I am, however, enjoying my class very much, though it's taking it's toll.

I work mostly all the time the four days a week I’m living in our trailer near school. Weekends home I work about half-time and spend the rest doing a few things around the house and trying to spend quality time with Mary. The old “quality time" thing, which is what you call it when you know you’re preoccupied and being something of a pain in the ass.

We change teachers next week since it’s technically three courses in sequence. I liked Lady Vanderlip well enough, although over the last week she slipping into speaking mostly ingles in class, something I think would take great discipline not to do. Manipulation of body language and facial expression by students can get a teacher to do about anything including delivering lectures wearing a swim mask and flippers, so foreign language teachers have to accept that when they’re actually speaking the language they’re trying to teach, students will often look at them like they’re from what used to be the planet Pluto. Also, the three native speakers I’ve had as teachers seem to need to share a lot of detail about growing up in their native countries, which is certainly interesting but, hey, I’m trying to learn Spanish here. I’m not signed up to learn about growing up in Panama.

The new teacher starts next week and I understand he’s not a native speaker but almost never speaks ingles in class. I’m hoping the new drill sergeant will stay on-task.

I’m making good progress but still basically a beginner. When I overhear real Spanish, my reaction is “Hey, that’s Spanish!" but beyond that I’m mostly in the dark. Also, the subjunctive was invented during the Spanish Inquisition as a way to torture heretics and it somehow caught on. It’s complicated as hell and serves virtually no communicative function as far as I can tell. I’ll bet the first thing L.L. Zamenhof did when he developed Esperanto was dump the subjunctive. Esperanto itself, btw, in a very interesting story which you can find with a quick Wikipedia search.

“Laca laca laca” means “blah blah blah” I learned this week, so that’s become my goal, to be able to laca laca laca in a language not my own and which I started to study after I turned sixty. Also, btw, I’m the only student in my class over twenty-two, I’d guess, so talk about wearing a swim mask and flippers. They’d probably warm to me faster if I wore a burka, but finally the chill is wearing off and a few students have actually said a few words to me before class starts.

Laca.

A blog of note

Mary (the wife) has started a blog. Initially intended just for her reading group, like all good blogs it has now expanded to include anything she feels like writing about. She writes real good for a science teacher, I told her maybe even better than that guy Stephen J. Gould, or Stephen Hawking, or even Stephen Darwin or Stephen Einstein.

I'm now a follower and you could be, too, by pasting this address into your browser since I never have figured out why I can't post hot links anymore:


http://kf-biblioblog.blogspot.com/

Week one progress report

This is great: The Panamanian Drill Sergeant brooks no complaining: if you miss a day, you miss a week’s worth of material and your grade drops by one. One student asked if he could leave an hour early one day a week because of his job, and she said no. Just “no.” I used to get requests like this all the time, and I also said no, but I’d add a long explanation about how important class time is, and if I make an exception for one student. . . . I once had a young woman ask if she could finish the class two weeks early because she was joining the Marines and going to Officer Candidate School, which started before our class was over, and her recruiter told her if she didn’t make this OCS class, she might not have a shot at another one. I told her she should get a new recruiter.

And but anyway,

Class is four hours a day with a five-minute break at the hour: she doesn’t hesitate to switch to English occasionally to explain something (which was just not done when I took French at UCSC exactly one hundred years ago), but otherwise class is almost completely in Spanish. I can understand her quite well, though if I hear her talking in the hall to another Spanish teacher, I can’t understand a word they say.

I’m at just about the perfect level to start this course. It’s a challenge, but it’s the workload and not yet the material that is close to overwhelming. After class I spend three or four hours on campus using my laptop to access the Website which has all of our film and audio materials (my WIFI connection at the trailer park is slower than a constipated turd), then back to the trailer to study from the book and do other written homework. I go to bed feeling like I need at least one more hour of study to be ready for the next day, but I long ago made the vow that I would never miss sleep over work or a class. It’s worked for me.

The other students are all about twenty and seem to have formed circles of friends before I got there, so I’ve been a little isolated, but finally yesterday a young woman sat down and visited with me during the break. My kind of kid. She and her husband left Boise State where they were studying business and came to Ashland, known for it’s lefty orientation and whole foods ethic, to study international relations. Jobs? They’ll worry about after graduation, and I expect they’ll sooner or later find the kind of work they want to do.

The class has dropped from 25 to 15 in the first week. Now I’m home for the weekend, where I can relax a little and do some things other than study Spanish. Still, I have a lot of work to do to be a little ahead when we start week two on Monday.

You don’t finish an eight-week class like this fluent, or even generally conversational, in a foreign language, but at last I’m actually learning fast in a structured program, and if I take time to stand back and look at it, I’m really enjoying it. I have to find a way to also eat during the day, but that’s not so important yet; I’m thinking microwave burritos (“Little burros”; who knew? ).

What is the meaning of this?

I've always got a kick out of the question, "What is the meaning of this?" because it's like the worst essay question you ever saw on a test. Or your boss walks into your cubicle with a memo you just wrote and demands, "What is the meaning of this?" and you can only look baffled for a minute and then say, "What, so now I'm a philosopher?"

But it seems an appropriate title to the following excerpt from a wire service story
on the Web today:

MONROE, Ohio (AP) — Hundreds of sightseers drawn to the remains of a six-story-tall statue of Jesus Christ that was struck by lightning and erupted into flames stopped Tuesday to snap pictures or gaze at the ruined structure.

The "King of Kings" statue, one of southwest Ohio's most familiar landmarks, had stood since 2004 at the evangelical Solid Rock Church along Interstate 75 in Monroe, just north of Cincinnati.

The lightning strike set the statue ablaze around 11:15 p.m. Monday, Monroe police dispatchers said.

The sculpture, about 62 feet tall and 40 feet wide at the base, showed Jesus from the torso up and was nicknamed Touchdown Jesus because of the way the arms were raised, similar to a referee signaling a touchdown. It was made of plastic foam and fiberglass over a steel frame, which is all that remained Tuesday.

Primero dia

Off to a great start. My instructor is named Lady Vanderlip, which led me to expect some kind of Dutch Noblewoman, but in fact she’s from Panama and speaks Spanish like a native.

Class was just as I’d hoped. Most students are at or a little above my level. We had lots of practice in Spanish, often working with a partner. Tonight I have homework that would usually be due over the first week. Sacre Bleu!

Fortunately, I got the book and other materials last summer and am a few chapters ahead, so I think I’ll survive the first couple of weeks. After that, well, it’s all just from grins, right?

Unlike at OIT, all the students are twenty-somethings, which made me feel a little self-conscious for about two minutes until we got to work. The good news is no one pointed and laughed. The bad news is the little bastards have working memories I can only vaguely remember having.

Steel traps vs. the rusty bucket. Pero, recuerde la tortuga and el conejo ( but remember the tortoise and the hare).

Hasta la pistola.

Joe Hablo

“No estoy seguro si es posible aprender una lengua nueva a mi edad.”
Or,
“I’m not sure if it’s possible to learn a new language at my age.” Probably with a few errors illustrating my point. (Just edited to correct a few errors even I could see.)

This comment was part of a short speech of introduction I made the last time I was in a Spanish class, about two years ago. The class was one in the first-year sequence offered at Oregon Tech, my former employer. Since all of the students except me were majoring in either engineering or one of the health professions, everyone was there only to satisfy a requirement. There wasn’t a lot of involvement or preparation by anyone else, and the overall quality of the class was poor at best. It ended up being a class in which we spoke about Spanish in English, kind of a Spanish Appreciation course.

Since then, I’ve studied on my own and managed to make some progress, though you can only go so far without instruction and opportunities to speak and practice. Not very far at all, really.

Today, I’m moving our trailer over to a little RV park outside of Ashland, home of Southern Oregon University, a liberal arts and teaching college with a Spanish department that has a good reputation. Monday, I’ll be starting an intensive Spanish summer program, all of year two in eight weeks. I’m a bit nervous that either the course will be way over my head and go much too fast, or that it will be badly taught with yet more unmotivated students and will prove of little value. My hope, of course, is that the reality will be somewhere in the middle and I’ll be able to make more progress in the next eight weeks than I’ve made in the last two years. We’ll see.

It’s hard to say exactly how my interest in this all started. At first, living in a bilingual and bicultural community, I thought it would be the least I could do to learn a few phrases, be able to say “excuse me” when I reach past someone in the supermarket, or “what a cute baby you have.” (A dangerous comment in Spanish since “mono” can mean both cute and monkey. “What a baby monkey you have!”)

Beyond my vague initial interest, I began to feel more and more that as an Anglo-American, I’m missing out on something important if I don’t at least speak some of the language I hear all the time around me. I reflected on the often-heard comment, “If you’re going to live in this country, you should learn English.” The corollary being that if you’re going to live in any bilingual community, you should speak some of both languages.

But I continued studying not because of some sense of a social imperative but because I became once again fascinated by the structure and astounding complexity of language, a complexity mastered with no study or effort by any average three- or four-year-old. Maybe in another year or two, I'll be able to have a meaningful conversation with a Mexican four-year-old.

And it gives a retired person who doesn’t play golf and stopped drinking four years ago something to do. Otherwise, I risk taking up shuffleboard.

This is all so exciting. I’ll be living in our trailer four days a week, studying as close to full time as I can, riding my motorcycle to school, and coming home on weekends. A perfect way to spend the summer.

Or maybe not. What if I can’t find my room? What if they all make fun of me? What if I can’t find the bathroom and wet my pants?

What, (my greatest fear), if the class is a dud and we spend four hours a day speaking English about Spanish?

I’ll post the occasional update here on my blog.

Mea gulfa, mea gulpa, mea culpa

It’s taken Sarah Palin fifty days to figure out a way to blame me for the Gulf Oil Spill: we environmentalists did it. Because we blocked development of safer sources of domestic oil, such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and from oil rigs closer to shore and in shallower water, we forced the oil companies into the more risky task of deep water drilling farther offshore. It was an accident waiting to happen.

What a bunch of mooseshit.

Let’s be clear about one thing: The Deepwater Horizon exploded, killing eleven men and unleashing the greatest environmental disaster in American history, for one reason and one reason only: BP malfeasance. Dozens of current and former BP employees have testified that BP cut corners, rushed deadlines and ignored warnings in their zeal to bring the well into production on schedule, which is to say as fast as possible. BP proceeded with insufficient data about safety issues and solid evidence that failsafe systems had failed tests. Workers on the rig have testified that they saw the accident coming and feared for their lives. As the evidence mounts, independent engineers, including distinguished faculty from the best engineering programs in the country, shake their heads in wonder.

One of the few pieces of good news that has been missed by the media is the slow rate at which the massive body of oil has approached the Gulf coast. Despite the horrific images—fouled beaches; dead and dying birds, fish, and endangered turtles; thick oil and tar invading fragile marshlands—the diagrams of the growing leak have demonstrated an amazing concentration offshore that has yet to make anywhere near its full impact on coastal communities. This is meager comfort given the disaster at hand, but it has at least given authorities and BP itself time to respond as best they could to contain and minimize impacts.

If even a smaller leak had occurred in one of the shallow-water operations close to shore, it’s easy to imagine that the result would have been far worse far sooner.

Blame the environmentalists and blame Obama; the loonies try every tactic to shift blame to their targets of opportunity, however specious their arguments.

I expect no less of Sarah. I’m just surprised it took her so long.

Drill baby.

Abundance

A note from Mary:

"Honey,

We have everything we need except green beans."

[heart]

Little enough

I've just made a donation to the National Wildlife Federation towards their ongoing efforts to save and protect wildlife affected by the gulf oil spill. The people of Louisiana need our help, too. I hope you will join me by contributing in whatever way you can.

Thanks,

ross

Good news at last!

This just in from the Washington Post:

"A cap is in place over the Gulf of Mexico gusher, live video footage provided by the company showed Thursday night, but the spewing oil made it very difficult to tell if the cap was fitting well."

BP also stated "Spewing oil is pretty much the only reason we're not sure if we've
stopped the spewing oil."

As soon as the oil stops spewing so much, BP promises to issue an optomistic press release and BP President Tony Hayward can take a well-deserved week off.

Fingers crossed

Lest I be thought alarmist, (me?), NBC Nightly News last night cited two experts, geophysicists or some such, who said that if BP can’t successfully cap its leak, oil will flow unimpeded into the Gulf of Mexico for our lifetimes and longer. BP’s top kill effort, today maybe, is given a sixty to seventy percent chance of success by its own engineers, and you have to worry that they’re putting a good face on it.

I’m not given to prayer unless there’s a direct and immediate benefit to me, but I’ll say a little prayer on this one. What’s to lose? I’ll also cross my fingers.

NBC also had a guest, the former president of Shell Oil, who said leaks like this are actually rather common. This one gets press because it’s here and already destroying vast wetlands and a fishing and tourism industry. The Shell guy said a comparable leak in the Gulf of Arabia a couple of years ago was treated by a fleet of supertankers which siphoned the leaking oil from the surface, separated it from the sea water, and headed for port and the refineries. He thinks we should be lining up tankers now.

I take it the Arabian leak was finally plugged, though it’s also the depth and cold that make our blowout particularly hard to stop.

Side bar: In his press conferences on this and other subjects, I notice that Obama’s hair is already turning gray, and not just a little. His has to be the toughest job in the world. Sadly, too many Americans expect him to fix every national problem in a matter of weeks, including a massive oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

He's missing a photo-op: he should be standing on a shrimp boat wearing a mask and snorkle with a Mission Accomplished sign in the background.

In the light of day

I forgot last night—it was late—that BP is also drilling a new well that it hopes will relieve pressure from the leak and perhaps slow or eliminate the flow. Maybe that will work.

It’s hard, though, to take seriously anything BP says, since it’s consistently understated the size of the leak and withheld information from Congress and the public, including video that showed multiple leaks gushing oil and gas at rates impossible to measure. Now, according to BP President Tony Hayward, “Everything we can see suggests that the overall environmental impacts of this will be very, very modest.”

This is more than spin control. It’s lying.

Tony—and let’s add Rush Limbaugh, who bloviated that environmentalists are overreacting and the ocean is self-cleaning—needs to get some detergent and rags and start cleaning pelicans, or paddle up into a saltwater marsh and tell us how he’s going to clean oil out of reed beds.

One thing we do know: when it’s over, if it’s ever over, we’ll have lots of tar and feathers.

What then?

The news of the massive oil leak in the Gulf just keeps getting worse. A month ago, it was 2,000 barrels a day, and BP was going to put a dome over it. At the time, news stories focused on how much worse the Exxon Valdez spill had been.

I don’t even know what the current estimates of barrels per day are, but I’m beginning to believe we’re looking at the largest environmental disaster in American history. It breaks my heart.

Now, as BP prepares to pump tons of mud, cement, and golf balls into the breach in hopes of clogging the flow, I’ve yet to hear anyone speculate that perhaps this leak simply can’t be stopped. But note that certainly BP hasn’t expressed any confidence, and I've heard not a word about yet another plan if this one, too, shall fail.

Suppose, like the volcano in Iceland, this is now a force of nature beyond the control of man.

What then?

Another year of bliss

Once again I'm proud to announce that Mary and I are enjoying our wedding anniversary today, our 35th, which I'm sure everyone knows is the Treasury Bills Anniversary. T-Bills make the perfect anniversary gift and come in a wide variety of denominations, one to fit every budget. You can have them gift wrapped and enclose a nice card.

It's not too late even if they don't arrive for a few days because I forgot, too, and Mary had to remind me. Now I have our anniversay and Mary's birthday on my Google calendar, which will send me reminders a few days in advance forever.

Thank you all in advance for the lovely T-Bills!

Why I read the papers

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A modest proposal

Here’s a simple suggestion to help Arizona remedy problems with its new law 1070: require everybody to carry and show proof of citizenship upon demand. Police would be required to check everyone’s citizenship papers during arrests or minor traffic stops, or when someone stops to ask them directions. Everyone who can’t produce proper papers is treated the same, probably held in detention until someone can come up with the proper documentation or deportated if they can’t.

This is the only fair way to ensure equal protection under the law, and it would also keep out unwelcome Norwegians and other Northern Europeans who take advantage of their fair complexions.

It would be interesting to see how long the law would stay on the books if white people faced the same scrutiny as brown people.

Gary Johnson for President

Colbert was particularly funny in his show this Monday, May 10. You can watch the full episode here:

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-may-10-2010-gary-johnson.

Particularly interesting, though, was his interview with former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, a two-term Republican who says he’s not running for president in 2012, a clear indication he’s running for president in 2012. Here’s what his Website says about Johnson’s stand on drugs:

“More Effective Drug Policy
Gary has been a leader of the movement toward a new, more effective drug policy that is more in line with conservative principles of fiscal discipline, limited government, and personal responsibility. Gary advocates an end to the failed prohibition of the past seventy years, and an honest discussion about the drug issue with America's youth. Specifically, he advocates the legalization of marijuana and the decriminalization of other drugs. While Gary himself abstains from all drugs, including nicotine and alcohol, he recognizes that the billions of dollars wasted on a big-government anti-drug policy have not been responsibly invested.”

Is there hope that we might be moving toward a realistic discussion of the failed prohibition policy known as The War on Drugs, first named by Richard Nixon and so far delivering only what I call “The Three Cs” : Corruption, Cartels, and Chaos on the Border? (Help me out here: I’m looking for a better third C. P is also an open letter, but I’d have to start over.)

Is it possible I could one day vote for a Republican for president?

In fact, Johnson is a GOP libertarian from the Ron Paul school of Ayn Rand, but if I had to be a conservative, I’d definitely want to take it to the extreme like they do. Ending drug prohibition, though, isn’t an extreme position at all (insert all the relevant arguments here), and I would be thrilled to see at least a few mainstream politicians begin to consider it under the rubric of reforming America’s drug laws.

Maybe this guy Johnson can help jump start the conversation. He’s one of the few guests who can keep up with Colbert’s machine gun interviewing style, so he should be able to hold his own on a stage with a few merely mortal candidates for President.

A post in search of a title. . . .

Here are a few loosely connected items floating around my cerebrum this morning: In the Washington Post, Philip Caputo reviews Sebastian Junger’s new book War, based on Junger’s extended experience embedded with an Airborn platoon in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. Caputo gives War an excellent review, particularly for its insights into the psychology of men in combat.

I’ll probably pass. I don’t read a lot of war journalism or novels or see a lot of war movies because, What’s new to say about that? The last war novel I read was James Jones’ The Thin Red Line, recommended by Broschat as (I quote from memory), “far and away the best war novel I’ve ever read.” I heartily agree. Jones writes about the army’s bloody capture of Guadalcanal, and though it’s a novel, Jones was there himself as a combat soldier. What distinguishes The Thin Red Line is its riveting psychological portrayal of very different men in combat. There’s heroism in Jones’ novel, but mostly there’s fear, brutality, and pure dumb luck, good or bad.

I watched the film version of the book just a few days ago and found it to be sadly lacking, sadly. I doubt any film could capture the omniscient narrator’s insights into the minds of soldiers in combat, but this film seems to fall particularly short because it takes its name from such a powerful novel. It could have changed the title and few would have noticed any cinemagraphic plagiarism.

Loosely connected item number one: Junger also wrote The Perfect Storm, which I happened to be reading shortly after its release while teaching summer school for two months aboard the California Maritime Academy’s training ship The Golden Bear as we cruised the South Pacific and visited mostly undiscovered or uninhabited islands.

And yes, I got paid for it. Hate me if you must.

The Perfect Storm, published in 1997, is also a creative nonfiction book based on a massive storm that battered New England and cost lives on ships at sea. Chances are good you’ve seen the movie if you didn’t read the book.

Interestingly, the ship’s officers on the Golden Bear were unanimously scornful of The Perfect Storm. In their view, Junger didn’t know squat about ships or storms, and mess hall conversation in no small part consisted of ridiculing particular points of the book.

I wasn’t qualified to say, of course. My only ongoing criticism is that the phrase “the perfect storm” should have been retired from the language no later than about Y2K, as it is now used to describe everything from an oil rig explosion and massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico to the release of the iPad to a city council meeting gone bad.

As a career writing teacher and sometime writer myself, I admonished students to avoid clichés like the plague. Enough with the perfect storm.

So I have my doubts about Junger’s verisimilitude, or “truthiness,” as Colbert would call it, in his new book. Not to say it might not be a book worth reading. Maybe it is.

Better, I’ll bet, is Jon Krakauer’s Where Men Win Glory, the story of NFL star player Pat Tilman, who gave up his successful football career to join the army and become a Ranger after 9/11, only to be killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. (This is loosely connected item number two, as I recently finished the book.)

The military and the Bush administration not only did their best to cover up how he died, they tried with initial success to use his story to promote public opinion in support of the war, as things by now were going very badly in Iraq. Krakauer’s book brings back all the powerful emotions of disgust I had for the Bush administration and its most vocal spokespersons, (Henny Penny Rumsfeld engenders particular disdain once again.) And while I initially saw Tilman as just another jock-bully-blindly patriotic-and-overpaid-sports popstar, I quickly began to develop the highest regard for him. It's a book well worth reading.

Loosely connected item the third is that reviewer Philip Caputo (back to Junger here) has just published a well-reviewed novel about life on the border entitled Crossers. My brief time this winter along the California and Arizona borders with Mexico, combined with my continuing efforts to learn a bit of Spanish, have left me thinking a lot about border and immigration issues lately. With a nod to the Arizona legislature and governor for keeping the kettle boiling, time will tell whether the current situation in Arizona will ultimately help move the cause of immigration reform forward or whether it will only serve to make real reforms politically more difficult.

I vote the latter and doubt, for that matter, that we’ll see much in the way of reform in coming years. I believe even more strongly lately that legalizing marijuana is the only effective way to dramatically reduce drug smuggling and deal a serious blow to the cartels, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t even inhale.

I’ve ordered Crossers onto my Kindle.

And since I’m coupling loosely this morning, I watched the film Frida last night. It could have been better, but I thought it was quite good overall, if a little lacking in gritty, and I learned a lot about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Who knew that they hosted Trotsky in Mexico, where he was murdered by Stalin’s hit men? A quick Web seach this morning tells me not to make too much of this as history, but still. . . .

Also, Selma Hayek naked. Both she and Alfred Molina as Rivera turn in fine performances.

The fight against terrorism, the border with Mexico, The Taliban, and the drug cartels: not so loosely coupled, maybe.

The movie I just happened to watch last night. Mexico is such a beautiful country and so rich in cultural history. It's sad to see it fall into such turmoil, and not just along the border. I'd love to visit to continue my language study, but there are few areas left that aren't on the State Department's caution list. Better, maybe, to go someplace safe, like Cuba, for example.

One voice of reason

In a column in today’s Washington Post, Norman J. Ornstein addresses some of the wildly off-the-mark nonsense being bandied about concerning President Obama’s policy initiatives. These gobsmacking commentaries come not just from the usual radio crock-jocks but from the reputed leaders of the Republican Party:

“The most extravagant rhetoric has come out of the gathering of Southern Republicans in New Orleans, led by former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who called Obama ‘the most radical president in American history’ and urged his partisan audience to stop Obama's ‘secular, socialist machine.’

At the same conference, Liz Cheney, the former vice president's daughter who is often mentioned as a possible Senate candidate from Virginia, fiercely attacked Obama's foreign policy as ‘apologize for America, abandon our allies and appease our enemies.’ And last week the ubiquitous Sarah Palin said of the arms-control treaty Obama signed with Russia, ‘No administration in America's history would, I think, ever have considered such a step,’ likening it to a kid telling others in a playground fight, ‘Go ahead, punch me in the face and I'm not going to retaliate.’”

Orenstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, begs to differ:

“Looking at the range of Obama domestic and foreign policies, and his agency and diplomatic appointments, my conclusion is clear: This president is a mainstream, pragmatic moderate, operating in the center of American politics; center-left, perhaps, but not left of center. The most radical president in American history?”
He concludes with a paraphrase of a conservative Southern Senator’s question about Strom Thurmond’s defense of segregation some fifty years ago: “Does Newt Gingrich, a PhD in history, really believe that [expletive]?”

The expletive here being, let me guess, “shit.”

It’s good to hear a few conservative voices begin to call out their brethren on the ridiculous spew that passes for political discourse these days. Here’s just one more example; he quotes from “Mark Levin, who manages to make Limbaugh and Beck sound like calm voices of reason:

[Speaking of Oklahoma’s conservative Republican Senator Tom Coburn, who dared to call Nancy Pelosi “nice”] ‘We don't need you hack, detestable politicians telling us a damn thing. Most of you are a bunch of pathetic, unethical morons. And so, no, Mr. Coburn, we won't be told to sit down and be quiet. We won't be told by you to watch CNN to balance off Fox. You got that, pal? Who the hell do you think you are? You sound like a jerk, to be perfectly honest about it. You, the jerk, who backed John McCain.’”

I swear, I’ve heard kids having a supermarket tantrum scream more cogently than Newt, Rush, and Sarah. The difference is that, at the least, you would expect a harried parent to look embarrassed and take the kid out of the store.

Home again

We’ve been back for about ten days now, and I have to say I enjoyed our three-month trip enormously. I don’t like to think of it as a vacation because for now it’s just what we do in the winter: we go south. Still, it was a vacation in many ways.

For me, I can’t recall when I felt more at ease and in the moment for an extended period of time. In the moment almost never describes me, but while on the road, I could read a book all afternoon, practice Spanish or not as my motivation determined, go for an easy walk around the campground or a more vigorous hike up into a desert wash.

With my new Kindle, I could download newspapers for less that a dollar, and since we spent most of our time in Arizona, I usually read the Arizona Republic. If we felt like it, we would go into a nearby town and find an internet café and have coffee and maybe a sandwich while we caught up on our email and paid bills online.

I never felt bored. Never anxious. Never depressed. I never felt like I should be doing something else.

Our biggest concern during the first half of the trip was money, as many national, state and local campgrounds have substantially raised their fees if they haven’t actually closed down. But during the second half of the trip, we began to find free or very low-cost campsites. Organ Pipe National Monument charges ten dollars a night, and since I’m now officially a senior (sixty-two), fees are half price. Five bucks a night to stay in our favorite park.

You can stay three weeks at Organ Pipe, then move a few miles north of the park and stay for free on BLM land for another two weeks: five weeks of camping for $105. We were paying that for three nights before we found out better.

We also scouted some of the BLM Long-Term Visitor Areas, which charge $80 per year for camping within a certain area, usually very expansive. The biggest of these is near Quartzite, Arizona where hundreds of thousands of snow birds come for the winter and spread out across the desert, either tightly packed for those who enjoy the company, or widely spaced for those who don’t. We didn’t stay in Quartzite and probably never will, but there are other areas run in the same way that are much more appealing, and we can easily see ourselves staying for a month or so in a few different locations.

We also found Wal-Mart parking lots to be commodious and convenient for overnight stays while traveling to new locations. Wal-Mart doesn't mind, and with our GPS, I’ve found you’re never more than ten miles from a Wal-Mart. I forgive Wal-Mart for killing Chinese babies for pet food. I even shopped in a few, call me what you will.

For me, this kind of life is so enjoyable and inviting I’d love to sell out up here in Klamath Falls and go full-time, which some millions of Americans do. As small as our trailer is, we were very comfortable in it for three months, and there are middle-sized trailers that come close to the feel of a small apartment. It would be a simple matter to retain a legal address in Klamath Falls through a mail-forwarding service.

I envision staying here between three to six months a year and traveling the rest of the time. I could see us doing that for another ten years or so. Although we’d take a beating if we sold the house now, I’ve been thinking a lot lately in terms of how many good years I have left, and good years have come to mean a lot more to me than money.

Especially since we have the money. It’s actually a lot cheaper to live on the road than in a house, and when the time comes, it’s easy enough to settle down again in a nice rental or old persons’ home. I’d like to find one that accepts only liberals. The Hubert Humphrey Cozy Home for Aging Leftists or some such.

Mary is less thrilled than I am with the idea, though she’s not completely opposed to it. She loved the mobile life as much as I did, but she also feels more connection to our home here than I do.

Whatever we decide, we’re both happy with the way things are for now or could be in the immediate future. The best of it is that with both of us retired, we have choices now that we never had before. We’re also cognizant of our great good fortune to have a modest but secure income in this time of such a serious and painful recession, but we more than earned what we have. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling guilty that things have gone our way in the last quarter or so of our lives. It’s not like I was a bank president or something.

The Spanish word for “retired” is “jubilado.”

So, back home to a cold and sometimes snowy spring, but it definitely is spring and I can wait it out until the weather improves. I’ve enrolled for this summer in an eight-week, intensive Spanish program at Southern Oregon University, across the mountains in Ashland. I’m both excited and intimidated by it. I’ve been studying Spanish, mostly on my own, for about three years now, and despite making progress, it can only be slow progress without good instruction and a chance to practice speaking every day.

Classes start mid-June, and I’m trying to cram on my own so I’ll be as ready to start as I can be. I’ll be staying somewhere near Ashland in the trailer four days a week, then back home on the weekends. The trailer is a good place to study since it’s about the size of a jail cell but nicer, and there aren’t any distractions built in.

Besides, I see myself spending a lot of time on campus. There’s even an Hispanic Students Union. If I study hard, maybe I can pass for a Mexican.

My only souvenir from the trip is a rattlesnake-skin belt, but that’s a story for another day. He was a big mother.

The Cubs win the pennant

But enough about me. How ‘bout that Obama!?

Like most of his supporters, I’d completely given up on passing any kind of health care reform and had come to believe he represented an enormous and completely unexpected sign of great social change in our country, as well as being both a charming and inspirational figure as president. Sadly, though, in the end it seemed he didn’t quite have what it takes to overcome The Great Republican Wall of No, No, a Thousand Times No. He proved us wrong, with Nancy Pelosi deserving as much or more of the credit for the final outcome. Next, he signed the most comprehensive arms control treaty with Russia in the last two decades. Then he rested and shot a few hoops.

Nothing but net.

It may not be perfect, it may not even be great, but we progressives have done the near-impossible in passing this health care bill, and I’m hopeful we can survive the November elections and continue to build modestly on recent successes.

In the meantime, there’s a grand array of buffoons and jesters to entertain us, and granted, there are a lot of scary people out there; still, there’s much to enjoy in the antics of the Tea Baggers and their leadership.

I mean, Sarah Palin: what’s not to laugh?

Beethoven in the desert

Mary and I are dry camping on BLM land about twenty miles north of Organ Pipe and some twelve miles south of the town of Ajo. We’ve been into town a few times, mostly to buy groceries and have a coffee and use the internet at a nice little café called the Oasis.

Other than the IGA market and the Oasis, Ajo doesn’t have much to recommend it except that it hasn’t been discovered by tourists yet, there not being much to discover. For a hundred years, it lived off a giant open-pit copper and gold mine, but that closed in 1983, and I’m sure the town’s economy collapsed just like the economies of small Northwest towns collapsed when the mills shut down. Today, law enforcement is probably the biggest employer, with 450 Border Patrol agents alone, though many of them must live in Gila Bend, about forty miles to the north.

So Ajo, despite some impressive historical buildings and a quaint Spanish-style square, isn’t a place you’d expect to find much in the way of culture, which is why I didn’t quite register the 8 ½ x 11 announcement at the Oasis the first time I looked at it: “Tucson Symphony Orchestra in an evening of all Beethoven, Tuesday, March 9, Dicus Auditorium.” It was only the next time we were in town that I looked a little closer and saw that the concert was sponsored by the Ajo Council for the Performing Arts.

“Where’s Dicuss Auditorium?” I asked at the Oasis.

“The high school.”

“Where’s the high school?” I asked.

“Right there,” she said, pointing through one of the Spanish-style arches that surround the square.

I bought two tickets, twelve bucks each, thinking, Who knew Tucson had a symphony orchestra and why are they driving a couple of hundred miles to this little town, and could they possibly be very good, really? Maybe it was in fact the honors orchestra for the University of Arizona, located in Tucson, not Phoenix, but still, that would probably be worth going out to hear. We’ve been camping for three months and haven’t done anything that might be called cultural the whole time, not even visit a museum. I guess we’ve been looking for other kinds of rewards on this trip.

What a wonderful surprise and a musically exciting evening! The Tucson Symphony, it turns out, is the oldest in the Southwest. It auditions nationally and sometimes internationally, and its conductor, George Hanson, has an impressive musical biography, as printed in the program. Most importantly, to my not entirely untrained ear, they sounded marvelous, at least in two of the three pieces they performed.

The Octet for Winds was performed by eight musicians, and although it was from Beethoven’s mid-career, I didn’t find it to be very interesting. To me, there’s a rather dramatic point at which Beethoven stops sounding a lot like Mozart and begins to sound like something entirely new and unsurpassed in classical music. The octet was still from the Mozart period, I thought.

The second piece featured the much larger string section performing the Grosse Fugue in B-Flat Major, which is an expanded version of one of the late string quartets. I’ve actually listened to the late quartets rather a lot, though many years ago, and remembered this piece and was once again struck by how modern it sounds, a good hundred years ahead of its time in its harmonies and fractured fugue structure. As the conductor said in introducing it, it drove audiences insane the few times it was first performed. I loved it.

Best of all after the intermission was the performance of Symphony No. 2. I expected this second symphony to be again rather Mozarty but was surprised at how many twists and surprises it held. The performance was stirring, only in part because it was so unexpected on a Tuesday night in Ajo.

In the whole evening, I can only fault the acoustics of the room, which swallowed up vast quantities of sound and left the performances sounding anemic, especially the two pieces before the full orchestra came on stage. Nobody’s fault. A high-school auditorium was never designed for a concert like this.

Mary and I drove back to camp navigating the twisted little dirt roads by my GPS and still having a bit of trouble finding our trailer in the dark, but enjoying that fullness of spirit that can come only during and after an evening of fine music, regardless of genre.

My knowledge of classical music is limited at best (please don’t take any of my music-critic comments very seriously here, though I do know enough to know that “classical” is a period, not a genre), but I actually did listen to quite a lot of Beethoven for a couple of years in college, about 1972 and 73, say. I had bought a number of collections on LP: the complete symphonies, string quartets and piano concertos of Beethoven, along with a few other things by different composers I liked. I remember often spending an evening just listening to music. Some music should never be used for background, I thought for a long time, though I suppose that’s a foolish limitation.

But still.

Beethoven was the composer who most fulfilled me emotionally and intellectually. The wonderful evening made me regret a little that I haven’t paid more attention to classical music over the years. Jazz has so dominated my passion for music, and so much of what I think of as classical music is frumpy rubbish. But then so much of everything is frumpy rubbish or rubbish of some other kind. In listening widely and well, I’ve discovered a world of music in jazz that I’ve now refined down to a broad but essential collection that continues to grow and delight. Is there room enough and time for a vast expansion in my tastes?

In any case, since I still have a working turntable, I think I’ll get out some of those old LPs when we get back home.