Send the boys back

A few days ago I wrote a piece on the withdrawal of the last American troops from Iraq.  It was long, bitter, and angry and I decided not to post it.  But it concluded with “we told you so,” and it’s a conclusion I stand behind. So then I published it anyway.

Michael Tomasky has written a better piece on why the right will soon start to publish accounts of how we actually won, and why it is Bush who should get the credit, not Obama.  It’s worth reading here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/12/16/michael-tomasky-the-republican-whitewash-of-the-iraq-war-to-come.html

Or, if things go bad, it’s Obama’s fault.

Personally, I think the campaign has already started.  Iraq’s government is splintering, violence is on the rise, and people in and out of the country are talking about a new civil war.  And John McCain says its Obama’s fault.  He should have left behind a few thousand combat troops.  In another nine years, we can take another look.

Mary made me do it

I had actually decided against buying another motorcycle, but Mary talked me into it.

The week before, I had a CT scan to follow up on a chest x-ray my family doctor had done as part of my routine physical.  Also, I still haven't completely recovered from the horrible cough I got in Mexico.  Although he was “absolutely comfortable” with what he saw, he wanted me to have the more detailed scan to determine if I might have lung cancer or not.  He saw something in the x-ray that caused him at least some concern.

I was never too worried about it, though I certainly had it much in mind as I reflected on my twenty-five years of heavy smoking and the occasional relapse even now, twenty years after I finally “quit.”

Even when I started smoking in 1965, we knew we were at risk for lung cancer and various other life-threatening conditions, but I did it anyway without a second thought.

I blame my parents.  They were smokers, too, and statistics show that children who grow up in smoking households are vastly more likely to smoke themselves.  I also blame my brother, who conveniently left packs of Pall Malls lying around so I could steal them now and then.  This is probably why we haven’t spoken for almost thirty years.  He was really pissed off about those cigarettes.

I certainly don’t blame myself since I’ve always had low impulse control, which is not my fault.  The devil made me do it, and if I had to have lung cancer, I didn’t want to carry around a lot of guilt about it. 

Anyway, it was a tense week waiting for the actual test and then the results, and if I wasn’t particularly worried, Mary was.  Shortly after we got the good news, she said I should go ahead and buy the bike.  Might as well do it now rather than wait too long and have to put it on a bucket list. 

Thing is, I already have a large collection of things I decided I should do now, including my recent trip to Mexico.  The trick for us seniors is always to try to guess how long we’re going to live.  The goal is to go broke the day we die and freely indulge all of our big-ticket-impulses up to that final minute.  It would be just my luck to live ten years too long and have to actually live on my pension for all that time.  I’m doing my best to keep spending at a relatively high level so I won’t have to face that grim reality.

In the meantime, “no one knows what tomorrow may bring,” as the old hymn reminds us, and for me, that’s an invitation to live like I might die tomorrow.  Or preferably, some time ten or twenty years from now, but still with a couple bucks in my savings account.

In the meantime, “beat the bucket.”  That’s my motto.  

Welcome Home

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was in Iraq yesterday to say job-well-done to the last American troops coming home.  President Obama met with soldiers at Fort Campbell, Kentucky and was warmly received as he thanked them for their service.  I can only add my own humble “thank you for your service,” though it always sounds hollow to me.  Only “I’m sorry for your loss” might be more empty and pointless to the families of the fallen. 

Personally, I prefer “welcome home” to those who made it back.  It was only a few years ago that a counselor I was seeing was the first person ever to say “welcome home” to me as a Vietnam veteran, and to my own amazement, I burst into tears.  Forty years after the fact, I’m not looking for any thanks, but it’s nice that someone recognizes I was even gone.

There’s a deafening silence on this last day of our war from the likes of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the dozen or so other neo-cons who pushed us into the abyss nine years ago.  No claims of victory from them.  Are they playing golf today?  Are they ashamed of what they’ve done?  “Possibly,” and “certainly not.” 

I was so amazed at the time that still so soon after Vietnam, most Americans didn’t recognize the same mix of outright lies and gross distortions of fact that got us into that earlier pointless, doomed-to-failure and far-away war.  Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations about “weapons of mass destruction” would not have got a search warrant from a local district attorney and it failed to get an endorsement from the UN, but in we went anyway.  I couldn’t believe this was happening again, but it was, and so few others seemed to see the parallels.  The press at the time failed utterly to report on the wealth of evidence demonstrating that the neo-cons’ case was a house of cards. 

But maybe not utterly, and maybe not so few.  There actually was a large and vocal opposition to the invasion, but it got precious little coverage and it certainly never got equal time, let alone a full hearing.  At least Oregon’s congressional Democrats voted unanimously against the invasion.  They had no effect, but it mattered to me and my friends and colleagues who stood amazed as the Bush administration maneuvered public opinion over the course of months to the point where they could say they had a majority of public support.  I have never in my life seen such a distorted and intense propaganda campaign.  At the time of the invasion, a large majority of Americans believed we had an endorsement from the UN, although the best Bush could patch together was a rag-tag “coalition of the willing,” many of the willing being tiny, weak countries who depended on American foreign aid and who sent at best a handful of advisers then pulled them out a few months later. 

Four-thousand, five-hundred Americans have died, tens of thousands seriously wounded, physically and mentally.  Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from over one-hundred thousand to one million.  In any case, lots and lots of dead Iraqis.  Are the Iraqis better off now that Saddam is dead?  Is the region in any way more stable?  Have we “projected American power abroad”?  What a total fuck-up, the whole thing. 

And still, I feel enormous pride in our fighting men and women.  They were over-deployed and bore the whole burden, about one-percent of Americans at war while the rest of us sat home and were never called upon to make the smallest sacrifice. 

To those who fought the war, Welcome Home.  Thank you for your service. 

To no one in particular, we told you so.  

The Tiger revisited

1967 Triumph Tiger 650

2007 Triumph Tiger 1050

Two weeks ago I rode my Suzuki V-Strom 650 over to Hansen’s Motorcycles in Medford to buy a new hat.  Somehow I’d recently lost most of my baseball caps and thought I’d get one with a motorcycle logo: Hansen sells BMW, Ducati, and Triumph.

I found the Triumph cap I wanted and also got into a chat with the salesman about new bikes.  I like the line of Triumph 800cc triples but can’t afford the entry fee, so I told Russell I’d sure like to find a used Tiger 1050.  Then I rode back home across the Cascade Mountains, seventy miles to my house in Klamath Falls.  I was cold, but I had on good gear and the roads were clear.

The next week I saw on Craig’s List a 2007 Tiger 1050 at Hansen’s for $8,200.  It was the only Tiger I could find listed in the region, so I thought I’d go over and take a look.  I took my checkbook just in case.

There was snow in the passes by now, so I loaded up my riding gear in my truck last Saturday and drove over.  After an hour talking to the Hansen people and taking the bike for a brief test ride, I bought it for $7,900.

I got a good price: the bike has 24,000 miles and is in exceptional condition.  It has hard bags, a custom Meyer saddle, heated grips, and Triumph tank and trunk bags.  Non-ABS, which was a demerit, but I loved the bike.  It’s general set-up is about the same as my V-Strom, but it has an engine that just rips and an exhaust note that makes the bike worthy of its name. It''s way fast.

About 4pm I started thinking about riding it home, and Craig said, “You want to take it home today?”

Well, yeah!

I’d accidently brought my summer gloves, so Craig loaned me a pair of winter ones.  I had no way to plug in my electric vest so he installed a BMW accessory plug on the Tiger.  I was wearing light-weight socks but I had some toe-warmers, which I put into my boots.  Then I was off on the exhilarating but coldest ride I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some very cold rides over the years.

I crossed the Siskiyou Mountains and headed south towards Mount Shasta, a much longer ride home but over lower passes.  It was almost dark and the temperature was just above freezing.  I was riding faster than traffic at about eighty-five, but I wanted to get home as fast as possible.  Up to now I was cold in certain places but overall comfortable.

Once I got across the mountains, I turned towards home and rode up the east side of the Cascades.  The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and I could tell my core temperature was starting to struggle to keep up.  Since this is a good road, mostly straight and wide with little traffic, I was now riding at over 100 mph in the dark.  I did see one deer but figured hitting a deer at 100 couldn’t be much different that hitting a deer at sixty-five, the legal speed limit.  I just wanted to get home.  I took my chances with the deer and the cops and was lucky.

I rode in after three hours on the road and headed up for a hot bath.  Despite the cold introduction, I love the bike, although it has a few issues to sort out.  Part of the fun of starting out on a new bike again is getting it set up just the way I want it.

This now brings me full circle.  My first grown-up bike was a ’67 Triumph 650, and after a dozen or so other bikes over the  years, I’m now back on a Tiger.

Triumph is now a completely different company as the old Triumph went out of business in the 70s but was  resurrected in 1984 by John Bloor, who bought the name and the old plant in Hinckley, England, which he gutted and refit with modern manufacturing equipment.  Today, Triumphs are very competitive with Japanese bikes and completely modern.  They make a line of retro-styled vertical twin models, including the much-revered Bonneville, but also make a range of modern sport bikes like my Tiger, an inline triple that is designed for touring but will almost hold its own against the fastest and best handling sport bikes out there.  It’s a lot more comfortable than a full-on sport bike, and it’s plenty fast enough for me, At sixty-three, I didn’t want to end my riding years on a merely practical motorcycle like the V-Strom.  I ride motorcycles in part because they get my blood up.

I know I’m going the enjoy the new Tiger as much as I did that old classic.  And now I’ve got the bike to match my new hat.  

In which art imitates life

Last week Mary and I enjoyed the Toulenc Trio for the second time at our fabulous local theater, the Ross Ragland.  I hadn’t remembered Toulenc from their first visit two years ago, but I slowly realized that I’d heard them before as the concert went on.  This is happening with my brain more and more, and I’m keeping an eye on it, so to speak.

Poulenc is a woodwind trio made up of Vladimir Lande, oboe; Irina Kaplan, piano; and Bryan Young, bassoon.  They’re based out of Baltimore and are more or less typical of what I think of as the first-rate second-tier musical talent we regularly get out our way.  Which is to say, for example, Young is principal bassoonist with the Baltimore Symphony but probably wouldn’t make the cut for New York or Washington National.  Still, to our rustic ears, you’d never know the difference.  In many cases, I’m not convinced there is a difference.

Poulenc started with two pieces from the late-Baroque and early classical periods. I listened politely but failed to ignite.  After intermission, though, they came back with three pieces from the 20^th century, all of which I thoroughly enjoyed: French composer Jean Francaix; excerpts from a filmscore by Shostakovich; and two especially wonderful tangos by Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla.  Lande explained that these are not tangos to be danced to.

After the concert, we talked with the musicians in the lobby and bought a CD from them, Poulenc Plays Poulenc, which they autographed for us.  I was especially interested in the amount of travel such musicians do, and Lande briefly rolled his eyes and said he was just back from a twenty-concert tour of Latin America in which he conducted Shastakovich.  So immediately I thought of Guanajuato, and sure enough, he had conducted there for Festival Cervantino.

Is this a small world or what?!

Regrettably, he said, he hadn’t been able to enjoy the city because he was off the next day to the next concert.  Regrettably, I said, I hadn’t heard his concert, probably because I was at one of the jazz concerts instead.  I really should go back one year soon and study the program more carefully, because every night during the festival there are a dozen or more events worth going to see, and it’s limiting to stick to only one genre.

Still . . . .

So for some reason I felt a personal connection to Lande only because we’d been in the same Mexican city at the same time, but it once again led me to ponder over what are the motivations and rewards to the musicians who keep up the travel schedules that are typical for these troubadours.  What keeps them going?  After traveling to twenty Latin American capitals in about as many days and conducting major symphony orchestras, Lande and his two fellow musicians (one of them his wife) set off on a West Coast tour for which, I learned, they landed in Sacramento and rented a car.  From Klamath Falls, they were driving the next day on icy roads to Moses Lake, Washington for another concert.  If you’ve ever been to Moses Lake, you might share my amazement at this fact.

I chatted about this with bassoonist Bryan Young, and he said some of their best audiences are to be found in the smallest venues.  He mentioned Coos Bay, Oregon as a concert they still talk about.  And I must say, they got a very enthusiastic reception here, although there couldn’t have been a hundred people in the audience that wintry night. 

I suppose people like them have to perform and people like me have to go out to hear them. 

Art is like life in this way.  It will do whatever it takes. 

Hogar dulce hogar

Home sweet home.  I'm back in Klamath Falls where it’s cold and dreary, with lows in the low-20s and another storm coming in this weekend.  Quite a shock from the routine mid-70s and sunny skies of Mexico.

Once the Festival Cervantino concluded at the end of October, life in Guanajuato returned more or less to normal.  By this time, I was hosting a bad and persistent cold and cough and energy was down quite a bit.  With no great concerts to tempt me out at night, I usually got back up to my house by mid-afternoon and stayed in until the next morning.   Mary was with me for ten days, and she went home with a cold, too. 

Still, she loved it there as much as I did, and was out and about on her own while I was in school.  She was also picking up Spanish at an alarming rate, mostly from her conversations with Blanca, from whom I rented a room.  They hit it off like old friends, and I learned that Blanca actually spoke just a little English, although she only spoke Spanish to me.   

By the end of week four after Mary had gone back home, I started to feel a little bored with my classes and the whole Mexico thing and was mostly just waiting out the time until I returned home.  How much more Spanish could I learn in a week, anyway?

Fortunately, my attitude turned for the better for week five.  November 2^nd is Day of the Dead, and the Mexican students studying English at our school made an altar for a secretary who passed away last year. [See below] They prepared a little presentation for the rest of us in English, and we in return did the same about Halloween in Spanish.  One of my Mexican instructors asked me what a witch hunt was, and I explained a little about the McCarthy era to her and made it clear that witch hunts and Halloween aren’t related.  I was proud of how well I did until I realized my last words, “no son relajados,” mean “are not relaxed.”  Oops.  I meant “relacionados,” but it was too late.

The altars and ceremonies are very formal, including, of course, the macabre elements of skulls and dancing skeletons that we Anglos find a little weird.  I can only say I thought the combination of reverence and playfulness was a refreshing take on the whole death thing. 

I took Saturday as an extra day to get ready and make one last, leisurely walk around the Centro of Guanajuato.  I was being more careful about what I ate for the last week, so I had a so-so lunch in one of the better restaurants.  For really good Mexican food, I had to go into the small, seedy looking cafés with usually only two or three cramped tables and just pick something off the menu, even though I couldn’t understand much of what I had ordered.  I never regretted a decision. I also never had any stomach problems.

Sunday morning was sad as I finished packing up and then said goodbye to Blanca.  Elias, a driver from school, took me out to the airport and we had a nice chat about this and that.  As long as a conversation partner talked slow enough, I could follow pretty much whatever we were talking about.  I still need a lot of practice on the real Spanish that all native speakers use among themselves, but even here I’m starting to make progress.  Soap operas and movies when I can get them are the best practice for this, although as I said earlier, I can only take soap operas in very small doses.  Still, I made a huge language leap in five weeks, even though my Spanish can still only be described as limited and halting.  The challenge now, as always, will be in finding ways to continue to study in a town that offers little in the way of classes.  I’m meeting weekly with two conversation partners, Leticia and Antonio, and they are very helpful, but it takes a lot more than two hours a week to continue to make progress. 

Flying out from Guanajuato, I looked down on Mexico.  What I know about the violence and brutality that are so common in most of the country was in such contrast to the friendly, genuinely happy demeanor of almost everyone I met or worked with.  I don’t feel any particular desire to retire as an expat in Mexico or anyplace else, but if I did I can’t imagine a better place to live than Guanajuato.  And yet, there’s that feeling that no place in Mexico can stay free for long from the kind of terrorism that has affected most of the rest of the country.  I can only hope I’m wrong and things take a slow turn for the better rather than the worse.

Here’s the most important thing I learned in Mexico:  Mexicans are proud of their country.  They have so many reasons to be so.  If I were Mexican, I’d be proud, too. 

A few last pictures

Highlights of my last week in Mexico include the Day of the Dead celebration on November 2nd  and my "graduation" from school last Friday.  Here are a few pictures.

Claudia and Edith award me my diploma.  Despite Edith's Anglo appearance and first name, all the teachers were native Mexicans.

My friend David, a talented photographer and filmmaker.  David is over 70 and was in Mexico for a semester to brush up on his Spanish.

My friend Mike, a librarian from Portland currently intentionally between jobs.  After a semester in Mexico, he thought he might go down to Guatemala to study for awhile.  He didn't seem to like the idea of plans, but he was sure he wasn't going back to the library.

Juan Carlos, who taught most of my grammar classes and who was even more fun than he looks in this picture.

Two burros just outside the door to the school.  Burros are still used to carry heavy loads up the steep streets, much too narrow for cars.  This load was a little too big for a single Mexican laborer, but I also often saw workers carrying up sacks of cement or propane gas cylinders which had to weigh well over a hundred pounds.

The altar made by Mexican students at our school in remembrance of a secretary who died last year.  Everything on the table, including placement, had a practical or symbolic value for the spirits of the dead loved ones

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Street art produced by public school students for Day of the Dead.  Materials consisted of various seeds, beans, flowers, and dyed sawdust and wood shavings.  These were all gone the next day.

Ultimo dia

It’s my last day in school.  I’m taking Saturday to get ready at a leisurely pace, then flying out Sunday.  I’m a little sad about leaving but looking forward to being home.  I guess that defines a good trip.

I have more pictures to post up, especially a few from Day of the Dead,, which was last Wednesday.  I haven’t uploaded them from my camera yet, so I’ll probably only get to that after I get home.  And I’ll probably write up a post-op.

And then a few weeks at home and we’re off in out trailer for the Southwest.

Vagabundo.

Immerse or drown

Since a few of my friends are planning to retire soon to Latin America, I thought I’d write a few comments on what to expect and what I’ve learned about Spanish immersion programs.  What’s good and what’s not so good:

First, it’s going to be very hard to survive anywhere in Latin America without at least some basic Spanish. 
Guanajuato is a university town that has an exchange program with Ashland.  There are about 20,000 students here and all of them study English.  Having said that, you’ll almost never meet anyone who speaks English, and especially not in the places you could most use the help: stores, restaurants, pharmacies, etc.  Even more importantly, without a year or so of university-equivalent Spanish, it’s going to be that much harder to get started.  At my school, there have been to a number of students with no Spanish at all who take two or three weeks of classes then take off for several months or a year of travel in Latin America.

Good luck.

There are some negatives about the program that I’m in, common, I think to any program like this, and all of them structural.  You can start on any Monday and take as many or as few classes as you want, including private classes.  You can stay for only one week or as long as you want.  This is a great convenience, but it also makes good scheduling almost impossible for individual students.  The mix of students changes dramatically every week, and trying to get every student in the classes they want at the level they need is nearly impossible.  I didn’t want to take any grammar classes since I need practice in listening comprehension and speaking.  I can and do study grammar on my own, but much of it is more or less absorbed through the skin.  Still, most weeks I’ve had two of four classes in grammar, and again because students come and go, there’s no coherence in the classes.  One week we’ll study one topic, the next week another.  It’s only next week, my last of five, that I actually have the right mix of classes that I’ve wanted all along.

That being said, the staff is without exception excellent.  At least they understand the grammar they are teaching very well, and since all classes are conducted entirely in Spanish, it’s good practice just to be listening to the target language, even if I do feel that other classes would be more valuable.  Generally, I think I’ve made huge progress in listening comprehension and speaking, good progress in building vocabulary, and, ironically, probably little or no progress in grammar.  I still more or less guess when to use the preterit or imperfect past tenses, two tenses in Spanish when only one will do in English.  Ditto between the two forms of the very “to be,” where English gets by just fine thank you very much with one.  Don’t even ask me about the subjunctive, which is evil and put there only to discourage gringos from staying for more than about two weeks.

On the other hand, living in Mexico, you quickly have to learn all the other tenses to speak about the past, present and future, and then  the compound tenses, such as “if I had known blah blah blah, I would have blah, blah, blah.”  Or the almost impossible, “If I [future] blah, blah, blah, I will have blah, blah, blah.”  These don’t come readily when you need them, but in class where they are patient and wait for you to put a sentence together, you can puzzle it out.

Here, immersion means immersion.  I pass four hours a day in class entirely in Spanish, and during breaks the intermediate students like me try to stay in Spanish as well.  Living in a Spanish-speaking household, I start and end my day in Spanish.   There’s very little homework since most students are here both to study and to go out drinking, but I can spend as much time as I want studying on my own.  And I’ve found one of the best tools to be television.  I can almost completely understand some programs, such as those on NatGeo.  Last night I watched a program on modern ice breakers and had no problem understanding almost all of it.  Wow, who knew about ice breakers?  The narrators speak more slowly than normal and they’re trained to enunciate very clearly.  If only everyone would speak that way I’d be feeling pretty, pretty good (as Larry David says).

What I call street Spanish is a different story.  Outside of the classroom, people speak very fast, and in Mexico they use so many idiomatic expressions that even if you can distinguish individual words, you still won’t understand much of what they say.  As a simple example, “Es pan comida,” translates as “it’s eaten bread,” but idiomatically it means, “It’s easy.”  That one’s kind of obvious, which is the reason I understand it.  There are about a thousand more that are used every day that simply don’t translate at all.  I have a list of a few hundred in Spanish/English and English/Spanish, but they’re a lot harder to learn than simple vocabulary.

So in the end, there’s a lot of classroom and more formal Spanish I can understand quite well, but a lot more everyday Spanish that might as well be Greek. One guidebook I have suggests the only way you’ll ever learn real Spanish is to get a Mexican girlfriend or boyfriend.  That not being an option for me, watching soap operas or movies at least helps me to process what I hear much faster than I would otherwise.  Unfortunately, most movies and all soap operas suck, so I can only stay with it for an hour or so.   

Also:  Mexican Spanish is what we learn in school and I’m guessing what is taught in programs such as Rosetta Stone, but the language varies a great deal from region to region, even in the same country.  Columbian Spanish, for example, just drops many syllables, and you have to have a pretty good ear to catch what’s being said.   Still, with a little practice you can pick it up, and if you can say it in Mexican Spanish, they can understand you in any region.

Finally, this is a very inexpensive way to travel and study.  My classes are about $120 a week, and my homestay is $27 a day including meals, although I still eat many of my meals in town.  If I do it again, I might take a room in a hostel just for the little bit of added privacy.  I’m not sure I gain much from the simple conversations I have in the home, but most if not all schools can place you in a hostel of some kind for a comparable price.  The school I’m attending has a very nice hostel with private rooms and baths, and I’d be very happy to stay there.  It’s also close to El Centro, as opposed to the long walk downtown from where I live and the punishing walk back up the hill.  Since I’ve been fairly sick with a bad cold almost the whole time I’ve been here, I always take a cab back.  There’s also a bus which only costs five pesos, about four cents, but I haven’t quite had the nerve to try it yet.  I worry that if I get on the wrong bus—easy to do—I might have a hard time finding my way back, and the cab ride is only about $2.50.

So, bottomlinewise, this is a great way to travel and a real jump start for anyone wanting to improve language skills rapidly.  If I could stay a year, I think I’d be approaching a level of proficiency if not fluency, but that’s way beyond my budget and way more time than I’d choose to stay away from Mary and home.  Too bad, because this is a great adventure and a wonderful experience.  If I were planning to actually to move to Latin America, I’d definitely start it out this way.  At the end of five weeks, you’ll be a lot more competent in the language and definitely know if this is a place you actually want to live. 

........ 

Today is the last day of Festival Cervantino, and I’ll be glad when everybody goes home.  I’ve been to several excellent concerts, all but one free, but last night was the traditional every-kid-from-Mexico-City-comes-to-Guanajuato-with-a-sleeping-bag-and-a-lot-of tequila end of the festival, and the streets were una locura.  I went downtown to eat and quickly turned back to a Swedish restaurant that serves good meatballs and is almost always empty.  It’s a refuge when I don’t want to be in Mexico anymore, which happens from time to time. 

Then I went home and watched some soap operas.  

Mary arrived Monday night ten days ago, and I happily met her at the airport with a very bad cold which had been coming on over the weekend.  Despite the cold, we got out in the city a little on Tuesday and had a good time exploring the many little streets and shops, but by that night I was really sick and worrying about things like pneumonia. At the least, I was worried I’d be sick the whole time she was here and pretty much ruin her visit.

Instead, of course, she got sick too, so we spent our ten days together coughing and sneezing and hocking up phlegm.  Not that it slowed us down much.  Our only real concession is that we always took a cab  back up to the house and I never had a chance to watch her nearly die climbing the hill.

Still, we had a great time together even if we were only running at about fifty percent. 

While I was in class, Mary went out exploring on her own and met me after school.   We tried a number of restaurants, from fairly expensive to the most humble.  Generally, humble was better.  We also caught some great concerts, including a free one in a plaza by an incredibly hot traditional/modern group called Sol del Monton.  I’ve got the DVD. 

Yesterday was her last full day, so I skipped school and we spent our time downtown checking off a few of the must-see locations here in Guanajuato.  Pipila is a statue of a hero of the Mexican war of independence against Spain, and although his most famous exploit, storming the gate of a Spanish fort in the middle of town, is probably a myth, there’s a huge statue of him on top of a hill across from our house.  The view from there is even more impressive than from my casa and it looks down on El Centro.  Then we went to the Diego Rivera museum and from there on to a historical museum, including some pre-Columbian art.  Guanajuato was founded in the mid-1500s, so there’s a lot of history to cover in a few hours.

We also went on a tour last weekend to the pyramid at Peralta, about an hour away.  It’s not Teotihuacán, but impressive enough in its own right.  After that, the tour took us to the largest tequila factory in the world.  Interesting in itself, although we had to pass on the tasting room.  We miss out on a lot not being drinkers.

Today I stayed out of school again to go with Mary to the airport.  Because of security, I couldn’t go with her even up to the ticket counter, so we said a quick goodbye, and now I’m on my own again back in our little room.  I trust her flight got out okay and she should be back in Klamath Falls at 11pm local time.  I’ll send off an email in the morning and try to call later.  [She made it without incident.]

There’s still a week to go of the festival, but like the locals, I’m rather looking forward to its end.  It’s not hard to imagine how crazy it gets downtown with tens of thousands of visitors, a fair number of them students from Mexico City who come up to drink and raise hell, and despite all the great, often free events, it will be nice to have our quiet little city back again.  I hope to spend the next ten days really concentrating on my classes and studying in my spare time, though I’ll also certainly try to take in a few more events and do a little more exploring. 

Time has passed quickly, and although I’ve sometimes missed home or grown tired of living in Spanish nearly twenty-four hours a day, I’m already feeling a little sad about leaving.  I met a man at a little coffee house close to school, and he was talking obviously native Spanish to his wife.  And then he turned to me and he chatted awhile in his perfect English.  Turns out he’s a Puerto Rican now living in Denver, but he comes here every year for the festival. 

“It’s kind of addicting,” he said.

                                                        Picture of the Week

                                                      Harley riders are the same all over the world

If you had told me a year ago. . . .

that I would be sitting in an outdoor amphitheatre in Guanajuato, Mexico with an American classmate and two of my Mexican teachers listening to an absolutely first-rate jazz big-band from Scandanavia, I would have said,

“Really?  How cool is that?”

But that’s where I was Wednesday night for the opening ceremony of Festival Cervantino, a series of concerts, plays, and dance performances, plus street performers ranging from Mariachi to jugglers, that officially runs the last two weeks of October. 

Most of these could be considered world-class presentations:  Examples include the Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestra, The Oslo String Orchestra, and the Chinese National Opera of Peking.  The Mexican National Opera is performing Il Postino, based on the wonderful Italian movie of the same name and written by the Mexican composer Daniel Catan.  There are a total of five operas, twenty-something classical concerts ranging from full symphonies to string quartets, and another twenty or so pop and jazz concerts.

Who knew there was a Norwegian blues band with an international reputation?  I’m looking forward to hearing an Afro-Cuban jazz band that’s actually from Cuba, and a variety of Afro-pop and regional musics from Latin America.  Many events are performed at the same time at various venues around the city, so there’s no way to see it all, but navigating the program is half the fun.

Festival Cervantino is the largest arts festival in Mexico, and I can’t think of anything of its kind in the United States.  Maybe New York City on a slow day, but otherwise. . . .

Guanajuato is designated a “Patrimonio Cutural de la Humanidad” by the United Nations because of its plethora of well-preserved and restored colonial cathedrals and museums, including, for example, the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo museum in the restored house where Rivera grew up.  (Been there.)  Magnificent paintings by both, but unfortuneately, there are no Rivera murals in Guanajuato.

So anyway, here I am sitting in the amphitheater back in the free seats, surrounded by mostly young Mexicans and listenting to one of the best jazz concerts I’ve attended.  I’d compare the band to Wynton Marsallis’ Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.  The music is complex, technically about impossible to play, and a challenge to listen to.  Just my stuff. About a third of the crowd back in the free seats left after three or four numbers, but their seats were quickly taken by people who were waiting outside. 

The whole thing was magical.  How could a thing like this happen in Mexico, a country whose reputation now is almost entirely one of violence and terrorism, and how is it I happen to be here?  Life constantly throws suprises at us, and sometimes they can turn out to be among the best moments of our lives.

After the concert, there immediately began a long fireworks display, accompanied by very loud recordings of stirring classical music:  Handel, of course, and I think Brahms and Beethoven.  The whole thing was so spectacular and emotionally stirring it made me cry.  But then, cat food commercials sometimes make me cry. 

Afterwards, my classmate Eric and I went off on our own, and Eric, being a true adventurer, led me to another one of those crowded bars and restaurants I never would have gone into on my own, where he threw back shots of tequila and I, of course, had my usual Diet Coke.  We ate about a ton of tacos and the whole thing cost about four dollars.  I’ve found and been told by other students that the quality of food is usually inversely proportional to the cost.  Among the best are the food stalls in the street, and I’m still happy to report that I’ve suffered no ill effects to my digestive system.  I have a little cold, though. 

Did I remember my camera for any of this?  No.

If there’s a downside here it’s that my days have been very long and tiring between five hours of Spanish classes a day, trying to make it back up to my house for lunch with my Mexican family (the big meal of the day), homework (not much), and then back out again to explore and take in the various events.

Mary arrives Monday for ten days, and I’ll probably skip a lot of classes so we can get out more on our own and concentrate on being tourists.  I’ve held back on visiting many of the places I want to see until she gets here.

Enough for now.  More later. 

Saludos.

No, I don't ride a Harley

I've been making some format changes to my blog, something I've discovered is fairly easy to do and makes for a more interesting and inviting look (I hope).  I can't get it exactly the way I want yet, but I'm still working on it.

Since these are the first changes I've ever made, I got interested in my first post and went back and found it had the title I'm using again here. I still like the original post.  The only thing that I would add is that the best question to ask if I say I ride a motorcycle is not "What kind of bike do you ride?" but "What do you like about riding?"

 I notice that my blog is now a little over five years old.  It's a wonderful opportunity to write about anything I want, whether serious or comic, and I enjoy the thought that single-digits of people are reading me.  Actually, I can now track how many people are reading me and sometimes even who they are, or if they're only a web-bot out searching for prey.  Turns out I get a lot more hits that I thought, although most of these are probably the result of Google hits when somebody searches, for example, for Guanajuato.

Still, I get the occasional email with a comment.  Generally, I think most people don't like to add comments to the blog itself because, well, it's not their blog.  I feel the same way when I'm on other people's blogs.

I can spend a remarkable amount of time on one of these posts and usually I never know if I've written anything of worth or not, what poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti called "constantly risking absurdity" (in the poem of the same name).

"What do you like about writing?"  I'll have to think about it.  Back to you in five years.

Language

I often find it a little difficult to answer when people ask me why I've spent so much time and money studying Spanish over the last four years.

"Because it's there"?

Because I enjoy it.  Because I find it fascinating.  Because I don't particularly like crossword puzzles.  Because achieving some level of competence in another language would be one of the greatest intellectual accomplishments of my life (the other being long division.)

Perhaps the most important reason, though, is that it's the best way for me to act out against the jingoist notion that English is the official language of the United States, or that the English-only movement will somehow make our culture more pure.  This is not only racist at its core, it's just sloppy thinking.  We could pass a law banning English, and it would have exactly the same effect on languages in our country: none.

So I was pleased to read this morning in Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac that much of Europe actually celebrates the diversity of language.  Here's the full excerpt:

"Today is the official European Day of Languages, which is a yearly event begun in 2001 to celebrate human language, encourage language learning, and bring attention to the importance of being multilingual in a polyglot world. On this day, everyone, young or old, is encouraged to take up a language or take special pride in his or her existing language skills.

"There are about 225 indigenous languages in Europe, which may sound like a lot but is only 3 percent of the world's total. Children's events, television and radio programs, languages classes and conferences are organized across Europe. In past years, schoolchildren in Croatia created European flags and wrote "Hello" and "I love you" in dozens of tongues while older students sang "Brother John" in German, English, and French. At a German university, a diverse group of volunteer tutors held a 90-minute crash course in half a dozen languages, like a kind of native-tongue speed-dating, groups of participants spending just 15 minutes immersed in each dialect until the room was filled with Hungarian introductions, French Christmas songs, and discussions of Italian football scores."

So today I take pride in my existing language skills, which are above average in English and a low-intermediate in Spanish.

How French is that? 

World's Greatest Outhouse

Escuela Mexicana

Somehow I lost my capacity to post an active link to my blog quite some time ago. Being a cyber dunce, I never figured out how to do it again, so any links I posted required you, the reader, to copy the link and post it into your, the reader's, browser.

 Now, cyber-specialist my wife, Mary, has shown me the secret, so above is a link to the web page for my school in Mexico, Escuela Mexican, which means Mexican School. I chose this school because I thought I could remember the name.

 By the way, the picture above shows the totally solar outhouse on Wizard's Island, smack in the middle of Crater Lake. I have no idea what the solar power is all about, but you can be sure they wouldn't put a generator out there. Now, let's post this sucker and see if it works.

Santorum

I occasionally post a link to another site for various reasons, but I've never copied an entire column by somebody else and pasted it here. Until now. Andrew Sullivan does outrage so much better than I could in this case, I've decided just to post it here. When you finish reading, you can go here to see the actual video in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mguDdsmCylU

Apologize now, Rick Santorum
by Andrew Sullivan

I have become used to hearing gay people and our lives either ignored or stigmatized or demonized in Republican debates. It is a function of a political party becoming a religion. And so my skin is pretty thick at this point, and my outrage button eroded by two decades of learning to ignore this stuff and focus on the positive arguments we have to make. It's not that I didn't react at the time:

10.18 pm. Santorum claims bizarrely that repealing DADT means permission for sexual activity for gays in the military. This is a lie. The same rules of sexual misconduct apply to gays and straights alike. And a gay servicemember is booed by this foul crowd. Santorum keeps saying "sex is not an issue." But that's the current policy! This has nothing to do with sex, as Santorum surely knows. And again, the crowd reveals itself as hateful - even when it comes to those serving their country in uniform. This is one core reason why I cannot be a Republican. So many are bigots - and no one - no one - stands up against them. They're a bunch of bullies congratulating themselves on rooting out the queers.

But as I went to bed last night, the scattered boos for an American soldier in the field at any debate began to sink in. And Santorum's despicable lie in response - that repealing DADT somehow means license of gay sexual misconduct in the armed services - was intended to reduce that soldier, his life and work, to Santorum's obsession: the intrinsic evil of gay sex. Again, this is usual. Gays are used to being reduced to sexual acts rather than being seen as full human beings, like straight people, with sexuality sure, but a whole lot of other things as well.
But somehow the fact that these indignities were heaped on a man risking his life to serve this country, a man ballsy enough to make that video, a man in the uniform of the United States ... well, it tells me a couple of things. It tells me that these Republicans don't actually deep down care for the troops, if that means gay troops. Their constant posturing military patriotism has its limits.
The shocking silence on the stage - the fact that no one challenged this outrage - also tells me that this kind of slur is not regarded as a big deal. When it came to it, even Santorum couldn't sanction firing all those servicemembers who are now proudly out. But that's because he was forced to focus not on his own Thomist abstractions, but on an actual person. Throughout Republican debates, gays are discussed as if we are never in the audience, never actually part of the society, never fully part of families, never worthy of even a scintilla of respect. When you boo a servicemember solely because he's gay, you are saying he is beneath contempt, that nothing he does or has done can counterweigh the vileness of his sexual orientation.
And then I think of all those gay servicemembers who have died for this country, or been wounded in battle, or been on tours year after year ... and the fury builds. Even GOProud, the two gay guys who love Ann Coulter, issued this statement:

“Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology. That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done – put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.
Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?”
He can't. Apologize, Santorum.

Abrumado

My departure date to Mexico quickly approaches, October 1st, when I leave for five weeks in Guanajuato.

Guanajuato? Careful readers will remember that I actually couldn’t think of the name Guanajuato when I decided to register and go to Mexico for five weeks, so I signed up for classes in Guadalajara instead. “Sounds like” often gets it for me.

It’s complicated, but never mind. Guanajuato is Ashland’s sister city, and its university is the sister institution to Southern Oregon University, at which I completed my nine-week intensive course in Spanish last summer. I might even meet some people I know from Ashland so I’ll have an opportunity to speak English and not have to suffer the humiliation of trying to get by in Spanish all the time.

My goal is to speak as little Spanish as possible. Off hand, I realize I don’t know how to say “off hand,” or “short latte,” or “Pardon me, but that’s my umbrella,” or “I’ve always been strongly opposed to American policy in Latin America. It’s not my fault!”

(Actually, I could say that last one now that I think about it, but it wouldn’t be pretty.)

Surprisingly, I’ve met and talked to a few people who’ve been to Guanajuato, and they said it’s their favorite destination in all of Mexico. We have a guide book, and of course, there’s plenty of information on the Web. I think I’m going to love this place. And Mary is joining me for ten days mid-month October.

Still. . . . Remember that the only good travel writing involves calamity. I’m sure I’ll be posting fairly regular updates here, so let’s hope I don’t have anything interesting to say.

I’ll be attending the Escuela Mexicana:

http://escuelamexicana.com/

Mamas, don't let your sons grow up to be cowboys

The Republican candidates’ debate: Couldn’t watch more than about ten minutes of it, can’t really bring myself to write about it. Here’s a quote from Jonathan Chait over at the Daily Beast today which pretty well sums up how I felt about what little I saw:

“The media seems to consider Romney the winner. Pardon the condescension, but they’re not thinking like Republican base voters. Romney approaches every question as if he is in an actual debate, trying to provide the most intellectually compelling answer available, within the bounds of political expediency. Perry treats questions as interruptions. What scientists do you trust on climate change? I don’t want to risk the economy. Are you taking a radical position on social security? We can have reasons or we can have results. His total liberation from the constraints of reason give Perry a chance to represent the Republican id in a way Romney simply cannot match.”

The Republican id is a scary thing by itself, and Perry is a bully. His biggest applause line came when he bragged about his record of presiding over 236 executions as governor of Texas. His response both to Romney and the moderators when challenged on points of fact, “Wanna make something of it?”

I’m mostly staying off the news lately and a happier man for it, but as the election draws near, I’ll succumb to my addiction and start to obsess on every word and every development, and it’s not going to be fun. The actual thought of Perry as president turns my stomach, the worst of Ronald Reagan and George Bush combined. Times two.

I’m beginning to feel more and more like the kid who grows up in a crazy, dysfunctional family: I can’t possibly be related to these people. I must have been left on the doorstep by a band of Gypsies.

Two great books

For $9.52, I just ordered from amazon.com the 50th anniversary edition of Catch-22 with a new forward by author Joseph Heller. I also went ahead and ordered The Catcher in the Rye for old-times' sake: $8.35.

No two books were more important to me, and to this day, though I’ve never reread either, these two books still stand out in my mind as the best expression of who I was and what I felt about the world as a sixteen-year-old kid. They had an enormous emotional impact on me. I felt as though if I had the words to tell it, this is what I would say to the world.

Make of that what you will.

Morris Dickstein has written an excellent retrospective review of Catch-22 here:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/09/04/joseph-heller-catch-22-50th-anniversary-how-the-novel-changed-america.html

I just hope I don’t find the whole goddam thing too depressing and all.

Reefer madness

President Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs in June of 1971, forty years now of a failed policy which cost the federal government fifteen billion dollars last year alone. And federal spending is only part of it. Add in the total cost of law enforcement at the state and local levels and you’re talking enough real money that it’s amazing Republicans haven’t zeroed in on the War on Drugs as just another failed policy of the federal government.

Except Ron Paul.

Also add in the cost to our legal system of arresting, jailing, trying and imprisoning millions of Americans every year just on drug charges. Your kid can do hard time and have a lifetime criminal record for possession of an ounce of pot. In fact, most people in jail for every possible crime from check fraud to burglary to armed robbery are there because they were trying to make enough money to feed their need for price-inflated illegal drugs. If pot were legal, prison populations and neighborhood crime would both decline dramatically.

Still, to appreciate the enormous damage the war on drugs can do to an entire country, you have to look to Mexico, where acts of atrocity and corruption barely make the news north of the border unless they somehow surpass the norm. You have to go a long way to surpass the norm in Mexico these days, which is why the Zeta Cartel decided to attack a casino in Monterrey—a bingo parlor, really—with assault weapons and then empty five-gallon cans of gasoline on the carpets and drapes and flick a match on the way out. Fifty-three people died, good enough to warrant a mention on NBC news the next day.

It’s at least thirty years past time to acknowledge that we’ve lost the war and need to start looking at what a successful peace might look like. For marijuana, by far the biggest cash crop for the cartels, the answer is simple: decriminalization, if not outright legalization.

The concern with legalization is that it will make pot more available and
lower prices so substantially that many more young people will try it and take their first steps down the path to meth addiction or worse. (There’s nothing worse.) This argument simply doesn’t hold up. I can get an ounce of pot in less than a half hour from this very chair I’m sitting in right now, and most of that time would involve getting dressed and combing my hair.

And enough pot to stay high for a month would certainly cost less than a cell phone plan, and I don’t see too many kids who can’t afford a phone. (I actually know one kid in the neighborhood who has offered to do yard work to pay for his. I think he might be the last kid in the United States who still realizes that work and reward are somehow linked.)

All of the arguments for legalization are old and obvious: we would control and tax marijuana. We would regulate its use in the same way we regulate alcohol. Kids under eighteen would face some legal consequences for using it. Providing it to kids under eighteen would be worse. You couldn’t drive while stoned. Your employer would still have the right to test and fire you for use, even off duty. The military would have a zero-tolerance policy. Airline pilots would avoid all brownies on the off-chance that grandma had slipped a little faux-regano in as a joke.

Legalization would take hundreds of billions of dollars away from the drug cartels and substantially reduce the levels of corruption and violence in Mexico, as well as law-enforcement, court, and prison costs here in the United States. The cartels would survive, of course, especially as long as meth and cocaine remained a lucrative source of fast, easy cash. But they would be weakened to a degree that Mexico might actually move to reduce corruption and effectively fight them.

Cartel leaders should fear legalization more than they ever fear each other.

It would be foolish to believe that legalization of pot would solve all of our drug-related problems, especially addiction itself. But it would allow us to channel a small portion of the enforcement dollars into treatment. Legalization of marijuana would provide a laboratory for decriminalizing other drugs, and in the end we would find what programs work best for individual, community, and national health.

Legalization doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. Like gay marriage, it will probably arrive by a series of small steps rather than one big initiative.

Still, forty years of failed policy might one day lead to changes based on simple evidence and logic. May the War on Drugs not live to see fifty.

Vamoos a Mexico

I wasn’t even planning to go to the University of Guadalajara. I was actually trying to think of the name University of Guanajuato because it’s a sister institution to Southern Oregon University, where I took my nine-week intensive course in Spanish last summer. But I couldn’t think of Guanajuato and I was mostly persuaded it must be Guadalajara I wanted since both start with G and have too many u’s a’s, and j’s. It’s easy to see how I got the two confused.

It seems to be a happy confusion, though, because when I got to the Guadawada home page I found out they have a five-week Spanish for foreigners program that runs throughout the year. Guanawana only offers a regular sixteen-week semester, which I couldn’t afford in terms of either money or time away from home and Mary. Or money.

So after a few minutes’ thought, I took the online placement test to see which of ten levels I would be put in. I haven’t heard any results yet, but I didn’t feel like I did too well.

Then went to the registration page and filled that out. I wonder what they’ll think of me since I had to click on a year of birth and their earliest choice was 1950. I was born in 1948, so I lied about my age. Then I had to click on my year in college, which didn’t offer a post-doc option, so I clicked on senior. Then I had to pick a school where I am a student, but this one offered a write-in choice, so I said non-admit. Chances are good they’ll have no idea what non-admit means.

I had, however, no trouble entering my credit card information to pay the non-refundable $150 registration fee, so in the end I think I’ll be accepted and they’ll find a place for me.

I’m excited about the trip. I haven’t studied a lot in the year since I finished the program at SOU. It’s hard to study in a vacuum but that’s mostly what I’ve done in the four years since I first started at the local community college with a “conversational Spanish” course, which in no way led to any conversational skills beyond maybe ordering a chimmichonga at Taco Bell.

So after the four years since I began, I’m really only at a college two-year level, which is to say not much. Right now, though, I’m meeting with two native-speaker tutors who I contacted through an ad, so I’m trying to cram and be as well-prepared as I can be when I get there. I have to keep reminding myself that one goes into a program like this to learn Spanish, not because one already speaks Spanish.

And I’m also a little nervous, though not much. I worry that there will be a fuss at the border since I’ll carry in a two-months’ supply of my prescriptions, of which there are five, plus a dozen of so boxes of OTC medicines that I think I need to survive. Just because I’m something of a hypochondriac doesn’t mean I won’t get diarrhea. I worry I’ll miss the first day or five because I have diarrhea.

I’ll have to take a cab to the home of my home-stay Mexican family, which shouldn’t be a problem, but then I wonder what my family will be like. Then I’ll have to find the university and the right room in time for a Monday morning orientation, then I worry I might have some lazy and ill-tempered instructors, which is probably my most legitimate concern based on past experience with faculty in general.

According to the school’s website, Guadalabamba is “the cradle of Mexican folklore and the traditional culture that is most representative of the nation: mariachi music, charrería and Tequila.”

Great. I absolutely hate mariachi music, I don’t drink, and I can’t find charrería in any of my Spanish dictionaries. It might share the same root with “charrasquear,” which means either to strum a guitar or to stab a person. (I did not make that up.)

I did find a blog of one former student, though, and it seems the tequila was the source of most of her entries, with only a few brief comments about the actual school. She said that to really keep up, she’d like have to study like four hours a day or whatever, so that’s a good sign for me. I don’t see myself going out a lot with all my twenty-something fellow classmates drinking Diet Cokes while they get shitfaced on the local distilled spirits and dirty dance to the primitive polka rhythms of the native mariachi music

Speaking of getting stabbed, though, I take the U. at its website-word when it says it is located in a safe, charming neighborhood where I will enjoy the many restaurants, shops Starbucks and a Wal-Mart as long as I take cabs at night and don’t stray too far during the day. Do not approach large groups of idle young men with tattoos on their necks. Do not make eye contact with their women.

I’m actually not at all worried about security, despite Mexico’s well-deserved reputation for violence which in places like Ciudad Juarez can make Baghdad feel like Colonial Williamsburg. What can go wrong?

So, it’s “¡Arriba, arriba!” or “Up there, up there!” to Mexico, and I have to call the consulate in Portland to see if I need a visa and call my doctor since I’m sure I’ll need lots of shots. If you don’t need some shots to go there, it’s not an adventure.

I have lots of other things to do, and I leave in a month. I could probably be ready to go tomorrow, but a month will give me extra time to worry about details.

Real money

Thank dog it’s over for now. If I learned one thing in this endless debate, it’s that a trillion dollars must be a lot of money. I’m old enough that I still remember when a billion dollars was a lot of money. The late Senator Everett Dirkson famously said, “a billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” Now you’re not. Even a billion isn’t enough to get the country’s attention. A billion is the new million. Now, if you’re serious about being a Republican, you have to talk about a trillion.

Of course, I have no idea how much money a trillion dollars is. If you stacked hundred dollar bills on top of each other, would they reach the moon?

In our little town, even a thousand dollars is still a lot of money. The city has been up in our neighborhood the last few days repaving the street in front of our house. For three days, we’ve had heavy equipment rolling around, making enough noise to wake the dead and even me. Yesterday, I thought the backup beeper on the backhoe was my alarm clock and kept mashing the snooze button until I realized there wasn’t going to be any more snoozing. This was at six a.m., and I usually sleep to about nine. I keep late hours.

We’re really happy to see our tax dollars at work like this. Since we moved into the house twenty-seven years ago, there has been a gravel strip between our sidewalk and the road. Winters, the strip would turn to mud, and the next spring I’d have to bring in more gravel to build it back up. To get my motorcycle out of the garage, I had to roll it backwards down our steep driveway and cross the gravel strip and make that backwards turn to be facing the right direction in the road. It was always a little tense, and fairly often my foot would slip out from under me if I had to touch down in the gravel. Fortunately, I never fell. Now I can roll down backwards and play the game of trying to never put a foot down.

We were lucky to get this work done because the crew chief said there are hundreds of miles of roads in town that need repair, but there’s no money to keep up. Our street was seriously breaking up, but there are others in just as bad a shape, and even some which are still not paved at all. The money for the job came from federal EPA funds because we have enough dust and other particles in the air to be a health hazard, especially in winter when lots of people still burn wood to heat their homes. We hate wood burning and get hit especially hard by one stove from a house on the diagonal behind us, but for a lot of families, it’s burn free wood from a National Forest permit or freeze in the dark.

So a few thousand here and a few thousand there keeps a couple of crews busy doing badly needed road work. This is almost certainly a program that will be cut under the new budget. Republicans hate the EPA, and they don’t care about these small programs that keep people employed doing important work. Next year this time, half of those guys or more will be out of work, drawing unemployment and food stamps, and they’ll lose their health insurance.

Tough beans. We're the Republican Party, and it's not our problem.

A few thousand here, a few thousand there, pretty soon you’re talking real people thrown into financial distress and a big hit to the local economy. At least we got our road paved.

They will always be among us

A new report from our conservative friends at the Heritage Foundation exposes the myth of poverty in America: shockingly, most poor people have refrigerators and microwaves! Not all of them, maybe, but lots of them also have X-boxes and air conditioning. Thus, I guess, we need to quit giving subsidies to the poor until they start acting poor by eating rancid food cooked on wood they gather from discarded pallets in those trash-filled yards of theirs.

They probably also have heaters and catchers’ mitts, but the survey didn’t ask those questions, nor did it ask if they can afford to run their air conditioners.

Oh, and you’re not homeless if you’re living in a homeless shelter, which might also suggest you’re not dead if you’re in a mortuary.

This is the latest reprise of the old Reagan myth of the welfare Cadillac, which he used to excellent effect to make substantial cuts on the anti-poverty programs of Johnson’s Great Society. But the big welfare cutter was that uber-liberal Bill Clinton, who succeeded in ending welfare as we know it by ending welfare as we know it.

Simply put, there are no poor if we give them food and housing and energy subsidies and they then spend some of their vast discretionary income on luxury items like toys for their kids. The survey, somehow, never asked questions as to whether the rich sometimes live beyond their means. I know the middle-class never does, which is why there have been so few foreclosures on McMansions.

What the study really shows is just how uncharitable the conservative movement is at heart. (Rich people have hearts, too!) In their minds, the fact that poverty programs—radically reduced in recent years and due to be cut even more in the debt-ceiling budgets of both Republicans and Democrats—have allowed some poor people to actually afford what most of us consider the necessities of life just shows that we need to cut back more on poverty programs.

I’ve always known this, but it’s refreshing to see a published report that makes it so abundantly clear: the poor don’t matter to conservatives. No more of this trickle-down bullshit. Let them eat cake!

Poverty in the United States is defined as an annual income of $22,000 for a family of four. I’d like to see the fellows of the Heritage Foundation live for a year on $22,000, even if they get food stamps and free health care, then come back and write a report on poverty in America. I’ll loan them a pencil.

More on this study here:

http://www.theshriverbrief.org/2011/07/articles/economic-justice/because-you-have-a-refrigerator-and-a-stove-you-are-not-poor/

A fine race

Australian Casey Stoner makes the pass that would give him the lead over reigning champion Jorge Lorenzo. It was a fine race, and two other races in the other classes were also exceptionally exciting.

Mary and I took a ride into the mountains in in our aging but still classy Mitsubishi Spyder convertible and had lunch on the deck of a good cafe. The weather was perfect. Then back home to enjoy a lazy Sunday around the house while I watched races and practiced Spanish at my leisure.

It was an entirely above-average day.

(Notice how I'm not writing about politics? I'm not even thinking about politics.

Politics? What politics??)

Race time

Motorcycle Grand Prix racing isn’t particularly popular in the United States. Worldwide, MotoGP ranks second only to soccer in popularity, with huge crowds at the races and television viewers in the millions. In Europe, Asia and South America, small, fast bikes have always been the favorites of riders and racers, totally unlike the Harley culture that dominates here. Today's race at Laguna Seca in Monterey will draw about 80,000 spectators, and part of the thrill of being there is just riding in with tens of thousands of other riders and seeing the hills covered with parked motorcycles, probably ninety percent of them sport bikes of one stripe or another.

Even without much background in this kind of racing, though, a GP Championship race should be exciting to watch. These are the greatest riders of their generation on the fastest bikes in the world, multimillion dollar thoroughbreds with full factory support. Top speeds on most tracks exceed 200 miles per hour, but the real excitement is in the corners, where riders achieve seemingly impossible lean angles, hanging off the inside of the bikes and dragging their knees on the ground, riding at 99 percent for the whole race and all-too-frequently making the small mistake or misjudgment that sends them flying in spectacular crashes.

Most regular viewers will admit that part of the excitement is in the crashes, but we don’t have to feel too guilty about this. Track safety improvements over the years mean that there hasn’t been a GP fatality in my memory, and although broken bones and dislocations happen, most of the time the rider jumps up and tries to restart the fallen bike to get back in the race. Even when a rider is down and can’t remount, it’s rare to be out with injuries for more than one or two races.



These guys are tough. American rider Colin Edwards fractured his collar bone this season and was screwed back together with seventeen titanium pins. His doctor said he couldn’t ride again until he could do some push-ups, so Colin dropped to the ground and put out two. He said the pain almost knocked him out, but he was back for the next race and finished third in the rain, a wet track meaning you have to slow down a little and ride with more finesse and smoothness, which makes the race a little less physical.

The real thrill, though, is in watching the close racing for the lead and epic battles back in the pack for spots as low as tenth or even lower. The best riders turn in lap times only a few thousands of a second apart on tracks that are typically between two and three miles long, and they race with an amazing consistency. If a rider loses a full second in a lap it usually means he’s made an error and misjudged a corner or got stuck fighting it out for position with another rider, which can force taking a defensive line through a turn.

I watched qualifying last night, in which riders have a full hour to put in their fastest lap, then go back to the pits to make micro-adjustments in the bike’s setup, then back out onto the track. The true qualifying laps come in the last ten minutes, when setup is as close to perfect as they can get it, and riders put their heads down to turn in a 99.9-percent performance to determine their starting position on the grid.

Pole position at Laguna was taken by Jorge Lorenzo, the Spanish rider who won the championship last year. Second is Australian Casey Stoner, off the pace by only seven one-thousands of a second. In fact, the first seven riders are all within seven-tenths of a second of each other, typical of GP qualifying. It amazes me to think that rider skills and bike development are all so close that less than one second over a two-mile track can mean the difference between a world champion and a distant also-ran. At these speeds, a winner with a two or three second lead over the rest of the pack will have a huge lead in actual distance. More exciting is when two or three riders battle it out and finish within inches of each other, the winner often determined by a well-planned pass in the last turn.



The races are most exciting, of course, if you follow the whole season and know each of the riders and how the standings have evolved over the last nine races, with eight more to go after Laguna. For even a first-time watcher, though, there should be enough adrenaline flowing to get you through the rest of the afternoon.

This is the second year in a row that I won’t make it down to Laguna Seca for the race. Last year I was taking an intensive Spanish summer course at Southern Oregon University. Although classes ran from Monday to Thursday, there was no way I could be gone for two or three days without studying. This year I’m recently back from two weeks in Washington, DC and a two-day bike excursion to Reno where I met up with several friends and got lucky at the blackjack tables, coming home up about a hundred dollars after expenses. In the end, I decided it was time to stay home for a few days straight.

Prior to that, I had an attendance record that was mostly unbroken for a lot of years; I can’t really say how many. I remember at least once leaving the track late in the afternoon after the last race and riding home straight through with only gas breaks, getting home well after midnight and then teaching classes the next morning. Usually, I’d just miss classes and ride home Monday.

Watching on television is almost as good, though, and actually even better for seeing the up-close battles that go on the full length of the track.

Racing is covered on Speed Channel, today’s race starting at 5pm Eastern time, 2pm out here on the Best Coast. There’s still time to set up your DVR.

Deus ex machina

The people we count on to take reasonable care of us are letting us down. Like almost all Americans, I’m disgusted by our nation’s leaders’ handling of the debt ceiling crisis. The budget negotiations are where Congress fights out its taxing and spending plan for the next year. Raising the debt ceiling should be a routine procedural event that happens mostly out of public sight, a page 5 story at best. Instead, Republicans are using it as yet one more opportunity to pile on to President Obama just to make him look bad while they ignore our real problems, primarily crushing unemployment and millions of Americans living hand to mouth with little or no hope of improvement any time soon. Or ever.

And like almost all of us who voted for Obama, I’m disappointed in his performance. To give him credit, he’s trying to do what he said he would do when he came to Washington: create a new kind of politics that rises above party politics and special interests and instead engages in genuine problem solving. Still, it was at best an unrealistic hope from the beginning, and it was clear from even before his first day in office that Republicans weren’t playing by the same rules. Quite the contrary.

So now we have the Tea Party extremists holding enough votes in the house to defeat any compromise, even if it’s tilted heavily towards Republican goals. They hold such power because they’re crazy. Game theory points out that when one side appears completely irrational in its demands, the other side will always make major concessions. It also points out that when one side really is completely irrational, it will crash the system. You can only negotiate a hostage crisis if the bad guys haven’t already decided to get as much press as they can, then kill all the hostages anyway.

We’re the hostages.

All of this has been too depressing to write about again, so I’m glad to see in a poll published today that most Americans still give high approval ratings to at least one big player: God. A majority of fifty-two percent of Americans approve of God’s performance, though nine percent disapprove and forty percent are unsure. Only an even fifty percent approve of God’s handling of natural disasters, a surprising number since God causes natural disasters, but I guess half of the population thinks he does a good enough job cleaning up after Himself.

And a substantial majority of seventy-one percent approve of how God created the universe. I have to agree with them that the universe works very well indeed. I mean, look at string theory.

A majority of Americans still like Obama as a person, even though they disapprove of his performance. The poll didn’t ask if people still like God as a person, but apparently they do.

We sure need His help right now, some kind of "plot device whereby a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.” Deus ex machina.

What that could possibly be, God only knows.