Monday, September 26, 2011

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? 

Saturday, September 24, 2011

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.

Friday, September 23, 2011

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.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

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/

Thursday, September 08, 2011

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.

Monday, September 05, 2011

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.