Barak

The media have at least mentioned what a historic occasion is the nomination of Barak Obama, but only just. Despite my vow to quit watching the nightly news on any of the networks, I tuned in last Wednesday when Obama had locked up the Democratic nomination. It seemed the commentators couldn’t move on quickly enough to the story of Hillary and whether or not she would go after the vice-presidential nomination.

This was Obama’s day and a day of historic proportions, and the television media reduced it to what will become a footnote of the political campaign. Not to take away anything from Hillary Clinton’s own historic campaign, but still. . . .

It all made me reflect back on some of my own experiences involving race in America, only a few of which I will relate here.

In 1967, though I barely understood the significance at the time, “The case is Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 ruling in which a unanimous Supreme Court found that state laws prohibiting interracial marriage violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The decision has been on my mind recently because of the death this month of Mildred Loving, the African American woman who dared to marry a white man and try to live with him in Virginia.” (I quote from an online essay and apologize that I’ve lost the link.)

“. . . My car radio crackled with the tinny voice of Virginia's lawyer urging the court not to usurp the state's "legitimate legislative objective of preventing the sociological and psychological evils which attend interracial marriages."

This was part of the backdrop against which I was being drafted into the army and only months away from landing in Vietnam. I made a quick rush down to the Coast Guard office to see if they were looking for any help but ended up enlisting as a GI in hopes of staying out of the infantry.

In January of 1968, I was at Fort Gordon, Georgia in Signal Corps school. Weekends, we would go into Augusta, where in the bus stations I first encountered drinking fountains and bathrooms labeled “white” and “colored.” I felt like I had landed in a different country.

In April, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and my company went through a quick day of riot control training in case we had to go into Augusta to put down riots. We were issued rifles and bayonets and confined to the company compound on ready alert for the week. A lot of good we would have done. Fort Gordon was also home to an MP school and an Airborne school, and presumably they would have gone in first. The Signal Corps motto, we said among ourselves, was “Last to Fight!”

Augusta didn’t riot, although plenty of other cities did. In May I was in Vietnam, and racial tensions in my unit were high. They didn’t get any better in the two years I had left in the army.

The struggle for civil rights, and even voting rights, has been a background to my whole like, starting with my earliest memories of the Freedom Riders when I was very young. Some of those early activists were murdered and their murderers are only now being brought to justice, some fifty years later, racist old men with hate still in their eyes. I celebrate their belated convictions.

I watched, as we all did, news reports of demonstrations in Southern cities in which peaceful protesters were beaten, had fire hoses and police dogs turned on them. We watched as National Guard troops, ordered in by President Johnson, escorted black children into newly integrated schools while white parents screamed hateful, shameful slurs at them.

So it says everything to me that we Democrats have now nominated an African-American to be our next president. It seems to me still utterly impossible that I am seeing this in my lifetime. Obama is a remarkable man, but right now he looks to me like a very fragile human being. I see him and I see my own experience of a fifty-year struggle for civil rights in America, an observer’s experience, but still one that has deeply shaped my consciousness. I hope he’s up to it. I hope we all, finally, are.

How to be a famous cartoonist

In the short list of reasons to go on living, I include the cartoons in the New Yorker. In recent years, there has been a contest on the last page in which readers are invited to submit their own captions for cartoon drawings. I don't know what the prize is other than being able to say you wrote for the New Yorker, but for most New Yorker readers, that would be enough.

So if you're interested in reading how one man did it, go to http://www.slate.com/ today to read "How To Win the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest: A champion reveals the recipe for victory," by Patrick House. An excerpt here:

"Today I can finally update my résumé to include "Writer, The New Yorker." Yes, I won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and I'm going to tell you how I did it. These observations have been culled from months of research and are guaranteed to help you win, too. (Note from Slate's lawyers: Observations not guaranteed to help you win.)

"Most people who look at the winners of the caption contest say, "I could've done better than that." You're right. You could have. But that doesn't mean you could've won the caption contest—it just means you could've done better. And if your goal is not to win the caption contest, why bother entering? There is one mantra to take from this article, worth its own line break:

"You are not trying to submit the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest."

Well, I thought House's caption was pretty damn funny.

No, I still don't ride a Harley

I first wrote here about my contempt for most Harley Davidson riders in August of `06 in a piece I called “No, I don’t ride a Harley.” I don’t like them any more now than I did then, and one of the things I hate is their over-the-top patriotic displays.

Here’s an excerpt from a piece by Garrison Keillor:

May 28, 2008 “Three-hundred thousand bikers spent Memorial Day weekend roaring around Washington in tribute to our war dead, and I stood on Constitution Avenue Sunday afternoon watching a river of them go by, waiting for a gap in the procession so I could cross over to the Mall and look at pictures. The street had been closed off for them and they motored on by, some flying the Stars and Stripes and the black MIA-POW flag, honking, revving their engines, an endless celebration of internal combustion.
“A patriotic bike rally is sort of like a patriotic toilet-papering or patriotic graffiti; the patriotism somehow gets lost in the sheer irritation of the thing. Somehow a person associates Memorial Day with long moments of silence when you summon up mental images of men huddled together on LSTs and pilots revving up B-24s and infantrymen crouched behind piles of rubble steeling themselves for the next push.
“You don't quite see the connection between that and these fat men with ponytails on Harleys. After hearing a few thousand bikes go by, you think maybe we could airlift these gentlemen to Baghdad to show their support of the troops in a more tangible way. It took 20 minutes until a gap appeared and then a mob of us pedestrians flooded across the street and the parade of bikes had to stop for us, and on we went to show our patriotism by looking at exhibits at the Smithsonian or, in my case, hiking around the National Gallery, which, after you've watched a few thousand Harleys pass, seems like an outpost of civilization. . . .
“No wonder the Current Occupant welcomed them with open arms at the White House, put on a black leather vest, and gave a manly speech about how he'd just "choppered in" and saw the horde "cranking up their machines" and he thanked them for being so patriotic. They are his kind of guys, full of bluster, giving off noxious fumes, and when they leave town, nobody misses them.”

Dissertation abstracts

Almost anyone who has ever written a dissertation knows what happens after those years of work are finally over. It gets filed in the library stacks of the granting institution and no one will ever read it again. I finished mine sixteen years ago.

So I was astonished and not a little flattered today to receive this email. I've checked it out, and Professor Kuykendall is legit.

I feel rather like I've been complimented on a sweater and my response is "Oh, this old thing?" But still, you have to love it.

***

Dear Ross: I am reading your dissertation for something I am writing about votes of no confidence. I think your dissertation is very well written and provides a rich set of case studies. It's a great resource on a number of levels.

I would love to chat with you about the research issues you thought about in writing the piece. Perhaps you have put all that behind you, but if you have some interest in good research and in advancing consideration of the topic you wrote about, perhaps you could take some time for a chat.

I hope we can talk at some point.

Sincerely,
Mae Kuykendall
Professor of Law
Michigan State University College of Law
463 Law College BuildingEast Lansing, MI 48824-1300

***
Well, of course the answer is yes. We have a phone date for next Friday. I found my dissertation in the basement, and now I get to read it again after all these years.

More overstimulated

For me, Pandora continues to be the best way to get my music, and it keeps getting better. Pandora is an internet music service located at www.pandora.com. It’s been around a few years. It's free.

You go there, set up an account and log in, then type in the name of a group or a song. It asks you a question or two, then sets up a station. Right now I’m listening to my station based on Todd Hildreth, who’s a piano player and teacher I met in an internet group. I added Michael Brecker and John Scofield to expand the range a little and Pandora starts streaming songs by these artists and other similar ones. If I like a song I can click a thumbs up and it plays more songs like that. If I don’t like a song, I click thumbs down and it doesn’t play that song any more.

In other words, the station learns. Over time, it gets closer and closer to music I’m going to like. There’s a danger that it could over-stimulate the pleasure centers of my brain.

I’ve added several other stations representing different styles of music I like. I can also listen to shared stations other people have set up. You can listen to my stations, but at any given time, we’re actually listening to different songs.

Wow.

The range of available music is astonishing. My Luciana Souza station has introduced me to dozens of musicians from a variety of Latin American coutries and styles.

Even more astonishing is that every song is individually listened to by Pandora people and “hand coded,” so to speak, in dozens of criteria. I have no idea how they accomplish this. Pandora is produced by The Music Genome Project. Again, I have no idea.

Pandora has added new features lately that make it even better. Click here, it says, to go to a biography of this artist. Click there to go to album information, including side men and a song list. Click in that place if you want to buy the CD from Amazon or download from iTunes.

They’ve also added classical music, though I haven’t tried that so can’t say anything about its quality.

Downside? I miss a good announcer, but then there are very few good announcers. If you find a good late-night jazz DJ, it’s like you’re the two hippest guys on the planet and this is your time together. Pandora is like listening to a computer. It’s a very hip computer, but still.

I’ve also stopped listening to my public radio station except for the news sometimes. I really should send them a check anyway.

Over stimulated

Any day now, Mary and I should be getting our economic stimulus check from the federal government. We’re expecting $1,200, and the patriotic thing to do with this money is go out and buy something to stimulate the economy. For $1,200, we could buy a good laptop, for example, and even one made in America.

But after only a little discussion, we’ve decided to use our money to buy food. Actually, half of it already went to buy a new freezer. When the check gets here, we’ll use the other half to buy food to put in the freezer.

Mmmmm, ice cream.

Buying and storing food now seems to be the best investment by far for families of moderate income. My bank is currently offering 2.44 percent on a CD. It’s hard to get a handle on actual price increases for food, but take one example: rice. The Oregonian reported that the one-year increase in the cost of rice is 300 percent. “What started with a shortage in Thailand and a typhoon in Bangladesh is now putting tremendous pressure on domestically produced rice,” according to one expert. Stores around the West are limiting purchases; Costco, for example, will only sell you one twenty-pound bag, and Costco is still running out. Asian restaurants in Portland report having to go to several suppliers every day to buy enough rice to keep their doors open.

There are food riots in many parts of Africa, and all of this before the typhoon took out the rice crop of Myanmar/Burma last week. But that’s over there.

Back at home, it isn’t just rice that is going up dramatically every month. I figure if we can buy one year ahead on food and other supplies, we’ll be saving, what, twenty percent, thirty percent? Even more?

Around here, lots of farm families and Mormons have always believed in a full pantry and a one-year supply of food. I used to think that was very old-fashioned. Now I think it’s a good investment. It might be more than that.

We did buy an American freezer, though: GE.

An end to misery

For the last week, I’ve been thinking that four things could not end soon enough:

The Democratic primary race

This miserable spring weather

My cold, and

The Pope's visit.

Well, one out of four.

Peru Negro

Last night, Mary and I went to see the Peruvian dance group Peru Negro. We’re blessed in our little town with a first-rate performing arts center that would be the envy of a town twice our size. Maybe even a town ten times our size. Sometimes we get performances worthy of the facility.

Peru Negro was one of the most exciting and enjoyable spectacles I’ve ever seen. I wish it had gone on for hours more, and I’d go back tonight to see it again if they were still playing here. It brings to the stage 22 dances, musicians and singers. Obviously, it celebrates the African slave heritage of Peru. In costumes and sometimes mannerisms of the dance, there’s a striking resemblance to American plantation life. The dances range from primitive to modern, but the music is always the driving, drum-centered rhythms I associate with Afro Cuban music. The singing simply stands your hair on end. In short, it was one of the most exciting performances I've ever seen. I found it very hard to slow down, my excitement was so great long after the performance.


Not the least of it was the costumes, which came alive with color, and color became a central part of the spectacle.

I see by their website at www.perunegro.org/ that they’re in Davis tonight, so I wanted to send a heads-up to Ed and Rhonda to try to make it if you possibly can.

¡Peru Negro!

Barack and Race in America

Barack Obama won my vote last night. In what might become one of the new century’s defining orations, he directly confronted the issue of race in America. Here’s part of what the Washington Post said about his speech:

“Mr. Obama's speech was an extraordinary moment of truth-telling. He coupled it with an appeal that this year's campaign not be dominated by distorted and polarizing debates about whether he or his opponents agree with extreme statements by supporters -- or other attempts to divide the electorate along racial lines. Far better, he argued, that Americans of all races recognize they face common economic, social and security problems. "”

I’ve heard often about his ability to inspire with rhetoric, but as yet I hadn’t seen evidence of it. Yesterday, he chose to rise above merely distancing himself from his pastor’s remarks, he dared to directly challenge the issue of race in America. The speech was all the more impressive because he wrote it himself, staying up until two in the morning the night before to finish it. It was a masterpiece of content and delivery that will reverberate for years, possibly generations. It might well rank with John Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you” and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.”

Will it work to quiet the criticism of guilt by association? Absolutely not. It’s clear that this will be the Obama swiftboat. On the other hand, McCain’s comment that we might be in Iraq for a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years, will become a sound bite we’ll be seeing often in the campaign. In the end, it might all still be about the economy, stupid.

But taken as a eloquent statement of hope for a country that could take a giant leap forward in the seemingly intractable problems of race, Obama’s speech will last long beyond the current presidential campaign. It brought tears to my eyes as it raised the possibility of a new politics of reconciliation.

El Sol de Medianoche

¡Bienvenidos amigos a mi blog en español, El Sol de Medianoche!

Estudio español por cinco meses. Verdad, solo sé unas cuantas palabras, asi qué espero mi español no es demasiado chistoso.

Empecé en un clase a el colegio comunal donde enseño dos clases, pero hablamos español en clase casi nunca. Tuve mucho frustración y deseé gritar. Pero ahora estudio con la tutora al colegio. Ella es de Honduras. Su inglés es perfecto, pero habla español conmigo casi todo. Y ella es muy simpática.

Me gusta mucho estudiar español. Es difícil de aprender, pero muchos personas lo hablan en mi pueblo. Trato estudiar uno o dos horas por día. A veces, estudio más. O menos.

Adiós, amigos. No escribiré mucho en español, yo prometo.

It's Only Rock and Roll

This year, Santa Baby brought me two presents for Christmas, just what I had asked for: the DVD sets, available from PBS online, of the two Eric Clapton Crossroads Guitar Festivals.
I happened to catch most of both of them on TV (I'm sure they repeated many times), one last year in Chicago, one a few years ago in Texas. The DVDs are much expanded, four hours each.

I was amazed at how much I loved this music, much of it familiar to me, but not very. I’ve followed jazz rather closely over the years and would even go so far as to call myself an expert, though I wouldn’t make too much of a point about that. Rock and roll, on the other hand, I picked up mostly from tuning in to FM radio in the 60s and 70s without focusing too much on individual players or bands.

What interested me watching these programs is that I have a fairly low threshold for blues-inspired rock. Most of it has such a sameness that only the best of the best can keep my interest for much beyond a few songs. These live concerts kept me glued to the screen for hours. Jazz critic turned rock groupie Ralph J. Gleason said way back in the mid-60s that the musicianship of the best rockers rivaled that of the best jazz musicians. The free-love thing was probably what cinched the decision for him. It's about a lot more than just technique, though.

The Crossroads sets feature just about everybody who is still alive from those old days, and a good sampling of the best younger players out there now. A perfect example is the too-short set by Jeff Beck doing some stunning effects on guitar, all to good musical effect, and accompanied by a young woman on base who looks fifteen and soloed magnificently across some very complicated times and rhythms. Instant crush, so I googled “jeff beck’s base player” and discovered she’s 21-year-old Australian Tal Wilkenfeld. She’s toured England with Beck and Europe with Chick Corea, and I’m ordering her first album as lead, Transformation.

Other names from the Crossroads DVDs: B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Carlos Santana, Jimmie Vaughan, John Mayer, John McLaughlin, Jonny Lang, ZZ Top, Los Lobos, Steve Winwood, and of course, Eric Clapton. And many more.

If you’re about my age, (soon to turn 60), these songs are something of a soundtrack for our generation.

People who like this sort of thing are going to like this very much.

The New Normal in Iraq

I’m not at all encouraged about the security gains in Iraq. Most people would say that’s because I’m a liberal, anti-war blogger who hates George Bush, but that’s not true.

Well, yes it is true, but that’s not why I’m not encouraged. Remember, I supported the surge. You can time-travel back in my archive to January and still read why I thought we had a responsibility to Iraq to give it one last, best shot. So unlike other liberal anti-war bloggers who hate George Bush, I at least wanted to see the surge succeed. And to a limited degree, it has.

It’s great that violence is down by about two-thirds. Fewer Americans are dying. Far fewer Iraqis are dying. It’s possible, apparently, to send your kids to school, drive from one part of town to another—don’t push your luck here—or even go to the mosque for prayers without a high level of certainty you will be blown up or shot or have your head used for wood-shop practice with electric drills.

But let’s face it: Iraq is still one of the most violent and dangerous places on earth. No one would dream of booking a vacation there any time soon, except perhaps the entire Iraqi legislature, which once again is going on vacation rather than address any of the multiple benchmarks the Bush administration itself set to measure political progress. That was the whole idea behind the surge in the first place, to buy time for the government to begin to make progress in certain key areas, without which a lasting peace in Iraq, we all agree, is impossible.

This time, two months off sounds about right.

Last week, seven soldiers based out of Ft. Lewis, Washington died. That’s a big hit to take in a single unit. Casualties may be down overall, but our professional military continues to bear a terrible burden while the rest of us bear no burden at all here at home. Here in Oregon, 3,500 National Guard troops are on notice that they’re headed for Iraq in the summer of `09. Not `08, `09. The military needs to plan well ahead, and apparently it’s plans don’t involve much of a drawdown in Iraq.

Meanwhile, with amazingly little comment in the media, Bush and Al-Maliki have signed an agreement for permanent American bases in Iraq. Is this something we had to take care of right now, before we get too busy with cleaning out the rain gutters or something? (Today I’m cleaning out the rain gutters on the back side of the house. It means going up a two-story extension ladder and it’s scary, but I don’t have a list of things I absolutely have to get done before I go up, like, say, reach an agreement for permanent US military bases in Iraq. I do need to get a flu shot, and I have a call in about that, but I can get started on the rain gutters while I’m waiting to hear back.)

The new normal in Iraq is an immense improvement over the old normal of the last four, going-on-five years, but surprisingly, the same two-thirds of Americans who wanted us out of Iraq before the surge still want us out now. This surprises me because I thought some sign of progress in Iraq might translate into at least a small increase in support for George here at home, but it hasn’t. Bush has been too wrong for too long about Iraq, and apparently very few Americans have become convinced that he either knew what he was doing all along or somehow finally blundered into strategy that might lead to success.

What would encourage me is a huge diplomatic initiative to try to pressure the Iraqi government to use this relatively quiet interlude to make progress on some of its political problems. There seems to be no indication of that happening. Instead, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is in the Middle East trying to downplay the intelligence reports that Iran isn’t actually working on an atomic bomb anymore.

Only in the Bush administration would this be greeted as bad news.

More Kindling

A little more information out on the Amazon Kindle. Here's a review in today's Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/05/AR2007120502611.html?hpid=news-col-blog
Not entirely positive.

My friend Michael Broschat is also an early owner and has a first-impressions review on his blog here. http://www.michaelbroschat.com/MontlakeBlog/DisplayBlog.aspx

Mary continues to enjoy her Sony e-reader and went to the site last night and bought a few more books. I still think the e-versions should be cheaper than they are, but they're definitely cheaper than paper, especially if you order online and pay shipping.

Me, I'm going over to Amazon and ordering the two books Broschat discusses. I'll have to wait a few days for them to arrive, but I have a shelf of recent purchases I haven't got to yet.

Amazon Kindle (?)

Sometime about a year ago, Mary and I were reading in bed before going to sleep. I had a paperback with print slightly smaller than usual and realized that type size has gradually become the first factor in determining whether I read a book or not. This book seemed promising, but after a few minutes, I knew I wasn’t going to put myself through the squinting concentration required to read it.

I like to end my day with nice big letters and wonder if sometime in the near future I’ll be limited to Dr. Seuss.

I realized, and said so to Mary, that all the technology is already here to remedy this problem, and since we aging baby boomers pretty much rule the world anyway, I was surprised some kind of reading device aimed at us hadn’t hit the market. I had a vague notion that I should call somebody about this and maybe I could get in on some of the cash that would flow to the inventor.

Mary and I started talking about it and came up with a short list of features we’d like to see. The e reader should be about book size, obviously, though I leaned towards something a little larger, say 8 ½ by 11. It would be thin and lightweight, probably with a cover that folded open to protect the screen.

The most important feature would be that type size would be adjustable. I could read jumbo letters, and someone else could read the same book in smaller print at the push of a button.

The screen should have a paper look and feel to it rather than a screen feel. I was sure this was possible. It should be readable in any light, from full sun to darkened room. No reason I should have to turn a light on if Mary’s sleeping and I want to come up and read in bed.

Obviously, an e reader would need books, but I assumed it would be easy to create the text equivalent of music sites such as Napster. Publishers would be happy to let us access electronic versions of best sellers, as long as they got a fair purchase price. Also, I know that at least the Guttenberg Project is digitizing thousands of non-copyright protected books, available for easy download. If I ever decide to try reading Moby Dick again, I could carry it along with correspondingly cetacean-sized print. I might even finish it this time.

I had a few other ideas. Pages, of course, would be turned at the push of a button, but there should be a way to mark pages for easy retrieval. I was a Lit. major, after all. Ideally, there should even be a way to mark on pages, an electronic stylus of some kind that would allow underlining and short comments in the margin. And it goes without saying that a computer-based reader like this would be able to hold hundreds and even thousands of books, a whole library in a small, portable package.

Of course, it was only a short time later that Sony announced the release of its Sony Reader. I was clear that they had someone listening in our bedroom. I was a little annoyed that the product had come along so fast I didn’t get a chance to claim some kind of credit for it. On the plus side, it made for one of the few holidays when I felt confident of my present for Mary. I bought her the Sony Reader for Christmas, and she loves it.

You can read more here: http://www.learningcenter.sony.us/assets/itpd/reader/

Now, the competition has stepped in from an unexpected place. Amazon.com started off selling books online, though now it’s become so genericized that I rarely visit its site anymore. There’s something about even an online bookstore that doesn’t go well with laundry soap and pet supplies. But Amazon is now offering its own e reader, named the Kindle. Not a great name, but it has some nice features.

Foremost of which is free wireless access to the Amazon catalog. As I understand it, you can just jack in anytime, anyplace and buy a book. I don’t know if Amazon has its whole catalogue available or not, but it shouldn’t be too long. Plus, you can access major newspapers and magazines.

You can read about Kindle here: http://www.amazon.com/ Watch the little film that explains it.

This still isn’t perfect. For some reason, Kindle won’t read PDF files, and I’m guessing it won’t read plain text either. It seems clear that Kindle is going to be linked to the Amazon product line. That rules out Guttenberg and amounts to short-term thinking in my view. My ideal e reader is going to be able to store and retrieve anything I can find online, just like any laptop can do.

In fact, add a small keyboard and some PDA features like a calendar and address book, and the reader and laptop will merge and become as one, the only real difference being size and layout. A laptop is a work station. A reader is for recreation and comfort. When somebody brings out the perfect blend and drops the price a hundred dollars, I’ll buy one.

Throw in a cell phone, camera, and GPS. They could have this out in two weeks. I should get a cut.

The Bitch

John McCain will survive “the bitch.” That’s unfortunate. If anything, this whole ugly little incident will give his campaign a boost.

More and more, when it comes to politics, I feel like I need to explain, “I’m not actually from here.”

Unlike George Allen, who watched his reelection campaign for the US Senate melt down after his “makaka” comment was caught on film and Youtubed, McCain didn’t say the bad word himself. He even recovered somewhat and assured everyone he respected Hillary Clinton. But he did laugh, and he did say “That’s an excellent question,” and he didn’t comment that calling a presidential candidate “the bitch” is inappropriate.

Should he have? Of course! If somebody called Larry Craig “the faggot,” wouldn’t we expect any major candidate to object loudly? Do we even need to ask what an appropriate response would be to calling Barak Obama “the nigger”?

So here’s an intimate look inside the Republican party in 2007. You can get a big laugh by calling Hillary Clinton “the bitch.” You can get another big laugh by joking “I thought she was talking about my ex-wife.” Lots of seemingly reasonable commentators will explain why this is no big deal.

But it is.

And the woman who said it? Whoo! What a bitch!

Here's the link to Youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLQGWpRVA7o

The End of the American Century

I might be going at things a little backwards. Most people concerned about our involvement in Iraq are probably looking for something positive to agree with. There isn’t much out there, ranging from the president’s most recent iteration of “stay the [ever-changing] course” to the Democratic rebuttal: “pull out now,” or “at least pretty soon.” Both options seem to offer great risks and only minimal chance of success.

When neither extreme offers an answer, reasonable folks look for someplace in the middle to find a compromise. This is happening in Congress as moderates from both parties try to build consensus around a plan for accelerated withdrawal that falls somewhere between Bush’s acknowledgement that his plan has large numbers of Americans in Iraq for decades and the anti-war Dems’ plans, which would have the troops home for Christmas, or at least Valentine’s Day.

For me, all sides seem to offer some compelling arguments, but only when they’re attacking the other sides. In other words, it seems clear to me that no matter what we do, it’s going to turn out badly. In other words, we’re pretty much fucked here.

To the Iraqis, “Oops.”

Imagine this as a platform for one of the dozen or so presidential candidates: “I promise [insert sound bite that substitutes for a complex military and political strategy], and I believe the results will be disastrous for the United States and for Iraq. Still, that’s what I plan to do.” But if you add up all the stark assessments of recent days, it’s hard to believe much of anything else. Petraeus, for all his confidence in the surge strategy, won’t project anything further than about a year out. Such projections, he concedes, have been unreliable in the past. Additionally, he’s afraid he just can’t say if the war in Iraq is making America safer.

This is a far cry from reaching Berlin by Christmas. Now that was a war that lent itself to calendar references.

What’s clear to me, and to most Americans, is what an unqualified disaster Iraq is right now. What seems unclear, or possibly just unacceptable to most everybody else, is that there’s nothing we can do about it. In fact, all sides make compelling arguments about how bad it will be if we do what the other side wants

Does this make me a pessimist? Probably, but maybe not entirely.

For a few years now, I’ve been thinking of these later years of my life as “The End of the American Century.” It’s coincidental that our American century happened to occupy roughly the 20th century and the end of a millennium, but it feels fitting somehow that the new millennium is going to look very different from the last one, America-wise. This suggests that the American empire was remarkably short lived. The Mayans, after all, had three thousand years, and they didn’t even have the wheel. We had everything from Silly Putty to manned space flight and we could barely squeeze out a century.

None of what I’m suggesting is particularly farfetched or even cynical. It’s obvious in Iraq, as it was in Vietnam, that American military power is unsuited for and ineffective against determined little insurgencies. But that can and should be seen as a good thing. We might even come to feel some gratitude to Bush 43 for so clearly illustrating in so short a time that American military domination is no longer an effective tool of foreign policy. In the end, if we want to have much influence on the world stage, it’s going to have to be as one nation among equals. The best hope for Iraq might be an international effort to rebuild, not destroy. We might try to get something started on that.

Or not. In any case, Iraq’s future is beyond the influence of American military determinism, as is the future of, say, Iran and Syria. The fundamental neocon principle of projecting American power abroad has been shown to be more than just a failure. It might, dare we hope, be America’s last such failure. In its place might arise a new American foreign policy of cooperation for mutual benefit, not premised on military threats. The possibilities are quite exciting, really. We’d just have to be patient with the rest of the world if they were suspicious for awhile.

American economic dominance also pretty much ended with the stroke of Y2K. The smart money for the new millennium is on China and India, but the millennium is still just a baby. Again, cooperation instead of domination might lead to possibilities that are difficult to visualize but not that farfetched. Imagine a significant part of our military budget going into education, and it’s possible to see an American economy that can still compete with the rest of the world. And imagine an economic theory based on cooperation rather than competition.

Personally, I think capitalism and competition are way over-rated.

If we weren’t spending all of our time and effort on world domination, we might be able to do a better job at home on some basics such as true universal health care, which by itself could save more lives than a dozen wars on terror. We might turn our creativity and determination toward developing energy sources which are cheap, clean, and entirely renewable. This would eliminate the risk losing Middle East oil.

Wouldn’t if be fun to thumb our noses at the sheiks and sultans? We could do the wave from coast to coast and find a way to hook that up to the grid.

The end of the American century does not necessarily mean total social collapse, as happened to the Mayans. Just as most countries have adjusted reasonably well to a post-colonial era, America could adapt well to a post-imperial era. We could be like France. Okay, Denmark then, but warmer.

But collapse is possible, as Jared Diamond documents in his book of that title. It could be triggered by an oil crisis, climate crisis, credit crisis, or an as-yet unidentified crisis. Like the Mayans, it could happen very quickly. In the end, perhaps our future depends on our ability to rethink ourselves into a new paradigm.

The American Century is over. Long live the new world order, whatever it turns out to be. Despite my tendency towards cynicism, I’ve been thinking of the last few years as a beginning.

My Summer Vacation

The weather begins a subtle but perceptible change that tells me fall is almost here. Afternoon temperatures are still in the mid-80s, but nights are cooling off faster. With nighttime lows in the 40s, the house is slightly cold as I write this. Sometime in the next few weeks, I’ll start turning on our geothermal heat overnight to take the edge off the morning chill.

Around the neighborhood, leaves show the first signs of turning, and the pear tree in our backyard is already dropping fruit and leaves.

Summer went by so fast that it’s hard for me to believe it’s almost over. It seems like only a few weeks ago that I turned in grades for the three classes I taught spring term and immediately left on a five-day motorcycle trip. Travel throughout the Northwest occupied most of my time this summer, and I’ve been gone more than I’ve been home.

My first trip was to a BMW motorcycle rally in John Day. I’ve belonged to the Oregon BMW riders for over twenty years and have many friends in the club. Although I haven’t owned a Beemer for some time now, they still let me tag along and only slightly give me a bad time because I ride a Honda.

Shortly after getting back from the rally, I left again for Laguna Seca and the world motorcycle grand prix races in Monterey. These are the best riders on the fastest bikes in the world, and Laguna Seca draws tens of thousands of enthusiastic riders every year for the races and the festival atmosphere that goes with them. I was out for two weeks, making my way down through the redwoods and the Oregon and California coast. Usually I camped alone, but I also stayed with friends in Santa Cruz and met another friend and his sister in Big Sur, where we camped during race weekend. It was a great trip and I was out for two weeks.

As soon as I got back, I started setting up our little travel trailer and Mary and I left for another two-week vacation on Orcas Island in Washington state’s San Juans. We took four days getting up there, staying on the northern Oregon Coast. On Orcas we did the usual tourist things. We rented a kayak and took some lessons and an evening tour around the island. It was good fun, but I was a little surprised that I didn’t fall in love with it. I thought I was going to have to buy one.

I was more excited to rent a sailboat and take it out solo for a great afternoon in a brisk wind on East Sound. I sailed quite a lot on Klamath Lake when we first moved here twenty-three years ago but reached a point at which the limits of lake sailing dimmed my enthusiasm. I don’t doubt, though, that if I lived on the coast I’d soon be back into it.

For the most part, we spent our vacation enjoying the spectacular scenery and the good fun we always have together.

We got back from the San Juans a few days earlier than I expected, which made me realize I could still make it up to Portland for a meeting of Honda VFR riders. I hang around an internet discussion site devoted to this bike, and the Pacific Northwest subgroup was hosting its third annual get-together. After only two days at home, I expressed an interest in going up and got an invitation from the organizer to stay with him, so I hooked up with two other riders from Southern Oregon and made the trip.

There were about fifty guys, and my host Tim and his wife put on a magnificent barbecue, and all of us had a great evening of food and motorcycle talk. The VFR goes back to the mid-80s Honda superbike race machine, and the street version is now in its 6th generation. It’s widely celebrated in the motorcycle press as the best all-around sport touring bike ever made, and although there is plenty of competition now from other manufacturers, it’s still regarded as a superb and spirited sport tourer. It exaggerates but not too much to say it has a cult following.

The next day we made a group ride up to Windy Ridge to view the Mount Saint Helens spectacle. Mary and I were there a year or two after the eruption, and although there are visible signs of recovery, the immense power and devastation of the blast are still quite apparent.

Still, our stop was brief. Being motorcyclists, we were more interested in the power we were sitting on, and during the day we put in about 300 miles of scenic and spirited riding. I was rather proud to be able to stay with all but the fastest riders. (I believe in the Goldilocks principle of motorcycle pacing: people who ride faster than I do are riding too fast; people who ride slower than me are riding too slow. I like all my rides to be just right.)

Now it’s time to settle in at home and start to slowly catch up on all the deferred maintenance of my life. Mary is back at school and students return tomorrow. By choice, I’m not teaching this fall. I am taking a couple of classes: Spanish and Tai Chi. I look forward to being a student for a few weeks again.

It remains to be seen whether the community college will have any classes for me winter or spring, or if I’ll feel like taking them on. For now, I’m content to settle into fall, the cool and colorful season that invites us to wander aimlessly through our external and internal landscapes.

A Day at the Races

I had my best year ever at the races at Laguna Seca, despite the heartbreak of our American hero Nicky Hayden's early crash, totally not his fault. Hayden is the reigning world champion in a sport that is second only to soccer in popularity worldwide: motorcycle roadracing. In his own country, he's virtually unknown, except to a hardcore cadre of race fans like myself and the 54,000 other fans at the race last Sunday.

After winning at Laguna the last two years, this year doesn't count on my scorecard, and I'm hoping he can win it next year and I'll call it a triple.

I spent two weeks on the road, camping every night or staying with friends. I travelled 2,500 miles and spent less than $1,500 total, including race tickets and a couple of souvenirs. I don't think it's possible to have such a fun vacation for much less money.

The VFR was a great ride, even with about a ton of gear strapped on. I've never been known to travel light. The Honda sport-tourer is consistently rated one of the best bikes in the world and has won many award as Bike of the Year from cycle magazines. After seven years in the saddle, I still love it like it's new out of the box.

The Laguna Seca facility continues to learn and improve after some serious crowd management problems in recent years, compounded by 100-degree temperatures last year. There were lots more shade areas, plenty to be able to find shade between races if I needed a time out. Also, they had giant "fog" machines for cooling off, which proved unnecessary this year as temps only made it to the upper 70s. Perfect! It's important to be able to cool off when I get overheated.

Crowd traffic was also much improved as they opened the track for fan crossovers after races, eliminating the bottlenecks. It was also very cool to stand in turn one, look down at the starting grid and up at the blind hill they hit at close to 200 mph. It barely looks like a turn from off the track, but many riders say it's the most intimidating point in the race, despite the famed corkscrew. And you could see the tracks of the bikes, about a foot wide, every rider hitting the perfect line on every lap. Amazing.

As always, the cheap seats, which is your own folding chair and a pair of binoculars, make for the best seating. Coming prepared is the difference between a spectacular day or a long ordeal. I try to come prepared and learn a little more about track survival each year.

Again this year, squid traffic was bad off track. I was turning into a freeway offramp in light traffic and was bumped from the rear by a guy riding two up. I gave plenty of signal and was to the right in my lane, so have no idea how he made that mistake other than just following too closely. He may have been trying to pass me on the inside, a common riding offense down there. But no harm.
Also, on the way back to my campground at Big Sur, a squid passed a line of bikes plus me and the truck in front of me going into a turn during triple digits and then some. An oncoming car appeared and he had to ride the double yellow between them. One of the dumbest moves I've ever seen on a bike, but not too different from other stunts I've observed. These people are putting MY life at risk. There were other lesser incidents, but again, no harm.

In contrast, everybody I talked to at cafes and gas stations was terrific. The excitement of the races brings out the most knowledgable and dedicated race fans on the coolest bikes. I just love it! My friend Keith, who I meet up with and camp with, brought his 41 year old sister, who is a NASCAR fan but has a crush on Italian Superstar Valentino Rossi. She said she couldn't believe how friendly everybody is compared to NASCAR events. She liked the diversity of the crowd. She tried hard to get a Rossi autograph but couldn't quite hook up. She did get one from some guy named Mick Doohan! Mick was world champion when I was living in Tokyo, and I'd watch the races with Japanese announcers on TV and it would sound something like "haji mashita goojie MICK DOOHAN des kamoto sanoma MICK DOOHAN!!!!"

I'd leave again tomorrow to do it all again, but have to wait another year. Hell, I'm sixty years old and the last time I had so much fun was when I was a kid and the Dodgers moved to L.A., where I grew up, and beat the Yankees in the World Series in four straight games. I had thought life was pretty much down hill from that point on, but Laguna is a close second, and my guy didn't even win.

Quite simply, Laguna Seca is the premier motorcycle event in North America, and the track finally has worked out all the kinks that have existed in the past.

It's like the pilgrammage to Mecca. If you love motorcycles and racing, God wants you to go there at least once.

What, Are We Stupid?

Today’s Oregonian features an editorial endorsing a really bad idea: humanitarian visas for tens of thousands of Iraqis. Oregon’s scrappy Democrat Peter DeFazio has sponsored a bill in the house calling for a free pass for 50 thousand Iraqis. Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith called and raised him 20 thousand.

The reasoning is humane. We created a mess over there and some Iraqis came to our assistance. They were the good guys who now face certain reprisals as our war strategy melts down. We owe them safe transit and haven, just as we did the tens of thousands of Vietnamese who served us as we retreated out of Vietnam in the 70s.

Mary and I sponsored two of those Vietnamese refugees in 1979, so it’s not as though I’m immune to these arguments. But how much damage from the Bush war can we reasonably be expected to mitigate? The Oregonian was in editorial support of “preemptive war” when I thought anyone with half a brain could see what a disaster it was going to be. Perhaps the editors feel guilty.

I feel a lot of things, but guilt isn’t one of them.

We’ve already paid with over 3,500 American deaths, the squander of hundreds of billions of dollars, and the crushing of America’s standing as part of the community of nations. Iraqis have paid much more, and they’ll continue to pay much more. But the mostly foiled bomb plot in Britain last week makes a good case to me that we should be admitting fewer Middle East immigrants, not more, regardless of their skills, education, or level of risk at home.

I’ve never believed the absurd argument that we must defeat the terrorists over there or they will follow us home. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to invite them to dinner, and there is simply no way in the world we could adequately vet tens of thousands of displaced Iraqis. Al-Qaeda, get in line! Doctors move to the front of the line! Await further orders when you arrive.

I’m tired of paying for Bush’s mistakes and being told we have a moral responsibility to pay more. If we want to bring 70 thousand Iraqis to the U.S., send them all to Crawford, Texas and let George make barbeque.

More realistically, we should be taking steps to help at-risk Iraqis resettle in parts of the Middle East where at-risk Iraqis are already settling, primarily Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. And we could pressure our good friends the Kuwaitis to open their doors. And Egypt. Saudi Arabia. Whatever.

So, call me racist. I’m happy to have twelve million illegal immigrants who are already here. I wish them well. I’m inclined to agree with those who say next step is to seal the border. It might not be perfect, but when the ship is sinking, you plug the leak, then you start to bail.

But at this time, I believe it makes every reasonable sense in the world to severely restrict immigration from any part of the world where polls show that the majority of popular opinion supports Al-Qaeda and direct terrorist attacks against America.

What, are we stupid?

The Devil in My Backyard

The Washington Post ran a series of articles on Dick Cheney last week. I’ve been reasonably sure for the last few years that Dick Cheney is The Devil, so I was interested in what the Post had to say.

No surprise that Cheney is the most powerful Vice President in history. No surprise, either, that he’s also the most secretive. The lead author of the Post series said on the McNeal-Lehrer report the other night that what was surprising was the scope of Cheney’s activities.

I’ll say! The final article focuses right here where I live in the Klamath Basin and ties into a story I’ve followed closely for seven years. Dick Cheney’s been in the thick of it all along, though this is the first time he’s been tied by name to events here. I’m afraid to look under my bed for fear of what I might find. So far, it seems that’s the only place he hasn’t left any footprints, at least none documented in the Post articles.

Over the next few days, I’ll write up a few of my own posts and see if I can explain my understanding of the local story. It’s complicated.

It begins and ends with water.

Klamath Lake is Oregon’s largest lake, running about thirty-five miles long by ten to fifteen miles wide. In addition to the lake, we’re surrounded by wetlands and wildlife refuges, a mere fraction of what existed a hundred years ago, but still impressive. The basin is a main stop-over for migrating birds on the Pacific flyway. We host the largest winter population of bald eagles in the lower forty-eight, which come here to feast on the waterfowl. In summer, I’m always delighted to see the return of the white pelicans, our city mascot, from their winter stay in Mexico. Smart birds! And beautiful and majestic in flight. This is a magnificent place to live.

The view from my front porch, with the Klamath River and Mount Shasta in the distance

But water in the basin is a scarce commodity, and everyone who has an interest in it is always fighting everyone else for their fair share and maybe a little bit more. The lake itself, despite its size, is shallow and warm, and its health depends on adequate water levels even in the dry summer months. Despite its marginal environmental conditions, it’s home to record-size trout, often running over twenty pounds. It’s also home to two endangered species of sucker fish. The Klamath Indian Tribes, which hold treaty rights for fishing and hunting, depended on the sucker fish for food until recent years. They voluntarily stopped fishing when the sucker was declared endangered, but they’ve been willing to go to court to fight for lake levels that will contribute to its survival.

There are Indians downriver, too, at the mouth of the Klamath River. For countless generations the Hoopa Indians of Northern California depended on salmon runs to sustain their culture, and salmon runs depend on adequate water flows so they can swim upriver to spawn. Both commercial and recreational fishermen also depend on the salmon. At one time, the Klamath River salmon fishery was second on the West Coast only to the mighty Columbia itself. Today, native Klamath River salmon are also endangered.

Add basin agriculture into this already delicate balance. The Klamath Project, a Bureau of Reclamation project, diverts lake water to The A Canal, from which water is drawn to irrigate the fields of over a thousand family farms. And they really are family farms, too. So far, the Basin has been able to resist the spread of corporate farming, for whatever reasons. Many of the local farms go back for three or more generations.

In my next post, I’ll talk about what happened in 1991, when federal agencies cut off water to the Klamath Project to protect the endangered suckers.

Meanwhile, for homework, read Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. If you have a little more time, you can read John McPhee’s Basin and Range for extra credit.