Who's Next?

We have a half Kenyan/half white American president who promised equality. So, of course, all the slices and dices of our great patchwork country are ready for their close-ups. Latinos. Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgendered. Women, women, women. Atheists and other non-Christians. (Not to lump Jews, Hindus, Muslims, etc. with atheists but also not to leave anyone out.) And the disabled. Governor Patterson of New York is blind and black, but he only got the top job because the white straight guy had a sexual activity dust-up. Everyone is ready to have their day. Lots of people took heart in Obama, but he is not them. He is not native Hawaiian, nor Japenese-, Chinese- or Vietnamese-American. He is straight. He is male. (Having a house full of females including the mother-in-law doesn't get points.) His ansestors weren't slaves. (That I know of.) He is not descended from the Sioux or Commanche. He is not a native Alaskan.

Everyone wants a turn, wants to be heard and be as important as everyone else. Most especially the probable majority...women.

You're a Doll

There have been a couple of dust-ups of late about dolls that maybe are trying to capitalize on the newsworthiness of some children. Here and here. Everyone is outraged! Especially Nancy Grace who is, as far as I can tell, now depending for her entire career on one dead kid. What I want to know, really, is where the Elián González and Jon Benet Ramsey dolls are? (OK, I'm not looking. I couldn't take it if there were dolls for this pair.) As for dolls for the Obama kids...well there was a Caroline Kennedy doll back in the day. Where was the outrage? Do you think it helped or hurt her in the pursuit of a Senate seat? (Read the great article from The New Yorker here. It even mentions the doll.)

[Apologies to the ebay trader from home JUC has stolen the image of the puzzled (?) baby doll head.]

Need A Job? Need an Adventure?

The young man in the picture above is a dear family friend surrounded by a couple of my great nephews and a great niece. He's like an uncle to them. He and his brother have both gone to Iraq and back.

In 1970, I graduated from college. I had a bit of a struggle to get a job. It was a time of unbelievable inflation and there was a financial crisis. I finally got a job but not before I'd visited some military recruiters. I was determined to get a job and some training somewhere. I had no money to go to law school or graduate school or take a year off in Europe to find myself. Note that this was before the draft ended for the Viet Nam war and before women were placed in quite as much harm's way due to the restrictions on their service. Which is not to say none died. They did.

Today's New York Times notes that as jobs disappear the military recruiters are exceeding their goals. There are other women out there and many men, too, who are looking to the military to support themselves and gain skills. So the bad economy is creating a boon for recruiting. Maybe as an unintended consequence someone will die who would not have. Or maybe someone will gain valuable skills. If Obama stands down in Iraq and somehow solves the problem of Afghanistan and all the other spots around the world, though, we won't need as many soldiers and sailors and Marines. And then these men and women will be 'riffed' (reduction in force is a kind term for being laid off from the military). When the Viet Nam war ended, my brother-in-law's military career ended with it. He went on the a career in the "military industrial complex" but I'm not sure the timing was his choice. And we all remember (OK, probably no one reading this does) when the "boys came home" from WWII and all the women who had been admitted to factory jobs were sent home whether they had a way to support themselves or not.

Employment, war, the economy. A tangle of consequences and most, yes, unintended. People get a job, training. Other people make bombs, Humvees, missiles. They have jobs and paychecks and buy houses and flat screen TVs and give to charity. Some people die. Maybe a lot. Viet Nam? Over 50,000 Americans and probably millions of Vietnamese. Obama promised to step down war and save the economy. Sadly, wars help economies sometimes.

The Danger of One Dimension

Some times it's best to temper your outrage. Sometimes it's best to give someone you loathe and see no good use for, the smallest benefit of the doubt. Maureen Dowd manages to celebrate Obama's view that there are many sides to issues ("Obama is delighted by doubt.") and skewer President Bush for casting things as good vs. evil only to land in the muck herself with this statement:

“You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made,” he [President George W. Bush] said Thursday night. “But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.”

Actually, no. His decisions have been, for the most part, disastrous. If he’d paid as much attention to facts as fitness, 9/11, Iraq, the drowning of New Orleans, the deterioration in Afghanistan and the financial deregulation orgy could have been prevented.

She gives him some decisions that weren't "disastrous" and then says that a list of things could have been prevented by, we assume, a less completely stupid (or evil?) president. Ergo, if Al Gore had been president, there would have been no 9/11 and no sub-prime loans? That she could use 'could' (not 'might' and maybe could is not as strong as 'would' but still) and prevent and 9/11 in a sentence is a strong statement indeed. Lucky for the pundits that people are willing to give Obama a long honeymoon period (as polls are showing).

This is what makes people discount the opinions of most of the pundits in Op-Ed land. Even if we blame George Bush for everything for the next eight years, this will not get us to a point of looking at the nuanced and scary world where lots of people don't think like we do. It will not get us to the point where we realize our own (well, not me personally, but still) blame in the mortgage and credit crisis. Blaming one man, even the president, for the acts of rogues is a dangerous game. I don't recall anyone upbraiding Bill Clinton for the attack of African embassies in 1998. (Although I'm sure if I searched I could find some right wing 'thinker' who did!) There was some dust up about Clinton's response, though. Seems we bombed a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum in the Sudan and claimed they were making chemical weapons. What did seem to be a fact was that the plant made a lot of the drugs for people and animals in Sudan. What is not as clear is that it made chemical weapons. And none of this fact-based (really?) and measured response by the Rhodes scholar Bill Clinton "prevented 9/11." Bush had been in office less than nine months on 9/11!

Maureen, I'm sure the former President of the Harvard Law Review does "delight in doubt" and that he will not take to heart this black and white blame game against George Bush.

When you write to sway our opinions (as opposed to connect with those who agree with you one hundred per cent), you should be careful with sweeping statements. I'll only be reading you in the future, Maureen, for more fodder for the JUC.

Crowds

When I was in Junior High School English I was asked to make a poetry notebook. We had to hand copy or type poems we admired and assemble a book. I couldn't see the point. (Which was, I'm sure, to make us familiar with the poems in a way just reading could not and, of course, prove we'd read them. Today the kids would blindly cut and past and print and, well, there wouldn't be a point. You'd have to make them write about the poems but then they'd still probably plagiarize from the WEB. But I digress. We'll get back to that.)

It seems that everyone is euphoric about Obama's election and determined to be present at the historic inauguration of the first president whose father is African and who played basketball in Hawaii and the president upon whom hope is heaped (he asked us for it, our hope that is) that all the pains of the last eight years may be erased and world peace and economic stability achieved.

I get it. I think it is more exciting than the (upcoming) Super Bowl and Oscars. I think it is more exciting, probably, than any inaugural in my lifetime. I think it is probably the most riveting non-tragedy in my lifetime. Kennedy's assassination, LBJ's swearing in, Ruby shooting Oswald was something you couldn't take your eyes off. 9/11 similarly. But for a happy occasion (or if you were not for Obama at least a neutral occasion showing that the country is indeed a sort of democracy), this seems like the biggest deal in my lifetime. If I'd been alive for VE day and VJ day, that would have probably won.

But. Going to Washington? You'd have to pay me. I'm not even going to join a remote throng in Austin. I'm going to sit in my condo and watch coverage on my flat screen TVs. I might have to pay some attention to the Australian Open, however. It is a Tennis Grand Slam, after all.

So what am I getting at? Well, happy crowds or mad crowds, doesn't matter. Crowds are unwieldy, expensive and dangerous.

Bush declared a state of emergency because of the fear that more funds would be necessary to control the crowds. Cell phone companies warn that they won't be able to handle the traffic. ("Where are you?" "I'm by the Lincoln Memorial in the Obama shirt.") People are staying in hotels hundreds of miles away. People don't know how they are going to get around from party to party. (Or to and from the faraway motel room.) Think Super Bowl victory celebration times a hundred. (These celebrations have turned violent even. Euphoria and anger are too close together it seems.)

So what does any of this, any of these unintended consequences of large groups of celebrants gathering, have to do with that poetry notebook?

Well, I guess that as I wound it up, after typing the penultimate poem from some book, that I thought of all these kids in my class doing this same thing and it struck me as funny. So this was the last poem my English teacher would see, I decided, if she checked that far. (She did. She guessed who the anonymous author might be. I did not fail, however.)

Crowds may cheer;
But never fear,
They also jeer
And rarely hear
What is intended or recommended.
These uncivilized masses:
English classes.
-Anon

Too many people, too few resources. No matter how cheerful everyone is...I wouldn't be there. I'm doing my part and staying home. It's my creative answer to it all. I won't be at the Oscars or Super Bowl either. Wouldn't want to be. The Austrailian Open, though? Yeah, I'd like to join that crowd.

Tribal Divides

As Kenya plunged into tribal conflicts after an election with allegations of corruption, suddenly the rival tribe names were in our newspapers. Luos and Kikuyus. Like the Hutu and Tutsis, it seems silly at a distance. We found ourselves localizing the issues: "Isn't Obama's father Kenyan? What tribe?" The answer is Luo. While the distinctions seem silly to us they are serious. Deadly serious. And is this so different from our talk of the "black vote" and the "Latino bloc?" Hopefully we can avoid the burning and beheading. But we are still tribal even though the distinctions are fast disappearing with intermarriage and confusing overlays of socio-economic and sexual politics. These conflicts between us and the other are deeply ingrained in humans. Maybe our best hope here is the startle factor from watching these grave conflicts from afar.

Domestic Bliss

There are things we can do to upset married life. You know those little nagging things that add up and split people up. Of course, women can be so tolerant. Norman Mailer (pictured here on the cover of the August 29 LIFE magazine) recently died. In The New York Times obituary (November 11, 2007) there is this paragraph:

In November 1960, Mr. Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife, seriously wounding her. It happened at the end of an all-night party announcing Mr. Mailer's intention to run in the 1961 mayoral campaign, and he, like many of his guests, had been drinking heavily. Mr. Mailer was arrested, but his wife declined to press charges, and he was eventually released after being sent to Bellvue Hospital for observation. The marriage broke up two years later.

Well, um, that's so rich, that paragraph! Does the Times' habit of giving everyone a honorific even when describing the most despicable deeds make this sound funny? Is there a tone of excusing stabbing your wife if you'd announced a political move and, after all, just drank as much as your buddies? She did give up on him, though. (Or he her?) After two years. Then, of course, one ponders what would have happened if she had died. If she hadn't been around to forgive this tiny transgression in spite of his 'seriously wounding' her?

I'd always known Mailer did this (stabbed one of his wives) but this description in the Times really brought a flood of thoughts of the unintended consequences of domestic violence, living or dying after an assault and, of course, of running for political office.