high latitude vantage

happy Guy Fawkes day, dudes

2008-11-05T01:56:00.001-05:00

(see also)

Last night was incredible. The jumping, the hugging, the coming together with strangers in celebration, the drinking too much, the crying over beautiful speeches.
The election of a Black man in a country practically defined by its racism is unbelievable -- important regardless of the fact that that man needed to be nonthreatening, nonresponsive and centrist enough to weather every epithet the cornered GOP hurled.

And last night was heartbreaking.
Californians cared more about the size of animals' cages than the right of people who love each other to marry; Arizona and Florida fortified their religious bans against marriage for some, and Arkansas proved exactly how important that right is by voting to prevent unmarried people from adopting their own children or even being foster parents.

Michigan and Massachusetts loosened marijuana laws for medical use and possession of an ounce, but California defeated the attempt to reduce drug sentencing practices that are brutalizing communities (communities racially and ethnically distinct from those who will benefit -- if anyone does -- in MA and MI).

South Dakota tore down that unconstitutional abortion ban yet again, Colorado defeated the idea of a sperm stuck in an egg as human life, Massachusetts refused to repeal the income tax (thank you, adopted state, for being full of thinking people), and Montana's theoretically going to provide health insurance for their poorest and most vulnerable uninsured children. Meanwhile, Nebraska dissolved race- and gender-based affirmative action and Missouri voters made English their official state language in a virtually irrelevant but pointed statement about who they think should count in this country.

In other words, there's a slight chance the NY Times might be making an ass of itself with that headline its been braying since last night.

In other words, for every victory, whether small and true or sweeping and symbolic, there's that tidal pull backwards into isolationism, xenophobia, and viciousness.

Here's hoping the organizers and workers and idealists who made this happen (sometimes against their personal convictions but for the betterment of our country) are now going to turn that fierce pressure on the government we've created and force them as only we can to act on what is just, rather than what is expedient, political and usual.

Obama's election solves nothing. We all know that, right?

Ugly Guns & Monks in the Box

2007-10-01T16:44:00.000-04:00

Today I opened my Hampshire email account, something I do only when I'm in the mood for deleting a lot of junk mail. Amidst offers of viagra and pornography was a message from someone named Colleen Conners with the Save Darfur Coalition. I get emails from her all the time, whoever she is, because a while back I went against the grain and signed an online petition for something or other demanding attention for the newest era of Sudanese atrocities. I generally delete these emails. I have nothing to divest and no patience with the buy a wristband / save a victim mentality of ass-sitting activism. Also, I have no money.

But I didn't delete it. The subject line was "Last chance, Catherine." This struck me as so severe and so formal that I immediately felt I was in trouble. Maybe my serial deletion of her well-meaning pleas had been discovered. God only knows what the almighty internet can track these days. Instead, I opened the message.

"Dear Catherine,
This is your last chance to take advantage of our matching gift offer. The deadline is midnight tonight!"

She informed me that "For as many as 400,000 slaughtered Darfurians, it's already too late." However, if I acted instantly, and with the aid of my trusty credit card sidekick, our "voice" would be matched by some "generous donors" to... what? Increase food aid? Assist refugees in an emergency immigration and naturalization program? Fund groups actively fighting the supposed "rebels" and the racist Khartoum government that almost certainly supports them?

Well, no. But in corporate boardrooms, Save Darfur will "urge companies to cut off the flow of oil money to the Sudanese government."

I write the above with unjustifiable snark. It is absolutely vital that the powers of the world stop funding petrolic despotisms like the one in Sudan. It won't happen, but it would be absolutely vital for a world in which human dignity or justice could honestly be discussed as possible aims. Groups like this perform important functions. Divestment is important. Increasing popular awareness is important. Being a known lobbying force in the U.S. Congress is important. It just doesn't have much to do with the struggles of people against brutal authoritarian regimes; with, as Colleen Conners put it, "the terrors faced by Darfurians every day."

Poor Colleen. I'm taking out frustration on her, and her respectfully purple request for funds, that actually stems from a BBC piece I read just before opening it. Titled "Lessons from the Burmese uprising," it informed me that "The military crackdown in Burma is a reminder that street demonstrations do not necessarily lead to success for popular uprisings.

"The key factor is the destabilisation of the existing regime and if protests cannot bring that about, they become vulnerable to the kind of repression the Burmese authorities have imposed. So far the Burmese military has held together. The campaign for democracy in Burma still hopes for rapid success but fears that the project will be more long-term."

Fears that the project will be more long-term? This of a constant democratic movement with an actual democratically-elected leader who has given up her free life and her exiled family to bring hope to her people for nearly twenty years?

Let me get this straight. The critique of the radical monks' protests is that they have failed to undermine a brutal junta on multiple fronts. Sounds an awful lot like a critique of non-violence to me. So let's say they had coordinated their efforts at a coup with guerrilla warfare -- which of course, seeing as they're Buddhist monks, seems a bit unlikely. Does Paul Reynolds, BBC World Affairs correspondent, imagine that the BBC would have spent ten days making Burma their top story? That the New York Times would have done so? That President Bush would have drawled at length about the country's "situation," would have given it a prime spot on his freedom agenda?

No. The monks--thousands of them now being taken to northern prisons, uncounted others shot, tear-gassed and beaten--have achieved the astounding: television-watching Americans are suddenly wondering where the hell Burma is and why the hell we haven't Done Something About It yet. Where are the t-shirts, the bracelets, the solemn celebrities intoning Aung San Suu Kyi's name? Here, as in Sudan, is an authoritarian government sustained on resource profits, one that has looked away from the active enslavement of its people, one that has collaborated with Western oil companies to devastate the farmland of its people, leaving multitudes homeless and starving.

The truth is, if a well-publicized guerrilla effort (such as the quiet armed struggle of the Karen over the past forty years) had accompanied those nonviolent protests, it would actually have served to legitimize the military junta, as far as the U.S. government was concerned. Who would receive military aid? The people who have been working for an open democracy throughout their entire adult lives, or the officials calling themselves Myanmar?

This leaves the people of Burma in an awful pickle, somewhat similar to that of the armed resistance in Southern Sudan, when theirs was the location of choice for the multi-generational Sudanese wars. You fight, and the powers further arm the juntas. You protest, and the powers voice polite alarm. Organizations ask for money to direct multimedia campaigns to raise awareness about you. Either way, you're being gunned down and the authoritarian governments of the world remain respectable trading partners and principles in negotiation.

Not that the U.S. should be sending Marines into Rangoon and Khartoum. International negotiation and censure have rarely been given the berth and heft that might allow them to function as true aids to the growth of non-authoritarian societies. But in the meantime, it seems that the message the superpowers and their folks are sending is just this: Only victims need apply.

Sure, we'll come to your aid. All we ask is that you do nothing to defend yourselves. Just wait with picturesque martyred patience until our slow-swinging gaze finds you fascinating enough to put on a poster. If, on the other hand, you pick up a gun in full public view and announce your intent for revolution, we'll make sure to sell so many land mines to your oppressors that your great-great grandkids will still be getting nickels to gather them out of the rough.

radiowaves

2007-07-26T00:56:00.000-04:00

For one of my jobs these days, I sit in a grey box of an office with a huge window all my own looking out across E Street at the yellow concrete of floors two through four of the JC Penney parking garage. Generally it seems to rain. Although parts of this job, the legal one, are interesting, I do spend a lot of time putting things in chronological order, and cataloging long columns of itemized personal injury medical costs. What makes this so enjoyable, besides my own delight in the nitpicky monotony of finite organizational systems, is that I listen to archived episodes of This American Life while doing it.

At first, I was just listening backwards one week at a time, until I hit big patches of weeks I'd actually heard when they aired, and decided I needed a new system. Through the due diligence necessary in my adopted profession, I discovered that Wikipedia lists every TAL episode featuring David Sedaris, and Sarah Vowell, and I'm sure other people as well, but who cares? This approach not only gives me a mind-boggling cross-section of topics to choose from, ranging from the earliest Radio Playhouse days, but a certain reassurance of quality. Either David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell could make me laugh anytime, by dint of inflection alone.

It's a dangerous game I'm playing. People rarely come into my office, but I'm sure that if they decided to start they'd be unsettled by the sheer range of emotions I've started displaying while filing. I mean, okay. Even leaving aside the obvious triggers, like the one with the undocumented college student who wants to be a doctor, but can't, because they just won't pass the damned DREAM Act. Even without that. Who could listen to Episode #24, Teenage Girls, and not get a big wad of nostalgia or empathy or just plain sad stuck in her throat? The suspicion that it could actually make you cry almost makes you smile. And #175, Babysitting? The teenage stud who terrorizes his little brothers into believing he's really a werewolf? It's perfect. Really, go listen to it. You'll see. And while you're at it, just try not falling in love with the author of the zine Infiltration who's interviewed during Invisible Worlds, #141. That's a dare. He starts talking 37 minutes in, during Act III. Go now. Give it your all. But be forewarned: it's not just his strangeness and his sweet voice and his amazing mind. It's also because he only dates people who come armed with a book, and then sounds almost surprised when Ira implies that might be odd. (Also because he manages to compare fish farming technique with complicity in a pseudo-fascist mindset.)

The one that's hit me the hardest, though? It's odd. I was listening to The Business of Death yesterday, (#60, first aired in 1997), and all of a sudden Michael Lesy was talking out of my computer speakers, and into the grey stillness of my files and lists and rain-pimpled window. For those of you who didn't go to Hampshire, Professor Lesy is something of an institution. As a writer, he's sort of a cult figure, author of Wisconsin Death Trip and more recently Murder City, along with other similarly stark photojournalistic histories of the country. As a professor, he's terrifying. He reduces people to tears, on purpose, on a regular basis. He's a ferociously keen observer, and considers undergraduate students to have unusually big, unusually frail egos. I took a class with him during my first year, because I heard these kinds of things. Despite considerable efforts toward a cool bravado, I was really scared of him.

Yet there was his voice, unexpectedly in the room, all around me. And there was something so weirdly, completely reassuring about hearing it. That irritable, mile-ahead-of-you voice. That pause, that sigh, that almost tangible air of judgement. I could hear him doing it to Ira Glass, imagined Ira (who I've never seen any pictures of, on purpose, but whom I of course consider very attractive) squirming as even his questions are left hanging, fullbellied, in the air. Ah, Lesy, and his rhythmic folding of "miracle" into casual conversation. His voice wielding words that swallow all of the oxygen out of most people's vocabularies. Divine miracles. Satanic miracles. Precious knowledge.

I know what the sensation was, the reassurance. It was the blessed rush of familiarity immediately preceding homesickness. And yes, it has come to this. Michael Lesy's eight-year-old recorded conversations on the Internet are making me homesick. And not so much for a place (although there is definitely that) as for someone I used to be, someone no less naïve but just a little more hopeful, just a little more devoted to her own improvement. Someone who wrote constantly, who couldn't keep herself from it, who watched and listened to strangers and figured there would never be a time that she'd stop.

...And in a queasy effort not to end this on a pitiful, melodramatic note: I am applying for jobs. Well, I have been since June. Entropy and realism are slowing the writing of cover letters these days. But mostly so far they've been in New York, Boston and D.C. If I get my stamina back, Seattle joins the list. Anyway, these are all long, long, long shots. So feel free to send me some good vibes, if that's your thing. Or advice. It's solicited, I promise.

And you?

Ah, Anchorage...

2007-02-08T03:27:00.000-05:00

...Where every overheard conversation is guaranteed to contain at least one of the following words: oil, gas, pipeline, or deployed.
Oh, the battered eggplants, withered green beans and three frozen food aisles per store symbolic of the statewide Safeway monopoly on groceries.
And then there's the mayor, who goes on the weekly public radio call-in show today (the host is my high school friend's mother) and he gets at least one chance to preface a caller's answer with the phrase, "Oh hi there, Myrna!"
All three of them went on to talk about all those poor folks on the East Coast where it's so cold these days.
For a third of a million people, it's just such a darn cute little town.

Here's what I learned at work this week. Floriental. Yeah, apparently it's a word. At least for people who write advertising copy.
Here's what I learned during the half-hour break every morning between taking Baby J to preschool and showing up for work: my brains have atrophied. Those LSATs actually aren't going to be a piece of cake after all. And I haven't even gotten to the logic games. We're talking reading comprehension.

I finally read my final evaluation. Clearly my committee didn't get the memo about my atrophied brain. I was getting kind of down, thinking about how much I love evaluations and how I won't ever get them again since Hampshire doesn't have grad programs and even if we did -- Ha! But I guess the feeling could be duplicated by reading a congratulatory review of some book you'd written... assuming you were paying the reviewer.

Here's to spiked hot cocoa and comic books at midnight even when you don't live with a passle of hotties who love these things as much as you do.
Forty-seven days.

all the photographs i meant to take

2007-01-22T15:16:00.000-05:00

In December and January, Katie:
• Finished her so-called Division III.
• Concluded that somewhere in her head, she actually dropped out of college last spring.
• Went back to Alaska early, missing her final meeting.
• Rang in this lackluster new year.
• Returned to Massachusetts, had her final meeting.
• Decided to move back to Alaska.
So, consider yourself updated on the life of a pingpong ball, pals.

It's hard to reconcile the need to be back in Alaska--the various needs to be back in Alaska--with the suddenly even sharper awareness of how much I've come to care for the geography here.* Things that made me homesick four years ago have taken on this throb of home now so, actually, no matter where I am I'm homesick for something. Whether it's the Chugach range or the Pioneer Valley pumpkin fields or something internal that I'm lacking, I couldn't tell you. I was solid as a kid. Life happens: people disappear, you leave places behind, time's erosion fades into view and sooner or later you realize that growing up is actually hollowing out. I keep looking for things to fill me, and they feel good for a while, but then... they don't actually fit in me and then the hollow is that much more resounding.
I'm preparing to leave, which apparently means putting off saying I'm leaving or packing stuff or thinking about how this isn't going to change very much at all except for taking me away from these incredible people I live with. Apparently, preparing to leave also means tabulating things. The ratio of crows to cows rutting for grain at a feed trough. The degree by which those bristling hills pale as they move layer by layer away from the road. How many invisible green cornrows it takes to fill each scabby January field. I just keep counting things and forgetting them and counting them again as I drive by as if really it's these numbers of things I'm going to miss and if I get them down in the right order I can reconstruct them at a distance.

But anyway.
Since this is already a pretty el jay sort of thing, all musey and angsty and Kings of Convenience-y, I'm not going to try for anything else. Here's the shortview of the Rest of My Life. I'm studying for the LSATs, but I don't know if I want to be a lawyer. I've got a cool gig writing an article about Alaska environmental/reproductive justice, but I don't think I want to go into journalism. I like tomatos, but I don't want to pick them. In the near future, I will be studying for the LSATs, working on the article, cooking with tomatos... probably while working at the Body Shop and substitute teaching and taking care of my fabulous, ferocious young cousin and reading novels and waiting for the flash of lightning that says something besides "God, what an awful lot of loans you have."

And definitely writing in my blog more than once every three months.
So, be well. And tell me what y'all been up to.

* Despite misleadlingly present tense prose, this was written over the last week so I wouldn't have to think in my present haze of loneliness for the Bay Road House + denizens. I am actually in the grimy grey city A-Rage even now.

2006-11-28T09:20:00.000-05:00

I made a turkey. A whole one. Well, some sort of evolutionary chain of events made the turkey, but I successfully cooked its featherless carcass until brown and that, my friends, has added a level of confidence to my life that I never before knew. From here on out, it's all gravy.

It's recently come to my attention that (wait for it) American television 'news' programs are really, really weird. I guess I never watched 'em before except when trapped beneath an airport teevee blaring CNN, but now I read Media Matters on a fairly regular basis, which is like watching the only admirable traits human society posesses self-destruct in slow, slow motion. This mostly involves lots of delightful clips of people like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck -- people I was much happier not knowing existed, but whose EvilBot™ rants I am now too fascinated with to lose.

So, racism. We all knew it was everywhere, but I guess we're back to the point where apparently you aren't supposed to talk about it. This explains a lot, but let's stick to the movies. Case in point: Tucker Carlson, speaking with Arsalan Iftikhar of the Council on American-Islamic Relations on November 21. They're talking about the six Imams who were handcuffed & forced off of their flight home from Minneapolis because fellow passengers found it suspicious that they said evening prayers. So, fairly cut and dry, a violation of these men's rights because of some passengers' ignorance of one of the most basic tenets of Islam, regular daily prayer.

So, Iftikhar goes: "I think, Tucker, that this incident in Minnesota highlights the racial profiling and 'flying while Muslim' phenomenon that we've seen for the last five years, where American Muslims, who are lawful, peaceful, law-abiding citizens of the United States, have been disparately caught up in the fear and stereotyping that unfortunately has become pervasive in our society. ..."

And Tucker responds: "I don't know what you're talking about. Wait a second. I know Muslim groups always make it sound like, you know, we live in a fascist country that hates Muslims. Actually, we live in a very tolerant country. I know that it's popular to be anti-American, but the truth is, most Americans are really sort of open-minded and there isn't a lot of racial profiling going on. I don't know what you're talking about. I know you've got a vested interest in claiming there is, but I don't think you're right."

Seriously though, just go watch it. It's hilarious and horrifying all in the same juicy moment, and it goes on. Reading the words on a silent little blog just doesn't compare with watching Carlson pompously bluster at this eloquent Muslim man that there isn't any damn racism in this country, boy, 'cause he flies all the time and there are, you know, South Asians on his flights. Hell, he's even been to a mosque! (Oh, sorry. That's that other racist dude.)

Not that Tucker Carlson's a racist. Just like Strom Thurmond and Trent Lott ain't racist. As TC will tell you, amidst a fit of hysterical laughter meant to distract from the fact that he's up against a wall. If you watch that Iftikhar clip through to the end, to the part where Al Sharpton takes him over his knee, you will be a happier person than you were only moments before.

Fifty, maybe seventy years from now when social anthropologists and political philosophers are writing books and collecting media samples to try and glean some stable, dissectable theory of how whatever chaos is coming came to be, they're going to be watching a lot of Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, and all the rest of these smarmy punchline pundits. And all of us, the faceless public, any silence we keep is going to be attributed to agreement with Beck when he says we should "embrace the Good Muslims," but that it's ultimately up to Them to persuade Us not to round them up and lock them in camps.

There's an awful lot of talking and not a lot of questioning going on. It's time to start teaching Hannah Arendt in high school.

S.U.R.L.Y. (Sex, Violence, and the non-Continental Aftershock in the 2006 Elections)

2006-11-11T20:06:00.000-05:00

"Can you believe I'm going to be the fucking president?"
~ George W. Bush to an Austin woman immediately after the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore (Reported by Sidney Blumenthal)

Okay. I tried to let it go. But it just feels wrong.
The rest of the (progressive) country is in throes of righteous delight, especially those lucky sonsaguns who live in VT, and I'm hunkered down into my trashcan, grouchin' away.
It's as it should be, I suppose. I mean, Alaska just wouldn't be Alaska if every single election didn't leave you wanting to cry...
And sure, there's plenty to be happy about. The House, the Senate, the Nancy, the TAKE THAT SOUTH DAKOTA LEGISLATURE.
But let's not forget what one wise republican pundit on NPR (who will remain nameless 'cause I don't care enough to look him up) said weeks ago: if you lose the midterm elections, it makes it all that much more likely that you'll take the presidency. There's a reason those pink states stay pink: their races are considered lost from the outset by the Nat'l Dem Party... even though many, as in Alaska, are decided by less than a 10% margin within the one-half of voters who bother to show up. A little more local presence would do us all some good.

On the other hand, who cares about strategy?? This is all about indulging in a little bad mood badmouthin' of one of the most repellent campaign seasons America's coughed up--a truly remarkable accomplishment, all considered. And with everyone else basking in the honeymoon glow of freshly vowed bipartisanship, who better to review the highlights than the pissed-off girl sulking in the (northwesternest) corner?

Three Wishes for the Next Election

#1. Leave Gay Sex Out of It.
For god's sake, when we try to talk about marriage, all those Republicans are interested in is carnal out-of-wedlock ...innuendo. Why is there this need to drag a time-honored American tradition into as many RNC advertisements as possible? It's the new baby-kissin' or something. I'm trying to limit my references, so I'll give you the Brokeback, I mean "Brokebank Democrats" ad against Democrat Jon Tester in Montana. But OMG, isn't it hilarious when Lynne Cheney, acclaimed author of mediocre romance novels and coincidentally the Vice-President's spouse, goes on the teevee to denounce Democrat Jim Webb's explicit books... and Wolf Blitzer asks her if 'Sisters' (her own 1981 'frontier' romance) had lesbian characters and she DENIES it as if insulted. But um, the book is sort of published already and clearly does, so everyone ends up a little, WTF Lynne?

#2. No More Violent Abusers, Plz.
Foley's just a statutory-fiddler, so let's leave him out of this. There are, after all, so many other examples to choose from. Such as that PA Repub (Don Sherwood) who half-strangled his mistress and then paid her $500,000 to stay quiet about it on the condition that she receive the second half after election day. AND THEN gets his wife to send a letter to constituents saying she wished that mean democrat opponent would just quit dragging her husband's personal life into the election. Or how about the NY Repub (John Sweeney) whose wife had to call 911 after he started "knocking her around," and "grabbed [her] by the neck"? (His teenage son, by the by, recently pled guilty to felony assault charges. Family Values party, folks!)

#3. Just Say No to Totalitarianism
In other words, people shouldn't be fired for disliking the President. Or even for flipping him off. Especially if it gets middle school kids to cheer for their bus driver.

...and since that was a short one, let's add #4: Quit Using Memory Triggers to Sell Your Candidates. Actually, how about not using gratuitous violence-against-women images at all? It might help you cut down on those problems the GOP's been having with the, how do you say... violence against women.

In conclusion, a few words about our (other) moral shepards. Though it couldn't have fallen under Wish #1 since it's not poor Ted Haggard's fault that he got nonconsensually outed during campaign season. Of course, it is his fault that he's rallied the forces of hate and intolerance against guys who love guys while taking advantage of his own wealth and position of autonomous power to have transaction sex with... guys who love guys. I mean, how self-hating does a man have to be to get up in front of 14,000 people a week and tell them gay people are abominations; to lead the National Association of Evangelicals and hang out with GWBush and fight rabidly against civil rights for gay people... all while carrying on a three-year-long relationship with another man?

You just want to say you poor, poor, poor man.

But then on the other hand there's that whole vituperous abuse of power thing. And the allying himself with asinine comrades like Mark Driscoll, who's gonna blame Haggard's wife for his forays into prostitution and crystal meth.
(Like so: "At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors' wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either."
In fairness, Driscoll's recently edited that blog entry along the lines of "...let us pray that his wife and five children will be loved and supported through this incredibly difficult time. The horror they must be experiencing is likely unbearable."
Much more Christian, I'd say.)

My favorite blog during this wild election season, with its ups and downs and low, low blows has been Talking Points Memo. Ever read that one? Good stuff. Contributer David Kurtz wrote in last week with a suggestion for a new 'Hypocritic Oath:'

"I think that it is time that we ask that all Evangelicals supporting anti-gay marriage provisions to pledge that they themselves are not having gay sex
or doing meth."

Amen to that.

The Warrior and the Putz

2006-11-06T18:43:00.000-05:00

Before I start my rambling, I just want to say this about the Saddam death sentence.
I'm not going to write about it, and to be totally honest with you, I'm going to avoid reading about it too, since from headlines it looks like all that's being said is a bunch of superficial, jingoistic, canned-last-year hogwash.
But I will strongly recommend two opinion pieces by two women whose writing I have come to respect. They would be MB Williams at Wampum, and her piece Fruit of the Forbidden Tree; and Riverbend at Baghdad Burning with When All Else Fails.

In other news, I just voted for Diane Benson on my nearly illegible Alaska Vote-by-Fax ballot, and I'm gonna tell you why. Despite the fact that this woman is not terribly electable on first glance (there was that whole Linda McCarriston "Is it free speech or racism?" mess a while back, and Benson has previously run as a Green candidate, which would ordinarily make her Alaskan anathema), she has closed the projected vote gap between herself and the 34-year U.S. Representative she's challenging to a seven-point space.

This is despite the fact that she's had barely $100,000 to spend on the campaign while he, Don Young, has over $2 million -- most of it from out-of-state Republicans, businesses, and assorted folks who have something they want to move in the Transportation Committee, of which he is the 73-year-old Republican emperor. He's got more money in his coffers from Pine Bluff, Arkansas than any zip code in Alaska. Why? Well, I wouldn't be so bold as to conjecture, but it's been noticed that shortly after those donations arrived, that state received a package of $415 million in special projects from the Transportation Committee, including $72 million for a major interstate extension for the community of Pine Bluff. Also included in that Arkansas package was $35 million in federal money earmarked for widening the road to WalMart Headquarters. The day before the bill passed, WalMart executives donated $4,000 to Young's campaign. After it passed, WalMart's 'political action committee' sent another $10,000--the maximum amount possible. Hundreds of special projects in the Transportation bill are entirely Don Young's doing.
Of course, Young also brings the pork home to AK, including that infamous $1 billion package of special projects this year, including all those bridges to ~~nowhere~~ places Lower 48-ers have never heard of. Which means, apparently, that just like our embarrassingly belligerent Uncle Ted (that's Stevens, to Outsiders), even the 'liberal' AK newspapers that expose him feel the need to toss in little appeasing gratitudes and decline to support his challengers.

So, there's the sleaze factor.
Also the saying-you're-from-Fort- Yukon-when-you've-spent-the-last- thirty-four-years-in-DC factor, which concludes the gratuitous hyphenization portion of the evening. But beyond this, he's... how to put this delicately? Dumb. On a nearly offensive level, considering his power and longevity in Congress. And when he's disregarding the facts, he makes up words to do it, as weekly ADN satire the AlaskaEar gleefully pointed out several times in October:

In a discussion of global warming, Don sneered at people who claim anything unusual is happening. All these weather changes are just "sickalitic," he opined. ...

Don Young, Congressman for All Alaskans Except Ear and a Few Others, gave a nice little speech last weekend at the lighting of the pink tree for breast cancer in Town Square. He told the crowd that included a lot of health care professionals how thrilled he was when he finally talked his wife, Lu, into getting her first "monogram." ...
On Friday, at the congressional "listening session" about BP's problems, held at Loussac Library, d'Ear Don wanted to know if it was possible to replace some of the steel pipeline on the slope with pipe made of a less corrosive material. He alluded to having a well at his house on the East Coast that originally had copper pipe, but when the copper wore out, they replaced it with new pipe made out of "PCP."
Hmmm. A PCP pipe. That would explain a lot.
Ear assumes he meant PVC pipe.
Has The Divine Appendage mentioned how much fun it is when Don comes home to campaign?

Also, even Rolling Stone knows he's the third-worst Congressman in the nation. Do yourself a favor and check out that bolo tie. The story includes this memorable quote:

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when Sen. John McCain proposed that Young redirect his prized pork money to help rebuild New Orleans, Young accused his detractors of "ignorance and stupidity." The victims of Katrina, he suggested, "can kiss my ear!"

...And it continues (I just can't resist!)...

Such coarseness is a Young hallmark. He once called environmentalists a "self-centered bunch of waffle-stomping, Harvard-graduating, intellectual idiots" who "are not Americans, never have been Americans, never will be Americans." And during a debate on the right of native Alaskans to sell the sex organs of endangered animals as aphrodisiacs, Young whipped out the eighteen-inch penis bone of a walrus and brandished it like a sword on the House floor.

But that's enough. After all, Diane Benson is savvy, eloquent and progressive enough to deserve election even if her opponent wasn't a total doof. She's inexperienced in politics, it's true. But she is a mother, a worker, an artist and a Native woman in Alaska -- it's about time we had a little of all of that representing us on the East Coast. She's well-known in AK these days for being a vocal critic of the wisdom of the war, as the mother of a badly wounded Iraq vet. Drawing attention to the hypocrisy inherent in underfunding Veterans' services has been one of her main issues during the campaign, as well as the threat to civil liberties in the Patriot Act. Another broad issue she's raised more than any other Democrat politico running in AK is American poverty, including a pledge to seek legislation freezing Congressional salaries until a living wage is mandated in this country. She supports unions, small businesses, ethical international trade and sustainable resource development. And this woman stands a chance of being elected in my state? Perhaps someone's seen a deliriously happy pig flying through an icy underworld lately?

Besides, she's tough. She's a Teamster, a biker (member of the Chugiak Alaska Bikers Against Totalitarian Enactments, actually), a foster mother, and a former pipeline construction worker -- as the pretty, unabashedly retrospective pictures demonstrate. She's a playwright, a supporter of the arts, and an anti-racism activist.

And I would be really damned happy, albeit more than a little in shock, if the headlines say Benson on Wednesday morning.

Stevens, Murkowski & Young, Oh My

2006-11-04T02:07:00.000-05:00

The moon tonight is impossibly beautiful. Even though I've been locked inside all day and night reading fabulous oral histories, I got to see it twice. Once on the way home from the library, aloft in that Grandfather Twilight lavender wash; and again when I realized I'd forgotten the CSA (and we cannot go without our weekly supply of daikon!), and it hung in the dark, an imperfectly cut peephole into universal brilliance. I feel that I've never seen such a white, white moon.

Been reading these oral histories, as I say, taken in the '80s, about the '50s, and I love them but that isn't what I mean to say. In a startling moment, the interviewer asks one activist a contemporary (to the 1980's) political question, and she responds mockingly, "Well, I'm sure Stevens, Murkowski and Young will say..." and what they would or would not have said is utterly beside the point because those are the same people in power twenty years later.

Last night David and I took in the new Idi Amin movie on its final showing over at Pleasant Street, the Last King of Scotland movie whose cinematographer did 28 Days Later and Von Trier's latest stuff. It was incredible, better than we'd expected. There's not much you can do with postcolonial African political history in Hollywood that won't stink a little of exploitation or eurocentricism, sure. And sure, as the more lukewarm reviews have pointed out, the movie revolves around its white hero/anti-hero, Amin's fictional personal physician and 'closest advisor' Nicholas Garrigan. I think it's too easy to point that out and leave the matter there, though, since this physician is complicated: a selfish, arrogant, naïve kid happily swept up by Amin's populist rhetoric and the paradoxically cush living arrangements he chooses not to question. His presence as a white man in Uganda--playing the white man in Uganda as both an actor, obviously, and as the hopeful-idealist savior figure--is a raw theme throughout the movie, neither glossed over nor glamorized. That savior figure portrayal cuts close to the bone with contemporary American youth-driven movements often professing a desire to 'save Africa' (is there any cause that slogan won't fit?); peopled by kids who know little or nothing of a particular country's history. Dr. Garrigan, after all, shows up in Africa to work at a mission without a clue that the government being overthrown by coup is unstable, not to mention violent, and not knowing the president's name.
The infamous grotesqueries of Amin's rule were barely brushed, but the view was enough to overwhelm; brutality enough to remain firmly planted in the mind and make you wish you hadn't previously eaten dinner. Anything more would have turned a fictional film into something of a snuff film, an inaccessible thriller bordering on the gratuitous. That kind of realism should be caught in the sober grayscale of text and documentary, in my opinion, not interspersed with fictional romances and plotlines. Last King left me hungry for a documentary, in the best possible way. Most movies attempting to take on a historical frame seem to me to over-explain themselves and thus trap themselves, in their finite storytelling space and without much faith in their audiences' attention span, into a brief and superficial story uninteresting to anyone who knows much about the actual course of events. I am fairly ignorant about Amin's Uganda, but still know enough to appreciate that much more was contained in this movie than was being said; more was being alluded to and portrayed without explanation than could ever have been spelled out in dialogue and contrivance.
The one major flaw was a truly banal and lousy sex scene. Seriously, it almost turned the tides of my opinion for a moment... it was far less than the female character in question deserved, much less the half-naked African dancers whose breasts were edited in and out of cuts of the Action-with-a-capital-A.

In short, though it's too late for anything short, it was an excellent film. As we were leaving, David reminded me that President Museveni, who came to power in Uganda seven years after Amin was ousted in 1979, is still president there. Which is what comes to mind when I remember that Ted Stevens has been my state's senator since before Idi Amin started calling himself Lord of all the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea. Nearly forty years, he's been our senator. Don Young's been our only U.S. Representative ('cause we only get the one, remember?) for seventeen terms. He got into the House six years before Amin was ousted. As for Murkowski, he was our second senator for 21 years before he was elected (possibly the worst-ever) Governor of AK. And then he appointed his daughter to replace him. God forbid we have a name change after only a couple decades...

I am in no way connecting these men to Idi Amin, of course. It's just a boggling length of time... And because of my odd penchant for visual analogies to verbal terms, I consider the "changing of the guard" a very close cousin of the "changing of the underpants." Both of which, perhaps, are just a bit too difficult for an Alaska ruled by boom-n-bust Anchorage and Fairbanks urban crowds to handle. Yet I play myself false: after all, come Tuesday I'll be voting like a good little partisan for a man who's already been Governor for over a third of my lifetime and was the mayor of Anchorage when I was born.
(Not that I recommend the relative newcomer, despite being young, or a woman. Aside from being quite conservative, Sarah Palin strikes me as a bit sleazy--as anyone would who counters criticism of her non-existent subsistence priority position with the "But my husband's Native!" defense.)

ANYway. The latest census shows that there are now eleven more women than men in Anchorage, meaning that the old 'Odds are Good' adage doesn't stand anymore. I guess we can re-apply it with just a bit of editing to the chance of change in our state's political world, though:

The odds are nil, and the goods aren't holdin' up too well.

Telephones & Microphones

2006-10-23T01:31:00.000-04:00

**Notice! Warning! My aunt has brought to my attention that I erroneously directed brownie makers (in the previous post) to put 1.5 CUPS of butter in, whereas I meant 1.5 STICKS. Do not overbutter your brownies, people! Now back to your regularly scheduled musings.**

Because I aim to emulate Samuel "Langhorne" Baden in all things, I've been working at the Hampshire Phonathon this fall, calling alums to wheedle their hard-earned dollars for the good of our financial aid and faculty salaries and xerox budgets. Because I was slow to catch on to the strategy of this job (which is apparently to pick through the alum cards looking for those who donate regularly, in order to win contests and be awarded gift certificates), I've ended up calling mostly people who either graduated last year and are affronted by my blatant attempt to steal their student loan payments or who went to Hampshire for a couple semesters decades ago. To these I must explain that "Hampshire considers all its students to be alums, not simply the graduates! No, not just 'cause we want your money!"
While I've made very little for the college in a 'tangible' (read: bourgie) sense, I have nonetheless had -- obviously because I am a smooth-talking and friendly chap -- many interesting conversations. The best of these seem to be with people on the West coast, and with more down-and-out folks in general. Take tonight: a long and energetic conversation with a guy who wrote a literary journalism-type Div III years ago about living and working on Mt. Washington for a year, which led (the conversation, not his Div III) to him offering me a purely hypothetical but still very exciting potential job offer for ghostwriting work on some books he's compiling. Whether or not anything ever comes of it, it's pretty nice to know that two Hampshire folks who've never met each other can generate energy and ideas between them like that.

On a related note, Donald Jackson should answer his damn phone when the Phonathon calls, even if he doesn't intend to give me money. Because then he could catch up with old comrades on Hampshire's dime and invert the whole purpose of the fundraising effort in one fell swoop.

If anyone's interested, the second-oldest post on oddsagainst is a lovely little verbiage-picture of humanity and a tall man sitting pensively on a train ...also the third oldest is HI-larious and the first oldest is about a crackpot egotist writer, but let's not go overboard with the recommendations, here. this here's a cool story about my peaceful-warrior cousin and the charges against him being dropped. also, as long as you're valuing my opinions, today I am partial to homemade mulled cider, long scarves worn indoors, and Johnny Cash covers of Gordon Lightfoot songs.

Finally, I offer you the following homage to the leaders of the globe, authenticated here if you find yourself doubting:

"He turned out to be quite a powerful man. He raped 10 women. I never expected it from him. He surprised all of us. We all envy him."

(That would be President Putin of Russia re: President Katsav of Israel -- the latter, of course, being the subject of a sexual harrassment and rape scandal breaking this past week -- when he thought his mic was off. Apparently, "Putin's remarks prompted laughter from the Russian and Israeli diplomats in the gilded conference room inside the Kremlin, where the two leaders went on to discuss Middle East policy and other issues for two and a half hours." Awww.)

Because the people demand news of the inane, delicious and lunatic variety.

2006-10-16T01:16:00.000-04:00

This has been such an excellent weekend. All it's been is cold outside, fires inside, cerulean skies and scarlet leaves, a downright persnickety-consistent alternation between ginger and throat-coat tea, and working at the library circulation desk, my new favorite job.

Oh wait. There's also been the daily eight+ hour stints at my kitchen table with mandy and david, growing ever-more-crazed with our individual, fascinating academic obsessions. What a bunch we are. We wax rhapsodic about etymology, feeding off of one another's frenzy. We forget things we once knew for certain (for instance, in my case, that there is only one west and one east; not two sets beginning at the 180º longitude). We foray into dangerous digressions involving the meanings of who was born on our birthdays, what the real name is for those banjo-looking deals full of hot coals used to warm beds, and whether there's really such a thing as coriander leaves. And finally, just now, a unifying theory has appeared out of the horrific, disjointed, unbelievably overwhelming mass of barely-related information that has heretofore been my Division III. I won't tell you what it is; because after all, besides me, who really cares? But it's there.

Because I don't have an interesting drug habit and stubbornly refuse to wear anything but the cheap 'n dowdy, my spare cash is spent on odd ingredients to further my cooking habit. (Actually, to be honest, tonight was the first night I'd made anything more interesting than a really incredible local-greens salad since the last time I bee-ell-oh-doubleG-Ed.) Anyway, here are two incomparably decadent recipes, taken from the shmancy Australian gourmet cookmag Delicious and sloppily converted out of the metric system for my household's benefit. The stew smells like the breath of God, assuming God's been eating Indian food, and I've nicknamed the chocolate thing Incomprehensible Chocolate Thing. Originally it was called Persian Brownies, but there's nothing Persian about them and brownies makes me think of Betty Crocker boxes and crumb-filled cellophane. Besides, they're just that unbelievably good. If you like this sort of thing. (Recipes to follow.)

PS, I've said it before: expect nothing of substance or coherence of me until well after this DivThing is finished. If for some reason there's a person out there who surfs on over to this internet site in hopes of finding substance.
PPS, If you would like to experience true love and stained hands like you never have before, get yourself a fountain pen with a convertible cartridge, the kind that dips in the ink pot. I do not even have the words.

"Aromatic Pumpkin & Chickpea Hotpot" (their name)

combine 2 14oz cans of coconut milk, 1/4c. soy sauce and 1c. vegetable stock & set aside.
heat 1/4c. olive or vegetable oil in a pot or deep pan. add 1 large onion, finely chopped (as I learned today, if you prefer translucent onions in your curry, sprinkle them with a little sauce at this point to prevent browning) and cook until soft, about four minutes.
add 2t. Thai red curry paste (which was actually not that expensive, surprisingly, I'll be using it again) and cook, stirring, one minute. add 1t. each dried coriander and cumin and turn the heat up to high.
add a 2lb (roughly, plenty of wiggle room here) sugar pumpkin (peeled, seeded & cut in 1" or bite-sized chunks). cook one minute, or until those pieces are nicely covered with the onion paste in the pot. at this point, if you don't think it smells incredible, you probably aren't going to like it. or you have a cold. or you're crazy, whatever.
add the stock mixture and stir well. bring to a boil, partly covered with a lid so not too much liquid evaporates and simmer 15-20 minutes, until the pumpkin is almost tender. Fifteen minutes was plenty for us.
add 4 14oz. cans of drained, rinsed chickpeas, stir well, and partially cover gain. Cook another 10 minutes. Add salt and pepper and 1c. chopped cilantro (Fascinating sidebar: Cilantro is what Americans call the leaves of the coriander plant, because that's what it's called in Spanish. Take that, English-only! Unfortunately, we did not learn this until we were home from the store, frustrated in our search for something resembling coriander in a fresh, leafy form. Joke's on us, but this would have been better with the cilantro in). This is one of those recipes that, when it says it feeds six, really means it. We had four hungry people, one of them David, and we still have two containers in the fridge. It was great with rolls leftover from Mandy's cancelled Stammtische, but rice would also be splendid. Note that this is one of the few things I have ever, ever made without adding either cayenne or ginger. Trust the spice medley here.

Incomprehensible Chocolate Thing
Mostly we wanted to make this because it gave me the opportunity to cook with rosewater (also surprisingly cheap in the food section, as opposed to the skincare or whatever section -- let this be a lesson to you, since it would probably be fine on your skin. Same with sweet almond oil, which is a great skin moisturizer. Don't ask me who I'm directing this wisdom to, I could not tell you). The rosewater's just in the whipped cream you put on top, but let me tell you it is a crucial part. This combination has a superbly complex flavor. And by the way, I warned you about the decadance. You really don't want to ingest more than a small amount of this in a 24-hour period. Anyway:

melt 8oz. good quality dark chocolate (70% cocoa content) and 1.5 sticks butter. If you have a double-boiler feel free to use it, but we don't and it didn't do no damage. remove from heat and let cool 10 minutes.
meanwhile, beat 3 eggs and one egg yolk with 2/3c. caster sugar (okay, if you know any reason why caster sugar is different from regular sugar except being British code for "Let's make Americans pay more for normal white sugar and then laugh", please do tell me. And feel free to use white sugar, I'm sure it would be fine -- again, this was a novelty item recipe for the Bay Road House). where was I? Oh right. Beat them until they're "pale and thick," whatever that means. Not having an electric mixer, I just went 'till my arm was tired.
fold the chocolate into the eggs, then fold in 1/3c. flour (no typo) and 1/2c. sifted (ha ha) cocoa powder. mix gently and pour into a greased pan -- a pie pan worked nicely.
Bake 20-25 minutes at 350º, just until the top develops a cracked, crusty look. I over-baked a little, thinking it would be puddingy, but there's not too much danger of that.
cool as much as you can, and top with cream whipped with "a dash" of rosewater, barely a pinch of sugar, and a few shakes of ground cloves.

those old red-and-yellow thoughts

2006-10-01T19:35:00.000-04:00

I love the smell of pipe tobacco. This, like my love of Indian food, may have passed into my bloodstream from my mom's when I was whiling away my fetal hours. If that's possible, then along with the cherried tobacco scent clinging to the clothes of a grandfather I never met, an affection for lower-forty eight autumnal glories passed, too.

Yes, I am talking about Vermont. I won't bore anyone with precisely the height of emotion reds and browns and golds mingling with spruce rouse in me; or how deeply at home black rocks and upward-smoking mist make me feel. I took a drive into Vermont today; as it turned out mostly for the sake of the excellent popcorn, but hey: hope will gladly be my bread eternal. With that good fellow Seth Jensen in mind, and looking vainly to ward off immediate identification as a flatlander, I had my overalls and david's old canvas coat on. Well, turns out you'd have to go a little further north to worry about being called out on that one, if the high density of pretty hipsters between Brattleboro and Bennington is anything to go by. But such good colors!

To get in the mood, or maybe just 'cause I wanted to, I spent the whole drive listening to James Loewen's lecture series based on Lies My Teacher Told Me, and periodically exclaiming to myself in horror (I think in my head), Oh my god, I DID get all my knowledge of reconstruction from Gone With the Wind!! Also, I'm pretty sure it was a Newberry or Caldecott or whatever the hell Award book that led me to believe, in my intellectual infancy, that Jackie Robinson was the first black guy in the Major Leagues. It's pretty depressing to think that I'm about to finish a respectable undergraduate education--knock on wood--and despite the fact that I love and value learning about the past, and am decidedly better at it than, say, math... I know very, very little about actual history. There goes that potential PhD.

Ha ha! PhD.
Luckily, Vermont also has the effect of (compounded by the immediate home-longing) making me want to sneak off into the woods and stay there. I don't know what it is, one minute you're looking at the foliage and the next you're a Libertarian. And Jesus is speaking to you. Well, okay, that probably takes a year or two. But it is safe to say that at this moment, tonight, all I want is to graduate, go back north, and spend the foreseeable future fishing, learning how to work with wood, and scouting for some good land near Talkeetna or Galena or the Kenai Peninsula where to build a little cabin with a cabbage n potatoes garden. Also tending to my freckles, which have been woefully neglected since I made with the book-learnin'.

That's all.

(Oh wait, no it isn't. My computer is dead. I find out tomorrow how much of my stuff is retrievable. Most things are backed up but... just don't ask me any questions about the Div III in the next week or so. In fact, don't mention the words "writing," "chapter," "graduation," or "failure" in my presence for a while. Thankyouverymuch. In the immortal words of the Lady Killigrew Café, You are a very kind person. Now pardon me while I go watch Nightmare Before Christmas and collect my wits!)

In Which They Eat Cake with the Masses

2006-09-25T22:41:00.000-04:00

A while back, one Miz Noonan left a comment on this blog asking me to offer some sort of logic behind my continual harping on "obscene wealth" and sometimes, in lazy moments, capitalism in general. Her point was, "The existing socialist and communist societies in the world have generally seemed to lead only to inhumane dictatorships, yes? And what you're saying seems to imply that you think socialism is the best answer." Also that it's hard to argue with people who see free trade and incentive-based capitalism as only logical, which I definitely understand.

I couldn't figure out how to answer this. For one thing, I know pretty much nothing about economics, or the political histories of all socialist and communist nations. I can immediately think of at least four people who comment here on a regular basis who are far more qualified to give a good answer. All I've got is my layman's understanding of what I have read and seen and heard about other people's lives, my own experiences, and my very strong -- if wonky and atheistic -- sense of morality. So beware that what follows is the musing of opinion, and is not backed up by any studied comparison of economic systems -- maybe someday, once i've got that degree and oh-so-much free time on my hands, I'll end up making such a comparison with the use of actual books. For now, please offer me better information if you've got it.

The reasons I think social democracy is better than unmitigated capitalism? An example would be the list, released last week by Forbes magazine: the annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans. For the first time in history every single one of them is a billionaire. They represent 1.25 trillion dollars. Four hundred people. That is half the number of people who live in the American village of Savoonga, where residents are trying to figure out how to afford oil heat in their homes as the arctic winter approaches. 1.25 trillion dollars also happens to be half of the entire GDP of China (just ask the CIA). As a matter of fact, that's over a tenth of our own GDP! (A number, of course, that includes all government spending.) Wow. Those four hundred people must be such hard workers.

Even if you believe in free-market capitalism as the best way to organize a market, not to mention an entire society, I'd consider this sort of consolidation of wealth a sign of failure in the system. The idea, as I understand it, is to foster competition among entities: Economic Man is all about the competition, right? He's supposed to be out seeking what's absolutely best for him, tirelessly, in the face of rocketing rents and utter disregard for the idea of a living wage. So the idea is that all of these different corporate entities, so long as they remain relatively unhindered by government regulation, will compete with each other to offer better products and services at lower prices until Economic Man chooses what's best between them all and takes the market with him. But when you have wealth accumulating in stagnant, nearly bottomless pools as we do here in America, you have a false system of choice for Economic Man. He becomes Warren Buffett, real estate tycoon, with his 46 billion; or the various Waltons, with their combined 46.8 billion and commitment to offering the same cheaply made, cheaply priced, union-free products "the American people" want from their local WalMart.

In fact, I see no adequate sign that American people DO want any of these things: the decisions made by politicians who fly on the dime of lobbyists, the $6 minimum wage, the absence of universal health care, the tax credits for people who buy Hummers, the tax breaks for those who inherit from the Forbes list folks. And somehow I doubt that any sign from the media would be enough for me, since television is owned and created every inch of the way by whims and motives belonging not to some platonic Economic Man or Social Man, but by the people on the Forbes list and the millionaires immediately below them. It's easy to believe you're in charge as a consumer, but the only competition is a false competition on the terms of the companies with both the spending power and the production capabilities; the only choice is a false choice, the Pepsi or Coke dichotomy.

There are many other good points to be made about the way free-market capitalism fails as a global system -- fails if you think disseminating great wealth, assisting sustainable local growth, and encouraging individual entrepreneurs is the point, that is. But these are the ways I see the system as having failed by its own standards. By my own standards, I see it as having failed by valuing competition over cooperation. I can't offer substantive examples of cooperation's value over competition, and god knows we all have our humorous little stories about failed co-op ventures. It's just that I don't think competition is actually the sole purpose and aim of people, from the little I do know of history; and even if I did believe that, I don't see the American market offering the opportunity of competition to American citizens.

The claim of 'incentive-based capitalism' is that anyone who works hard enough can attain wealth and security -- but it's a man-made system and all too simply designed. What is meant is the hard work of those who can afford to concentrate on school, who are not pregnant, who do not have sick family members or children to take care of, who are given an equitable education with their peers', who are given the opportunity to continue their education to its culmination point, who are not handicapped, who have access to affordable housing and food, and who are paid a wage for their work that allows them to live without working two or more jobs. For many, the competition doesn't exist. For most of the people in the great ass-heavy triangle of American society, the game was over before it began. If half the citizens of the United States make more money than your family, your family is existing on $46,326 a year. Yet the movies we watch and the advertisements we see allow us to believe that a household making $100,000 a year is 'middle-class,' and that the great white experiment in self-interest is working.

There were thirty-seven million people living in poverty in this country last year, including a quarter of all black Americans and a quarter of all Native Americans. Thirteen million of those people are children. And that's just by the archaic measuring system the feds use, which only takes into account income vs. food costs in a country where transportation and housing costs are much more considerable. Even with that, 'poverty' in IRS-speak means that if you live alone and are under 65 years old, you're surviving on about $9,000 a year. Many people get their only health care from the emergency room: 114 million visits in 2003 and climbing. Fewer than 60% of Americans are covered by employment-based health insurance, and if I wasn't just procrastinating the work I need to have done tomorrow, I might start in on the manifold problems of Medicare/caid.

This is not capitalism's problem, though. Capitalism makes no bones about its purpose, and that purpose does not include providing a bearable standard of living for all of the people in the world's wealthiest society. Which is why I'm of the opinion that the system ain't working from a moral standpoint, either.
I know it's a subjective statement. I just can't imagine a way that it could be considered conscionable for 400 people to possess 1.25 trillion dollars in a country with needs like this one, much less in the greater world we all live in. I don't feel a need to back myself up with numbers on this one. It's wrong. That's just what my soul says.

And maybe it goes without saying, but there's something in between Stalin and Greenspan, you know? There's something between Mao and what we've got now. I know there's quite a bit of ground to cover on the failure of various socialist and communist governments, and why that has happened (and what the U.S. involvement was in some of those failures and human rights abuses). But what I support in the sense that I'd vote for it any day is common-sense socialist democratic policy: health care, living wages, higher income taxes for higher income brackets, rent control, public housing, all that jazz. Exactly the kinds of things the old Left worked for, the American socialists who were by and large silenced by their government and by history textbooks. And... that's that. For a more concise or contextualized response, see one of my smart friends.

(The picture up there is Sergey Brin, one of America's two youngest billionaires. The other's Larry Page. They're both 33 years old with $14 billion apiece. They founded Google.)

For a very clear report on Income, Poverty & Health Insurance Coverage for 2005 by the Census Bureau, go here.
Also, there's:
2005 Poverty Thresholds, USA
Economic Stats from the President
and Labor Force, Employment & Earnings stats

Oh, and PS, don't even get me started on billionaire philanthropists as a cure for billionaires in general. See this story, from the July Socialist Worker for a nice editorial on that one.

PPS -- Just interesting. There are six women, in that list of Forbes Top 400. Each of them except for Oprah is white. As a feminist, it is not my idea of success to have women in the multi-billion dollar owning class. Just sayin'.

Cold Comfort

2006-09-16T03:50:00.000-04:00

Have I mentioned how much I love autumn? And particularly arriving home at my Bay Road house after dark, with all those crickets and peepers goin' at it, to the sweet acrid smell of woodsmoke? Yes, we have the hardwoods. And they are good. Good to smell and good to warm your feet. And that means it's time for soup!
But first, a few moments in recent history that don't involve that man my father keeps calling "MY president" in a spitting voice that makes me worry about his potential ulcers. Or at least that don't involve that man snarking off to Congress about letting him handle things in secret. With the lights out. And a rubber hose, please.

1.)
There was a great story in The New York Times on September 1st about breastfeeding, and pumping in particular, and the immense differences women find as they try to navigate a postpartum return to work depending on their class. The writer compared women in professional jobs (consulting companies, offices, and Starbucks corporate headquarters in particular), who often have access to 'Lactation Rooms' and even company-owned pumps, with women who staff Starbucks or Red Lobster or what have you, who all too often end up cramped in a bathroom stall on their fifteen-minute break. These women pretty much have the choice between giving up and feeding their babies formula, with its far inferior nutritional content, or worrying about harrassment from management and infections or mastitis if they're stuck without being able to pump for too long. The story's here but knowing the NYT, they probably won't let you read it unless you give them money or a password. Anyway, yet another example of what class means to babies in America. Let the Family Values NeoCons suck on that one.

2.)
So, in Pakistan, under a very conservative and brutal interpretation of Islamic law (in fact, let's just call it Islamist law instead), if a rape victim fails to produce four male witnesses to her own rape, she faces prosecution and punishment for sex outside of marriage. Obviously the idea of actually prosecuting a rapist under this system is laughable. Ha, ha. Not so much when you read this BBC article reminding you that "According to the country's independent Human Rights Commission, a woman is raped every two hours and gang-raped every eight hours in Pakistan." So, the secular opposition party's been supporting this bill that would transfer rape cases to secular law, but the parliamentary alliance of Islamist parties has said they'll resign if it goes through. President Musharraf (supposedly committed to reform, remember?) immediately leapt to pacify them, changing the bill completely, and with some nonsense about 'lewdness' thrown in -- completely bypassing parliament while he was at it. In the end, "Liberal political parties, civil and human rights activists and lawyers said these changes essentially eviscerated the reform, and allowed powerful religious lobbies to manipulate what is seen as a weak judicial system."

3.)
And I don't even want to mention what happened to Jessica over at Feministing today. Seriously, do not get sucked into those comment threads. The ironic lack of irony is hideous to behold.

4.)
But on the other hand, there's this new Our Bodies Ourselves blog at http://www.ourbodiesourblog.org/ so that should be an interesting source of news and what have you. And hey, was I the last person in the world to discover HollaBack?? Using camera phones to capture and (sort of) publicly expose harrassers is a great concept, even if a couple of the spin-offs seem to feature one or two pretty dicey ideas of what harrassment is to get things going. (For instance, leering and gesturing and sleaze, yeah; a "god bless" at the bulk foods section, not so much.) Anyway, if anyone's up for getting something off the ground for Alaska, let's talk. I haven't decided yet how I feel about it, but there could be merits. Convince me.

So, after all that... the best butternut squash soup recipe in the world! Beware though. It takes a little while.

Preheat that oven to 350º
Cut a large (3lb??) unpeeled butternut squash in half, seed it, and then cut each half into four sections. Cut just the tops off of an unpeeled onion or two (I only had one and it turned out okay, but two wouldn't hurt) and a head (yeah, she said a head) of garlic. Put all these guys on a baking sheet or pan, brush them with olive oil and shake thyme (fresh if you're oh-so-good, and then tell me how it is) all over.
Cover and roast 1.5 to 2 hours, then remove and let cool to touching temperature.
Pour 3-4cups chicken broth and half a cup of cream in a big bowl, then add the soft chunks of vegetable as you seperate them from their skins.
Puree in blender cup by cup and transfer to pot. Slowly heat but don't boil. I added white pepper, ginger, nutmeg and chopped fresh parsley.

And it's great with spicy cornbread (I think D put cardamom in this time, good stuff). Just so you know, don't skimp on the garlic. If you don't like garlic... well, get another soup. And I'm sure this could be made vegetarian with some good mushroom broth or skinny with milk instead of cream. But whatever. Just love it.

And what we get is what we bring: / A grey light coming on at dawn.

2006-09-08T22:16:00.000-04:00

Northern Ohio is dead trees left standing: peculiar and lovely from the corner of your eye, but not when approached directly. I-90 from New York to Michigan means miles of September-burnt Ohio cornfields. Silos, water towers, factory stacks in the distance. The blank face of a quarry wall shimmering flatly through far-off trees. The alluring yellow-green stretching to that white or red farmhouse actually means the grass is withering brown blade by blade.

But Cleveland's just frankly nice to look at. Obviously it must have its desolations, but it's still got that old charm of planned permanence going for it that I never see out west. The air's sort of dead and grey at times, but the architecture's to die for and they make good sandwiches in Little Italy.

A Hampshire professor passed away this week. I really can't understand that he's gone. He was diagnosed with leukemia a year ago, and that felt unreal enough to begin with, but now...
He just had such amazing energy. I kept thinking, "But he was so big," which is completely illogical. Of course. But in a fairly nonliteral way, he really was. He was big, he was funny, he was idealistic and sensible and loved books and he was so goddamn interesting I just don't understand how it's possible for him to not still be sitting somewhere, talking to someone.
He's got little kids.
I know being sick must have made him smaller, in some ways if not in others. But I never saw it happen, so it just isn't real to me.
It's hard not to be able to think of anything more apt to say than i'm so tired of people being sick, since of course what I mean by that is this helpless fragility of being exhausts me...

There's a James Wright poem that's always made me think of Dr. Eric Schocket. It's called 'Honey,' and when I gave Above the River to my dad a couple years back, it was one of the few I took the liberty of dog-earing ahead of time for him. It goes like this:

My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law "honey." One afternoon in the early 1930's, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren't fighting about Paul's love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life,
I say a life.

Sweet corn; Cayenne pepper

2006-09-04T20:50:00.000-04:00

In Massachusetts, I buy sweet corn and garlic and tomatoes. David cuts the kernels from the cob and I mince the garlic with the ulu, cut the tomatoes small, try to catch all the juice in the guttered corners of the cutting board.
I love tomatoes. Lumpen malformed, burrowed into by tiny bugs; going soft, going orange; warm and dusty and smelling of sweet fields. I've said it before: having all the tomatoes I can eat, waiting out there on the vine, that's my idea of heaven. I hear organic food trashed a lot these days -- not as food, of course, but as an Idea. Because organic food is more expensive, meaning that it's chic, trendy; and people who succumb to trends, especially expensive ones, are generally ripe for ridicule.
Organic food standards being what they are (meaning, political), the label itself of course means far less than the act of going to a farmer's market or buying a community-supported agriculture share at a local farm (should there be such things near you). But the instigation of that label, the importance behind it, is rarely misunderstood. It's just underestimated.
I mean, the idea is that you'd be doing it for yourself, right? Avoiding chemicals sprayed on fruits and vegetables because somewhere down the line your respiratory function or immune system quality could be harmed because of your continued exposure (although the flippant reason is -i'll get cancer- and the equally flippant counter is -i'll get cancer anyway-).
That's really not how I choose to look at it.
Considering that most people wash their carrots and grapes before eating them; cook their potatoes, tomatoes and corn; the exposure route for most people is fairly minimal. Especially when compared to -- as invariably comes up in any argument about organic foods -- "everything else we're exposed to in the course of daily life."
In truth, the people whose health is consistently and significantly affected by the use of heavy chemical fertilizers and pesticides on fruit and vegetables are the people who work in the orchards and fields. To suggest that most of these workers have health insurance, much less access to adequate health care, is laughable. To suggest that their employers will change profitable standard practice simply because it endangers these workers is also laughable.
As far as I'm concerned, a very good reason for people to buy "organic" when they can -- or not make fun of others when they do -- as its value as a market statement. When it becomes profitable not to expose your workers, workers will not be exposed.
Of course this isn't the only means of action on agricultural labor standards. But it is something that can be done in the course of daily life. Just a thought.
Of course, most of the corn and tomatoes I'm eating every day, the cabbage and radishes and luscious cucumbers, those things aren't FDA organic -- the people who grow them can't afford the label, or aren't interested in it. They are chemical-free, though, and for the most part grown on small farms in this valley, and when I buy them (or pick up our CSA share on Friday) all I'm really thinking about is how happy and privileged I am to live in a place like this for part of the year.

And now back to this delightful book about military waste disposal practices in the '70s and '80s. Oog.

I really need a puppy.

PS, Here's a recipe I've been evolving for anyone who wants it. I'm calling it salsa because that's what it looks like; and because it's really good with beans and cabbage and chicken on corn tortillas or just on chips.

Scale the kernels from an ear of sweet corn & set aside. Finely chop two cloves of garlic and half a red onion; coarsely chop one tomato.
Heat a Tbsp or two of olive oil in a small skillet. Add garlic, caraway seeds, and plenty of coarse-ground black pepper. After about thirty seconds, add the corn and stir quickly. Add (liberally, but to taste): ground ginger, paprika, thyme, allspice, and cayenne.
When kernels start to soften, add red onion and shuffle around with a spatula for a couple minutes. Then add the tomato, more pepper, and stir. It's ready whenever. Good hot or cold.

I'm also experimenting with adding gradually increasing numbers of seeded, chopped chili peppers, but so far I think they don't make anywhere near the difference that the cayenne does. And lime and cilantro will make great additions, as soon as I get some.

Heroine of the Month: Karen Button

2006-08-12T04:52:00.000-04:00

Last week, I went to Saint Mary's at night. There were about forty people in the congregation; most of them older, grey-haired or white-haired or no-haired. Several were knitting. A very few had babies resting against their chests. I was late.

The woman speaking that night was a woman I used to work with in my late teens, over at Alaska Community Action on Toxics. I was always sort of in awe of her, primarily because our work as a small health justice nonprofit often brought us into tense confrontations with other people, companies and organizations, and Karen Button's just one of those people who does not lose her cool. She doesn't overcommit herself, she doesn't allow herself to be boxed in, she doesn't say yes unless she wants to.
After she stopped working at ACAT, I lost track of her for a time. KB's a peace activist and involved in the World Social Forum, so I knew she traveled often. Then, around the time I left for college, I began receiving e-mails from her. The messages were about the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they weren't letters. They were articles.

Karen Button has been traveling to Jordan and Egypt to interview people -- doctors, activists, refugees, soldiers -- and write about them. She's been sending their stories out to everyone who subscribes to her e-mail list since long before you could read such things in the mainstream news or even listen to them on NPR. She funds her travels and her translators with donations, and her own work when she returns to the states. She's an independent journalist in an age when corporations rule newspapers almost as hamfistedly as they rule television news stations. She's an independent journalist when we need all of them we can get -- and when too often we're only offered a glut of bloggers, people like me composing opinions on the net, built out of what they've read on the net.

A few days ago, I received her latest story, "Refusing to Fight: An Interview with Kyle Snyder." I strongly recommend this story to people.

"...Resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq (and, to some degree, Afghanistan) among its own military is growing rapidly and the Department of Defense teetering on the brink of recruitment crisis. Thousands of soldiers are refusing to participate any longer. Dozens, like First Lt. Ehren Watada—the first commissioned officer to refuse—have chosen to go public and face the consequences. Others simply disappear. By the Pentagon’s own admission, over 8,000 GIs are now AWOL (many now calling it Against War of Lies). ..."

The young man she interviews for this story is in Canada, trying to claim refugee status. He joined the military "the minute" after he graduated in 2003, eager for the benefits of signing: the bonus, the education, the family protection. Karen asked him if he thought about the invasion of Iraq when he joined. Kyle Snyder said,

"I wanted to help liberate the people of Iraq, just like the American president was saying. So, I signed up to be a heavy construction equipment operator, part of the 94th Corps of Engineers. I figured if I was an engineer in the United States Army I could build foundations for the Iraqi people to form their new government, to form a civilization after the bombings of 2003.”

He found a very different reality, both in the ways being in the military affected him personally and mentally, and in the things he saw on 38 missions during four and a half months in Baghdad, Tikrit, Mosul, Stryker and Scania.
You should consider reading this man's story. He has a lot more to say. He's currently trying to set up a safe house for resisters in Surrey.

I would also strongly recommend looking around in her other reports. Anything about Doctors For Iraq, for instance, an organization I've only heard about from Karen Button. Her piece on ExxonMobil in Alaska and Iraq from this March. Her interview with an Iraqi journalist about his experience being detained in an American torture facility.
You can find more on the blog she uses to publish: http://karenbutton.blogspot.com or you can ask me to forward your email on to her, for inclusion on her list.

Take care.

Big Things & BP

2006-08-11T05:43:00.000-04:00

Big things are happening. The British plane plot (and now no lotion in your carry-on). The tsunami in China. Israel and Lebanon are negotiating and being negotiated for, respectively, in the Security Council. Ned Lamont beat the guy who says Ned Lamont means more terrorism attacks, whasisname-o-that'sright Lieberman. And I went dipnetting on a cold gray day with leaky waders and we only caught three lousy pinks.

But all I'm gonna talk about just now is my lil ol state. I want to be clear about a couple numbers, in case anyone cares, that I keep hearing tossed around about Prudhoe Bay oil: it represents 8% of our domestic production, and about 2.6% of the total national daily oil use (a total that includes 'foreign oil'). And that's all of Prudhoe Bay. Only half of the area is actually shut down, the east half, which they say accounts for a clean half of the oil output. The shutdown itself is projected to potentially cost Alaska $6.4 million dollars A DAY in tax revenue, which is why our Governor is blustering through press conferences up in Deadhorse, impatient to get the money-show back on the road. Even after a pig detected sixteen holes and potential holes in the three-mile section of pipe that leaked 210 gallons on Sunday.

It's like the administration is making no connection between their own inability (and refusal) to restrict industry's behavior and the economic withdrawal they're now experiencing. As far as I'm concerned, the emergency nature of this shutdown gives credence to speculations of extensive and consistent environmental damage along the pipeline which has gone unaddressed and will undoubtedly go unaccounted for. I mean, let's not forget who else is involved: BP may be taking most of the flak (and yes, BP was in charge of maintaining the pipeline for the corporate coalition) but ConocoPhillips and our good old pals ExxonMobil together own three-quarters of the thing. And not to beat a dead horse, but if Exxon's drunk helmsman slimed our shores and and ocean almost twenty years ago and we still haven't seen a dime in reparations, I'm not holding my breath for them, or their cronies, to honor the tundra.

Anyway, point being, the state is going to lose a lot of money. Money that wouldn't have been lost if we demanded stricter accountability on a regular basis and responded to signs of neglect and damage (say, spills) as quickly as we respond to our economic foundation being shaken. Thank god we can still rest easy on the income taxes we levy... Oh. Right. Well, at least the state legislature voted to keep my cousin from receiving his PFD since he was in the Peace Corps last year. Between the cash the state won't be giving him and the other, what, two volunteers, our schools should be just fine. (Did I not mention the teachers are almost certainly striking for a new contract when schools open this month? Great atmosphere for it, considering the total freeze on all government hiring now in effect...)

Next time: Why are we leaning on corn-based ethanol to save us from our oil dependency when our oil dependency is linked to the droughts eliminating corn yield and giving the lie to a monocropping ethanol solution?
(...and other fun tongue-twisting riddles!)

Can't believe it's not bacon!

2006-08-08T04:56:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed – I didn’t, because I was up in Arctic Valley all day allowing mosquitos to bite me on every square inch of my body while picking one point five million blueberries (holy hot pancakes, batman, who’s coming to breakfast?) – but you may have noticed that today BP announced they’re closing the Prudhoe Bay oil field until they can address the corrosion in that section of the pipeline.

That would be the corrosion that’s causing recurring leaks so huge (270,000 gallons this March) the company’s now at the center of a criminal investigation here for their dealings on the North Slope. The corrosion (seventy to eighty percent wall loss) in pipes they haven’t bothered to pig clean for fourteen years. This, again, is a company which made over seven billion dollars in profit in the last financial quarter alone.

Anyway, so they’ve been leaking like kids at a carnival all over the tundra and now they’re making the surprising move of an indefinite full shutdown of Prudhoe Bay, which produces 400,000 barrels of oil a day, about half of what comes out of the whole North Slope. That’s 2.6% of the nation’s total daily supply, including imports. California in particular receives 20% of their oil from this state. Yesterday the average U.S. price for a gallon of unleaded gas was $3.036. The all-time high (meaning last September 5th, after Katrina hit the Gulf Coast) is $3.057.

Verrrrry interesting.
(ADN story)

Where Men are Men and Women Win the Iditarod

2006-08-06T17:44:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid, Susan Butcher was sort of my hero. My image of the kind of woman I wanted to be was informed by her as much as anyone outside my family: tough, capable, and smart as hell. Better musher than just about anyone else on the trail. She was the mythic girl in braids to me, and still is.
She died yesterday. She's been fighting leukemia for a couple years now, which the Anchorage Daily News has covered intensely and well. She had two little girls, and a man in her life who loved her the way any person would hope to be loved in this life.
If you want to read it, this is easily the best Craig Medred story I've read.

I'm a grouchy pissant these days. Can't figure it out. I'm just so angry... and it's just so useless. I'm angry at the people I see driving Hummers. I'm angry at the people building hotel-sized houses just over the ridge from my neighborhood. I'm angry at some guy from high school (oh, hadn't you seen that, Rothman?) for acting like it's a bold move to say that yes, you do love money more than human beings. I'm angry at the Press writer who fed him that slavering piece of ego. I'm angry at the Daily News Managing Editor for deciding that since local news is their 'franchise,' there will be no world news above the two-third mark of the front page -- where was that commitment to local news when McClatchy hacks gave We Alaskans the axe? I'm angry at the Alaska Railroad for yet again trying to spray Agent Orange derivatives on the land around the Talkeetna homesteads. I'm angry at Chavez for making me happy for a couple years and then turning out to be an ass, to put it lightly.

But as you've probably gathered, I'm well aware that it's all junk, I'm just pumping energy out; that it does no good to act like a bastard and let small things rot your mind. Yesterday I was out sanding our upstairs walls with my dad, rain falling on my bent back every couple minutes before changing its mind. Just up there where you can see Bear Valley stretching out around you to the Inlet and the sun changes thunderclouds into blankets. I was listening to the CD I made for Carrie for the first time since I made it. All those -what the hell am I supposed to do or say- songs, those dopey, confused hippie folk songs that don't sound like anything I ever remember her singing. Why did I do that? In the sun and the rain, quiet and content with my dad and the electric sander and the thick soursyrup smell of wood varnish... how am I supposed to get up and out and go to work when I never want to leave that porch?

Anyway, in all this murk if you want to have a laugh, I strongly recommend microfilm records of old newspapers. I've been reading The ADTimes from the late 1950s, mostly the statehood summer, for Div III research, and it's just a beautiful thing. My favorite headline so far has been "Soviet salad not so tasty." Everything's about the Reds or the labor party or how Texas isn't as big as it thinks (did you know three Texas counties seceded after Alaska was given statehood?); and all the women are Post Wives or Harmony Homemakers or Girls of the Rainbow Order. I get so caught up in following Scooter and Poteet's polo match and the time-traveling escapades of cavepeople (on the comics page) that I almost, almost forget to watch for the papers blustery dismissals of radioactivity up north.

Take care, y'all.

Sailed my ship of safety 'til I sank it...

2006-07-24T00:11:00.000-04:00

Working your way along in this dance of veils that is existence, there are moments when three or four breeze open, and something of unspeakable complexity shines through. Played pickup softball today with a bunch of my uncle's friends, remembered how much I love playing second base. Little cousin was there, learning to tip a ball off her tiny bat, knuckling hard grounders to me. Later we were in the car, and she explained to me that when we are all angels we'll sleep in the clouds -- she was talking and singing, joking with me like she does. I looked at her and for a split nothing, everything compressed: this brilliant small organism I've watched from nothingness to seed to a possessor of silent thought.
"I can't believe you're going to be four and a half," I said. "You're amazing."
She laughed. "Not really," she said.

I'm not a religious person. I have no god (although I used to wish I believed in the Catholic one, so I could be a nun). This makes my experience of faith incomprehensible at times, to myself. I waver momentarily into nihilsm, especially out loud. But there's something about the language of religion when spoken with sincerity and passion that moves me in a way I can't compare to anything else. I think that's why it numbs and disgusts me to see that language prostituted to a political cause.
But just as it disgusts me to hear words like morality used in superficial and calculated attacks on gay people or women who seek abortions, it disturbs me to discover more and more the void of morality on the other side of the political spectrum. I want there to be morality in politics. I don't want to leave it to the churches. But it is so often left to churches to feed and clothe the poor, to deliver women to prisons to visit their children and offer shelter to pregnant teens and to provide clean needles to drug users... I believe it is possible to have a moral, federally secular nation. I just have never seen it: the Welfare and Medicaid and public education programs we now hold as a nation are so far from humanist, so far from loving or just or moral that they are shameful. This will never be a moral country so long as there are in it the self-justifying and obscenely wealthy.

What's been touching this chord in me lately is the Johnathan Kozol book I just finished, Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children & The Conscience of a Nation. There are in this book passages more moving and more disturbing than any I have read in a work of nonfiction since I read My Traitor's Heart. Here he writes about the humbling strength of mothers raising their children in poverty in the Bronx:

One could write forever of such women, and of many men as well, who work together to create a genuinely 'beloved community' on St. Ann's Avenue, one that is at once political and spiritual, joyful and prophetic. Again, however, I worry about speaking too much of the triumphs that such people and communities achieve without positioning these stories in a realistic context.

I have, after all, seen hundreds of small victories like these over the years, and have been involved in some of them in Roxbury, New York, and elsewhere, but I have also seen them--almost all, with few exceptions--washed away in time by larger losses. I've also seen heroic and ephemeral victories of individuals used by conservative sectors of the press to militate against the larger changes it would take to win enduring victories for their communities. If only enough children, we are told, would act the way the heroes do, say no to drugs and sex and gold chains and TV and yes to homework, values, church, and abstinence, and if only enough good parents, preachers, teachers, volunteers, and civic-minded business leaders would assist them in these efforts, we could 'turn this thing around' and wouldn't need to speak about dark, messy matters such as race, despisal, and injustice. ...

I guess that I do not believe there are good ghettos and I get quite nervous about seeing stories of this kind in the newspapers, generally signaled by a standard set of headlines ('From the ashes: A flame of hope') that seem to be recycled periodically, because I believe that they inflate exceptionality into a myth of progress that is not based in reality. They do console us, but I think they may permit us also to congratulate ourselves too easily about the 'bootstrap' possibilities for individual endeavor or for localized renewal efforts in an atmosphere where the toxicity of life is nearly universal.

So long as the most vulnerable people in our population are consigned to places that the rest of us will always shun and flee and view with fear, I am afraid that educational denial, medical and economic devastation, and aesthetic degradation will be virtually inevitable; and this, I am afraid, will be the case no matter what the individual or even shared achievements of small numbers of good human beings who are infused with the essential heroism of the people whom I have described. So long as there are ghetto neighborhoods and ghetto hospitals and ghetto schools, I am convinced there will be ghetto desperation, ghetto violence, and ghetto fear because a ghetto is itself an evil and unnatural construction.

...So, amazing book. But that's enough rambling for now. I get to go paint on a giant canvas with a tiny person who reminds me regularly that "Kitties don't eat crusts. Kitties just eat banana sandwiches!"

10:07 PM edit:

Brave New Budget

2006-07-19T22:39:00.000-04:00

I love that we're living in a new age of recognition and hope.

Al Gore's gone and took his message to Hollywood, the President gets to tout the dangers of an oil addiction and tour alternative fuel research centers (meaning the laid-off workers at those centers get their jobs back). In the Economist a week or so ago, I got to read about how Bush has always been an ardent conservationist. You know. Deep down.
It really seems like people are waking up, inside the Beltway and in the great American Beyond, to the fact that climate change is real, and is dangerous, and we must understand it better. So we're doing what any strong, wealthy, forward-thinking nation does in times of crisis... burning books, closing research facilities and firing librarians.

Okay. I exaggerated. The feds aren't burning books.
They're just planning on cutting the EPA's National Library Network budget by 80% for the fiscal year that begins this October.
That's right, from $2.5 million... to $500,000. Since we pretty much already understand the way that climate change affects, say, weather systems. And oceanic pH balance. Not to mention drought and famine. Besides, even if we didn't understand them, it's not like scientists need to read other people's work before they do their own!

This network of libraries, as The Scientist tells us, "Includes 27 libraries serving 10 regional offices, two research centers, and 12 research laboratories around the country. Combined holdings include more than half a million books and reports, 3,500 journal titles, 25,000 maps, and 3.6 million items on microfilm. Last year, EPA libraries handled more than 134,000 research requests and cataloged about 50,000 unique documents."
Well, gee. They should be able to keep that up for the next year on the same amount they'd been using to run just the Headquarters library alone.
Even if ten thousand naysayers have poked their heads up in the six months between the story breaking and right now: all of the 10,000 scientists, engineers and specialists represented by sixteen local chapters from four unions, all protesting the cuts.
Alright, we know who it is fighting the good fight, but who's They these days? I mean, it's Bush's budget that Congress is approving, right? (Just like they did during the last four years of consistent cuts to the EPA.) He's the one who wants to shift the dollars over to "research funding for topics such as nanotechnology, air pollution and drinking water system security as part of his 'American Competitive Initiative'” (PEER). But the top officials over at EPA (the ones Bush has been appointing for the last six years) are vocally supporting this move, and already beginning to implement the changes.

So they're not going to just fund these new programs that Bush (aka The Kyoto Killer) is interested in. They're going to steal the money from the research library system. Already in March, "employees at the EPA’s Midwest Regional Library received a memo that the facility was closing 'in the near future' because the budget cuts resulted in a removal of 90 percent of the library’s funding" (New Standard). But on a larger scale, what's the damage gonna be?
The Scientist says,

Cutting $2 million from the budget could entail reducing operations at or even closing selected regional libraries, letting go of a third of contractor library staff, and shutting down the Online Library System (OLS), an electronic catalog of library holdings, according to an internal report prepared last year by the EPA Library Network Workgroup, a group of library officials who evaluated the proposed cuts.

But I don't want to give my own my pet peeves all the play. The two million they're proposing to cut from the library system represents a whopping 0.5% of the entire hit the EPA will be taking as compared to last year. Chief among the rest of this 400 mill is $199 million from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which provides loans to communities for drinking water, and according to The New Standard, "has been subjected to over $1.4 billion in reductions since 2002." Further, "Research and development funding would decline by 7.1% to $528 million, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)." This hurts on a number of levels, since about a third of this research and development takes place in American colleges and universities. So, goodbye grants and good luck to you future scientists of America. We sure were looking forward to seeing you shine.

Oh well. It's not as if the EPA was doing all that great to begin with. There's only so much the beleaguered employees of an underfunded agency led by regularly replaced industry hacks can accomplish. I mean, how behind are they on those chemical safety report verifications for chemicals already on the market? The blank checks we've been writing to the chemical industry and their 'science advisors' have worked alright this far. And at least after October 1st we won't have to worry about nosy folks from low-income communites located near medical incinerators, landfills, missile silos, nuclear reactors or Love Canal actually getting an EPA librarian on the phone to answer their questions... Much less finding informative documents online.

Viva la Information Stockade!

Free Speech Radio News (yeehaw!) broadcast, July 17
New Standard article, July 11
Scientist article, March 10
New Standard article, February 13
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility press release, Feb 10

well, dye my eyes and call me pretty.

2006-07-17T04:56:00.000-04:00

the reason every girl (and other people too) should be able to change her own tires is that you may just blow one to tatters somewhere between cantwell and the first nenana river crossing around eight pm on a sunday night. and roadside assistance, in that particular situation, isn't worth much more than a chuckle.
other than that, great road trip to fairbanks with the fabulous third sister. few things as beautiful as driving into interior alaska. between the chugach and alaska ranges you move in and out of weather systems: you can see the first storm far across the valley flatland, belly ragged and dark as magnetic tailings. inside the storm, the car windows are quicksilver and a beaver humps across the road, his coat scaled with dark triangulated wetness. and between the first and the second storms where the sun pours through... there's no other light like that. no green so intense as escapes the shade of those first alaska range mountains. ridges curling and jutting like razorous tongues.

i don't really get to read fiction right now. or that's the rule. but when david was visiting, there was something of a gorging on short story collections, and it was hard to stop. james salter's last night, alice munro's runaway, and william trevor's a bit on the side. that last one is amazing. i can't wait to get my hands on more trevor. he's far more variable than salter, whose stories can be interesting and once in a while moving, but always circulate in the same closed-window environment of wall street and hollywood and connecticut yacht club characters. trevor's less oppressive than munro, more willing to allow for human love without consistent underpinnings of weakness, manipulation and utilitarianism -- although she's amazing too. and his stories are shorter. not that this would matter, unless you suffer from fiction-reading-time guilt.
and johnathan kozol, who's got nothing to do with fiction, is pretty spectacular too. i'm in the middle of amazing grace: the lives of children & the conscience of a nation. he writes mostly about the extent of classism and the effects of funding-segregated schools, especially in the bronx. if you don't already hate giuliani, go for it. he interviews a lot of kids and adolescents, uses their words in surprisingly respectful ways. it's good for my vaguely delineated moral self.

as soon as someone reads the one percent doctrine, tell me what you think.
first fairbanks workshop is tomorrow. welcome back into my life, galway kinnell and sherman alexie...

Phish Food

2006-07-10T19:25:00.000-04:00

One.

There's this crazy fish, looks like an eel, a log with a mouth or something. Called an ocean pout. The crazy-looking pout lives very very deep beneath the ocean and carries a protein in its blood which can be compared, as far as crude metaphors go, to antifreeze. The protein lowers the temperature at which ice crystals form. Naturally, this makes one think Yummy! --at least if one works at Unilever (that big corporation that bought Ben & Jerry's a while back).
Yummy! The folks at Unilever thought. That would be great in ice cream! And so it came to be that they used the protein to lower the necessary amount of fat and cream it took to make their ice cream products.
Far be it from me to question the right of neurotics, models and dieters to half-fat ice cream. However, the story doesn't end with the fish. Or rather, the story of the fish ends, but the story of the protein goes right on, because Unilever has figured out a way to manufacture a substitute using genetically modified yeast! (That's the stuff they use to make vegetarian cheese, I think.) Using the fish would be terribly expensive, not to mention -- since people's fondness for guiltless dessert outweighs our fondness for relatively ugly fish -- unsustainable.
This is legal in the US, and the UK is currently considering the potential health effects. Last night, a commentator on Air America radio said that some human health scientists are concerned that this represents a time bomb for immunodeficiency problems in young people. But I think he was speaking generally about GM foods, rather than specifically about the fake fish blood.
All the same, think I'll excise calories some other way...
BBC article, June 26
Air America, which doesn't have a link. Unsurprisingly, since I think it was the Alaska guys, who can be adorably crazy.

Two.

The ocean's acidity is rising. That's another fish-related thing, although more related to coral and phytoplankton. Which unfortunately shelter and feed fish! Ha ha, fish! Good thing we've already figured out a way to replace you with Scary Yeast. The lemonization of the blue planet is connected to greenhouse gas emissions: carbon dioxide. Probably exacerbated by the burning of fossil fuels. Probably.
A quarter of the CO2 released into the air is absorbed by seawater (at an estimated rate of 20-25 tons a day), where it forms carbonic acid and lowers the pH levels of the oceans in general. No one has a very clear idea what the potential impact of this is, especially at the same time as the water is warming, but luckily a number of scientists are scared. They're saying things like "Such dramatic changes in the carbon dioxide system in surface waters have not been observed for more than 20 million years of Earth history" (BBC), and "one of the most pressing environmental threats facing Earth" (Washington Post). It's all apparently a little unexpected (although you just know there's some beleaguered and bespectacled person somewhere saying I told you so), since the ocean's absorption of carbon dioxide has been one of the things we've all counted on to mitigate the transformation of rampant emissions into global warming. As the Post points out, "Some have questioned global-warming predictions based on computer models, but ocean acidification is less controversial because it involves basic chemistry."
The reason this could be quite bad for coral, as well as for animals with shells, is that increased acidity reduces the amount of calcium carbonate in the water, which is what they use to build those shells. Hilariously, it is the slow decomposition of those same kinds of shells which replaces calcium carbonate (necessary for the absorption of CO2 into the ocean). There are speculations that in addition to harming coral, shelled marine creatures and plankton, the increased acidity will alter the growth and reproduction of fish, and compromise the ability of larger animals, like squid, to extract oxygen.
Best of all (to get the joke, remember where people have historically survived against tremendous Arctic odds largely through a dependence on fish and marine animals for subsistence), nutrient concentrations especially in high-latitude waters is likely to fall as "subsurface waters become less oxygenated, and phytoplankton will experience increased exposure to sunlight" (BBC).

Washington Post article, July 5
BBC article
The Ocean Carbon Cycle, according to Harvard Magazine
Roddy Scheer in EMagazine

Three.

But, as always, what's important is the personal story. The individual, the nuance -- in this case, the family fisherwoman and the fishing family. My friend and lifelong role model Paula Cullenberg had an editorial in the Anchorage Daily News on Saturday, which she emailed to the paper from Dillingham, where their family used to live and now returns to fish every summer.
Why should we care about fish? Well, besides dire subsistence needs and the possibility that even ocean pout might possess inner beauty and a karmic soul, there's this:

As I watched my two sons, ages 15 and 17, jump onto our skiff with my husband for the short run to our setnet site in Nushagak Bay, I was struck by how we were beginning to pass on the gauntlet. Eighteen years ago, when we started our first season in Bristol Bay, I was six months pregnant with our oldest son, Matthew. We joked about how our child would be fishing for his college tuition in a few years. Now, our two sons are approaching college age and have surpassed my ability to set anchors, pick fish and stay up all night.
This month, fishing families from Ketchikan to Kotzebue are working together catching salmon to sell and to eat this winter. In coastal communities across Alaska, salmon fishing is a core economic force. This has been true for well over a hundred years and likely will be for years to come. ...
The salmon fishery has been constantly changing in the almost 20 years that I've been involved. In our first season, each Bristol Bay salmon was more valuable than a barrel of oil. For 15 years we made good money in our short fishing season. Farmed salmon was a nagging worry, but not one that we gave much credence. Five years ago, the price for fish took a nose dive. As fishing families did all over the state, we looked at the bottom line, shook our heads, and started to work on improving quality and markets.

In a survey of 2,300 salmon fishermen from all over the state in 2004, by UAF's Marine Advisory Program, well over half said they expected to be fishing for the next 10 years and many said they planned to keep fishing the rest of their lives.
The survey confirmed what fishing families all over Alaska know. While the money is critical, salmon fishing has other values.

For me, fishing is a month each year that our family is together, all day, every day. My children have grown up seeing their parents working hard and experiencing the slow pleasures of rural Alaska. Year after year, they joined in that hard work until now, they are full players. Fishing is basic, simple, sometimes boring work. But it is satisfying, physical labor with days dictated by the tides and the weather, rather than meetings and school schedules. ...

For the whole thing, go here.

annual financial aid tangent

2006-07-09T04:27:00.000-04:00

this is indulgent. but it's also the weirdest 'problem' i've recently had. so obviously i need some bloggoheroes to assist me with thinking power.

last year around this time, i received my financial aid information from hampshire, and my award was so bewilderingly small that for a while i thought i wouldn't be able to afford to go back to school. a month later, thanks to emotional bolstering from y'all and also to the intervention of my superb dragon lady committee, i had more financial aid and a plan to graduate a semester early and thus be able to afford finishing my degree. the plan, up until i opened yesterday's mail, was that i'd be done with my div III this december and school-free after that.

except i just got this year's financial aid. and apparently, either because my sister's starting school this year or because hampshire has collectively decided i'm cool, i have fantastic aid this year. like, seriously, it would cost me as much to take two semesters at hampshire this year as it would to take two at UAA. (thanks also to living off campus and not eating their food... yay for that!)

why is this??? and what am i supposed to do now?? i would LOVE to take another semester of classes. david's sure that they won't let me complete my div III and then just dink around taking classes for a semester. but what then? i assume i have to work this out privately with my committee or something, but god. i could get a minor in something in a semester! i already checked for construction minors at umass. or i could take some languages. or i could take some grad-level courses just for the hell of having them on my transcript.
but i definitely couldn't do that with my div III hanging over my head unwritten. so i'd need to stick to my writing-it-this-semester plan. gaaaaaaggggghhh.

why couldn't they have given me so much money last year, when i could have just putted about in Div II some more?? i don't know if i can face the euphoria of picking out classes again just when i'd accustomed myself to never doing it again.

When 2+2 Equals Twenty-Five Hundred

2006-06-27T19:32:00.000-04:00

As there's been a 33% increase in American instances of flag desecration in the past year, it comes as no surprise that Congress is spending this week (and do I need to say my taxes?) deciding whether there should be an amendment to the constitution forbidding violence to cloth.

Numbers are tricky. One is the loneliest, two can be as bad as one, and the difference between three and four happens to be 33%.
That's right, this year the number of times Americans desecrated their flag totalled four. Up from three last year. Anyone want to take a guess at what that number will soar to if any decent civil disobedience movement results from this asinine congressional debate? The House already passed the amendment. The Senate votes on it Wednesday. That Arlen Specter dude insists that amending the constitution doesn't change it. "I think it's important to focus on the basic fact that the text of the First Amendment, the text of the Constitution, the text of the Bill of Rights is not involved," he says. Where are they going to stick those seventeen words, if the text itself is out? Those senators! They sure didn't drop out of Algebra Two like me!

Numbers are also fun. As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank (link below) so cheekily writes,

The [Senate] chamber has scheduled up to four days of debate on the flag-burning amendment this week. If that formula -- one day of Senate debate for each incident of flag burning this year -- were to be applied to other matters, the Senate would need to schedule 12 days of debate to contemplate the number of years before Medicare goes broke, 335 days of debate for each service member killed in Iraq this year and 11 million days of debate on the estimated number of illegal immigrants in the country.
Unfortunately, the Senate has only 49 days left on its legislative calendar for the year.

Yes, okay, thinking that people fight and die for dyed cloth rather than for ideological and material triumph is funny. And some numbers are dead serious.

Such as 2,500. That would be the number of reported sexual assaults on female American soldiers stationed in Iraq last year, according to an NPR piece played this morning and not yet available on their site. Most of those attacks were perpetrated by other American soldiers.
The Army's response to numbers like these is to explain that "the five-year tally included reports of abuse that proved to be 'unfounded' after investigation" (see Post article below). The Pentagon's response is to point out that they've recently put several programs into motion to protect the women serving in the armed forces. Unfortunately these programs often take the what-the-hell-did-you-expect victim education approach of instructing women not to go to bars alone, and so forth, rather than examining what it is about the military and military training that seems to encourage men to violate women's bodies and personal autonomy.

On the soft, fetid underbelly of this issue is a teeming mass of questions. For me, foremost among them is what these numbers mean for Iraqi women (and any people victimized by assault in all American-occupied areas, in fact). What they mean for invisible people, men and women and children all, the people caught in the tangled strands of a decimated social, political, and medical infrastructure.

We know that years ago--is it already years ago, for Abu Ghraib?--the Pentagon 'fessed up in an internal report that in addition to humiliating men sexually in a hundred different ways, they allowed videotaping of naked female detainees, allowed forcing them to reveal their bodies at gunpoint, and allowed male guards to "have sex" with these women. But such things are always dealt with quickly, have no fear. For instance, in October of 2003, when at least three soldiers from 'military intelligence' were accused of assaulting an Abu Ghraib prisoner they weren't tried for that nonexistent offense, but they were fined a couple hundred dollars each.

Apparently, the Pentagon doesn't discriminate much between Iraqi and American women when it comes to prosecuting people who hurt them. Since the beginning, as the Denver Post reported,

U.S. soldiers accused of rape and other sex crimes while serving in Iraq routinely dodged prosecution ... with the help of commanders who gave them light punishments such as reprimands and pay cuts, according to military records ...
Troops facing sex-offense accusations were given job-related punishments - which offer no prospect of prison time - nearly five times as often as criminal charges.

Such leniency also was granted to soldiers accused of serial crimes. Although investigators compiled evidence to prosecute a Fort Stewart, Ga., sergeant on claims he sexually assaulted three subordinate battalion members, he was given only a reprimand, records show.

Again and again, in these scattered newspaper reports from throughout the years of the Iraq occupation, you read about sealed files, stalled investigations, minimal reprimands, and horrific violence. I'm not reprinting what the few women who have undertaken a media conversation about their assaults have described happening to them. Read it yourself, if you think you need to know. What I think is vital is that this, what is reported to the authorities and reported by the news, is the thinnest crag of that proverbial iceberg.

Rape is a tool of war. The sexual humiliation of women is a tool of dominance in any situation.
And the United States Congress thinks four people 'desecrating' a piece of cloth deserve four entire days of discussion. As majority leader Bill Frist so touchingly and relevantly reminds us, "Ever since the Boy Scouts first taught me how to care for our flag over 40 years ago, it has always held a special place in my heart."
Conclusion? A bipartisan majority of this Congress doesn't know the meaning of the word desecration.

If numbers don't lie, how much do they leave unsaid?

Dana Milbank's Post column
WA Post article on increased sexual assault in the Army
New Standard article on assault against detainees
Denver Post story on stalled assault cases, 2004
TruthOut editorial on women soldier's unexplained deaths

Three Weeks Ago in Congress

2006-06-27T03:59:00.000-04:00

I'm back from Savoonga. I wrote this before I left, but didn’t have time to post it. Anyway, they still all got voted on. And Congress is mad crazy. So it still may be interesting.
I've also got some things to say about being on the Island, but it'll be a day or so...

1.) Homeland Security Grants would have reduced Bush’s tax cuts to those in income brackets of more than a million dollars in order to pay for $750 million in grants to high-threat cities like NY and DC. All this would have done was ensure that such cities received NO LESS money for protection funding than they have before. Nita Lowey, New York Democrat said the projected cuts in funding to these cities are “beyond belief.”
Don Young voted to block this. 207 House Members did, in fact, against 191 others.

2.) Aid to Egypt would have been reduced by $100 million next year, out of $1.7 billion, as a message to the Egyptian government to stop suppressing dissent and jailing political opponents. The amendment was criticized for potentially endangering one of the U.S.’ only good relationships in the Middle East (chalk another one up for the spread of freedom!). The amendment failed, 225 to 198, and Don Young voted to fail it.

3.) Indecency on the Radio!! Well, maybe there used to be. But last week, the FCC fine for airing indecent material – what exactly ‘indecent’ means is not defined in the bill – increased ten-fold, from $32,500 to $325,000. Only 35 people voted against this, and Young was certainly not one of them. Diane Watson, democrat from California, points out that while the bill creates enormous fines for on-air ‘indecencies,’ it does nothing to address “media concentration and a lack of competition. When big media gets bigger, conglomerates move further away from quality programming and the principles of diversity, localism, and competition.”

4.) Finally, one that allows your heart a little oxygen! Only 37 representatives voted against a bill already passed in the Senate that sets new standards for safety in coal mines and increases fines for mine operators who violate federal safety regulations. That’s the kind of indecency I’d like to see fined hundreds of thousands for each small infraction… The bill doubles the required oxygen supply along escape routes, increases reliability standards for the oxygen packs, requires wireless underground-to-surface communication installment within the next three years, and so forth. On this one, Young and 380 other jolly fellows voted yes.

5.) Unfortunately, the glow doesn’t last long (unless you’ve got miners in your family, in which case the previous news may carry you well into next week). The House passed a bill along to the Senate that would enable the FCC to supercede local authority in decisions about who will provide Internet to their communities and how. About thirty thousand local agencies currently make these decisions. Basically, this would make it even easier for the nation’s largest companies to compete against smaller franchise holders. The idea is lower monthly bills and better service (does anyone else get tired of Libertarian undertones every once in a while?). The probable actuality is the destruction of consumer protections and local requirements for equal service to all neighborhoods, as well as death knells to smaller businesses. 321 people voted for this, Don Young among them, and 101 voted against.

6.) In an attempt to salvage something from the above bill, 152 people voted for an amendment that would prevent telecommunications firms from setting varying speeds and service levels for different people/neighborhoods/businesses. Unfortunately, Young and 268 others thought that was a stupid idea.

JESUS CHRIST THE NEXT TWO ARE EVIL.

7.) Voting 218 for (ahem, Mr. Young) and 179 against, the House adopted an amendment to the Dept. of Homeland Security budget denying any funding to states or localities with a “sanctuary policy” for undocumented immigrants. “Sanctuary policies” are what allow these people to report crimes and appear as witnesses without having their status reported to federal authorities. So: penalize people reporting rapes and murders, or your community doesn’t get any money from the feds to make it safer. Yossarian? Yossarian, where’d you get to?

8.) The House voted to prevent the Department of Homeland Security from disclosing information about Minutemen operations to Mexico except when treaties force them to. (As a reminder, the Minutemen are a “self-appointed civilian patrol” group on the Southwest border, claiming about seven thousand members.) In other words, a majority of the fine men and women of the United States House of Representatives believe it to be more important to protect a bunch of racist paramilitary thugs than the victims of violent crimes. Does your homeland feel safe? Cause mine’s crying under the bed.
293 for, 107 against, you take your wild, wild guess at which side Young was on.

9.) Big, ugly abandoned military bases sitting around collecting dust? Well, no more! Turn ‘em into oil refineries, says the House. None have been built in the U.S. since the seventies, and now with this new bill, we can “coordinate the permitting process… so that needless delays would be eliminated” (thanks to Ralph Hall of Texas for the soundbite).
Alright, a) this was debated under an incorrect heading (boring problem!), b) most of those ‘needless delays’ have to do with environmental regulations, and c) at least one brave little Democrat had the guts to mention that ‘over-regulation’ is not so much the reason for oil companies not having built new refineries portside: driving up domestic gas prices was (go Bart Stupak of Michigan!).
283 for, 179 against. I’m not going to bother mentioning Don Young’s name anymore, it’s a waste of imaginary internet ink.

10.) Those Democrats (so cute when they’re desperate!) tried to offer their own alternative to the above oil refinery plan: a government-run Oil Refinery Reserve with the capacity to meet 5% of US demand for oil products. It would operate below capacity and fuel the Naval fleet unless an emergency arose, in which case it would be used to stabilize commercial markets. Unfortunately, this plan had little or nothing to do with lounging around in and/or making big business’ bed, so it tanked. Get it? Tanker? Ha. Ha. That would be 223 to 195.

Okay, enough evil. On to the Senate!

As you may have noticed, the great big deals in the Senate last week were the SameSexMarriage! Amendment and the EstateTaxRepeal! …erm, Thingy. They didn’t go anywhere. They were both quite pointless to begin with. But that’s just my bleeding heart talking.

1.) In case you didn’t realize, there’s a constitutional amendment on the table. Yup, in the same proud historical tradition of The Right to Free Speech and The Right to Bear Arms and The Right to Peaceful Assembly, this sorry excuse for a Congress’ ass is happy to present… The Right to Not Get Married to A Person With Similar Biological Genitalia to Your Own Self!
Personally, I’m a conspiracy theorist, so I think there must be a commercial benefactor here. That’s right, I said it: I think the Right has stock in surgical equipment and is just biding its time until some old gay folks get sick of waiting and say, hell with it, let’s draw straws on who gets the genital reassignment surgery.
Anyway, so, 49 for and 48 against. Close call, McCain. Hope you’re really, really proud of yourself. They needed sixty ‘for’ votes to advance the crazy old thing. And speaking of crazy old things (and the dynastically-appointed daughters of unpopular governors), Stevens and Murkowski voted for this.

2.) Estate Tax. Better known to those of you who partake of the televised news as DEATH TAX, I’m told. (Capital letters impart a certain sonorous quality. I’m hoping for one reminiscent of professional wrestling.)
Most of you shouldn’t care about this tax. Okay, none of you should care about this tax. Because the only way it will ever affect you is if your parents suddenly accrue at least four million dollars. That’s the baseline for having to pay this, and 98% of all estates in this country are exempt. Fortunately, we live in the kind of beautiful place where the majority cares deeply for the smallest of minorities, and does its best to watch out for its wishes and dreams.
Currently, under the Bushies’ tax cuts, this silly tax is being phased out, and will be completely by 2010. But hurry up and die then, rich people, because it will be reinstated in 2011 at 2001 levels. Don’t ask me how this makes sense. Ask Mitch.
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (Republican): “Starting in 2011, many small-business owners and their families may be unfairly penalized if we do not eliminate the death tax. We can change that by repealing one of the most destructive, unfair taxes ever conceived by government. Let’s kill the death tax forever.”
Oh wait. I forgot. Mitch thinks we’re stupid and likes to lie to us! Let’s ask …um, Byron.
Byron “Funny Name” Dorgan of North Dakota (Democrat): “There is no death tax. … There is, in fact, a tax on inherited wealth in this country. Very few Americans pay it.”
(Postscript Update: Nine days after I wrote this, the House passed this amendment. The projected cost to American taxpayers over the next decade is estimated at $280 to $800 billion dollars in lost tax revenue if the Senate passes it.)

How is it even possible to teach a boring high school government class these days?
I mean come on here, people!!

Guantanamo & Goodbye (for now)

2006-06-12T06:10:00.000-04:00

First off, how mortifying to your soul is it that our government controls illegal prisons so unbearable that the human beings within refuse their food to draw international attention? And that when the criticism of every reputable human rights program in the world doesn’t sway our country’s commitment to locking people in Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial, the people move beyond desperation into despair and attempt, over and over, one by one, to take their own lives?

Not as mortifying as it is when three of those people (one of them a man younger than me and another barely older) finally tragically succeed, and our government’s top officials call their deaths a “good PR move to draw attention,” and “a tactic to further the Jihadi cause.” When the esteemed concentration camp commander himself says of the men (held for years 'on suspicion'), "They have no regard for life, either ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us."

As it turns out, one of the men who took his life this week at Guantanamo – which our taxes pay for and our representatives allow to exist without serious political action against it – had been selected for release. Meaning, they had nothing, nothing to try him for! But he hadn’t been told. Because officials had yet to decide where they would be sending him.
Two of these men were from Saudi Arabia, the third from Yemen. The news does not mention whether they have families still living.

What kind of person describes the loss of a life, of anyone’s life, as a good PR move?

Now that I've released a little of that, I should mention that in less than three hours I leave for the airport. My bags are too heavy. They are full of food, canned and vegetables and fruit, that I’m unlikely to have access to in Savoonga. I don’t think I can take anything more out, though… most of the weight that’s left comes from the books I’m carrying for the workshop. I’m excited and terrified, and my first class is tomorrow shortly after I get in.

For those of my dear friends in Alaska who I didn’t get to see as much as I’d have liked to these past few days… know that I definitely would have liked to. Even the short visits I got with you made me feel so lucky. My autonomy has been less than usual of late (which is a good thing, right? Seeing as how my autonomy was only an illusion in the first place, born of the individualist Lockian cultural framework I arrived into, and utterly disregarding the fact that I am simply a moment within the organism, a joint in a web, a piece of a family…).
Thanks for giving me the time I got. I can’t wait for more… a year from now or whenever.
(And Soph, I have a birthday thing for you I thought I’d get to give you, but I guess I need a mailing address…)

Wish me luck.

Initial story on the suicides, BBC.
Story on “PR move” allegations, BBC.
Story on Mani Shaman Turki al-Habardi Al-Utaybi’s intended release

damn, it's good to be a [sociallyconstructed] woman

2006-06-10T05:35:00.000-04:00

...a woman
is wilderness
unbounded
holding the future
between each breath
walking the earth
only because
she is free...
~ alice walker, "a woman is not a potted plant"

1.) The May 30th, 2005 issue of The Nation had an opinion piece by Katha Pollitt on the Merck vaccine for cervical cancer. Seeing as this vaccine was just FDA-approved this week, and will be entering the market selectively as one of the world's most expensive vaccines at over $100 a pop, the old familiar Focus on the Family argument against it is likely to resurface: all that's keeping unmarried virgins from straying down Jezebel lane is the rampant fear of... cancer after they turn fifty. I thought this might be an apt time to restate Pollitt's catchy phrase for this approach to sexual health politics. She wrote that witholding a cancer vaccine in order to protect virginity or promote abstinence is simply "honor killing on the installment plan." Feministing has a more recent analysis.

2.) Also, with a legal challenge to the South Dakota abortion ban upcoming, here's a look at how it came to pass... so to speak. It'll be damn interesting to watch what happens with this one, since the ban was passed by the legislature and the challenge will go to the ballots. We all know who has more money and louder voices, but there are some indomitable feminist canvassers working SD--met some of them at this spring's conference--and I wouldn't want to be the first to underestimate their discursive power... however many it may reach. Anyway, Lauren Bans' piece in a more recent Nation issue does a great job of looking at why the SD legislature voted the way it did, after commissioning a task force to look into abortion, including medical information collected over the last thirty-odd years. However,

Though it was designated a bipartisan committee, the task force ended up with a voting bloc of nine staunchly antiabortion members--a mix of antiabortion legislators, doctors, a Catholic antiabortion lobbyist and Dr. Alan Unruh, a chiropractor whose wife, Leslee Unruh, is the founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse. From the first meeting onward, the antiabortion majority refused to conduct the investigation with stringent scientific guidelines, as is standard in most research committees. Alan Unruh even protested that such restrictions would exclude research based on ideology. ...

The dissenters--Linda Holcomb, a family therapist; Dr. Maria Bell, the sole gynecologist on the committee; Senator Stanford Adelstein; and [Kate Looby, state director of Planned Parenthood]--say the final report distorts the information and testimony the task force surveyed. Though the testimony was evenly divided between citizen and expert witnesses in favor of legal abortion and against it, most of the testimony in favor of legal abortion was omitted from the final report or discredited to what Looby considers a libelous degree.

3.) And (insert something about beauty being on the inside), does it get any uglier than Ann Coulter? She's touted as the glamorous intellectual of the far-right by such institutions as Time magazine (that's right, the one that recently broke the Haditha story after internally suppressing it for some time), but as it turns out, she's not only hateful but plumb crazy! What else would you call her latest claims that women widowed by the 9/11 attacks are "professional victims," and "witches who acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them"? But, as it turns out, Coulter's hatin' on the wrong crowd these days. Not that good old-fashioned profiting-off-your-own-vitriole is a bad thing, except when it burns bereaved people fashioned into unassailable patriot figurines in the public eye. Looks like the right will be turning Coulter a cold shoulder, for a little while at least. And here's a QuickTime clip of Olbermann on NBC crushing her flat, in effigy.

4.) Speaking of women, NPR did some sort of little special on masculinity yesterday. First part was quite decent, what I heard of it, anyway: poet Robert Bly talking about father-son relationships in this country, and the post-industrial phenomenom of men being largely and in general removed from their children's everyday lives. He spoke pretty eloquently about men needing to have a space to "work on themselves" without that being classed as feminine; that men needed to know that they could, and should, have "soul talks" with their sons or other men. Was nice. Then, suddenly, he was replaced by some panel talking about how masculinity has changed "since feminism," with a lot of gobbledygook about metrosexuality and becoming uncomfortable in traditional roles. The first caller was a man who said his main dilemma lay in whether or not he should be opening doors for women. I'm not even going to touch that one. But Michael Caruso, former editor of Men's Journal, responded in seeming seriousness that while some women were genuinely offended by doors being opened for them, he'd never met a woman who was offended if you paid for dinner.
From this I infer that masculinity can't have changed all that much in the last forty years or so, and what's more, smart girls don't date Michael Caruso.

5.) This is about fairly-genderless civil rights, but check out the article that Tennessee Guerilla Women posted about Tennessee not allowing immigrants--documented or undocumented--to get married, thanks to what the ACLU considers a statewide intentional misinterpretation of a 1997 law that you must have a social security number to obtain a license.
It's nice to see bigoted legislation expanding its horizons, doncha think? There's just so much world out there...

6.) And last of all, there's some interesting--if not very well proofread--information here about women being the majority of voters in a system in which their bodies are treated as expendable (oh, with caveats of course!) and their votes (unless backed by cash) are largely treated as jokes or inevitable exercises in submission. Wish that particular shit would hit the fan already.

watch it, Texas, we're the big boys now!

2006-06-08T05:09:00.000-04:00

Don't know how many of y'all read the Anchorage Daily News on Tuesday, but on the front page they ran a story that made me proud of the paper in a way I haven't been in a while (thanks to McClatchy's influence, goes without saying, not the ADN writers). 'Course, it didn't make me too proud to be from a state that's been electing republican Don Young to the U.S. Congress for the past thirty-three years. That's well over half of our entire statehood that he's been the only Alaskan (albeit California-born and raised, Donald Jackson) in Congress. I mean, when do we start to get tired of looking foolish?

I'll cut to the chase. The story was about members of Congress and their staffers being sent on trips paid for by "Private groups, corporations or trade associations--many with legislation that could affect them pending before Congress." Such groups have collectively paid almost fifty million dollars in the last five and a half years to send these nice folks who allegedly represent us on at least 23,000 trips overseas and within the states. As the paper says, that "included at least 200 journeys to Paris and 150 to Hawaii, room rates of up to $500 a night and some high-flying on corporate jets that cost up to $25,000 a trip, according to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, American Public Media and Northwestern University's Medill News Service."

It comes as no surprise that first place in the latest Congressional competition goes to Tom DeLay -- after all, he's resigning tomorrow, his face permanently associated with the dictionary definition of dirty politics, not to mention grand jury felony indictments for violating campaign finance laws. That fellow accepted about $500,000 in trips for himself and staffers since 2000.

And in second place? With $492,000 over the same period? Why folks, that would be Rep. Don Young, humble mariner from the Yukon (as his congressional biography trumpets). I won't go too far into this one, but the most expensive single trip went to a staffer who visited Brazil in February of 2003 courtesy of the American Soybean Association, for no disclosed purpose except to spend nearly ten thousand dollars. Okay, okay, I'll also say that the second most expensive trip was for Don himself, and the wife, who headed to San Diego to christen what I'm sure was a very lovely boat. And that over $350,000 of that ham sandwich was from groups outside his state. But that's it, I'm done.

And this while entire villages go bankrupt along the selfsame Yukon River he so shamelessly touts as home. Thank god he's at least protecting those river folks from the terrifying wedding rings gay people want to wear! Feverishly, at that, for session after session after session, in between bouts of crushing abortion rights already inaccessible to those bankrupt villages and gluing his face to the Bush administration's collective backside. Poor man, a good thirty-dollar crêpe is probably the least he deserves!

I'm not going to compare Young to DeLay. Neither am I gonna make any wise-ass insinuations about the two biggest bloaters coming from the two biggest oil states. The article I'm talking about reminds us not to jump to conclusions; that there's a very pertinent distinction between private organizations, which can serve important educational purposes, and corporate interest groups (both are included in the study, draw your own inclusions about who's got more cash and/or clout). Plus, the most expensive trip taken overall was three times more than Young's staff's most expensive (that would be Virginian Bliley Jr.'s thirty-odd-thousand dollar jaunt to London for something having to do with tobacco). It doesn't matter to me whether my C-man got the most obscene gifts or the less obscene gifts.

What matters is this isn't being clarified in the the mainstream media, and it could be. It's treated as if--because it has to do with economics, with gunless crimes--it's way too complicated for the voting morons of the country to grapple with. Ah yes, the newsrooms of the television world say. Campaign finance reform. No good image there, no clear connection to people's lives or their values -- instead let's run the story on the immigrants, or the San Fran trannies, or the wildeyed bearded terrorists. And how those convenient figments are endangering our constitution and our godgiven rights.

All's I'm saying is, whether or not the lobbyist groups get special favors, the job of these people in Congress is not to be celebrities. Their job is not to give speeches at Harvard, christen Californian boats, party in Paris and Brussels, or play golf in Scotland. Their job is to represent the rest of us. Even those of us who cannot buy them dinner. Even those of us who aren't within four thousand miles of them. Their job is to look around this country at what's going on, check out the power served to them on that silver Beltway platter, and give a shit.

As far as I'm concerned, that idea would come across as clear as crystal to any middle- or working-class person able to turn on a TV.

...or how to ace torture class.

2006-06-06T05:46:00.000-04:00

In Georgia, there's a Fort called Benning; and on that fort, there's a school... the School of the Americas.
Oh, wait. Strike that. Reverse.
In Georgia, there's a Fort called Benning; and on that fort, there's a school... the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

Hey man. It worked for KFC and Philip Morris. Exxon does it in Alaska, where they're still a little bit on the outs. If people's opinion of you starts to decline, don't worry--change your name!
Okay, well, it's an idea. But it didn't work for me in puberty (oh, the brief, anticlimactic days of Kati-with-no-E), and it isn't working for "WHINSEC" now.

Because people seem still to remember the School of the Americas' reputation, and don't seem to be buying the idea that a fake ID means the Institute no longer trains soldiers to torture and kill dissidents. The School of the Americas, specializing in combat training, was established in Panama in 1946, moved to Georgia by the early 1980s, and then was officially shut down in December of 2000. But much like the famed chocolate factory that seems so perversely present in my mind tonight, just 'cause the doors were closed didn't mean the Oompa-Loompas quit their jobs. See, in January of 2001, a brand-spankin-new school opened. In the same buildings. Teaching the same classes. But--those tricky vixens!--they'd gotten themselves renamed.

Little bit of background, mostly from a 2002 Latin American Perspectives article (and if Bowen or Donald or Devon or anyone wants to add to my relatively uninformed analysis, I'd appreciate it):
Some people think that certain methods of psychological warfare used by Latin American militaries can be traced to the incorporation of Nazis into those militaries after the second World War. It seems like this should continue to be examined as a theory, but that a perhaps stronger influence came from the fact that, as political scientist Patrice McSherry puts it,

"...in the late 1940s U.S. military and CIA strategists, with their European counterparts, set up and trained 'stay-behind' guerrilla forces in Italy and elsewhere in Europe--forces that included extreme-right and fascist networks--in an effort to combat the advance of communism. By the 1960s, counterinsurgency strategists decided to fight revolutionaries and guerillas by creating counterguerilla forces made up of military officers and paramilitary irregulars who used the methods of terror. Modeled on the special operations forces of the U.S. military, these counterinsurgent guerillas used dirty-war methods and psychological warfare to deceive and destroy perceived enemies.
... The now-infamous CIA and School of the Americas (SOA) military training manuals, declassified [under directive from Clinton] in the mid-1990s, were drawn from Project X manuals."

Project X being the basis of U.S. 'intelligence' training in Asia and Latin America from the mid-sixties to the late 1970s. The McSherry article further specifies that,

"Joseph Blair, a retired major and former Phoenix operative who taught at the School of the Americas for three years, said that the author of the SOA manuals drew from intelligence materials used during the Vietnam War that advocated assassination, torture, extortion, and other 'techniques.' President Carter tried to end such training, but in 1982, under the Regan administration, Project X manuals were used again to update army manuals and to train new generations of officers in Central America and elsewhere.
... The training manuals provided documented proof that army and CIA instructors taught Latin American officers methods of torture, including use of electroshock against prisoners; the use of drugs and hypnosis to induce psychological regression; the sequential use of sensory deprivation, pain, and other means in interrogations; assassination methods; and the use of threats against and abduction of family members to break down prisoner resistance."

Those recently declassified documents (you see why I love FOIA so hard?) also revealed that manuals used at SOA into the 1980s advocated such 'tactics' as beatings, false imprisonment, execution and bounty payments for enemy dead. Old-school students of this esteemed institution include Manuel Noriega (formerly of Panama), Roberto D'Aubisson (the brain behind El Salvador's death squads during the Civil War), and former President of Argentina General Leopoldo Galtieri: thousands of people conveniently disappeared during the 'dirty war' of the 1970s, but at least he wasn't a commie! (For information on atrocities connected to SOA grads in the last few years, see http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=205 )

So these days 'WHINSEC' asserts that they've changed their ways, and that some of their modern graduates are participating in such life-affirming activities as mine removal (this from a country refusing to sign the international anti-landmine treaty because its defense contractors are making too much money off of 'em). Also, their press guys explain, out of tens of thousands of soldiers who have trained there, "only about 300" have been formally accused of human rights violations. Further, as of 2001, the administrators codified an existing policy that insists that each student receive at least eight hours of instruction in "human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military, and the role of the military in a democratic society."
However, some of us still read what news we can get, and it looks to me that despite best intentions at the re-branded SOA, torture just keeps on keepin' on. Perhaps partly because there are schools around to train folks in doctrines that historically not only permit and encourage torture, but demand it as a wall of defense against perceived encroaching anti-Americans, whether Communist or Islamist.

Alright. Most of you already knew this, in fact know it far better than me. So why did I say it? Partly so you could smile and nod and think to yourself, gosh it's cute when she reads stuff and gets all fired up. True. But also, there happens to be a piece of legislation you could act on *this week* that could suspend operation of the SOA/WHINSEC and limit the Dept. of Defense's ability to start a similar training facility until a Congressional task force submits a report assessing all courses and curricula, and their effect on "human rights and adherence to democratic principles and the rule of law." HR 1217 was introduced in March by none other than Massachusett's James McGovern, and currently has 133 bipartisan supporters (none of them from Alaska, I might add). It will hopefully be voted on this week.

So, you all know the drill: if you want to, please call your representatives, or email them at least.
If you want their phone numbers or email addresses quickly, you can try the School Of the Americas Watch site on this very topic at http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=96
They have guidelines listed if you've never made a call like that before, and they also have a list of everyone who's already agreed to co-sponsor (a good number of Texans, interestingly...).

And th-th-that's all, folks. It's three in the morning in Alaska and I don't know if the sun's going up or going down. All I know is it never got dark.
Take care of yourselves.

McSherry, J. Patrice. "Tracking the Origins of a State Terror Network: Operation Condor." Latin American Perspectives, Vol 29, No 1, Jan 2002, p38-60
CNN article: http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cold.war/episodes/18/spotlight/
Latin America Working Group Education Fund: http://www.ciponline.org/facts/soa.htm
The whole School of the Americas Watch Website: http://www.soaw.org/new/type.php?type=8
Article on Bush's refusal to keep Clinton's promise & sign the anti-personnel landmine ban treaty: http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2004_03/Rademaker.asp
TO READ THE BILL, go to http://thomas.loc.gov/ then select "bill number" and search for HR 1217 . The summary and status are listed here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.01217:

**Also** That Patrice McSherry has some damned interesting looking articles and contributions to books, and most recently her own Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (2005). If anyone's read this, please tell me. It's going on my list unless I hear a couple really, really bad reviews...

two-thirds majority

2006-06-04T01:35:00.000-04:00

so, my uncle's going through all this shit with his cancer, as people with cancer do. he's lucky enough to be doubly insured, and have his own home, and a wonderful family and wife, and they're lucky enough to have him. he's been able to have access to really good medical care, here and in seattle, really good oncologists etc. except for this little thing that happened where one of his doctors mis-wrote a prescription for pain meds, unintentionally doubling the intended dosage. even the intended dosage was apparently the level you'd give to someone whose system was already quite accustomed to opiates, unlike my uncle. the point is, this mistake caused him a week of avoidable suffering added to already serious pain.

listening to him talk about it tonight (they caught the mistake several days ago) was interesting. the doctor is good, he said, and trustworthy. but s/he has fifteen minutes to talk to each patient, and if you take any longer you're cutting into the next person's time. s/he is writing during every conversation, and talking as s/he writes prescriptions. in other words, it would be crazy not to expect some mistakes like this one. yet when someone is fighting for his life, there are no casual mistakes, no acceptable margin of error.

and this is the best-case-scenario for health care in this country? this is what the upper-middle class, highly educated, professionally insured person can expect? fifteen minutes with an exhausted, harried doctor who has ten more completely different people to see before s/he can take a break?

god. i can't even think about what happens to people when they show up uninsured in the ER far-gone into their tumor growth. or their families, who have to make the non-choice to pay for the hundreds of thousands of dollars of inflated costs incurred when someone who doesn't have insurance simply walks into a hospital.

something from amanda singer's Division III keeps coming back to me (she did an ethnography on the UMass chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, investigating whether complexities exist in individual ideologies in the Right's youth movement ...and I can't seem to stop talking about it...). she said that almost all of the Focus on the Family-type students she interviewed thought it was the responsibility of the federal government to provide health care to all its citizens.

of course they do! of course a group that believes in the sanctity of the proscribed family unit will support little children being allowed to have regular check-ups and dental exams, will support gyno and ob-gyn care for women (whether pregnant or waiting to be), will support encouraging people to be tested regularly for cancer, heart disease, etc. and liberals pointing snarky fingers at self-annointed Right To Lifers for every death row inmate or civilian casualty of war doesn't do much to bridge the unwarranted gap. if for once the heads of the 'family-values' Right could focus on universal health care, environmental 'stewardship', and real education reform -- if for once the democratic party could reach across hate lines on those platforms: real issues, issues that touch working families whatever their god...
but now i'm getting a little frothy 'round the mouth.

well, gosh congress, right there you got yourself a bipartisan issue. and people are strongly behind this, when asked: a Gallup poll earlier this year showed almost 70% of the surveyed public "worry a great deal" about the availability and affordability of health care. more than they worry about terrorist attacks, no matter how many hospitals and elementary schools the pentagon & their corporate sponsors set on fire in the middle east.
unfortunately, the wealthiest country in the world actually taking care of its citizens doesn't have much to do with ~~scary brown people~~ immigrants or ~~SEX~~ women marrying women and men marrying men, so i probably won't be hearing much about it anytime soon, eh?

not when there's an midterm election coming up!
god forbid!
quick everybody, let's vote on ANWR some more!

massacre, memorial day, me, me, me

2006-06-01T01:44:00.000-04:00

On my second day back in Alaska, my dog Ishmael was killed by a woman driving a little too fast down our one-lane, two-house dirt road. She was on her way home. She lives down the one-lane, two-house dirt road that lies perpendicular to ours, beyond which they both dead end. (All of our neighbors seem to drive a little too fast these days, neighbors who have moved in since I moved out. Every time I see it I want to shout at them--foully--to move to the suburbs... but then, I'm bad at moving out of the anger stage of grief.)

I've been working at my soon-to-be four-year-old cousin's preschool lately, helping with a vegetable planting project. This morning, she turned to me and said, "Katie, what is 'died'?"

Whether this was related to 'Shmael's disappearance or the larger and more hidden things going on in her life right now, her words hurt inside me. I'm trying to think of a better, calmer, more distant way to say that, but it's the truth. They're still in there, hurting.

Except no, now what they're doing is festering. Because I started to read Balfour's new blog tonight, and she broke the Haditha story for me. And with inimitable precision, she said exactly what would braid me into the story she was about to tell: Devon wrote that in Time's investigation of the killings, a reporter interviewed a little girl. Nine years old. She saw her grandfather shot by Marines last November. And then her grandmother.

So, what happened in Haditha, Iraq? Rampage. Massacre. Revenge killings. Whatever your title. It's being compared to My Lai. It seems that a Marine Corps corporal was killed on November 19, 2005. Civilian Iraqis were murdered for this, men, women, children. The number of deaths the Pentagon says it is investigating is 24. Of course, they're saying this now, after accusing villagers of lying, then paying $2,500 for each dead person, then accusing Time reporters of lying and spreading enemy propaganda. Well, that poorly-attempted coverup has come to an end, and we can all once again be openly proud to pay taxes in a country that thinks a kid's grandma is worth half as much as a really cheap new JetSki.

As I'm half a day behind most of the nation, everyone I know has probably already read about this. If you haven't, here's the BBC Story. I recommend the link to Devon's post above, of course. Daily Kos has an informative piece (and led me as well to this AP story of the U.S. Army murder of two women yesterday, cousins who rushed through a checkpoint to get to a maternity hospital because one was going into labor). Baghdad Burning (original blog for book of the same name) doesn't have a story on Haditha that I can find, so that's certainly worth watching in the near future, and always. Looking back through her archives reminded me that of course late November and early December were packed with election and anti-election news--that was all you heard of Iraq around here. It made me think also of Iraqi journalism, and the trickling nature of the horror-river of information journalists have to contend with. It must be so hard to follow or verify, and even harder to publish and prove. What goes on every day, simply sliding away in the current of chaotic bloodshed?

I started to write something about the presidential and midterm elections here.
I just realized I don't have the energy.
I know the language most of the candidates will use to defend or denigrate the war will commonly offend me with simplistic jingoism, skipping off the chasms of reality like dust through air. It will reinforce the distance of most of the more radical intelligent people I know from interest in the act of voting. With the same apathetic destructive results at the polls.
I'm exhausted.

My Uncle Bud, really my mother's uncle, died early this month. He fought in the second world war. He got a Purple Heart for going back into the field under fire to rescue people, so I wrote a paper about him in seventh grade. He never argued with mom about her adolescent commitment to pacifism; used to make his kids, all nine or eleven of them, say to him before they left the house in the morning, "I'm going to have a great day." When my mom was a kid, memorial day was sacred, it was Bud's day: barbeques and stories and family. When she was a teenager, memorial day stood for everything that was dark and wrong and violent. Now, she says, it's complicated. I understand that. There needs to be a way to honor tradition, to honor Bud, to honor family and pain and pride in service.
But there has got to be a different way to do it.

This monday being memorial day, my family did what we always do: went to the Parkstrip at nine AM for the Vietnam Vets Motorcycle Club's remembrance ceremony, then to my Aunt Suzan's grave, then to Jackie's for breakfast and word games. This year I couldn't handle it. I don't know if I'll go back again.

I don't think I want to say much about not feeling the ceremony as I sometimes have before, because my reasons are pretty predictable. The military, Bush and Murkowski addresses had far too much praying for me to pretend we live in a secular nation. The word WarOnTerror was spoken over and over, as I have never heard there before. The crowd was three or more times its usual small size. The constant refrain was sacrifice, uniformed sacrifice. The price of freedom. That night a fresh batch of Alaskan kids lifted out for the bloodfield of Baghdad.

I know I'm not alone when I say I don't believe that a military won my freedom. I think many soldiers and generals played a significant role in that tenuous attainment, but no more significant that union leaders, legislators, judges, civil rights activists, abolitionists, suffragists, feminists of every wave, etc. I know I'm not alone. So why do I stand in a sunny green park in Alaska and feel frankly terrified?

I was dizzy. The men who spoke kept speaking, many of them contributing to the holy uniform-uniform-uniform drone, and my head my head was thick with Birkenau, with Rwanda and Okinawa and Vietnam and Dresden and Hiroshima and Kuwait and Sudan and and and.

What do I want? A re-design of memorial day and its purpose? Yeah, that's going to happen. Exposure of the Pentagon in journalistic nonfiction? I wish. An upsurge of radical public school history teachers? Definitely closer to helpful and possible.
Do I want to be able to distill my many thoughts once again into a simple STOP KILLING EACH OTHER, into a belief in war as a mysterious continuous aberration?

Whatever. Goodnight, ugly world. I'm going to try to sleep for a while.

You load sixteen tons...

2006-05-30T23:03:00.000-04:00

If you have lived with me for any extended period of time, you've probably had the pleasure of being around while I downloaded Alaska Public Radio Network stories on my crumduddly little laptop--which means you probably had the pleasure of listening to me shout at said computer about Teck-Cominco and the Red Dog Mine.
"Shining bright above the Arctic Circle my ass!"
"If I wanted corporate ads, I'd listen to FOX!"
...Or something like that.

Kind of the reason for those unpleasant disruptions of what might have otherwise been lovely evenings is the fact that Red Dog Mine is the largest-scale toxic polluter in the United States... now for the second year running. On account of things like 458 million pounds of "toxic release" in 2004 alone.

Oh, it's a headline alright. Just beautiful. Looming monoliths of death on the horizon by my own implication, right? Charred plumes hanging low above the tundra, perhaps. And at one time in my more black-and-white greenie (haha) days, otherwise known as psychological puberty, I'd have gone with it. But as seems to be the case in this crazy life, Red Dog is one hell of a complex story.

On the high northwest coast of Alaska lies the world's largest zinc mine, caught between the Chukchi Sea to the west and Deadlock Mountain of the Brooks Range to the southeast. The mine, also a source of lead ore, is located on land belonging to the Northwest Alaska Native Association Regional Corporation (quick refresher: instead of reservations in AK, a portion of the state's land and resource rights were divided between twelve regional corporations and a number of smaller village corps, meant to cover over 220 federally-recognized tribes). NANA leased the mining rights to non-Native corp. Teck Cominco in 1982, and production began at the end of 1989. Since then, the mine facilities have been expanded in 1998 and 2001.

Teck Cominco calls the mine, "An open pit, truck/shovel operation," which it would certainly seem to be, since it's so far off the roadbelt that anything more complex would probably be prohibitive to set up. 'Course, those some mighty big shovels you're talking about, considering their yearly production capacity is around 600,000 tons of zinc in concentrate. That concentrate is trucked--and we're not talking via paved road--fifty-two miles to the Chukchi Sea Port where it is stored year-round, lying in wait for the brief summer shipping season when it's taken by ship to the Lower Forty-Eight, Asia, and Europe. To transport that volume of material, zinc- & lead-loaded trucks leave Red Dog every fifteen minutes around the clock, trundling right down past the traditional food-gathering grounds for the Iñupiaq people of Kivalina.

So here's where the EPA classification of the mine as the nation's Numba One Po-lluter comes in: they mine rock, right? Rock's heavy. Herein lies the reason this particular honor is usually dismissed as irrelevant in newspaper stories and conversation in this state. Of course the mine is the highest polluter by sheer volume: it mines lead and zinc, technically toxic materials. They aren't creating pollution, the argument goes, they're simply moving the organic stuff we know to be dangerous up out of the ground and then all around on top of it.

Hmm. Good point. Problem is, I really don't care if Red Dog is the nation's first polluter or fiftieth or five hundredth -- it certainly has some worthy competition. What I care about is the fact that the levels of lead and cadmium found in areas where the people of Kivalina gather greens and berries are higher than 'acceptable.' What I care about is the fact that lead dust is dangerous. Working in this mine is dangerous (somehow I am not comforted by the proud assurances of Teck-Cominco that over half the mine's employees are NANA shareholders, are Native Alaskans). And the heavy dust rising from those ninety-six trucks a day is dangerous.

Lead affects your nervous system; can cause irreversible brain damage. It can harm your kidneys and reproductive organs beyond repair, depending on the concentration and an individual's susceptibility. It is especially dangerous--like most toxins--to pregnant women and developing children. According to an Alaska Community Action on Toxics report (the group who released the report on exposure levels in subsistence gathering areas), "Long-term exposure to lower levels of cadmium can result in kidney disease, lung damage, fragile bones and damage to liver and blood. It can also cause children to become hyperactive, and reduce their verbal skills and IQ scores."

Also according to the ACAT report, "Since the mine began operating in 1989, villagers have noticed a serious decline in the quality of their drinking water, as well as fish kills and changes in the abundance and patterns of caribou, beluga, and bearded seal migrations. On March 8, 2004, residents of Kivalina filed a lawsuit against Teck Cominco alleging nearly 4,000 violations of the federal Clean Water Act."

Alright so, bad situation, yeah? But there should be two safety nets. I mean, that's the whole point of the federal government's plan to merge Native sovereignty and governance with a capitalist structure, right? The corporations are supposed to be responsible to their people. And perhaps some are... arguably many of them are, if your definition of their responsibility is to financially reward shareholders. There are always going to be uncomfortable tensions, though, when profit begins to contest with people's welfare; especially when many of the people on the corporate board no longer live in the communities whose resources they've received the right to exploit, having moved to Anchorage, Seattle, etc.

So the Native Corporations are a complicated story, and the arguments for and against their existence would be a whole 'nother library. But there's supposed to be a non-corporate entity involved here, too: the United States government, in its Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation incarnation.

Permit yourself a chuckle.

ADEC has an illustrious history of privileging the desires of the Native Corporations (okay, all corporations) over the rights of rural folks. (I won't even start on the Klukwan / Long Island saga.) The point is, the people of Kivalina and nearby Point Hope and Noatak have been asking for clean-up, for testing of their blood and water, for any sort of help the government might feasibly deign to offer, since well before the expansions five and eight years ago. And the government just doesn't care. They're perfectly satisfied with the tests they conducted sixteen years ago, immediately after the mine opened.

Long story, and a tangled one. But this much I know to be true, right? The reason ADEC has no interest in the plight of the people eating from the earth in that area is that they consider the area itself to be an industrial site. And people who choose to live within industrial sites, well, what exactly do they expect? They've made their own beds there, regardless of how many centuries of elders have walked the same ground.

Sources, cause I'm going to try to do right by this one:

ACAT's Autumn 2004 Newsletter, available through their website (link on right side of page)
Seth Kantner's 5/28/06 ADN column "Red Dog mine proves we have good reason to fear pollution," not yet available online, (this man is now a renowned Bush novelist, check out his book Ordinary Wolves sometime)
various notes from Alaska Natives and American Laws by David S. Case & David A. Voluck, UAF Press, 2002
a letter to the editor (ADN) I wrote, published July 18, 2004 (no link anymore)
this 2001 Vermont Journal of the Environment piece by Michael O'Brien: http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/RedDog/obrien.htm
this U-Conn site collecting media information on Red Dog: http://arcticcircle.uconn.edu/SEEJ/RedDog/
Teck-Cominco's story: http://www.teckcominco.com/operations/reddog/index.htm
NANA: http://www.nana.com/default.htm
The Conservation GIS Center map: http://www.conservationgiscenter.org/maps/html/reddog.html

Oil & Water, Food & Cash

2006-05-26T16:41:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time when I was a wide-eyed girlchild of sixteen, I cried myself to sleep because Al Gore lost an election. Why? Well, I can't claim dark foresight, because I wasn't afraid of going to war or losing my rights to privacy and the Freedom of Information Act, or of being implicated as a citizen in torture, illegal imprisonment, and the destruction of entire countries. Nope, I was crying because I was sure that now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be opened to oil drilling.

See, four years before, an incredible elementary school teacher named Cheryl Hilmes had taken to me to my first adult environmentalist's event; a weekend conference for women from all around the state. And while I was there, I met Sarah James, a Gwich'in elder from Arctic Village.

Arctic Village lies in the south of the Refuge near the Brooks Range, a town of less than 200. Sarah's people, she told us--and for me this was revelation, because I was a kid, I'd never heard of the refuge--depended on the Porcupine River caribou for life. More than that, the caribou were life: the living structure that all Gwich'in have built existence around since time immemorial. And these people were now, she told us, frightened that they would lose their caribou. That drilling would separate them from not only their food source and livelihood but their source of history and spirit as well.

The caribou on the already-drilled areas of the North Slope have done alright with drilling, as oil companies tend to point out. What they don't mention is that this is mostly because of the much larger space availability and smaller herd populations than in the Porcupine River area. The people of Arctic Village and many non-corporate-affiliate biologists contend that if the trucks and equipment neccessary for drilling move in, the herds will grow much smaller, and may well change their migration pattern, severing their ancient connection with the village site.

At some point, I'd like to write about Sarah James for real, in print. She's been a heroine of mine since I was a kid. But the point of this here, today, is different. Because there's something else in this whole ANWR debate, something far more complicated than the greenie vs. oilie dichotomy, the pristine wilderness vs. barren wasteland debate. And that is the fact that Native Alaskans are human beings with complex and varying opinions (surprise!), and the stance of many Gwich'in against drilling in the Refuge set them at odds with the island people of Kaktovik, who are Inupiat Eskimo. Many of the people of Kaktovik--which also lies within ANWR--have been pro-drilling all along: their sources of history, food, and use come largely from the Beaufort Sea in addition to caribou herds, and there is a strong belief that drilling will bring jobs to a community where 10% of families are below the federal poverty level.

On that note though, it's interesting to look at the income difference in the two towns (which are of comparable size and both rely on subsistence) in light of their varying distances from the current oil fields. In the 2000 census, Kaktovik men had a median income of $50,000--aha, yeah, but a per capita income of less than half that (I'm willing to hypothesize that some of the 15% white population is jacking that median score up). In Arctic Village, which is about 7% white, the median income for men is about $22,000 and the per capita income is about $10,000. Over forty percent of the population lives below the feds' poverty line.

But this doesn't necessarily mean what the numbers seem to say, that the people of Arctic Village are in dire need of economic investment, like drilling, in their area to obtain jobs. It means that many don't have a capital income, indicating a much stronger dependence on subsistence food as much as it indicates 'poverty.' The people of Kaktovik, on the other hand, have already been made to open their home to corporate interests and corporate benefits--whether they believed it to be in their best interest or not.

So anyway, I've always been fascinated by this opposition, as both villages have lobbied congress for the past many years, using and being used by environmentalist and oil company lobbyists, respectively. And then, in Wednesday's paper, there was a story about oil in the North, and for the first time in about a decade, I saw the words Shell Oil connected with Alaska's Arctic.

Apparently, Shell's back. Those high oil prices did it (plus I've heard Nigeria's tough these days), and the company is planning to continue testing the Beaufort Sea area for reserves, especially with seismic testing this summer. The people of Kaktovik, who depend on bowhead whales, are worried that this testing will harm the whales or keep them away--and with good reason. The tests use airguns to send sound pulses to the ocean floor and somehow (not a scientist, here) create images of rock formations below. The effects of such sound pulses on large marine mammals are largely unknown (anyone remember those 400 dead dolphins in Zanzibar, and the murmered connection to Navy sonar use?), and when the villagers ask for assurance, for research and information, Shell sends public relations folks.

So now ADN tells us that Kaktovik has passed a city council resolution calling Shell "a hostile and dangerous force," and authorizing Lou Sonsalla, the mayor, to take legal or other actions necessary to "defend the community."

Intensely fascinating. Especially when you consider the incestuously interlocked relationship between the AK Department of the Interior and oil companies (the Dept. of Int. being supposedly responsible for American Indian and Native Alaskan needs, as well as lands claims, subsistence, and mining interests, etc). For instance, the main spokesman for Shell quoted in the ADN story worked in the Department up until a few months ago.

It looks like no one is taking this very seriously in Anchorage, big shocker. Maybe that will change. I'm preparing to feel very tired if the debate becomes (inevitably?) one couched entirely in environmentalist terms, rather than the completely applicable language of human rights.

But we'll see.

More info:
http://www.adn.com/news/alaska/ap_alaska/story/7763134p-7675534c.html
http://www.gildartphoto.com/story/sarah_james.htm

those big gun, small state, cash-in-the-pocket blues

2006-05-25T15:56:00.000-04:00

I’m home. Strange, the house that is my home is 4600 miles away. The land that is my home, and always will be, is right here where spring comes in May and smells sharp and wet like willow dew. Moose, eagles, myths and all.
But I think I’ve said before, in my endearingly optimistic way, that I guess it’s a good thing to have enough amazing people in each of the two states to be homesick wherever I am.
So anyway:

A while back I got into a phone-tiff with my dad about who was responsible for the jumps in “predator control” at home. He thinks it’s the Alaska Board of Game, and rural folks who want protection from wolves. I think it’s pilots who make money ferrying mostly Lower-forty-eight big game hunters out to the tundra via small plane. Or their powerful Juneau lobby group, the Alaska Outdoor Council. Long story short, we’re both right.

“Predator control” around here – and I mean the controversial kind coming out of Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, not defensive trapping and hunting around small bush communities – largely boils down to aerial hunting. It’s the ability to chase wolves and now bears down from the air through land mostly free of trees or other cover, exhausting the animals before you land and shoot them. The loudest argument for aerial control is protection of small communities from hungry wolves and heavy bear populations. A more honest argument for the scale on which the program’s been enacted is that moose are good to eat, and keeping the number of non-human predators low means that there are more for us guys. (Please disregard the fact that nonhuman predators are most successful when attacking weak and old moose, while people—smart ones anyway—generally go after the big, healthy, meat-tastic ones.) The third argument though, and the one I personally believe should not be underestimated in a state with more lobbyists than legislators, is that wolf and bear skins are awfully nice things to hang on your wall in California, New Hampshire or Ohio; especially if you barely have to leave the plane to bag ‘em.

Aerial hunting of wolves has gone to state referendum twice in my young memory. Both times it was voted down. (I’d say this had to do with the effects the practice has on the tourism industry as much as with any ethical revulsion.) Somehow, though, it keeps popping back up. Frank Murkowski, flaccid-faced dynastic governor of this fine state, yanked it back into practice three years ago. Earlier this year when the Superior Court banned aerial hunting because of inconsistencies in the Board of Game’s internal regulations, Murkowski threw the judges the finger and threw his weight into getting the pilots back in the sky.

A week or so ago, the AK Board of Game met in Anchorage. At that meeting, they widely expanded the area for aerial and snowmachine hunting--excuse me, 'control'-- of wolves and bears. They approved adding grizzlies and black bears to the aerial hunting list for same-day killing (this is rare for big game species). Best of all, they removed a sentence in the policy for all existing control programs that “required the Fish and Game commissioner to reduce predators efficiently, safely, and humanely.”

Coupla things. The Game Board is appointed by Quirky Murky (who hovers around 26% in approval polls). In the claustrophobic state government—currently under total Republican control—if you speak out or act out, you are out. This doesn’t excuse their actions: dad’s right, they bear responsibility. But the commands don’t materialize from nowhere.
The Alaska Outdoor Council is a lobbying umbrella over fifty-four gun clubs, snowmobiling groups, boat and plane charter “organizations,” chapters of the Safari Club International, and sportsmen’s associations. Shockingly enough, they often oppose legislation connected to Alaska Native sovereignty and subsistence – the word Outdoor in this case being shorthand for tourism-oriented sport hunting, fishing and guiding. While the AOC supports small and often somewhat green businesses and assists in many conservation measures for their own reasons, they also wield a not-insignificant heft of lobbyist power rooted in the NRA side of their connections. And that’s the kind of base the swarm of republican representatives depends on—not to mention Murkowski, busy clinging to that 26%.

Hunting is what happens here. It is the way most people in the Bush and a good number in roadbelt areas feed their families. And that’s food and fur and traditional harvest, not sport. Not trophies. Not stuffed grizzlies for the Ted Stevens Autoerotic Airport.

Aerial ‘predator control’: one more symptom of a government that claims to represent a state while bowing happily to the whims of the moneyed urban folks of the roadbelt.

More Info: http://www.adn.com/opinion/compass/story/7758537p-7670683c.html