May 2008

wolf has been touring the country with a talk developed from the themes (or should i say horrors) in her book, the end of america. i got an invitation to a special taping of it last night at pace university, and i will shamefully admit to accepting the invite in the spirit of “well you never know who you might meet and i’m tired of being single so what the fuck”.

if you’ve been to any antiwar protests since the dawn of iraqi slaughter, you’ll have a pretty good idea of the kind of crowd lined up outside the Schimmel auditorium. two twentysomethings in front of me compared notes about their upcoming weddings (apparently it is now a Big Deal to choose Your Songs — nary a moment of these $50,000 extravaganzas is left unscripted). other attendees tooled up in wheelchairs. we ran the gamut. inside, preshow music clearly handpicked for the occasion played on a kickass sound system.

a nameless MC delivered the disclaimer — if your ass is in the seat when naomi is onstage you’ve granted permission for us to use your likeness “throughout the galaxy and in perpetuity,” followed by an applause sound-check: first, on a scale of 1-10, give up some level 5 applause. okay, once more. okay, now a level 7. we let it rip. i wonder, is he gonna ask for 10 and how stupid are we going to feel carrying on like that for a sound check. then he says, “ok, ready? 10 - barack obama is president of the united states!” everybody goes nuts, and i think i like this guy, who the hell is he?

there’s some confusion after wolf is introduced and she doesn’t take the stage for a while. there’s a quickie do-over on the intro (we all know the purpose of this lecture is to get the tape — hollywood-quality cameras are everywhere, even one swinging ominously back and forth on a long boom over our heads) so we are patient. when finally she takes the stage i find myself strangely disappointed at the fact that she’s beautiful and wearing a smart orange-red suit that flatters her excellent figure. isn’t the author of the beauty myth supposed to be all hairy armpits and muddy birkenstocks? when she starts off with an audience warmup asking us what are the best things about america — shouts of  “the right to criticize the government” “separation of church and state” “economic freedom” “freedom of the press” — encouraging and inciting with people hooting and shouting and clapping like mad, i slump in my seat thinking what the fuck? we don’t even really have most of these things any more, is this some kind of a gimmick?

her talk begins with an apology and a joke about bringing us valium. then she launches into it, and for the next forty minutes i was riveted. and furious. and scared shitless.

the 20th century history of fascism reveals a ten-step blueprint that every dictator has followed — and which has not, as yet, been known to fail. each of those ten processes is in place right now in the united states. wolf did not offer any conspiracy theories; the question of who benefits from transforming the US into a dictatorship is not addressed. frankly, if what she says is true — and i believe it is — motives are irrelevant.

she related her experiences as an early member of the TSA security list - which included the head of the ACLU as well as ted kennedy - which had about 700 names on it at the time she learned of its existence. there are now over 700,000 names on the list, no known way to get your name removed (and naturally no way to know how it got there in the first place). what else might this list be used for? every dictatorship maintains a blacklist; there’s a good chance that either the security list or the no-fly list (or both, and yes there are two) is an american version of that. and it’s not as if it hasn’t happened here before. remember mccarthy?

i won’t go on and on about it, you can get a better gist at naomi wolf’s blog on huffingtonpost.

two moments were particularly chilling. first, when she asked “the $150,000 question” — name a state which, once having authorized the use of torture on those at the margins, did NOT subsequently use torture on its own citizens. no one could. no one at any of her talks has been able to name such a state.

second, when she talked about everyone having limits and used herself as an example. “when a public speaker or journalist with a profile similar to mine is hauled off to the gulag without charges, that’s when i’ll shut up.”

gulag, guantanamo, the area of LAX that is considered “not part of the united states” — what does it really matter where they put you? our government has already given itself the power to do that to any one of us, at any time, for any reason. or no reason.

listen to her tell it (though the quality of this video makes it clear why a formal retaping was done last night). but take some valium first. oh, and buy the book. buy some extras. let’s make this required reading.

bookmark to:

the fact that hillary clinton remains in the primary race at this point is nothing short of obscene, a testament to how little the prospect of public service actually has to do with her campaign.

but there was nothing inappropriate about her reference to RFK’s assassination. she was simply being honest: when she thinks about conceding, she also thinks “what if…” i doubt that she’s lighting black candles or funding some Jackal-type operation to take him out, she may not even be hoping for it. but you’d have to be an idiot not to recognize that obama is one helluva target. (note to clinton: if you drop out of the race and somebody blows barack’s head off, i’m sure the democrats will find you for the do-over.)

obama received secret service protection earlier in the primary than any candidate in history (apparently we still do some things right) and his choice of running mate is critical. we live in a culture where god-fearing men and women throw bloody fetuses into the faces of terrified pregnant teens in the name of jesus, where merely “displaying a noose in a threatening manner” (whatever that means) has just officially been declared against the law, where the category of Hate Crimes — a category unique to the USA, incidentally — grows like weeds.

i’d like a little more, not a lot less, transparency in political campaigning. so hillary mentioned the date of RFK’s assassination on her list of reasons for staying in the race and everyone goes ballistic. why? has it become impolite — or unthinkable — for a candidate to simply state the naked truth? should we pretend that political assassinations don’t happen, pretend that nobody hates obama for his blackness, however diluted that blackness may be? let’s not pretend that cold-blooded calculation is not only typical but is considered intelligent and strategic in the toilet that is our present political system.

we tiptoe around like a scared bunch of children — don’t say bogeyman, if you say it he will come! as if somehow NOT saying that obama is a likely target would be enough to prevent an attempt. as if merely mentioning it will “give somebody the idea” as my grandmother used to say.

no worries on that account, the lunatic fringe has all the ideas that it needs. but it might be prudent to make sure that at least half of the secret servicemen assigned to protect barack obama happen to be black.

bookmark to:

underneath a photo spread laid out as if the subjects were defendants in a murder trial is the headline Let the Soaking Begin, further subtitled “Water Board’s vote makes 14.5% hike official a year after 11% jump”.

oh, the evil, moneygrabbing Water Board, stealing an extra $102/year from strapped nyc families. why, they are practically taking the food from babies’ mouths.

perhaps funds are needed to get the pharmadrugs out of  the aquaduct, but that isn’t discussed in the article. (hey, what’s a little Lipitor, a little codeine? if they found marijuana in the water system, well, that would be worth mentioning — hell, they’d probably call out the national guard for that one (wait, all of the national guard is in iraq) but we all know that pharmaceuticals are harmless, don’t we?)

or perhaps it’s funding city participation in the global conservation efforts that most environmentologists have called for, but that’s not mentioned either. what? there’s no water shortage in new york? not yet there isn’t. but, as president kennedy said, the time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

maybe both or neither of these have anything to do with the hike; you’ll never find that out from this article, which simply denounces the increase as egregious and goes on to recite a litany of other economic screwings, from fuel to groceries (hello? maybe there’s a connection?) currently inflicted on nyc residents.

setting aside the tabloid style and sub-elementary research and reportage embodied in the piece, let’s look at its position, since as we all know location is everything in new york. so if this blockbuster gets the lion’s share of page two, the headline story must be a real ballbuster.

and ballbuster (or at least crackbuster) it is indeed: jason giambi wears a golden thong to break hitting slumps, complete with a full-page full-color photo of jason in full swing, apparently uninmpeded by the metallic strands threaded up his ass. ever the sportsman, giambi lends this selfsame thong to teammates who need some help getting back up to par. i hope it gets a good washing in between — if a mad epidemic of buttscratching breaks out in the dugout, we’ll know who jason’s friends are.

well, whatever works. it’s certainly harmless enough. but why is this, why is ANY pure sports story, ever on page one? don’t we have a back page for that?

i’m not big on sports, but i have nothing against them. games are good. people need to play, and other people need to watch the playing people and so forth. other than billions of tax dollars being squandered on stadiums and the polluting, infuriating traffic jams generated by every single game played in new york, i have no beef with baseball or any other sport. but it’s a SPORT. it is not NEWS. it does not MATTER.

but the daily news seems to think sports are more important than things like water (and that a hundred bucks a year is a bigger deal than the impending global water shortage). in the unlikely event that anyone missed the point (hell, anyone obtuse enough to miss the point probably isn’t able to read a newspaper in the first place) the little snippet of page two left over after railing at the Water Board is an article about a corrupt basketball referee, who not only bet on games that he worked, but told his friends to bet them the same way.

the top of page three is devoted to the fact that mayor bloomberg now wears contact lenses rather than reading glasses, complete with before and after photos of “hizzoner”. no comment.

startlingly, the following article is a well-written piece about some actual good that came of daily news reporting: stephanie ocana’s wheelchair had waited almost two months for repair. she can’t get around without it, couldn’t even go to school, used a skateboard for her trips to the bathroom (she’s got MS). the daily news reported it and — surprise! — the wheelchair was fixed and returned the next week. i’d like to see some follow-up on this one: how many other wheelchairs are gathering dust in this clearly incompetent (government-run and funded, of course) repair shop, who else is skateboarding around their tenement or confined to their beds or losing their jobs because of their laziness? (maybe jason should lend them his thong.)

a smiling picture of stephanie and her dad accompanies the article. i wish that had been the photo on page one.

bookmark to:

it’s astonishing that an agency that fucks up every project they manage is even in the running to manage the eternally morphing (and atrophied) plan to rebuild penn station under the nom du jour of Moynihan Station.

the port authority has just cost the city of new york $321 million — wait, let me write it out correctly:

$321,000,000.00 dollars

every port authority project comes in late (if at all) and overbudget, but this last one is a killer. we, and i do mean WE, the taxpayers of new york city, have to pay (are you sitting down?) GOLDMAN SACHS these hundreds of millions because the port authority did not make its building deadlines at the former world trade center site, where goldman is building its new world HQ, lured by immense tax breaks and a sordid backroom deal where the little taxes and rent they are required to pay went into an escrow account that would revert to them if things didn’t happen by deadline, which they didn’t.

to his credit, governor patterson is questioning whether or not they should get this new project, but he does believe they belong at the table with the other frontrunners.

the port authority sucks money out of the MTA, mismanages the airports, and is half controlled by new jersey. i don’t understand why such an agency even exists, much less why it owned the world trade center and continues to administer that site. but now that their incompetence has resulted in a situation where we have to pay millions to the most wealthy investment banking firm in the world, well, this is not an agency that belongs in charge of pocket change, much less multimegamillion dollar projects.

throw the bums out!

bookmark to:

“if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.” these words appear in a report written by a group of scientists that include james hansen, who works for NASA and has been researching climate change for most of his career. a new group, 350.org, has been established to raise awareness and fight for the necessary changes, though even they seem a bit despairing of the possibilities for success. as long as there’s money in oil this will be an uphill fight.

so that’s big-picture climate, in contrast to the small-picture changes that are breaking out in hurricanes and earthquakes all over the planet. likely half a million dead this year — if we’re lucky — at the rate we’ve been going so far. of course, there could always be a mother of all earthquakes in california, or a couple more in asia, or ten countries taken out by storm and tsunami. by that time, it won’t matter if the bloodthirsty and moronic juntas in power don’t let relief planes in, because there won’t be any relief planes to send. nor gas to fly them with.

so i turn to the New Yorker, hoping to distract myself from imminent doom (if nothing else, the cartoon caption contest in the back is good for a couple of grins). but i have the bad habit of reading most of the magazine, so i spent half an hour in bed this morning with The Last Bite, learning (among other gruesome food facts) how the farming of popcorn shrimp for the fast-food industry has resulted in the clearcutting of entire tropical mangrove forests. have you ever eaten popcorn shrimp at the mall? or at a chain like houlihan’s? it is a disgusting mass of flavorless substance that bears no resemblance to any actual shrimp that you might see swimming along, smothered in preservative disguised as breadcrumbs then deep-fried in week-old grease. yum. part of the reason that the burmese hurricane destroyed as much as it did was the fact that so much clearcutting had been done there. i don’t know whether that particular laying of waste had anything to do with popcorn shrimp, but the forests likely went down in the service of something equally easy to do without. without even trying, i can imagine a world without popcorn shrimp. unfortunately, it is increasing easy to imagine a world without forests.

there are food riots going on in 33 countries, right now. not just haiti, though theirs may be the bloodiest. the amount of food thrown away by one behemoth like mcdonald’s in a single day could likely keep the haitians going for awhile, and by now they’re hungry enough to eat a fecesburger (let’s call big macs what they are) and an unsupersized side of fries. and the sad fact is that most of the food that ISN’T thrown away goes into bellies that would be better off without it:

not one but TWO books entitled The End of Food have been published in the past two years, by thomas palwick and  paul roberts, respectively. i don’t plan to read the books — it was hard enough getting through the reviews — but hearing about them just two days after i learned about rice rationing at big box food suppliers was pretty sobering.

so here’s how sick my thinking gets: maybe we don’t have to worry about food shortages because climate change will get us first. or we don’t have to worry about climate change because any minute now the global bird flu outbreak will begin. or hey, what about all those north korean nukes?

nevertheless, i have recently begun doing in earnest what i have done only halfheartedly (shame on me) for most of my life. conserving. thoroughly, not halfassedly, recycling. after years of back-and-forth flirting with vegetarianism, i am making the commitment and it’s final. i will NOT leave the computer on if i’m not using it, let alone when i’m not home (small exception there for unplgugged laptops, they can hibernate) (yes, i know that’s cheating) (mea culpa).

yet a lifetime of bad habits is not easy to overcome. i have a couple of tote bags that i use for grocery shopping, but i don’t always remember to take them to the store. i still buy garbage bags, having spoiled myself out of the twenty-something practice of using grocery bags for trash. i am using both sides of all pieces of paper, often more than once. i am recycling, not just tossing, the junkmail. i am unplugging appliances and have just decommissioned the UPS unit that has for a year protected my computer from fuses that yet to blow.

day late and a dollar short, i know. but. big BUT…

i find i am not the only one whose lifelong dalliance with conservation has recently turned into something nearing obsession. the awareness of impending –not far off, not someday, but IN PROGRESS — disaster has permeated the collective consciousness and i suddenly encounter energy-saving and recycling reminders in the most unexpected and divergent places. cashiers no longer give you the eviil eye when you say that you don’t need a bag. one of my co-workers was admonished by another in staff meeting for needlessly printing the document displayed on the projector. handouts are no longer routinely left behind after every presentation and in my corner of the corporate world, the “soft copy” has finally become king. (of course, effective use and comparison of soft copies requires ever-larger monitors on which to view them, which in turn have greater power requirements…)

writing in the face of doom, if you’re not quite writing about the doom, can be difficult. i ask myself, why finish my book if there will be no one left alive to read, much less publish, it? why blog about moronic politicians when they are becoming increasingly irrelevant?

but that’s all just another way of saying “i give up”. i don’t and i won’t.

bookmark to:

my ‘perk’ week in london turned out to be a ballbuster, office all day, conference calls until 10pm, rain every night. except for two generous co-worker lunches, one at the national museum and one fish & chips date that ended with a tour through leicester square and chinatown, i wouldn’t have seen much of the city at all.

so i started walking at 6:30 this morning, and only got lost 3 times between covent garden and buckingham palace, which i wasn’t even sure WAS the palace until i found a sign that told when the next changing of the guards would be. (which sign i of course immediately photographed and would share with you right now if the camera battery had not died a few moments ago, driving me into this internet cafe which is the only game in town on charing cross at 9am).

you are in constant danger of death by car in london. forget that the traffic flows in the direction i would call backward, it isn’t even consistently backward, and since the ‘look right / look left’ signs are all on top of one another on the asphalt, and since i (like most) can easily read upside down, i’m never sure which direction i’m supposed to look and whichever i choose is always the wrong one and then the horns come blaring and i run — hopefully not into the arms of the next ad-wrapped taxi. that’s one kind of advertising london seems to beat new york at — the wrapped car.

i try to imagine a version of buckingham palace in nyc. blocks away the neon pointers and palace tchotcke vendors and price of admission and hours of operation signs would begin. or, conversely, if the public were not allowed onsite, the hurricane fences and cops in riot gear and no-doubt-barbed wire and barricades and warnings and threats would assault you blocks in advance. but in london, i’m at the frigging palace and still not sure whether or not i’ve arrived because apart from a modest blue sign with an arrow at the entrance to Green Park i haven’t gotten a single indication that i’m on hallowed ground.

not that the palace itself is much to look at. i found the gates more interesting than the building and the fountain more interesting than the gates, while most interesting of all was the brilliantly designed canadian world war memorial: a big gleaming low black hunk of polished stone, perhaps obsidian, starting at grass level and about thigh-high at its tallest, split perfectly in half with a separation just wide enough for a not-grossly-obese person to walk through. on the lower side of both polished halves, a random scattering of maple leaf shapes is etched into the stone, the leaves shrinking and fading as the monument grows
taller. it’s gorgeous and moving — i barely realized that canada even fought in the two world wars and still found myself tearing up a bit as i stood there. this may be a symptom of aging, such random, misplaced
(and perhaps unpatriotic) sentimentalism. but still.

there must be an american war memorial somewhere, and i shudder to think what it might look like. nothing as delicate or elegant as leaves for us, i bet. luckily, i didn’t stumble across that one.

the most wonderful thing about the park was its near-emptiness at (by then) 7:30 in the morning. it’s a long time since i’ve walked through a park without having to skirt an assortment of jury-rigged homeless shelters, and while i don’t begrudge the homeless their paltry temp housing it was nice for once not to have to navigate their construction nor step into their puddles nor contemplate how their lives twisted up to land
them sleeping under the bushes. for a while, i was equally delighted by the absence of joggers — i suppose they would annoy me less if i participated in that masochistic “sport” but i don’t and they do and if that makes me a crotchety old bitch then so be it. all those flushed cheeks, all that lollipop-colored spandex, all those high-tech sneakers: yes, i’m far enough away from new york right now that i think it’s safe to say that joggers annoy the SHIT out of me. and there i was, widening my aperture and manually focusing my lens and rejoicing in the fact that londoners don’t exercise when a young ponytailed woman JOGGED right into my frame. at least she wasn’t wearing spandex. just tight black shorts and a matching Queen (band, not monarch) hoodie.

a while later, as i tried to figure out the impossible spaghetti of streets that hang off picadilly circus, the camera battery died, driving me toward charing cross and The Bookstores — one thing i am determined not to miss on this trip. but london simply doesn’t wake up as early as new york does, maybe because they don’t all go out jogging at the hairy crack of dawn. halfway down a sidestreet, where i’d been despatched to avoid some huge construction project (the construction workers were up all right, digging and heaving away) was a little alley of music shops. in one window i saw a 1959 Gibson mandolin and for a moment wished i had the kind of money where i could throw away £4300 without a second thought, because my brother is an expert mandoliner who was born in 1959. the instrument might sound like shit, of course (i know gibson’s reputation for guitars, this was the first i heard that they make, or made, mandolins). but still. what a birthday present it would be. (the shop, naturally, was closed.)

same way the laundrymat was closed last night, which finally drove me to hand-wash
my undies and socks in the sink, before remembering that there’s no shower curtain, and therefore no shower curtain rod, around the tub. is this usual? nothing but a half-width, three-quarter height swinging plastic panel to keep the water off the floor? i haven’t been in anyone’s home, so i can’t tell whether this is standard brit practice or some strange idea of the radisson. (almost as strange as the practice of putting steps - steps! - directly outside the elevator door. the personal-injury lawyers, if there are such things over here, must adore the lunatic who dreamed up that little decorating touch.) anyway, about the sopping danties: i rigged a clotheslines in the closet but couldn’t leave the door open since it triggers a light that
can’t be turned off. this morning everything was just as wet as ever, so i cleverly found a way to prop the window open and lined everything up along the sill.

i must have forgotten what city i was in when i pulled that little maneuver because, once again, it’s getting ready to rain…

bookmark to: