Bluefood Endorses ...

You practically can’t open up an editorial page or blog without coming across some pundit scratching his head over John McCain “suddenly” going negative.  Some wonder how John McCain had this horrible campaign thrust on him against his better nature and maverick spirit. Others express sorrow at seeing the man they once admired transformed into yet another victory-at-all-costs Republican willing to transfer from the Straight Talk Express to the Turd Blossom Special, as long as it stops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue along the way.  Some, such as William Kristol, cry for the campaign to let McCain be McCain.  Others, like  a Time magazine doofus named Ana Marie Cox (who is well dissected here) wonder “wha happen?” to the guy they thought was so honorable and cool, and wait for him to be a maverick again.  This article hits all the typical notes.

I am amazed that anyone who has spent even a moment studying the presidency and/or observing politicians could have such thoughts.  It seems obvious to me that anybody running for the office of president is on some level a defective human being.  To say to the world "I deserve more than anyone else to hold the most powerful political office in the world" requires an astounding degree of narcissism.  Campaigning requires a comparable degree of mono-mania.  I find this confirmed (at least in hindsight) by the performance of the people who actually reached the office.  I can think of no examples of presidents since the U.S. became a major power who didn't exhibit some disturbing personality traits and who didn't commit at least some frightening abuses of their power (except perhaps those who died in office before they got to do anything).

Given this, I think it behooves journalists to work from the assumption that any serious candidate is in fact dishonest and dangerous, and that any image he presents of himself is to be questioned.  Ultimately, it's a matter of the scale of the deceit and danger, not its presence or absence.  On that continuum, as a human being, McCain is not Bush or Nixon, but he sure as hell ain't Jimmy Carter either (who was probably the closest we've ever come to having a president actually be what he professes to be).

 

In this light, it has been obvious from the get-go that the mainstream media has completely failed to report on John McCain as it should have.  I mean come on, the man has actually called himself a maverick for years, without winking.  In and of itself that should be a clue that he's trying to mask his conformity.  Real mavericks don't call attention to their differences. They just keep doing whatever they do, and to hell with everyone else's opinions.  Gandhi was a maverick.  Oskar Schindler was a maverick. Ted Kazcynski was a maverick.  William S. Burroughs was a maverick.  John McCain is about as much of a maverick as the Fonz.

Throughout McCain's career, there have been well established (but under-reported) instances of the gaps between what he says about his character and values and his actual behavior, in both his personal and public lives.  His treatment of his first wife.  His behavior in the Keating five scandal.  His notorious ill-treatment of people in his inner circle and foul temper.  His less than complete grasp of most of the facts and issues he confronts.  His campaign finance practices.  His earmarks and log-rolls.  He's not the worst hypocrite ever.  He actually has on occasion gone with his conscience in spite of his self or party interest.  However, this has been nothing like the matter of course that so many are convinced it is. 

Maybe at least in this small way he is better than the most craven of his peers. But, realistically, he does not stand apart from them.  He is one of them, in spirit and action. 

Actually, I take that back.  He is in at least one dimension worse than any of his peers that I can think of.  He is the only current member of congress to have  spent years in captivity as a prisoner of war under horrible conditions and frequent torture.  He knows better than any of his peers how terrible it is for those in Camp X-Ray, or the ratholes of extraordinary rendition.  He also knows the galvanizing effect torture, (and endurance), have on soldiers who believe in their cause.  Yet when presented with an opportunity to take a stand against the Bush/Cheney torture regime, he did so only briefly. He then turned about face to legislate a policy that specifically allowed heinous torture of POW's and others in the Bush/Cheney Gulag, in an obvious quid pro quo for support of his presidential bid.     

So if all serious presidential aspirants are to be treated as sociopaths, what are we to make of Barack Obama?  The worst anyone seems to be able to dredge up against him is that he maintained personal ties to an impolitic preacher and an erstwhile Weatherman.  He seems to be the apotheosis of decency and sophistication.  Annointed "the one" by the Matrix generation, he is seen as a morally pure, prophetic liberator from the yoke of Republican tyranny.  Yet here he is, on the threshold of the presidency, so there must be something, or else the defective human being theory of political success must be abandoned.

Hmm.  What could it be?  Among friends, I have joked that I have profound reservations over Obama's honesty because of his confessions in his first memoir that he was a dope fiend in his college days.  I have my doubts.  He was class of '83 at Columbia.  I was class of '84.  I lived in Sigma Nu for a semester.  I played in bands.  Barry who?  I never saw the guy once.  Not at the pot store on Amsterdam Ave, not in the back room at Cannon's, not at tequila night at the West End.  Not drinking the Quaalude and grain alcohol punch at the parties in Furnald Hall.  If he can lie about being a degenerate, what else is he lying about?

But seriously, a recent event makes it clear that the DHBTPS is safe for another election cycle.  On October 20, Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama.  Wow, you say. The leading African American Republican switches sides for our guy.  That's terrific.  Cynically, yes, it probably is terrific, if endorsements mean anything.  And how did Obama respond?  He called him "a great soldier, a great statesman, and a great American."  He then went on to say:  "I have been honored to have the benefit of his wisdom and counsel from time to time over the last few years, but today, I am beyond honored and deeply humbled to have the support of General Colin Powell."  Wow, you say, what a gracious acceptance, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.  Again, cynically, nice touch, Barry.

But wait a second, what's Obama's position on the war in Iraq?  Right, he was against it in 2003,  and has been ever since.  He says it's one of the worst mistakes in the history of U.S. foreign policy and has had  dreadful consequences at home and abroad.  And what does he think of his colleagues who support the war?  He says the biggest thing wrong with John McCain is his judgement about the war.  It completely overshadows whatever positives there are in the rest of his resume.  And remind me again, who was it who actually made the public case for the war in Iraq, turned American opinion in favor of it, and crafted the "coalition of the willing" by telling a bunch of lies and half truths to the United Nations?  Right, Colin Powell.  And when did Colin Powell express regret for having done this and come out in favor of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq ASAP?  Uh, not yet.  In fact, as near as I can tell from his recent utterances, he still supports the war and thinks the surge was terrific.

Yet Obama welcomes the support and advice of this man whom I doubt he really respects.  I can only guess why, but I think it is because he has made a calculation that the American public is blind to what Powell really is (a consummate Pentagon bureaucrat, with a mixed command record, and a disastrous civilian one), and is still drawn to his personal magnetism and prominence.  If Obama really had the courage of his convictions, he would reject the endorsement and tell the American public what fools they have been for allowing themselves to be duped again and again by this fraud.  The reality, though, is that he wants to be elected more than he wants to be right.  In accepting Powell's endorsement and saying nothing about Powell's role in getting us to where we are now in Iraq, he allows Powell once again to abuse his status as a touchstone for black pride and white guilt.  In effect, he absolves and endorses Powell in a cynical bid for the votes that he thinks this might bring him.

This is not the worst thing a politician could do, but is undoubtedly something a politician would do.  I often joke that no man alive deserves to be president, therefore I'm voting for a dead guy, Eugene V. Debs.  I thought I might have to shelve that line this year, but it looks like old Eugene is  on the ballot again.  Now if I can only figure out how to do a write-in ...

I've seen the future and it is ...

As readers of my novel in (slow) progress may have gathered, I am a bureaucrat. My current role in the leviathan of municipal government has me dealing with a great many consultants who have been hired to decipher and improve the bureaucracy. For those not familiar with the sweet science of consulting, it consists of paying a bunch of guys who used to work for you upwards of $250 an hour each to ask people who work for you now what they do, writing down their answers in a report that's more nicely copied and bound than what your own graphics department can produce, and doing a bunch of Powerpoint presentations that state the obvious in obscure ways.

OK, not the consultants I manage (ahem), because I know how to extract real value out of these guys. But pretty much any consultant project parachuted from enough levels above where the work gets done to scare people into cooperating does tend to play out this way. The best part, of course, is the Powerpoint. There's a recent trend poo-pooing Powerpoint as everything George Orwell told us to watch out for (google "powerpoint crashed the space shuttle" or "powerpoint makes you stupid" to see what I mean). I think this is mostly wrong, or rather confusing correlation with cause. The ascendency of Powerpoint doesn't so much make people stupid as it reflects the inexorable ascendency of stupidity.

For those not familiar with this product, Powerpoint is a Microsoft software package that empowers one stupid person to convince a group of other stupid people that he knows what he's doing. Per Bill Gates' plan to take over the universe by bewitching worldwide upper management with shiny objects and paralyzing the able-minded by not telling them how to turn off Mr. Paperclip, if there's a smart person in the room when a Powerpoint presentation is on display, he's so busy rolling his eyes and having his ironic comments go over everyone else's heads that he fails to notice that he has been assigned all the "action items" and "touch points" for the follow-up session until the end of the meeting.

It all kind of reminds me of "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley's novel about a totalitarian future in which introspection is treated as a crime, cosmetically perfect people at the top of the food chain carry out simulated fornication endlessly without consequences, and people speak almost exclusively in what sounds a lot like leetspeak. BNW is usually described as "dystopian", because it presents a vision of a future stripped of all nuance, complexity and irony. But unlike "1984," which depicts a totalitarian world in which suffering is redefined as pleasure, BNW shows shows most people enjoying themselves, which leaves some room for some people to view it more as a how-to manual than a cautionary tale.

Powerpoint is evidence of this. But it is also a reflection of something much deeper in the human psyche. Bear with me now, because I'm about to lay out a theory of everything for the perfection of the human experience. It's all about shape and it's all about the future. For instance, in BNW, a book about the future, human beauty is idealized with the adjective "pneumatic", i.e., inflated, plumped up, no longer angular, but ... what's the word I'm looking for? Round.

Another example (and the one that inspired this vitally important cross-cultural, highly scientific examination of human nature during a long layover) is Charles DeGaulle airport outside Paris. CDG was planned in the early 1960s, at the apogee of futurist idealism. It is round.








Extravagantly so. Terminals, passageways, flight information screens, water towers, taxi-ways -- it's one futuristic curving swoop after another. The plan of the whole place is round. Other examples abound. From the eastern bloc, we have the embodiment of communism's triumphant future, Sputnik.

In contrast, we have many examples of non-round visions of the future ending in failure or obsolescence, most notably the wedge-shaped angularity of rusted, underpowered 1970s automobiles

and post-war public housing projects.

So what does all this have to do with bureaucracy and management consulting? Everything. Bureaucrats toil in misery in square, dimly lit cubicles. They drown in reports full of lists, tables, and bar chars, all square, defined, and limited. The quintessential artifact of the bureaucratic craft is the organization chart -- people in boxes tethered to the hierarchy, defined by their function, not their essence or aspirations. But bureaucrats dream, and when they do, they dream of the future. A future where things go smoothly, processes flow unimpeded by insecurity, ineptitude, or turpitude. A future that is ... Well I'll let you guess.

To illustrate, let me first tell you the true, inner secret of Powerpoint presentations: They are all the same. They come in many colors, jargons, and templates, but they all follow the same story arc. They foretell two futures. One is the path you are on today, and where it will lead you without the guidance of the presenter. It is full of loss, disharmony, and suffering. The other offers the possibility of redemption, renewal, and remuneration and can only be reached through the wisdom of the elders and their knowledge of best practices. Something like this:

Now a cynic might say that this what you get in a society ruled by marketers schooled in conformism. But no, I say it is something else. It is a yearning, for a voluptuous, pneumatic, curved ideal, rejecting the piercing angularity of the past, embedded deeply in all of us. Without knowing it, when we speak of revitalization and change in the corporation, we express ourselves in the visual language of visions of the future. Heck, it might even be genetic, a sort of transformational grammar of the visual. Somebody get me Chomsky, stat! Anyway, I have seen the future, perfected, and it is round.

R.I.P. Peter S. Albin 12/20/1934-2/20/2008

My father Peter Steigman Albin died on Wednesday February 20, 2008 after a long illness.  Below is the text of my Eulogy to him.

.........

Before I move on to what I have to say about Dad, I’d like to acknowledge a few people who made an enormous difference in the quality of his life in the years since his stroke.

First, his friend and colleague Duncan Foley, who continued to see light in Dad when so many of us could only see darkness.  Duncan has also asked me to read a few words he wrote: Pete Albin had a big effect on my life both as my collaborator in scientific work and as a human being. I will leave the scientific issues for another time. What Pete lived through remains astonishing to me. His experience in the small way I was able to understand it, was uniquely cruel and powerful. I cannot miss his suffering, but I will miss him. As the Quakers say, let us hold Pete in the light.

 

To Gerard Trebot, who provided camaraderie under extraordinary circumstances and showed us all how to see not only what Dad needed from us, but what he could still give us.

To Doctor James Robilotti for his wisdom, compassion and friendship.

To Doctor Gary Inwald who saw hope where others saw futility.

To Doctor Chris Fabian, for his calm counsel

And most of all to my mother, Pat Albin.  Those closest to our family know the heroic sacrifices she made.  I can only marvel at her strength and kindness.

To all of you, I offer you my deepest thanks and express my admiration for the examples you have set as human beings.  Many others helped, but without you, Dad would have died many years ago and would have had many fewer moments worth living.

….

It’s tempting to talk about Dad from a particular perspective – colleague, family member, friend, teacher, but choosing any one of those seems not merely insufficient to me, but wide of the mark.  As is true of anyone, Dad was of course more than the sum of his parts, but I think one of the things that set him apart from the rest of us with multiple interests is that in essence, there weren’t any parts, only the whole.  Whether he we was delving into the most abstract of mathematical constructs, raising children, telling a joke, becoming a master go player, carrying on an ordinary conversation, or just staring out the window, he brought to bear the same combination of attention, rigor, eclecticism, humor, and Rabelaisian gusto.

Staring out the window is a particularly illustrative example, because it’s something he did a lot, and it was for him an exceptionally fruitful activity.  For many years, he would look out the picture windows of our 22^nd floor living room and watch the landscape below him be transformed by construction.  This culminated in the site excavation and then construction of the NYU gymnasium in the late 70s.  As he watched the work unfold, he became more and more fascinated, eventually bluffing his way onto the jobsite and getting to know both the labor and management sides of the operation.  This led to a series of papers on the differences between the way engineers and workers approach problems of optimization and queuing.

His conclusion was that the traditional management-science approach of traveling salesmen and linear programs didn’t capture the richness of what was going on and wasn’t any more effective than letting the front-end loader operator decide by himself how many trucks were needed on-site.  He laid this out with his characteristically idiosyncratic symbology.  All while sitting around in his speedo-style underwear, drinking pots of coffee, puffing away on pipes of varying contents, while listening to WBAI on the radio and bullshitting with his teenaged son.  There was no incongruity to this multi-tasking across the spectrum from sublime to ridiculous, though.  No contradiction in any of his dimensions, habits, virtues, or vices.  It was all simply Pete.

I think this captures the essence of how he approached his more theoretical and intellectually challenging work, too:  First, he liked real-world examples.  Second, he thought that cognitive and information sciences that try to model how people actually think have a better shot at representing the way people solve problems and interact than the “incomplete” formalisms of traditional models of rationality.  Third, standard economics terminology never quite worked for him; he always needed his own.  Fourth, he couldn’t just sit in an office and crank things out.  He needed coffee and conversation to develop an idea.  He needed distraction, hustle, and bustle, before he could settle into his night-owl productivity.

The other thing, which is very hard to recognize if you didn’t really know him in more than one context, is that there is an earthiness and whimsy in the way he presented his ideas.  His writing is full of neologisms, circumlocutions, and odd constructs.  In someone else, this might just be jargon, but in him it was a form of wordplay and a source of amusement.  Dad punned and kenned on paper and in person with abandon, regardless of context.  I often sat with him as he worked, and watched a smile play across his face, or even heard him chuckle as he scrawled away in felt tip.  Looking at these sentences after the fact, I can’t say that I get the jokes, but I know they’re in there.  The verbiage in his later work is drier, but the whimsy comes out in the illustrations.  The meaning of the images generated by his simulations was almost secondary to him.  He got a big kick out of the idea that his equations could produce such pretty pictures, and he often just showed people screen shots without trying to explain what they meant.

My thoughts about Dad as an intellectual often center around a conversation we had about the word “discipline,” in the sense of an academic discipline.  This word represented everything he found most frustrating about academia.  Working within a discipline meant restricting yourself, punishing your own mind when it strayed outside the boundaries set by the arbiters of the field.  Deep down he was very ambivalent about the label “economist.”   He was proud of the field’s intellectual rigor and admired many of its practitioners.  He wanted to be known as someone who worked in the same tradition as, Keynes, Arrow, Galbraith.  However, he kept being told (in reviews, grant applications, and job interviews) that he wasn’t working within the discipline.  Maybe it was good mathematics, or linguistics, or computer science, but it wasn’t economics.  He didn’t really understand why academics put themselves in bins like this.  And though he craved the validation of his peers, he grew weary of the chase.  Because of these frustrations, it never bothered him that his children didn’t follow in his footsteps.

I think I’ve said enough about the serious side of Dad, though, and I’d like to return to what I started to say about gusto.  Here are some of the things Dad loved to do: 

Swing a tennis racquet
Swing an axe
Eat haute French cuisine
Make Chinatown waiters bring him the dishes written on the walls in Chinese
Eat in greasy spoons, and declare that there is no such thing as enough bacon
Give talks on highly technical subjects
Consult with captains of industry and finance
Tell shaggy dog stories
Play absolutely any game
Listen to Bach, Wagner, and Beethoven
Sing “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”
Go to foreign movies
Go to plays
Go to the opera
Hang in out pool halls
Listen to Phil Rizzuto call a Yankee game
Read the great books
Read mathematics and physics texts
Read Linguistics journals
Read Gargantua and Pantagruel
Live like Gargantua
Organize anti-war protests
Read the Nation
Listen to WBAI
Listen to right-wing talk radio
Hang out in cafes
Hang out in museums and art galleries
Explore the wonders of cities
Sleep out under the stars in the country.

 Come to think of it, he really liked to do almost anything, go almost anywhere, and talk to almost anyone because all knowledge was good, and to him, accessible.  Any activity offered new skills to be mastered, new people to meet, and new places to explore.  Growing up with someone so filled with wonder and fascination at the world around him, who was also equipped with such astounding powers of understanding and communication was an extraordinary privilege.  It was also an extraordinary to privilege to feel my esteem being reciprocated, a feeling I’m sure many of you share.

 I’m not going to say that he was a saint, or that there was never friction between us, or that he wasn’t at times enormously frustrating to deal with.  But I knew from very early in life that he had rare gifts as a parent and human being.  As I grew into adulthood I recognized more in the way of feet of clay, but I never really lost the sense that he was sui generis, and above all, fun.  He remained the person I most enjoyed spending time with, up until the moment in August of 1991, when so much of that was taken away, not just from him, but from all of us.

 It has been very hard to find perspective on Dad’s long and brutal illness.  It is hard to imagine a crueler fate than to be a polymath and athlete who retains only enough of his mind and body to know what he has lost and be unable to do anything about it.  The last 16 years have been a punctuated equilibrium of decline, with each crisis bringing lower baselines of health and function and erasing more of what Dad once was.  In this context I have struggled to maintain my best memories of him, but this is a struggle that has to be taken on.  I believe in a sort of life after death.  By this, I don’t mean that I believe in god, or the spirit world, or any metaphysical sense of “soul.”  Trust me, it is impossible to imagine that the grandchildren of Joe Albin or the children of Pete Albin would.

 What I mean is that the influences of the people in our lives are not simply winds or waves that knock us one way or another as they pass.  As much as a child carries the DNA of his parents, we all carry the words and deeds of those who shape us physically, emotionally, and intellectually.  These can be a burden, or they can be a blessing.  Dad’s influence was overwhelmingly the latter for me. I have a mind that he in large measure taught me how to use.  I have a love of the intellectual, the physical, the aesthetic and the comical.  Most of all I have memories of his shaggy grin as he picked me up from school, joined me on climbs in the four corners, or walked up to me after a gig and said “now I know how Keith Richards’ mother feels!”  I would like now to leave you all with a simple request.  Keep the best of Dad alive inside you, the whole thing.

Oh No!Not Another Mac vs. PC Blog Entry!

Given how I'm old and all, I've been using computers for a long time, strictly PC's, going back to the days of MS-DOS.  I can't say that I've ever been religious about it, but PC's have been the logical choice.  I used to do a lot of development (mostly in MS Access, which is highly platform dependent), and to the extent that I sometimes brought work home from the office, strict compatibility, without having to think about it was a virtue.  I used other people's Mac's occasionally, but failed to see what all the fuss about (and really didn't like one-button mice).

Recently, my wife has significantly ramped up her level of computer usage, and for the first time, we really needed a second machine.  My own requirements have changed.  I really don't do any development anymore, and am most interested in doing more writing and more music production.  Time constraints aside, I had largely given up on music on the computer.  Multi-track audio on a PC that has to run a lot of other software and be shared by multiple users really is a pain in the ass, and I have completely lost whatever capacity I once had to fight with the assininity that is the way Windows configures stuff.  I also wanted a laptop rather than another desktop machine.

Putting all these thoughts together, it became clear to me that it was time for a Mac, a specifically, a MacBook.  Even though at first blush

Part of me really resists this because I absolutely despise cult marketing, Apple's in particular, and don't want to reward it with my business.  Mac's also appear to be (significantly) more expensive at first blush.  But after doing a bit of due dilligence, it became clear  to me that a PC laptop comparably configured to a MacBook is really not much cheaper.  It used to be impossible to figure out what "comparably configured" really meant, but now that Macs use Intel CPUs (and only the high-end ones), um, apples to apples comparisons are much more straight forward.

The other real kicker is software. Mac comes bundled with a multi-media suite called iLife that achieves a level of integration and interoperability that's comparable to what MS Office achieves with "productivity" software.  iLife includes something called GarageBand, which for me turned out to be the coup de grace.  GarageBand is what's called a "digital audio workstation" -- basically, a recording studio in a (virtual) box.  In its first few releases, it was basically a toy, dumbed down version of a DAW, but the latest release is a whole 'nother story.  It has all the functionality I will ever need, is free, and requires no configuration because it comes pre-installed and guaranteed to work.  There is nothing comparable out of the box in PC land.  OK Mr. Jobs, you can have my credit card number now, but please, no more of those stupid PC drone in a suit vs. Mac hipster in jeans commercials ...  

The other big seller with GarageBand is that it includes it's own collection of synthesizer sounds, and "loops" that are tightly integrate with the rest of its functionality, as opposed to DAWs that treat these things more as ancillary "plug-ins" that require more in the way of getting the pieces to talk to each other.  In practical terms, this means that for someone like me who is neither a competent keyboardist nor drummer, I can build tracks that have fairly convincing fake drums and keyboards much more easily than I could in the DAW packages I had used previously.  At some point I may actually detail some of this, but for now, evidence of my first efforts with GaragBand is below.  Several other generations of audio production technology are represented here.  

Guns or butter?

Pardon the political intrusion, but every once in while one of my more deeply buried multiple personalities, which cares about these things, manages to seize the conn ...

Prior to the election of 2000, one of the bits of conventional wisdom was that there wasn't a dime's worth of difference between Gore and Bush. One of the bits of conventional wisdom that came to replace this (as the Bush regime plunged us into war abroad, alienated us from our allies, ravaged freedom at home, and put a hurting on the polar icecaps) was that there was in fact a huge difference between the two. As someone who voted for Ralph Nader, I've done penance for this for many years. I'm willing to concede that there was indeed a larger denomination of difference, and I think the world is a worse place for having been subjected to going on eight years of shrubbery. Still, as a new silly season bears down upon us, I'm once again left to ponder how much difference there really is between one side and another.

For instance, Giuliani has anointed himself the heir to Bush's militarism, authoritarianism, contempt for dissent, and rejection of the sovereignty of other nations. He seems to like fetuses a whole lot more than he used to, and is looking forward to owning beach front property in Dutchess County.  In contrast, we have the populism of Edwards, whose positions can best be summarized by writing down a list of Bush's policies and inserting the word "not" before every verb. Then there's Huckabee, the absurd holy roller, and Hillary the soulless technocrat. It's easy to find dipole pairs of elephants and donkeys, (or elephants and elephants or donkeys and donkeys) and compare and contrast until the cows come home.

Ultimately, though, this is a fool's errand because the terms of debate are so constricted. On the environment, the battle lines are drawn over which pseudo-alternative energy technologies will be subsidized. On issues of "security", the question is which restrictions of the Patriot Act will be retained. On health care, it's a matter of nibbling at the edges of the absurdity of a system built on the inherent conflict of interest between for-profit insurance paid for by employers and sick people.

But perhaps greatest lost opportunity is the war because no candidate or other significant figure in the mainstream has taken the matter beyond the questions of "what were Bush's reasons for going to war?" and "how long should we stay in Iraq?"  None of them asks "why militarism at all?"  In this domain, I really think they're all minor variants on the same theme.   

Suppose any of the three big lies of the war (WMD, Saddam hearts Al Qaeda, democracy flowering in the desert) had a shred of legitimacy, and the cases for any were not manufactured entirely out of whole cloth.  Would any of the candidates of either party (except maybe Kucinich, who doesn't really count) oppose the war, even as currently prosecuted?  Frankly I doubt it.   I think some of them were and/or are troubled by Bush's deception and with the way he actually did things on the ground.  But to say that you're against the war now because it turns out Bush was bullshitting (or to say that you were against it at the outset because of concerns about the particulars) is really to say that you accept that there is a case for invasion other than pure self defense and that aggression is an appropriate tool in our international relations kit.

A true opponent of the war would say that even if everything Bush had said Iraq in 2003 had been true, he would have voted against invasion, and taken personal risks to make his opposition known. Of the big three Dems, only Obama can get away with saying he opposed it from the beginning, but if you read his published positions more closely, you can see that he's hedging his bets.  He says he was against the war because he didn't think it would work as conceived by Bush, and because it drew resources away from the more important conflict in Afghanistan.  Those are certainly valid positions, but they strike me as entirely inside the Beltway. 

Looking at how he proposes to end the war, I see more of the same.  He says he'll immediately begin withdrawing "combat" troops and not build "permanent" U.S. military bases (good), but it's clear that he intends to maintain a sizable American military presence.  More importantly, there's nothing in his budget positions about reducing the level of military spending in Iraq or anywhere else. Edwards and Clinton have very similar positions (though it took both of them quite a bit longer to arrive at theirs). 

Each of the big three (and even in some ways a couple of the Republicans) also makes populist noises about making the country a better place by tinkering with the welfare state.   They even all offer "plans" to fund these changes.  In reality, though, all they really do is spout a bunch of platitudes about taking back the Bush tax cuts and cutting pork barrel spending.    None of them really talks about the kind of fundamental restructuring of national taxation and spending policy that would be needed to make us a bit more like Canada or (heaven forfend) France.

 

So let me just say up front that in some ways I would like this country to be a bit more like France.  I say this out of pure selfishness.  I have elderly, infirm parents, a young child, I'm not rich, and my prospects for financial reversal (absent winning lotto) are dim.  I would like my parents' modest estate to live as long as they do, and maybe even a bit more.  I would like my son to be able to go to a good College and enter a career without debt.  I would like to be reasonably sure that if I keep working more or less as I do now, I can stay more or less in the middle class.  I would like the air we breathe and the pace of the lives we lead to be a bit gentler.  None of these is even close to a certainty within the means at my disposal, and I am well above the median household income.    If I lived in France, it would be.  One option would be to move to France, but there are reasons not to, not the least of which is that I actually like this country.

There are five things that I think could bring these meager dreams a bit closer to reality, and I don't think any of them should require us to stop pronouncing the last letters of words:

• High-quality, free education from infant daycare all the way through university
• "Single payer" comprehensive, universal health insurance, not linked to employment
  
• True medical coverage for the elderly (without all the gaps in medicare, and including coverage nursing homes),
  
• A national plan for improving mass transit and reducing car usage
• An energy policy centered around reductions in consumption rather than exploitation of new resources. 

In other words, your basic left- liberal agenda.  None of this is actually all that radical in light of the things that large numbers of Americans actually say they want.  Some might require us to rethink ideas about freedom of economic choice.  Some might challenge commonly held ideas about moral hazard and entrepreneurship.  All of them would require vast changes in spending at all levels of government.

Okay, so now go ahead and call me a tax and spend liberal.  The thing is, though, I don't think that tax increases are the answer to any of this.  Another bit of conventional wisdom is that France (and Germany, and Sweden, and Holland ...) can all afford generous welfare states because they have much higher tax rates than we do.  Trouble is, this isn't true.  Various studies show that if you factor in the total tax bite (including taxes on real estate, sales, state and local income etc.), America falls somewhere in the middle.  Tax havens like Switzerland pay a lot less than we do, but on average, it turns out that Americans' total tax rate is about the same as Germans' and Frenchmen's.

The big difference is that the typical middle-class German or Frenchman actually receives some direct services that have a real bearing on quality of life from the national government.  In contrast, non-retired middle-class Americans basically get nothing from the feds.  So what do we get that Europeans don't?  We get a military.  A really big one.  Big enough to fight major wars on multiple fronts without resorting to conscription.

We have been trained to believe that this is something that we need and can afford.  The truth neither is the case.  As our rising national debt makes clear, we definitely can't afford it.  The rhetoric about the irresponsible Bush tax cuts are a bit of red herring.  Sure, they've made a difference (especially in out-year projections), but the real hit to the Federal budget has been Iraq.  Pretty much nobody but Bush disputes this.

But what about the need part?  We need a strong defense don't we?  Okay, we do, but not this strong for two reasons.  First, the level of "preparedness" is wildly disproportionate to the threat.  The cold war is over.  The greatest threat to our survival is no longer military.  It is economic (i.e., China, and soon India).  We need enough military to make anybody think twice about fucking with us or our most important or favored allies.  We'd have that if we spent a quarter of what we spend now.

 Second, and perhaps more importantly,  having a huge military tempts us to use it.  Our national mythology is that we fight on the right side and enter wars to rescue the downtrodden from tyranny.  Truth is, we've done that relatively few times, and during the eras when we've had growing standing armies we've tended to use them to overthrow governments and install dictatorships. Sweden used to do this to, 300 years ago, when they had an empire.  Now they have Ikea, and life is good.

To tie this all together, what I would like to see in the campaigns is a real discussion of how our government should set priorities.  Do we want to fill the hole in the medicare donut, leave no child's be ... uh leave no child behind, improve our transportation infrastructure, put our country back at the top of the basic research charts, land on Mars ...?  Well we can't do all (or most) of those things and be orders of magnitude more militarily large than the rest of the world combined.  I would like to see every presidential hopeful present a pie chart of how he would allocate the current federal budget among major priorities.  Use the current CBO revenue estimates.  No fudging about new revenues from better tax compliance or cutting bridges to nowhere in Alaska.  Given a pie the same size as the real thing, how would you cut it.  This would force them to confront what they want out of a military, and how much they're willing to pay for it.

Okay, I know.  Nader isn't running this year.

Chapter 7 – Where’s Crazy Joe?

This is chapter seven of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here The novel begins here.

Shitonya turned to my captors and said,

“That’ll be all boys. I’ll be sure to let Mr. Maudlin know what a fine job you’ve been doing keeping the premises secured.”

Gorilla number one then released me from my shackles, he and his partner turned and walked away without another word, and I found myself facing my liberator on the threshold. Too bad I hadn’t stopped to pick up flowers on the way in.

“So, should I let you in? You do seem like a bit of a risk to the operation.”

“Why Shitonya, after all these years I’m shocked to hear you think of me as anything but harmless.”

“Well, you have been known to do an honest day’s work from time to time, and your colleagues are not exactly happy about the precedent that sets.”

“Flattery will get you no where, toots, let me in. I’ve got pointless tasks to complete.”

“Sweetie, you better not call me ‘toots’ or I’ll have the sensitivity police on your ass, and a few other places, too.”

“Promises, promises. It’s tempting but I think I’ll have to pass.”

With that, she turned on her heel and headed down toward her desk a few steps from the door, leaving the coast clear for me to steal into my place of employ.

Before turning into my own office, I stopped in front her desk.

“So where’s Arthur? I’ve got a meeting with him in five minutes.”

A half shriek half rasp sound rose from behind me. It was Mauldin love interest number one, Altoona.

“Oh, he called about a half an hour ago. Said he won’t be in until after lunch, and that you should start the meeting without him.”

“I’m supposed to start a meeting that’s supposed to be just me and him without him? How’s that gonna work? You know I can’t keep to an agenda.”

“Don’t ask me, babe. Figuring things out is not in my job description. You’re on your own with that one.”

I was about to throw some out some questions about why everyone above and below me in the chain of command was either missing or killed in action. Something told me not to trust Altoona and Carboña with those kinds of thoughts, though. I turned into my office, threw my jacket in the general vicinity of a coat rack and sat down behind my desk. Shitonya was the one to talk to about this. She was the only one in the office who did a lick of work, and the only one so far as I could tell, rebuffed the boss’s advances. She hardly ever gossiped, either, but her rumors were always on the money.

“Then I guess I’ll just have to make an executive decision. Meeting cancelled. Shitonya, can you come into my office for a minute please. I gotta do the asphalt orders myself this morning, and I need some help.”

“What are you talking about? You can do those things in your …”

“Shut up and close the door” I hissed at her.

“Ever since they started that new system over at Amici, I can’t keep the orders straight. I don’t know how Pats did it,” I said, perhaps only slightly exaggerating my usually befuddled tone for the benefit of the other two secretaries, who had perfect hearing, except for the sounds of their own phones ringing.

“Oh, you mean the new order forms. Here, I think there in this cabinet behind the door,” said Shitonya, clearly picking up on my ruse as she shut the door behind her.

“What are you talking about? There’s no new system. And what the hell happened downstairs?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. You managed to get in the door, how come I couldn’t?”

“The stupid ID things didn’t work, so I just walked in. The guards never stop me. When I got up here, the ID thing didn’t work on this door either, so I used the key I never gave back when they installed that thing.”

“What about the others? How did they get in?”
“Carboña and Altoona were already in when I got here. I didn’t ask them how. This happens a lot, and I think they have keys, too.”

“Yeah, I know, but nobody stopped you downstairs, and nobody ever stopped me before. I don’ know, but with everything I’ve been through, I’m getting a weird feeling about this.”

“What? You think it’s weird that somebody in our office gets murdered, and the security gets a little tighter? If you ask me, that’s a pretty good thing.”

Maybe I was being a little paranoid, or getting a little carried away in my new role as a homicide investigator, but it seemed to me that that wasn’t quite what was going on, and I said as much to Shitonya.

“Security’s getting tighter? So how come everybody gets in like usual except the one guy who talked to the cops, witnesses, and maybe the killer?”

“White, what the hell are you talking about?”

“What I’m talking about is this. Crazy Joe was in the apartment with Pats, alone. Maybe Pats was dead already, and maybe he wasn’t. He says he didn’t kill him, but he sure isn’t acting that way. He’s disappeared off the map. I’m the last guy that talked to him, and I’m the only one with any connection to Pats except his wife that had any connection to him. And that’s not all.”

With that, I started to tell her about Hunny, leaving out the underwear details. After all, who knew where the line between appropriate and appropriate lay. At first I also left out the details of her family tree.

“So lemme see if I got this straight. There’s this incredibly hot chick who used to be some broke dumpy married guy’s girlfriend and now she’s shacking up with you. And she’s trying to get you to solve a murder she’s afraid to talk to the cops about because she trusts you, a slightly less dumpy, slightly less married, equally broke guy?”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“And you’re going along with it cause you’re a knight in shining fuckin’ armor right?”

“I don’t like to flatter myself, but you could look at it that way.”

“I’m not buying it. You’re an idiot who can’t take his eyes off a nice pair of tits, and is so desperate to get laid that he’d jump in to bed with a killer.”

With that, I looked up at her face (not that I’d noticed her tits), and started to contradict her.

“Look, maybe you’ve got a half a point about the tits (not that I noticed), but she’s not the killer, I didn’t jump into bed with her, and I’m not desperate. Just very particular, not that it’s any business of yours.”

“More to the story? Like what? She’s a member of the free frickin’ French resistance and you own a piano bar you ain’t telling me about?”

“What?”

“Casablanca was on the tube last night. It’s the best I could do.”

“Right actor, wrong movie. This is looking a little more like the Maltese Falcon. But trust me, this girl is in trouble, and if I don’t help her I could be to.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t want to know anything more about her than that. I just need you to help me with one thing.”

“I’m not helping you with anything until you tell me the whole deal. Who is this girl?”

“Come on, you’re the only one who can help me with this, and it’s too dangerous for you ot know anything else.”

“Nothing doing. Spill it.”

I realized at that point that there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t crack this case by myself, and if I was going to be taking on a partner, I couldn’t keep holding out.

“Her name is Hunny Pugliacci, and she’s afraid to go the cops, because she thinks her father might be involved.”

Shitonya let out a long whistle, then said:

“Vinny the Pooh’s daughter? Man you are in deep shit. If you’re stupid enough to get this involved, you’re definitely to dumb to get out of it by yourself. What do you want me to do?”

“Find Crazy Joe, and get him to come into the office, but don’t let him find out that it’s me who wants him.”

“You got it. But this is going to cost you.”

“She says she can pay. I’ll give you, uh, a quarter of what she gives me.”

“Fifty-fifty partner, and I got one more condition.”
“Yeah, what’s that?”

“Help me get rid of those to hos outside. Deal”

Under the circumstances, I didn’t see that I had much choice.

“Deal, partner.”

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

This is something I wrote for my 25th Anniversary High School Reunion a couple of years ago. It summed up where I was at the time (with the impending birth of my son). Had I had a blog then, this would have been posted there. I just happened upon it while looking for something else and figured, what the hey ...

Just for a little context, nowadays, Stuyvesant has a reputation for being ultra competitive and uptight, and populated exlcusively by Asian-American genius overachievers. In my day, in keeping with the generally apocalyptic character of New York, it was a much funkier place. There was a distinct lawless, anarchic character to the place, shaped by the forces of waning hippiedom and rising punk in a decaying city. The principal at the time was a guy named Gaspar R. Fabricante, who was a complete cypher so far as any of us could tell. He had no relationship of any kind with any students or teachers. Periodically, he could be observed at the top of the main stairs of the school greeting the student body in the style of a tin-pot dictator, with slicked back hair and a forced smile. He would occasionally circulate some sort of communication or make an announcement over the PA system reminding us that we attended a hallowed institution. I'm sure announcements of similar character are still made in the present day Stuyvesant, and from what I gather would probably be taken more or less seriously at face value.

Such was not the case back then. To most of my friends, even though many of us were relatively high achieving, Ivy-bound, etc., the ideas that we constituted some sort of elite, and that the decrepit teachers and facilities that attempted to contain us actually deserved their reputation were patently absurd. I don't quite know why the memory stuck with me, because I had zero contact with the him, and gave him virtually no thought during my high schoole years, but GRF actually did pronounce "You are the new elite" at our graduation, just at the moment that a friend of mine in the front row sent up a puff of smoke from a bong hit ...

What I Did on My Summer Vacation
By John Albin, Stuyvesant, class of 1980

It was a cloudless June day in 1980. Though the sky was clear, the air hung heavy with anticipation, the anxious perspiration of imminent adulthood, and a hint of burning vegetation (which due to impending life circumstances -- to be described later -- I shall not identify). I sat in Avery Fisher Hall with 800 of my closest friends listening to the most inspirational orator since William Jennings Bryan predict my future. I'm speaking, of course, of the great Gaspar R. Fabricante and his vision of me as a member of the new elite, a Stuyvesantian bound for glory.

Sad, to say, Gaspar, I haven't quite lived up to that billing. Stuyvesant (and the 1970s) taught me many things, not least a capacity for, suspicion of pomaded authority, along with a mastery of wry detachment and indolence, to say nothing of the nail delay and the collected works of McKinley Morganfield and Chester Burnett. However, Stuyvesant didn’t teach me how to find my way in the world. That is something I’ve had to learn on my own, and is still a work in progress.

That work began just two months after Gaspar’s valedictory, when I set forth on the road to elitehood. The first stop (after a series of track fires and diversions to some of New York’s more apocalyptic settings) was a collection of ivory (well, copper-roofed, but that ain’t the metaphor) towers, in a community the great 20th century philosopher Carlin once called “White Harlem”. I, a simple youth from a small village in lower Manhattan, soon found myself trafficking (never proven) among an assortment of humanity from an assortment of lands, some unknown even to the cartographer Steinberg.

While at this fine institution, I continued honing my skills as an authentic interpreter of African American music, subsidizing my studies with weekend gigs and dreaming of seeing my name in lights at the Regal (or at least Dan Lynch). Eventually, I made it as far as a certain Delphic temple on 125th Street (as an authentic Ivory Coast pop musician), but I realized that, even though the world always made life comfortable for artists, it might nevertheless be a good idea to pick up a trade. With this in mind, I settled in for a long hard slog in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Marx, figuring that if the blues didn’t pan out, the job market was always bullish for philosopher kings.

This plan, of course played out to perfection. First, the obligatory sojourn in a Paris garret, followed by three years of editing elementary school textbooks. By 1988 I found my self in civil service, studying garbage accumulation on New York City’s roadsides. The mythical cave wasn’t available, but shadows cast on underpasses served nearly as well. I could sense elitehood around the next bend.

Slowly I accumulated knowledge and responsibility, making sure to avoid remuneration with each step up the ranks. After all, philosopher kings are in it for justice, truth, and discovering the forms, and I certainly discovered the forms. Personal, intellectual, artistic, and romantic growth followed the same glorious arc as career and finances for many years.

Through it all, my fecklessness rarely caused me much more than an occasional sleepless night. I had friends and flings, music, recreation, and navel gazing to divert me. I also had the friendship and indulgence of my parents. But In 1991, tragedy struck, literally. My father, who had always been my closest friend and confidant, suffered a massive stroke at the age of 56, which rendered him severely physically, intellectually, and psychiatrically disabled.

He had been an athlete, polymath, and epicurean, a larger than life figure to most who knew him. Now, he was left a cripple who could speak, and cry out in despair, but could no longer think, create, or enjoy life. The impact on our family was enormous, physically and spiritually. Between the strain of caring for a demanding invalid, and the daily realization that what had once been was no longer, we all barely treaded water for years.

Gradually, we found ways to cope. I formed bands, wrote music, and performed sporadically through the mid and late ‘90s. In 1999, I began what have become annual visits to Europe. Most years this has included tours of some of Switzerland’s spotlessly seamy juke joints (where standards are low and, pay is high) with fellow Stuyvesantian Tom Lyons (‘81).

In 2000 I met the love of my life, Ivana Jovic, and my European vacations started including trips to her native Serbia. She has dragged me kicking and screaming toward maturity. I’ve done my part too, making sure to bring her down to my level whenever possible. With many miles still to go, significant milestones have been passed. We began living together in 2002. We were recently married, and now are expecting our first child. I’ve even started doing the kinds of career and life planning that most of my classmates probably got to at least a decade ago.

All of this is a bit daunting for a somewhat past it former new elite. It’s the kind of stuff that I’m sure Gaspar figured out by the time he was 20. But it’s also exciting and inspiring. There have been struggles and disappointments. But there has also been joy, and plenty of good old affirmation of the quotidian. And, when I’ve opened my eyes and paid attention, one commencement exercise after another. As Molly Bloom once said (or was it Marv Albert?), “YES!”

Minna and her sisters

A curse usually credited to ancient Chinese wisdom is "may you live in interesting times". I often think that my father Peter must have pissed off some ancient sage big time because he was born into quite an interesting household. His mother was one of four sisters nee Steigman, Minna (his mother), Rose, Lilly, and Olga. Rose, the oldest, escaped -- first to Westchester, later to Florida. Having escaped the folie a quatre Rose was only an occasional presence in my father's (and later my) life, flying north each summer to unite the remaining three against a common enemy.

These three spent almost their entire lives living close to each other in Manhattan, the last 20 or so years in the same building in Chelsea, and in neighboring country houses in the least fashionable corner of Fairfield County. Grandma Minna was the second oldest, and the closest to sane of the sisters. By the time I came along, she was retired from a career as a high school biology teacher and spent her time attending cultural events, gardening, dropping hints of her many affairs, and cooking large quantities of something she referred to as "food", but which was not readily identfiable as such. She also made frequent reference to things she used to do, such as playing tennis and the piano, but which she no longer could do, for reasons that were never clear. She remained vibrant and physically active with no outward signs of infirmity into her 80s, yet never touched the Steinway baby grand piano that stood silent witness to her abandoned concert career throughout my childhood.

Each morning my grandpa Joe made the coffee, and Minna exclaimed upon her first sip "Joe, this coffee is terrible! It's like dishwater!" Joe would then reply "Oh for Gord's sake Minna, if it's so terrible make it yourself!" She never did. Breakfast was always followed by a long, vigorous walk, and, when in the country, marathon sessions of ping pong in the barn on Lilly's nearby property. The sisters all fancied themselves expert ping pongers, though in reality they were no match for any of the men.

Joe was a classic, crafty spin-meister. Lilly's husband Lou (Grudin), though riddled with emphysema and arthritis by the time I was old enough to face him at the table, was a vicious smasher. Dad, a varsity tennis player and highly proficient in all racquet sports, was on a plane so far above the rest that they refused to play him, denying his gifts and declaring him a cheater. The same fate befell me when I showed signs of following in my father's athletic footsteps.

Minna was highly competent in her family's specialties, namely, disputing anything one of her sisters said at Led Zepplin-esque decibel levels, maintaining decades old grievances, mispronouncing any name she encountered, and disparaging anyone not related to her by blood, notably Joe and Lou. When not en famille, Minna was generally cabable of surpressing her worst instincts, and communicating civilly. Having also had the experience of giving birth to and rearing a child, she was capable of degrees of affection, jollity, and empathy almost completely lacking in her two childless sisters, traits that also helped her maintain a handful of friendships and get along with her neighbors.

As Calliope was to Minna, Terpsichore was to Lilly, the youngest, craziest, and most flamboyant of the four. In childhood and early adolescence, my sister Liz (then known by another name, which is another story) was an avid ballet and modern dance student. Lilly would often demand impromptu performances from Liz. She would then critique her form, while regaling us with tales of dancing "the bolly" in her youth. Lilly, who was five feet tall, grotesquely steatopygous, wore Murray's space shoes, and suffered from all manner of malady real and imagined, would then commence a demonstration of the "correct" technique, which would end mid-twirl in some combination of sneezing and spasming of various body parts.

What Lilly lacked in her older sister's argumentative versatility, she made up for in volume, paranoia, deafness, and production of bodily fluids. Her particular specialty was making it clear to strangers that she had no children because uncle Lou forced her to have countless abortions, preferring to forestall procreation until he wrote the great American novel and became a man of independent means. In the 1920s and 30s, this might not have been an a bad idea, as Lou was a published poet and critic of some repute, a polymath, and a minor figure in the modernist literary world, who showed promise of becoming much more.

Lou's poetic masterpiece, "Dust on Spring Street" is included in some editions of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and was called one of the greatest poems in the English language by William Carlos Williams, with whom Lou carried on a sporadic friendship and correspondence. Lou was close friends with Maxwell Bodenheim and other figures in New York bohemia. He was also acquainted with T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, about whom he would say nothing more than "Ptui, that anti-Semite son of a bitch," when I attempted to interview him as a source for a college literature paper. When his novel Inkly Darkling was finally published in 1954, this review seems to have put an end to his greater literary ambitions.

Olga, between Lilly and Minna in age, was to put it cruelly but honestly, a person of no worth to anyone in the family. She had been married briefly in her youth to a man denounced by her sisters as a conniving abuser. Family legend had it that he met Olga on a cruise, conned her into marrying her to gain U.S. citizenship, and then left her as soon as the papers came through. I think it more likely that he married Olga (who in youthful photographs possessed a petite, doll-like beauty) for love, but an extended dose of the Steigmans was enough to send him to Australia.

Olga spent the rest her days living first with her mother, and then alone, working as a secretary for the Amalgamated Bank, and growing increasingly deaf, abusive towards children, and foul smelling. Each holiday season and birthday, Liz and I would buy Olga fancy soaps, perfumes and powders in the hopes of rendering the experience of being yelled at, insulted, poked, and pinched agonizing only to the senses of touch and hearing. Olga died when I was about 15, and my father and I were tasked with disposing of her belongings. I found boxes upon boxes of unopened toiletries stashed behind the furniture in her bedroom.

It feels heartless to admit this, but almost nothing more than this can be said about her. Almost immediately after her death, Olga disappeared completely from the consciousness of her family. She was almost never talked about, never the subject of reminiscences fond or otherwise. This wasn't superstition. No one feared speaking ill or well of the dead. It was simply that Olga was so insignificant to her sisters, that they paid no mind to her absence. Liz and I, having never had any feelings other than revulsion arising from the way she yelled, insulted, grabbed, poked, and stank, were guiltily relieved, but nonetheless relieved that we would no longer be subjected to her presence.

The sisters were raised by their mother. Her, name was Sarah, but she was known to all only by the nickname "Suchi". She called herself Suchi, and was never referred to as Sarah by anyone except on official documents. Suchi, who died when I was about three, and whom I remember only vaguely as a malevolent apparition, was feared and loathed by all of her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren. Suchi came to America from somewhere beyond the pale of settlement (either Moscow or Minsk, depending on the document and the storyteller) with her four daughters and her sister, Gussie Zuckerman, who became a concert pianist and composer and made a name for herself as Manna Zucca. According to Minna, once they all got to America, Suchi took up with a boarder they had taken in, and tossed her husband the Luftmensch Torah scholar to the curb. He was never seen again by the sisters, who learned years later that he had died homeless in another city (variously recounted as Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle).

All other stories told about Suchi amplified the theme of her cruelty, manipulativeness, and divisiveness. She lived for a time with Minna, Joe, and my father when my father was very young, but was eventually sent to live with Olga after she accused Joe of molesting Dad. Even Minna, who rarely had a kind word to say to or about her husband, knew that such an accusation was preposterous. Joe, though not without some quirks, was a kind, gentle soul, completely incapable of anything approaching abuse of another human being.

Decades later, the subject of Suchi came up in conversation between my mother and Sophia, a Russian Jewish woman hired as a home health care aide to take care my father, who had become severely disabled following a stroke. As always happens among Ashkenazim, conversation turned to the names and geographic origins of our ancestors, and my mother described my father's monster of a grandmother. Sophia interrupted her.

"I'm sorry, Pat, what did you say her name was?"
"Suchi."
"Suchi? And She was from Russia? She spoke Russian?"
"Yes, yes. Mostly Yiddish, but Russian as well."
"Do you know what Suchi means in Russian?"

[It bears repeating at this point that Suchi was never called by her real name, called herself Suchi, and insisted that everyone else do so.]

"No, please tell me what Suchi means in Russian."
"It means 'bitch'."

Ah hah.

Liz and I experienced all the wonders of the Steigman clan at family gatherings, and during weekends and vacations in the country. We always had each other as refuge, day camp, friends, and activities as escape, and knowledge that we would eventually return to our parents as hope. Consequently, we were able to maintain a degree of detachment and amusement at the sisters' eccentricities, laugh at Lou's wordplay, and share conspiratorial asides with Joe, who kept his distance from the rest as much as he could.

Dad, on the other hand, had no such luxuries. He grew up in a cauldron of anger, argument, and erudition, and his personality reflected this. He possessed an absolutely astonishing mind. [My apologies for referring to him in the past tense in this context; he is still alive, but his mind is barely so.] By training he was an economist, but his intellect was restless and achieved heights of creativity in mathematics, artificial intelligence, chaos theory, chess, go, and even children's literature. I have never met a fellow academic who didn't spontaneously and sincerely describe Dad as one of the most brilliant people of his or acquaintance. Yet he spent much of his career in a (albeit tenured) backwater, unable to convince more prestigious universities to hire him, and unable to complete what he viewed as his most important work. The social and emotional deficits instilled in him by the Steigmans left him unable to navigate institutions and collaborations. They also left him with a distorted capacity for mature romantic love, which played itself out in a troubled marriage and embarrassing affairs.

In surprising ways, though, he transcended his upbringing. He was as outgoing and spontaneous as the Steigmans were xenophobic. He was fascinated by new people, cultures, and experiences, and had a number of long lasting, deep friendships. He was something of a fixture in the Greenwich Village cafe scene, particularly at the Figaro (which was once a boho outpost), where he was known as "Pete the Prof". He hung out in pool halls, and at basketball courts and tennis clubs. Consistent with his Upper West Side upbringing, he subscribed to the opera and the symphony, visited art museums and galleries at every opportunity, and called himself a socialist, but he also had an extensive collection of rock records, read science fiction voraciously, and listened to right wing talk radio in the car.

Above all, he was a wonderful father. He loved Liz and me as all parents love their children, but he also liked us as people, enjoyed our company at all stages of our development, and became our friend in adulthood. He was one of the dads in the neighborhood that all the kids like to play with when we were little, and was one of the "cool" parents when we were older, but he was also serious and responsible with our upbringing. He protected us from bullies, taught us to read write and do advanced math before we got to school, and was a stern taskmaster once we were there. As hard as he pushed us academically, he supported and "kvelled" at our experiences outside the classroom. He encouraged me to take the music I loved seriously and attended my gigs whenever he could. After one performance at a college dormitory, he walked up to me with a huge grin on his shaggy, bearded face and said "Now I know how Keith Richards' mother feels."

It is this side of my father that I hope has had the greatest impact on me. As my young son begins to emerge from babyhood and engage the world around him, I am often filled with sadness that he will never know his grandpa Pete, who would no doubt have surpassed himself in that role. At the same time I rejoice that I had the opportunity to know someone who was able to move past the curse of an "interesting" upbringing in some measure and achieve a state of fascination with the world around him. Alexander, may you live in fascinating times.

So Many Roads ...

When people ask me what kind of music I play, I usually say something along the lines of "a bit of everything", because that's more or less true. In my gigging and jamming life, I've played all different kinds of rock and roll, jazz, blues, folk, r &B. I've even played in an authentic African band (with one obviously non-authentic member). But really, I play blues. For better or worse (often the latter), when I pick up my guitar, that's what I'm most likely to play for myself.

I got to the blues somewhat circuitously. When I was growing up, my father was an avid audiophile, with a pretty eclectic record collection for someone of his generation. This was the source for pretty much all the music I experienced up to about age 15. Tucked in with the classical, Beatles, and Kingston Trio records, there was some Muddy Waters, some Josh White, Jr., and an odd mix of progressive rock, stuff like Vanilla Fudge, Gentle Giant, and Cream.

As a little kid, I listened mostly to the Beatles and folk records, but when I started playing guitar, I stumbled onto the Cream. The songwriting credits on these records turned me into a bit of a junior Allen Lomax, and got me back to Muddy and co. But the playing of a white dude named Eric is what really got me hooked on playing blues guitar.

That led me to the infamous John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (the "Beano" album), which is the basis for the epithet "Clapton is God". Alas, "Wonderful Tonight" "Forever Man" and so much other dreck followed, but that's another story. The lead cut on this album is a song called "All your love (I miss lovin')". It's a minor blues that offers the Platonic form of the Les Paul-Marshall tone.

I'm never satisfied with a cover version though, so I had to chase down the original. "All your love" is credited to a guy named Otis Rush, who I think is the greatest of the second-generation Chicago Blues artists. This is the crowd (names like Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and James Cotton) that got their starts backing the people who pretty much invented electric blues -- Muddy, Wolf, John Lee, et. al., and then emerged as solo artists in the early 60's. All of these guys are great, but to me Otis Rush has something extra going on.

Apart from the obvious talents -- a great singing voice, guitar tone, phrasing, and time -- there's something I find particularly fascinating about Otis Rush. One of the standard bits of wisdom about blues is that it's not just sad, dark, music. There's all kinds of humor, playing the dozens, ribaldry, love, hopefulness, and so forth. Not with Otis. With him you get all the darkness, sadness, and bitterness you can handle, and more. Death, depression unrequited love, you know, the blues. Some of this stems from the fact that he does a lot of tunes in minor keys, and as we know from music appreciation class, major keys are happy, and minor keys are sad. But the guy also puts out a vibe, and sings an awful lot of songs about being dying, or being mistreated by his woman, including at least one wherein the first person narrator is both dead and mistreated:

You've done me wrong
For a long, long time
And all you've done
Will never change my mind
So please try to love me
Please baby try
My love for you will never die

And these flowers grow
Where I lay and rest
And these colored blossoms
Darling hold to your breast
And darling know
It's my mind
Breaking out
From inside
My love for you will never die.

The other curious thing about Otis is the way he plays. He's left handed, but he plays a right-handed guitar, without restringing it. This makes all the fingerings, chord shapes and techniques not just mirror imaged (a la a typical lefty), but upside down, so you can't figure out what he's doing by watching; you have to use your ears. The only other player I know to do this is the late Albert King, and it has a similar effect in both of their sounds. Stevie Ray Vaughan comes closest of any "conventional" player to capturing it, but not quite.

Finally, for all you late night TV fans, come on, admit it, you've watched the Robin Byrd show. You know, the weird naked public access cable TV show with porn star interviews and stripper showcases? Anyway, ever notice how there's this really cool blues guitar tune over the opening credits? No, not "Baby you can bang my box" at the end. I'm 99.99% sure that's Otis Rush doing "Will my woman be home tonight" from a live in Japan album he did in the late 70's. That's the first Otis record I ever got, and the Robin Byrd thing is the same, note for note, inflection for inflection. Check it out, and if you can't find it on your dial, check this out from his prime:





And this when there were a few more miles on the odometer:

Chapter 6 – Morning with Hunny; back to the office

This is chapter six of a novel in progress called "Uncivil Service." The previous chapter can be found here. The novel begins here.


Being a bachelor of uncertain domestic talents, my usual morning routine is to stagger out of bed, somehow make it to the deli on the first floor of my building, and return to my lair with as much caffeine and breakfast pastry as I can carry. On the not so rare occasions when the elevator is broken, this is hazardous, as taking stairs in a pre-caffeinated state can lead to serious injury. It is often said that a child learns to go up stairs more easily than down. Not just kids, unless the definition of toddler has been expanded by a few decades. I’m not much of a drummer, but I think the rhythm of my cranium bouncing off the faux terrazzo is what’s known as a paradiddle. .

The morning after my first evening with Hunny, I awoke as usual to the grindings of world class garbage crushing-machinery beneath my window. As I readied my skull for some early morning percussion, though, I sensed something was different. For some strange reason the bouquet of mid-summer dumpster juice that usually wafted in from the street seemed to be masked by something pungent and strange. As I clawed my way to consciousness the strangeness of the smell receded, only to be replaced by the oddity of its presence in an unlikely environment. My days as botanist in the highlands of Central America told me that I was detecting the volatile aromatic emissions of the high-temperature distillation of c. arabica, a process that had never before been successfully performed in the biological niche of this particular homo civilis vernula. Either that, or someone had made a fresh pot of coffee.

As I staggered the few feet from my bedroom to the kitchen, awareness of the previous day’s events worked their way toward the frontal lobes. The smell, and now the sight, in front of me told me that I hadn’t been dreaming. Once again bursting out of her Arthur Avenue uniform, Hunny lifted a steaming mug from my kitchen table and beckoned me to the table. As I sat down across from her, the sort of thoughts apparently condoned in my workplace sprang to mind. No doubt, this was one picture that appropriate though it might be to the desires of a lonely man, still didn’t belong on my office desk. What little blood left to circulate to my brain fought its way north and woke up whatever common sense was left after years of bureaucratic purgatory and a night as a public-sector private dick. Rule number one: stay away from the daughters of men named after whimsical woodland creatures. Warily, I took a sip of coffee and broke the ice.

“You know, I heard there was a coffee maker around here, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before”

“Really? It was in the cabinet, right next to the coffee.”

“Will wonders never cease. How did that get in there? Next thing you know, a couple of eggs and a glass of OJ’ll jump out of the fridge.”

“Don’t press your luck smart guy.”

This kind of witty repartee could go on forever, and certainly wouldn’t improve unless I artificially raised my dopamine levels a bit, so I put the mug to good use for a few reps and then got down to brass tacks, whatever those are.

“Listen. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night, and I’m not saying that you’re right, but I’m getting a funny feeling there’s more going on on the job than I might have realized. The way Crazy Joe disappeared doesn’t make any sense.”

“So you’ll do it? You’ll find out what happened to Tony?” she said almost giddily

“I didn’t say that. In fact, I doubt I’ll be able to find out much, but at least I’ve got to find Crazy Joe and figure out what he’s been up to. After that, I can’t say what I’m going to do.”

“But you promise not to tell the cops about me, right?”

“Listen, I don’t know what I’m going to tell the cops. I’ve got to keep my job, and keep my ass out of trouble. If I can do that and keep your name out of things, maybe, but I’m not promising anything. That’s the best I can do for you.”

She seemed to deflate a bit, at least from the neck up, with that, but she knew she’d gotten as much out of me as she was going to.

“All right then, I guess I can’t ask for any more than that. So I guess you’re going to work, right”

“Yeah, I’ve got to at least start from there. Besides, my boss scheduled a meeting for me that neither of us is going to show up to, so I’ve got to get to the office. What are you gonna do?”

“Can I stay here?”

“I thought you said you weren’t gonna ask me for anything else.”

“What are keeping score or something? Besides, you’re forgetting something. You need me here.”

“Yeah? And why’s that?”

“Well, it’s either let me stay here, and fix your phone, or kick me out and hope the phone company shows up, and charges you 350 bucks to reconnect the lines in your walls. I read your phone bill – you don’t have a service plan.”

Damn! If they hadn’t broken up AT&T, I never would have wound up in a spot like this. Besides, it was getting late, and I had to get to work early to line up the day’s asphalt supply now that Tony wasn’t around, so I didn’t have time to argue with her anymore about deregulation of the telecommunications industry”

“All right, you win. But just for today.”

With that, she gave me what might have been a smile of gratitude, or triumph, I couldn’t quite tell. Either way, I didn’t have time to sit around and try to figure it out.

A few minutes later, dressed, and as well pressed and shined up as a man of my means can be, which is to say wrinkled and scuffed, I got ready to leave. As I headed out the door, she grabbed my arm and stopped me. She gave me a soft kiss on the cheek and as she looked deep into my eyes, said

“Thanks, and here I blow dried it, and I think it might work now.”

With that she handed me cell phone gave me a little shove through the door and closed it behind me.
So I found myself on the way to work at the usual time, with the usual level of stimulants in my system, but with an altogether different collection of thoughts and obsessions. In this state I was barely able to direct a few tourists back to Boston, failed to muster my normal level of fierceness in glaring at my fellow passengers, and almost gave up my seat to a person whose impersonation of an arthritic eighty-year-old woman with a “thirteen” totebag was quite convincing. Fool me once …

Having miserably failed to meet the standard of surliness expected of me as a resident of a natural history museum diorama, I merged from the subway and scurried the rest of the way to my place of “work”. Only to be confronted with a puzzle worthy of Indiana Jones. Years ago, there was no security in government buildings, and anyone could and did go in, including the people who worked there (who generally chose not to, at least in spirit). All of that changed due to the events of one bright autumn day. Now, municipal government was attacking security with the single-minded alacrity it attacked efficiency and public service.

My office building has four entrances, each with its own separate electronic security systems. . Each requires a separate electronically encoded card, each of which emits its own radar or electronic whatchamacallit that cancels out the others unless all four are positioned just so. This might have been the product of the highest levels of security wizardry intent on keeping evil-doing enemies of freedom away from the strategic bureaucrat reserve. Or it might have been low-bid contracting. In any event, being in the midst of a bad just-so day, I gave up entrance roulette and joined the line of visitors signing in with the security guard. As I reached the head of the line, I fanned my ID’s for the guard and awaited admission.

“May I see some identification please?”

“C’mon, you see me here everyday. My cards aren’t working on the door.”

“If you have a card key, please use it at the security gate, sir.”

“I did, and it didn’t work.”

“If your ID isn’t working, please speak to security, and they’ll take care of for you, sir.”

“Aren’t you security?”

“No, I’m protective services.”

“Since when?”

“I got a promotion, see?” he said, grinning and pointing to where someone had crossed out the word “security” on his badge and written “protective services” over it.

“Congratulations. You must be proud.”

“How did you know name?”

“Excuse me?”

“I said how did you know my name?”

“I don’t.”

“Then why did you call me Proud?”

“I just assumed that you were proud because you got a promotion.”

“Oh, so you think I can’t get a promotion without using my family connections, is that it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just want to get into my office.”

“Oh so that’s how you want to play it? Don’t want to tell me how you learned confidential information about a Protective Services employee? And then go insulting my abilities to get a job fair and square. We’ll see about that.”

With that, he hoisted a walkie talkie and punched a series of buttons.

“Security, this is officer Proud of protective services down at entrance 3.”
Ah hah.

“I got a code 6 here.”

As soon as he said spoke those words, an alarm went off somewhere above my head, and a voice crackled through a loudspeaker. “Security to the lobby code 6 in process”

Before I could get my bearings a pair of guards swooped down, hoisted me from both sides side and hauled me into a door I had never noticed before. Before I knew it, I found myself handcuffed and being perp-walked to an old-style manually operated freight elevator, where a third guard waited.

The two gorillas who were holding me let go, and the one to my right said,

“OK Pal, in you go.” He gave me a hard shove into the waiting car. I stumbled forward, bounced off the back wall of the car, and flipped around in time to see the gorilla number three slam the cage door behind his rainforest buddies.

“Wait a second! What are you doing to me? I work here,” I shouted

“We’ll see about that”

“You have no right to do this.”

“Sure we do. Ain’t you heard of the patriot act?”

“What are you talking about? You’re not federal agents – you’re rent-a-cops.”

“Private Special Enforcement Officers”

“What?”

“I said we are private special enforcement officers. You’re in enough trouble as it is, accessing confidential protective services information. I caution you not to risk further sanctions by further use of incorrect nomenclature.”

“Huh?”

“I will not release any more information about the details of this action until I am authorized to do so by my superior.”

“And who would that be?”

“First Assistant Deputy Assistant Commissioner for security and support, Arthur Maudlin.”

Well, it looks like I was being taken into custody in my own office. That would solve the ID problem.

“I surrender. Take me to your leader”

As I spoke, the elevator lurched to a stop, and I once again found myself levitated by my elbows, half flung down a corridor and unceremoniously plopped outside the entrance to my own office. Gorilla number two swiped an ID card along the card reader. No buzz, no green light. He tried another, with no better luck. He then gave up and picked up a telephone hanging on the wall next to the door.

“Hello this is security. May I need to see Mr. Maudlin please … What’s this about? Well, we captured an intruder attempting to gain access to the facility…Uh, yes he did have ID, but it is a suspected forgery … Why am I using the phone? Uh, my ID does not appear to be working… I see your point, ma’am … His name? Just a moment”

Turning to me, and looking a little less, a bit less Rumsfeldian than a moment before he asked “You -- what’s your name?”

Knowing better than to risk another nepotism incident, I suppressed all repartee impulses and gave him only the information required by the Geneva conventions, which he then relayed over the phone.

“Oh, you recognize the name? … Yes, I think it would be all right if you came out, identified him, and let him in.”

Ah the sweet smell of freedom. I could practically taste it. A moment later, a familiar face appeared at the door.

“Hello Mr. White, nice of you to make it in this morning.”

“And hello to you, to Shitonya. A pleasure to see you, as always.”

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