It takes two to tangle up the schools

The current New York Review of Books has a polemic by Diane Ravitch that provides an interesting counterpoint to the "Waiting for Superman" craze.  I have no great love for any particular variant of schools, but I find the arguments Ravitch makes here about the flaws of charter schools, the virtues of regular public schools, and the importance of investing in traditional public education pretty compelling.  


Ravitch lays out convincing evidence and arguments against the trope of poverty not being the reason kids fail and money not being the reason schools fail. The single data point I can draw on (my son's local public school) seems to support Ravitch's contentions.  It's a pretty good place.  The parents are involved, the principal runs a tight ship, the teachers teach, and the kids learn.  There are no major discipline problems, the building is in pretty good shape, and the parents raise a fair amount of money to support the school.  The basic reason it's a good school is that it is in a school zone that (by luck) is coterminous with a stable middle class neighborhood (that is in the process of turning into an upper middle class neighborhood).


The only thing stopping this school from becoming every bit as impressive as a wealthy suburban school or a fancy Manhattan private school is lack of money.  If the school had (I'm guessing), 30% more money, we'd have enriched curricula, activities, supplies, recess.  Instead, we get the basics, reasonably capably presented, a bit of sadness about how spartan our kids' school experience is, and relentless parental fundraising.

I also agree with what Ravitch has to say about the demonization of teachers and their unions.  I've been on both sides of  the union/management divide (and oddly enough am currently in a management union that is a subsidiary of the teachers' union), and have no particular love of unions.  They suck up a big piece of my paycheck in exchange for a pretty low rate of return in benefits and raises.  But: 1) every contract has two sides; you can't blame unions for the terms of contracts that management signs. 2) Unions may sometimes impede firing, but they don't hire, grant tenure, or stop management from giving merit raises. 3) It's a myth that "union work rules" stifle public sector productivity; civil service rules and crappy management are much more to blame for the shoddiness of the public sector business culture.


This not to say the unions have no role in any of this, but see point 1).  Politicians negotiate and sign public sector labor agreements and appoint the people who manage public sector agencies.  If you want better public sector workers (including teachers), you need politicians who look out for something other than their own electoral and personal interests, actually know something about the operations they ostensibly manage, and stop accepting political support from unions (as well as other special interests, but that's another rant).  In  New York there are  the added complications of the City's limited home rule and subordinate status to the State on labor and civil service matters.  This creates opportunities for our corrupt state legislators to accept campaign donations from public sector unions in exchange for writing counterproductive employment terms and conditions into State laws.  You can blame the unions for pushing these agendas, but as with politicians caving in to corporate special interests against the public interest, the bulk of the blame falls squarely on the politicians.


They way I see it, "saving our schools" is a matter of money, managerial/educational  competence, and politics.  To get this, we need an involved citizenry with a stake in the game.  In New York City, we have had the twin problems of the middle and upper classes opting out in favor of private schools and the lower classes either being too dysfunctional to contribute, or opting out in favor of parochial or charter schools.  If there's a silver lining, it's that private schools have become absurdly expensive, parochial schools are disappearing, and so many of us have dropped out of the classes that could afford these options in the past, that there is now a growing cohort of involved and informed parents militating for improvements in the core public schools system.  Bloomberg and Klein have probably lost the confidence of this cohort because of the testing fiascoes, which leaves a huge opportunity for the next generation of politicians.  I don't know who  (if anybody) will fill that void, but I'm interested in seeing who does.  And for now, sending my kid to a plain old public school.

Open letter to the President on enforcement of Marijuana laws

I just submitted the letter below to President Obama at the White House's website.  I encourage others to do something similar


Dear President Obama,

Let me start this letter just by saying hello.  You and I were contemporaries at Columbia (I'm '84), and I have discovered that we were once next door neighbors on West 109th St.  Someday, perhaps we will swap stories about how we coped with the experience of cold-water slum living.

I'm disappointed to read that your administration intends to enforce marijuana prohibitions in California.  Given your personal background as someone who experimented with drugs, and came through the experience unharmed, I can't help but think that you are doing this for cynical political reasons rather than because you truly believe there is a clear moral basis for imprisoning people for marijuana posession.  Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that you really believe in the merits of this course of action.  In order to clear this up for me, I'd appreciate your answer to these questions:

When you were in college experimenting with marijuana and cocaine, do you think you should have been arrested?

If there were no statute of limitations, and you were still potentially in legal jeopardy for these actions, do you think you should be arrested now?

To be fair, I'll give you some relevant personal history and answer the same questions.  I was a regular pot smoker roughly between the ages of 16 and 20.  I also experimented occasionally with cocaine and psychedelics.  I stopped on my own when I found I no longer enjoyed the effects.  I suffered no ill effects from any of this.  As to the questions, no I do not think that you or I should have been arrested for this, now or ever.  Nor do I think anyone else should be.
 ....

FYI: The contact form at the white house seems buggy, and I'm not sure if this all got through, so I will probably re-submit.  If anyone else submits something, watch out for this.

Origin of the species

The Setting: Downtown A train this morning
The Players: Myself, Charlotte (a friend/parent from the neighborhood), Charlotte's two daughters (aged 3 1/2 and 4 1/2), who are occasional playmates of my son (5).

Charlotte distributes pretzels to the cast.  Daughter1 looks at the pretzel and asks if this is how small she was when she was in her mommy's stomach.  A discussion ensues involving breaking the pretzel into ever smaller pieces and comparing the pieces to foetus/embryo/blastocyst/egg-sized daughters in mommy's tummy.  Charlotte then asks me whether I have had similar conversations with my son.  I say that I have. Indeed, he has gone so far as to ask not only where he came from, but where the first people came from.  Charlotte laughs, and daughter 2 then asks where the first people came from.  Charlotte, thinking she's got me on the ropes, suggests that I answer.  So, to the curious, this is where the first people came from (with help from the class).

The first people were fish.
No they weren't!
Yes they were.
No they weren't! You're kidding aren't you?
No, really the first people were fish. Some of the fish got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators.
No they didn't!  Mommy, is he telling the truth?
Well, um, kind of
Yes, I'm telling the truth, the first people were fish who got tired of being fish, so they crawled out of the water and became alligators.  But some of the alligators got tired of being alligators so they decided to become dinosaurs.
NO THEY DIDN'T!!
Yes, really they did.  And then some of them got tired of being dinosaurs, so they became squirrels.
They did not!! Mom, did the dinosaurs become squirrels?
Um, well in a way ...
OK, so then the some of the squirrels got tired of being squirrels, so they decided to become monkeys, which are a lot like people.
They did not.  Monkeys aren't like people.
Monkeys look kind of like people don't they?
Um ... yeah ...
Well, they have hands like people don't they?  And two eyes in the fronts of their faces don't they?
Yeah.  But they have feet for hands, and hands for feet, so they're not people.
I know.  They also have tails.  Some of the monkeys decided they didn't want tails anymore so they got rid of their tails and became chimpanzees.
NO THEY DIDN'T!  Mom, did they really do that?  Did the monkeys become chimpanzees?
Um, sort of ...
Chimpanzees look a lot like people, don't they?
Yeah, they do (at this point, the daughters have stopped objecting and are looking at me like this is starting to make some sense)
OK, the chimpanzees got tired of being chimpanzees, so they decided to become people, and that's where the first people came from.
Really?  Did all of them do that?
No, not all of them.  Some of the chimpanzees decided to become people, but some of them decided to still be chimpanzees.  We call those Republicans.

Oh, here's my stop.  Gotta go.

This is Kindergarten. This is Big.

My son started kindergarten a month ago, which is big, much bigger than I ever could have imagined.  I went to kindergarten, and I don't really recall it being particularly important or rigorous.  In my day, there was a lot of smearing of colors and mushing of stuff.  There were many, many choruses of John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt, a bit of duck duck goose, and if I recall correctly, passing mention of the alphabet.  Times have changed, though.  In New York City, kindergarten is the new first grade.  Kids are now expected to learn to read, do homework, and say the Pledge of Allegiance.  In the first month.

They are also expected to be good citizens of the educational community.  I know this, because the New York City Department of Education just told me, via a fascinating document called "Citywide Standards of Intervention and Discipline Measures: The Discipline Code and Bill of Student Rights and Responsibilities, K-12" that just arrived via my son's backpack.  It is 28 pages of small-font, landscape-printed gobbledygook that is supposed to tell parents what kids are and are not supposed to do in school, and what will happen to them if they run afoul of the rules.

Or at least that is what I think it is. I have tried three times to get all the way through this thing, and I am so frustrated by its turgid, ungrammatical, passive-voiced bureaucratic incomprehensibility, that I cannot be sure.  For, example the section entitled  "Promoting Positive Student Behavior" begins with:

"Each School is expected to promote a positive school climate and culture that provides students with a supportive environment in which to grow both academically and socially."  Okay, a little stilted, but I have no problem with the sentiment. Schools should be pleasant places that help children learn and grow up.

Next comes "Schools are expected to take a proactive role in nurturing students' pro-social behavior by providing them with a range of positive behavioral supports as well as meaningful opportunities of social emotional learning."

Huh?

I have spent the last 22 years working in government and higher education bureaucracies.  Before that, I spent three years in the educational publishing business.  That is not the worst sentence I have ever seen.  For instance, it's nowhere near as bad as this one:

"Effective social emotional learning helps students develop fundamental skills for life effectiveness, including: recognizing and managing emotions; developing caring and concern for others; establishing positive relationships; making responsible decisions; and handling challenging situations constructively and ethically."

We're still on page two.  There are five more pages to go before we get to the actual code of conduct that our kids are supposed to follow.  Five more pages like this.  Jargon, wordiness, too many ideas running together -- everything your freshman composition teacher told you not to do occurs in every sentence of every paragraph of this document.

I suppose I could google "pro-social behavior," swallow my distaste for "proactive," break that sentence up into more manageable chunks, and figure out what it's about.  I could do that with the rest of the sentences in that paragraph.  I could do that for the whole 28 pages of this thing, and after a couple of hours boil it down to the 10 things I need to know about discipline in kindergarten.  After all, I do that sort of thing all the time with laws, regulations, directives, proposals, contracts, and all the other artifacts of my trade.  But could an uneducated immigrant parent struggling to find his way and hoping that his child's first month in kindergarten will be the beginning of a better life?

Well, you say, what do you expect?  The schools are run by a bunch of bureaucrats with no connection to kids or the classroom.  They sling this kind of drivel around at each other all the time.  What does it matter?  But this isn't some intra-office policy exercise.  This is a document that was printed up and distributed to every parent of every public school child in New York, sent home in the kids' backpacks so that the parents will read it and understand it.  I know this because it says so right on page one:  "All members of the school community -- students staff and parents -- must know and understand the standards of behavior which all students are expected to live up to and the consequences if these standards are not met."

This is also a classic CYA warning -- some day, we're gonna boot your kid out of school, and you'll have no excuse for not knowing that could happen because we told you so in black and white in your kid's backpack.

It should not be done this way.  This stuff is important.  Both the substance and the form. We should be told what is expected of us and our kids, and what can happen if we don't live up to the those expectations.  But we should be told in a way that all of us can understand, in the language of the parents, not the administrators.  The great irony of this is that the DOE has got thousands of people trained in exactly how to construct a clear readable document that can be easily understood by parents and children.  They're called teachers, and every school is full of them.

For many years, I have followed the story of Mayor Bloomberg wrestling control of the schools away from the monstrosity that was the old board of education.  I have paid particular attention to the dialectic between Chancellor Joel Klein and the teachers. Klein has been portrayed by some as a lone voice for integrity and merit, and by others (especially teachers) as someone who knows nothing about education.  As someone who worked in the Bloomberg administration for eight years and saw first hand how much of a real reformer he is, I have tended to take Klein's side in this debate.  Now I'm not so sure. Now, it's my kid, my kid's backpack, and my job to read what's in it.

This is kindergarten.  This is big.

Follow the money?

Today, Paul Krugman wrote an article destroying the arithmetic and logic of the Republicans' latest propaganda piece.  He focused mainly on the impossibility of the GOP's budget proposal and drew the connection between this exercise in wishful thinking and the longtime GOP strategy of deception.

"The answer isn’t a secret. The late Irving Kristol, one of the intellectual godfathers of modern conservatism, once wrote frankly about why he threw his support behind tax cuts that would worsen the budget deficit: his task, as he saw it, was to create a Republican majority, “so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.” In short, say whatever it takes to gain power. That’s a philosophy that now, more than ever, holds sway in the movement Kristol helped shape. "

OK, so Republicans will say anything (no matter how improbable) in order to gain and maintain power.     The logical inference, therefore, is that Republicans want power for reasons almost entirely other than those they state*.  So the question is, why do they want power?

Krugman walks a little way down this path.  He notes that the logical and arithmetic implication of the GOP pledge to balance the budget while cutting taxes by 2020 is that we would have to eliminate the entire Federal government aside from Medicare, social security and the military (including Congress) and privatize Medicare and Social Security in the bargain.  But then he steps back from the implication of this (that Republicans want to hand over as much dough as possible to the capitalists and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves) by noting that this agenda doesn't stand a chance, even among the Republicans themselves.  Instead, what is going to happen is that we'll get the tax cuts and little if any in the way of spending cuts (or more likely, increases in spending in ways that won't do much good), and we will drive the government even deeper into debt and dysfunction.

Krugman's analysis boils down to calling them a bunch of idiots who won't get what they really want and will destroy us all in the process.  But there's a contradiction at the heart of this.  They're smart enough to understand that their numbers don't add up.  They're smart enough to craft propaganda that gets people to join in their wish-fulfillment fantasies.  They can't be so so dumb that they've miscalculated the political impossibility of what they're proposing.  OK, so I will admit that my motto in life is "don't assume conspiracy when incompetence suffices to explain."  I am predisposed to accepting exactly this assessment of the Republicans.  However, I don't really buy that they are pushing us toward banana republic status out of sheer ineptitude.  There's something else going on.

I have a partial explanation.  First, it mostly boils down to the fact the Republican party is controlled by the most nakedly ruthless forces within capitalism.  These forces want to grab as much of our society's wealth for themselves as possible.  Increasing public debt (especially debt spent in their interest) is a great way to do this, since they wind up holding most of that debt, and can tax the rest of us to pay it off.  At the same time, they recognize the limitations of this worldview (default on that debt would be a bad thing for them).  They realize that if they manipulate things just right, they can make Democrats take much of the blame, and be forced to do the heavy lifting of trying to clean up public finances (as Carter and Clinton had to do).  This is a crude analysis, no doubt full of gaps, but I think it fits the facts better than sheer incompetence.

There's also the deeper question of why people seek power in the service of this kind of agenda. While many politicians are part of the uber-wealthy class pulling the strings, many aren't.  What's the payoff for them?  Some are actually true believers in the cause and think they are doing society some good.  But given that the "cause" makes no objective sense in this instance, it seems unlikely that greed and stupidity alone are sufficient to explain the behavior of all Republican politicians.  The missing element would seem to be the desire for itself.  This is the part that I will admit I simply do not grasp.  I have exercised small amounts of power in my day (in the workplace, at home, over an audience), and have mostly been left cold by it.  Though I have certainly witnessed it over and over again, I have never come to any understanding of why some people seek power and use it in ways that harm others without necessarily serving their own material welfare.

To me this should be one of the central questions of the social sciences, yet it seems not to hold such a place.  Perhaps Krugman could turn his Nobel-wattage abilities to dissecting this

*In all fairness, Democrats (who may be better but aren't saints) will also of substantial improbability in order to gain and maintain power, also for reasons left unsaid, but I generally find these to be less frequent and less astonishing.  But that's a subject for another day

Next time, Danielle Steele ...

This summer vacation's selection for light reading has been Bob Woodward's "State of Denial," a pastiche of insider accounts of the war in Iraq, from its pre 9/11 stirrings through 2006. I realize I'm way too late to this party (given the age of the book), but better than late than never I suppose when it comes to recognizing ugly truths.

This is just about the most depressing thing I have ever read. A consistent thread through the book is people with doubts about the validity (or certainty about the invalidity) of the case for the war and management of post-Saddam Iraq keeping silent about their reservations. As Woodward describes things, it's as if no one who knew anything about the subjects of WMD, Saddam, al Qaeda, 9/11, Iraq, or the Mideast thought that any of Cheney's, Bush's, or Rumsfeld's utterances on these subjects had any basis in fact or evidence. Rumsfeld (in his own words and in descriptions by others) comes off as a truly pathological figure. Cheney comes off as, well, Cheney. And Bush comes off as even more of a disengaged idiot frat boy than we all thought he was. The "brains" behind the whole thing, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz are ivory tower hallucinators.

But the worst thing about all this is that Woodward makes it seem as if there were possibilities to do things differently. He presents a series of episodes where people who knew that facts were not as Rumsfeld presented them, that the post-war plans were insane, that the premises underlying transformation to a unified democratic Iraq were utter fiction, had an opportunity to speak the truth to Bush and failed to do so. Tenet, Rice, Powell, Garner, Bremer, myriad generals, even David Kay (the great debunker of the WMD myth) all had opportunities to be alone with Bush, and none of them spoke his or her mind. None of them told him that there were no WMD, that there was no al Qaeda-Saddam links, that transforming Iraq into a west-loving democracy couldn't happen. The best that could be expected in a "free" Iraq was more social, religious and political chaos than under Saddam, at a lower standard of living. And this was only possible with two or three times as many U.S. troops as Rumsfeld said were needed, staying in Iraq for years longer than anyone could stomach.

They all knew this, and they all said it to each other. But no one said it to Bush. Even worse, none of these figures said it in public. They stayed on through the 2004 elections protecting Bush's political butt by keeping their mouths shut. Then they resigned and moved on to their think tanks and consultancies, and still kept their mouths shut. Or even worse, like Tenet, accepted medals for keeping their mouths shut.

Perhaps the worst thing about the book, though, is that Woodward himself was privy to all of these doubts from the very beginning. He references conversations he had with all of these figures going back to the very beginning of Bush's first term. While he was busy embedding himself in the Bush administration writing two other books that told tales of the resolve and political smarts of the Bush team, he was listening to the same warning bells and doing the same thing that Powell, Tenet and Rice did. He kept his mouth shut. This is the man who toppled Nixon and exposed Iran-contra in mid-scandal. He is perhaps the one journalist who could have said "this is a house of cards" and on reputation alone forced doubts into the open and allowed dissent to be treated as something other than treason.

But he didn't. Alas. I can't say that any of these revelations changed my views about the invasion and occupation of Iraq. I was opposed from the beginning. I saw the case for war as transparently implausible, and saw further that even if the worst of Bush's accusations were true it was a terrible idea that could only lead to decades of military involvement and make the world less safe for all of us. But after a while, I gave up thinking about it and talking about it. Perhaps it's time to reconsider this strategy. The only positive I can draw from this is that I now plan to make a conscious effort to pay a little more attention to Iraq and Afghanistan news and talk about it a little more. Maybe even in public.

Other voices, other shoes

Hmmm. It seem I haven't written anything in quite a while. Must be because nothing has happened anywhere in the world in the last, oh 12 or 13 months, that is worthy of comment. Either that, or I have no comments worthy of ... Well you get the picture. So, I am now into week two of the first real vacation I have had in something like five years.

By "real vacation" I do not mean "time off from work characterized by no basic change in level of obligation, anxiety, or lack of pleasing diversion." This time around, the adults number the child by 4 to 1 (using the conventional, age-derived definitions, of course, not the behavioral ones) which seems to be sufficient. The weather is nice. I brought a guitar (and a battery powered amp), plenty to read, and my thoughts are pleasingly free from of the leaden nostalgia of past beach forays. I even got the wax flushed out of my ears, so I'm ready to jump back in the ocean. Or, sit here in a shaded, breezy room, with 6 more days of vacation to go.

Things could be worse.

It's a dirty job ...

... But somebody's gotta do it, so let me be the jaded native New Yorker who shrugs and says "good riddance" to Tavern on the Parking Lot. It was shoved into the park by Robert Moses to spite a bunch of sheep, and that was more or less its high point. Real New Yorkers only went there for someone else's bar mitzvah. The one time I went there on purpose, I was a little disappointed that the food was actually somewhat north of ptomaine, but at least it was overpriced and the service stank.

News of the demise of Tavern on the Green (and the auctioning off of its gaudy fixtures) has spawned a wave of cyber garment rending, but really, it was just one of those things spoken of as quintessentially New York that was almost completely divorced from the reality of New York, even for New Yorkers who like to splurge on kitsch. It was no more than a confection for tourists, like carriage rides (or nowadays pedicab rides) in the park. Which is not to say that there aren't touristy things in New York that aren't really great, and which the natives enjoy without embarrassment, but this wasn't one of 'em. Bring back the sheep I say.

Raise a Ruckus for the Public Option

To anyone following the healthcare reform debate, it's obvious that there's a big difference between what the House, the White House, and the people want and what the Senate is willing to legislate voluntarily. Witness the bill that just passed committee, with the miraculous bi-partisan army of one, that lacks what most people who have looked at the issue carefully conclude is a sine qua non of any real improvement in the way health care in this country is adminstered, namely the public option. Or whatever else you want to call it. I like "medicare for all," but I'm not in the advertising business.

Historically, the Senate's role as the more inherently "conservative" (in the literal, not current political sense of the term) chamber has been to put the brakes on overly radical ideas, to keep the irrational exuberance of democracy and the dark power of empire in check. Some might argue that that's what is going right now. Good old altruistic Senator Baucus and his 99 friends in pinstripes are saving us from our worst instincts by ensuring that we will all have our choice of indistinguishable, crappy, unaccoutantable, private-sector bureaucrats denying us coverage. I hate to say this, but I think something else may be going on. I think it's possible, just possible, that the Senator, plutocrats who listen more and more to other plutocrats and less and less to ideas from outside the echo chamber, have lost perspective.

I think it may not be a bad idea to help them get some other perspectives. In light of this, I've written the letter below to one of my Senators (Schumer). I wrote a variation on this theme to my other one (Gillebrand) as well. I think it would be useful for others to do this as well, focusing efforts ont he Senate, as that is the place where it seems good ideas need the most help.

Dear Senator Schumer,
My name is John Albin, I am a lifelong fourth generation native New Yorker. Among other things, I worked for 21 years in the New York City Dept. of Transportation [NB, where his wife was the boss for 8 years] and now work in CUNY [where she's now a big shot], so I am well aware of all you have done to help Washington help New York, and I share your commitment to helping my fellow New Yorkers. I am writing today to urge you to keep fighting for a robust public health insurance option. It has been disheartening to me to see the scope of healtcare reform grow narrower and narrower within the Senate. I am hopeful that a better bill than what has come from Senator Baucus' committee can emerge, especially if people with your progressive pedigree and legislative savvy keep fighting for it.


My family has been through several major health crises, and we have experienced the full gamut of options -- from "none" to "cadillac" to Medicare. I have to say that on balance Medicare has provided the best level of coverage, with the least difficulty. I think it is essential, from the perspectives of cost containment, quality, and access, that something like this be available for all. I know that in your heart you agree with this. I would be happy to share some of my thoughts and experiences with your staff if that would help you frame issues as the debate continues in Congress. It is my sincere hope that Senator Baucus' flawed and limited vision of what health care reform should be does not win the day.

What's in your wallet, Mr. Gingrich?

Various news outlets reported recently that Mexico has decriminalized possession of small amounts of various drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin, LSD, and methamphetamine. This is a good thing, though not as good a thing as a much broader legalization both there and here would be, but that's not really my topic today. Two of my pet political peeves are health care reform (which I commented on here), and drug policy. Apart from the obvious connection between the two issues (drugs are medicine), something else joins the two topics that I find interesting: Many politicians' views on these subjects are bizarrely disconnected from their own life experiences.

Most of the elite political and business leaders of our society (the people who control the debate and outcome for almost everything important) came of age in the sixties and seventies, which means that most of them a) got high when they were young, and b) are now over the hill and starting to fall apart. One would think that people in this cohort would be able connect those two facts of their existence to the policy questions they face, yet somehow many of them don't, and as a consequence fight for rules that they wouldn't live by if push came to shove.

Here's why I say this:

On the question of drugs, there is virtually no politician anywhere on the mainstream spectrum of left to right even willing to entertain the notion of legalizing drugs. Case in point: Barack Obama. By his own admission, the president regularly smoked pot and snorted cocaine. In his memoir, he placed front and center his realization that he was on the road to self destruction and needed to sober up and grow up, which he did (except for the cigarette thing). Yet when faced with the question of whether marijuana should be legalized (via an electronic town hall in which three million people voted for him to be asked this question), he firmly said that he was against it, and made a joke about the preferences of his questioners. In other words, for him learning how to control himself is OK. Other people should go to jail.

It's become a bit of a ritual that politicians of a certain age get asked about past drug use. Most of them have given up on denying the undeniable. Instead, the politician gets a serious look on his face, talks about how much he regrets having done so, offers the excuse that he was young and stupid, and says that it is wrong to do such things. But the young and stupid thing the politician did was a crime. Can you imagine a seeker of of high public office getting away with the same dance about, say, having sex with a girl he met at a party who was too drunk to give consent? Of course not. The politician gets away with it because neither he nor his interlocutor really believes the conduct to have been wrong, but neither wants to admit it. Whenever the "did you inhale" question gets asked, this is done with the intention of giving the pol an easy out and staying away from the real implications of the admission.

So this is what I'd like to see asked: Given your stance on enforcement of drug laws, is it OK that you got away with using illegal drugs in your youth? Should you have been arrested for this? If there were no statute of limitations on marijuana possession, would you turn yourself in? I would love to see, say, Norm Coleman wriggle his way around that.

So what does this have to do with health care? Well, the thing is, all these aging boomers are, well, aging. They're either already medicare eligible, or damn close. I would love to know how those who oppose universal access to affordable health care square their positions with their actual or impending membership in a publicly-funded, universal (for those of a certain age), affordable health insurance program.

Take, for instance, Tom Coburn, senator from Oklahoma and licensed physician who opposes health care reform of any stripe and wants to throw us all into the free market. He was also born in 1948, which means he's four years away from being medicare eligible (or may already be under certain circumstances). Or Newt Gingrich. He's over 65 already, regularly disses medicare and other government health programs and lobbies for "choice".

Coburn is a special case because he was a practicing physician before he became a politician. I'd like to see him asked: "You are a staunch opponent of government run or funded health programs, and you are on the record opposing both Obama's 'public option' and the idea of 'medicare for all.' Why did you accept both medicare and medicaid patients in your medical practice? Why did you accept fees from government programs you condemn?"

But Gingrich (and any other pundit over or in the vicinity of 65) should be asked one simple question: "Are you enrolled in medicare (or do you intend to enroll when you become eligible)?"

I'd be willing to bet that all of them would have to say 'yes,' because medicare is such a valuable and useful benefit that only an idiot (or that mythical creature known as the consistent ideologue) would turn it down. For reasons that I cannot grasp, media types never ask this. They do ask congress people why they wouldn't want everyone to have access to the same type of employer-provided health benefits they get, but that's really too much of a softball. It's too easy to for them to say that they do in fact want to bring that about, but it's a matter of how and how much it'll cost (which they all say). The question doesn't really expose the, I don't know, cognitive dissonance? hypocrisy? involved.

Looking at it in these terms brushes up against argumentum ad hominem, the fallacy for which I have the most scorn. So I'm reluctant to say that one should disagree with Gingrich, or Baucus, or Boehner, or Ensign or Coburn because they don't even agree with themselves. Still, I can't help but think that in the domain of political discourse on matters of inherently personal import, that the personal is in fact political. So, with that thought in mind, I can't help but wonder whether Newt et al are card carrying FICA members. What's in your wallet Mr. Gingrich? Indeed ...

They're all a buncha HIPAAcrites

As the right-wing rhetoric on healthcare reform heats up, I really have to wonder whether some of these propagandists have ever actually encountered our so-called system. I could spend time swatting away the falsehoods, like the one about how Obama is going to require old people to kill themselves. I could also copy and paste the same statistics that every other commentator cites about how the "greatest medical system in the world" leaves us 39th in health outcomes, but that's all a bit too impersonal.

For me, it comes down to this. You've got some symptoms, so you go to the doctor. The receptionist asks you for your insurance information and makes you sign a form that says you promise to pay any charges not covered by insurance, no matter how large. You fill out a bunch of other forms authorizing your doctor to share your sensitive medical information with insurance people, who offer you no guarantees of privacy. You wait, sometimes for a couple of hours. You see the doctor. The doctor takes tests (sends samples to a lab not covered by your insurance; you get a bill). The doctor spends five minutes with you because he can't afford to dawdle, unless he can work a procedure into it, which he gets paid for separately from the office visit.

Days or weeks later, you get the results back. It's something serious. He refers you to a specialist. You go to the specialist. Same insurance drill. You see the specialist. He's a putz. He doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He picks his nose and chews his boogers. All he tells you is that some people die from this, some people get better. We'll cut the top of your head off and take it from there. You want a second opinion.

You go to another specialist. What insurance do you have? Sorry, we don't take that. Do you have out of network coverage? I think so. What's your maximum out of pocket? What's the deductible? What are the co-pays. If you need surgery, you have to work out a deal with the anesthesiologist yourself because they don't take insurance. Now you get to see the new guy. He's great. He knows exactly what's wrong with you. He's treated 5000 people with the same thing, and they all live to be 95. He's gonna save your life, make you feel like you're 25 all over again. Thank god. How much is this gonna cost me? We don't know, could be a few hundred, could be a few thousand. Could be more.

All through this, you get "explanations of benefits" that explain absolutely nothing, and bills from people you never even heard of for stuff that was never done to you, but you're getting sicker, and something has to be done. So now you have a choice: Let the angel in the white coat save your life and wipe out your savings, or let the putz sew boogers into your cranium for free.

OK, so maybe this is a bit of a caricature, but not that much of one. No matter how good any of these doctors is, the first thing you talk about is insurance and money. While you're getting diagnosed, you talk about insurance and money. All of your choices are influenced by insurance and financial concerns. You spend more time on the financial implications of your illness than you do on the medical concerns. Once you're cured, you spend months, maybe years, filing and re-filing the same claims that have been inexplicably rejected, and all this is with "good" insurance. The administrative and financial burden, under the best of circumstances, infuriates you and distracts you from the task of getting better, or taking care of a sick loved one. Moreover, none of this actually about making good health care decisions. Rather, it is about clawing the right quantity of the right kind of care out of the P&L statement of an insurance company that for completely arbitrary and impenetrable reasons has contracts with some doctors but not with others.

Even in a market dominated, capitalist society, it does not have to be this way. Despite the right-wing rhetoric, France, Germany, and Holland are not communist countries. Switzerland is not a communist country. England is not a communist country. All of these countries have simpler systems that provide high levels of care and better outcomes overall at lower costs, without forcing people to do the insurance dance and worry about bankruptcy. Some are single payer; some have a mix of private and public insurance. However, they all have strong, central government bureaucracies that impose universal coverage and consistency without requiring patients to go nuts with paperwork. They all have compromises, but not the ones we're stuck with.

It's also not this way in the United States, if you're over 65 (or at one time, 62). My father had a massive stroke when he was 56 that left him permanently, severely disabled and forced him to retire, at greatly reduced pension. To get to that level, he had to spend four months in hospitals and inpatient rehab, and a year in outpatient physical and occupational therapy, while seeing multiple medical specialists. Managing the insurance and bills became such a huge task that my mother had to cut back on her teaching courseload and hire someone to help her.

Magically, when my father turned 62 (and became eligible for Medicare), all this went away. No more secretary at home. Doctors who wouldn't see my father welcomed him with open arms. Hospital admissions took minutes instead of hours or days. Out of pocket medical expenses were virtually nil. All at a lower overall cost (according to those pesky EOB's) than with private insurance.

No one who has ever been sick and had to deal with the nightmare of our insurance system could spout the nonsense that passes for debate in Congress. Not that I would wish any ill will on, say, Mitch McConnell or Jim Boehner, but maybe these guys might learn something from, say, a heart attack or a brain tumor. Then again, maybe they've already been sick and went to see Dr. Putz, who sewed so much snot into their craniums that the drivel they've been spouting is the best they can do.

What are you Kant's Nephew?

The McCourt thing has got me thinking about education, teachers and such. That, and I'm a little health-updated out, so pardon the interruption

I've had the pleasure of studying with two singular educator/raconteurs: Frank McCourt, and Sidney Morgenbesser. Though better known these days for his second act as a best-selling author, McCourt's first act as a teacher of lord knows how many thousands of budding writers no doubt built the fan base for his future success. Morgenbesser was a philosophy professor at Columbia who despite very thin publishing credits, was revered as one of the great wiseacres and skewerers of pomposity in the western world. Mention to any philosopher, economist or political scientist that you studied with Sidney, and you will be greeted with a smile and a story about something Sidney said at a conference that broke up the room in laughter, while completely changing the way everybody thought about the subject at hand.

I have two vivid memories of something each of them said in class that have stayed with me all these years. I've come to realize that these very brief interludes informed nearly everything I've done in my working and intellectual life. It's kind of hard to process the notion that one sentence each by a philosopher and a creative writing teacher would matter to someone who has spent very little time at either of those endeavors, but facts is facts.

One day in creative writing class, McCourt began reading an assignment of mine aloud (I don't remember exactly what it was) that started off with the word "basically," as in "basically, what I mean to say is blah blah blah." He proceeded to tell me exactly why it was a bad idea to start a sentence with an modifier, or dangle one in any other fashion, and extended this to a mini lesson in applied sentence parsing. Never before had grammar or the mechanics of writing made any sense to me. Forever after, I understood that if you want someone to understand what you are trying to say, you have to say it clearly, succinctly, with a minimum of distraction from your point, and without ambiguity. That insight has enabled me to get my meager ideas across with enough success that I am reasonably frequently told that I am a good writer (which I am not, but mainly because of the meagerness of my ideas).

My great Sidney moment happened in a seminar on philosophy, economics, and Marxism he team taught with a fascinating figure named Alexander Ehrlich. Actually, the moment I'm going to tell you about was my second great Sidney moment. The first happened on the first day of class when he explained what the seminar was going to cover and how it was going to work, making liberal use of such technical philosophical terminology as "mishegas" "megillah" "famisht" "shmegegge" and "farblunget". In the middle of this, he stopped and announced to the class "by the way, a working knowledge of Yiddish is a requirement for this course". The next week (in time for the drop deadline) the herd had been culled of every blonde head.

OK actually, that was my second great Sidney moment. My first great Sidney moment came after in my first semester of CC (Columbia's core survey of western thought course) when I started giving serious thought to majoring in philosophy. I was talking about this with my father (an economist with Sidney stories), who simply told me "go talk to Sidney." I managed to find Sidney in his office, introduced myself as Peter Albin's son, and told him that I wanted to study philosophy. He asked me why, and I told him that I liked CC, had started reading some philosophy in high school and was interested in getting into the questions I had encountered more deeply. He asked me what I had read in high school and I said "oh you know, Carlos Casteneda, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the Dancing Wu li Masters ..." Sidney smiled and said "so how's your dad?"

OK so my third great Sidney moment came when Sidney started talking about how Marx's only real important works were those that dealt with practical critiques and analyses of politics, society, and economies; that the early stuff was all fuzzy headed noodling; that as a grand scheme theorist there wasn't really that much to talk about. This was circa 1983, when there still was such a thing as communism, critical theory and post structuralism were at something of a zenith, everybody walked around with a copy of the Marx-Engels Reader, and the 1848 Manuscripts were being viewed as his Marx's deepest work.

So I said to Sidney, "what about alienation? Isn't that a deep idea? Doesn't it all hang off that?" Sidney said "Alienation schmalienation. What the hell is that? Can you define it?" And I couldn't (at least not in non-circular, non-mish-mosh terms), despite having read thousands of pages on the subject and written a number of A papers that claimed to talk about it. At that moment, I realized that it was possible to regurgitate jargon that either meant nothing or which you absolutely didn't understand without anyone being the wiser. Philosophy became pretty much a dead subject to me after that, which was a bit of a problem because I was maybe 20 credits into a 30 credit major. However, I have discovered that there is perhaps no better management tool than asking people to define their terms and explain in plain English why what they are saying is important.

Now if I could only figure out what the meshuganah Derrida was talking about ...

Can you verify?

All dialog guaranteed verbatim.

Hapless Call-center Lady: Welcome to the card-member service line.  Can you verify the last four digits of your social?

Literal Minded Bugger of a Customer: My social? I wasn't aware that this involved socials, or that dances had digits.

HCL: That would be your social security number.

LMC:  Ah, why didn't you say so?  Yes, I can verify the last four digits of my social security number.

 [several seconds of silence]  

HCL: Sir? Are you there?

LMBoaC: Yes, I'm still here.

HCL: Sir, can you verify the last four digits of your social security number?

LMBoaC: I said yes, I can.  If you tell me the information you have, I'll verify it for you.

HCL:  No sir, I need you to tell me the last four digits of your social security number.

LMBoaC:   You want to verify what I tell you, is that it?

HCL: Yes.

LMBoaC:  Ah, I see.  You seem to have this a bit backwards.  Why didn't you say so?  The digits are XXXX [Those are not the real digits, by the way, or "BTW" for the youngsters in the audience.  If I told all of you the real ones, you might be able to verify them, which would not be a good thing for me, I gather.]

HCL: Yes, and how can I help you this evening?

LMBoaC: Well, I've had an account with you for many years, and have always paid my bills on time, but for some reason, you have increased the interest rate on my card to 29 percent, and reduced the credit limit to $390.  This would seem to indicate that you don't want my account anymore, so I would like to oblige you by closing my account.

HCL: Yes, I see from your account that you are a very good customer, is there anything I can do to change your mind?

LMBoaC: Can you restore my credit limit to $10,000 and the interest rate to 8.9%, which were the terms last month?

HCL: No, I can't, but I can give you a free gift.

LMBoaC: What would that be?

HCL: A credit card holder.

LMBoaC: Uh, no, that's OK.  Just close the account please.

HCL: I'm sorry I can't do that.  I will have to transfer you to someone else who can.

LMBoaC: Please do.

HCL: Before I transfer you, may I please have your daytime phone number?

LMBoaC: May I ask why?

HCL:  For account maintenance purposes.

LMBoaC:  Account maintenance purposes?

HCL:  Yes, so that we can maintain your account.

LmBoaC: You mean the account that I am closing and will no longer be maintaining with your company?

HCL:  Yes.

LMBoaC: Do you see the irony in that?

HCL:  I'm sorry sir?

LMBoaC: Never mind.  No you may not have my daytime phone number.  Please transfer me to the person who can close my account now.

[Beep beep.  Hold music.]

HCL#2: To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking

LMBoaC: Define pleasure.  Oh never mind.  John Albin, that's A-l-b-i-n  [I always spell it because for some reason despite only two simple syllables, no one ever gets it.]

HCL#2: Yes Mr. [sounds like "elbow"], how may I help you this evening?

LmBoaC:  I would like to close my account?

HCL#2: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, may I ask why?

LmBoaC: Well you've changed the terms so as to make it unusable, and I have other cards that are better, so I don't see the point in keeping an account that you clearly don't want.

HCL#2: I'm sorry to hear that, is there anything I can do to change your mind?

LMBoaC: No thank you.

HCL#2: I'm sorry for the inconvenience, I'm sure you understand the reasons.

LMBoaC: It's no inconvenience to me.  You're the ones losing my business. 

HCL#2: Yes, but you understand that with the financial situation we have to change the terms.

LMBoaC: What financial situation?  My account is in good standing.  I pay my bills on time and rarely have a balance.

HCL#2: Yes, but the bank has been losing a lot of money.

LMBoaC: Not from me.

HCL#2: No sir, you are a very good customer.

LMBoaC: It's nice of you to say so.  Please close the account now.

HCL#2:  Yes sir.  Is there anything else I can help you with?

LMBoaC:  No thank you.  Just close the account.

HCL#2:  Just to let you know sir, after you close the account, you will not be able to use it.

LMBoaC: Yes, that's the point.

HCL#2:  Your account is now closed.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

LMBoaC: No inconvenience at all. Good night.

[Click]

The financial system is doomed. 

Wake up and smell the coffee

Proust had his madeleine, and I have my burger, doughnut and coffee, one whiff of which is capable of launching me into an almost hypnotic state of nostalgia.  It all goes back to an afternoon in the Village when I was maybe three or four years old.  On the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue, there's a coffee shop.  There has always been a coffee shop on the corner of Waverly Place and Sixth Avenue.  These days, it's called the Waverly Diner, or something similarly logical.  I think of it as the new place, even though it has probably been called that for 30 years.

Back in the day, though, it was called Twin Brothers, and it was a little more on the doughnut shop end of the continuum.  Back in the day, most diners were, and most were  called something like that -- Twin Brothers, Four Guys, Three Joes.  They all had the same neon and chrome motif, white Formica counter, soda fountain, round stools that a little kid can spin around on, and the smell of burgers, doughnuts, and coffee. 

At the time my family was living a few blocks away on the corner of Houston and Sixth, and we had some interesting neighbors, as people in the Village tended to have back then. Next door to us was a divorced mom named Cathy Phelps, with two kids about the same age as my sister and me named Peter and Susie.  It's not a given in New York that two families with kids the same age living next door to each other will become friends, because nothing interpersonal is a given in New York, but we did in fact all become friends.

Elsewhere in the building, there was a guy named Bob Gibson.  He had three daughters who were quite a bit older than us, and baby sat from time to time.  Bob was a famous folk singer, a prominent member of the generation that immediately preceded and mentored  Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, and the like.  My parents were sort of beatnik-ish, and deeply involved in the anti-war movement, civil rights, and lefty causes, which made "folk singer" a respected profession in our household. 

At the age of three or four I was only very dimly aware of any of this sociology, but it was part of the background of life, and I was aware that Bob was somebody.  I was also dimly aware that there was something dark and wrong about him, that made others wary.  I have learned (through family reminiscence and reading up on the folk scene) that what was wrong was drug addiction.  Bob also had a brother named Jim, who wound up moving in with and marrying Cathy next door and become a presence in our lives thereafter (and who may also have shared some of his brother's troubles, though I'm not clear on this).

So anyway, there we all were, folk singers, junkies, college professors, divorcees, lovers, teenage daughters, and little kids in and out of each others apartments doing what ever it is that such people do.  [I can't speak for anyone else, but I had a serious Tinkertoy jones] Though they were little more than kids themselves, my parents tended to be the most adult and level headed figures around.  My father was often the only male possessed of basic urban family preservation instincts and common sense, and my mother was often the only female who knew how to keep people fed and clothed, acting as a den mother to all manner of strays throughout the sixties.

Anyway, where were we?  Ah yes burgers, doughnuts and coffee.  One thing that was definitely not a regular feature of daily life in the level-headed beatnik home was greasy spoon food.  My mother was a relatively serious cook and homemaker, and my parents were relatively broke in those days, so we didn't routinely go out for snacks, and when we did, they tended to be wholesome.  So one day, one of the Gibson girls (I don't remember any of their names) invited me on an adventure in search of snacks, and she took me in hand to Twin Brothers.  Immediately upon entering, I was greeted by the combined aroma of burgers on the griddle, coffee, and fresh doughnuts.  I spun around in circles on the stool and cautiously accepted the Gibson girl's offer of a bite of burger, a jelly doughnut and a glass of chocolate milk, sensing somehow that all this was contraband.

Soon, the snack was over, and it was time to head back down Sixth to Beatnik Towers.  We arrived home to furor and panic, my father searching the streets, my mother ready to call the cops, and Gibson adults in high dudgeon.  It seems that not only was the snack itself contraband, but conveying me to said snack without proper notice and authorization was a rather serious transgression.  After that incident, to the best of my recollection I was no longer entrusted to any Gibson girls, and I believe that very shortly after Bob's family imploded and disappeared from Beatnik Towers.

Ever since then, any time I have walked into or past a greasy spoon or doughnut shop and encountered that combination of aromas, this narrative plays out in my mind, with a vibrancy and certainty as strong as anything else in my memory. Literally, every time for my entire life, a jelly doughnut can serve up near total recall of an event that happened at the edge of memory and experience.  It also triggers a flood of memories about Cathy, Jim Peter and Susie, and the ways we would exit and re-enter each other's lives over the following decade or so, which is a story for another day.  Perhaps I'll head down to the coffee shop for a jelly doughnut and a glass of chocolate milk, find a Bob Gibson record on iTunes and see what happens.

Do I know you?

The fall of 1981 marked the beginning of my sophomore year at Columbia University, and what I thought would be a year full of positive changes.  My freshman year and the summer after had been kind of tough.  As a native New Yorker, at a time when Columbia had a housing shortage, I was unable to get a dorm room.  I spent the first semester living at home in the Village and commuting uptown, and had a hard time making friends and working my way into college life. 

For my second semester, I lived in a fraternity that made animal house look like a chapter of the John Birch society.  I started making friends on campus and and fitting in a bit better (living in what was easily the largest warehouse of illicit substances west of Lenox Avenue certainly helped), but it was all so drug addled and bizarre that rather than spending spring break attending the frat's week-long acid test, I retreated home and let my parents nurse me back to health and sanity.  In the last month or so of the term, I had started a dating a senior girl who moved away after graduation.  We traded visits over the summer, but it didn't really work out, and we wound up going our separate ways.

By the time the summer came to a close, I was ready for a bit of renewal and redemption.  I still hadn't gotten housing from the college, so I wound up throwing my lot in with a colorful character named Michael Offen.  Michael was a bit of a hustler in those days (and for all know, still is -- last I heard, he worked for Bear Stearns).  He was the spitting image of Marty Feldman, with wild bulging eyes, curly hair,  pointy features, and an amazing ability to charm people into whatever schemes he had going with girls, jobs, or school.

His father and uncle were involved in some sort of agribusiness, which led Michael to tell people that his father jerked off bulls for a living.  His uncle (who visited us a couple of times), bore a striking resemblance to George C. Scott in his Patton days, and had been an intelligence officer before he turned to romancing livestock.  The family had houses full of extra furniture, which was part of Michael's sales pitch for the tiny hovel he found for us  at 142 West 109th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, a region the student guides warned us to avoid. [I still remember the address because I've been around that neighborhood for one reason or another enough times over the years that it has stuck.]

The first time we went to the building to check things out, there was an elderly disheveled hispanic woman cleaning the hallways.  In a mix of hand gestures, and Spanish (she seemed not to speak English), she conveyed the notion that she was the super and would show us to our prospective new digs.   We walked up to the third floor and arrived at a knobless, lockless door.  We pushed it inward, and it fell off its hinges, revealing only gloom.   The super made gestures suggesting it would be fixed, so we wrestled it to some sort of stability and proceeded.

The apartment consisted two small bedrooms, one of which had no door, a small living room, a large kitchen, and a bathroom.  The bathroom had a tub without a shower, and no sink or mirror.  The apartment had no closets, though there were hooks on the walls.  The floors were rough unfinished wood, and the entire apartment was painted in high-gloss red enamel.  Dead cockroaches littered the floor and a vague odor of decay filled the air.  The apartment faced airshafts on all sides.  As I stuck my head out the kitchen window to see if there was anything to see, a chicken carcass whizzed by and crashed into the debris-strewn courtyard below.

Despite missing the opportunity to read the entrails of the chicken, we interpreted all the omens to be good and decided to take the place.  Sure it needed a little work, but we were young, school didn't start for another couple of weeks, we'd get the lease in our own names, and the price was right -- 350 bucks a month.  Besides, it was the only apartment available  that had real rooms. The others were all "railroads," and neither of us liked the idea of having to traipse through the other's bedroom.  We made arrangements to return to the real estate office that had sent us there, eager to hand over our first and last month's rent and sign on the dotted line.

Later that day, we got our semoleans in order, and headed to an office on the upper west side to meet our landlord and close the deal.  When we arrived, the "super" was there waiting for us, now well dressed, coiffed, and made up.  The real estate agent introduced her to us as Mrs. Parada, the owner of the building.  She greeted us in lightly accented, fluent English.  I don't remember whether I was just to too stupid to see the mess we were getting ourselves into, or whether Michael pulled a Michael and convinced me that it was all copacetic, but no matter.  We paid our money, took our chances, and spent the next week or so schlepping in our belongings, and getting the place as livable as possible.

The months that followed (surprise surprise) were absolute hell.  We had an unexplained power outage that took days to resolve, a fire in one of the next door apartments, noisy neighbors, flocks of chickens and other detritus streaming past the airshaft windows, and a front door that continued to fall off its hinges.  More importantly, as one of the coldest winters in recent memory descended upon us, Mrs. Parada showed her true colors, providing neither heat nor hot water for weeks at a time.  We stalked Mrs. Parada and complained to every public official we could, but none of it helped.  We took cold baths, and froze.  The only solution was to spend as little time as possible in the place, shuttling between the library, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the Marlin Cafe, and friends' apartments.  Given the unfavorable male:female ratio in pre-co-ed Columbia, romance was rarely a refuge.

As we soon discovered, our surroundings also had some interesting, uh, economic activities.  Car stripping was one of the main industries in the neighborhood.  Every week or so, a new car would appear on the block.  Men would emerge from adjacent buildings, plug power tools into the streetlight bases, and gradually reduce it to little more than a few bits and pieces sitting in a puddle of oil.  Other cars would sprout new fenders, bumpers , and trim, which were, miraculously, the same color as the car that had shed its skin.  There was a curious specialization to this.  Our block was the Toyota-stripping block.  One block west was strictly Datsuns.

The other big business in the neighborhood was, ahem, distribution of chemically active horticultural products.  Liberally sprinkled around the neighborhoods to the east and north of Columbia were pot stores.  Literally, these were stores that sold pot, either openly over a counter, or through a bank-teller like cage.  The one I remember best was on Amsterdam Avenue, just below 110th Street.  It had two signs, one above the door that said "Joe's Meat Market," and another painted on the window reading "Right-On Variety."  I soon discovered, though, that there was more to the neighborhood than just retail outlets.

Not too long after I moved in, I went down to my parents' place for dinner, and my father drove me home.  My father, who grew up on the upper west side, and knew every inch of Manhattan like the back of his hand, was very concerned about where I was living.  He had been trying to talk me into moving back home.  Hoping to convince him that everything was OK, on the drive uptown I told him not to worry.  The neighborhood was poor, but the people were nice and it wasn't dangerous.

At the height of my spiel, we turned the corner onto my block and were stopped from proceeding by a police detachment.  The street was full cops wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying rifles.  There were snipers visible on the roof of one building.  Learning that I lived on the block and was heading home, the cops let us through.  As we reached my building, a couple was dragged out of a building a few doors down from mine in handcuffs.  It was a major heroin bust that made all papers.

Fast forward to the end of the year, and I had had it.  I sublet my share of the apartment to my buddy Tom Meltzer (sorry Tom), and moved back down to the Village to lick my wounds, and devote myself to earning enough money to stake myself to slightly better digs.   As vivid as my memories of that apartment are, it strikes me that I remember almost nothing of any of my neighbors, except for another pair of friends (Gavin and Phil)  suffering through a year of Parada-hell in the building next door.  This is somewhat out of character, because in every other place I've lived, I've usually gotten to know or at least taken notice of my neighbors, many of whom I can still easily recall.

Fast forward another 27 years, and the subject of forgetting or failing to notice people has become current.  Doing the math, my sophomore year beginning in 1981 puts me in the Columbia College class of 1984.  A certain fellow named Barry-something-or-other (who has subsequently found a nice place to live) was class of '83, as were a number of my closest friends, including several with whom I am still in regular contact.  So far, I've only come across one college friend who has any recollection of him.  Still, he's obviously a hot topic of conversation, and every issue of every Columbia publication has had at least one item about alma mater's most illustrious alum over the past year or so. 

Recently, while catching up via email with a high school friend who went to grad school there, we of course got on the subject of Obama's days at Columbia, and did you know him, and funny how no one seems to have, and all that, and he called my attention to a couple of items.  One was an essay entitled "Barack Obama '83, My Columbia College Roommate" in the most recent alumni magazine.  The author talks about how as junior transfer students from Occidental College in the fall of 1981, neither he nor Obama could get housing from CU, so they wound up sharing an unheated dump of a railroad flat on 109th between Amsterdam and Columbus.  Hmm.  It seems the president of the United States of America and I lived on the same block, under similar circumstances.

The other item was an article in something called WikiCU (a Wikipedia-like site devoted to Columbia trivia) about Obama's days at Columbia.  Most of it is lifted straight from the roommate piece (or vice versa), but it also includes some additional detail, namely pictures of said dump and (a drum roll please) its address.

"#3E, 142 West 109th St"

Upon reading this, your faithful correspondent picks his jaw off the floor, and runs around his office shouting "holy shit!  Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!  Barack Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!  Barack  Obama was my frickin' next door neighbor!"  Now I suppose it's entirely possible that Barry is reading this and now running around his (significantly rounder) office and shouting "Holy shit! that guy who played at the Postcrypt all the time was my frickin' next door neighbor!"  Then again ... 

But even now, I must sheepishly admit that I still don't remember him.  However, Barry, if you were the guy throwing chickens out the window, I've got a bone to pick with you.

White, You Huckleberry

When I was growing up, there were two kinds of people: Yankee fans and Mets fans.  Red Sox fans didn't count as human, so the didn't fit into either category.  Given this conceptual framework, I get some satisfaction out of the  big news on the sports pages that feared Sox slugger Jim Rice finally made it into the Hall of fame, on the 800th ballot, or something like that, and Rickey Henderson (the most exciting Yankee of one of the team's most frustratingly underperforming incarnations) it in on the first try.

The less said about any Red Sock the better, except that by the numbers Rice was as deserving as anybody of election to the hall.  That it took so long is probably not because he played for the Red Sox (unfortunately, the HoF voters do not understand the proper categorization of humanity).  Rather, it was because the HoF is run by a bunch of sportswriters (i.e., over-aged nerds), who hold grudges against athletes who don't kiss their butts enough.

Speaking of butts, let's talk about Phil Rizzuto.   Some years ago, I was watching a ball game on TV with my dad.  Scooter and Bill White were calling the game, with the usual mix of Oh Holy Cowisms and disagreements, with White playing his usual role of straightman/huckleberry.  Rickey Henderson was on first, taking a long lead, jabbering, twitching, and doing everything he could to drive the pitcher and catcher to distraction.  He takes a big lead, and White says "there's Rickey taking that big lead."  All of a sudden he's off.  Before you can say, um, Jack Robinson, Henderson slides in safely, beating the throw by a mile.

White continues:

"That Rickey Henderson, he always gets that good jump"

"Yeah, he's so fast, too,"  adds scooter.

"Well, you know, he's got those powerful legs,"  says White.

"Yeah, and he's got cute buns, too," concludes Scooter.  We all, dad, me, and White, fall off our chairs. 

That's why there's a hall of fame. 

Are you Jewish?

As many of you many know, Judaism is divided into four main streams of practice: orthodox, conservative, reform, and ambivalent.  Most people would assume that the order in which these were just written reflects the gradual passage of the Jewish people into coexistence with the gentile world.  Certainly the folks in black hats would have us believe that the most authentic form of the Jew is the most "traditionally" religiously observant and that relaxation of practice puts one on the slippery slope toward loss of one's very identity.

Interestingly, archaeology suggests that the opposite may be true.  To vastly oversimplify, the historical portions of the bible say that god offered the descendants of Abraham a deal: worship me, and you get the promised land.  On the way down through Moses, the deal got a bit more complicated and specific -- worship me, follow the laws, and wipe out the infidels who are living there despite the fact that I gave it to you, and you get the promised land.  Along come David and Solomon, and a few more details get fleshed out as to the where's and how's of practice, and the Jews get the promised land, plus this really cool kingdom, a nice temple, yadda yadda.  Fast forward lots of centuries, and we have a culture built around the idea of a covenant, liberation from slavery in Egypt, and the carrot of the promised land being dangled in front of us.

However, since the rise of modern archaeological techniques, and especially since Israel's expansion following the six-day war, there has been lots of opportunity to dig up the holy land.  Lots of old cities have been found, lots of worship sites have been found.  Evidence that many of the kings mentioned in the bible were real has been found.  The problem is, most of this evidence suggests that the kingdom of David was relatively modest, and that the Israelites were consistently polytheistic (rather then errantly monotheistic), until hundreds of years later than traditional readings of the bible suggest.  More importantly, no evidence of the exodus has been found, and other finds filling in the context of the ancient world make it extremely unlikely that it occurred on anything like the temporal or physical scale described in the bible, if it occurred at all.

Or so argues a book I've recently read  called "The Bible Unearthed" by archaeologists  Israel Finklestein and Neil Asher Silberman.  Assuming that the narrative F&S lay out is accurate (and a even a cursory survey of the literature on biblical archaeology threatens the certainty of such an assumption, which never stopped me before ...), the greatest significance of this story is that traditional orthodoxy is actually the most recent, and least historically grounded of the forms of practice.  Ambivalence about god and monotheism, ambiguity of identity, intermingling with other peoples, and picking and choosing which religious laws and practices to follow or ignore is the most traditional path of all.

As a fourth generation, smart-assed New York atheist Jew, this is a combination of comforting and disturbing.  On the one hand, I no longer have any reason to feel even the slightest bit sheepish around the nudnicks in the mitzvah tanks.  Which reminds me of a story ... One fine spring afternoon some years ago, I was riding my bike near Washington Square Park, when a guy with a black hat and a long beard standing in front of a Winnebago accosted me. "Are you Jewish?" he asked.  Why, I don't know, but I answered "yes," then swerved away from the liturgy he proferred.  "It's no reason to get he killed," he lamented, with a shrug.  About that, he was certainly correct.

On the other hand, finding out that ambivalence and doubt are the oldest forms of piety undercuts whatever hipster cred attaches to ambivalence and doubt.  Which leads to more ambivalence and doubt about ambivalence and doubt about ... Infinite regress is so, I don't know, regressive ...  Of course ambivalence and doubt about identity and god have their own implications that go far beyond my navel gazing.  If you lack absolute certainty in your beliefs, and you doubt the story that places your ethnicity in a special place in the universe, membership in the tribe is not only a reason not to get killed.  It is also a reason not to kill (or condone the killing of) others just because they are not one of you and aren't happy about your asserting a shaky birthright.

So picking and choosing which laws to honor in a fashion consistent with the ancient traditions of my people, I eat the occasional cheeseburger or rasher of bacon (don't tell my doctor, oy my cholesterol), and worship a false idol or two (Clapton is god).  However I strictly honor the one about "thou shall not murder," and think this applies to dropping bombs on schoolhouses in Gaza.

On yet another hand, I am a non-practicing ethnic Jew, married to a non-practicing ethnic Serbian Orthodox Christian, which makes our son an Orthodox Jew.  This used to be a joke, but in light of recent archaeological findings, not so much so.

Always a bridesmaid ...

In a previous post I mentioned some minor misgivings about Barack Obama -- something about him being a politician not immune to a touch of calculation, and not not quite the saint some would have him believe him to be.  This led me to support another candidate, who, sadly, did not win.  I'm speaking of course of Eugene V. Debs, a man who would not have shrunk away from accusations of socialism.

There were of course a number of practical and legal obstacles to Debs winning this year's presidential election.  As a permanently disenfranchised convicted felon, it's unclear whether he would qualify for the ballot in all the states.  That, and being dead, though I've been unable to find anything in the constitution specifically listing vitality as a requirement for the office, a loophole exploited for several years by Ronald Reagan.

Still, it's worth considering the merits of Debs' character, policies, and qualifications.  Debs was a brilliant union organizer and labor leader, driven by a deep hatred of suffering and injustice -- the sort of person we might call a community organizer these days.   This brought him into the world of (Socialist) party politics.  Radicalized by the brutality of government and robber-baron response to strikes, Debs turned to socialism, and ran unsuccessfully for president four times.  Debs' socialism wasn't about mere wealth re-distribution.  Nor was it the party and state sponsored terror that the totalitarian movements that usurped the name convinced Americans socialism means.

Debs' credo was one of sacrifice and humility in the service of improving the lives of poor people and opposing war.  He saw capitalism, not as the engine of universal prosperity and political democratic freedom (as it is so often seen today), but as a source of suffering, stratification, and militarism, the true enemies of freedom and democracy.  His pacifism led to his greatest sacrifice.  As World War I ground on, and Woodrow Wilson brought  America closer to the fields of Flanders, Debs agitated against the draft and was arrested for espionage.  Though convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, he remained  unbroken.  At his sentencing hearing, Debs uttered what became the rallying cry for his final presidential campaign from behind bars:

"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Next time someone tells you Barack Obama is a socialist, throw that back at 'em and ask 'em when Barack ever said anything like that.  As much as the right might want to tar Obama with the brush of radicalism and class warfare, it's worth remembering what the real thing looks like.  So far as I know, Obama has never claimed that his rightful place is in prison alongside the other outcasts from American prosperity.

It's been clear since he spoke at the 2004 Democratic convention that Obama thinks his rightful place is at the apex of the U.S. political system.  It's also clear from the way he has campaigned, and most recently from the people he seems to be selecting to that we shouldn't expect a commune to break out any time soon in Washington.  But it's also worth remembering that Obama did promise change.  Much of this came in the form of Yoda-like platitudes ("change we must").  But he also said some specific things about what he would do (and how he would do them) that he should be held to.

One of the areas where he promised change fairly specifically was environmental policy, and today he made good.  He announced that he would put in place a "cap and trade" system this year to begin addressing pollutants causing climate change.  Put that one in the plus column.

He also said that he would work to re-professionalize foreign service and diplomacy, and move us away from a fear-based national security policy.  Not such good news on this one.  The two big items were his behind-the-scenes support for keeping Joe Lieberman on as head of the senate homeland security committee and his offering the secretary of state slot to Hillary Clinton.  Neither of these moves is about the merits, because on the merits neither is a good candidate.  This is pure naked politics.  Lieberman means one more vote for the Democrats (assuming he's back on the reservation for good), and nothing more.  Putting Hillary in the cabinet takes a potential voice of criticism out of the senate (with no risk of losing a safe Democratic seat), and more importantly, out of the running in 2012. 

Obama is entitled to be political about certain things. Though a bit disappointed, I'm not yet heartbroken about these moves.  Still, that makes him only one for three on big decisions this week, and I'd like to see him do better.  Now what would Eugene do?

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 ...