Bobby Kennedy: 41 Years Ago Today

Once a guy is dead and not around to defend his own name the enemy tends to do a dance all over their reputation. The Kennedys, Jack and Bobby, were by virtue of their murders raised to the level of saints. In reality they were politicians with all that implies and which left them open for some pretty vicious hits post mortem.

And furthermore, the scribe doesn’t go in much for family dynasties, which by their very nature are anti-democratic. You only need to look at what’s going on now to get an idea.

Nonetheless, the scribe lives his life in the belief that Senator Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign represented the high point of the American experience and that his murder marked the beginning of our decline as a special and enlightened nation which, through its ideas and not its armies, led a democratic revolution around the world.

To go back and listen to Bobby’s speeches from that terrible and tremendous time is to wonder what country they might have been delivered in, because it’s not the America any of us are experiencing. He and his brother the President were the closest thing to social democrats the post-war United States ever produced and both were shot like dogs for their efforts.

His own presidential candidacy featured a discussion about inequality and poverty never, ever repeated in American politics. He took the anti-war movement mainstream and gave it a head of steam and respectability it did not lose until they had killed him.

If you ever get frustrated at Democratic presidential candidates and wonder why it is so goddamn hard for them to just come out against a war they know is wrong, remember what happened to the last guy who tried it.

As they say in Spain, “Haz bien, trae mal” or “Do good, bring bad.”

That he was shot by Sirhan Sirhan is a certainty. That more bullets than the eight Sirhan’s gun could hold were found is also a certainty. That the doorway beam from which two bullets were pried was inexplicably burned by the Los Angeles Police Department is also a known fact. The rest can be left to those with the time to sort out conspiracies; for us it serves as a stark reminder of how the American right wing plays for keeps.

They talk a lot about the bankruptcy of American liberalism, the loss of direction and lack of ideas. They never wonder what the murders of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr., meant in that regard. They were young men, standard-bearers of the left with many years of fight, maturity and leadership still ahead when they were struck down. And they could not be replaced.

We should remember that.

The recently departed Hunter S. Thompson wrote about Kennedy in his classic “Fear and Loathing on Campaign Trail ‘72”. He was addressing the McGovern campaign’s idea of using Bobby’s voice on commercial spots:

“In purely pragmatic terms, the Kennedy voice tapes will probably be effective in this dreary campaign; and in the end we might all agree that it was Right and Wise to use them...but in the meantime there will be a few bad losers here and there, like me, who feel a very powerful sense of loss and depression every time we hear that voice – that speedy, nasal Irish twang that mailed the ear like a shot of ‘Let It Bleed’ suddenly cutting through the doldrums of a dull Sunday morning on a plastic FM station.

There is a strange psychic connection between Bobby Kennedy’s voice and the sound of the Rolling Stones. They were part of the same trip, that wild sense of breakthrough in the late Sixties when almost anything seemed possible.

The whole era peaked on March 31, 1968 when LBJ went on national TV to announce that he wouldn’t run for re-election – that everything he stood for was fucked, and by quitting he made himself the symbolic ex-champ of the Old Order.

It was like driving an evil King off the throne. Nobody knew exactly what would come next, but we all understood that whatever happened would somehow be the product of the ‘New Consciousness.’ By May it was clear that the next President would be either Gene McCarthy or Bobby Kennedy and that the War would be over by Christmas...”

the scribe lived that connection before ever reading the passage. The Stones marked the boundaries of his lifestyle as a young rake, Bobby his political activism as a reformed one.

As a reporter with the “Los Angeles Business Journal” the scribe had to do a story about the Ambassador Hotel where Kennedy was slain. He asked to be taken into the infamous “pantry” where the nefarious act went down. He didn’t stay long.

In 1966, Kennedy gave perhaps his most famous speech to an arena filled with young people in Cape Town, South Africa.

We close tonight with an excerpt from the same:

“[T]he belief there is nothing one man or woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills – against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence...Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

“It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

Let it bleed indeed.

Book Report: "Ornament of the World" by Maria Rosa Menocal

"Ornament of the World," asserts that the history of modern life passed through medieval Andalusia and does a good job of making the case.

The subtitle to Maria Rosa Menocal's engaging volume is "How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain," but that doesn't say the half of it.

Which is fine, because the subtitle that can do justice to this alternately sweeping and efficient book probably doesn't exist.

In fact, the featured period of tri-partite harmony is but a brief one in the book, shattered by the kinds of antagonisms that sustain our state of violent tension today.

In those days of European ignorance and atavism, Menocal writes that, "Arabic beckoned with its vigorous love of all the things men need to say and write and read that not only lie outside faith but may even contradict it -- from philosophy to erotic love poetry and a hundred other things in between."

Menocal explains how the prophet Muhammad would not perform miracles, given that the Quran, the book off God's revelations, was the true miracle.

Latent in the Arab's linguistic passion was a respect for the Christian and Hebrew reliance on scriptures.

Pagans subjected to the Arabic invasions covered in this book were required to convert, while the two "Peoples of the Book," were granted religious freedom under a covenant known as the dhimma.

Under the prescriptions of the visionary Abd al-Rahman, founder of Al-Andalus (Arab moniker for the region of southern Spain),"the Muslims did not remain a ruling people apart. Rather, their cultural openness and ethnic egalitarianism were vital parts of a general social and political ethos within which the dhimmi could and did thrive."

If it doesn't sound much like the Afghani Taliban you know only too well, that's because there are Muslims, and then there are Muslims.

The good ones were the Umayyad.

How they became the faction they did (descendants of Muhammad's brother-in-law's sister's mother or something) is not so important as the fact another faction, the Almoravids, did them in on behalf of an Islamic intepretation more in-line with that which mystifies today.

The authoress maps out the rising tide and recession of ambulant Islam, the countercharge of Christian warriors, the religiously confused alliances of enemies when battles of family succession and greed intervened to rent the otherwise clear lines of battle asunder.

And the point of these events, for Menocal, is how the cultures involved were affected and transformed.

"Ornament of the World" is mostly about an assortment of intellectuals, dreamers, poets, and philosophers who informed these transformations, mostly forgotten, but sometimes lionized down the years.

"Ornament" details the Jewish intellectual Hasdai's rise to the exalted position of foreign secretary in the Cordoban caliphate because he, "spoke and wrote with elegance and subtlety, and because the vizier possessed a profound knowledge of everything in Islamic Andalusia culture and politics that a caliph needed in his public transactions."

Much the same happened to a wealthy merchant of Malaga now known to history as Samuel in the taifa of Granada. Another star of Arabic letters, his appointment as The Nagid established him as leader to the city's Jews.

South and West of Granada, in the hamlet of Niebla, lived Ibn Hazm, a contemporary of the Nagid, and an exile from the Almoravid sacking of Cordoba's imperial city, Madinat al-Zahra.

Ibn Hazm remained dedicated his countless writings to the tolerant glories of Umayyad Cordoba, where he had thrived in younger days.

Considered alternately by scholars as embittered or sad, "He was, in any case, an astounding intellectual, his life a fitting tribute to and a noble and melancholy end point for the caliphate he never ceased to long for and lament, as if it had been a lost lover."

That caliphate fell to a malevolent force that, Menocal writes, "was often rooted in what they considered the Andalusians inappropriate relations with the Jews and Christians."

Which is not to single out Arabs as the sole possessors of intolerant habits.

Upon the Christian conquest of Granada, the famed Ferdinand and Isabella granted dhimma-like rights to their Muslim subjects. But they turned out to be paper promises.

Unfortunately for us, hundreds of years on, the results are still being reaped.

Menocal demonstrates the cultural contortions involved in this subjugation by dissecting Miguel de Cervantes' strange set-up to "Don Quixote" as the work of an Arab historian, found in the Jewish quarter of Toledo, and translated for him by a Christian Arab.

She turns something most of us shrug and pass over into a stark political statement on Cervantes' part, and necessarily alters one's consideration of El Quixote. It is worth the price of the book.

Cervantes' literary arrangement demonstrates how, in the end, the Catholic monarchs, "chose to go down the modern path, the one intolerant of contradiction. The watershed at hand was certainly the rise of a single-language and single-religion, a transformation that conventionally stand at the beginning of the modern period and leads quite directly to our own."

Mesopotamian Wordplay

Tigris:
I have a secret day and nobody knows about it.
Euphrates:
You mean polka dot day?
Tigris:
Hey! and Polka dot night. How come you knew?
Euphrates:
I saw you telling Medina.
Tigris:
I think she's the only other one who knows.
Euphrates:
It's too bad. She's got some Jihad. She's got to wear a veil every day.
Tigris:
It doesn't matter. She can just dream, then. Anyone can dream
anything, even you. I do.
Euphrates:
Truly?
Tigris:
Yes, all the nights are polka dot nights for me.
Euphrates:
I like you Tigris, and your friend Persia, too. It's the way you two say silly things.
Tigris:
And I like you, Euphrates. Your whitefish and your date palms and
your centuries old limes.

David Brooks' "Hare" Raising Spectre

If your life is the subject of a book, you may not want to have lived it.

This truth was slow in coming to the highway scribe who spends less time each year on the highway and more time on scribery. The goal is to be an artist known more for his work than his public exploits.

A matter of substance, if you will.

Lives that are worthy of a literary recounting are exceptional things. In rare cases, extraordinary biographies can consist in a litany of experiences kissed by the Gods and sun alike.

But usually, what makes for a good read are those rollercoaster rides spiked with irony, tragedy, movement, and setbacks answered with victories and then succeeded by sudden drops in fortune again.

That's how life is. The more you go for, the more you are subjected to and the vast majority prefer things even-keeled so that their life trajectory rarely becomes the stuff of bestsellers.

"New York Times," columnist David Brooks has scripted "In Praise of Dullness," which posits that the story of American business is not much told, nor well understood, by writers.

The piece focuses on recent studies regarding what makes a good corporate Chief Executive Officer.

The results favored a humdrum personality: "The C.E.O.s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people around."

Which is well and good and something we knew thanks to Aesop's fable, "The Tortoise and the Hare."

It is one reason (the other being money) why highwayscribery spends less time bounding through fits of international adventure and more time eating Orville Redenbacher's "old-fashioned butter" popcorn in front of a Dell.

Providing good information on running a company, should it ever come to that, Brooks runs the boat aground with his subsequent assertion that these Tortoise types demonstrate why, "people in the literary, academic, and media worlds rarely understand business. It is nearly impossible to think of a novel that accurately portrays business success."

highwayscribery would suggest Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" fits the bill, just not in the way a profit-focused guy like Brooks is looking for.

But that's neither here nor there. Our beef is with Brooks' separation of art, literature, market, and business into separate rarified environments.

An artist himself, the columnist reasons that "the market" -- that Gilded God of all pinstriped and serious folk -- demands a tortoise run the business.

What interests writers, on the other hand, is "self-expression and self-exploration."

But these endeavors are personal goals of novelists and not necessarily the subject of their work, which involves a search for, and construction of, the good yarn.

Artists are subject to markets, too. And these markets are more particular, less democratic or meritorious than anything the newly minted MBA will experience upon emerging from the Wall Street subway station

The very nature of their craft condemns writers to the tortoise's way. In a variation on the them Gore Vidal's "Palimpsest" refers to the "bovine" character of the novelist slowly masticating his cud, his subject.

Brooks, who works in Washington D.C., notes how monotone business leaders don't fare well in a place where political leaders brandish their "charisma, charm, personal skills."

But business is the story of American politics as this piece on the Employee Free Choice Act's dwindling chances, in spite of a Democratic president and majority, will attest.

Brooks' earlier March 16 piece "The Commercial Republic" suggests much the same.

For every Obama or Reagan that struts his term upon the national stage, there remains behind a Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.) or a Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), humble (maybe not so much), anonymous, and busy as bees.

The columnist perceives the Obama administration's "interposing" of artistic temperaments upon industrial management culture and fears it is unleashing "a revolution in values" damaging to American business.

But Brooks is interposing a "hare" mythology onto noncorporate types that doesn't fit well.

Every endeavor cultivates its slow-pokes, passionate in their pursuit of incremental progress, and committed to the long haul in a way Wall Street has rarely been in recent years.

So we should be alright.

Book Report: "Mayor" by Ed Koch

New York. If you can make it there, you can't make it anywhere else.

"Mayor" has a strange launching point given that New York City was looking at six more years of Ed Koch when it was published and that it came on the heels of his surprising defeat in the Democratic gubernatorial primary to Mario Cuomo.

That loss was only the latest in a series of events described in this autobiography, which must have alerted Koch to the unique limitations associated with his otherwise powerful position.

"Mayor" comes off as the author's stab at "cashing in" before his story was fully told, because it had turned out to be truncated in advance of its termination.

Edward I. Koch assumed office at the city's nadir, in the wake of a rescue plan to save New York from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s. And although his popularity followed the typical politician's arc from novelty to popularity to ignominy, his mayoralty is widely considered to have been a success.

Koch was reelected twice by adeptly turning his gruff, no-nonsense personal style into a certifiable brand for the city itself.

"Mayor" details the idiosyncratic nature of New York City -- our country's financial and cultural capital -- the way Gotham stands apart, stewing in its distinction and self-sustaining...er, um selfness.

To wit: As mayor of America's largest city, Koch could not be ignored on certain issues of national import.

One of the longest chapters in the book involves President Jimmy Carter's efforts at getting Koch to round up the Jewish vote for his 1980 reelection bid and the Mayor's incessant push-back for certain concessions on the administration's Israel policy.

Having gained those concessions, Koch hit the hustings for Carter who was trounced by Ronald Reagan anyway.

And so it goes. Koch was a big fish in a big pond with no estuary by which to escape it.

Another study in mayoral limitations is Koch's accounting of negotiations with the Transportation Workers Union and the strike through which he successfully shepherded the city.

The Mayor's quandary was that, although the strike was in his city, the entity negotiating with organized labor was the Metropolitan Transit Authority, a feud of New York's governor.

Lacking real policy power, Koch glibly recounts how he used his bully pulpit, his penchant for walking the streets of the ultimate street-walking city, and a sly understanding of how New York's overheated media operates, to pull off a successful negotiation, mostly en absentia, with the all-powerful unions in pre-Reagan America.

But his skills were particular to that magnificent and fascinating city. Beyond its boundaries, whether campaigning in Florida for Carter, or clumsily insulting suburban and rural New Yorkers during the gubernatorial primary, Koch's style did not go over well.

"I'm still Mayor," he said after losing to Cuomo.

Exactly.

highwayscribery can remember Koch inarticulately peddling "Mayor" on Saturday Night Live following its publication, the over-the-top delivery, his brash charm clashing with the Klieg lights before falling flat in both the studio and over the airwaves.

But "Mayor" can be good fun for our politics-crazed, cable news addicted legions. It takes you into that room of players and lofty titles it shows you how it goes down, what they say, and who sorts it out.

The book offers egos, grown-up Kindergartners, well-meaning citizens getting hammered for their efforts, radicals of an era gone by all playing the roulette wheel of American democracy.

Koch performs in an entertaining fashion throughout. Tough, uncompromising, holding course often in spite of his missteps, ready each day to start flailing anew.

Ralph Waldo Emerson warned the poet that, "Others shall do the great and resounding things also. Though shalt lie close hid with nature, and canst not be afforded to the capital or the exchange. The world is full of renunciations and apprenticeships, and this is thine; thou must pass for a fool and churl for a long season."

Although "the capital's" inhabitants leave their imprints on future lives and their names on public works, the fascinating revelation in reading "Mayor" is the anonymity into which the big shots of an earlier time fade.

Who, today, remembers New York Governor Hugh Carey (D), or Koch's sexiest supporter Bess Myerson? Carter honcho Hamilton Jordan died last year while Rep. Bella Abzug (D)and her big hats are buried artifacts.

The cast of characters arrayed throughout "Mayor" could have easily been given aliases because it is their actions, more than their identities, that lend the narrative its thrust.

Vedette Does La Danza Scores at Indie Excellence Book Awards

A short post informing anyone who cares that "Vedette Does La Danza," closed the Indie Excellence Awards contest as a "Finalist." That translates into second place in the Audio Book Fiction Category. It comes on the heels of a second place finish at the London DIY Book Festival, and an outright win in the USA Books News "fiction abridged audio book" category a few months ago.

Omar and the highway scribe invite you to watch a videotaped presentation documenting this unique marriage of poetry from the former's novel "Vedette" with music composed and played by the latter, or visit our My Space Page to hear the tracks and buy the CD.

Romanian Hot Dogs

Agribusiness giant Smithfield Foods, has muscled its way into Eastern Europe and the famed Romanian hot dog will never be the same.

Doreen Carvajal and Stephen Castle of the "The New York Times," wrote May 7 that, "For centuries, from the Hapsburg Empire through Communist dictatorship, peasant farmers here have eked out a living from hogs, driving horses along ancient pocked roads and whispering ritual prayers on butchering day."

No more. The factory farming conglomerate's move into the backward and rustic region, "ranks among the continent's biggest agricultural transformations."

The kind of company President Obama recently promised to kneecap by doing away with offshore tax shelters, Smithfield's devastation of the Romanian countryside was subsidized by the European community, and abetted by national leaders.

As locals who opposed their invasion found out, big is necessarily better.

Factory farming became a reality in the United States before we ever really called it that or were aware of its evils. And while there are movements afoot here to reign in the waste and cruelty, Eastern Europe lacked the environmental regulation and oversight to handle the newfangled hog hell.

Which is just how Smithfield wanted it, according to Chairman Joseph W. Luter III who has described its global strategy as moving in a "very, very, big way, very fast, very fast."

Calibrated to a smaller and slower existence, Romanian hog farmers never stood a chance. But Smithfield, bathed in the Anglo-American profit-driven understanding of all things bright and beautiful, insists it has been a boon to U.S. consumers because of lower pork prices.

The point of the "New York Times" article is that, in Eastern Europe, they are not quite sure that a reduced price for the Romanian hot dog is worth the imposition of factory farming systems and the disappearance of traditional agricultural structures.

In Romania, the article states, the number of hog farmers has dropped in the four years spanning 2003 to 2007 by 422,000, which is a statistic that speaks for itself.

"Ex-farmers," the article reads, "overwhelmed by Smithfield's lower prices, often emigrated or shifted to construction jobs," replacing scenes like the top one, by Romanian painter Theodor Aman, with something like that below it.

Environmental concerns, in particular over air quality, have arisen. Smithfield's 40 factory farms in western Romania are equipped with metal manure containers "to inject manure into the ground."

highwayscribery is not sure what that means, but for Aura Danielescu the upshot is that, "We go crazy with the daily smell."

Mmmmm. Pass the mustard!

To be fair, the reporters gave the company a chance to respond, which its lawyer Charles T. Griffith did through an e-mail citing its contributions to Romanian life including (but not limited to!) "acquisition, renovation and construction of meat processing plants, swine farms, feed mills and cold storage facilities...networks of independent farmers that are contracted to shelter and feed pigs to market weights."

In these benighted facilities, "every stage of a hog's life is controlled. With assembly line efficiency, sows churn out litters three or four times a year. Withing 300 days, a 270-pound pig is ready for slaughter."

Oh you lucky Romanians!

The article offers an especially appealing -- and timely -- account of the mass murder and waste of pigs last year when swine fever broke out at its operations there.

Mexicans living in the environs of Smithfield's hog farm at Perote think it's where the recent outbreak of swine flu was born. Clearly there is precedent for this suspicion.

So why do we re-present this article to you?

highwayscribery believes in a politics that respects the delicate fabric of local food-related customs in places fortunate enough to have eluded the various waves of industrial mechanization which have buffeted those of us in the "developed" world.

Farming, for centuries, went hand-in-hand with a culture informed by the turn of seasons, the cycles of family existence, and a mutual relationship between beast and human.

Reducing these eternal rhythms bankrupts the societies long-guided by them and releases a new generation of youths into a world without direction, signposts, or native symbolism.

As for the animals, it can be said that, were they not to be consumed, they would not be bred and raised. But reducing their functions to those of machines with hearts, is to deny they possess those hearts and to unleash a karmic sin into the universe not all of us are willing to pay.

Obama: The First 106 Days

It's a good thing that, as a blogging outfit, highwayscribery decided to stay clear of the "first 100 days" traffic and waited patiently for the no less important FIRST 106 DAYS milepost.

On top of highwayscribery's little peep being overwhelmed by the roar of outlets both mega and minor, President Obama's ensuing stand against offshore tax havens and unequivocal nod to industrial syndicalism might have gone unremarked.

Offshore tax havens are the things that people who don't get 10-99 or 1040 forms at the end of year use to avoid paying taxes the people who get 10-99 or 1040 forms can't use to avoid the annual tithe.

Like, say, Warren Buffet.

When the Oracle of Omaha was asked by "New York Times," business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, why his empire was structured as a conglomerate when he advised other investors to "keep it simple," Buffet responded, "We've got this ability in terms of moving money around into various opportunities without tax consequences."

Get it. WITHOUT TAX CONSEQUENCES.

Jackie Calmes and Edmund Andrews at the "New York Times," (NYT) reported that Obama's is a move which, "appeals to growing populist anger among taxpayers but that is likely to open an epic battle with some major powers in American commerce."

To quote a very unpopular former president, "Bring it on."

The new President, you see, is fulfilling a campaign promise to end tax breaks for American companies that send American jobs overseas.

John Castellani of the Business Roundtable gave the reporters a canned reaction: "This plan will reduce the ability of U.S. companies to compete in foreign markets, which will also cripple economic growth here in the U.S."

The obvious question is what is it that makes these countries "American"? You also have to wonder if other companies in other countries pay taxes and, if they do, how they compete.

Finally, while blessed with all these neat tools for avoiding taxes, why has economic growth been crippled anyway?

If the NYT reporters are to be taken at their word, Obama merely wants to fix provisions that no longer serve the original purpose of protecting multinational corporations from being taxed twice: once overseas and once by the Internal Revenue Service.

But according to the same article, in 2004, the last year for which there are figures, corporations deferred reporting earnings and wracked up tax credits that led to a paltry 2.3 percent contribution on what is supposed to be a 35 percent tax rate.

In short, they didn't come even close to paying their fair share.

the highway scribe, by the way, is still being forced to pay his.

The Obama plan has left open one big, fat loophole, according to Lynnley Browning, also of the "New York Times" (which should give you an idea of what political blogging's future will look like when all these "real" newspapers go under).

The Obama plan, apparently, doesn't do away with "transfer pricing," a concept we feel no need to explain since most of you aren't going to need it and because the outcome is essentially the same, where multinationals and taxes are concerned.

There's a pattern developing with the president, who seems to throw big punches, but them dance off into a corner when battling the big boys.

Robert Reich at Salon.com thinks the president throws a lot of stuff out there, and keeps some close to his chest, because he's trying to affect great changes in American society. More often than not, Reich believes, he will run into the same people at the negotiating table and all of these plans and provisions will serve as so many bargaining chips on its coffee-stained surface.

For example, when the American car industry started going belly-up, there were complaints from people the scribe has coffee with that the bankers were bailed out, while unions were being required to eat their contracts in most usual and inequitable fashion.

But lo-and-behold, at Chrysler Obama practically went syndicalist, which is a philosophy that believes unions, workers councils, and others cooperative labor groups are best-suited to running industrial entities.

On May Day itself, "NYT" subscribers awoke to a headline that claimed "Chrysler Files for Bankruptcy, UAW and Fiat Take Control."

True, it's not the revolutionary syndicalism preached by Pierre Prodhoun, but it's still United Auto Workers control with $8 billion in government grease for the wheels.

Or as Jim Rutenberg and Bill Vlasic, again, of "The Times" noted, "It was a stark moment, and one unseen in modern times..."

Micheline Maynard, of (yes) "The Times," penned "In Chrysler Deal, Union Takes Rare Front Seat," and observed that Chrysler's Chapter 11 could end up being the "Cadillac" of bankruptcies for the United Auto Workers.

Apparently Chrysler didn't have a luxury model that could make the analogy workable.

Quoted in the piece was an expert in bankruptcy restructuring of Washington-based Arent Fox saying, "This is extraordinary, truly extraordinary. I never would have thought a year ago that this would occur. These are truly unusual times."

Change indeed.

Maynard noted that the United Auto Workers is not just any union thanks to its heavy political contributions, but that's a narrow conclusion that lacks a back story.

Which is why you come to highwayscribery.

The UAW is the holy grail of democratic trade unionism in this country with a not inconsiderable reputation around the world as well. The union's dramatic history is woven into labor lore. The auto workers have cut a noble and progressive profile in countless fights since their formation by the Reuther brothers in the 1930s.

In 1986, when the highway scribe was a cub reporter, he was assigned to cover the union's national convention in Anaheim, Calif.

Now reporters are a pretty jaded lot. We've got to sift through a lot of buffalo chips to get at the truth and many events we cover are shows concocted especially for our delectation and/or distraction.

But the sight of 5,000 UAW delegates, sitting at long tables across the sprawling convention floor, rising to their feet and singing "Solidarity Forever" stamped a memory in the scribe's mind that 23 years have barely dimmed.

And that's part of what is behind this move. A progressive president standing by a blue chip labor union and assuring its members get a fighting chance rather, rather than sacrificing them to the cold and heartless logic of the marketplace.

Book Report: "Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician" by Gerald Meyer

Emerson said an institution is the shadow of single man, a lesson Gerald Meyer learned during research on the history of the American Labor Party (ALP).

In his "Acknowledgements" to the book under consideration here, Meyer confesses, "In the process of accomplishing this formidable task, I fell in love with Vito Marcantonio. The ALP was an important institution, but Marcantonio loomed over it."

"Vito Marcantonio: Radical Politician," represents the skillful and thorough response to a series of questions posed by Herbert Gutman, the sponsor of Meyer's proposed doctoral dissertation: "Who voted for him? Why did they vote for him? What was East Harlem like? What did people do for a living? Who owned the stores?"

Meyer's work succeeded two earlier efforts, "Vito Marcantonio: Radical in Congress," by Alan Schaffer and "Vito Marcantonio, The People's Politician," by Salvatore John LaGumina.

Schaffer's effort placed Marcantonio in the national firmament of the times, 1902 to 1952, and LaGumina added some anecdotal history and a slightly different angle than that of his predecessor.

But it is Meyer's book that places Marcantonio in the New York of his day and, specifically, the East Harlem neighborhood that produced him.

Here is Marcantonio diving off a truck into the street mob during a speech, arms flailing. There the Congressman confessing unconditional trust in his grandmother who attends rallies with an umbrella under her coat in the event of fisticuffs.

And here is the "retail" congressman delivering coal and Christmas baskets to troubled neighbors, a guy who empties his pockets to the hard luck cases that pock his district.

Meyer's work goes where the other two did not in regards to the Marcantonio Papers archived at the New York Public Library on 42 St. and Fifth Avenue.

In these 85 boxes can be found dusty, flaky records of "Marc's" public life and work, but more importantly, the voices of his constituency, which Meyer has culled for insightful passages from letters both handwritten and typed.

Yes, Meyer meticulously details the complicated nature of New York City's "fusion" politics and the skill with which Marcantonio navigated them to unique projection as a national leader of far left-wing forces.

But the author also renders the radical politician's story an organic whole.

Rather than the narrative of some anomalous oddity out of time, we have in this book a man fleshed out and brought to life by the environment that produced him and to which he gave so much form, through his leadership.

In his conclusion, Meyer laments Marcantonio's slow fade into anonymity and argues that, "his story deserves to be known, because it contradicts so many of the platitudes which pass for American history and therefore suggests new ways of thinking about the present."

"Radical Politician" takes the first, bold steps in this effort, loyally transcribing the voices of desperate constituents seeking assistance of every kind and often beyond the natural purview of the congressional representative.

Meyer began his project just in time to provide his work with an important layer of oral history extracted from residents of East Harlem, now mostly departed.

Through these voices we gain the story of progressive and communist movements during the 1920s, '30s, and '40s and begin affixing them to real faces; faces worn with lines wrought by terrible struggles.

And through these same voices, we hear Marcantonio's, because they were one and the same.

Thanks to Meyer's rendering of the fighting congressman and his world, we realize that, beneath the Jazz Age's glamorous narration, people were being crushed by the inequities in American life.

We witness how the annihilation accelerated with the next decade's economic miseries so that these movements appear not so much as insidious viruses inexplicably invading the body politic, rather as natural responses to a clamor for redemption.

And through Marcantonio's story, we can see how the ensuing repression was not the result of some lightning-strike catharsis which brought Americans to their senses, but the product of a brutal rollback to darkness fueled by American capital's resurgence after the healthy profit-making venture that was World War II.

"Radical Politician" renders a multifaceted talent: a lawyer, political street fighter, parliamentarian, neighborhood Don, leftist commissar. A man who had affairs, yet was sainted by those who knew and were affected by his labors, a man who switched tacks to accommodate the shifting sands of mid-century politics, and committed enough mistakes to make him more human and beautiful than so many populate our historical memory.

The Faces: An Appreciation

Probably the best thing about growing older these days is the low price of album’s from one’s time.

Last night the scribe converted a $20 Barnes and Noble gift card from mrs. scribe, a Christmas offering, into an album of greatest hits by The Faces pop group called “Good Boys... When They’re Asleep.”

It cost $12 and that’s cheap for a guy who doesn’t have an MP3 player and laments the lack of outlets for purchasing music the old way – bargain bin prices for those of us stuck in the time warp of paying for “ElPees” (long players).

A renewed interest in this old-time boogie band (1970-1975) can be chalked up to endless musical investigations of brother-in-law Clinton; the only person in the world to have placed value on information gleaned from the misspent youth that was the highway scribe’s.

Clint’s been listening to a unique treasure trove of ’60s - ’70s music found on the Web site, Wolfgang’s Vault, a depository for the late and great rock-and-roll impresario Bill Graham. Not long ago, The Faces were the “concert-of-the week” and Clinton burned a few opening numbers and passed it along.

The Faces were vaulted back onto the scribe’s radar a couple of years earlier when some Madison Avenue types absconded with their wonderful “Oooh La La” for the purpose of selling cars. Maybe you remember it:

I wish
that
I knew what I know now
when I was younger!

But it was the CD from Clinton, that raw guitar of Ronnie Wood’s pushing the even rawer voice of a young Rod Stewart, that took the scribe back to a place of appreciation for those wonderful Faces.

Clint will listen to any of the scribe’s stardust memories about long ago and was more than willing to accept that the Faces were “enormous” in their time, despite their relative anonymity now.

Yes, Rod Stewart is a very famous man/celebrity and Ronnie Wood’s sitting pretty as co-guitar with the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards, but who today remembers their turn as pretty Faces?

Tucked away on Long Island, New York, escaping only to Manhattan for rock shows at Madison Square Garden, the scribe was not nearly as worldly as now and his perception of the Faces’ hugeness can be largely attributed to the fact he lived, ate, and breathed a now-defunct rock rag weekly called “Creem.”

“Creem,” ran hundreds of words about the soap opera that was the band; scores of pictures of The Faces, including Rod with Swedish sexsation Britt Eklund, and the rest of the boys waving whisky bottles around on stage, leaning loopily upon one another in trashed hotel rooms.

They were a unique blend of pretty boy pop group and serious rock outfit that lent themselves to the magazine’s format, which was irreverent, chancy and hungry for gossip. Cameron Crowe, the guy who directed “Almost Famous,” wrote for “Creem” as ( his pen name escapes now) “the world’s most au courant teenager.”

the scribe was crushed, crushed, when “Creem” cheekily announced the break-up in 1975. “Your Pretty Faces Have All Gone To Hell. How Will You Carry On?” (Or something to that effect.)

Anyway, the point is, The Faces may (or may not) have been as big as the scribe remembers through the prism of “Creem,” but they were clearly big enough to gain a foothold in a corporate closet like Barnes and Noble 32 years after the fact.

And surprise of surprises when the liner notes to the CD turned out to be written by Dave Marsh, a regular at “Creem” in the early ’70s.

Here’s how he opens things up: “For me and my crew at the notorious garage-punk rock magazine ‘Creem’, the advent of The Faces in 1970 was a dream come true.”

That explains that.

More Marsh: "Like the Rolling Stones, they were obsessed with R&B; like the The Who, they sported Mod clothes, coifs, and attitudes; like The Beatles and The Kinks, they adapted the anarchic, goofy spirit of the vaudevillian British music hall to the rock 'n roll stage."

Count on highwayscribery for your "anarchic."

Marsh provides some valuable history: The Faces were an offshoot of a ’60s group known as the Small Faces, led by Steven Marriott who left the group in 1969 to form Humble Pie with Peter Frampton. During those times, apparently, guitar god Jeff Beck also had a band with Rod Stewart as vocalist and Ronnie Wood on bass (!).

When Marriott blew town (as it were) Stewart and Wood decided to join the remaining Small Faces -- Ronnie Lane, Ian McClagan and Kenney Jones -- drop the “Small” (because they were kind of tall) and forge ahead as the subject of this post.

"I can still remember seeing them take the stage for the first time,” wrote Marsh, “one cold night at the Eastown Theater, a 2,500-seat ballroom packed to the rafters with local rowdies.”

One simple sentence in summation of a time. Clint frequents live shows, but the scribe usually demurs in accompanying him for he finds no joy or identification with the concert crowds of today.

At 14, 15, and 16 years of age the scribe reveled in the mobs of ill-behaved boys and sex-cruising teeny girls, suburban toughs, spun from the green lawns of Long Island.

They seemed countless, legion, and the scribe took heart at their scruffiness and smokiness; found safety in the ample numbers. Certainly all these wayward kids weren’t on the path to ruination? (they were) They couldn’t all be threatened with home expulsion over the length of their hair? (again, they were)

There was a contagious attitude about the youths and the scribe returned home to battle the parents with a new sense of urgency and commitment.

Over what? Priorities kiddies: pot, beer, rock music, money for shows, ElPees, and petting rocker girls, (though not necessarily in that order).

And a good band mirrored all that. Here’s Marsh: “Faces took that stage the way they took over every stage I ever saw them on, from Louisville to Madison Square Garden. They took it the way a teenage gang takes over a corner, rolling into place with unfeigned casualness, tossing a leer and a giggle here and there. They could barely have known a soul in the room, but they acted like they owned the place. Then, like a gang with good intentions, they began bashing away at everything in the neighborhood, nailed down or not, raising a ruckus and ensuring a great time for everyone willing to participate.”

Rock ’n “Role” models, you see...

And because of this, school studies were a source of great concern because they were very far behind the six priorities listed above. In that time, and place, good grades were a mark of shame, barely lower than a clean haircut, and knowing how to play guitar a source of certain and elevated status.

Thanks to a similarly dissolute best friend, Darren Wiseman, there was literature, even if for all the wrong reasons. Darren and the future scribe sat in the school library reading Herman Hesse’s “Narcissus and Goldmund,” largely because Goldmund had weaseled his way into the bed of a certain medieval knight’s two teenage daughters - a definite rock-fed fantasy buried in a “legitimate” book.

An essay penned in senior year on the character of Goldmund was widely appreciated by the English Department and went a long way toward demonstrating the scribe’s otherwise sketchy academic solvency.

Later, in college, a kid named Crash gave the scribe a tape with Stewart’s “Every Picture Tells A Story” on one side, and The Faces' “A Nod Is As Good As a Wink to a Blind Horse” on the other. What with Wood playing both on The Faces' offerings and Stewart’s solo albums it was hard (and unnecessary) to distinguish between the efforts.

It is also worth noting that Stewart, in the single seminal year of 1971, was part of three classic albums, the third being The Faces’ “Long Player;” a string of beauties that form the quality nut of his career.

The writer’s progress continued apace over the years, these values receding, yet lurking, beneath the developing persona of urbane, urban, syndicalist literary lion.

In the early ’90s, the scribe penned a screenplay entitled “Chasing Cuqui Molina,” which recounted the adventures of an English rocker, Peter Coverdale (“heir apparent to Townsend and Weller”), and a Gypsy guitarist in pursuit of a flamenco goddess across Andalusia (where he was living).

The Faces’ “Pool Hall Richard,” and “Had Me a Real Good Time,” fleshed out the English character’s devil-may-care attitude, figuring prominently in the soundtrack to another film that was never made, but should have been.

In fact, for years, “Had Me A Real Good Time,” stood as personal anthem and credo while the gates of wealth and prestige and pretension were breached with little more than an arsenal of pretty words to buck the highway scribe up.

Thought I was looking’ good
So I cycled cross the neighborhood
Was invited by a skinny girl
Into her high class world

Left my bicycle under the stairs
Laid my coat across the kosher chairs
made my way across the crowded room
I had nothing to lose

My reception wasn’t very keen
So turning on a friendly grin,
Stood on the table with my glass of gin
and came straight to the point

I was glaaaaaaad to come!
I’ll be saaaaaad to go
So while I’m here
I’ll have me a reeeeeal good time!

The years may pass and the gap between one’s aspirations and reality may pinch, but not getting invited back to the party is not without its piquant pleasures.

Thanks lads!

Credit Crookery Redux

Today Mrs. Scribe took to the phone in search of a reason for $70 worth of charges on a credit card she does not use.

The phone people, of course, had a very good reason for that debt in spite of the fact no purchase had ever triggered it.

Mrs. Scribe persisted. The phone attendant insisted she had no authority to wave the fees and said a supervisor would attend to Mrs. Scribe's grievance. The gentleman, naturally, had no intention of using the authority his predecessor did not possess to cancel any of the late fees or penalties on the never-accrued debt.

But while the phone transfer was occurring, the highway scribe told his wife to bring up the meeting at the White House last week and drop in a few comments about egregious charges being targeted by Congress.

Although it didn't come out quite that way, Mrs. Scribe's assertion that "this is why Barack Obama had you people up to the White House," did the trick.

Angrily, the supervisor agreed to wave the mystery fees.

Credit card companies are under pressure and it is up to average Americans being squeezed by them to push back and make clear they're aware of the rare and powerful friend they have living on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Tomorrow, the Mrs. Scribe returns to do battle with Chase, which just bought WaMu and raised her interest rate from 9 percent to 28 percent.

These people just don't get it.

Credit Crookery

The voice at the other end of the phone, representing Bank of America's credit card division, had just gotten an earful and then unburdened herself by a simple tilting of the head.

What spilled from that empty vessel were suggestions from highwayscribery that she, in no uncertain terms, visit Hell in the not-so-distant future.

The basic outlines of our discussion involved- and this probably will sound familiar - a rather arbitrary and dramatic annual rate interest increase from 1.zero percent to 28.something percent.

Having paid the BofA Visa credit card through the BofA online banking system on the due date, the financial giant and recipient of highwayscribery's tax money, applied a cutoff date based on Eastern Standard Time when the scribe lives in a place that starts and finishes three hours later.

The upshot was a bank determination that the scribe had been late on two different occasions and was therefore worthy of a "default" interest rate of 28.something.

The Random House College Dictionary entry for the word reads thusly: de.fault n. 1. failure to act; neglect 2. failure to meet financial obligations.

highwayscribery told the absolutely useless woman that his situation certainly did not meet the first criteria, while any claim he fell short of the second represented something of a stretch and did not merit a 27.something interest rate hike.

the scribe pointed to the meaty sums he'd contributed in recent months to paying down his debt. He further argued that to stain such a sterling record with a pair of time difference discrepancies - "isn't electronic transfer immediate?" - was punitive and unfair.

Her response, though not in so many words, was that life is unfair and Bank of America punitive.

Finally, in a fit of ridiculousness, the scribe added how he was going to contact the White House in the hopes President Obama went after the company's greedy rear-ends.

He never believed it was actually going to happen, and yet, on Friday, there was the man himself, having exercised the enormous power of his office on behalf of people being screwed by banks everywhere, "jawboning" credit card executives at the Big House.

The "New York Times," April 24, ran the adjoining photograph of President Obama sitting with these crooks and apprising them of coming changes to their profit margin based on new legislation in Congress that would put an end to the shenanigans that daily enrich them while impoverishing the rest of us.

Most of these people run companies awash in taxpayer money and are reporting tentative profits after having single-handedly wrecked the world economy with their high-flying financial fakery.

Stephen Labaton reported that the Federal Reserve Bank has already approved some reforms that will kick-in next year, and that the President told the moneychangers, "I know you feel that anything beyond what the Fed has done would be overkill. I just disagree."

Now that's what the scribe calls having a friend in the White House and he's rather shocked to find that friend. All his scribbled ministrations on behalf of the candidate Obama not withstanding.

When one spends 20 or 30 years preaching that government should serve as a countervailing force against the most powerful national interests, and favor the less fortunate, it becomes a kind of pie-in-the-sky sermon conjuring up some revolutionary rapture that would yield the milk-and-honey land.

But here it is thanks to the 2008 election when a majority of the American people woke up to the fact they'd been being screwed all these years and cathartically rejected the Republican dogma of individual freedom for the red herring it is.

And so, The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2009 (H.R. 627), sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) and Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) would, among other things:

- require your credit card company to let you know in advance of its plans to increase your interest rate;
- ban "retroactive" interest rate increases on existing balances unless you're more than 30 days late on a payment, which is something closer to "default" than some time-zone infraction;

These are in the Federal Reserve Banks new regulation, but, The Times reports, "the industry strongly opposes the bill because it believes the law would be harder to overturn than a regulation."

Hmmm.

Sounds like we need the law.

the scribe and Mrs. Scribe saw Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) who is one of the many nondescript pitchers pulled from the GOP bullpen of late. He talked a good game about a party worrying over those Americans sitting around the kitchen table trying to make ends meet, which, although he didn't see it, include inequitable credit card charges.

But according to the "Times," editorial department, The Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights Act of 2009 is facing "fierce," opposition from Republicans in Congress.

Americans now know, and expect, the party's pro-corporate postures, whereas before they weren't so sure and which is why the Democrats hold the keys to the kingdom these days.

If this keeps up, a recent letter by the scribe to his Blue Cross administrator, praying that Obama sets up a socialized health care system and puts predatory health care insurers out of business, may be more than idle dreaming.

My Willow and Other Wonders

The Rifton Hotel




Red worms, catfish, snakeskins, wasps, bats, pickerel, beaver dams, burned autumn leaves, sleigh rides and lily pads.

These bits of Americana were, along with others, part of a year spent in rural New York state. The location, to be precise, was the Rifton Spanish-American Hotel and Country Club.

It loomed alongside a two-lane country road around the bend from which sat a tiny hamlet featuring a grocery story with a screen door that screamed at the springs when pushed open.

There was a giant, three-story hotel connected by a walkway between green lawns and towering maple trees, to a casino with bar and bandstand. A shady hill dropped down to a blackish-brown pond known as "The Lake."

There were rowboats on small, muddy beaches at the hill's end, and directly across the pond. It was not so much a pond or lake as the widening of a stream passingthrough the property and under a bridge where it continued its narrow journey as part of the larger Esopus Creek watershed.

Down the path over that bridge, toward the back of the property, was a sky blue swimming pool with many a patch job in evidence. Some fifty feet away was a "haunted house" that had lodged the resort's domestic help in better times, abandoned and vandalized.

Each of the singular elements surrounding the hotel - The Lake and pool, the casino, the bungalow where we lived - represented complex worlds to the eyes of a seven-year old boy bursting with curiosity and bloodlust. And these were augmented by other sections of the 100-plus-acre property. Distinct kingdoms of animal life and sap-thick richness to fully overwhelm the imagination of any child, at any age.

That single summer, for an able wordsmith and observer, offered enough stories to fill a book and perhaps, in later years with the wells of imagination and experience run dry, will lead to something like that. For now these select recollections must do as a list of all-star anecdotes in a long rank-and-file of remembrances.

One involves a willow tree. Perhaps 100 years ago, most American boys still inhabiting an undeveloped landscape, might hope to have their own, but by the late 1960s, the possibility had diminished.

But I had a willow.

It was a majestic thing that swung out over The Lake on the path down to the pool, just before the bridge that covered the creek. It's overall effect was that of a shelter. Only the slightest glimmers of sunshine on a hot summer day could spark through the thick roofing of olive-colored leaves. The branches drooped until they tickled the water's surface so that the tree marked a definite world, a micro-universe unique unto itself.

Fish liked the coverage as much as the seven-year old boy did. And if that weren't enough, through the rails of the plank fence and directly across the pathway was a six-foot parcel of much-turned soil riddled with reddish worms. These were the favorite food of the sunnies and catfish and carp that called the shady pool beneath the willow arcade home. It is almost a certainty that these fish, beneficiaries of a "never kill" policy, were caught repeated times by the little Indian who lorded over their inky universe.

Still a child with childlike notions, I would leave behind a rod in the water with many worms writhing about the rusty hook, fully expecting a much larger fish to be caught upon returning; the logic being that the more time the line was submerged, the bigger the prey.

The Willow in the background, right.






From the dark, dank, mostly unoccupied third story of the hotel, the pond's meatiest inhabitants could be seen suspended on a sunny day, and they remained, forever, desired quarry never to be captured.

The wormy trap left behind, the path led up to the hotel before which spread a gravel parking lot. It lay on a significant dip down from a driveway facing the front porch with its forty or fifty wicker-wound rockers. It featured a rusty barrel meant to serve as garbage pale, but doing dual duty as a strike-zone for long, conjured baseball games in which no hits were achieved by either the New York Yankees or one of their American League rivals.

Winding up and hurling the gravel at the barrel yielded either a strike - when it was hit - or a ball, and complete games of nine innings were unwound with the Yankees usually finding a little help into the winner's column from that boy's prejudiced arm.

Baseball was a reigning passion, but there was no television to speak of in "the country" at the time. Locals had elaborate, spidery antennae to draw a channel or two from New York City and a visit with them was a treat, although even they did not always get a "clean reception."

The New York Daily News was available from the grocer with the screaming screen door, but technology was such that it went to press without the outcome of an evening contest having been decided. "Yankees - Baltimore nt" the box score would read; code for night game with unknown result. The upshot was that it sometimes took three days to find out who won. Unless, of course, some guest from the city arrived with the news.

The hotel itself seemed terribly old and beyond the grasp of a juvenile's perception in terms of time and size. There was a wooden lobby at the center of the structure that might have been small but seemed enormous to someone no taller than four feet. There was an equally wooden staircase that fed the behemoth's two different wings with luggage carting arrivals.

Brown, mahogany, maroon and velvety are accents that force their way through the cobwebs of time altogether. The walls were stucco and furniture in the rooms slung simple iron loops, sinks of porcelain, and embellishments seemingly old beyond belief, but probably not so dated for anyone exceeding 20 years of age.

Some rooms had bathes, showers, and toilets, but those that didn't were served by a public facility down the hall. Another accent, a surviving accident, from a time gone by. My grandmother, ever economical, prepared the place for opening weekend by putting myself and the little sister to work painting walls.

She got what she paid for and couldn't have been more pleased with both the joy we took in our labors and their sloppy final result.

Musty and moldy, the hotel was also foreign, with its Puerto Rican chefs and scent of heavy cooking oil in the great timber and steel kitchen, its crossdressing waiters from Cuba, and its Spanish-inspired dishes. It was a world of people with accents and bilingual tics all of which would serve in accommodating us to the changing face of America for, exposed young, such things never seemed foreign at all.

There was a dining room that also impressed for its size, the number of tables and chairs, but most of all, for its light which poured in from the two walls of windows that met at a perpendicular angle and opened up onto the lovely green and wild vistas of the carelessly kept grounds.

Of course, the reality may have something other, but renderings are pulled from the walls of memory erected in a harried human head.




The author and his sister in the hotel driveway


My parents managed the property in its waning days and to augment income they would contract with "jiras" or tour groups of Latins from inner city Manhattan who came up for the day to play congas, drink beer, be entertained by the salsa band at work in the casino before leaving a mess behind, and heading home again. Wild and intimidating and unkempt, they arrived with tough and uncouth children who lacked the kind of polish expected of ourselves or evidenced in the offspring of families who came to stay for one week or even two. But nothing bad ever happened and their presence served to plant further seeds of familiarity with a culture that would become partially our own.

There are many other components to the larger memory of that time and place. The bats that flew at night, the croaking of giant bullfrogs in the evening, giant wasps nests, the anxious preparations for the Memorial Day, Fourth of July, and Labor Day weekends.

There are specific personalities that include American rustics and south-of-the-border exotics, Manhattanite sophisticates, and a great giant St. Bernard that had to be banished from the place because of all the business he drove away with his unrestrained antics.

But nature, and two elements in particular, push their smells and features through 40years of time and forgetfulness.

Chronologically, we must start with the strawberries. Down the hill from the path connecting the hotel and the casino, past the cut and sloping lawn, were some dilapidated and worm-eaten wooden fences beyond which things began to grow wild before being halted by the stream meandering into The Lake.

Here were found wild strawberries not evident to the untrained eye, camouflaged by so much ground coverage, poison ivy, myrtle, but tiny, ripe, and plentiful in the earliest phases of spring. Down the hill we bounded with pails and into the natural garden we dove, alternately eating our catch and storing them for later failed experiments in preserve-making back at the cavernous kitchen. They were delicious and a source of marvel to young souls confronted with proof that out of the incongruous dirt something better than candy could be coaxed.

In the autumn the property, rich with trees, was covered in a carpet of flame-marbled leaves that had to be gathered up into great piles before being placed into the same barrel that served as a summertime batter's box, for burning.

With grandmother as field marshal, the rhythm was anything but harried and the job could take all day. There were leaves to be chased as they dropped dead from the spindly branches, tracked in whimsical circles until they fell into our hands or softly to the padded ground. There were piles, often moistened by grass and mud intermingled with the sheaves, that had to be broken with full body dives and spread about by writhing little limbs.

Halloween shadows were ever-present to our young imaginations, the country road beckoning for that dark night, when the jack-o-lanterns glowed with orange light, and the nipping winds and animal spirits commingled and converted cozy homes to haunted houses.

And then there was the burning of the leaves itself, the fixed stare at the crackly yellow fires, and the crisp smell that only people who lived in that time might still identify with copper autumn and the foreboding gray and snow-bleached winter following close behind.

The View from Abroad

With Dick Cheney roaring the benefits of torturing foreign citizens and right-wingers upset with President Obama's projection of American power abroad, it's a good time to see how things are playing overseas.

To that end, highwayscribery is going to translate an article penned by Jorge Ramos Avalos from today's "Diario San Diego."

Ramos, for those of you not versed in Latin American culture, is a Mexican journalist of enormous prestige whose reputation is derived from his objectivity, lack of ideological prerogatives, breadth of culture and coverage in the southern hemisphere.

That's him next to Ana de la Reguera, about whom we know little other than that her image is worthy of reproduction.

In "The End of Big Brother," Ramos writes that Obama's appearance at the recent confab of Latin American leaders in Trinidad and Tobago, "broke prejudices and schemes that, in some cases, took decades to construct."

On that trip, Ramos observes, Obama agreed to deal with the Cuban dictatorship, a novelty not witnessed in 50 years. He shook the hand of Hugo Chavez in spite of prior insults directed at him and in contrast to his predecessor who "hid" from the Venezuelan.

Obama, he continues, treated Mexico as an equal, jettisoning an era of U.S. congressional "certifications' of that country's efforts to deal with its [our] drug problem.

"He promised change and that's what we're seeing," Ramos wrote. "In just two days time, Obama launched a completely new policy toward Latin America."

Of course, this is what has the right-wingers so upset. Great fans of the "global" economy, their understanding is that all its participants be subservient to U.S. interests. When flashpoints arise from the hatred this unilateralism breeds, the redneck analysis is that they "hate freedom."

What they hate is something quite the opposite.

Ramos views Obama's perspective as one of give and take: That the U.S. won't stick its nose in the affairs of Latin America, but will not accept the blame for all its ills.

The prior approach, still a favorite at FOX News, was to interfere and deny the effects of that interference.

In Cuba, Obama is trying something different than his 10 predecessors, all of whom failed in their efforts to dislodge the Castro regime from power.

In an interview with Ramos, the president said, "During the past 50 years the status quo has failed to promote liberty or democracy in Cuba and I'm ready to try some new things in an effort to break up the old bosses."

Unwilling or, as we know from this side of the border, unable to renew a ban on the assault weapons causinng Mexican law enforcement so much trouble, Ramos noted that Obama has proposed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, "a relationship of mutual responsibility, of partners in a process."

The "Univision" tele-journalist said Obama reasserted his position that "round-ups" of illegal immigrants in the U.S. solve nothing and that he has communicated this sentiment to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

"I can't promise immigration reform," the president told Ramos, "because the outcome is not mine alone to determine, but it is mine to initiate a process and that I promise to do."

These items are music to the ears of our southern neighbors. Our own southerners, clumped into the Republican Party as the are, have long viewed foreign agreement with our international policy as evidence of failure, but Obama has a different understanding of the way it should work.

Ramos sees this in Obama's familiarity with soccer, which he played during that part of his childhood lived in Indonesia, and his desire to prod a return of the World Cup to the U.S. in 2018 or 2020.

"Obama no longer wants the U.S. to be the hemisphere's big brother," observes Ramos,
''except when it comes to soccer, which he wants to invite everyone to his house to play."

For conservatives who feel their world overrun by federal takeovers of financial institutions and the imagined avalanche of gay marriages eroding our nation's moral fiber, Ramos' conclusion should serve as salve:

"In spite of Obama's best intentions, it will be hard to forget that, in may ways, the United States still owns the soccer ball."

And that should make for a Happy Hannity.

Fatal Handshakes?

In Newt Gingrich's diplomacy can the roots of his disastrous marriages be discerned.

The former House Speaker from a zillion years ago thinks President Obama talking with Hugo Chavez is a sign of "weakness."

highwayscribery does not watch the morning shows, but according to "Politico," Gingrich showed up on a bunch of them today (April 20) in another effort to revive his career.

He told FOX & Friends (he's one of the friends) "Frankly, this does look a lot like Jimmy Carter."

He was being "frank," and not calculating or compulsively negative like the FOX he's friends with.

"Carter tried weakness, and the world got tougher and tougher, because the predators, the aggressors, the anti-Americans, the dictators - when they sense weakness, they all start pushing ahead."

Carter, you see, got together with people like Cyrus Vance and Zbignew Brezinski circa 1976 and said, "let's try a foreign policy rooted in weakness."

Tarring the Democratic Party with the Nobel Peace prize winner's presidency used to be a potent firearm in the Republican arsenal, but now gains no more traction than calling Obama a socialist does.

And that's because after eight years of Republican misrule, Carter doesn't look so bad...and neither does socialism.

Now let us be, er um, "frank" here. highwayscribery has very little use for Hugo Chavez. We think he is a bully and wrong to keep amending the Venezuelan constitution so that he can continue running for president.

Much the same way we think the Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg is wrong for amending voter-imposed term limits to suit his own purposes.

But we weren't talking about New York, we were talking about Chavez whom we think is undemocratic and unfair to the Venezuelan opposition.

We think he gives socialism a bad name and has not demonstrated much breadth of intellect by repeating errors of socialist governments past, rather than manifesting an accumulated acumen from lessons learned.

But we don't think talking to him at a diplomatic event is a sign of weakness. We think it is diplomatic.

Because highwayscribery has an international perspective, we are comprehending of the Latin American viewpoint, which sees that continent as something of plantation for American corporate interests.

We're also familiar with the author of the book outlining this position Chavez gave Obama. Eduardo Galeano is a serious and respected man of letters in the Spanish-speaking world who would probably have little use for the Venezuelan strongman.

The Republican Party in its current state of ineptitude lacks a response to the health care crisis or any of the daily problems it created and which the president must now spend his days trying to fix.

Piling on with their "ideas man" Gingrich were senators John Ensign of Nevada and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire.

Gregg, you'll remember, agreed to be Obama's commerce secretary, but then backed down in the purest example of his party's inability to govern and preference for obstruction.

We don't know anything about Ensign, but what little he said justifies our lack of curiosity:

"I think it was irresponsible for the president to be seen laughing and joking with Hugo Chavez. When you're talking about the prestige of the United States and the presidency of the United States, you have to be careful who you're seen joking around with."

Ensign doesn't seem to think the prestige is very sturdy if a smiley photo-op can undermine it.

Back in the days when the mainstream media used to amplify, without comment, anything the Bush administration sought to convey, bloggers had a real purpose, but President Obama's response to the manufactured hoopla over his Chavez handshake moment is better than anything we might come up with:

"We had this debate throughout the campaign, and the whole notion was, is that somehow if we showed courtesy or opened up dialogue with governments that had previously been hostile to us, that that somehow would be a sign of weakness - the American people didn't buy it. And there's a good reason the American people didn't buy it - because it doesn't make sense.

Obama noted that Venezuela's military outlays are one/six-hundreth or one six/thousandth (not sure which, but it doesn't matter) of the U.S. budget and added that, "It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States."

Quite the opposite.

Book Report: "American Made," by Nick Taylor

Writerly passion and interest can even inform a dry subject like the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

In "American Made: When FDR Put the Nation to Work," Nick Taylor takes what might be food for only the wonkiest among us and gives a fighting chance with those who merely like an interesting story.

Lists and data are inevitable in a book about a public works project and so we are often exposed to paragraphs detailing the 5,000 bridges built, 70,000 zillion miles of road paved, one million people vaccinated etc. etc.

Not that this is without merit. Conveying a story, Taylor must-needs wrestle with the second job of assembling an accurate historical document to support his conclusion that the ordinary folks of the WPA "proved to be extraordinary beyond all expectation."

The literary calculus here entails providing a political context for the WPA narrative, a focus on some of the agency's more colorful exploits, and the depiction of a nation brought to its knees by government neglect, rather than cataloguing every single deed done.

By way of background, the WPA was the newly inaugurated Franklin Delano Roosevelt's effort to provide some of the Great Depression's many unemployed millions a job.

"American Made," enjoyed a special relevance over the past few months as the Obama administration dug deep into our pockets to finance projects that would both stimulate the economy and put idle hands to doing some long-overdue repairs all around the country.

New Deal comparison were inevitable and "The New York Times" recently reported Taylor's appearance at a Gotham conference focused on the virtues of the era.

The book makes clear that, politically, little in the United States has changed over the past 80 years or so.

In an all-too-familiar role, the Republican Party of those times choked on its own insistence all economic issues be sorted out by free market while, while its subscribers and supporters belittled WPA workers as bums looking for a handout.

Last week the highway scribe saw a bumper stick in Republican north county San Diego that read: "I voted for a hero, not a handout."

Same as it ever was.

"American Made" makes clear that, when Roosevelt could squeeze money for WPA projects out of Congress, unemployment went down and economic prosperity rose. In subsequent years, when budget balancing took precedent, the whole enchilada tanked once again.

Taylor does a nice job of fleshing out the major personality behind the WPA, administrator Harry Hopkins, whose book, "Spending to Save," serves as a perfect textual response to present day budget hawks and Bible for deficit defenders such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

But it is the stories of the little people writ large by their efforts on WPA projects that gives the book its life.

These include the story of a famed international chef reduced to assuming the cooking duties in the work camp at the Timberline Lodge in Oregon.

Another tells of an Appalachian women driven to the WPA rolls and charged with delivering used books on horseback to back country folk suffering as much from mental malnutrition as physical.

The recounting of John Houseman and Orson Welles launching a voodoo-infused version of MacBeth in Harlem brings to life New York culture of the time, details left-wing infiltration in Gotham's WPA branch, and shows how Republicans and Democrats alike used it as a springboard for a rollback of New Dealism, and worse, McCarthyism.

Chapters recounting terrible natural disaster impacting a beleaguered nation carry are pregnant with commentary on the importance of never wasting human desire to thrive, be useful, and live with some dignity.

These chapters attest to the potential dividends yielded by investing in human capital and to the virtue of the democratic project when it is working best.

The author smoothly lays out transitions in the political environment while successfully linking them to changes within the WPA itself.

The New Deal and the times in which it unfolded were not static, but ever ebbing and flowing. Nick Taylor's book does a fine job of capturing the personalities, the issues that moved them, the tenor and pitch of the debate surrounding.

Under Attack

Right wingers are swinging like monkeys from one extreme political label to another in an effort to bring our president down.

None of it is working, according to Jack Glaser, a Berkeley professor who told the
"San Francisco Chronicle," that this political apoplexy, or "Obama Derangement Syndrome," comes from the Democratic President's high approval ratings.

"They can't get anything to stick to him," he explained.

A cast of crazies including Glenn Beck, David Limbaugh, and the "American Spectator" have all blatantly asserted that Obama is a "fascist," according to the article by Carla Marinucci, and Joe Garafoli.

This comes on the wings of the "socialist" tag, which was big during the fall campaign and turned out to be true, not only about Obama, but a good portion of the beleaguered American electorate.

There's an old axiom that says people have the politics they can afford.

Now, just a few days ago, highwayscribery criticized Obama for his stance on the domestic spying program initiated by the Bush administration.

But we did so not because we want Obama to fail, but because we think a rigorous challenge will keep him from adopting certain repressive policies conservative pundits are eerily quiet about largely because they support them.

Nonetheless, Sean Hannity of FOX has repeatedly promised to fight Obama-inspired "tyranny." America's most important journalist, Jon Stewart, says the wing-nuts are confusing tyranny with "losing."

How sweet it is.

Media Matters, a watchdog says that, since the president's inauguration. there have been over 3,000 references to socialism, communism, or fascism, which, anybody who lived through the 1930s can tell you, are very different things.

"Defenders of Limbaugh and other conservative pundits argue that the use of such loaded criticism is hardly unique in American politics," the article said. "They note that during the previous presidential administration, pundits on the left didn't pull any punches on President George W. Bush and often resorted to equally aggressive language - though not so early in his administration."

Well, that's because, as the conservative pundits would tell you, we're "elites," with enough education to know that the Bush regime, which meticulously meshed the projects of government and big industry, demonstrated high indices of fascistic policy.

The critique was not invented to bring him down, rather an assertion that instead of serving as counterweight to corporate power, the U.S. government had become its wing man.

The conservative ranters, by contrast, "obviously have no understanding of the history of the world, of national socialism or of fascism," Cal State Sacramento poli-scientist Michael Semler told the "Chronicle."

Semler went on to say the pundits are firing blanks, but the administration seems to think differently. Or at least is wise enough not dismiss a rain of charges merely because they have no basis in reason or reality.

Yesterday the sent out an e-mail requesting money to fight their antagonists. They're asking for $25, but will take $5 or $10.

We don't know what they plan to do with the money given that they already occupy the ultimate seat of power, but they've been wise with it before

Book Report: "Studies on Love" by Jose Ortega y Gasset

The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) made a name for himself in the 1930s with Revolt of the Masses, a book which lamented the industrial era's effect on Western culture. It created, he said, a need for specialization which led to a stunted humanity characterized by mediocrity and the "median man' of which he observed: "This planet is condemned to the reign of the median man. As such, the important task is to elevate the median as much as possible."

Ortega abhorred the dehumanizing effects of science and its handmaiden, reason, upon the life of this world. Nonetheless, as editor and publisher of the El Sol newspaper, and as the leader of his own political party in the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, Ortega was a logical voice in an era when violent passions would ultimately prevail. While not nearly as seminal a work as Revolt, a collection of Ortega's essays edited from El Sol, and packaged as Studies on Love (1939), is certainly his most charming. In this collection, Ortega, a professor of metaphysics at the University of Madrid, takes reason and trains it upon that greatest of human mysteries: Love.

Here are the results:

Ortega sets out, as a good philosopher, to define his concept and begins by debunking the equating of love with happiness. "Who doubts that the lover can receive joy from the beloved? But is it no less certain that love is at times sad as death, a sovereign and mortal torture?"

He quotes the letters of a Portuguese nun, Mariana Alcoforado, to her untrue seducer: "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the desperation you have caused me and detest the tranquility in which I lived prior to knowing you."

Love's hypothetical happiness disproved with an example, Ortega bores into his subject. Love, he maintains, is incitement. "Through a pore opened by the arrow launched from an object of affection springs love, actively directing itself toward them...It flows from the lover toward the beloved -- from me to the other, in a centrifugal direction."

As an emanation toward the object, love is not unlike hate, the difference being that love flows toward its target positively, whereas hate proffers negativity. Both, however, generate heat produced in varying degrees. "All love," he notes, "passes through phases of diverse temperature and, subtly, the language of love talks of those relations which 'cool,' and the lover complains of the beloved's tepid responses, of their coldness."

The third aspect to loves definition must naturally, perhaps hopefully, take into account the point at which lover and beloved are united.

Perfect Projection

Ortega insists that love not only errs upon occasion but is essentially an error. "We fall in love when our imagination projects nonexistent perfection upon another person. One day, the fantasy evaporates and with it, love dies."

The idea, like so many around us, is born with the Greeks: Plato to be specific. Ortega points out that for Plato, all love resides in the desire to unite the person who loves to another being blessed with perfection, in the volition of our soul toward something excellent, better and superior. "Let the reader try generating a state of enchantment -- sexual enchantment -- in an object which provides not a single aspect of excellence, and see how impossible it becomes."

Sexual instinct, he points out, may preserve the species, but does not perfect it. Throw love into the sexual mix, however, and enthusiasm for that other being, for their body and soul in union indissoluble, and what you get is a gargantuan effort to improve the breed.

"With the erotic process barely initiated, the lover experiences a strange sense of urgency to dissolve their individuality into the other, and vice versa, to become absorbed by the beloved...This recalls the doctrine of the Saint Simonians, according to which, the true human individual is the loving couple."

Our world, Ortega says, is cluttered with innumerable objects whilst the field of our conscience is very limited. The details of this world engage in a kind of fight for our attention, which supplants one object with another, according to its importance. "Mania," consequently, is a condition of focus extended beyond the limits of normality. Ortega suggests that all the great thinkers have been maniacs. "When they asked Newton how he was able to discover his mechanical understanding of the universe, he responded, 'By thinking about it day and night.'"

Love, our philosopher says, works the same way, represents an anomalous focusing of attention upon another person. "It does not constitute enrichment of our mental life," he points out, "just the opposite. It grows rigid and fixed, prisoner to a single being. Plato called it Theia mania (divine mania). Nonetheless, the person enamored has the sense of life being much richer. In the reduction of their world, it seemingly grows more concentrated."

For a lover, then, the world ceases too exist, having been supplanted completely by the beloved.

Loves Fatal Machinery

Curiously, the evolution of enchantment lacks spirituality, depending as it does upon the paralyzing of our attention -- that which regulates mental activity -- leaving the lover dependent upon a series of automatic, mechanical processes. Love, Ortega reasons, is an imposition which mocks free will. The great heartbreakers know this, that once they've managed to affix someone's attention to them, total preoccupation is possible with a simple tightening and loosening of the string attached to their romantic prey.

The lover falls under a "spell," an "enchantment." These, he notes, are words which point to love's extraordinary character. We resort to religious terminology when trying to describe it.

"The curious sharing of lexicons between love and mysticism leads one to suspect common roots." For Ortega, mysticism is also a phenomenon of attention. In the mystic, "God permeates the soul to the point of becoming confused with it, or the inverse, with the soul becoming diluted in God. Such is the union the mystic aspires to. The ecstatic perceives said union as something definitive and perennial, just as the lover swears eternal love.

"Once initiated, the process of enchantment develops with an exasperating monotony," Ortega points out. "What I mean to say is that all those who fall in love do it the same way - the smart one and the dope, the younger and the elder, the bourgeois and the artist. This fact confirms love's mechanical character."

The only exception to this mechanistic rule is found in the question of precisely what attracts the attention of one person to another. Ortega does not shrink from the challenge.

Naked in Love

By demonstrating an interest in someone, we expose much of ourselves that is hidden. "In the election of his mate, the male reveals his essence, in the election of her man, a female does the same," notes the philosopher. "The type of humanity we prefer in one another being sketches the profile or our own soul. Love is an impetus that emerges from the subterranean reaches of our person, and in traveling to the surface dredges the algae and shells of our interior with it."

Ortega posits that not unfamiliar situation which pairs a gregarious woman of beauty with a man considered low and vulgar. The judgment is usually an optical illusion because of the distance involved. Love, Ortega asserts, is the business of minute detail and the fact is that, viewed from far away, authentic love and false comport themselves in a similar manner: "But let's say the affection is genuine," he asks. "What are we to think?" One of two things: Either the man is not quite so vulgar as we thought, or the woman not so select."

The great error, vigilant since Descartes and Renaissance, is that which views human being as living by the dictates of conscience, "that small part of ourselves with which we see clearly and which operates according to our will." The greater volume of our being, he asserts, is neither free nor rational. "In vain does the woman who would be viewed as exquisite try to fool us. We have seen she loves Joe, and Joe is clumsy, indelicate; caring only for the perfection of his tie and the shine to his Rolls."

Ortega argues that a man likes most women that pass within his periphery, but this instinct rarely strikes at the depths of his person. When it does, when that aforementioned emanation springs forth and toward the other, that is love. "If it is an idiocy to say that love between man and woman contains no sexual element, it is a bigger stupidity to suggest that love is sexuality. The sexual instinct has an ample sampling of objects to satisfy it, but love is exclusivity, selection."

Beauty

Beauty is that which invites selection and Ortega tackles the concept with particular relish. "More than acts and words, it is best to focus on what appears to be less important: gesture and physiology. Because they are spontaneous, they permit the escape of profound personal secrets and do so with exactitude."

He says that society has its "official beauties," those whom people point to at parties and in the theater, as if public monuments, which in a sense they are. Ortega suggests that such women may pique a man's desire to possess, but rarely gain his love. Their esthetic beauty sets them apart as artistic objects and the distance prevents love.

"The indifferent find beauty in the grand lines of the face and in the figure -- in what we typically call beauty. For the enamored, they do not exist, the grand lines and the architecture of the person which beckon from afar, have been erased. For them, beauty is found in the scattered features, the color of the pupil, the curve at the corner of the beloved's lips, the tone of their voice."

Boys and Girls

Ortega believes that woman is more capable of this all-encompassing, almost mystic state of love. He argues that the feminine psyche is less concentric, more cohesive and more elastic, thus better lending itself to the singular pursuit, or attention, required for love. "The feminine soul tends to live by a single axis of attention and each phase of her life rests upon a single matter.

"The more masculine the spirituality, the more dislocated the soul, as if divided into separate compartments," says Ortega. "Accustomed to living upon a multiple base, and in a series of mental fields with only the most precarious connection, conquering the attention of one achieves nothing since the rest remain free and intact."

Ortega points out how the woman enamored is frequently exasperated by a sense that she never has the entirety of the man she loves before her. "She always finds him a little distracted, as if, in setting out for their rendezvous he has left, dispersed across the world, entire provinces of the soul."

For this reason, even the most sensitive of men is shamed by his inability to attain the perfection a woman is capable of lending to love.

The Message, Not the Messenger

The messenger is beloved when the message is peace, freedom, equality, rights, and other byproducts of the American and French revolutions.

A lot, but not everything, that President Barack Obama does passes muster with the highwayscribery editorial board.

Take, for example, the Obama Department of Justice brief in Jewel v. National Security Agency.

For nitty gritties we suggest you visit Glenn Greenwald's blog at Salon, where he applies an unrelenting commitment to civil rights with a constitutional lawyer's training.

In broad strokes, the lawsuit represents a legal challenge to the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping policy.

By way of recap, last year Obama and other Democrats joined Republicans in passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). This nefarious piece of legislation granted immunity to telecommunications companies that had complied with Bush administration requests to spy on their customers.

This provoked a howl of protest from civil libertarians. Congressional Democrats responded that the government, in spite of the FISA bill, could still be sued for its transgressions upon our rights.

Jewel put that promise to the test.

An unfortunate byproduct of our country's majestic process for transferring power is that new administrations get saddled with their predecessor's sins, and the Obama administration necessarily became the defendant in Jewel.

But rather than fold the government's defense and bless the claims of citizens legitimately asserting their constitutional right to privacy, Attorney General Eric Holder has done just the opposite...if not worse.

In requesting the lawsuit's dismissal, Holder asserts the state's "secret privilege" doctrine and attempts to repress evidence that might add meat to the plaintiff's boney claims.

It is identical to the Bush administration's posture which said: "We can't play ball in this court, because its rules require the exposure of information that threatens our national security...

..."trust us."

Holder then argues the doctrine of "sovereign immunity," which leans upon the loathsome Patriot Act and says you can't sue the government on illegal spying unless the pilfered information is made public.

Or, you can't sue the government for spying on you, unless it lets everyone know it has been spying on you.

Worse, it serves the double purpose of letting all Bush administration officials off-the-hook on these crucial constitutional questions.

Howard Fineman of "Newsweek" told Keith Olberman of "Countdown" that the Obama administration was engaged in a political calculus pitting its earliest and core supporters against the "intelligence community" in Washington.

Obama is an "outsider," Fineman explained, who needs the support of the intelligence community in waging the war on terror.

Being commander-in-chief is, apparently, not enough to get them to do their jobs.

highwayscribery does not know much about intelligence types since they sit on the other side of a deep cultural, political, and philosophical divide.

And highwayscribery can say it has about as much use for this particular "community" as it has for highwayscribery's civil rights.

That President Obama would expect anything from them by acquiescing to age-old tropisms evident in our political fabric suggests he may be as naive as some right-wingers insist.

The government could lose. The last administration did not fair well even in a federal judiciary system largely appointed by presidents named Bush, so that losing the case would also mean losing face, with Obama having sold-out his principals for no good reason.

As for the "earliest and core supporters," the scribe can claim initial membership and long-time relations in and with that particular army.

And this qualifies him to observe how people who never gave a hoot about politics came out of their ghettoes, border shacks, and coffee shops to rap, sing, write musical anthems, and put their street cred on the line for the president.

They did not prevail in the administration's formula on this issue, and they can hardly be expected to view this kind of expediency as some new politics fashioned by a unique leader for their own benefit.

Losing their energy and belief would be a real tragedy to the Obama narrative.

Of course, it was always going to be difficult conducting a "new" politics. Obama has been a doctrinaire liberal in many of his first steps and this has pleased the doctrinaire liberals among us, although it is new only to the extent such politics have been out of fashion for so long.

To date his politics have been to the left of President Bill Clinton's, but that is a product of the present political climate.

President Obama has been no more willing than Clinton to engage the right wing in a full-throated battle over a nominee or a law that is important to his supporters, always fearful of losing just one Republican Senate vote he rarely possesses in the first place.

Barack Obama seems a very successful politician, but his triumphs are in the old-style politics.

We see it in his financial plans, which not only leave the old order in place, but reward them with our money for the misery they've inflicted upon us.

We see it in the signing statement he made reserving the right to silence government whistleblowers not explicit in the legislation sent to him.

Of course, when he wins as an orthodox liberal we are glad, but the horse-trading and calculation represent a dark side to his old-school tics and the high price we pay for his doctrinaire leftism.

Perhaps this was inevitable, but the President was hired to do a special job on behalf of wronged, but hopeful, people the world over who look to him in a way they have looked to no other U.S. leader.

And this cannot be what they had in mind.

Kennedy on Poetry

Those who know the scribe personally understand how he has been guided by conflicting lights over the years: Jack Kerouac and Jack Kennedy. He has essentially chosen a path hacked out of the cultural forest by the former, but now and again allows himself a lapse into fantasy about public service so remarkable in the latter. Having lived longer in years than both, the highway scribe is now stuck with a process of self-invention for the remainder of the journey, or wondering if these choices in men-models were not ill-advised.

In any case, here are some thoughts Kennedy had about poetry from a speech given at Amherst College in honor of Robert Frost in September 1963. For one moment, at least, the President sounds a little something like Kerouac.

It ran in an issue of the “Atlantic Monthly” from whence it was transcribed.

A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.

The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us...

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones for our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, “a lover’s quarrel with the world.” In pursuing his perceptions of reality he must often sail against the currents of his time...

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, make them aware that our nation falls short of its highest potential.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him...

In free society art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the sphere of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation...

I look forward to a great future for America – a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens.

And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world, not only for its strength but for its civilization as well.

And I look forward to a world which will be safe, not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.

Psychedelic Surfer (reprint)

The Brotherhood of Eternal Love colored the black flag of anarchy rainbow tutti-frutti.

And it may not have considered itself such, but an excellent article in the July 2007 issue of “Surfer" magazine profiling legendary board shaper, wave hunter, film star, movie producer and all-around mad man, Mike Hynson certainly suggests they were.

The article was written by Steve Barilotti. It is not available online and we thought a highwayscribery-styled “book report” for the piece (even though it’s not a book) was in order given the great accompanying visuals, and the fact it fits a number of the blog’s themes.

Hynson was born, in Barilotti’s words, “A pure SoCal golden child with slick-backed blond hair, Ray-Bans, and a seamless straight style...an airtight package that could be readily sold to the mushrooming mid-’60s surf population and beyond.”

At bottom is Hynson, age 17, working as a shaper for G&S in Downtown San Diego.. A few years later he starred with some other guys in a famed surf film, “The Endless Summer.” the iconic poster for which (Hynson in the middle) is second from the bottom.

The rest, as they say, is surfstory.

“After ‘The Endless Summer’ broke big-time in 1966, Hynson’s look, now seen in full-page ads in ‘Surfer’ and ‘Surfer Illustrated,’ was copped shamelessly by mainstream media as the archetype of California style.”

(Just so it’s clear about what and whom we are talking about here.)

Ah, but the sixties were the sixties good friends. Look at the familiar temporal progression in the photos. Short to long hair, straight to freaky-deeky clothing, and a lifestyle shift to match them is what ensued.

Hynson, contrary to most surf-urges of the day, was a dandy who for a time owned a clothing store in La Jolla stocked completely with goods shipped in from Carnaby Street, when Carnaby Street was, well Carnaby Street.

By the time the conversion was complete, Barilotti notes, Hynson had decided to spurn the gifts laid at his feet by the gods of surf commerce. “His choice to go it alone, without the backing of a leading board house such as Hobie or G&S, resulted in his being subtly moved out of the golden light of surf-media celebrity and assigned the status of drug-addled eccentric.”

Which clearly (perhaps proudly) he was.

Barilotti jumps around a bit in his piece, choosing to lede with Hynson’s involvement as co-producer of a strange film product involving the collaboration of Jimi Hendrix known as “Rainbow Bridge,” which highwayscribery promises to review sometime in the near future.

It’s an interesting story about how Hendrix’s death held up the film’s release and how Hynson, seen in the third picture from the bottom during the shoot, and director Chuck Wein, skirted legal issues with Warner Bros., and “four-walled” the film at the South Coast Cinema in Laguna Beach, south O.C.

Present at the 1971 premiere were, “the Brotherhood of Eternal Love -- a freewheeling crew of spiritual seekers and psychedelic buccaneers...”

(More Barilotti)

“The Brotherhood, set up a church in 1966, proclaimed LSD and other mind altering drugs to be sacramental pathways to enlightenment. Their philosophies drew heavily from the preachings of psychedelic high priest Timothy Leary, who at times lived with Brotherhood members in Laguna.”

Leary was on then-President Nixon’s infamous “list of enemies” and this article suggests that the cooler, younger, sexier Hynson probably was, too, given his potential for corrupting the minds of a particularly susceptible generation.

Anyway, the premiere was a gift to a brother surfer named Johnny Gale; a crazy guy given to splashing tabs of Orange Sunshine acid at local rock audiences and who built a fortune through illegal drug sales before (surprise!) dying violently in car crash that the article suggests had something to do with those same illegal drug sales.

Also at the premiere were some local narcs of the federal stripe who did not take kindly to a portion of the film wherein some Hawaii surfers bust open a surfboard yielding a stash of Afghani hashish with a poster of Nixon hovering that read, “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

It’s easy to look back at those times as completely free and open and wild, somehow innocent and forgiving, but when you look harder you see the universal military draft, an ongoing war that, from a casualty perspective makes Iraq look like a family feud.

In that light it becomes clear that those crazy self-destructive pioneers of radical politics and sheer sensuality lived dangerously. Why they did so is for the psychologists to determine.

That movie scene, the article continues, “which brought on howls of derisive laughter from the audience, was an audacious slap in the face of Nixon, the [Drug Enforcement Agency], and especially [local narc] Neal Purcell - a bold yet foolhardy act of defiance that spurred retaliation and a global manhunt that lasted more than 25 years.”

Crazy times. Times in which the daughter of a U.S. Senator, Melinda Merryweather, could act in something like “Rainbow Bridge” and marry the psychedelic surfer/producer.

Soon after the film was screened, agents busted into Hynson’s cutting-edge shaping studio, Rainbow, and busted some of the custom boards open with rifle butts in a futile search for Afghani hash.

No one ever accused the federal government of committing the original turn of thought.

The article gets into the specifics of Hynson’s approach to shaping, the radical nature of his “rails,” which are the side parts of the board. Before Hynson, boards were flat and rounded and sat atop the water. After his innovative, razor sharp edges boards road through tubes and cut the waves up.

Fourth from the bottom is a photo of the Rainbow Surf and Juice Bar in 1973. It was designed by architect Ken Kellogg and “hand built by Hynson without a single nail or square corner,” according to the article.

Hynson’s passion was so abiding that he and a friend, “sweet-talked their way around the Sea World front office to have one of the handlers coax a trained dolphin named Cindy up on the ramp so that Hynson could meticulously trace and duplicate her dorsal fin.

“He wrote later, ‘The softness, the rounded corners the fact that it’s a natural design that works for one of God’s perfectly functional creations. And if you can put your head in that place, and maybe this fin will help, it will be the beginning of a new awareness and surfing’.”

That’s enough to know there, although the article gives lots of love to the design aspect, because it is, after all “Surfer” mag.

Journalistic requirements obligate the scribe to wind up a story you know too well. The early ’70s, the cocaine, the end of “the dream” and, once again, the dissipation of a streaking, creative spirit.

Hynson spent the last 15 years or so sleeping in garages along the San Diego County coast, doing a number of stints in jail and just trying to keep his lonely difficult life afloat.

As the article notes, “‘The Endless Summer” and the Summer of Love were long over. The mother wave of all bad Karma was feathering on the horizon, and the best Hynson could do for the next 25 years was suck it in and scratch for the bottom.”

The surf metaphors are actually more refreshing here at highwayscribery than at “Surfer” where the writers work hard concocting original prose for so specialized an interest already burdened with its own linguistic signposts.

What saved Hynson, and led to the writing of the piece, was his continued commitment to board shaping, what the article called the endless “quest for forms” ... his craft.

Hynson’s shapes are back in demand in the strange and impermeable culture of surf, he’s back on the map and, over sixty, still good with his tools.

He has a Web site and the boards are beginning to sell, which makes this fascinating story happier at the endpoint, then it has been for so many of his contemporaries.

United State of Denial

Free and easy to self-administer, denial may be a drug more dangerous than marijuana.

President Obama held an online chat March 26 in which internauts were invited to vote for the question they would most like answered.

According to Shirley Gay Stolberg at the “New York Times,” that question turned out to be about legalizing marijuana and balancing the nation’s books from the resulting tax revenues.

The president, who is a meticulous intellectual, took the economic out offered in responding, “The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.”

Fair enough. Even a country whose secretary of state admits to its “insatiable demand for illegal drugs,” can’t toke its way out of the hole we’re in.

Ms. Clinton said what she did in Mexico and further asserted that U.S. drug consumption was the cause of much murder and social havoc in Mexico.

Her remarks were made a day prior to the online chat, but they would have made a fair response to the president’s wondering what the question “says about our online audience.”

Obama, of course, knows full-well what it says, not only about the online audience, but about the country generally. It says that millions of Americans have less of a problem with marijuana use than they do with millions of Americans rotting in jail because of that use.

Now highwayscribery, the occasional heresy not withstanding, has stood four corners behind candidate Obama and the presidential version, too. And we realize he has a lot on his plate without having to be bothered with an issue like the legalization of a hippie drug.

But this is what happens when you succeed people not content to leave their misinterpretation of Jesus’ teachings in church and turn them into benchmarks for governance.

Repression begets simmering rage and then, when you decide to no longer raid medical marijuana dispensaries in states that have approved them, expectations rise.

Although it’s better than what came before, the administration’s weed policy has a whiff of the “don’t ask don’t tell” approach that always gets American liberals in trouble.

Rooted in a casual live-and-let-live attitude, it falls easy prey to the moral force of hysterics on the right, while leaving those on the left without a principled policy with which to defend it.

The Obama crowd won’t raid dispensaries for a series of bland reasons such as “it’s not a national priority,” or “it’s a matter that should be left up to the states,” which is not nearly as good or as necessary as saying, “It’s undemocratic to punish such large numbers of people with antiquated and unnecessary drug laws.”

The fear, of course, is attack from conservatives, but they’re already (and always) attacking…so screw ‘em.

In California, we have our fair share of right wing lugnuts, but they are outnumbered. And so Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a (gulp!) “San Francisco Democrat,” has reignited the debate with a proposal to legalize and tax the “insatiable” habit.

Perhaps because there is a threat of the Mexican drug wars spilling over the border, the normally staid and uptight “San Diego Union-Tribune” took on the issue, and unwittingly gave the pro-legalization crowd a boost by contracting the anti-argument job to a less-than-able advocate.

The “Yes” (we can legalize) banner was taken up by Alex Kreit, an assistant professor at the local, Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

He made it pretty quick and crisp, noting that marijuana is the state’s number one cash crop worth about $14 billion a year (by some estimates).

In case you’re a speed reader with poor retention skills, we’ll repeat: “number one cash crop.” As such it captures no tax revenue and is instead administered by Mexican gangs who behead rivals and dissolve their bodies in giant tins of chemicals.

“Frankly,” he argues frankly, “the idea that something 42 percent of all Americans, including, the three most recent presidents, have admitted to doing is still illegal is almost surreal.”

Correction.

“Surreal” refers to dream states formed in the unconscious mind. We assert, anew, that this is a case of national denial leading all the way up to our fine young president who thinks a high index of public concern about marijuana is some kind of statistical outlier.

Kreit goes on to observe that 872,721 Americans were arrested on marijuana violations in 2008. He quotes figures and cites an actual study that has our country’s youth claiming they get high more often than drunk because it’s easier to find weed than buy booze.

Putting it another way, he says, “drug cartels don’t ask for ID, but well-regulated legitimate businesses do.”

The “No” argument is advanced by one Jim Gogek, a former editorial writer for the “Union-Tribune” who “has written extensively on drug policy.”

“Extensively” does not, of course, translate into “intelligently.”

Gogek promises not to “go all reefer madness” on the reader and then proceeds to go all reefer madness on the reader.

Unlike Mr. Kreit, he cites no studies or survey, but leans upon tried-and-true tactics of the anti-marijuanites such as conjecture and doomsday prophecy.

The problem with Ammiano’s bill, he says, is that, “California cannot afford more stoned people, especially stoned young people,” even though his opposite numbers has effectively argued that repression fans usage.

For Gogek, there must be no good drunks, happy drunks, violent drunks or bad drunks, because marijuana’s impacts are universal. It saps initiative, increases confusion, and “makes you stupid.”

Like John Lennon or Walter Benjamin or Pauls McCarthy and Bowles…and the last three presidents.

But let’s give Gogek the benefit of the doubt, Marijuana is, as he posits, “the loser drug.”

And so this is the case for criminalization? Could the same argument and classification not be applied to the effects of television? Anne Coulter?

Since we’re speculating here – Gogek started it – we might assume that he spends the rest of his time arguing for the invisible hand and free markets and an economy unencumbered by the weighty hand of government.

What happens in the conservative mind that the same weighty hand they loathe to see mucking about the corporate boardroom becomes so acceptable when rifling through an individual’s stash?

Assemblyman Tom Ammiano (916) 319-2013

Letter to the Iranian Ambassador

March 26, 2009
Los Angeles, California


The Iranian Ambassador to the United States of America
2209 Wisconsin Ave. N.W.
Washington D.C. 20007

Dear Sir,

I’m writing after reading a brief news report on the uncertain fate of the journalist Roxana Saberi in the March 25 edition of the“New York Times.”

The piece reports that your government, after promising to release the woman, now may keep her in custody for months “or even years.”

I’m ignorant of the tenets governing Islamic law, but less so when it comes to the rights of human beings, and especially journalists, confronting the overwhelming power of the state.

I urge you to release Ms. Saberi. Journalism is a crucial function in the Western democracies. It permits a fully informed populace to make educated decisions about their own government and those of others with whom their countries interact in an interdependent world.

I understand that whatever medieval code you’ve decided to run your own country by probably does not extend the same courtesy to information-seekers, but it is incumbent upon me to inform you of your presence amidst other states and other peoples who conduct themselves more openly and fairly.

Who are you, in the end, to curtail the movements and box in the body and spirit of another human being? Is this something Allah desires? I should think not. What your detention of this journalist demonstrates, dear sir, is that you are running a dictatorship fearful that its own citizens, and those beyond your borders, would be repulsed if fully informed as to its actions.

The only government worth preserving is one that lives in truth. Not one that would jail it.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Book Report: "The Story of Edgar Sawtelle," by David Wroblewski

To call “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” a tragedy is to give the thing away, but there is no path around it.

From the first pages of this long tale of an ill-fated Wisconsin family, writer David Wroblewski soaks his reader in a prose that reeks of foreboding and skillfully draws-out the deep vulnerability hidden beneath layers of illusion in all of us.

There is a strange prologue involving the death by poisoning of a dog in the back streets of an unnamed Korean city during the time of America’s military action in that country.

And poison is the story here, both literally and metaphorically. “Edgar Sawtelle” tells how a fateful act committed years before can affect so many people so many years after. It tells how one bad seed in a family can poison the well for all the rest.

Wroblewski’s large and first opus is set in mid-20th Century Wisconsin on a kennel started by a man who purchased a pretty parcel from an unlucky farmer and seemed to assume and bequeath that bad luck to his son and those of his immediate family.

It is a dog story, among many other kinds of story including family drama, road adventure, and small-town yarn writ large with life’s big questions. It is certainly more than the New York Times best-seller list summary, that imparts, “A mute takes refuge with three dogs in the Wisconsin woods after his father’s death,” which turns the neat trick of getting it all wrong while being right in the particular.

But that’s why Wroblewski wrote 562 pages and not a sentence and also why writers hate summaries.

Here is a detailed dissection of life on a kennel that, even in the 1950s, “placed” dogs with owners at a clip of $1,500 each. The book reveals the patient mind-grooming associated with the training of dogs and posits that an untrained dog is almost no dog at all, a furry potential unrealized. It goes inside the mind of the boy’s favorite, the tender Almondine, with a heart-wrenching authenticity. The novel unspools a debate surrounding the pairing of mates and mixing of bloodlines and the variety of goals behind these exercises. And it dramatizes the vanity of the untrained in such a delicate science and transfers the wild strain in one family’s genes to the breed of dogs that carries their name and genius.

“Edgar Sawtelle” is a portrait of mid-century, rural America that those who lived during or near either will recognize in the make and smell of cars, the brands of boxed sweets, the unregulated Fourth of July lakeside fireworks celebration, and Edgar’s “Zebco” fishing tackle.

And it is, of course, the “Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” born mute, but so hardy his struggle to communicate and evolve like other children is seemingly forgotten by his parents at no small expense.

Wroblewski’s writing is long on description and it is a tough decision to mention this characteristic critically, while simultaneously admitting to the strong sense of time and place his book imbues the reader with. His novel does not really get cooking until about 200 pages in, but after that really becomes a page-turner, which is a way of saying you have to work with “Edgar Sawtelle,” dealing both with the extended set-up and the nerve-wracking sense that something is going very wrong.

Which is to say it succeeds at engrossing, in taking a reader beyond the bucolic façade of a kennel on a country road, and dissolving that image to reveal the terrible mistakes people can make and the resulting damage.

“The Story of Edgar Sawtelle” is a force to be reckoned with on its own terms.

Make 'Em Pee, Harry

While Republicans are debating whether Rush Limbaugh is the their leader, highwayscribery wants to reduce the significance of whatever conclusion they come to.

In "This Winning of Our Discontent," (Feb. 23) highwayscribery said this about what has become an automatic filibuster in the U.S. Senate:

[Democratic] Victories in the Senate are deemed "razor-thin" when 61-37 is something of a trouncing. Or should the scribe remind you of how votes went, say, three years ago under guys with names like Delay, Frist, and Bush?

It's razor-thin because the Republican filibuster is an unchallenged daily blessing to a struggling minority, when it should be subject to national derision.

The way the Senate operates now, all you have to do is inform the leadership of your plan to filibuster and the altered, more difficult, voting math kicks-in.

highwayscribery's suggestion is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) drop the courtesy and force Republicans to sustain their filibusters for real.

Reid should obligate them to wear catheters so they can pee while reading from newspapers, and do midnight relays to fresh senators, making a spectacle of themselves while delaying the nation's business.

(Just a thought).

The catheter reference applies to the former and late Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) who strapped one on in a game effort to prevent the enactment of the Civil Rights Act with a very long filibuster.

But that was back when filibusterers were filibusterers.

By way of primer, a "filibuster" is the extreme application of the Senate's unlimited debate rule. To kill one - to make a Senator shut up - the majority needs to muster a two-thirds vote or 60.

It is certainly no measure of highwayscribery's influence that others are beginning to wonder why we need a supermajority to enact the agenda of a president who was elected by a simple plurality.

David E. RePass in a "New York Time"s Op-ed entitled, "In Make My Filibuster" noted that what we have today are "phantom filibusters," which he notes, is clearly unconstitutional because the founders were rather specific about when supermajorities were required.

Like highwayscribery a week or so ago, RePass noted that all Senate Majority Leader Harry Read needs to do, "is call the minority's bluff by bringing a challenged measure to the floor and letting the debate begin."

We'd continue quoting from the piece, but it reads like the stuff from the Feb. 23 post and there's no need for mindless repetition...unless you're a Republican senator trying to keep country club friends from leaping into higher tax bracket.

Jean Edward Smith, also in the "New York Times," does a great historical look at the parliamentary tactic, noting how rare it was used until Republicans made it an every day thing in an effort to stymie the initiatives of that rare animal in American politics - Democratic administration - during Bill Clinton's reign.

He goes on to say:

The routine use of the filibuster as a matter of everyday politics has transformed the Senate’s legislative process from majority rule into minority tyranny. Leaving party affiliation aside, it is now possible for the senators representing the 34 million people who live in the 21 least populous states — a little more than 11 percent of the nation’s population — to nullify the wishes of the representatives of the remaining 88 percent of Americans.

Of course, the filibuster is supposed to protect these very folks from the majority's tyranny. highwayscribery does not want to get rid of the filibuster. It wants a robust filibuster characterized BY ACTUAL DEBATE.

So, we're proposing folks ride this thing for all that it's worth. There's an agenda to be put forward and a country to be fixed. The situation is too dire to let a bunch of very sore losers arrest all progress and be rewarded with an election-year claim that "The Democrats didn't get anything done."

Even a lack of success will serve to shed light on something the media has, up until today, let go on without remark. Hardy, boisterous protest will make it harder to filibuster day in and day out.

Harry Reid's number is (202) 224--3542. Call him and say:

'Make 'em pee, Harry."

A Sexy Mondale

Stefan Heym






It started with a Facebook profile picture and an Obama t-shirt.

the highway scribe was in his usual, perpetual search for work and wondering if he should remove the photo with Shepard Fairey's artwork and replace it with one starring a suit and tie.

Ever has it been, the modest cutting of sails, the cautious coiffing of locks, the camouflaging of ideas from an unforgiving mainstream in which the scribe did not swim.

Then it hit. "Wait! This guy on the t-shirt is the President! highwayscribery supports the President!"

It took some getting used to, which a while ago might have said something about highwayscribery, but now says more about what has passed for presidential timbre lo these many years.

Much the same is happening to the young conservatives profiled by the "Washington Post" in "Right, and Left Out," except in reverse.

It's a heartwarming yarn of Ian Shapira's about young conservatives spurned by the majority of their own generation, their own country, even.

Savor if you will:

"Those 18 to 29, part of the 'millennial generation,' voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the presidential election, according to polling data. Some at this happy hour [in the D.C. bar where this profile went down] won't name their employers in social settings with contemporaries because they fear it will create awkwardness."

Oh you little lambs, the highway scribe feels your pain. Has felt it, in fact, since 1980 when that whole Reagan Revolution went down.

Flush with the fever of youth and altruism, the scribe was left feeling, at the time, like some cigar-chomping, Hawaiian bowling shirt-wearing union guy from the fat '50s.

The very programs that had paid for his schools and provided a warm and secure middling malaise were suddenly being referred to as "sacred cows," ready for slaughter to feed and fuel the go-go '80s.

the scribe's concern for the poor and working stiffs was openly jeered at by his conservative contemporaries. Born into the same comfort so long after it had been built they had forgotten somebody had to build it and pay for it.

"Wimp," "limp-wristed," "weak," "naive," and other characteristics typically associated with the greatest mistake America ever made, Jimmy Carter, were callously applied to the scribe's sways between old lady liberalism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Not that one should change their politics to fit the times. highwayscribery continued to march so that Reagan would get out of Central America, chronicled as a reporter the drastic decline of American labor, and worked for Democrats who lost to nitwits in landslides.

the scribe was a kind of sexy Mondale...and that ain't easy.

The "Post" article notes that the young conservatives "worry they might not have jobs in Washington for long," that the gravy associated with hitching their car to the train in power has dried up.

the scribe understands, but still needs a good pinch now and again to believe this is all happening.

It's political Bizzaro world where bankers are dead meat and people who think in terms of community truly are Sacred Cows; like the kind in India.

President Obama can't do much about the scribe's decrepitude, but Barack has elevated the value of his social and cultural endeavors, which are locked in at around 24 years old anyway.

Sexy Mondale anyone?

Years of railing against power, writerly independence, and a joy at working to obstruct rather than build have highwayscribery aching to jump off the Obama express and get on to more typical endeavors, but the ride just keeps getting better.

Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that the federal government will stop raiding medical marijuana outlets permitted under state laws like the one we have here in California.

See, that's how Bill Clinton started rubbing people the wrong way. He let the raids happen to show how tough he was, but nobody right about now is doubting how tough Obama is.

highwayscribery has always hated the raids happening right up the street from him, here in West Hollywood, for the ugly face of government they present to the locals.

It’s the only face anti-government Republican types can stomach: The Gestapo stomping, sunglass-wearing, mustachioed suburbanites occupying our urban centers, bullying citizens and screwing up the lives of people who need weed to ease their terrible pain...or who just need their weed.

As highwaysribery noted in "A Different Approach to Life" (2006), the raids were always an outlier in those blasted culture wars:

The whole thing smacks of an attack on one class of Americans by another over a difference in approach to life.

There is no sense, on the law enforcement-and-tradition side, that one person should live one way, and a second another way, and that what defines them as Americans is their ability to exist side-by-side on those varying terms.

There is only one good kind of American. And it’s their kind.

But now there’s another kind of good American.

The President said so.

It's a policy attuned to reality where marijuana and the American public is concerned... it is not out there and up where decisions don't have anything to do with facts on the ground.

And it is at least a partial granting of writer Stefan Heym's wish for "a kind society where the human mind and the human heart are the most important elements, not the elbow."

Cecilia Lost

Snowfall of harpsichord, longing of the loon. There, these voices the slight angel offered. Such were the born fruits of June.

Catchless were the albacore lifting, were the sand dabs shifting in the ocean, in the sea world of Cecilia.

Where gentle sharks with lemon pedigree upfluffed her foam, lurched her to desire, where she faltered, where her fear wet the fire. There down under, inside deep Cecilia.

Where grass-stained colts, white-minded in the syrup and kindling of recent wombs, are lark friends and bare no ill pills for lost Cecilia and her sainted spiders...

...the noble cryptics of some shivering river.

Oh, don't cry Cecilia. Don't ripple dark pools with the juice of your sadness. Don't let the passing of things hasten your own passing.

Kick and scream. Drape in amber madness every battle you wage. Drink more scotch. Taunt freely the ravages of age.

Lady of sheep. Sand merchant of sleep on the gasping moors and plain. What is your name, Cecilia? Tell us where you live, and what it means, or where your trail without footsteps leads.

(collage by Antonio Mendoza)

What Lefties Like

Rep. Vito Marcantonio, "The Goodfather."








The old revolutionary yearning having passed with the Sandinistas, what The Left wants these days is an end to war and taxes on the very rich - the top one percent rich.

Simple as that.

You can talk new politics till the cows come home, but either you're taxing people at the top of the income pyramid or the unwashed down at the bottom.

What can be "new" is the direction in which spending that tax revenue leads a nation, but left/right battles typically come down to who pays.

The unwashed, who started this whole economic cycle somewhere in the middle, have paid for so long now they're closer to the bottom, and so, according to the "New York Times," President Obama plans to slash the deficit all these bailouts, stimuli, and relief efforts are creating by changing the existing calculus.

The articles observes that, "The reduction would come in large part through Iraq troop withdrawals and higher taxes on the wealthy."

Presto! Some $9 billion a month saved and tons of international goodwill earned by ending the bloodiest boondoggle on the national credit card.

Yes, credit card, because the Bush administration never levied a tithe to pay for its violent crusade. It merely passed the price onto those too young to vote or yet unborn.

Which was easy except the bill came due much sooner than expected.

And that may be because of certain "accounting gimmicks" instituted by the Bush crowd that the Obama gang has decided to scotch.

What were those gimmicks?

That's a good question.

The answer: Leaving the costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, along with Medicare reimbursements to physicians, out of the formula.

Jackie Calmes' "New York Times" article on this subject does not contain a single dissenting voice to balance the account because there are none.

Not even the Limbaugh/Coulter axis has the chestnuts to claim leaving your largest expenditures off the balance sheet is some article of faith to the conservative shock troops.

But without the gimmicks, their supply side, relieve-the-rich-of-taxes mantra will be harder than ever to peddle.

That's because it was pap, and cant, and crap, and now it's okay for writers to come out from the shadows and talk about taxing the rich as an option to giving them a perpetual free ride.

Michael Thomas of the "New York Observer," puts it in the context of making private capital pay something for the exploitation of public capital.

"What's public capital?"

Another good question and fair indicator of where we've traveled as a country on such questions.

As primer, highwayscribery recommends you read great turn of the (19th) century muckrackers such as John L. Mathews, whose "Mr. Ballinger and the National Grab Bag," describes how the all the waters in water-rich Oregon ended up lining the purses of a few self-interested operators.

It is no longer recognized that this country's natural resources were once considered a public trust, meaning they belonged to the people and the benefits they rendered should necessarily accrue to the people.

Just before leaving office, Bush leased a bunch of wild Utah land to oil and natural gas companies for exploration.

There was a great outcry, but the claims were largely environmental. Opponents expressed anger the leases would despoil the landscape near treasured national parks and taint virgin land.

Nobody questioned the executive branch's right to sell the peoples' land to profit-seekers, when that same executive branch was ideologically opposed to taxing profit-seekers so that the people might see a proper return.

If you follow.

As late as 1935, highwayscribery favorite Rep. Vito Marcantonio spoke in favor of a bill to eliminate public utility holding companies from operating and selling securities to profit from the exploitation of public property.

Here's what he said:

"If it be radicalism to believe that when God said, 'Let there be light,' that that light should be used for the benefit of a few exploiters; if it be radicalism to believe that our national resources should be used for the benefit of all of the American people and not for the purpose of enriching just a few; if it be radicalism to smash, to abolish, and to surgically eradicate these companies which have been throttling the life of America and siphoning out the lifeblood of American consumers, then, ladies and gentlemen of this House, I accept the charge. I plead guilty to the charge; I am a radical."

And so is highwayscribery.

Book Report, "A Man Without a Country" by Kurt Vonnegut

Had Kurt Vonnegut died last month his literary goodbye, "A Man Without a Country," might have been brighter.

Maybe the sea change in American politics was already affecting Vonnegut when he passed on April 11, 2007, but this book, his last sigh, had been published in 2005.

That means it would have been written the year before, an annus horribilis, marked by the American peoples' unfortunate validation of George W. Bush's presidency.

So Vonnegut, an avowed socialist, was pretty soured on the United States. And that resulted in his swan song being a mixture of a trademark whimsy and heavy doses of dead seriousness.

For the book-loving, Vonnegut unpacked this chestnut:

Do you realize that all great literature -- "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," "The Bible," and "The Charge of the Light Brigade," -- are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

Maybe it's a relief if you've lived well and are on the way out, but if a good stretch of road is still in front of you, not so much.

In "Man Without..." the famed writer riffed often on the oil problem, our national addiction, and the increasingly desperate decisions being made by the country's leaders to placate that addiction.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet -- and the only one in the whole Milky Way -- with a century of transportation whoopee.

But, as can be seen from this quote's opening beats, oil addiction is but a symptom. It's the human race that rots.

Why was Vonnegut a man without a country? Here's a decent stretch, long in inches, but short in bandwidth, wherein he lays out his case in the writerly way:

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.
That's correct.
Millions spent on public health are inflationary.
That's correct.
Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.
That's correct.
Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.
That's correct.
The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment's notice, the safer humanity is and the better of the world will be that our grandchildren inherit.
That's correct.
Industrial wastes, and especially those that radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.
That's correct.
Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: Bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.
That's correct.
That's free enterprise.
And that's correct.
The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn't be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.
That's correct.
The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.
That's correct.
The free market will do that.
That's correct.
The free market is an automatic system of justice.
That's correct.
I'm kidding.

Which reminds us of how good writers communicate deep concepts with simplicity and economy.

Vonnegut was dead-set against the war in Iraq. His chief grievance was the unprovoked nature of the military action and he drafted a historical parallel with the U.S. invasion of Mexico in the 19th Century.

More than a decade before his Gettysburg Address, back in 1848, when Lincoln was only a Congressman, he was heartbroken and humiliated by our war on Mexico, which had never attacked us. James Polk was the person Representative Lincoln had in mind when he said what he said. Abraham Lincoln said of Polk, his president, his armed forces' commander-in-chief:

Trusting to escape scrutiny, by fixing the public gaze upon the exceeding brightness of military glory - that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood - that serpent's eyes, that charms to destroy - he plunged into war.

Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!

We told you there was whimsy melded into book's gloomy view.

One chapter revisits an old Vonnegut favorite about the simplicity of successful story structure, but then goes a step further wherein he demonstrates why "Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho," whose true virtue was that he told the truth in a world where the truth is in short supply.

A lifetime of literary creation and consumption led our subject to crown poet Carl Sandburg a personal favorite, and Ambrose Bierce's "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," as a "flawless example of American genius like, 'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove."

He warns writers off using semi-colons, "transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing." And then, after using one, remarks, "The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules."

"Man Without a Country" plugs Eugene Debs and plies the sad story of Ignaz Semmelweis.

This gentleman convinced his unbelieving fellow doctors that leaving the morgue after doing autopsies to perform surgery on live patients, without washing their hands first, was causing a lot of death.

It is a story of truth spurned and suicide and one of the reasons, along with Vonnegut's presence at the firebombing of Dresden, he lost hope in the human race.

Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people, too. I am a veteran of the Second World War and I have to say this is not the first time I have surrendered to a pitiless war machine.

My last words? "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."

Perhaps it was the responsibility of Vonnegut's editor to loyally assist in the assaying of a downer document. We expect these things from older people. Their pessimism completes the arc of our devolutionary intellectual development.

But we also expect wisdom from a life lived well and fully. So highwayscribery is going to step in and close this report with something that appeared at the beginning of the book and, for that reason, may have been lost to those who closed "A Man Without a Country,' in gloom.

It is advice with which highwayscribery agrees, often propounds to novice writers, and finds worthy of such a fine man and artist:

If you want to hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created to something.

"Vedette Does La Danza" in San Diego

Here are some photos from a performance of "Vedette Does La Danza" in San Diego last month.

Here a few poems from "Vedette" for textual contrast:






Old Ladies in Love Forever

it was gray
gray in the port of Cadiz.

of salted dogs and
shadows sliding silkily
through gray water.

and Saint Mary there
with her swallows
that sleep and sing
on the gray bridge
yawning across
Cadiz.

Cadiz.
who has been in love
and gray for
centuries with
the sea.

the sea/
and her downy
arms mad for
she of the pearl gray
and gulls
and black sandy
necklace.


Tomatito’s Last Words

“Pine, thistle, loon
A minnow a slippery spoon
Saltwater lollipops
Freezing for the sun,
Melt under gun
Thunder moon.”


Prison Verse for Clara Montes

In the misery and iron concrete of jail,
the most passionate of flowers are grown.
From them all meanness and pain must sail.
They are watered in dreams clinging and known.

Blind all your singers, rape the sweet girl.
What is fair takes time, but will come.
Folded between hope and heart is the pearl,
of new children and the paths they will run.

In this Winning of Our Discontent

Why is the winter of our winning becoming the winter of our discontent?

The media narrative has President Obama denied bipartisan support and schooled in the harsh realities of Washington politics, failing his core constituencies and settling for a plan that is not "stimulative" enough (which "spellcheck" agrees is not a word).

"New York Times" columnist Paul Krugman says "Mr. Obama's victory feels more than a bit like defeat."

Except that it's a victory.

Joan Walsh at "Salon" says Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) "humiliated" the President by accepting and then rejecting his offer to head the Department of Commerce.

Except that he'll go back to being one of a minority in the Senate and the President will still be the President with large majorities in both houses.

"The compromise stimulus is probably better than nothing," she writes. "With its expansion of food stamps and unemployment benefits, its tax rebates for low-income workers, aid to states and cities and billions for infrastructure projects."

Sounds good right?

"BUT," Walsh continues, "it won't be as effective as a bigger spending bill would have been, and let's hope Obama doesn't come to regret how much he gave Republicans to get so little."

and later:

"He better have learned that Washington bipartisanship is dead."

It has been dead and not fixing it on the first go-round is hardly a failure. Lacking a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Obama got the support of three senators who do not occupy red meat conservative seats. And they delivered him a stimulus package.

Glenn Greenwald, also of "Salon," accuses liberal groups of precipitating this non-debacle by, "subordinating their concern about issues to their support for the party and its leading politician."

That leading politician, of course, being the guy we all broke our asses and wallets to get elected: Barack Obama, the man who renovated the Democratic Party and won states south and west long-treasured by rank-and-filers.

"During the 2008 election," he noted, "Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas."

That's because his Ideas where their/our ideas.

Krugman is a brilliant, Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Walsh a darling and charming soldier of progressive forces, and Greenwald a hard-boiled walking left-litmus test who keeps his eye on the issue rather than the personality.

But they are not helping things.

Each, as a loyal member of the anointed commentariat, is allowing the mass media's narrative focus on stimulus to block out their own sun and bum the rest of us out.

Day in day out, the Obama administration is doing what progressives, liberals, leftists, or whatever flag you fly under, had prayed for, but feared never would happen.

Every place in government, in ways big and small, whether it's admitting the Earth is getting warmer, cancelling energy industry fire sales offshore and on treasured Western lands, undoing a conservative Supreme Court's ruling by signing the Lilly Ledbetter Law, forestalling foreclosures, or appointing a pro-union Latina to the Labor Department, we see change we dared not dream of in the darkest days of the Bush era.

But romps in the House of Representatives are tainted by the fact Obama "failed to garner a single vote," from the GOP, when the failure, of course, is their own.

Victories in the Senate are deemed "razor-thin" when 61-37 is something of a trouncing. Or should the scribe remind you of how votes went, say, three years ago under guys with names like Delay, Frist, and Bush?

It's razor-thin because the Republican filibuster is an unchallenged daily blessing to a struggling minority, when it should be subject to national derision.

The way the Senate operates now, all you have to do is inform the leadership of your plan to filibuster and the altered, more difficult, voting math kicks-in.

highwayscribery's suggestion is that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) drop the courtesy and force Republicans to sustain their filibuster for real.

Reid should obligate them to wear catheters so they can pee while reading from newspapers, and do midnight relays to fresh senators making a spectacle of themselves while delaying the nation's business.

(Just a thought).

If the Republicans' desire is that they should glue themselves to one another while walking over a cliff, than liberals should be glad of it.

They are not insulting Obama or the Democrats. Rather they are flipping a middle-finger at the American people, who are suffering and currently of a unified mind regarding the man and party they want running things.

Those senators and representatives of the GOP, in herding together like hunted buffaloes (which they are), will have a hard time separating themselves out should the public render a negative verdict on their obstinate groupthink, which is very likely.

Paul Krugman is much smarter than the highway scribe, who agrees with him and would like to see more money spent on good things for a beleaguered people.

But there are doubts and they are legitimate.

The package is enormous and backed by the questionable force of an already overheated U.S. Mint. As most Americans are now painfully aware, spending with one hand while borrowing with the other usually triggers a law of diminishing returns.

There needs to be a balance and to the extent the opposition party used a scalpel to trim things and orient some of the package toward their own constituents, the system is working the way it was designed to.

The stimulus bill represents the largest nonmilitary expenditure since the Great Depression and deals a telling blow to Republican dreams of burying forever the New Deal and the idea of government activism.

No wonder they are of one mind. What's perplexing, and the reason for this post, is that our joy doesn't match their despair.

The president compromised and got nothing for it.

But he remembers -- where Walsh, Krugman, and Greenwald don't -- that the idea is to look beyond the other party to the people they represent...and govern for the entire country.

We just got through with a guy who governed for one half of the populace simply because he had the votes.

His gang's gone. Obama would like a more enduring coalition like the one that lasted for some 40 years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt assembled it.

You win big by being big, not petty.

This stimulus debate, which has consumed our media's narrow bandwith of attention, at the expense of many other issues, is naught but an opening night performance.

As the day-in-day-out business of legislating the country's future unfolds, a filibuster will not serve at every turn nor will its giddy impact on a dwindling Republican base resonate quite so strongly as in the first round.

Because the reality will set in on both sides of this national debate.

Obama-nation Day 16

Our Change New World continues apace with the Obama administration moving promptly and correctly on a number of fronts.

The President announced limits on executive pay for companies receiving taxpayer-subsidized bailouts of their self-induced declines.

Such an act under the Bush administration would have been unthinkable.

"This is America," the President said. "We don't disparage wealth. We don't begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset -- and rightfully so -- are executives being rewarded for failure. Especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers."

highwayscribery, for the record, gets upset at the outsized bonuses and golden parachutes earned by executives even when companies thrive. It is looting what belongs to all the workers and contributes to the dismaying drift of national wealth upward to the richest one percent..

Elsewhere, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar silenced certain environmental critics by dashing the Bush administration's fourth quarter effort at leasing some 77 parcels of land to oil and natural gas companies in Utah.

The "Washington Post" reports that, "Salazar's decision, which reverses the Bush administration's move to allow drilling on about 130,000 acres near pristine areas such as Nine Mile Canyon, Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument -- is one of a series of steps that the new administration and congressional Democrats are planning to reshape federal regulation of drilling, mining, lumbering and other resource-tapping activities both on U.S. soil and offshore."

That doesn't have mean an end to energy exploration. It just means the eight-year fire sale Bush threw for his industrial cronies is over and we'll start doing these things, er, um intelligently again.

It was part of a move the Bush crowd made to govern after they were out of government, which has failed remarkably. When you leave, you leave, and whatever you made "law" can be unmade...eventually.

The president, either before or after he capped the pay of greedy executives, then signed a measure appropriating $32.8 billion for the State Children's Health Insurance Program. It's a move that will extend coverage to 4 million kids the former president didn't think the country could afford.

"I refuse to accept that millions of our children fail to reach their full potential because we fail to meet their basic needs," said Obama. "In a decent society, there are certain obligations that are not subject to trade-offs or negotiations, and health care for our children is going to be one of those obligations.."

To which we have nothing to add.

Meantime, Energy Secretary Steven Chu was reversing eight years of government denial on global warming in an interview with the "Capitol Weekly."

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he soberly informed. "We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California. And I don't actually see how they can keep their cities going either."

Maybe that's some kind of Republican wet dream since their presence and influence in the state is nil. If California dries up, there's going to be a big migration back into all those empty red states.

But that would make them Blue.

And speaking of heat, the "Los Angeles Times" reports how the President is now turning it up on Republicans.

The piece by Peter Nicholas observed that Obama went a long way toward appealing to the GOP and upsetting his own party in crafting a stimulus plan, "that relied heavily on tax cuts rooted in Republican economic doctrine."

For Democrats such capitulation has always been what "bipartisan" truly means, and it seems Republicans have grown so used to it, they forgot to pat the president on the back.

In fact, as Michael Hiltzik, also of the "Los Angeles Times," noted, the GOP has engaged in a deceptive and hypocritical campaign to discredit the stimulus plan by isolating specific measures and distorting their reach and purpose to the American people.

Having extended a hand in cooperation, Obama was met with the familiar fist of GOP obstinacy. And he didn't like it.

The Writer President, in an Op-ed penned for the "Washington Post," had this to say:

"In the past few days, I've heard criticisms of this plan that frankly echo the very same failed theories that helped lead us into this crisis in the first place -- the notion that tax cuts alone will solve all our problems, that we can address this enormous crisis with half steps and piecemeal measures and tinkering around the edges, that we can ignore fundamental challenges, like the high cost of healthcare, and still expect our economy and our country to thrive. I reject these theories and, by the way, so did the American people when they went to the polls in November and voted resoundingly for change."

Now we're getting somewhere!

But there is more to go.

Yesterday, in Los Angeles, the Drug Enforcement Agency applied its usual Gestapo tactics in shutting down some medical marijuana dispensaries.

California, for those of you who don't know, approved by way of ballot initiative the establishment of such outlets 13 years ago.

We hope that, as Attorney General Eric Holder's influence permeates the Department of Justice, this choice made by California voters is respected and the harassment stopped.

California is entitled to some deference while the federal government deserves a more humane face.