highwayscribery

War is Over

2011-12-31T17:04:00.001-08:00

Troops in America have truly come home. The war is over.

Or one of them anyway.

Wars rarely end to the same kind of fanfare with which they are launched. It is one thing to rush off and get holes blown through you, it is another to lick your wounds and quietly carry your fallen comrades home.

Like all of them, but more so, the Iraq War was a horrible war.

It involved the deaths of countless innocents. No class, creed, gender or age group was spared. No one was spared.

Somebody casually mowed down a line of fish-frying stands along the river, killing all the merchants who had maintained them for years. Another madman blew up a United Nations building full of people bearing food and medicine. There were the burned U.S. contractors hanging from a bridge, macabre marionettes in Falloujah. The middle-aged female aid worker whose resume read like Mother Theresa's, kidnapped, videotaped in misery, and left to the side of the road with a few bullets in her.

the highway scribe could go on, but as a practical and mechanical exercise, it would take more than a lifetime to chronicle the million little horrors that unfolded in Iraq over the past ten years. It would go on and on through the decades: the highway scribe sitting behind a manual typewriter as Iraqis came and recounted the way a bomb went off in the market where they were shopping, shattering their psyches forever, or about the family who misread the soldiers' signs at a checkpoint and were killed with machine-gun spray through their windshield.

highwayscribery's allegiance has always been to the little girl playing with a kitten in the courtyard, and favors policies that ensure, at all costs, she is not the victim of violence cooked-up with special malice in some weapons laboratory.

Such policies were not in evidence in Iraq.

Opposition to the war was intense before it began. The country was split between those who saw an immature man in search of something easy to legitimize his shaky presidency, and those who thought the problems of the Arab world were just a few quick fighter-jet strikes away from being solved.

These latter generated no great passion and the administration resorted to some "mushroom cloud" nonsense. They had only marginal success with that. Bush went ahead with the plan anyway. Colin Powell was the administration's Kabuki artist at the U.N. where he lied to the world and truncated his promising political career.

The American left, lampooned and characterized as usual, hit the streets with dignity and impressive force. Large numbers came out to oppose the adventure and the president applauded our democratic state because they were "allowed to express their opinion," if not to necessarily have it acted on.

There were brawls, arrests, and beatings between protestors and police, and citizen against citizen. The policy further widened schisms in American life, confirming the progressive lesson learned in the 2000 presidential elections: your vote and voice matter less than you thought.

They bombed the crap out of the place. It was really something of a slaughter, even where the Iraqi army was concerned. Built up into "elite" cadres and "seasoned" outfits by a media constructing a narrative from embedded positions within the U.S. military, they turned out to be what would you might have expected prior to the PR blitz: A tinhorn operation with as much chance of resisting U.S. forces as the Washington Generals do of beating the Harlem Globetrotters.

But this was a Republican project, the Democrats lamblike acquiescence notwithstanding. Once the president made an idiot of himself around the world by strutting on an aircraft carrier in pilot's suit and declaring "Mission Accomplished," there was no plan.

The parallels between the government response to Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the post-invasion plan for Iraq are simple and direct. A party that disdains government, is actually quite poor at governing, administrating, and statecraft.

So, in the early heady weeks, when administration officials swooped in to done flak jackets and collect a war photo for their personal collection, they made some rather careless, poorly developed decisions that opened up an insurgency.

Especially in 2004 through 2006, Iraq became an inferno of massive civilian bombings that could kill hundreds, and ferocious battles like Fallujah that verged on extermination of the local peoples.

Some 4,500 Americans were killed. Another 38,000 flood the veterans hospitals now. It's the usual stuff, missing limbs, brain damage, wheel chairs, prosthetics, grim striving, vivid agony.

The numbers and suffering of Iraqis were far worse. It is not at all ironic that they had no say in whether their country should be invaded in a fashion that was designed to "shock and awe."

That is the logic of most wars. Some will play at it. Many more will suffer it. Little girl in the courtyard beware.

There are no ticker tape parades as the troops trickle home, another clean-up job left to President Obama. We don't know if the work and money left behind will uphold and sustain a true democracy. Iraq reminds us that distinct cultures make homes of varying quality for civic life.

Attempts to install the instruments of modernity run up the grain of very established practices and, unfortunately, may not be possible.

In Iraq we must wait and see what the balance of our efforts their be.

But maybe there is a quiet joy in the land, at least in the homes of those directly affected by the war, the people hired to fight it and the families left alone because of it.

Nobody escape unharmed, that is certain, but people did escape and for them it is going to be a happy new year.

The war's end should make it one for you, too.

Book Report: "I married you for happiness," Lily Tuck

2011-11-02T11:10:00.001-07:00

I Married You for Happiness by Lily Tuck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Early evening, a woman's husband comes home, greets her, goes up to their bedroom and dies. She spends the night by his side, looking back on their happy marriage.

That's the plot, such as it is, to author Lily Tuck's "I Married You for Happiness."

Philip and Nina are worldly, educated, and well-traveled so that the stuff of their otherwise anonymous lives does not weigh the reader down in boring, quotidian minutiae.

She is a painter. He is a mathematician specializing in the field of probability. The novel is peppered with lectures on this topic, some to his students, some to his wife. These can be interesting or opaque and difficult to understand.

Even in the latter case, Tuck manages to make it sound good and it's not beyond reason to suspect there was something in the language associated with probability that she found pleasing to the eye and ear.

As Philips examples and scenarios accumulate, it seems the author is trying to say this happy marriage, with its ebb and flow, glories and pratfalls, was something that might or might not have occurred given the laws governing chance and that, even though it panned out, it was not meant to be forever.

Ms. Tuck is a prior winner of the National Book Award and her command of craft is patent in "I married you for happiness."

The remembering takes place as the night winds on. The reader is kept abreast of the changing light outside, the passing of cars, and barking of dogs. You know Philip is dead and the recollections are more poignant because we know this woman will have no more of them.

There is no chronology. The memories are placed by the author in places she needs them most, the musings on probability the same, yet for all this temporal disorder, an overall impression of control and order seep from this thin tome.

Maybe it's the two lives detailed that imposed the order.

Those with happy marriages can mourn along with Nina, even apply the exercise to their won coupling. Those less fortunate can indulge in a kind of guilty pleasure, absolved, up to a point, by the underlying theme of chance and likelihoods.

View all my reviews

Jerry Brown: A Literary Appreciation

2011-10-25T17:32:00.000-07:00

Let us not praise him for leaning left or right, rather for being an uncommon artifact in a world of windblown bluffers.

And let us not confuse this post as a political endorsement of California Governor Jerry Brown (D).

The purpose here is to focus on someone who meets our special highwayscribery threshold for the successful mixing of politics and literature.

Brown, as might be expected, and as this article in "Capitol Weekly" attests to, is comfortable with a book.

The article does a detailed review of the governor's library, which includes Melville's "Billy Budd," a tome on "Christian Monasticism," Kevin Starr's "California," "The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture," Beat poet Gary Snyder's "The Old Ways," and much more: a well-detailed map of one Renaissance man's mind-stamp.

"Yes highway scribe," you shake your head, "that's very impressive, but how does his literary bent inform his work as governor? Is there a difference between a west Texas bumpkin, and a fellow who sets himself up as an intellectual, when it comes to horse-trading and dispatch of the National Guard?"

Glad you asked and hard to say.

It's not much, but by way of first-hand experience, highwayscribery can say the governor handled the 600 bills sent him by the California legislature, almost all of them at the end of September, differently than other's he's covered including Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), George Deukmeijian (R), or Gray Davis (D).

(We skipped the Wilson years)

Typically, the bills begin to trickle out as they are signed. Some are posted on a governor's web site or announced in press releases by his office, some on the web pages of legislators who sponsored the measures. Reporters also break the news before it's available from the public record.

It's willy-nilly and in tune with the frantic note set by the closing days of the legislature.

This fall, Brown disappeared while those of us waiting on the final disposition of bills we'd followed for months waited and wondered. What was Brown doing? There was a deadline and, with about five days to go, he had only acted on a handful of measures.

The signing and veto messages were finally released in a staggered fashion, smartly grouped by issue. These issues (environment, transportation, public safety, etc.), for the most part, jibed with those Brown campaigned on as priorities.

They were the stuff of PR: "Gov. Brown Signs Bills Protecting California's Lakes, Streams and Coastlines," but were presented in the form of an argument and as the expression of an overall policy. It-

"C'mon highway scribe," you interrupt, "that because Brown know the state machinery inside out. You can't attribute that to the fact he read some Beat poet."

Point taken.

Over time the record has shown art to be no great civilizer, nor artists benighted with special human graces.

In "My Last Sigh," filmmaker Luis Bunuel wrote of the Spanish Civil War:

"I tell myself that all the wealth and culture on the Falangist side ought to have limited the horror. Yet the worst excesses came from them; which is why, alone with my dry martini, I have my doubts about the benefits of money and culture."

This second article from "Capitol Weekly," suggests that Brown's reading has at least informed his veto and signing messages, which, unlike those who came before him, writes his own.

The reporter, Greg Lucas, notes that "Brown has been brusque, pithy, candid, acerbic, droll, trenchant, and even a tad persnickety - sometimes all in the same veto message. His penchant is brevity, simplicity, and precision in word choice."

The article quotes Brown's communications director, Gil Duran, as saying, "He's a writer. he pays very careful attention to what he's saying and how he says it. Why use a word with three syllables when you can use another with only one?"

There are good answers to that, but they'd take up another article and that's not happening.

Here we sought only to examine the literary and legislative habits of one character in current American political theater.

Chile: A Dead Poet's Society?

2011-06-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

"I was alone like a tunnel. The birds fled from me,
and night swamped me with its crushing invasion."
Pablo Neruda

The past, they say, dies hard.

And so did poets, musicians, and other dreamers who, decades ago, tried to make Chile a more fair and just society.

You don't read about these things in the United States, which is why highwayscribery's sleepy editorial board has decided to apply the blog's efforts at informing the uninformed.

It was reported in the Spanish daily, "El Mundo," that a Chilean court has ordered an investigation into the death of Pablo Neruda, "The Poet of Love."

Neruda, (pictured at right) for those of you who did not see the Miramax production of "The Postman" (Il Postino), was a rock star poet whose work was known and beloved throughout the world in spite of the fact he was a dyed-in-the-wool communist.

Or because of it. Who knows?

The last of his kind, Neruda typified an early-to-mid-twentieth century intellectual who worked as hard generating beauty as he did justice.

We'll not engage a curricula vitae of his work in poetry and politics here. Suffice it to say, he served in the Chilean senate, ran for the presidency, and secured the Nobel Prize for Literature.

An important and worthwhile man who touched millions.

The poet died 12 days after a sanguinary general by the name of Augusto Pinochet led a Sept. 11, 1973, coup d'etat which overthrew Neruda's close friend, the left-wingy, but legally elected, Salvador Allende (at left).

The poet was ill with advanced prostate cancer at the time. He died, it was officially reported, after his condition was exacerbated by watching his friends being rounded up, tortured, and killed.

President Allende, for his part, was assumed to have shot himself before butchers in the Chilean military could lay their cold and grimy paws on him.

Enough of the dictator's acolytes are either dead or senile now to permit a thoroughgoing examination of these claims without Chile sliding back into the bloody horror of the 1970s and '80s.

To that end, Allende's body was recently exhumed for a forensic examination that will hopefully reveal the true nature of his death.

As for Neruda, his chauffeur, one Manuel Araya, recently told a story that conflicted with the official version peddled once the poet's voice was stilled.

Araya says that Neruda was fine, walking about, and ready to be flee the country in a plane Mexico's then-President Luis Echevarria had put at his disposal.

According to the driver, Neruda sent Araya and other helpers to get some personal belongings. When they returned, the poet was dead, with a big, red, bloody blotch, staining his stomach.

Araya insists the poet was injected with a lethal chemical cocktail by a doctor at the clinic in question.

Not surprisingly, nor out of character with the incoming regime's practices, Araya was then arrested and sent to the national stadium where so many unfortunate progressives met their terrible end.

Some Neruda "experts" have contradicted Araya's account, but it should be pointed out that he was present on the poet's last day, and the biographers and academics were not.

Similarly, it is worth noting that Neruda's death mirrored that of way too many others.

Long after the state was secured, Pinochet's thugs made a habit of showing up to the houses of journalists, writers, and opposition activists in white vans, 'round midnight, and pulling them from the frantic arms of loved ones.

These unfortunates invariably "disappeared," and their bodies are still being searched for to this day.

As for artists, the dictatorship reserved a special disdain and exquisite cruelty.

highwayscribery long ago drafted an intense post designed to memorialize the life and death of singer/songwriter/guitarist Victor Jara.

The post noted that, as the coup unfolded, "Jara was singled out for special treatment. The charming men who saved Chile from godless communism and agrarian reform took delight in breaking his hands and then daring him to sing without the benefit of a guitar.

Few witnesses survived the massacre, so we must trust or distrust the legend which has Jara singing the anthem of Allende’s Unity Party, and being joined in chorus by others awaiting their own turn to be broken on the wheel.

And then they killed him. A pop star."

Which is to say, Araya's story doesn't seem far off the mark at all. Certainly, a Neruda in exile would have been, to say the least, nettlesome for the U.S.-backed dictatorship.

And if it seems to some that this is dredging-up old stuff, chasing water under the bridge, remember that great poets -- like all people -- are entitled to their story.

If Neruda's tale ended with a clinically induced death at the hands of lowly men, then his life and its end take on a more tragic and ironic cast than currently understood.

And that is a swan's song that deserves singing.

Mexico and the Death of Poetry

2011-04-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Few are the times we'd choose death as an option when offered others, but one such time is in the case of your own child.

Nobody wants to outlive their kid.

In Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon unleashed a civil war against drug cartels that has claimed the lives of nearly 60,000 since 2006, a lot of parents are burying their children.

Most of them are anonymous and stained with the implication of having been involved in the drug trade.

But last week, the savages whom ply the death hovering over Mexico like a toxic cloud, picked on the child of a man with a voice.

One of the six, ill-fated young fellows found tortured and asphyxiated, in a car south of Cuernavaca, was the son of noted Mexican poet Javier Sicilia who had to get the news while working in the Philippines.

They were killed by gangsters for having alerted authorities to shady behavior for being citizens. On the plane ride home, Sicilia wrote a poem to his boy.

highwayscribery has done his best to translate:

The world is no longer worthy of the word
(El Mundo ya no es digno de la palabra)

They have drowned it inside us
(Nos lo ahogaron adentro)

In the same way they suffocated you
(Como te asfixiaron)

In the same way they clawed out your lungs
(Como te desgarraron a ti los pulmones)

And the pain refuses to leave me
(Y el dolor no se me aparta)

All that is left is a world
(Solo queda un mundo)

For the silence of the just
(Por el silencio de los justos)

For your silence and my silence alone, Juanelo.
(Solo por tu silencio y por mi silencio, Juanelo).

When Sicilia (pictured above) arrived in Mexico he read the poem and added, “It’s my last poem. I can’t write poetry. Poetry no longer exists in me.”

And so another voice, a precious one, was silenced by heartless beings who resist application of the term “human.”

Forgive us if piling politics on top of poetry seems inappropriate in this instance, but that’s what we promise and pledge here at highwayscribery: politics, poetry and prose.

Back in 2006, when the Mexican presidential campaign was in full swing, this blog surprised no one with its full-throated support of the left-wing offering, Manuel Lopez Obrador.

An outspoken advocate for the poor, a strong candidate with a healthy coalition of peasants, unionists, and urban hepcats, he was defeated through a combination of cynical Madison Avenue-styled attacks from his opponents and, when that did not work, screwed by the country’s supreme court.

Sound familiar?

Calderon, a diminutive nerd with an educational pedigree in the U.S., dressed in military garb for his inauguration, in breach of the country’s laws.

It was all downhill from there.

The little soldier that could launched Mexico’s armed forces into a war they were not prepared to win, because many of them were part of the drug transport-selling complex and the rest were under-armed and under-trained when compared with professional assassins their commander and chief had targeted.

You might be asking how the other guy, Lopez Obrador, would have handled the same intractable situation.

Well, and we are speculating here, he might have legalized the drugs and pulled the rug out from under the murderers by taking the risk and, hence, the profit, out of moving the stuff north the border.

Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox, actually did this and had to backtrack in approximately two days time when our last president, Little Bush, told him to do so.

In left-wing fantasy land, we tell ourselves Lopez Obrador, had he been elected, would have legalized the stuff and then held fast.

Because that would have been right.

Mexico has, for too long, paid not only the price of America’s drug habit, but that of its policies, which entail the imposition of prohibitions confected by a moral few on everybody else.

Here in California, over the last year or so, we saw a burgeoning of retail pharmacies made possible by the state’s medical marijuana law, the Obama administration’s announcement that it would not persecute such enterprises, and local authorities’ slowness to respond.

Street life got cleaner. Supply went local, became plentiful and cheaper. The market saw some interesting permutations as people who would have indulged, but had no interest in plumbing dangerous corners for their stash, suddenly could do so in safety.

Now they’re rolling it back into the hands of criminals and those daring enough to do business with them.

The Obama administration, transformative in no way any of us who supported the candidate might have hoped, is falling into the familiar patterns of governance, sticking its federal nose into state affairs or resorting to military tribunals first prescribed by the most rancid and reactionary elements of our political class.

Wars. Drug wars. Oil wars. War wars.

More wars, the death of poetry, and a silencing of the lambs.

Update from the Kingdom of Wisconsin

2011-03-30T18:31:00.000-07:00

The new Republican majority in Wisconsin must have that state's citizens feeling God-like.

What else when a simple legislative election elevated their status to that of aristocrats empowered by divine right?

We all know the Badger GOPers didn't need a quorum to shove a bill through a Senate in which they were the only party present.

Now, "The Washington Post" reports, they don't have to listen to Wisconsin judges enjoining their pet law to destroy unions from implementation.

By way of background, Judge Maryann Sumi ordered the secretary of state not to publish the law while she sorted out the whole sordid business of its run through half a one-party legislature.

In the democratic world, that means the plaintiffs' claims have merit and all bets are off while the courts consider the matter.

Happens every day.

But in Wisconsin they have Tea Party kingdom, which is anti-government, and means they just seek out another Tea Partier, say, "the legislative reference bureau," have them publish the law, and call it even-Steven: "Your legally appointed/elected judge, our bureaucrat."

Same thing, see?

Judge Sumi tried to make it "crystal clear" she wanted the law iced until the courts have checked out the smelly sausage for themselves.

But the top-down chamber run by Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald is subject to no checks and/or balances. He said Sumi's ruling, and we quote, "flies in the face of the separation of powers between the three branches of government."

It's not surprising Fitzgerald's got an alternative take that empowers his branch of lawmakers over the one conceived to review what they legislate.

He went on to say, "It's disappointing that a Dane County judge wants to keep interjecting herself into the legislative process with no regard to the state constitution," by which we can assume he thinks the state constitution does not provide for judicial review when affected citizens request it.

If you're wondering whether Fitzgerald's nuts, stop. And bear in mind his brother is the Senate Majority leader; also much put-out by a judge mucking up the majestic legislative process over which the twin-headed ignoramus presides.

And we do mean majestic, because King Scott Walker and the Princes Fitzgerald won an election granting them absolute power to revoke long-held rights and reduce the judicial function to one of (unheeded) advice and consent.

Judge Sumi, according to the article, has suggested the Republican majority might avoid all the ruckus by simply running the law through their House of Lords again, this time with a quorum, while adhering to the state's open meetings statute.

But those things are anathema to kings who poke their fellow citizens in the eye and call it democracy, who subpoena the e-mails of a professor who disagrees with them, while brandishing their freedom-loving pedigrees.

And that's because angry citizens and dissident professors can reap results which run counter to their wishes, and their wishes supersede anything those they govern desire.

Recall.

Portrait of a Portrait of a Lady: Anne Theroigne

2011-02-22T12:43:00.000-08:00

Sometimes bit players steal the show.

That is not to say the historical figures of Danton, Desmoulins and Robespierre are upstaged by the sparse appearances of Anne Theroigne in Hilary Mantel's
"A Place of Greater Safety: A Novel," but she certainly adds to the conversation.

This post is both about a fascinating person, and about the author's masterful crafting of a secondary book character.

highwayscribery's own novel "Vedette: or Conversations with the Flamenco Shadows,"and posts like "Birthday Card for Tina Modotti," are evidence of an abiding interest in female revolutionaries. No less sanguinary or egalitarian in action and thought, Anne-Josephe Theroigne de Mericourt fits the bill as a subject of interest here.

The goal is not to conflate the scribe's humble effort with an eminence quite so eminent as Mantel (okay, maybe a little), but to assert his rightful place as an admirer and collector of lady iconoclasts.

Not in the girlfriend sense, let us be clear. They are not conducive to a writer's quiet life.

Throughout this expansive novel, Theroigne surfaces, burns and submerges, resurfaces again, lighting the dank torch-lit streets of ragged and unjust Paris...just a few passages, evocative ones, transmit her flavors.

Late Entry

Camille Desmoulins, pamphleteer extraordinaire of the revolutionary cupola, first stumbles upon Anne at a theater audition where she is being humiliated.

It takes place at page 118 of this weighty literary chronicle: "She was about twenty-seven, he thought; small bones darkish brown hair, snub nose. She was pretty enough, but there was something blurred about her features: as though at some time she'd been beaten, hit around the head, had almost recovered, but would never quite."

They exchange barbs before she submits that her future looks bleak. Desmoulins wants to know what she has done in the past when faced with a dry spell between acting stints:

Answer: "I used to sleep with a marquis."

"There you are then."

"'I don't know,' the girl said, 'I get the impression that marquises aren't so free with their money anymore. And me, I'm not so free with my favors.'"

She then establishes herself as a free-ranging woman when divulging her plan to meet contacts in Genoa.

"She put her cheek on her hand. 'My name is Anne Theroigne.' She closed her eyes. 'God, I'm so tired,' she said. She moved thin shoulders inside the shawl, trying to ease the world off her back."

This is an introduction to someone mordant, socially astute, battered, yet unyielding.

She is being marginalized by fading beauty and diminishing artistic talents. Anne Theroigne is afraid and her future actions reveal she thinks the government, or society, or somebody, should do something to arrest her tailspin into the gutter.

(the scribe does not know this for certain, rather has drawn certain conclusions from these first paragraphs written by Hilary Mantel).

This is Theroigne before the revolution. And this is her France.

Once the deluge is unleashed, Desmoulins is out in the street doing what he does best, rousing the rabble. Among them is a "pretty young woman with a pistol in the belt of her riding habit, and her brown hair tied back with a red ribbon and blue one."

These are the colors the ascendant radicals have adopted and she is with them, flowering, purposeful.

Though she may be fading, Anne has been feted by Paris. Has heard a few stories. She has been at the center of the world and lived off making believe she is other, made-up people.

"Her face seemed luminous in the watery light. Now he saw that she was very cold, drenched and shivering. 'The weather has broken,' she said. 'And so much else.'"

The streets are seething and a few hours later she is a portrait of action.

Made for the Part

Underemployed, she certainly has the time. Dramatically gifted, the troubles of 1879 provide her with a proper stage.

"Another night on the streets: at five o'clock, the tocsin and the alarm cannon. 'Now it begins in earnest,' Anne Theroigne said. She pulled the ribbons from her hair, and looped them into the buttonhole of his coat. Red and blue. 'Red for blood,' she said. 'Blue for heaven.' The colors of Paris: blood-heaven."

You can earn respect by cranking out 749 pages of engaging literature, and sometimes, in one brush stroke, give the whole thing a strident coloring that clings.

Blood-heaven.

The highway scribe is not going to pick apart each of the Theroigne-related passages. He is giving you an idea of how the text was read. Your reading would be something else entirely.

Now back to the revolution. In the earliest phases, action draws the highest premium and the new order has jobs for people like Camille and Theroigne. Their gang, a disparate lot of social maladroits and axe-grinders, is somehow on the rise.

Centripetal forces continue to drive politics in France; Paris in particular and apart. Louis and Antoinette's days are numbered. The politics of the moment revolve around what to do with them. The king does try. He receives a delegation of women and makes promises.

"Theroigne is outside, talking to soldiers," Mantel revives her anti-heroine. "She wears a scarlet riding habit. She is in possession of a saber. The rain is spoiling the plumes on her hat."

Anne can dress the part, although there is usually some element gone awry, screwing up the perfection of the whole, gaining empathy.

Laying Low

And then she is gone, though not for long. As chaotic Paris tries to sort itself out -- going to the theater, dining, sexing it up, and carrying the enemy's head around on a pike -- Theroigne marshals support and plays her hand in the deadly game for power.

The author finds a character who can tell us they are all -- Danton, Desmoulins, Robespierre, Anne and their revolutionary caste -- "virgins."

Soon enough, she reappears before Desmoulins. "Theroigne swept in. She wore a white dress, and a tricolor sash about her waist. A National Guardsman's tunic, unbuttoned, was draped over her slim square shoulders. Her brown hair was a breeze-blown waterfall of curls; she employed one of those expensive hairdressers who make you look as if you've never been near a hairdresser in your life."

Desmoulin rebuffs her sexual play and denies her a job writing for whatever paper he's editing at the moment. She is damaged goods and he's worried about his reputation.

"As far as he knew, Anne was leading a chaste and blameless life; the strange thing was, that she seemed dedicated to giving the contrary impression. The royalist scandal sheets were not slow to pick up on anything. Theroigne was a gift from God, as far as they were concerned."

So she gets labeled the whore while Danton and Desmoulins enjoy the winning revolutionary's celebrity, notching their belts with every belle at every ball in town.

Anne, by opting for a public life, for demanding a voice, gets tarred and good.

And though she's acting, it's not an act. She's a revolutionary having her say and you can't mistake Theroigne for anything but what she is, except for what she's not.

Which is to say there is ambiguity in this portrait, someone we can both like and not like, a person on whom we are still withholding judgment, but find worthy of attention.

Onward.

The revolution, as most left-wing ventures tend to do, begins consuming itself. First overboard are the dreamers. Mantel tells us, "In May, Theroigne left Paris. She had no money and was tired of the royalist papers calling her a prostitute."

Noblesse Oblige indeed.

"One by one, the "murky layers of her past" had been peeled away to reveal unsavory acts and liaisons that "we've all done when necessity has pressed. It left her open, though, to ridicule and insult."

Anne's plan is to return once the libelers move on, but she suffers the star's burden of being missed: Her scarlet cloak, her "claque" surrounding, pistol swinging as she prowls the National Assembly's corridors looking for deputies to berate.

And so rumors circulated, in her absence, that the Austrians, with whom the revolutionary government is at war (along with the rest of Europe), have abducted her.

"Hope they keep her," is what Lucile, Desmoulins' modern wife and newly minted revolutionary, says. "What gave her the right to be a pseudo-man, turning up at the Cordeliers [that most ferocious of workerist sects] and demanding the rostrum."

Aborted Catfight

Lucille gets a shot at some answers when Theroigne shows up in her tricolored salon. Anne has been released by the Austrians with some money to boot, but she has not come to square-off with a feminine rival. She has come to lament. For her part, Camille's wife is very pregnant.

Their lives have assumed radically different paths, and each prefers the other's.

Theroigne is out of sorts, tattered, not sharp. Lucile can see that the hem is frayed on her scarlet coat, "that the dust on the streets was upon it, that even the red was not so red as it used to be."

Anne is furious that the papers are still spreading lies about her. And Camille is ignoring her.

"He's busy," Lucile covers for her husband.

"Oh yes, I'm sure he's busy. Busy playing cards at the Palais-Royal, busy dining with aristocrats. How can anyone think of passing the time of day with an old friend when there's champagne to be drunk and so many silly, empty-headed bitches to be screwed?"

"Including you," Lucile murmured.

"No, not including me," Theroigne stopped pacing. "Never including me. I have never slept with Camille, or with Jerome Petion, or with any of the other two dozen names the newspapers have named."

The object of a superior social deference, Lucile wouldn't dare stake the same claim.

Theroigne has a particular grudge against a royalist by the name of Louis Suleau, publisher of The Acts of the Apostles who has had his way with her good name in print.

Lucile is miserable in this hellion's company. She explains how Anne's bankrolled release from the Austrians has left her open to the charge of spying.

Theroigne comes a little undone. She admits to having a daughter who died after being left behind. She doesn't know how to write. Things are not going her way, her tribulations multiplying willy-nilly.

Today she has been weak.

Ascendant

But life can turn on a dime, and soon the angriest most radical of the revolutionary factions is literally up in arms, jailing aristocrats left and right, and forcing the king's imprisonment.

Desmoulins is witnessing a riot outside the Royal Palace at Versailles.

“Theroigne had taken charge. Here was her own, her little Bastille.”

She has led an “unfocused rabble” to a place where the royalty are being held against their will, and is breaking in, not to save them, but too...

More revolutionary and feminine portraiture:

“Theroigne wore black; she had a pistol in her belt, a saber in her hand, and her face was incandescent.”

It’s romantic writing, without getting melodramatic. Theroigne is incandescent, but she’s also out of her mind. Camille watches as the fourth prisoner emptied into the mob’s maws is Louis Suleau, the guy who’s been spreading the rumors.

It’s not a heroic moment, but an ugly one. Your own politics determine whether it is necessary.

Leader of the revolution, or some part of it, Desmoulins can do nothing but watch Theroigne, “approach Louis Suleau and say to him something that only he could have heard; Louis put up a hand, as if to say, what’s the point of going into all this now? The gesture etched itself into his mind. It was the last gesture. He saw Theroigne raise her pistol. He did not hear the shot.”

Don't call her a whore.

As all of the revolutionary class learned, direct action is effective, but does have its drawbacks. Among these are constant exposure to committed enemies and overheated throngs.

Some time later, Robespierre asks Camille if he’s heard about “that girl. Anne Theroigne.”

“What’s she done now?”

“She was making the speech in the Tuileries gardens, and a group of women attacked her -- rough women from the public gallery. She’s attached herself to Brissott and his faction, for some reason only she understands -- I can’t believe Brissot is delighted. She found the wrong audience -- I don’t know, but perhaps they thought she was some woman of fashion intruding on their patch.”

She is saved by the dangerous Jacobin scribe Marat, soon to be assassinated himself, at the hands of a “fashion plate.”

Camille laments that she was not killed. “I'll never forgive that bitch for what she did on August 10.”

Robespierre is philosophical. Old schoolmate or not, Suleau “ended up on the wrong side, didn’t he? And then so did she."

Brissot is on the extermination list, so Theroigne’s made a bad political call. It meant Robespierre wouldn't mind taking off her head.

But he does not have to kill Anne, because everyone thinks her own choices are doing it much better. Theroigne, in fact, ended up surviving the stunning violence of her time and living another 25 years.

In the book, Anne is done before the revolution is done. Disappearing as easily as she first appeared, she is an afterthought in the fast-moving paces of a tumultuous situation.

“A few weeks ago in the street Lucile and her mother had seen Anne Theroigne. It had taken them both a moment to recognize her. Theroigne was no longer pretty. She was thin; her face had fallen in as if she had lost some teeth. She passed them; something flickered in her eyes, but she didn’t speak. Lucile thought her pathetic -- a victim of the times. ‘No one could see her as attractive now,’ Annette said. She smiled. Her recent birthdays had passed, as she put it, without incident. Most men still looked at her with interest.”

Not this reader fair lady. Both eyes are on the rebel girl.

Letter to the Russian Ambassador

2011-02-02T16:30:00.000-08:00

Sent Feb. 2, 2010

Sergey I. Kislyak
Ambassador of the Russian Federation to the United States
1125 16th St. N.W.
Washington D.C.

Dear Mr. Ambassador,

Greetings from Southern California.

The persecution of the Russian artist Aleksei Plutser-Sarno and the art group "Voina," really gets my goat. And as a planetary citizen I urge your government to cease the mindless pursuit of this artist and release those of his allies whom have been detained.

I read about their plight in a "New York Times," article dated January 22.

That's a while back, I know, but maintaining a journalist's post, a literary writing career, and the self-appointed job of skewering repressive governments around the world can really weigh on a guy.

I'm sure the article by the marvelous Ellen Barry -- and please don't harass her, too -- caused you a degree of heartburn.

And it's a good thing, too.

Mr. Plutser-Sarno has some unpleasant things to say about those who govern the Russian Federation. But surely you realize that the official response to such provocations only lends credence to his claims that you guys need to lighten-up and take a democracy class.

You work for him, and his fellow citizens, not the other way around. I say this only because I know Russia is new to democracy and could probably use a few pointers.

And by the way, I think Plutser-Sarno's "installation" involving a 210-foot penis hanging from a St. Petersburg drawbridge, pointed at the state security outfit's building, is the ultimate example of free expression.

Anybody can insult some man on the street. The democratic protection to speech is truly cashiered when we try it on those who make the rules and enforce them with the threat of violence.

You should give the way we do it here in the U.S a go. There are vast spaces of freedom for mouthing-off across our mediatic landscape. As a result, so many people are doing it, that no single voice truly rises above the din, except very stupid ones like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

Such people are a stain on the nation's honor, yes, but at least we know where and what they are.

You guys are doing it the old-fashioned way and the result is, well, this letter by somebody one zillion miles away from Russia. See how it doesn't work?

Charging Voina with "organizing a criminal gang," would be laughable, were the artists' lives not getting screwed-up in the process. After all, let's not kid ourselves Mr. Ambassador, when it comes to criminal gangs, you guys set the gold standard.

Your government's support of Chechnya's "president" comes to mind. You know, the one who takes time off from a busy executive schedule to personally torture his political opponents.

I hate that guy.

And not to make political hay out of a tragedy, but those people who blew up the airport in Moscow a few weeks ago and killed dozens of people: THEY were a criminal gang.

Perhaps if your security and police forces weren't so busy harassing mischievous Dadaists, the bomb plot might have been detected before so many innocent people died. Touche.

By the way, I'm going to post this letter on my blog "highwayscribery," just to make a point about how hard it is to keep the truth from circulating.

You know Mr. Ambassador, it is not difficult to find absurdities, cruelties, and meanness in the world with which to fill "highwayscribery."

Just this morning I read in the "New York Times," about the slaughter of 100 dogs in Canada, for no good reason (as if there could be one).

Stories like that, and the Voina artists' plight, say to me that no matter how complicated the world may be, right and wrong are not so hard to distinguish.

Thank you for your time.

the highway scribe

The Black Swan Swims

2011-01-19T16:35:00.000-08:00

The American right, and its Republican Party, have formulated their talking-point in response to the Tucson tragedy, but its impacts are bigger than any public relations posture.

In the overheated claims of certain right-wing bloggers that President Obama is happy Rep. Gabrielle Gifford (D-Ariz.) was shot, is an implied recognition of the political damage done to the red state revolution before it ever got going.

The shooting represents what author Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a "Black Swan," which he defines as "an event (historical, economic, technological, personal) that is both unpredicted by some observers and carries massive consequences."

The first, and most immediate consequence of the Tucson massacre, was that it arrested the GOP's envenomed plans to generally make life miserable for what self-appointed inquisitor-in-chief Rep. Darrell Issa (R) calls the most "corrupt administration ever."

Which is a fine example of discourse that is less than courtly.

Congress was suspended after the tragedy and Republicans began to back down, sensing the Democratic caucus had become something of a feral animal. Some of their own had been hurt or killed. A real tragedy had occurred and they were, rightly and demonstrably, very upset.

If not scared.

The long-overdue softening did not end there. Newly minted House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) was criticized for not attending the Tucson memorial service, but he had serious and real business to handle at the House Republicans' retreat.

It was more than a retreat in name, because out of the meeting came an admission that the revolution was not likely to be televised, let alone launched, because
"Washington Democrats still control the Senate and White House," as Boehner noted.

Choosing patriotism over his post-presidential election peevishness, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) penned a mostly gracious column in the "Washington Post," praising the president's speech in Arizona and calling for a greater civility in our public discourse. It amounted to a clarion call that commits Republicans and their Tea Party antagonists/allies to a kind of unilateral disarmament.

When McCain wrote that, "we should be mindful as we argue about our differences that so much more unites than divides us," he was essentially signing pink slips for the media carnival barkers whose daily bread is demonizing Americans who believe in progressive tax rates, peace, and social programs.

McCain tried to take the fire-eaters' toys away, noting that, "I reject the accusation that the president's policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals."

That's the Tea Party-line, and that group, together with Tea Party Express rider Sarah Palin, came in for a particularly harsh drubbing in the shooting's aftermath.

They'd gotten away with a long run, pushing the limits of acceptable debate, spitting at congress people, disrupting their town halls, lining them up in the crosshairs of graphic gun-sites, and generally doing very well by it.

But the electoral success came at a price, paid mostly by others, and now they're back on their heels instead of attacking.

When some nut makes your words a live and macabre tableaux, when he attempts to blow a Congresswoman's brains out, slays her idealistic aide, and murders a little girl for good measure, you've bought yourself a bumper crop of trouble ripe for the reaping.

The aforementioned talking-point confected by conservatives is that their insults and disparagements of those different them than did not cause the shooting, that he was a "lone, deranged, gunman, acting on his own, without political leanings blah, blah, blah."

That is probably not true, though in an effort at putting his money where his gob is, President Obama unselfishly granted the concession and ended the discussion.

Even if Sarah Palin's gums are still flapping.

Which is somewhat the point. Tea Partiers and their Republican allies know no other way. It is not enough to carry unconcealed weapons to Democratic convocations and pepper they or their constituents with invective.

The ranting and raving must extend to those in their own party, which, in highwayscribery's estimation (and Karl Rove's, however briefly) cost the Republicans a shot at the Senate majority.

To wit:

The "L.A. Times," reported that three different Arizona state Republican apparatchiks were forced to step down in the face of threats and harassment from the little darlings. The shooting has these people spooked, too, and they don't view civic engagement as worth the price of their hides.

And that's a loss.

The paper reported fleeing GOPer Jeff Kolb saying, "This is a group of people who should in theory agree on 95 to 98 percent of things. This is not Republicans against Democrats. I don't get it."

The highway scribe does.

They flouted the rules of democracy in order to gain power and now stand to lose it for the same reason.

And it is not a question of employing the oft-abused lefty-cry of "Fascist" to point out that these are brown-shirt tactics of intimidation and that, if the Tucson madman had no truck with the Tea Party, they've still benefited by his actions where Arizona Republican politics are concerned.

The Tea Party and their allied drum-breaters, spent too much time screwing the empiricist's square hat onto their round heads in an effort to separate their heated diatribes from an event it seemed to prescribe.

But they never denied the heated rhetoric itself, which has left them plainly vulnerable in wake of the Black Swan's swim.

Book Report: "Really the Blues," by Mezz Mezzrow

2010-11-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

"Really The Blues" demonstrates how it's good having something to do.

Talk about alternative paths. Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow blazed one through the jungle of conformity, "went black," lost time to drugs, fomented early 20th century jazz, became too familiar with jail, but remained focused on a vision.

Were it not for the journey New Orleans jazz made up the Mississippi to Chicago in the early paces of the 20th century, Milton Mezzrow would have had, like all of us, a story to tell, but no audience.

His story stands on three sturdy and utterly novel legs.

One was a total adhesion to all things African-American, or Negro, as they said in his day. A second was the aforementioned passion for a very specific jazz the came up out of the Crescent City and got amplified by his friend, Louis "Pops" Armstrong. The third was a commitment to the manifold virtues of marijuana or, as he alternately referred to it: golden leaf, gauge, muta, and -- highwayscribery's favorite -- muggles.

Tee-hee.

Raised on Chicago's south side, "Mezz" landed in jail early. More stupid than criminal, his interest in the clarinet and saxophone kept the young Jewish jailbird on the up-and-up; focused and ennobled his misbegotten adventures.

His story really takes form upon moving to New York with Gene Krupa and a tiara of future jazz-era jewels in an attempt at storming the music industry's gates with their hot new toy.

Settling in Harlem, establishing his base at the intersection of 133rd Street and Seventh Ave., Mezzrow became the "white mayor," the "link between the races," ambassador for muggles, purveyor and recorder of a unique argot -- the poetry of the proletariat -- "jive."

The Mezz was an influential fellow in his moment and this jive the dominant tongue at the intersection of Cool Street and Downbeat Avenue.

"Really the Blues," came out when Jack Kerouac was digging the music Mezz expounds upon, and it's no fantasy to surmise that the beat poet's jazz-infused prose are not heavily influenced by this book and the way it is told.

We're suggesting, without a hint of accusation, that Kerouac borrowed heavily from, or at least riffed on, the Mezzrow's mostly forgotten text. It's called research and is born of the writer's anthropological duty.

Colorful or operatic, Mezzrow's life was rarely easy, but he kept blowing horns, in and out of jail, searching for a soul-state firmly rooted in his beloved New Orleans jazz.

An uncompromising commitment to the style finally bore fruit in his savoring of Sidney Bechet's "Blues of Bechet" and "The Sheik of Araby."

He describes the epiphany thusly:

"It meant: Life gets neurotic and bestial when people can't be at peace with each other, say amen to each other, chime in with each other's feeling and personality; and if discord is going to rule the world, with each guy at the next guy's throat, all harmony gone -- why, the only thing for a man to do, if he wants to survive, if he won't get evil like all the other beasts in the jungle, is to make that harmony inside himself, be at peace with himself, unify his own insides while the snarling world gets pulverized."

The next natural and positive step for Mezzrow was to team-up with Bechet.

In a publication called "The Record Changer," reviewer Ernest Bornemen said that these tracks, "went back beyond Louis and beyond Bunk Johnson and beyond Buddy Bolden, to the very roots of music, to the cane and the rice and the indigo and the worksongs and the slave ships and the dance music of the inland Ashanti and the canoe songs of the Wolof and Mandingo along the Senegal River."

The review represented Mezz's crowning moment. Not as a professional poo-bah, but as proof that he had reached an important milestone in his musically inspired drive for spiritual wholeness.

Mezzrow closes his by relating how writer Bernard Wolfe convinced him to cough-up an autobiography. Wolfe's word's best describe what's on tap in "Really the Blues."

"Not very many people have gotten a good look at their country from that bottom-of-the-pit angle before, seen the slimy underside of the rock. It's a chunk of Americana, as they say, and should get written. It's a real American success story, upside down: Horatio Alger standing on his head.

"In a real sense, Mezz, your story is the plight of the creative artist in the USA. -- to borrow a phrase from Henry Miller...It's the odyssey of an individualist, through a land where the population is manufactured by the system of interchangeable parts. It's the saga of a guy who wanted to make friends, in a jungle where everybody was too busy making money an dodging his own shadow."

Mission accomplished, Milton.

Told You So

2010-11-03T11:48:00.000-07:00

Told you so.

Jerry Brown, outspent 6-to-1 by ebay bazillionaire Meg Whitman, made it look easy in returning to the office he left 27 years prior.

Moonbeams ago, we suggested in "Jerry Brown: The Chessman Cometh," that the former Governor-Mayor of Oakland-Treasurer-Attorney General's lackadaisical campaign was born of a sublime knowledge about how the California mind works.

Ka-ching!

Meanwhile Whitman, as we also forecast, spent nearly $180 million in an effort that downgraded her status to late-night joke punchline.

In California, where we happily take stimulus money and give our state a facelift; where we recognize an oil industry-financed campaign against the laws enacted to limit the crap in our air; where we don't allow candidates who accept corporate funding to delude us with cant about liberty and freedom; in California, Democrats won every major state office.

Barbara Boxer, whom highwayscribery never believed was in any kind of trouble, beat a discredited Hewlett Packard executive rather easily, because her actions matched her commercials' claims of standing up for the little guy/gal.

Kamala Harris, defeated L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley, because L.A. politicians don't fair well statewide and because Cooley's a jerk who spent too much time making hay on the marijuana issue in a place where smoking marijuana's not an issue.

A guy like that isn't going to beat a gal named after the courtesan lover of "Siddhartha" from Herman Hesse's classic novel.

Not in Cali.

Nationally, highwayscribery's prediction the Democrats might hold onto their majority was impacted by this same Blue State insularity and a cash windfall from undisclosed sources that would make Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito blush, if he had any shame.

Which he doesn't.

But it doesn't really matter. Scott Brown's election to the U.S. Senate last autumn, by the otherwise sane people of Massachusetts, effectively ended the Democrats' ability to halt Republican obstruction in that dysfunctional institution.

In the end, a House majority means squat without a similar advantage in the upper house and the White House.

Two houses beat one every time.

John Boehner can run his legislative paper mill day-in-day-out, passing tax cuts for the rich, de-funding the health care bill, and neutering American unions, but those measures won't get any farther than that chamber's portal.

In an environment befouled by an economic crash that started on the prior administration's watch, the House Democrats lost seats in places where Republicans reliably roost, but withstood challenges in the Senate from low-grade Tea Party picks like Ken Buck in Colorado.

The Tea Party, for all the breathless analysis it has spawned, was a wash last night (though you won't read, hear, or see that anywhere). Yes, Rand Paul won in Kentucky and good luck with that Mitch McConnell.

Kentuckians should only be slightly less ashamed of voting-in a guy whose supporters step on ladies' heads than the Louisianans who reelected a man (Sen. David Vitter) who enjoys a good bordello stop between filibusters.

Can you say political metaphor?

Christine O'Donnell lost in Delaware, where the GOP had a chance to grab a Senate seat until the Tea Party stuck its runny, juvenile nose into the mix. And Joe Miller is losing up in Alaska to someone whose name you had to find on six pages of write-in candidates, consisting mostly of his ornery supporters.

(Don't ask).

Yes, Marco Rubio won in Florida, but, even as a Democrat, the highway scribe would have to admit he was the most compelling candidate in that race.

Parties are good, and loyalty to them useful, but you should always vote for the smartest guy/gal on the ballot.

The founding fathers were kind to minorities. And so it looks like so much thunder on the right, because those voting where less people reside went GOP, while states where everybody lives, and which generate most of the national wealth, ie., New York and California, stayed emphatically Democratic.

In short, this is simply not the end of the world.

As the "Washington Post's" Ezra Klein noted, "A few dozen politicians" lost their jobs last night, but the country won in the long run.

Wrote Klein, "[I]f you see the point of politics as actually getting things done, the last two years, for Democrats, have been a stunning success. Whatever else you say about the 111th Congress, it got things done."

highwayscribery recommends you read his beautifully crafted laundry list of accomplishments.

A "New York Times" conservative stand-in, Ross Douhat, mostly agreed with Klein, to whose article he linked his own post-mortem entitled, "Was It Worth It?"

"Politics," he wrote, "often gets covered as though the legislative sessions are just a long prelude to the real action of election season. But for all the breathless horse-race coverage, elections only matter to the extent that they produce (or forestall) actual legislation. And where the policies of the United States government are concerned, all the ground the Republicans gained tonight doesn't change the fact that what liberals achieved in Barack Obama's first two years in office was more consequential than any conservative victory in recent memory."

It's hard to envision the GOP and its single house delivering like results to a fickle and impatient people in the 12 months before media outlets begin shaping perceptions for 2012.

Congratulations on those new seats, Republicans, but don't get too comfortable.

We Can All Use a Laugh

2010-09-15T23:01:00.000-07:00

When the highway scribe was living in Andalusia, roaming narrow, flower-strewn streets, frequenting bullfights, and writing his novel "Vedette," a wonderful occurrence transpired in the Andalusian Parliament.

A debate had lasted into the wee-hours of the morning and a deputy from the conservative "Partido Popular" found something funny in the proceedings. She could not bring herself under control and yielded to another member of her caucus, but by then it was was too late. A collective fit of laughter had swept the chamber and Diego Valderas, the communist president of the camera, was forced to suspend the session.

See it here and have a laugh of your own.

Book Report: "Anarchism and The City" by Chris Ealham

2010-09-10T22:46:00.000-07:00

Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898-1937 decodes Barcelona's urban landscape for reasons behind the unlikely rise to power of anarchist elements in those years preceding the Spanish Republic and the civil war that consumed it.

Chris Ealham brings an urbanist's tools to this interesting proposition, positing sometimes insightful, other times idealistic, explanations to questions about the Confederacion Nacional de Trabajo's (CNT) season of sway over Europe's then-most productive city.

Academic in style, "City," serves up enough good stuff to offset the loss of momentum resulting from the historian's job of stringing evidence from various sources and affixing them to each other with footnote glue.

Ealham documents the geographic reordering of Barcelona as undesirable immigrants from the south of Spain swelled its working class in an era when the city was considered "Europe's factory."

Viewed as something "other" (the author proposes), as fomenters of vice and carriers of disease, this surging class of workers was subjected to a bourgeois reordering of the urban terrain that isolated and marginalized.

Ealham's view is that, left unto themselves, the working class folk of Barcelona wove themselves into a collection of tight units clear on what the issues facing them were and how to address them.

For a while, the anarchist policy guys showed real prowess in organizing neighborhoods, winning their loyalty to the CNT unions' causes, and channeling a universal resentment against the existing order.

Then they put that existing order to work for them:

"Making full use of improvements in the transport system and the growing availability of bicycles, and backed by the Barcelona CNT's paper, Solidaridad Obrera, which played an essential auxiliary role, advertising union meetings, talks and social activities across the city, the local federation would receive feedback from, and send instructions to, the comites with the great speed. This enabled the CNT to respond swiftly to events on the ground and generally mount a more sustained and coordinated opposition to capitalism."

A big policy winner for the CNT was embracing the despised Andalusian and Murcian migrant laborers, and other groups not found on the industrial shop floor.

"Ever ready to mobilize beyond the factory proletariat," Ealham writes, "the radicals applauded street gangs as a vanguard force in the fight against the police."

Harassed ambulant street vendors and the unemployed alike also responded when the
CNT called for action; action that transcended the workplace and transformed the streets.

The union and its minions expanded public space, cultivating working class interaction that produced a dense web of community relations only a civil war could sunder.

As its title suggests, this is about the CNT in Barcelona, even though the union's influence stretched well-beyond Catalonia's borders. There the organization thrived under the conditions so painstakingly detailed by Ealham, and did so in its own way.

Resorting to violence didn't hurt.

The author quotes one source as saying, "This was an original type of criminality that was typically Barcelonese. The anarchist robbers of Barcelona are nothing less than the Catalan equivalents of Al Capone...Today it is the fashion among all thieves, pickpockets and swindlers to pass themselves off as anarchists."

"Anarchism and The City" was published by AK Press, an anarchist imprint, and Ealham, while maintaining a balanced tone throughout, is okay with the idea that, at some point, a people being exploited have the right, are obligated by the dictates of survival, to kill the guy who is killing them.

It's a chicken-or-the-egg quandary. For Ealham, the question of whether the anarchists and their constituency had any choice in the matter of violence is worthy of a deeper consideration.

In his examination of how the loosely structured union federation interacted with the working class barris, the relation to and impact of the Federacion Anarquista de Iberia (FAI) upon the CNT, and how shadowy associate groups used the gun to "appropriate" banks and erase political enemies, Ealham's efforts are first-class.

It's fascinating stuff that renders Spanish anarchism more understandable, if not completely dispelling the notion the rank-and-filers were a little nutty, or appear so thanks to their disparate ideas for reorganizing society.

Noting that the anarchist revolution was the first of its kind in the automotive era, the author observes how workers were seized by an "irrationality" after appropriating the cars of the merchant and capital classes.

"But revolutionary motoring possessed its own logic," Ealham writes. "In the first instance, the destruction of cars reflected a desire to usher in a new set of spatial relations as well as resistance to the attempts by the local and central Republican authorities to impose a new urban order of controlled consumption, consisting of new rules of circulation and traffic lights designed to improve the flow of capital and goods."

Or not.

Rather than ushering in new spatial relations the armed workers may have just been having a crazy time in cars. It happens, you know.

He observes that, "On the day after the birth of the Republic, as a gesture of solidarity, the Barcelona CNT declared a general strike that affected all branches of industry apart from the essential food and transport services."

The Republic/Spanish Civil War epoch is akin to a family fight and the multi-sided affair can tug at one's loyalties depending upon which side's version is being aired.

Read the well-written diaries of Republican leader Miguel Azana and savor the portrait of a rational, intelligent and literate man burdened with allies and governing copartners bent on overthrowing the enterprise he's been elected to lead.

It's hard to imagine Azana viewing the general strike as a gesture in solidarity.

While sympathetic, Ealham is not so blind as to ignore the fact that, as anarchists and their allies launched a revolution in red Asturias they hoped would catch on throughout Iberia, "Francisco Ascaso, 'Nosotros' member [an anarchist affinity group] and secretary of the Catalan CRT, issued a call to the Barcelona proletariat to return to work from a radio station controlled by the Spanish army."

My revolution, not yours, you see.

The anarchists thrived for a season as the CNT, FAI and related groupings were wonderful at forging a cohesive culture and strategy for the beleaguered barris residents. But Ealham lifts the lid on the corner committee meeting and details the inner-workings, the feuds, and fault lines that hampered the movement.

Ealham spends less time on the CNT's temporary reign over the streets of Barcelona after fascist generals rose up to destroy the Republic. And he does well in eschewing too detailed a rendering of those events, because that is much-tilled terrain.

The real triumph of "Anarchism and The City" is its fulfilling the title's pledge. Showing how a metropolis's geographical configuration, industrial bent, and raw social arrangements made a bed comfortable enough for some very unique individuals to sleep in.

The scribe's tired: Listen to His Album

2010-09-03T21:27:00.000-07:00

Happy Labor Day, everyone. the highway scribe is tired and heading south to Encinitas for surf, barbecue, and salmon-colored sunsets. Since there is no writing to read, go ahead and listen to his album, Ladybugs or Lovesongs.

Jerry Brown: The Chessman Cometh

2010-08-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

Were he sympathetic, Bill Clinton might tell everybody to “chill out” and enjoy Jerry Brown in action.

It is possible that Brown is old and that his seemingly lax campaign is a sign that he is past his time, stuck in the halcyon days of 1976. One California blogging outfit refers to him as "Krusty."

He may, in fact, not know what he is doing. But Brown deserves everybody's indulgence, because he has earned it.

Too many Gov. Moonbeam characterizations have obscured the fact it was Brown's iconoclasm and independence that earned him the disdain of the Sticks-in-the-Mud Club.

So, until he demonstrates otherwise, Brown must be taken for a man with a plan. And we can expect that plan to diverge from the conventional wisdom.

Brown can’t help himself, never could. And he has been called many things, rarely "stupid," more often “brilliant.”

He’s a thinking guy. He doesn't have to be recognized for the novelty of his ideas for them to affect our existences because they have in so many facets of California, and even national, life.

His long-standing presence in government as governor of California, mayor of Oakland, state attorney general, secretary of state, and whatever else, has produced that rare bird who knows the state from basement to helipad.

All the money in the world, or even Meg Whitman's, can't substitute for total comprehension of the system in play, let alone partial responsibility for its construction.

And so we have an article in the, “Los Angeles Times,” by Seema Mehta, taking worthy note of the fact that, as the autumn beckons, Brown is essentially tied with his free-spending opponent.

The former e-bay chief executive officer has spent $104 million of her own money in an effort to blanket the airwaves and "put Brown so far behind by Labor Day that he would never catch up. That scenario has failed to materialize," wrote Meta.

"Since winning the primary in June, he has spent almost nothing, has rarely appeared on the campaign trail and has yet to air a single ad against Republican Meg Whitman."

That can't be a simple oversight.

One theory is that, with all the flack flying around the cable-sphere, maybe Brown sees a different shelf-life for a candidate than has been traditional. The longer you're out there, the more slings and arrows of misinformation you can be hit with.

Ask Whitman.

As low-key as he has played it, the attorney general has still dodged a few swift-boatings, because when somebody spends $20 million telling countless people over and over again that you're a sow-sucker, it's probably going to stick.

Another possible explanation is that the content of Whitman’s media “buys” are low-grade. It should not come as a shock that getting elected entails more than a quest to run the most commercials.

It helps, but it's not everything.

highwayscribery finds the Whitman spot that claims "Meg has a plan" for solving California's problems, pretty disingenuous.

Either it’s a big secret to be revealed after voters reward you with the bill of sale on your purchase of high office, or it's something we're entitled to weigh on its merits. Kick it around, as it were, before we decide.

Brown's early pitch already runs counter to the media-juiced "anti-incumbent" fever. And he mostly gets a pass on the charge, because you can't attack a guy as being wacky and a deadbeat officeholder at the same time.

Nobody will ever accuse Brown of the being an "old boys" network guy, and therein his lasting appeal in a state that marches to its own drum.

Brown, like highwayscribery, doesn't seem to be buying the whole anti-incumbent narrative, because he has out-and-out said his experience, the actual breadth of it, makes him better qualified than Whitman to solve the state's woes, as this highwayscribery post on an early campaign event attests to.

It's a message that has got to resonate.

The passe' notion of a "business leader" coming in to run government the "right way," Whitman's leitmotif, has been tried and tried until we've figured out business and government aren't the same animal.

Meg’s actually the second e-bay politics spin-off. Steve Westley, a former board roomer at the online retailer, crapped-out against the hapless Phil Angelides in the last gubernatorial sweepstakes.

The business-person/politician has lost its allure ever since Americans became aware of how a greedy merchant class squandered the nation's financial patrimony.

The great conservative attempt to prove self-interest and market efficiency were part of a spontaneous synthesis found in nature failed. Smart, educated people in suits can act with the same instincts the guttersnipe 100 floors below in the street shadowed by the corporate tower.

It boggles the mind that Wall St. is angry about the Obama gang’s “anti-business” policies. Proven buccaneers, they oddly expected to again be handed the keys to the economy without adult supervision.

"Salon's" Andrew Leonard cites a report by ProPublica's Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein documenting how, "even as the housing boom collapsed, Wall Street's biggest investment banks continued to furiously sell each other crappy mortgage-backed securities. No one who was paying any real attention wanted to buy collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) constructed out of imploding subprime mortgages, so the originators of the CDOS simply unloaded them on their co-conspirators. In the process, no economically useful service was performed, other than the enrichment of a small coterie of bond dealers and managers. The eventual damage caused, of course, was beyond enormous."

Says Leonard, "These jokers are annoyed at the prospect of wealth redistribution? What do they think they were doing over the last couple of decades, aside from sucking wealth out of the 'real' economy and redistributing it to themselves. And now they are are upset about higher taxes? What they should really be nervous about is the prospect of 20 years in prison."

Whitman is selling her work days in that overheated and false economy as proof she can effectively wrangle legislators from San Francisco and south Orange County alike.

Brown clearly thinks conceding the point links her to a bygone and discredited model of business star.

Mehta quotes him saying, “There are two things unprecedented in American political history. One, the $100 million plus that Whitman has paid on her campaign, most of it from her own pocket, and two, the virtually know effect it’s had.”

Whitman’s toeing a fine line between the ‘Triumphant March” from Aida, and becoming a colossal joke. The grotesque proportions of her spending demonstrate a certain overheated approach to big projects when sobriety would seem the order of the day.

The dynamic sets the table for an opponent to mark differences between herself and regular folk. Most Democrats are afraid to accept this inherent gift woven into American politics.

Brown’s not one of them.

Machiavelli, whom Sir Moonbeam has probably read inside-and-out, noted that a prince needs a certain degree of fortuna to prevail at court and with the public.

Brown has had his fair share of late.

First, the assertion his campaign has spent no money on advertising camouflages the fact other groups are running ads in his stead, narrowing the apparent gap in airwave time purchased by the two campaigns.

Second, the article pointed out how, “Notable stories -- the arrest of a suspect in the Grim Sleeper serial killings in Los Angeles and the pension and pay scandal in Bell -- allowed Brown to stay in the spotlight in his day job as attorney general."

Mystified by Brown's low-key, "rope-a--dope" campaign, pundits and opinionmakers are hedging their bets the attorney general is blowing it. They might make for more entertaining columnists and talking heads if they treated Brown's drive, or lack thereof, as interesting political chess worthy of watching.

Most media have painted themselves into a box by sowing the image of Brown as some kind of nutbox. Because who's going to listen to a nutbox?

But here he is, still toe-to-toe with a bottomless paid announcement machine named Meg Whitman. Now the real game begins and Brown can take advantage of debates, his thin coffers, the state's Democratic majority, and whatever else he has up his sleeve, to make a real run at the job he held in another, different time.

Fascinating (Maybe).

Birthday Card For Tina Modotti

2010-08-17T16:46:00.000-07:00

Pure your gentle name, pure your fragile life,
bees, shadows, fire, snow, silence and foam,
combined with steel and wire and
pollen to make up your firm
and delicate being.

--Pablo Neruda

Today's is Tina Modotti's birthday.

She would have been 114, but during her short 46 years, Modotti lived a century's-worth.

highwayscribery admires Modotti, not just for an unparalleled commitment to working people, but for the rich texture she wove into her existence, and a willingness to embrace not just what came her way, but the troubled she looked for and found.

By way of birthday card for the fabulous lady, we will sketch a resume of her brief, but full-fledged, engagement with the World.

Modotti was born in Udine, Italy. Her real, first name was Assunta. Poppa was a craftsman who followed the currents of work through the western workplace, so that she spent some years in Austria before taking off, as a teen, for San Francisco.

There she worked as a seamstress in factories while Momma fed her pasta and Poppa the rantings and songs of the anarchist-inspired International Workers of the World -- the Wobblies.

Modotti liked the theater and, at some point during her development into a first-class vixen, was tapped by a Hollywood talent scout to go south and settle in Los Angeles.

There she played the exotic and foreign siren in a number of A-list productions such as The Tiger's Coat and I Can Explain.

Tina married and fell in with a bohemian crowd that counted among its numbers Edward Weston, a still-renowned photography pioneer at whose knee she learned the craft, while simultaneously having an affair with him.

She was, by any measure, a seductress with a strong sexual appetite.

Her husband tempted Tina into visiting post-revolutionary Mexico. Weston followed. There she stayed and delved into that wonderful and beleaguered nation's cornucopia of colors, sounds and flavors, honing her craft into a portfolio much-admired even today.

Modotti mixed with muralist Diego River and his wife (not Frida, the first one), Siqueiros and other figures of the Mexican left until her commitment grew enough to join the communists' feeble efforts to overthrow an already corrupt regime.

When her first husband died Modotti became lover to a Cuban Marxist named Julio Mella, who was shot as he walked with her down a Mexico City street. She was accused as an accomplice in the murder.

Surviving the legal inquest, she nonetheless acquired the sobriquet, "The Bloody Tina Modotti."

Sooner than later, the revolution melded seamlessly with her own life. After somebody tried to kill the Mexican president, Modotti was tossed from the country and into a wanderer's existence served exclusively on behalf of the worker's cause.

Her art was dedicated to the same cause, but unlike socialist realism and other products of the era, Modotti never took up a cudgel. There is nothing bombastic or cloyingly heroic about her photographic subjects.

Rather than impose a communistic view onto the world, Modotti found natural instances, bits of workerist filigree that she highlighted with a Graphlex lens and whatever light was at her disposal.

The compositions are often exquisite.

Berlin, Austria, Paris...Modotti served as a spy in the service of the communist movement. Like many well-meaning progressives, she wasted her countless and life-threatening efforts on the schemes of wicked Joe Stalin.

Few knew what Stalin was until it was too late, that's what is said. Still, it was not necessary, this falling into the trap of losing God only to replace him with the leader of Russia's Communist Party, good or bad.

But we all make mistakes. The swoop and sweep of our lives can be ennobled by their smaller embellishments.

Modotti was dispatched to Spain along with her lover Ennea Sormanti, where she worked as a nurse for the international communist medical auxiliary, staying until the Spanish Republic's tragic demise, squiring the poet Antonio Machado over the Pyrenees to death in France.

Tina floated the world over on a barge for a while, no country willing to take her in. Mexico finally relented. She died there in a cab a few years later, her life only partially rebuilt.

Some think Modotti was killed by Stalin's agents, because she knew of Sormanti's alleged crimes against humanity.

Elena Poniatowska, Mexican author of the definitive biography, "Tinisima," crafted a more quiet expiration brought on by a life of high-drama and chain-smoking.

Either way, the mystery befits a woman who led an uncommon existence, following her bliss, seeking a higher purpose, molding life itself into a work of art.

The Donkey Business Done

2010-08-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

In progressive politics, no good deed goes rewarded.

(or something like that)

Carl Hulse's piece in the "New York Times" (Aug. 15) says congressional Democrats find themselves on the "political defensive" despite having done everything they promised voters in 2008, save for delivering on a climate change bill.

Republicans, the article reads, "grudgingly concede that Democrats compiled a record perhaps unrivaled since the Great Society programs of President Lyndon Johnson were passed during 89th Congress or the New Deal programs were pushed through they 73rd Congress by President Franklin D. Roosevelt."

And that, Hulse noted, was with considerably more opposition than those two earlier executives faced. By contrast, The Obama/Reid/Pelosi "victories were wrenching, partisan and procedurally ugly, but they were victories."

As White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel told Hulse, "He said what he was going to do, and he did it."

"He" being the president.

No wonder the American people are furious! They're not used to seeing things get done and when you throw in the fact a lot of these measures are about improving our lives long-term, rather than froth designed to deliver votes in November, they should rightly be flummoxed.

For years now, they've grown accustomed to "divided government." Having blessed the Republicans with the one guy they needed to filibuster Washington D.C. into its habitual inactivity, the words of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell should be disheartening.

He told "The Times" that he was "amused" that his caucus's endless caviling, holding, stalling, and fingers-up-their-buttings should be criticized.

"I wish we had been able to obstruct more," McConnell said. "They were able to get the health care bill through. They were able to get the stimulus through. They were able to get financial reform through."

And we didn't need any of those things. We needed nothing and lots of it!

Out on the hustings, Obama called the Republicans the "no we can't crowd" and correctly noted that they are "more concerned with the next election than the next generation."

The minority leader says the Democrats will pay for pushing such "sweeping measures" in the face of public opposition.

The GOPers often forget they represent a single region of the country and that, love Dixie though we all do, it simply does not represent a majority any more than the Republicans do.

Hulse's piece quotes Democrats lamenting that they don't know "how to celebrate" and that's why November is going to bring THE END OF THE WORLD! (as we know it).

Not sure what else the Democrats could do. It would be nice, for them anyway, if the Hulse piece, instead of being buried on page 20, were on the cover and crowned with a headline like, say... "Democrats Have Compiled Record Unrivalled Since FDR."

But there's no point complaining about the media anymore. People are either smart or stupid and that extends to their choice of news source and their literacy when it comes to consuming it.

It's a matter of cold and hard politics and with more than a year of gloom and doom forecasts, "The Times" also noted that, unlike in 1994, the Democrats are prepared and taking those steps necessary to prevent the no-nothings from storming the gates (again).

Should they fail, those of us who support the president and his cohorts might be content with the record they've pieced together and the easier task of stopping GOP efforts at repeal.

Wither goest thou America, forward or back?

Letter to China's Ambassador Zhang Yesui

2010-08-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

August 12, 2010

650 South Sweetzer Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90048

Zhang Yesui
Chinese Ambassador to the United States
3505 International Place N.W.
Washington D.C. 20008

Mr. Ambassador,

This letter is in response to a most disturbing article in the August 12 edition of the "The New York Times," about the impending prosecution of the Tibetan writer Tragyal.

We here in the United States know that somebody being prosecuted in China is going to jail, because you have no concept of individual rights and such politically motivated processes usually result in conviction.

Why don't you let this gentleman go? I'm not well-informed on the politics of Tibet and China, but, like Tragyal, I'm a writer who gives free reign to his thoughts about governance, and mis-governance, both in my country and around the world.

You and I, it is understood, hail from different cultures, but I'm unwilling to accept the idea that in certain places, the thoughts, emotions, and intellectual productions of a human mind have no right to expression in the public sphere.

One thing is jailing somebody for violence against the state, but to snuff them out for writing a book strikes me as beyond the pale.

More importantly, I do not understand how it is your government can destroy the lives of people who circulate their thoughts and opinions regarding the Chinese government's performance.

Is it flawless, your government? Do its many officials, to a person, never make a mistake?

I'll be frank Mr. Ambassador. I tire of reading about the torture, disappearance, summary execution, and long-term incarceration of people whose only difference from me is that they had the misfortune of being born under a system your government finds beyond reproach.

I frequently put-off letters like this, because another article, about another person with the temerity to question the Chinese government's way of doing business, is published to take its place in my catalogue of outrages against human freedom.

So while I'm at it, let me put in a good word for Hu Jia, winner of the Sakharov Price for Freedom of Thought, and Liu Xiaobo another writer for whom I feel truly sorry.

And I extend the same sentiments to other forlorn victims of your repressive state. You know their names better than I.

Your government ought to be embarrassed with the way it deprives China‘s best citizens of the fundamental right to breathe freely, and by extension, with the way it instills fear into each and every citizen.

A child is not a grown up because he wears an adult's clothes, Mr. Ambassador.

And China is neither a modern or humane country simply because it successfully shills cheap goods to people around the world.

Shame on you.

the highway scribe

Tuesday's Results: The Dirt(y)

2010-08-11T17:22:00.000-07:00

Another series of primaries done and highwayscribery is still waiting for the big "anti-establishment" revolt at the polls that will crush the Democratic majorities and usher in another era of shoddy governance.

Let's see, the guy backed by the president in Colorado won. Jeff Zeleny's piece in the "New York Times," noted that Senator Michael Bennett's victory, "interrupted the story line that all incumbents are doomed by voter discontent."

These damn primaries keep interrupting the same story line but the media, which can't be "mainstream" if perpetually wrong, continues to peddle it.

Some guy named Ken Buck beat up on the Republican establishment's candidate of choice, which only confirms what we've been saying about Tea Party types since the last round of primaries/elections: These people are dividing the Republican Party.

Rand Paul, the Tea Party guy from Kentucky, can't get anything right and may give the Democrats a chance at stealing a seat they have no business contesting.

Sharron Angle, the Tea Party gal picked by Nevada Republicans has done more to resurrect Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's career than anything President Obama might have.

The Connecticut GOP is going with a former wrestling executive, effectively snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Dan Quayle's kid Ben, not content with the mess his daddy made of the family name, got nailed on some old posts he wrote for "The Dirty" (Scottsdale, Ariz. edition).

highwayscribery doesn't think that should disqualify Quayle fils, but that's because he's a Democrat out of the Kennedy tradition who thinks presidents and other political fauna should be allowed to have testes.

But Quayle's neither running on a blue ticket or in a blue state so he's got some explainin' ta do at the next church social.

And, of course, the shelf-life of Sarah Palin continues to grow as stale as the Democrats-are-doomed meme we've been hearing since, oh, the Republicans came up with the cockeyed idea of saying no to every Obama effort at fixing what ails the country.

"The Washington Post" has a great graphic charting the success of Palin's self-proclaimed "Mamma Grizzlies."

It is understandable that you might not click-through given her increasing irrelevance, but suffice it to say, 10 candidates she endorsed won, and eight have lost, which is mostly a wash, just as her run for the vice presidency and half-term as governor of Alaska were.

There is no difference between what the Republican Party is enduring and the trials undergone by their Democratic counterparts in the 1980s when the liberal wing, of which the scribe was an active member, forced uncomfortable and unpalatable positions on the likes of people like Michael Dukakis.

'Nuff said.

And while the Democrats have picked up baggage by adopting long-term fixes and strategies for our declining country, the Republicans offer no alternative, since there is little change to what or who they, in truth, care about and represent.

To wit: Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican senator ever, just died as he lived: in a plane crash on his way to a corporate junket...even though he's been out of office for a few years now.

Book Report: "Mr. Sammler's Planet" by Saul Bellow

2010-08-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

"Mr. Sammler's Planet" (Penguin Classics)makes the case for sticking with an author's big hits before delving into their more exotic offerings.

Saul Bellow, of course, is/was a famous writer whose big triumphs were "The Adventures of Augie March (Penguin Classics)" and "Herzog (Penguin Classics)."

highwayscribery decided upon "Mr. Sammler's Planet," thanks to its being mentioned in a column by David Brooks of the "New York Times."

In "Children of the '70s," Brooks sought to put a damper on recent enthusiasms for 1970s New York as a dangerous, but freewheeling and artistically sympathetic urban landscape that, on balance, was much better than the white flight and capital disinvestment that characterized it.

highwayscribery, who grew up in that New York, indulged just such a flight of fancy in his post memorializing the recently deceased downtown poet, Jim Carroll.

Brooks noted in his piece that, when the city tried slum clearance on the upper West Side, "Crime did not abate. Passivity set in, the sense that nothing could be done. The novel, 'Mr. Sammler's Planet,' by Saul Bellow captured some of the dispirited atmosphere of that era -- the sense that New York City was a place of no-go zones, a place where one hunkered down."

Some.

"Mr. Sammler's Planet," to the extent that it is about anything, fleshes out the post-Holocaust relationships between Jewish folk in New York: their mutual aid toward one another and the friendships forged by their unique and tragic recent history.

It is, briefly, about a pick-pocket Sammler watches and with whom he later experiences an unfortunate encounter. It is about the pending death of a close friend and benefactor. It is about his wacky daughter and her personal quest to make a father whose claim to fame is a long-ago relationship with H.G. Wells relevant to fast-changing times.

But these story threads are a skimpy skeleton upon which Mr. Bellow hung a lot of issues swimming around in his mind. It almost works until he gets into a discussion with Dr. Govinda Lal from whom his daughter Shula has stolen a manuscript.

The exchange is characterized by long-winded discourses from both men on the nature of things, which, to their minds, cannot be described in elementary terms. The two gents hold court with only the rarest authorial interjections to remind us these are characters talking and not just a stream of raw, unplugged Bellow.

The author was a Nobel Prize winner whose thoughts are novel and well-expressed. There is certainly valuable currency in "Mr. Sammler's Planet," but less of a story than one might expect from someone quite so celebrated.

Bring on "Herzog."

Possessors of the Ball, Owners of the Universe

2010-07-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Below is the translation of an article written by Jesus Alcaide from the Madrid-based daily "El Mundo" on the Spanish selection's winning the prized World Cup. Two years ago, when the same group of "mozos" won the European Cup, the highway scribe wrote "Spain is Cool," as an expression of those sentiments aroused by a stunning land that has given him enough beauty to fill a 360-page epic novel, and memories aplenty to entertain him in old age. After Johannesburg, these feelings return and almost overwhelm.

Possessors of the Ball, Owners of the Universe

That's it. Spain, World Champion. It is not a dream, it is real. In decades to come an entire country will remember the decisive action. The pass by Cesc, the delicate control of Inieista and the finish from a kid of Albacete who uplifted 46 million Spaniards after 117 minutes of continuous domination, of chiseling away at rock to bring down a fortification that resisted heavy artillery with dark arts that stained an illustrious orange jersey.

Yes, the World Cup comes to Spain after 90 long years of waiting, of seeing how the good ones were always somebody else. In the end, this curse was ended thanks to the best generation in history, artists in love with the ball who avenged the memory of so many others who never reached the river bank. From Zamora to Zarra, Gento to Luis Suarez, Butragueno to Raul. So many that tried and never even came close to that river bank. This bunch did. But most importantly, they did it with an identifiable style, beautiful, the envy of those who like their soccer clean, offensive, joyous, and without malice. Yes, this time we were the good ones. And this time, soccer was not capricious, instead tipping its hat to those who merited it, to those who overcame the tricks, dirty play, and knifings of a rival that, Dutch coat-of-arms on their jersey not withstanding, looked more like Nazi officials overunning Poland. They were taking no prisoners, only corpses, and counted on the collaboration of an English referee who had more in common with the great conciliator Chamberlain than the visionary Churchill. A referee who permitted the crunching of legs, only remembering the red card in his pocket during overtime.

But this Spain, the red ballet that revolves around Xavi with the divine collaboration of Saint Iker Casillas in the dire moment, forced every rival to admit their inferiority before the possessors of the ball, owners of the universe, those who now have a star on their jersey. Let's go for another. God, what an orgasm. Viva Espana. Long live the mother who birthed you, oh heroes, and thanks Don Vicente.

Material Girl Lands

2010-06-29T17:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a link to the Web site for the new Material Girl fashion line. The scribe's wife is part of the design team that has brought this sartorial confection from Madonna's daughter Lourdes (Lola) to Macy*s stores everywhere.

Kennedy on Poetry

2010-06-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Tuesday's Results: Some Thoughts

2010-05-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

In Pennsylvania, the Democrat beat the Republican in a congressional race, the Democrat beat the Democrat who was really a Republican in the Senate primary and, down in Arkansas, neither Democrat could beat the other Democrat in another Senate primary.

That makes the Democrats look almost…unbeatable.

highwayscribery lacks the time, funding, and staff to check up on such things, but MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow does, and she said the congressional pickup represents the seventh consecutive special election victory for the Democrats since 2008.

These results jibe exactly with what we’ve been saying over the past few days and months: that anti-incumbent sentiment cuts both ways and that the GOP isn’t ready to govern just because their opposite numbers have made some tough choices about the country's needs.

The “New York Times,” which doesn’t openly admit to reading this blog, was forced to finally soften its dyed-in-the-wool narrative of a coming Democratic debacle in November:

“For Republicans,” wrote Carl Hulse and Jeff Zeleny, “the failure to take an open seat that they made great efforts to capture was interpreted as a warning to curtail talk of how many seats they will win in November.”

They should have included themselves in the chastened grouping, but heck, it’s the “New York Times”!

The pundits are still talking about a scared, freaked-out electorate, because otherwise they’d have to admit how wrong their recent prognostications have been.

An occupational hazard.

But Tuesday’s elections remind us that local issues are more important to such contests than those trying to read the nation’s tea leaves in them dare admit.

Straining to divine national implications in Sen. Arlen Spector’s (D-Penn.) defeat at the hands of Joe Sestak (pictured), the media geniuses may be missing a simple reality: Sometimes you gotta go. Especially if you’ve held a seat for 30 years, beaten cancer twice, and are up against a younger, more energetic fellow who deserves a chance.

Just a thought.

In the Pennsylvania Congressional 12th contest, a working class, non-latte drinking crowd went with the last guy’s chief-of-staff, which makes the electorate seem not as angry, scared, or rabid about incumbents as we’re still being told it is.

Meanwhile, an Indiana Republican, Rep. Mark Souder, resigned his seat thanks to his affair with a married staffer.

We’ve never heard of him, but “The Times” assures us Souder is “known for his push for stronger drug penalties and abstinence-only sex education for teenagers…”

Which only goes to show that even the people who advocate such policies don’t truly believe in them.

Such paper-thin righteousness is hardly the stuff a party might expect to ride a national wave to power upon.

And good riddance.

Boilerplate Bunk

2010-05-18T13:19:00.000-07:00

Unsurprisingly, nobody listens to highwayscribery.

On May 14 the “New York Times,” once again, peddled the “death of the Democratic majority” narrative in a prominently placed piece.

This time, it was written by Katharine Seelye, and uncovered the strong “shift of ground” in a Massachusetts congressional district currently represented by Niki Tsongas, a Democrat.

With no poll numbers to boost its contention the incumbent is in trouble, the story sticks, after the Republican/conservative fashion, to the unscientific and anecdotal; mostly impressed with the fact Ms. Tsongas is watching eight Republicans of zero stature savage one another for the right to oppose her.

You’ve read this piece before and will continue to read it for months to come as the conventional wisdom slowly petrifies into the institutional kind nobody dares challenge.

(exceptin’ us!)

Particular to all these stories is what highwayscribery calls the “boilerplate” paragraph.

Seelye uses it, as all the reporters to do, to explain the over-ballyhooed “anti-incumbent fever” which, she claims, “is rooted in anger over the federal economic stimulus package, the new health care law, and the succession of bailouts, as well as a desire by voters to feel empowered.”

That last one is a phenomenon of her own invention and not part of the classic boilerplate paragraph.

The bailout was bipartisan and accrues to the debit side of every incumbent’s account, Republican or Democrat, although it is not often presented in those terms

The rest is pap about the stimulus package and health care reform being the stuff of Democratic debacles

We are told a majority thought the stimulus unnecessary. Like numbers feel health care reform is something that, as Republicans repeated ad nauseum in their ill-fated effort to Kill-The-Bill, “was shoved down the throats of the American people.”

Rarely, if ever, is there an article focused on the millions of folks, bit-players in the current governing coalition, who fought for health care reform.
Nobody wanted it you see. Representatives and senators did what they damn well pleased because they don’t listen to or need votes.

There is a dearth of articles interviewing happy teachers who kept their jobs, parents whose kids’ schools stayed open, or construction workers relieved to be laboring on infrastructure projects funded with stimulus money.

highwayscribery does not believe this is because such stories don’t exist.

Similarly, few are the stories about where, and on what, the stimulus package is being applied.

The overall impression is that health care reform will cost Americans much, but offer them nothing while the stimulus money was poured down some black hole of unaccountability when, actually, the opposite is true.

Certainly, a goodly portion of Americans opposed these measures, but the coverage we’re talking about here renders them a majority, which is to regurgitate a Republican talking report rather than practice sound journalism.

The oft-predicted Republican resurgence set for November occurs on the commentariat’s chessboard where all things remain equal and the opposition party holds its own in spite of a pathetic performance over the course of the Obama reign.

But there are telling exceptions.

In Sunday’s “New York Times,” an interview with the former chairman of Bear Stearns,
Alan C. Greenberg confessed that, “I was a Republican for years. After the way the Republican leadership acted when the health care bill was passed, I changed my affiliation to Democrat.”

Election-year coverage, to date, suggests he is utterly alone in these sentiments.

We doubt it.

Reform This!

2010-04-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

Three filibusters and out.

That was fast. The "New York Times," reported that the Republicans had "relented" in the face of considerable pressure the likes Goldman Sacks be brought to heel. This means the party is very NOT relentless and Mr. Peebles, otherwise knows as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, just the opposite.

You can't judge a nerd by his glasses.

The Republicans' was a great performance in legislative self-gratification and another example of the neutered Republicans' over-reliance on the filibuster.

As "Times" reporters David Herszenhorn and Edward Wyatt, or one of them anyway, pointed out, "While the Republicans can still filibuster, they are at a disadvantage during the floor debate given the Democrats' 59 to 41 majority. And the decision to allow floor debate appeared to be a significant retreat by the minority, reflecting a calculation that further delay was politically untenable."

You can say that again!

"And the decision to allow floor debate appeared to be a significant retreat by the minority, reflecting a calculation that further delay was politically untenable."

Hurts so good.

The Republicans don't want President Obama to succeed at anything regardless of what that thing means to the country. It's a clumsy posture forcing the GOP into uncomfortable, pretzel-like political positions:

"Among the challenges for Republicans, "The Times" writers write, "was explaining how they could participate in an oversight hearing on Tuesday criticizing Goldman Sachs executives and proclaiming the need to tighten regulation of Wall Street, but then go to the Senate chamber and vote to block debate of the financial regulatory bill."

"Salon" has a problem with some of the ensuing coverage, which grants the President's party a victory without being sure of what has been won. But it's "Salon's" self-appointed to be whine about Democrats in between election seasons and support them when the line outside the polling place starts taking shape.

Speaking of polling, that same outlet's Joe Conason parses an upturn in Democratic support out of a new sampling of voters from the "Washington Post."

It's a question of whether you believe in polls or not. highwayscribery does, like all of us, when they confirm his beliefs.

Conason quotes the survey which concluded, "The public trusts Democrats more than Republicans to handle the major problems facing the country by a double-digit margin, giving Democrats a bigger lead than they held two months ago when Congress was engaged in the long endgame over divisive health legislation."

There's more. President Obama's numbers are up and, despite all the "anti-incumbent" sentiment we are told is out there, the Republicans come off much worse in the poll.

Proof of highwayscribery's hard-earned lesson that you must be more than AGAINST something to win an election.

we told you so four months ago, and four days (or so) ago as well.

Same goes for our prediction that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist would leave the Republican Party and run as an independent, thereby increasing the Democrats' chances of taking that Senate seat.

Tea anyone?

Naturally you are wondering, "How can highwayscribery be getting it so right?" But we must confess that has not always been thus. In fact, back when the scribe's belief in the minimum wage left him "outside the mainstream of American politics," he confused his anger with that of everybody else's in the country, much the way Tea Party people do now.

But the presidential election of 2004 fixed THAT.

Now, the scribe is a piece of particulate matter in the same political class around which the President has built his core support, demographically, intellectually...by many measurements.

So much so, that he was offered to apply for a job with Organizing for America, the Obama crowd's grassroots storm-troop group.

the highway scribe declined.

Our support is contingent upon specific policies we are, for the most part, getting from Barack Obama. Plus, we don't do propaganda. If the Obama administration wants to subpoena a reporter over his resources, for example, we observe how the policy runs counter to the First Amendment and our hallowed free press traditions.

And besides, the job requires relocating to D.C., where there are no waves for surfing.

Book Report: "A Magnificent Catastrophe," by Edward Larson

2010-04-27T15:49:00.001-07:00

Ambitious people don't always come off too well in literature, and "A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign" shows that our hallowed founding fathers were no exception.

The "Founding Fathers" are usually presented as an archetype of monolithic cohesion; high-minded patriots, with a nascent American polity's well-being the driving force behind their every action.

There is a wistful, almost universal, sentiment that says, “they just don’t make them like that anymore.”

But this book establishes that they were monolithic only in their desire for independence from England, and thereafter took radically different positions.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Larson's portrayal of names as revered as Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the not-so-revered, Aaron Burr or Thomas Cotesworth Pinckney, leaves hardly a hair of difference between the high- and low-minded amongst them.

These gentlemen were, in the end, politicians. And like all specimens of that species, they craved power and stepped on people to get it.

Alexander Hamilton comes off particularly bad, or good, depending on your politics.

As a member of the "high Federalist" faction, which ruled before the presidential election covered here, Larson marks him for a pro-British, almost monarchical, presence on the American political scene. A guy who managed to finagle his own standing army out of the Federalist majority and was known as “General Hamilton.”

And he wasn’t the only founder with aristocratic tendencies.

Larson writes that the aforementioned Pinckney, “fought the Revolution to preserve what he, as a South Carolina patrician, viewed as the traditional rights of Englishmen, which for him included the God-given right to enslave Africans -- a right that prewar legal developments in Britain appeared to threaten.”

"Liberty or Death!" indeed.

It comes as quite a shock, in fact, that beacons such as Hamilton, John Adams, and other Federalists in power at the time had a strong aversion to, well, democracy.

They didn't like it, feared it, figured it for a precursor to the mobs, massacres, and guillotines that were all the rage in France at the time.

In fact, they made it a practice to tar Thomas Jefferson's Republican Party (not THAT Republican Party) as "Jacobins," after the unruliest faction of the tumultuous French political scene. Much the way today's Republicans go on about the Democrats being "socialists."

There is, perhaps, something calming in all of this. A vote of confidence for those who shrug at today's Washington shenanigans, confident that our Republic shall survive this, too.

The debate so marvelously detailed here traces the pedigrees of our current political divide.

It may come as a surprise, for those who went into paroxysms over the Bush administration’s scant deference to the rule of law, that such behavior has roots in the guy gracing our ten dollar bill.

Concerned that changes in Maryland’s election law would deliver the presidency to Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton wrote a fellow Federalist, “I am aware of strong objections to the measure, but if it be true, as I suppose, that our opponents aim at revolution and employ all means to secure success, the contest must be unequal if we not only refrain from unconstitutional and criminal measures, but even from such as may offend against the routine of strict decorum.”

In blog-ese, Hamilton is saying, “If we don’t act unconstitutionally or criminally, and risk offending everyone’s sensibilities, we’ll lose the election.”

Al Hamilton, meet Karl Rove.

This book makes clear that today’s rabid partisanship is hardly a new phenomenon.

As the complex election of 18000 is being resolved, things in Washington are at fever pitch. Members of the warring parties no longer socialize as they did up in Philadelphia and Massachusetts Federalist Harrison Gray Otis writes his wife to say, “I have concluded to go to no more balls. I do not enjoy myself with these people.”

Seeking to forge some kind of bipartisan sentiment, the victorious Jefferson is obligated to point out that, “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle.”

Sound familiar?

Well, the founders reacted in much the same way their legislative offspring do today, and they didn’t need Fox News or the Internet to slime far and wide.

Messenger on horseback was sufficient to spreading a rumor that the mostly forgotten Pinckney, a frequent and viable presidential candidate in those days, had gone to England in search of four mistresses for sharing with John Adams, who quipped in response: “If this be true, General Pinckney has kept all for himself and cheated me out of my two.”

There isn’t enough of such stuff in “Magnificent Catastrophe.” It's a dense, if worthwhile read.

That’s not Larson’s fault. The people he’s researching did what they did and said what they said, and the business of resolving the dangerous partisan rift was indeed a grim one.

In fact, “Magnificent Catastrophe,” suffers from its almost exclusive focus on the inside ball associated with the party politics that followed the death of George Washington who preferred that grand and national coalitions conduct the country’s business.

Readers may yearn for a wider portrait of America, such as that rendered in the account of John Adams’ time on the hustings, when an agrarian, English-styled nation filled with country villages surfaces, if only too briefly.

“Magnificent Catastrophe” doesn't quite live up to its grandiose title. The founding fathers’ low-brow dealings are anything but magnificent, and the catastrophe was ultimately averted.

But it is a revelatory document detailing the way presidents were chosen in the nation’s early days, and dissecting the numbers, myriad votes, and concomitant conniving employed to affect them, in a tense political season that might have doomed the country.

Ahead of the Curve

2010-04-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

You read it here first. Or at least before you read it on "Politico."

In his April 21 post, "Democrats Banking on Reform," the highway scribe called the Tea Party movement, "the biggest white elephant in American politics."

The post noted that you might be distracted from the divining the true tenor of our country's politics by "an endless barrage of mentions" about that particular group. This was followed-up there by a few details about how damaging the Tea Party might actually be to the efforts of those hoping to topple President Obama.

Well, the next day, while highwayscribery's entry was traversing the global system of flows, an infinitely more potent outfit, "Politico," published, "The Tea Party's Exaggerated Importance."

The online powerhouse concluded that nothing succeeds like excess and the media has succumbed to this formula in its Tea Party coverage, noting that, "In fact, there is a word for what poll after poll depicts as a group of largely white, middle-class, middle-aged voters who are aggrieved: 'Republicans'."

highwayscribery's riposte said: "Essentially Republican voters, the only thing that would make this 18 percent segment of the population newsworthy is if they actually turned on the GOP and helped consolidate Democratic control."

The point?

highwayscribery is special!

"Politico" noted that the Tea Party has "failed to make a dent so far in Republican primaries."

In "The WikiLeaks Massacre," this blogger observed that in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, he marched with "crowds much larger than anything the Tea Party ever cooked up. Unlike that self-centered bunch of hysterics, we were confronted by police sent out to bash heads, because of our opposition to exactly this kind of horror."

Or as "Politico" authors Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith put it: "And just a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of Americans turned out to rally against the Iraq war. Now, veterans of those protests -- covered largely as spot news and spectacle -- wonder why they didn't get the weighty, anthropological treatment assigned to the tea parties."

(They forgot the part about police knocking the snot out of the anti-war crowd).

The "Politico" piece notes that the group's Tax Day crowds [promoted by Fox News as they were] "were not representative of a force that is purportedly shaping the country's politics. About a thousand people showed up in state capitals like Des Moines, Montgomery, and Baton Rouge, and even fewer in large cities like Philadelphia, Boston and Milwaukee."

Their reward? The article enumerates a blogger "The Washington Post" hired to cover the "movement," CNN crews that joined the Tea Party Express bus tours, polls in the "New York Times," addressing their importance, and "CNN" (again), and their own outfit.

Pew's Project for Excellence in Journalism noted that the Tea Party competed for attention with the Iceland volcano and beat out health care in terms of coverage garnered.

The upshot, the reporters say, is that, like Sarah Palin, who couldn't wait to glom onto the Tea Party poopers, they are symbols "that outweigh their actual impact."

Exactly our point (again).

Democrats Banking on Reform

2010-04-21T13:14:00.000-07:00

Even as its business model is shredded to smithereens by the Internet, our mainstream media persists in propagating a wisdom utterly conventional.

Why the information industry's foot soldiers insist the Democratic Party is headed for doom in this year's elections, and bury an article headlined "Democrats Top GOP in Fund-Raising for Midterms" is anybody's guess.

Hee Haw!

Back on January 10, in "Dem Dead Dems," the highway scribe said the Democrats' problems were relative and the Republicans were in no position to take advantage of them.

Although highwayscribery hates repeating itself, the popes of American news do not, and so we are obligated in our gadfly's mission to follow suit, repeat, and refute this widespread fallacy.

We are not going to serve up a bunch of stuff you are supping on daily, just a few recent examples of the aforementioned popular pap.

The "San Francisco Chronicle," which ought to know better, put a California spin on things.

The state's Democrats just adjourned their convention and the reporter wonders how they're going to rev things up to 2008 levels of excitement, which, of course they can't.

This begs the question of whether a governing party needs to generate the energy of historic, watershed elections every time voters are convened to settle the polity's direction.

We would suggest there is margin for error and that, in the wake of the health care debate, the Democratic Party is holding its own, hardly imploding as the present-day narrative strains to assert.

At the national level, "Salon" throws in the towel on the mid-terms, too. Then it sugar-coats things for its liberal audience with some high-falutin', demographically based hoo-hah about how 2012 will be better for Democrats.

The article only affirms the highway scribe's hypothesis that journalists think way too much before arriving at like conclusions.

Our editorial board's take, honed over years in opposition, is that Republicans will not fare well just because folks are unhappy with the other guys.

It's a cyclical analysis of American politics that sees parties rise to power, expend themselves of ideas, crash on the shoals of a popular clamor for change, engage in internecine policy purges, and then start hatching ideas anew.

In today's speedy world, this takes less time than before, but it's still a process that requires some years unfold.

highwayscribery's prediction is that, as the premier and dominant figure on the American political landscape, Barack Obama remains the focus of our national narrative by holding serve in 2010, slowly wearing down the opposition, and imposing those programs he was elected to affect.

We predict he gets reelected in 2012 for lack of fresh Republican talent, coupled with a bruising 24-hour cable-news-ified primary season on the right, before getting his hat handed to him in 2014.

If that comes as cold dousing given what you've been reading and watching, witness the flailing Republicans push each other to the right, waffle over keeping or dumping their ineffectual party chairman Michael Steel, while slowly losing their ability to gum-up the legislative works.

Here, an article in the "New York Times," about the Democrats effectively moving on nominations held-up by the GOP for nine months.

It notes that, "Under the threat of late-night sessions, Republicans have agreed to allow votes on two federal judicial nominees, and Democrats hope to force votes on two others this week."

From which we can only surmise that Republican legislators are willing to surrender their ideological bona fides for an early ride home.

Here's another "Times" piece about follow-up health care legislation regulating insurance premium increases.

No GOPers are predicting the end of freedom as we know it this round. So either they've accepted socialist enslavement or don't think that line of reasoning worked too well for them.

The Republicans bet everything on the health care debate. It was a careless wager against something a lot of people have been clamoring decades for.

There was never a clear policy from the opposition.

We never knew if they were against the drug companies, who backed the measure, the insurance companies whom Obama had wisely co-opted early on in the process, the medical community, or the American people themselves.

What they were clearly against, was President Obama's achieving anything.

As Tom Friedman noted in "Everybody Loves a Winner," one needn't be Machiavelli "to believe that the leaders of Iran and Venezuela shared the barely disguised Republican hope that health care would fail and, therefore, Obama's whole political agenda would be stalled and, therefore, his presidency enfeebled."

Now, the highway scribe and countless leftists wanted and worked for much the same in the case of George W. Bush. But he stole an election.

As Frank Rich recently noted, the problem for Tea Partiers, who are otherwise "doing fine," is that Obama is black.

That is less an offense than rigging an election in your big brother's state. Except in the south, the regional rock to which Republicans cling for a modicum of relevance.

As Democrats continue their efforts to keep us healthy at a cheaper price, we'll see how the world did not come to an end and that their positive labors in this area will match their good deeds in the credit card business.

Have you seen your statement lately? It tells what you've forked over in fees and interest for the year to date, maps out your future expenses at current rates of payment, and details alternative sums that wipe out your debt sooner.

The changes are due to new laws, not some new predisposition on the part of big banks who want to be your friend.

They really don't.

And as the "New York Times," noted on April 19, the Democrats have seized a great combination of populist ire at banks and fancy pants investment houses, and their opponents' predilection for all things financial, to make hay at the GOP's expense.

You have to hand it to the Republicans. They know what they stand for and they don't back down when the political climate is searing their values on the grill.

They like banks. The lunch with banks. They want to help banks. They tell bankers not to worry about congressional staffer "punks" harassing them.

Obama was out here in Los Angeles raising money for Sen. Barbara Boxer; someone who is supposedly vulnerable in November, which is not likely.

The President informed his audience about where his opposite number, politically speaking, has been of late. That would be Mitch McConnell, Senate minority leader whom, the president noted, recently convened a little confab including Wall Street Brahmin, himself, and Sen. John Cornyn of Texas.

"Now, the Senate Republican leader, he paid a visit to Wall Street a week or two ago," the president narrated for his partisans. "He took along the chairman of their campaign committee [that's Cornyn]. He met with some of the movers and shakers up there. I don't know exactly what was discussed, all I can tell you is that, when he came back, he promptly announced he would oppose the financial regulatory reform. He would oppose it. Shocking. And once again he's threatening to tie up the Senate with a filibuster to block progress."

The health care debate turned McConnell's once obscure tools of obstruction into household words so that now "filibuster" is officially a dirty one, unless you're the kind who ties teabags to your NASCAR baseball cap.

The Senate minority leader explained that he was on Wall Street, "gathering information" regarding peoples' views on the proposed reform.

Which is fine, but highwayscribery is still waiting to talk with McConnell so he can air some views, too. He hasn't heard from Mitch yet.

Have you?

While the Obama crowd and their suddenly cohesive cohorts in Congress were working to get financial reform on the Senate floor within a week (the House has already passed a bill), the federal government sued Goldman Sachs for fraud.

The firm just posted another $zillion quarterly profit and word has it the government's case is a tough sell, but the timing's right, isn't it?

If you think it's a mistake an Obama Department of Justice filed the lawsuit around the same time the administration would like the Senate to take up financial regulatory reform, than you're one of those people who thinks the president is stupid.

You are invited by a supporter of the administration to keep doing that.

McConnell is backtracking, because his threat to kill legislation reining in predatory financial institutions, while railing against predatory financial institutions, is fooling nobody and he can't get the 41 votes he needs.

The strategy of gridlock is being affected by a law of diminishing returns and financial reform represents the second big loss in a month's time for Republicans.

And this time it wasn't even close.

By now you should see where things are heading, but might be distracted by flack from an endless barrage of mentions about the Tea Party. The biggest white elephant in American politics since Ross Perot.

Essentially Republican voters, the only thing that would make this 18 percent segment of the population newsworthy is if they actually turned on the GOP and helped consolidate Democratic control.

And it is happening.

They've made Florida's Marco Rubio a poster-boy for the new conservatism, and a dumping ground of Sunshine State Gov. Charlie Crist's political career.

The feckless Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), in a dog-fight with a newly, self-identified Tea Partier, J.D. Hayworth, just "distanced" himself from Crist.

Ham-handed and craven, the Republican establishment has treated one of its proven and successful moderates so roughly that Crist is threatening to run as an independent.

Can you say "split ticket?"

Michael Gerson, a right-leaning columnist with the "Washington Post," thinks McCain's in trouble. The operative phrase to his piece is, "in an environment where anything can happen to an incumbent."

Which is one of our points here. If the electorate is still in a foul mood seven months from now -- something that is open to dispute -- it won't be the President's party alone that pays the price.

With the pain equitably distributed, the Democrats can be expected to hold onto power.

Bank on it.

The WikiLeaks Massacre

2010-04-07T17:10:00.000-07:00

The guys marked for momentary death documented in the now famous "WikiLeaks" video don't appear to be engaged in any kind of military activity so much as milling about.

But we're going to give the "fog of war" crowd their due. We are going to stay away from (for the most part) whether the killings of a journalist, his driver, and the wounding of two children were justified.

highwayscribery is going to talk about what this miserable episode says about the United States as a country.

And what it says, first, and most obviously, is that we are at war. And that such events leave us vulnerable to revenge attacks like that in Russia last week and to the spiritual perversions protracted, factory-style killing produces.

Exactly what invading Iraq had to do with terrorism in the United States has always been a matter of debate. But the next time we're hit, the reason why will be much clearer and the WikiLeaks video will stand as solid evidence.

Again, the need for engagement is not our issue here. But the aftermath is the aftermath, like it or not. And the aftermath would suggest a bunch of innocent people hanging out in the street were unsuspectingly mowed down, including two guys who worked for Reuters news service.

the highway scribe as been a journalist for 27 years now, and incidents of reporters being hacked to bits in the Philippines, tortured to death in Mexico, and obliterated in Iraq really get his goat, because his goat's really close.

It makes complete sense to him that the wife, or brother, or lover to one of these anonymous men we care not a wit about, will make their presence felt in your random subway station.

You have to expect it.

Secondly, as you mail your tax return off to the Internal Revenue Service, the WikiLeaks video should assure you the money is going toward the purchase of very fine weaponry.

A picture can be worth a thousand words, but this video caused the scribe to cough up just two:

"Holy shit!"

The Apache helicopter's firepower is shocking for the devastation it leaves behind. The bullet spray kicks up a full-on dust storm and we can only be grateful not to see the butcher's mess underneath it.

Keep watching -- if you can -- and witness what happens to the van picking up the unfortunate Reuters photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, who is crawling around, drawing his final breaths. It literally gets bounced upside down...

...with two children on board.

(Oops).

Third, for better or worse, we've got some tough hombres riding in those multi-million dollar helicopters. If the soldiers in Allah's Armies of Death seem particularly heartless, don't worry. This particular bunch need not envy their clinical, reaper-like mien.

It's clear the pilots are very pleased with the pile of bodies their finger-pushing exertions have gathered. There's humor in them thar massacres, children or not.

"Well, it's their fault for bringing their kids into a battle," says one, forgetting whose neighborhood it is in the first place.

And it is hard to understand why the van's occupants, clearly unarmed, backs dangerously exposed to an aircraft that has just scattered corpses near and far, had to be sacrificed.

Really hard.

Fourth, and thankfully, the unfortunate occurrence says hopeful things about our country, too. For example, in the wake of this slaughter, Reuters wanted a copy of the video the military possessed so they could see what happened to their guys.

The agency filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a law signed by a Democratic President, Jimmy Carter, which it is nice to have. However shopworn, abused, and ignored, the measure works on a lot of occasions.

And we need a Freedom of Information Act, because of stuff like the statement from Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Blechwehl, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad, who said, and we quote:

"There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force."

As promised, we're not going to say the pilots were bloodthirsty animals with no regard for civilian life, but we will say there is certainly "a question" of whether the whole thing was necessary.

It's not clear whether Reuters got what they wanted with the FOIA filing, but WikiLeaks did, from somebody inside the military with a conscience. Good for WikiLeaks, the whisteblowers, and the United States of America.

In his "New York Times Sunday Book Review," assessment of Karl Marlantes' "Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War" author Sebastian Junger:

"For a reporter who has covered the military in its current incarnation, the events recounted in this book are so brutal and costly that they seem to belong not just to another time, but to another country. Soldiers openly contemplate killing their commanders. They die by the dozen on useless missions designed primarily to help the careers of those above them. The wounded are unhooked from IV bags and left to die because others, required for battle, are growing woozy from dehydration and have been ordered to drink the precious fluid. Almost every page contains some example of military callousness or incompetence that would be virtually inconceivable today, and I found myself wondering whether the book was intended as an indictment of war in general or a demonstration of just how far this nation has come in the last 40 years."

Well that's a relief, sort of.

Whatever the guys in the Apache copters thought and did, which was plenty no matter how you want to spin it, you have to be heartened by the soldiers on the ground grabbing the wounded children in their arms en route to getting them help.

The "Collateral Murder" crew which edited the raw video for your consumption assert that dumping the kids in an Iraqi hospital was less desirable than taking them to a superior, U.S. military facility.

And that may be true, but at least they didn't leave them bleeding to death in the street.

It's kind of remarkable, watching the video, how many rules and procedures there are to the business of combat. These guys are getting clearance and asking permission yet, for all that, still shoot up a bunch of people, two of whom we can be sure were innocent men doing their day job.

Which brings us to the rant part of this post:

The video is shocking. Mostly because we are protected from the real horrors our bellicose actions, however justified, generate.

The footage is authentic and few things are more unnerving than watching live, threatened humans fleeing for their lives and not making it. The movies are no match. The gap between staged death and the real deal underscores the tragedy of all human slaughter.

Already six years ago, highwayscribery marched in crowds much larger than anything the Tea Party ever cooked up. Unlike that self-centered bunch of hysterics, we were confronted by police sent out to bash heads, because of our opposition to exactly this kind of horror.

"Saddam Hussein was a bad man"

In that idiotic phrase was all the misery and murder on every side - still going on mind you - finally justified once there were no chemical weapons or mushroom clouds to buttress the rolling charnel house that is Iraq.

The WikiLeaks video recalls so many senseless deaths of innocent children, aid workers, United Nations workers, and others. And it stirs up memories of the arrogant smirk owned by the ignoramus who governed us for eight long years.

It conjures all the lies men still running about in our land influencing policy committed in order to launch this little shop of horrors.

It recalls that dark time when the Bush administration had the whole country cowed and, on the eve of the war, walked our listless mainstream press through a color-by-numbers press conference at which they raised their hands and answered pre-approved questions.

The footage brings to mind the last presidential election during which a bunch of white guys battling for the Republican nomination wagged their fat fingers and promised to be "tough," much more so, than the last guy who had just promised the same thing.

This video is what's tough. Tough to watch and tough to live with. It stands, on its own, as marvelous portraiture of what the flag-waving and finger-wagging jerks who don't have to wage war are ultimately responsible for.

They may sleep well, but others don't.

Book Report: "Just Kids," by Patti Smith

2010-04-05T13:56:00.001-07:00

"Just Kids" is just another Jersey-factory-girl-runs-to-New York-and-hooks-up-with-bisexual-art-pornographer-on-her-way-to-rock 'n roll-stardom story.

It details Patti Smith's evolution from tentative neophyte to rock-and-roll poetess, woven through with her unique relationship to Robert Mapplethorpe, a triumphant artist whose own untimely ending, alas, makes for engaging literature.

The place is lower Manhattan. The time-period is the mid-1960s and 1970s when Mapplethorpe and Smith are, age-wise, a "beat behind" the reigning princes and princesses of rock's golden age.

As such, she is influenced artistically by the Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, and Janice Joplin for whom she pens poetic cycles while absorbing political pointers from Jean-Luc Goddard's "One-Plus-One."

The life-as-artist anecdotes have a familiar ring: hunger, rejection, perseverance, and a healthy amount of name dropping.

Smith has affairs with Jim Carroll, Sam Sheppard and a guy from Blue Oyster Cult. Allen Ginsberg mistakes her for a pretty boy in the Automat, and Gregory Corso imparts stern advice to the budding scribe inside her.

They are revealing tales that highlight Smith's achievement as survivor of an era peopled with fascinating characters demolished by addictions and carelessness.

"Just Kids" is the portrait of a New York City not completely subsumed into the grid of overpriced realty, before the Internet, where artistic ambition had a geographic component and required settling into some dump on the mighty Isle.

Here is "art" before its subsequent elevation to bourgeois respectability. To an artist of today's saturated market, the idea that you could install yourself at the Chelsea Hotel and initiate apprenticeships with living legends seems, with the benefit of hindsight, a no-brainer.

One can only assume that, in those days, choosing art meant the painful burden of rejection from loved ones and dangerous uncertainty on the path ahead.

So, as time capsule, "Just Kids" is just great.

But autobiographies should tell us something we don't know about somebody. They can be intriguing when it comes to artists; usually reinvented characters very mindful of their own brands, of what they show and don't show the world.

And who does Patti Smith tell us who she is/was?

For starters, because it's really how she got it going, Patti Smith is/was American as apple pie; thrifty, industrious, entrepreneurial, and self-involved, her Rimbaud-inspired disdain and punk rock posture notwithstanding.

Here Smith describes her efforts in the opening stanza's of the couple's bohemian idyll:

"I scoured secondhand stores for books to sell. I had a good eye, scouting rare children's books and signed first editions for a few dollars and reselling them for much more. The turnover on a pristine copy of 'Love and Mr. Lewisham' inscribed by H.G. Wells covered rent and subway fares for a week."

And she is a fashionista of the first rank.

Long before Patti Smith was confident enough to confront an imposing poetry world, she parsed a personal vocabulary in clothing ensembles that, 30 years on, she remembers down to the last accessory.

In this passage she describes a successful attempt at sartorially seducing Television guitar-star Tom Verlaine to work with her band:

"I dressed in a manner that I thought a boy from Delaware would understand: black ballet flaps, pink shantung capris, my kelly green silk raincoat, and a violet parasol, and entered Cinemabilia where he worked part time."

And she is materialistic. Not flat-screen TV materialistic, for sure, but tightly tied to, and moved by, objects tactile and tangible.

Before joining Mapplethorpe for a photography shoot she, "laid a cloth on the floor, placing the fragile white dress Robert had given me, my white ballet shoes, Indian ankle bells, silk ribbons, and the family Bible, and tied it all in a bundle."

During the shoot she is stricken with anxiety that is eased by Mapplethorpe's knowing voice and a change into dungarees, boots, an old black sweatshirt.

Smith interprets this evolution as an expression of certain ideas she and the photographer have discussed prior. Ideas about the artist seeking contact with the gods, but returning to the world for the purpose of making things.

Her conclusion to the section does not surprise: "I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our hand-made world, saying, 'I choose Earth.'"

As for Mapplethorpe, especially if you're a foot soldier in the art world, he seems a rather common phenomenon: ambitious and single-minded in his craving for fame. Patti's lazy percolation into what she would ultimately become makes for an infinitely more interesting yarn.

One gets the feeling he might agree. In one of the most charming parts of the book he tells her through a cloud of cigarette smoke, "Patti, you got famous before me."

She dubs Mapplethorpe her "knight," but this reader cared thanks to the love she invested in him.

Mapplethorpe, of course, was an artist and all the writing about art in the world cannot replace the actual experience of it. Perhaps he is shortchanged by the autobiographical form; try as his muse does to honor him.

Although we rarely accuse anybody of being too old to rock 'n roll anymore, writing remains a mature person's game. So it was Smith's good fortune to be a writer first, a musician later, and a writer now, because she brings lit-passion and a high level of skill to "Just Kids."

This is especially true towards the end of the book. In earlier stanzas she is more a chronicler of the famous and idiosyncratic characters surrounding. When the poetess describes the artistic vision, purpose, and goals upon which she ultimately settles, the narrative assumes the force of that direction:

"We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it was losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms or our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone."

Pretty grandiose stuff.

But she is, in "Just Kids," nothing if not a dramatist scripting the play of her own life, decorating it with universal symbols, inserting Patti Smith into art history's larger arc.

There are persons and outlets, many in the very cultural current Smith helped generate, who find such self-positioning both cloying and pretentious.

Not highwayscribery.

Worms squirm in the mud and we are all welcome to join them. Walking with the deities is the tougher task and should be worthy of our admiration.

What Change Looks Like

2010-03-22T15:27:00.000-07:00

Two lessons from the great health care debate of 2009-2010: When you have the votes, you have the votes; and, there is nothing like winning.

For too long the horse race as presented to us by the media obscured the Democrats' large majorities in both houses.

Reporters and editors like legislative donnybrooks because they hold readers' attention and make their own jobs more interesting.

And so it is a familiar journalistic habit to focus on certain disgruntled back-benchers, the leftist-rightists of the rightist leftist faction, whose interests diverge from the larger party's.

And, in rare instances where a party is bent on driving over a cliff, you can expect the aforementioned to grab the steering wheel and finish the job in self-demolition.

But the Republican strategy of obstruction, with the sole purpose of provoking the president's failure on a signature initiative, ensured that would not happen.

The liberal elitist in highwayscribery thinks that's because this group of Republicans is not very bright.

While the "New York Times," cooed last week over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Kentucky) masterful melding of his caucus into a useless pile of obstinacy, highwayscribery was thinking that if, let's say, nine Republicans had voted with the Democrats, they might have killed the bill.

But by making it a strictly "party thing," the GOP put wavering Democrats in the position of either betraying their caucus, or squeezing its leadership for a treat.

As an old hand who observes legislative debates with the same intensity he does the World Series, highwayscribery can tell you these holdouts usually want something specific from party leadership... and usually get it.

Meanwhile, ignoring their significant disadvantage in numbers and enjoying their own positive press, Republicans mindlessly stuck to a do-nothing strategy and lost.

Lost ugly.

There was something truly paltry in the dilatory tactics of House Republicans on Sunday. Paltry and puerile. With passage secured, the White Guy Party worked the rules machinery in the chamber with the fury of that fake playing at Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.

It was an unappealing exercise in futility to stave off final passage by what? Four or five hours?

Their link to the viscerally driven Tea Party is not shtick.

Outside the capitol building the rabble were calling black legislators "nigger" and gay legislators "fag." Inside the House chamber someone labeled the man who rallied the Democratic Party's pro-life faction a "baby killer."

Who can buy this bunch as a credible group of leaders?

On the other side of the political spectrum, the infighting over 'lo these many months was intense, but always characterized by the shared goal of keeping an eye on the prize.

While rivers of ink flowed on the Tea Party, the great unwritten story was how well the progressive types who brought Obama to the summit (or followed him, depending on your understanding of such things) held together.

If somebody in the caucus wavered, MoveOn, or Bold Progressive or whomever targeted them with a creditable primary challenge on their left flank in matter of days, raised a million bucks one week afterward, and beat them back in line.

The Tea Partiers make for great photo-ops because they're the ones in the street these days. And not by choice. The liberal left, on the other hand, currently keeps counsel in the halls of power; less theatrically, but more effectively.

NEWS FLASH: The winning 2008 election coalition endures and governs.

Choice words were traded over the public option, single-payer and other issues, but nobody was, in the end, willing to hand the FOX crowd a victory.

It has been so long since progressives won a significant legislative battle that there's hardly anybody alive who remembers how good it makes the team look.

Compare House minority leader John Boehner's red-faced, spittle-spewing condemnation of his "colleagues across the aisle," with Nancy Pelosi's measured, joyous, and forward-looking explanation of why Democrats were spending $900 billion on the American people.

Being constructive comes off much better than does being obstructive.

Now we must reconsider Pelosi's effectiveness as manager of the Democratic rank-and-file, while elevating her place in American political history.

President Obama's steely perseverance and infinite stores of patience will become new topics of analysis and admiration.

And rightfully so.

Republicans say they will base their 2010 campaign on the idea of repealing health care.

It's unlikely. They never really gave a hoot about health care reform. It was merely, as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said so early on the debate, an opportunity to stage-manage Obama's Waterloo.

But let's hope they run on repeal: an anti-idea that expresses perfectly their approach to governance.

There is no greater gift to the ruling party than an opposition looking backwards, asking voters to undo something they lacked the savvy to stop in the first place.

Ladybugs or Lovesongs?

2010-03-09T15:37:00.000-08:00

highwayscribery has posted an album of songs written and performed by his alter ego, Stephen Siciliano, on a My Space page, called "Ladybugs or Lovesongs?" It's an acoustic, rough-cut recording done one rainy December afternoon at the home of guitarist extraordinaire Omar Torrez, who lent a most able hand. The singer/songwriter's six-year old son, Wesley Siciliano, did the album artwork. Enjoy

My Left (-wing) Foot

2010-03-05T11:59:00.000-08:00

Was channel surfing last night when the phone rang and the cable-go-round ground to a halt at FOX.

Not that we never drop in behind enemy lines. It's good to check-in on that alternate universe to marvel at the sameness of the message and the ham-handed delivery.

It's like the soap opera you drop in on after 10 days to find out the whole sordid town of Westport is still suck in the same place.

It's not that highwayscribery doesn't hold conservative principles or drink with conservatives. Not at all. It's just that station is, frankly, beneath him, not good enough.

The mantra and cant are interchangeable, the anti-intellectual bent suffocating.

Conservatism, by its nature, reaches backward and into the past, so that it can't really offer novel ideas so much as old ones in new wrapping.

FOX is the land of the lowest common denominator, a dufus dystopia cluttered with tired buzzwords uttered so often that even "Keeping Up With the Kardashians" seems an acceptable emergency exit.

Anything to escape the simple land where things are true just because Simon says they are. Where Sarah Palin has an intellect, President Obama is stupid, the world is blessed with infinite natural resources, and liberals stole the wooden swing off rural America's front porch.

Now, highwayscribery doesn't typically groove on the ugly back and forth of American politics. FOX can walk alone to hell. But the scribe needed Wednesday night's "Hannity" show as launching point for a post on an obscure British politician who just died by the name of Michael Foot.

Hannity was simple-Simoning his way through another hour of color-by-numbers propaganda when he pulled out his shopworn charge that Obama has put the United States on the road to "SOCIALISM."

That's a big, nasty, dirty word that Fox refused to let die when the communist world did.

Now it is applied to ideas such as preventing banks that enjoy federal deposit insurance from investing in hedge funds and private equity funds, or increasing the minimum wage.

When Hannity slams a Democratic politician with "Socialism" it is expected that person run for cover or begin blubbering about the market, jobs, small-business entrepreneurs: all teflon terminologies in the American political lexicon.

Michael Foot, on the other hand, draped himself in the term. If you stuck a finger in this guy's chest and said "Socialist!" you got a smile and a thumbs up.

"The New York Times," obituary quotes him as saying, and we re-quote:

"We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth, and if you ask me about those insoluble economic problems that may arise if the top is derived of their initiative, I would answer, 'To hell with them.' The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves. They always do."

That is something more like socialism. You can hear more than intellect in it. Passion perhaps, or a chip on the shoulder Foot, apparently, carried with him an entire career.

When the highway scribe was loitering for years with the far left of Spain's politics learning for his novel "Vedette: or Conversations with the Flamenco Shadows," he once saw a stage speaker say some very distasteful things about Che Guevara.

When they were done, an acquaintance by the name of Antonio Saseta, an architectural professor actually, stood up in the audience and told the person who said such unkind things, "If you were a little closer, and we weren't in such fine company, I'd sock you right in the jaw." (In Spanish, of course)

The point being that if Hannity thinks Obama and the Democratic Party are socialists -- and we don't think Sean really does -- he'd have no jaw.

Upon reading the afore-linked obituary, highwayscribery remembered Foot vaguely from his disastrous campaign to unseat Margaret Thatcher in 1983.

At the time, for those who cared, there was hope at this end of the pond, fueled by a great English Beat song called "Stand Down Margaret." And if the band's singer "Rankin' Roger" had led the Labour ticket that year, he would have probably fared better than did our subject.

Foot, if memory serves, hurt his foot during the campaign and hobbled around on crutches for a while. Not sure whether it was the right foot or the left, but either way it ploughed ample fields for the sowing of metaphors mostly cruel.

A few years later, Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for his work in a movie entitled, "My Left Foot," which the highway scribe went to see, thinking it was about, well, Foot.

But we digress.

"The Times," quotes Labourite Gerald Kaufman calling the party's manifesto from the ill-fated 1983 effort as "the longest suicide note in history."

Hyperbole aside, that manifesto, drafted by trade and industrial union folks, and the party functionaries who did their bidding, was what you would call "Socialist."

Foot campaigned on a platform of -- and dig this -- higher taxes, a more interventionist industrial policy, unilateral disarmament, nationalization of the banking system, and scrapping the hoary House of Lords.

Does the highway scribe really believe in those things?

Why not? An adult lifetime both chronicling (as journalist) and enduring (as citizen) our world's experiment with the marvelous and unfettered market has yielded a nauseating cycle of irrational bubbles followed by disastrous bursts.

They seem to leave nothing behind but a few lucky slimeballs with giant sacks of money living behind gates. As Foot said, "The top is greedy and mean and will always find a way to take care of themselves."

We enter Goldman Sachs, its post-bailout bonuses and perpetual middle-finger directed at the rest of us, as Exhibit A.

It's all been downhill in the scribe's lifetime. From the early heady days of the "Reagan Revolution," when government got out of the business of caring, through the recent weeks of relentless obstruction, less help, greater complexity, deeper insecurity, outdated infrastructure, invisible public engagement or assistance, homelessness, and illusory runs of prosperity have been the order of each day.

The "invisible hand" of the market has proven, again and again, to be a crooked one that mostly feeds the body it's attached to.

The great money-making machine of Wall St. has never produced a single widget the common person might take home and use to improve their small lot. It does not embarrass highwayscribery to admit he does not know what it is they do there.

Yet somehow Wall Street's unproductive white collars draw money upward until the bottom is emptied and the whole edifice tumbles down on innocents and rubes.

Yours truly included.

Finally, we honor Foot here, because he was also of a special breed prized by highwayscribery: The Politician Poet.

On top of doing the endless round of political luncheons, party meetings, factory walkabouts, backroom dealings, and parliamentary sessions, Foot wrote a number of books worthy of praise in "The London Times," for their "neat, economical, and muscular prose."

He wrote a two-volume biography of his own Labourite hero, Aneurin Bevan: 1897-1960, The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron, H. G.: The History of Mr Wells, and Uncollected Michael Foot: Essays Old and New 1953 -2003, among others.

And we must always honor men and women who make us wonder where they find the time to lead in two fields, when climbing the tall mountain in just one exhausts the rest of us.

Fare thee well, Mr. Foot, and may your politics, poetry and prose be missed somewhere.

Book Report, "This Coffin Has No Handles," by Thomas McGrath

2010-02-22T08:57:00.001-08:00

With a title like "This Coffin Has No Handles," you can't help but know what you're in for.

Thomas McGrath's depiction of working class, west side Manhattan in the days immediately after World War II is told in a noir style not uncommon to mid-century American literature.

Its tone is tense and grim, the prose dense, the plot thin.

There is a labor action going on -- the 1945 longshoreman's strike -- but the real conflict takes place inside McGrath's scattershot collection of characters. None of whom are particularly happy, settled, or comfortable in their own skins.

It is a rare book that understands or properly depicts the crosscurrents of lethargy and hyperactivity that characterize an industrial strike (one provokes authority and then takes a metaphorical seat on their ass), but "This Coffin Has No Handles" is one of them.

McGrath's tome is passport to a time when American cities were home to factory workers and wharf rats. Where people lived stacked atop one another in crowded warrens shot-through with the smell of someone else's cooking and a soundtrack of baby's crying and married couples fighting.

McGrath's characters are desperate, caught in dead-end alleyways with thugs, "metal gleaming in their hands," blocking the escape route.

Blackie Carmody must choose between joining the rackets in order to pay for his mother's cancer treatment, or take the work-a-day job he knows will make the woman happy while sealing her fate.

McGrath's cast is led by one Joe Hunter, a card-carrying Communist Party member just back from a turn in the European theater with the U.S. Army.

The other characters revolve around him in greater and lesser arcs, although sometimes the author follows a different tortured soul on their individual rounds for a bit.

There is a crooked union leader. There are rank-and-file strikers, each standing in for the various degrees of commitment typically found in such industrial battles. There is misbegotten hitman and a teenage girl growing up too quick.

Tremendous, if petty, violence and racketeering abound. There is a grim, philosophical striving from some of the players in this tale and directionless ennui from others.

The Communists are the good guys, incorruptible, committed, diligent as an army of ants in their well-organized and underfunded effort to secure worldwide justice for the working stiff through countless shop-floor scuffles.

The positive portrayal landed McGrath before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where an unhelpful turn as witness cost him his job as professor at Los Angeles State University.

The point being, you have to understand where the poet was coming from.

In "Manhattan '45" Janet Morris opens with ebullient soldiers returning triumphant from World War II to a New York City at the height of its power and prestige.

Her New York shimmers with possibility and prosperity, McGrath's "iron city" is a decidedly darker place:

"Black cliffs rising into the dark sky to the south were expensive hotels. They were hung with ladders of light and were crowned with the aureole of luminous mist. To Hunter they looked as if they were enormous chunks of black ice, rotted loose from the bottom of some great ice island, rising slowly from the depths of a cold midnight sea hung with chains of freezing phosphorescent light."

McGrath, who died in 1990, was fine writer and the book maintains a nice tension that succeeds in pulling one through the thicket of ruminations that, at times, veer off into authorial exposition.

This is especially true at the end where this poet's sharp and complex mind draws a portfolio's-worth of conclusions from the strike's outcome.

For the Big Apple buff, students of unionism, and scholars of the American city, this "political noir" serves of plenty of good "Red" meat.

(The photo is of Rep. Vito Marcantonio at strike headquarters during the 1945 longshoremen's walkout).

highwayscribery Launches "Book Report" blog

2010-02-21T16:16:00.000-08:00

Friends, Fans, and Fellow Citizens of the World,

This post is to announce the launching of highwayscribery's "Book Reports" page where the reviews covered at the flagship blog are gathered under one URL without the interference and noise from intervening posts. It represents a small effort on the scribe's part to make some money as an associate of Amazon.com. When readers click on the links embedded in the reviews, the scribe gets a pence, or shilling, or farthing (or something, not much). Such an arrangement might lead some to suspect the scribe will go soft on a particular text in the hope that someone will press on to purchase it. Those people have not been reading highwayscribery very long. In any case, the highway scribe has always made it a practice to go against type as a writer and respond with kindness and look for the achievement in the work of his fellow craftsmen and craftswomen.

Those Not-So-Civil Congresses Past

2010-02-21T15:51:00.000-08:00

The present universal longing for collegial congresses past conjures Oscar Wilde's observation that, "Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened and couldn't possibly have happened."

Sen. Evan Bayh's (D-Ind.) decision to bail on all that Senate roughhousing implies that things have never been so bad and sparks nostalgia for a more civic group of players now gone from the national stage.

Oh for those civil congresses of the past!

Examination of a long-ago tete-a-tete involving Rep. Vito Marcantonio of New York (top) and Sen. Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi provides a little perspective.

Marcantonio's far-left politics and vanguard positions on civil rights often clashed with the "Pride of Poplarville's" views, but things came to a particularly nasty head in a 1945 letter exchange between the two elected officials.

It was then that Democrat Bilbo responded to an unpleasant missive from one Josephine Piccolo of 93 Garfield Place, Brooklyn, with letter of his own employing the salutation, "My Dear Dago."

Marcantonio, who represented East Harlem's 18th Congressional District, had, at different times, run on Democratic and Republican tickets, and sometimes both, in gaining his frequent, voter-stamped trips to Washington D.C.

But his political identity slowly merged with that of the American Labor Party, formed in 1936 by the needle trades unions in an effort at funneling New York's left-wing votes to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Along with his annual anti-lynching measure, persistent efforts on behalf of the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and feverish opposition to the Taft-Hartley labor reform bill, "Marc's" electoral success depended heavily on a unique, storefront, retail servicing of his Italian-American constituency.

Although Piccolo hailed from beyond Marcantonio's bailiwick, "dagos" anywhere could feel the sting of Bilbo's insensitivity. The radical congressman rose to her defense and wrote the Mississippian demanding an apology, "if you have any shred of decency left."

On July 24, Bilbo fired back. He confessed to being completely "astounded" at Marcantonio's "audacious, arrogant, and presumptious [sic] letter."

And he was only getting started.

Marcantonio's advice, wrote Bilbo in a fit senatorial decorum, would be "the last in the world to which I would give any consideration whatsoever."

He continued that, if Marcantonio's gang, --"and I dare say many of them are gangsters from the sin-soaked, communistic sections of the great metropolis of New York" -- had their way, "our great American dual scheme of government, with its freedoms and ways of life that have made this country great, would soon be a thing of the past."

And that was just the first page.

Marcantonio, a man House Speaker Sam Rayburn once called the third best parliamentarian he'd ever seen, kept his July 25 response short, but sharp.

He wrote that Bilbo had, "aided Hitler in the war by spewing out race hatred on the floor of the Senate." He called the southerner a "Nazi collaborationist" during the conflict, adding that since its termination, "you are Hitler's inconsolable political male widow."

And there was more. More than enough to make a present-day cable news anchor blush.

Marcantonio is something of a New York historical treasure awaiting an informed reconsideration. Bilbo, his white supremacist beliefs aside, did good things for his home state as both U.S. Senator and Governor.

But their hot Summer of '45 clash again recalls Wilde who noted that, "Arguments are to be avoided; they are always vulgar and often convincing."

Book Report: "Dishing It Out," by Dorothy Sue Cobble

2010-02-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

Caution to flirts, cads, and ladies' men: "Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Working Class in American History)" will change the way you look at waitresses for forever.

And if you think a book about waitressing falls into the hum-drum category, "Dishing It Out" demonstrates how a well-researched idea, presented with passion, can bring seemingly less-enticing topics to colorful life.

Sometimes, subjects can appear devoid of interest because of their very neglect and let us note how Microsoft Works Word Processor spell-check doesn't recognize the expression "waitressing."

But Dorothy Sue Cobble's book suggests that, to a certain degree, the rise and fall of waitress unionism traces our evolution (devolution?) as a country.

highwayscribery first came across Cobble through "Lost Ways of Unionism: Historical Perspective on Reinventing the Labor Movement," one in a larger collection of essays entitled "Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-First Century" (Frank W. Pierce Memorial Lectureship and Conference Series, No. 11), wherein she challenged the widely held view that skilled craft unions of the American Federation of Labor were less progressive than the Congress of Industrial Organizations' mass unions.

In her, "The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America)" Cobble posits that dominant feminist analysis passes over a generation of mid-century "labor women."

Picking up on a theme developed in that book, Cobble writes that, in contrast to the later wave of feminists, waitresses did not want to be treated the same as the boys, rather, "They wanted equality and special treatment and did not see the two as incompatible."

"Dishing it Out," kicks the can a little further down the path, by focusing on the specific craft.

"The craft of waitressing has always been, she writes, "one of the principal jobs for women, it was distinguished by certain characteristics that enabled female servers to formulate and sustain a culture of solidarity at the workplace. Most female food servers shared share a similar racial and ethnic background. The relative ethnic and racial homogeneity of waitresses fostered group cohesion as it has for other groups of workers, men and women. In addition, more than women in other occupations, waitresses lived outside a traditional family setting and hence turned quite readily to their workplace community for friendship and support. If young and single, they often chose to live apart from their families, frequently residing with other waitresses in small apartments or rented rooms. The high proportion who were divorced, separated, or widowed lived alone, with friends, or with dependent relatives or children. Unable to rely financially on their family of origin or on a husband, waitresses were often primarily self-supporting and attached to the work force in a permanent fashion."

Cobble fleshes out how these attributes lent themselves to a sorority-like adhesion that fostered unionization. The heyday of waitresses syndicates took root around the same time the larger movement took wings, back in the 1930s and '40s and the better part of this story takes place then.

She notes that, "The separation of workers by trade provided women with a space apart from male hostility and allowed the development of female perspectives and leadership."

The self-conducting nature of craft union locals allowed for "female autonomy" and were, generally speaking, "superior in sustaining female participation and leadership."

Rather than focus primarily on moving individual women into higher-paying jobs held by men, this generation of lady unionists opted for improvements in the jobs they traditionally called their own.

"Dishing It Out," details the restaurant industry's growth and is worthy of one's precious attention.

It comes as something of a revelation that the nation was not always strewn with "public" eateries and that a long march toward the "feminization of food service" brought us the hospitality model we're familiar with today.

Less surprisingly, early 20th century mores held waitressing to be an "improper trade," running counter to the reigning Victorian sensibilities as it did. The ladies, after all, interacted with males customers and labored where alcohol was served.

(!)

Discussion of the job's sexual component and its double-edged nature make for great reading and should deepen a reader's understanding of the person catering to their needs at "Hooters."

Not coincidentally, the craft was widely held to be rife with loose women and attitudes intimated a kinship with prostitution.

The ladies, with few options, rolled with it: "[Waitresses] acceptance of the sexual character of their work was rooted in their distinctive mores, but it also derived from their situation as service workers in an occupation in which their livelihood depended upon attractiveness and allure."

There was a kind of self-generating, autonomous effort to fight such perceptions by raising professional standards and forming unions were a way of gaining legitimacy.

"They spoke of their work as a skilled craft," says Cobble, "and they engaged in practices that have long been associated with craft unionism: organization along craft lines, emphasis on craft identity and specialization, restrictive membership rules, and union monitoring of performance standards."

As combative unionists, "waitresses could hurt business by suggesting the least expensive menu item, ignore the poor tippers, offer food and drink on the house, or simply provide lackluster, un-inspired service, even though it jeopardized their own tip income. Waitresses could also go out of their way to add that special attentive, anticipatory touch that would cement the customers patronage."

Which makes perfect (economic) sense.

The book dissects the unique and bygone arrangement whereby unions increased their members' value by cornering the labor market and parceling the work via hiring halls.

It turns out to not have been all bad for restaurateurs, "because culinary employers relied on the hiring hall for 'good and reliable' full-time workers as well as for the extras needed in emergencies"

The gals liked the hiring hall because "it gave them, rather than the employer, control over when and how much they worked. As long as they maintained their union standing, waitresses could quit a job and 'lay off' for however long they chose."

Lamentably, Cobble is obligated to tell her tale in the past-tense, waitressing unionism being more a study of history than a dissection of current events. The unions examined here were done-in by the same forces that have reduced organized labor's power globally.

But as either history or prescription for sound industrial relations, "Dishing It Out," sets the table beautifully.

Book Report: "An American Family: The Buckleys," by Reid Buckley

2010-02-04T12:10:00.000-08:00

"An American Family: The Buckleys" is the story of a youthful and ambitious clan that grew great together with the young and ambitious country in which they lived.

We have before us a gaggle of children born with the 20th Century. Children reared by proper and upright parents who accepted nothing less than perfection from them. In exchange they gained lives on sprawling estates with names like "Great Elm," and "Kamschatka."

They pursued overseas educations and employed nannies who alternately taught French and administered castor oil. They rode horses, walked their property lines shooting quail and rabbits...

Of course, the Buckleys were not just any American family. the large brood of William Sr., and Aloise grew up to be a rather potent bunch who left their traces upon the thin ice of American culture.

This story charts trajectories of the famed conservative ideologue William Jr., the one-term Conservative Party senator from New York, James, and a bevy of other sisters and brothers in lesser, if equally loving, detail.

Nonetheless, brother Reid's real purpose here is scripting a Valentine to his parents. He crafts a recollection demonstrating the strength of their imprint on the offspring.

"Our bonding as a family of individuals has expressed itself in the social, spiritual, and intellectual dimensions in astonishing degree," the author writes. "Though we differ widely among ourselves, and almost always, when coming together, argue fiercely, it's often as though the ten of us were extruded from the same toothpaste tube."

Which is to say, not a single one of The Buckley's sprawling progeny strayed from the family's profound Catholicism or credo of self-reliance.

Buckley's mom has an interesting background out of old New Orleans, a sturdy character with positive energy, and discrete charms, and the author canonizes her in the way those of us who love our mothers do.

But the chestnut here is Bill Sr.

For those of you who thought the Buckleys were a blue-blooded crowd with fake English accents out of Connecticut, the family’s southern, even Confederate, roots may come as something of a surprise.

Big Buckley hailed out of deep south Texas and made his first bundle of serious money in, of all places, Mexico. There he successfully "wildcatted," for oil and helped develop Tampico before his catholic principles ran afoul of the new revolutionary (and anti-clerical) government, which threw him out of the country.

Dad was forced to "start all over," but not in the way most of us would, which is why his story is worth a read.

Buckley lived large for a number of years, popping children hither and thither, housing them in impressive realty, without letting on that his was a shirtsleeve operation. He eventually struck some more oil in Venezuela. Only then was the future security and prominence of the family America came to know assured.

The children's textured lives in Texas, Mexico, Connecticut and South Carolina make for worthy recounting and Reid, like all the lucky long-lived, enjoys the reserved grace of explaining a disappeared world to us.

An accomplished, if not widely celebrated novelist, Buckley's well-developed mind and pen combine to render credentialed insight regarding Mexico. He is, too, great at recalling the eccentric and authentic characters populating his past, delighting and reveling in them.

He is looking back on a fulfilling and eventful life.

The book's lure may dim for some when Reid Buckley steps aside to punch in an article written by one or another of his many siblings about the good old days, which they certainly were.

He declares conservatism, such as the clan purveyed it, dead. And the brainy Buckleys do not appear to have much in common with that breed of rural no-nothing carrying the banner today.

"On the ideological level, we inherited an anachronism that we have tried lifelong to defend and perpetuate," he writes of the family's run through American politics. "Vain endeavor. Our parents were the product of a nation that has vanished, and we, their children, have manned the ramparts in defense of that ghost. From this standpoint, our existences have been futile, our works folly."

Indeed, "An American Family," views the world through the dark lens of an aged fellow looking backward, weighed down by the loss of so much family and so many contemporaries. It is a tome that loves the past.

His parents' time, he notes, "was the age of American infallibility. How lucky they were, both of them, born to the simultaneous emergence of our country from its international status as an exotic experiment in a faraway and uncouth region of the globe to become economically and militarily the central power on earth."

Reid Buckley is something of a fuddy-duddy. He seems proud of it, and even makes it look good. He likes what he likes, and don’t be surprised if your lifestyle or personal philosophy doesn‘t meet with his approval.

The things he approves of, and the type of person he admires, are gone from the scene, and this book recuperates their memory one last time.

Special Election Rant

2010-01-20T00:07:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the Massachusetts special election debacle, Democrats will predictably veer to the right...and hit a wall.

The conventional wisdom, called that for its endless repetition and complete lack of novelty, is that Democrats overreached after the 2008 elections with too progressive an agenda.

The corrective, and ever has it been thus, should be to act more like Republicans.

The question is whether that's possible.

The loss in the Bay State was not due only to an energized Republican base hopped up on FOX-generated nonsense about "socialism" and a "government takeover" of health care (and every other thing highwayscribery wanted from President Obama and didn’t get).

It could also be attributed to a disillusioned liberal base that wanted a single-payer health care system (and didn't get it), and compromised for a public insurance option to compete with the public sector crooks raking us over the coals all these years.

Instead we got Tim Geithner, a bailout of criminal bankers, the public option’s junking, and a fire sale on what was left of health care reform to the highest bidders representing the lowest common denominator.

Early on special election day, "Salon" and "New York Times" were reporting low turnout in the Latino and African-American communities. It is highly likely they were too busy looking for jobs to engage in another play for redemption at the ballot box.

That was so last year, what with all the hope and change stuff.

Now independents are going for the Republicans. At least with the GOP you know what you get...nothing, which may seem like an improvement after so many shattered, short-lived illusions.

And while we're on the subject of independents, highwayscribery would like to mention how much he loathes them.

Although he has spent his life cutting an independent path, and paying the high price reserved for such behavior, highwayscribery has always managed to VOTE WITH THE PARTY.

He does not sit around with his finger in the air, sensing which way the wind is blowing, and then go out for a good 'ol voters' revolt against all these damn politicians with their fingers in the air trying to figure out which way the wind is blowing.

He knows what he stands for and is aware that, in fits and starts, the Democratic Party is kinder to middle-class, wage-earning, craftspeople of liberal profession such as himself. highwayscribery views voting as a civic responsibility, rather than a shopping quest for people to drink beer with.

highwayscribery did not witness the Massachusetts campaign, but he's pretty sure it would not have mattered a wit that Martha Coakley didn’t know what team Kurt Schilling pitched for, or whether the guy entering the text on a paid announcement spelled Massachusetts wrong.

It's hard to spell.

He would have voted for Martha Coakley, lackluster as she was reported to have been, for her service to the Democratic Party and its principals throughout most of her life. We call these “touchstones” here in the shrinking universe of people guided by a moral compass.

Coakley would have gained highwayscribery’s vote because of her proven allegiance to something other than herself.

Which is really what we're talking about when we go on about the growing class of independents so much in the news this political season. They are the apotheosis of this godawful baby boomer generation that has put self-accommodation ahead of any other consideration while blessing themselves with an appealing adjective in the process.

Independents.

Joe Lieberman is an independent: a man who stands for nothing. A man who supports an idea and a party one year and throws that party under the bus along with the idea he once so piously espoused.

He is, like most of our voters, an inveterate invertebrate, worthy of our deepest disdain. So here goes:

“highwayscribery disdains you Joe Lieberman, and all the jellyfish who voted for that Brown guy in Massachussecks, or whatever they call it.”

The American people have a right to be miffed, gelatinous though their collective political will may be. They gave the Democrats an almost-filibuster proof (Lieberman!) majority, a hefty margin in Pelosi’s realm, and a cool black guy to lead from the White House.

The Democrats and Obama then took a couple of weeks to bail out the banks and the rest of the year to NOT FINISH HEALTH CARE.

The Republicans, openly, shamelessly nasty, pledged themselves to obstruction and obstruct they have. But not without the help of hacks like Sen. Ben Nelson, Democrat from Nebraska, Sen. Byron Dorgan, Democrat from North Dakota, and...LIEBERMAN!

Rather than move with celerity on the health care issue, senators like Sen. Max Baucus, Dorgan, Nelson, and you-know-who, dilly-dallied while wing-nuts jumped like monkeys for television cameras posted on the Washington Mall.

Progressives have been think-tanking health care to death (no pun intended) lo these many years while waiting for the great majority moment.

We'd have liked an approximately one-page bill saying something like: “Every American will make a contribution adjusted to their income, which the government will then pool according to generally accepted actuarial principles and insure every citizen’s health care.”

Instead we got 2,100 pages too terrifying to welcome with open arms.

There’s been a lot of talk about the decline of newspapers and good reporting, but when it came to covering an 18th century invention -- the U.S. Senate -- our Old Media machinery was up to the snail’s-paced job.

The upshot was great articles, for anyone with 50 cents to read, about how lobbyists from the insurance, drug, and medical establishments were eating away at reform like the greedy guppies they are.

The guys across the aisle were firm in their pledge to filibuster everything that came up and the Democrats let it happen.

In “Make ‘Em Pee, Harry,” highwayscribery suggested the Republicans be forced to actually man the Senate floor for their record-breaking suite of filibusters and then call in the troops if and when they abandoned the fort.

The “pee” reference related to an old yarn about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C) strapping on a catheter before going to filibuster in defense of Dixie and against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

He lost, the nation won, and it is painful to say, but Obama is no Lyndon Baines Johnson.

So highwayscribery thought that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid should call the Republicans out and oblige them to stand behind their verbal diarrhea. Make a spectacle of themselves before the American people, rather than allow their tactic to render Democrats passive and inept (which isn’t a difficult task in the first place).

The idea was being bounced around at the time and one of the MSNBC cable shows had the former Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott opine. He said it was implausible to require actual filibusters, because “NOTHING WOULD EVER GET DONE.”

Which is somewhat the point of obstruction. So if nothing’s going to get done, let’s have the blame rest squarely on the shoulders of those responsible, and not those hogtied by the undemocratic behavior.

If the scribe sounds a bit like a campy, angry, gay guy, that because he has been reading one by the name of Simon Doonan, who writes for the “New York Observer,” while watching the election results over the edge of the paper.

highwayscribery doesn’t live in New York, but he does inhabit a New York state of mind and truly enjoys how “The Observer” reduces the big city to a small town with solid street reportage and peppy writing.

Anyway, it turns out Doonan was at the heart of a December tempest-in-a-teapot over the way Christmas balls were decorated for placement on the White House tree.

That leggy Desiree Rogers woman enlisted his services in the name of style. Doonan came up with the idea of sending out 800 recycled silver Christmas balls in the White House’s possession for a dressing up by the schoolchildren and poor folk of America.

Somehow, (and god forbid) a Warhol image of Mao was pasted on one, and another of a transvestite named Hedda Lettuce to a second.

A right-wing commentator of the lower orders named Andrew Breitbart engineered a “blogsplosion” (Doonan’s expression) decrying creeping communism and an assault on family values in The People’s House.

But enough paraphrasing. Doonan can do this himself:

“The irony of Tinselgate is fairly breathtaking. A person donates his time and expertise -- for free! -- thereby saving taxpayer money. That same person then uses his ingenuity -- incorporating the creativity of kids and needy folks and reusing tchotchkes from previous administrations, thereby saving even more dosh -- and ends up on the receiving end of a torrent of threats and physical abuse from his fellow Americans.”

What’s happening at the top is often happening at every level of a society, which is why we mention Doonan’s nightmare here: It’s a good parable for the Obama presidency and a cautionary tale about the trash that is out there and the evil motivating those who would prevent someone come to do a little good for those who need it most.

You deserve your senator Mashochistetts. But we don’t.

Book Report: "To A God Unknown," by John Steinbeck

2010-01-14T12:37:00.000-08:00

Purple and brown, dusty wine shot through with wheat-colored sun.

John Steinbeck's, To a God Unknown (Penguin Classics)is both love letter and a Dear John to his native Northern California countryside.

The author lingers often and long on the Salinas Valley landscape, now a land of milk 'n honey, moist, juicy, dashed with clover; now a dry and crusty graveyard frozen beneath a foreboding moon. These pastoral passages can transport. Steinbeck looks at the same places and renders them differently with each new encounter.

The protagonist is grafted by his creator to the land, and Steinbeck is an avid guide, reading the topography and its changes like a mood-ring, drafting his American rustics to rise and fall depending.

Steinbeck's dialogue, at this point in his life, was not as strong. The exchanges between country people, makin' butter and castrating cows, seems like they're chatting from the couch about their inner swoonings. But you move along with a sense of the things that are agitating them.

As Golden State portraiture, we can see how past is prologue. After Burton, Joseph's holy-rolling brother, leaves the farm in disgust with the devil's presence, the protagonist tells his wife: "We'll try to get along without another hand. If the work gets too much for us, I'll hire another Mexican."

Oh brother.

It is a dark and brooding book, mostly tragedy with redemption only in death. Steinbeck's characters shrink before the enormity of nature. Christians new to the heathen west are bent on exploiting and controlling the wilds. Others are more ready to make love with them.

Earthy stuff.

There are many ways to read "To A God Unknown," and with some work, you might find your own.

Dem Dead Dems

2010-01-10T22:47:00.000-08:00

That crazy rollercoaster ride known as the "24-hour news cycle" has the Democratic Party headed for a disastrous election...11 months away.

The announcements that sparked this most recent go-round of political calculation were those of Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), who are exiting political life -- stage left.

Cable guys and gals have so much air-time to fill, while watching the glacial U.S. Senate parse the nation's future, that soon enough Republicans will again be doomed for extinction, only to see their fortunes bolstered anew by some Democrat's prostate surgery, which will then plunge that party into oblivion, only to be revived by another utterance from GOP National Chairman Michael Steele, who will then be fired, spiking the stock of Tea Partiers...

Posh.

Journalists view politics as played on a game board atop a table where the pieces are moved, knocked out, and returned to action with a roll of the dice.

But governing and vote-getting are tied as much to organization, controlling the levers of power, and the crafting of a saleable national message, as they are to the ebb and flow of "news" such as it is packaged these days.

As someone who spent 20 years of his life battling the Reagan and two Bush administrations, highwayscribery can attest to the fact you must be something other than "against" the gang in power to assume it yourself.

And to date, with its well-cemented obstruction to everything Obama, the Republican Party has little to recommend itself.

But don't ask highwayscribery. Query, let's say, the "Wall Street Journal," which recently opined that, while the Dems have their problems, "most polls don't show a significant turn in support toward the GOP."

Feet firmly on the ground, in spite of its ideological preferences, "The Journal" also noted that, "the [Republican] Party hasn't done well in special congressional elections to fill seats that have opened up in the past year."

Which means in the REAL WORLD where campaigns are run and votes are tabulated, the GOP hasn't left the woods it was lost in circa November 2008. Which makes perfect sense. National, governing coalitions take time and grooming to develop.

Steele recently got himself into trouble by admitting that, not only did the GOP have little chance of retaking the House of Representatives, but that it wasn't ready for the responsibility.

He got hammered very quickly because, in the Republican universe, the message is the medium, rather than the other way around.

The "Wall Street Journal" (which said a lot of things in a short article) also noted that, "In addition, though the intensity is up among grassroots conservative activists, much of the energy has poured into the 'tea party' movement, rather than the Republican Party."

The point is that all those loonies on the lawns with racist placards are somewhat different than the Republican Party itself. Probably a good thing, in the long run.

And we stress the "long-run" aspect of that last sentence.

highwayscribery has never been sure just what the significance of the Tea Party movement is. These were not Democrats to begin with, and the notion that because they're even angrier than usual (which is pretty angry), doesn't necessarily transform the political landscape.

A vote's value doesn't double with the emotional lunacy of the person that casts it.

It reminds the scribe of Solidarity Day in 1981, when a still-potent American labor movement paraded through the streets of Washington D.C. It was a massive affair peopled largely with Democratic Party loyalists. The Reagan Administration spokesman of that time (Larry Speaks?) responded to the phenomenon by noting, "If they're trying to tell us there are people out there who don't like Ronald Reagan, we already knew that."

Ditto President Obama.

"Salon's" Joe Conosan agrees. He doesn't let the Dems off the hook. They've got to fight for their votes and always have. But he turns to numbers in a Rasmussen poll, which tends to view the world through red (state)-colored glasses, and highlights these facts:

The Illinois Senate race is drifting toward the Democrats. Ohio Republican Sen. George Voinovich's seat is also competitive and could be a pick-up. That would erase the Dorgan loss. The Missouri Republican Senate seat being vacated by Republican Kit Bond's departure is also looking pretty good for Democrat Robin Carnahan.

Conason credits Republicans with effective control of the narrative, which is the only job they have given the fact Democrats are busy trying to solve the country's problems.

"What those Rasmussen numbers suggest," Conason wrote, "is a more nuanced reality. Republican advantages could quickly evaporate amid a volatile electorate -- and as with yesterday's retirements, the recent trends are not as dire as right-wing propaganda and mainstream prognostication claim."

His counterpart at "Salon," Mike Madden, noted that Dodd was a sitting duck in any case and that his successor enters the race with a 30-point lead in a solidly blue state.

Seat held.

As one of the public option's hangmen, highwayscribery thought Dorgan a pain in the ass in any case. In other words, 60 votes is nice when the 60 votes gets you something in line with your party's principles, rather than just any old thing you can call a "victory."

Since the unwritten 60-vote rule dominates national politics now, Madden's math here is worth considering, too.

"...[E]ven after the retirement announcements, there are more Republicans who won't run for their seats this year than Democrats. Already, 14 House Republicans have declared they won't see another term, compared to only ten Democrats. Six Senate Republicans, compared to only four Democrats are stepping down," and so on into the state races.

That said, there is something to be said, or admitted, about the essentially conservative nature of the American electorate.

highwayscribery always thought that was something of a media-elite chestnut, a conspiratorial canard with which we progressives were intended to be burdened.

Faced with a corrupt and spent Republican Party - its perennial mainstay - and presented with an elegant and eloquent option, the nation chose the Democrats and Barack Obama to keep them out of a second Great Depression.

Spending like drunken sailors, the Dems got the job done, and now everybody seems horrified at how much it cost to keep their over-leveraged asses afloat.

the scribe has been only moderately pleased with Obama's performance, wishing the secrecy policies of the Cheney administration, and that crappy war in Afghanistan were off the nation's to-do list.

But the rest of the country, outside of New York and the California coastal cities, has seen enough and are running back to their fiscally cautious bivouacs.

To wit: The "Los Angeles Times," just covered a poll which had the vast majority of the electorate proclaiming themselves "conservative."

So it's true. What we lefties view as moderate progress, most Americans view as beyond the pale and all of the above may be a lot of wishful thinking.

Obama should have let the floor drop on everybody. Deficit spending would have seemed a lot more palatable.

But he thinks more about the country than power itself.

Book Report: "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

2009-12-21T19:23:00.000-08:00

Wolf Hall: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)is more the story of that guy who kills the cow than the big shot who eats the steaks.

Hilary Mantel's time and setting are the oft-told English Court of King Henry VIII.

And while the randy and capricious Harry (is their a supreme ruler who is not?) and his short-lived wife Ann Boleyn come in for some decent portraiture, "Wolf Hall" is the story of an influential aide to both, Thomas Cromwell.

Although we don't watch the goings-on at court unfold from Cromwell's point of view, Ms. Mantel uses him as guide and compass through the seven or so years during which Ann Boleyn worked her whiles on Henry who extricated England from the Papacy's influence to marry her.

You know, probably, how she failed to deliver a much-desired heir, cheated sexually, and lost her head as a result, but this book does not venture there.

It journeys, instead, early into the young Cromwell's life as a low-born country boy whose father comes within a hair's-length of beating him to death before deciding to strike out on his own.

He is a seasoned fellow with no small measure of luck who becomes a good soldier in France, and better banker in Italy, before returning to England where his cause is taken up by one influential Cardinal Wolsey whom he serves in turn.

The first parts of the book detail Wolsey's fall from grace at court and his simultaneous death at the news of it. The latter parts render Cromwell's rise at court as someone useful to an archly-rendered Boleyn, and later Henry, for his skill as bureaucrat (of a pre-modern kind).

This skill primarily involves the undoing and capital punishment of one Thomas More, the Holy See's top dog in England.

But it entails all manner of "fixing" including arranged marriages, unarranged ones, deaths at the hand of the state, the purchase of properties for the crown, and other things those of us born in a modern democracy have such a hard time wrapping our minds around.

And that's what makes it most fun. There is also the usual confusing family politics of succession (the bastard son of the deposed King borne by his second wife and shunted in The Tower, etc.) rendered no less intelligible by this otherwise superb writer.

Cromwell is sympathetic even if he is prized mostly for certain hard-assed qualities and a talent for using his low-birth and war pedigree to intimidate gentle ladies and men alike.

The fact he is something of state-sponsored monster is obscured by the fact we're rooting for him. Cromwell takes in all manner of folk needing help and turns them out of the house at Austin Friars and onto varying paths toward prosperity.

He represents something of a democratic green shoot growing in the golden brown wheat fields of aristocracy.

Here's one of highwayscribery's favorite lines about Cromwell regarding his close alliance with Ann Boleyn; who was nothing if not the wrecker of Henry's first marriage with Spain's Katherine of Aragon.

"He sighs. It's not much, to know that all the merry young whores are on your side. All the kept women, and the runaway daughters."

Mantel's greatest triumphs are the elevation of Cromwell as archetype for the true governmental mechanic (think Rahm Emmanuel), and her making believable the goings-on behind closed doors, the stuff of closed council, as she paints them.

"The fate of peoples," the author writes, "is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman's sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rose water; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh."

"Wolf Hall" is a recent winner of the British Commonwealth's "Man Booker Award," useful as far as such things go, which in this case is pretty far.

The writing is economical, the transitional passages are deft and colorful, her application of language is economical but rich, her focus never so tight as to lose that English subtlety for telling you a story with a point not too obvious.

It's a big literature, fancy-schmanzy in reach and range, all the while being a page-turner that sheds light on an important, if under-celebrated, historical figure.

Calvino's Propositions Presented

2009-12-09T17:45:00.001-08:00

In 1984, the Italian intellectual Italo Calvino was invited by Harvard University to conduct its Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures cycle. The author of "The Path to the Nest of Spiders," "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...," "The Cloven Viscount," and other post-war classics decided upon the theme of "Six Propositions for the New Millennium." Calvino was only able to finish five of them. According to his wife Esther, the sixth, "Consistency" was never completed in as much as he died of cerebral hemorrhage on September 19, 1985, one week before the conferences were to begin. The propositions were directed primarily at the future development of novel composition, but contain lessons applicable to our lives, which are, in a world of exploding aspirations and desire, increasingly novels in and of themselves.

Levity

Calvino began is discourse on "lightness" by noting that his own literary efforts had consisted primarily of relieving the weight bearing upon humans, celestial bodies and cities. At those moments when the human condition appear condemned to heaviness, Calvino said he attempted, like Perseus, to fly toward another space, to change his focus, to see the world through an alternative looking glass, using a different logic, other methods of investigation and verification.

Through the centuries, he maintained, literature has been characterized by two tendencies: one which construed language as an element without weight, like a cloud or a field of magnetic impulses; the other which used it to communicate weight, density, and the concrete nature of bodies and sensations.

"The second industrial revolution does not present itself as did the first," he noted, "with overpowering images of presses and steel furnaces, rather as bytes in a flux of information, which run through circuits in the form of electronic impulses. Machines of steel still exist, but they obey bytes without weight."

He goes on to recount an anecdote composed by Bocaccio about the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti.

Despite being "rich and elegant," Cavalcanti was unpopular with the young lions of Florence for he chose not to cavort with them and because they suspected him of sacrilegious thoughts. Once, they decided to test the poet, surrounding him on horseback as he meditated atop a tomb in the piazza of Santa Reparata. "Guido,' they sought to intimidate him," you reject our company, but when you discover God does not exist, what will you do?" The poet replied, "Sirs, in your house [of death], you can tell me what you please," before escaping them, using the weighty tomb as a springboard for a leap to safety.

"If I had to chose a single symbol with which we might approach the new millennium," Calvino asserted, "it would be this one: the agile, sudden jump of the poet/philosopher rising above the heaviness of the world, demonstrating that in its gravity lies the secret of levity, whilst that which many consider the vitality of the times, noisy, aggressive, angry, and thundering, pertains to the kingdom of the dead, like a cemetery of rusty cars."

Speed

In his second proposition, Calvino broached the question of speed and the differences between its physical and mental manifestations. A story, he asserted, is a horse, a means of transportation with its own pace and itinerary. "The horse as a symbol of speed, even mental speed," he wrote, "marks the entirety of literature, and presages all that is problematic on our technological horizon."

Today, he observed, other, faster media triumph to the point where we run the risk of "flattening all communication into a uniform, homogeneous crust."

Faced with this challenge, it is the job of literature to establish lines of communication between what is different, and exalt that difference. If the machine age has imposed speed as a measurable value, the records of which mark the history of progress, "mental speed cannot be measured and does not invite confrontations or competitions. It has its own value -- namely the pleasure it produces in those sensible to it -- not for its practical utility"

Only mental speed possesses a tool for arresting civilization's race with time: the digression. "If a straight line is the shortest distance between two inevitable and fatal points, digressions stretch them out; and those digressions return, thereby becoming longer, more complex, tangled, tortured and so fast themselves as to become derailed. In doing so, perhaps death loses our scent."

Calvino opposes speed for its own sake and likens our obsession with it to one with death itself. Only the meditative nature of literature, drawn from life-engendering creativity, can delay it.

The genie of modern velocity, of course, cannot be returned to the bottle, but writers [and everybody else] "should keep in mind its rhythmic components: that of Mercury and that of Vulcan, a message of immediacy obtained through patient and meticulous labors; an instantaneous intuition which, barely formulated, acquires the fullness which permits its perception by any other means."

Exactitude

"I have the impression," he stated, "that language is used approximately, casually, negligently, which causes an intolerable anxiety in me." Calvino likened this condition to a plague affecting language so that it "loses all cognitivity and immediacy, like an automatism which tends to level expression into its most generic forms..."

But more importantly for our time, this pestilence affects the world of imagery as well. "We live under a rain of uninterrupted images; the most potent mass media do nothing more than transform and multiply the world of images which, in large part, lack the internal necessity that should characterize them, like form and meaning, like the capacity to attract one's attention, a richness of potential signifiers."

The world, he claimed, is ever-dissolving into a cloud of heat, precipitating a whirlwind of entropy. But this process lends itself to intervals of order and form, privileged points from which a plan and perspective can be perceived. "The literary work is one of those small points of privilege where things crystallize into a form which acquires such meaning."

Just as the understanding of speed requires deliberate labor, so the search for exactness takes two roads: one which reduces events to abstract schemes and the other which uses words to express, with the most precision possible, the meaning of things.

"I think we are always in the hunt for something hidden, a potential or hypothetical, the tracks of which can be seen on the surface of things, and which we follow. I think our most rudimentary mental mechanisms repeat themselves, from our Paleolithic hunter-gatherer forefathers, throughout the cultures of humanity. The word unites these tracks with the invisible entity, the absent quantity, the thing desired or feared, like a fragile bridge improvised across the void."

Calvino urged the exact use of language because it would permit us to approach things, present or absent, "with discretion, attention, and caution, with the respect for those things which communicate without words."

Visibility

The fourth conference Calvino gave was to start with the following premise: Fantasy is a place where it rains.

"We can distinguish two types of imaginative processes," he maintained. "One that uses the word as a point of departure, another which derives inspiration from the image."

As a writer, Calvino fell into the latter category. "In conjuring up a story, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image that, for whatever reason, is charged with significance for me."

Where do the images raining upon the imagination come from? he asked and then answered: "Writers establish links with earthly emissaries such as the individual or collective unconscious, sensations emerging from lost time, epiphanies, or the concentration of being on a certain point or moment. It is a case of processes which, although not born in heaven, escape from the world of our intentions, from our control, granting the individual a kind of transcendence."

For Calvino, the imagination is a form of identification with the "soul of the world." He worried about its future in the so-called "civilization of the image." He saw it threatened by the deluge of prefabricated pictures bombarding us all.

"Our memory is coated with image fragments, like a depository of waste, where it is becoming increasingly difficult for one figure, amidst so many, to acquire full relief. If I've included visibility in my list of values that should be saved in the next millennium, it is as a warning to the danger of losing a fundamental human faculty: To focus upon images with our eyes closed, to make them jump forth in full color and form from the alignment of black letters on a white page, to think in images."

Multiplicity

Calvino argued for a continuation of the modern novel as an open encyclopedic adventure in opposition to the unitary, closed system which characterized the form in its medieval incarnation.

"Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread which unites all the masterpieces, both modern and post-modern, a thread which transcends all labels. This I would like to see developed further in the coming millennium."

He maintained that the best novels encompassed the convergence of a multiplicity of interpretive methods, modes of thought, and styles of expression. What is important, Calvino argued, is not that the story close harmoniously, rather that its centrifugal forces liberate "linguistic plurality as a guarantee of impartiality."

"Somebody," he concluded, "might argue that the closer a work leans toward a multiplicity of possibilities, the farther it gets from the unified self who is writing, their inner sincerity, the discovery of their own truth. Bu the opposite is true. What are we but a combination of experiences, information, readings and imaginings? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, a showcase of styles which can be continuously mixed an reordered into all the possible forms."

Princes and Paupers (Afghanistan)

2009-12-01T16:16:00.000-08:00

"When I look past the crazy name, I just see another guy from Harvard," highwayscribery's dad said of Barack Obama on the eve of the 2008 presidential election.

In doing so the old man might have presaged the scribe's content with President Obama as a traditional Democratic, but his disillusionment as an orthodox hippie.

The president has turned out to be utterly conventional where Democratic policies are concerned.

That's hurting him with independents who took his pledge to bring change as meaning something different than government spending to improve our collective lot.

They don't like stimulus plans, don't care much for infrastructure schemes, and hardly give a hoot about reforms in labor relations or health care.

They just wish their credit cards worked again.

That's fine. Democrats must sink or swim according to the appeal and impact of their policies.

But the staffing of the administration with familiar party hacks and Obama's retention of the Bush crowd's Defense Secretary has put us wild-eyed dreamers in the position of defending so much realpolitik from "our" president.

We have to tell ourselves that Obama's pragmatism keeps us in power and permits a slow sea change in American politics and culture as witnessed, let's say, in the largely quiet movement toward a liberalization of marijuana laws.

At highwayscribery we consider it a good thing that people be freer to partake in their stimulant of choice and that our jails not be busting with those busted for doing so. And we think the administration's simple decision not to harass medical marijuana outlets in states where they go in for that kind of thing has had a cataclysmic impact.

Hurray for the hippies! If only the Obama crowd was so influential elsewhere.

For example, Afghanistan, where we don't much like what we see.

It is just too familiar, what with Dick Cheney accusing the president of "weakness" for merely deliberating so important a matter.

Obama seems more worried about such criticism than a traditional Democrat might. His efforts are always designed to assure those who are convinced he is a black radical, that he is not a black radical.

And giving in on the war will gain him no grace in the "weakness" department. In fact, giving in at all will win no converts from their camp.

For we have seen plenty of what passes for a Republican Party these days and it's no surprise debate and thought are confused with "weakness" since the GOP is short on both, and long on bluster or "strength" (as they see it).

Anticipating the President's non decision to keep W.'s Afghan adventure alive, "New York Times" columnist Bob Herbert deemed the new/old policy "A Tragic Mistake."

"New York Times" columnist David Brooks went softer, suggesting in "Clear, Hold, and Duct Tape," that Obama is merely splitting the difference between peace and war through a half-hearted military effort focused on withdrawal.

highwayscribery's positions are normally aligned with Mr. Herbert, who can probably withstand the damaging association, and not so harmonious with Mr. Brooks's, who probably can't.

Caviling about our boys dying overseas has never achieved much. After all, folks like Cheney are always willing to sacrifice other people's children while their own enjoy life on the D.C. cocktail and conference circuit.

And America is hardly a place where moral and ethical ideas hold the same currency as, well, currency.

So we're going to do what the administration did and sit the hippie over in a corner (with his weed, of course). In his stead we'll forward the rank-and-file Democrat's economic arguments before going to pick the kid up from his overcrowded and under-funded public school.

And rather than stain Brooks through our usual trick of electronically linking and commingling our prose with columnist stars such as himself and Herbert, we're going to spin things in a literary way.

We will do this by excerpting a timely exchange between King Henry VIII, and a lesser-know historical entity by the name of Thomas Cromwell, beautifully presented in Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall: A Novel (Man Booker Prize)

Sincerest apologies Ms. Mantel.

In this exchange (page 150), Cromwell has come for a chat with the King whom he hopes will let up on his own patron, the Cardinal of York, a fellow falling out of favor "at court" as they say in these English dramas.

Cheney, er, um Henry, apparently blessed with a long memory, quickly takes Cromwell to task for a speech in Parliament, made seven years prior, challenging the king's right to wage war in France:

"Listen to me, master -- you said I should not fight because the taxes would break the country. What is the country for, but to support its prince in his enterprise?"

"I believe I said -- saving your Majesty -- we didn't have the gold to see you through a year's campaign. All the bullion in the country would be swallowed by the war. I have read there was a time when people exchanged leather tokens, for want of metal coins. I said we could be back to those days."

"You said I was not to lead my troops. You said if I was taken, the country couldn't put up the ransom. So what do you want? You want a king who doesn't fight? You want me to huddle indoors like a sick girl?"

"That would be ideal, for fiscal purposes."

Everybody wonders if the Internet has made newspapers obsolete. A more important question might by why we need public discourse at all if the issues never change and neither do our responses?

NYTimes' Copy Clunker

2009-12-01T11:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a clunker from "New York Times" writers Tim Arango and Bill Carter:

"While a deal between G.E. and Comcast still could hit a snag over price, it is considered highly likely because G.E. wants to sell NBC because of rising losses and Comcast wants to buy it so it can control more television programs and movies to offer viewers through its cable systems."

That's one heck of a paragraph/sentence. It's a run-on, as they say in third-grade, uses "because" two times in the same (long) breath, and "it" thrice.

highwayscribery humbly suggests:

"A deal between G.E. and Comcast could still hit a snag over price, although that is unlikely. The electronics giant wants to sell NBC, which is losing money. Comcast wants to buy the network because its movie and television properties would help to fill cable programming needs."

That's not so hard.

"Times" writers, supposedly the best in the business, churn out this kind of stuff almost everyday. The example before us is most remarkable for its center-page placement on page one.
Watch that picture-window folks.

Book Report: "Working Class New York," by Joshua Freeman

2009-11-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

The narrative in Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War IIgrows less interesting along with the declining labor movement it chronicles.

That's no criticism. After all, Joshua Freeman did not write a novel, rather penned an important nonfiction and academic effort that tells the story of New York through its workers.

"Working Class New York," is wonderfully done and demonstrative, at every turn, with the author's passion for his subject.

But, for labor enthusiasts, the end can't match the beginning for excitement.

In the early chapters, the poesy of labor reigns as the Hatters, Printers, Furriers, Elevator Operators, Milliners, Bakers and Tugboat workers, representing a rainbow of crafts and productive industries, bring the world's mightiest city to a halt through mass strikes driven by the underlining goal of reorganizing society itself.

Freeman's analysis of New York's economic structure, and how it created a textured union movement unequaled in the rest of the country, is fascinating and as much a love letter to the unions as to Gotham itself.

Indeed, the author frequently asserts that the city's best face was the lined countenance of the laborer or craftsperson enlightened by their recognition of a shared destiny, on the shop floor and front stoop, with similarly situated souls.

"Working Class New York," meticulously follows the labor movement's progress and retrenchments, starting with its halcyon days in the post-war 1940s.

It makes no bones about the powerful impetus communist politics played, and the subsequent loss of energy that coincided with the reds being chased out of American labor.

Freeman illustrates how the union movement reflected changes in the city as it lost manufacturing jobs and embraced the financial and service-based industries.

His mapping of municipal unionism's rise has less of a workerist flavor and more of what the departed Allan Bloom called the "Nitzscheanization of the left," as ethnicity and cultural issues consumed unions' internal power struggles and drove their industrial strategies.

And the book details how the decline of labor in New York reflected its nationwide losses as the country grew more individualistic and market-oriented in the 1970s and '80s.

Freeman's chapter on how financial types used The Big Apple's fiscal crisis in the late 1970s to undermine and rollback the unions' hard-earned, and unique urban social democracy, is must-read for anyone interested in those dynamics affecting the American workplace for nigh on a generation now.

Jerry Brown Does Sunset Blvd.

2009-11-23T02:03:00.000-08:00

California Attorney General Jerry Brown's Nov. 19 appearance at XIV on Sunset Blvd., was proof there is such a thing as being young at heart.

The former-governor-running-to-be-governor was in good form, voluble, humorous, and purposeful.

By way of confession, highwayscribery attended the event, sponsored by Generation for Change, with little enthusiasm for the budding Brown candidacy.

Covering the attorney general as a real-life reporter at press conferences, the highway scribe's alter-ego and rainmaker was left with an impression that, at 71-years-old, Brown had lost a step and gone mushy in his gray matter.

And besides, maybe it's time for some others to try. Politics these days, at least Democratic Party politics, have a transformational tinge that was reflected in the event itself.

Generation for Change, after all, grew out of Generation Obama Los Angeles following the president's triumph last November.

It is headed-up by two political operatives - Justyn Winner and Haroom "Boom" Saleem, still young enough to actually believe in all the Obama-inspired Hopela and energetic enough to convene a cabal of handsome, well-dressed, young professionals comfortable in venues like XIV (by Michael Mina) who, prior to last year' campaign were hardly worthy of political consideration.

And the kids are learning the hard way. Saleem noted that last year's ardor for change has given way to this years sense of disappointment.

Patience, grasshopper, patience.

For his part, Brown has always been more of a visionary type. His turns as secretary of state, Oakland mayor, and attorney general, while positive contributions, do not bring out the quest-like qualities in him that running for president and governor do.

For Brown wants to lead in big, system-changing ways and Generation for Change, thinks he has the stuff, and has come out early for him.

The ambience of confident cool hardly intimidated Brown who grabbed the microphone, and persuaded the crowd to separate itself so that everyone could see him.

He did not, Brown said, work from prepared speeches, "because they're boring. If you have something to say you should be able to say it without looking at some notes."

Freed from the tyranny of text on paper, Brown rambled on in an organized fashion only someone of his unique cast can.

He pulled the crowd, separated from him by decades of life lived, closer, talking about the nonpolitical part of his personal journey: "I've lived in Mexico and different countries of South America, I took Linda Ronstadt to Africa. I went to Japan and meditated for six months; not on the achievements of my life, but on the essential emptiness of it. And you're not going to find a lot of politicians who will do that."

Working the crowd afterward, Brown may have learned how few knew who Linda Ronstadt is (was?), but he's just getting going at this point, and that gap could link his living legend to a time when California was truly a Golden State.

The day's backdrop was a University of California Regents meeting two miles away at UCLA. There, student demonstrators clashed with police while inside "the board" jacked-up their tuition 32 percent.

The campus was crammed with so many police it begged the question of whether cutting the force's size might improve the tuition picture. The university's shock troops, with the help of California Highways Patrol(ers) handled the students' in a typically over-the-top fashion: rude, violent, disdainful of the fact universities exist for the kids.

It was tense, and unpleasant, and sad for those who remember the state's halcyon days.

Things clearly need fixing and if Brown's audience represented a generation of "change," he suggested they had much in common since he's been accused by political enemies of changing all his life.

"And it's true. But I'm not ashamed of that," he said, "because if you're alive, and your mind is open, than you have to change."

They ate it up without fully understanding how true the claims were. Brown's politics have always invited intense debate. However, the inherent truth of his commitment, his advocacy, and his willingness to go a new way are agreed upon by friend and foe alike.

Perhaps the crowd sensed it.

The quintessentially Irish-looking pol enumerated the many offices he has run for successfully and not so successfully.

"Many of the people I ran against are dead," said Brown, hinting of his hand in their demise, "because I'm a stressful person, and some of these other people in this campaign for governor are going to find out the same thing."

And them's fightin' words of which the impromptu address contained more; perhaps a tip-off to the approach Brown may take in the campaign, running on his experience rather than away from it.

Brown said the country had been, 30 or 40 years ago, a productive one that lost its edge and then continually borrowed to maintain privileges no longer earned the old-fashioned way.

He did not, of course, use the words "old" or "fashioned."

Brown conducted a brief analysis of the financial "leveraging" that brought the state and country to its knees, and referred to the resulting fiscal crisis as "the greatest case of grand larceny in American history."

Applause again.

The country's political system is, Brown observed, "in an advanced state of decay." He lamented the "wall of resistance" President Obama has run into at the hands of Republicans in Washington D.C. and said it was a symptom of that decay.

The attorney general did not run away from Obama, rather suggested the president was a kindred spirit who could use some help with the heavy lifting out on the Left Coast.

He wove is merry way through about a 20-minute discourse, jumping from subject to subject, free-associating, joking, and holding the group's attention through the background chatter of the adjacent restaurant, and clatter of pots in the close-by kitchen.

California's budget deficit, large as it is, amounts to only 1 percent of its annual gross product and is fixable, said Brown.

He is, naturally, the person to do it. "These other people running don't know how tough it is to run the state. I've worked in it my whole life. I do."

For political junkies, the evening on Sunset offered a good sampling of what Brown is testing in the campaign's early phases.

His effort at tapping into the energy of a generation that knows little of him, but offers some of our best prospects, demonstrated the flexibility he claims to possess in real time.

More than anything, it was a tip of the hat to the hoary old notion that youth must be served...

...in very good restaurants.

On Obstruction

2009-11-21T00:10:00.000-08:00

Saturday's Senate debate has as much to do with Republican obstruction as it does with health care.

The Republican strategy of arresting any progress on the country's problems, of suppressing the will of voters who elected President Barack Obama and a attendant Democratic congressional majority, has begun to garner attention.

Which is why this post will be written more by other writers than the highway scribe, whose intention is to extend their reach and blow off a little steam at the same time.

Like Social Security, the weekend, paid vacations, and health care reform, the first volley came from the far left of the American spectrum in the form of a Nov. 11 "Washington Post," piece by Harold Meyerson.

In the "Do-nothing Senate" the one-time "L.A. Weekly" essayist referred to that body as "dithering heights."

That's pretty good and demonstrates how you need a sense of humor to make your ideology go down a little easier.

Meyerson noted that a few weeks ago, the Republicans thrice filibustered a measure to extend unemployment insurance. Once they relented, the measure passed 98-0.

"Just flexing their muscles, mind you," he wrote. "Establishing a new normal. If we have anything to do with it, nothing moves."

Indeed.

The filibuster, as we know only too well now, is an endless stream of B.S. meant to bury a bill under the Senate's terms of unlimited debate. It was not always thus. At the beginning, under rules drafted by none other than Thomas Jefferson, a senator was allowed to "move the previous question" and end floor discussion.

But Aaron Burr, the guy who shot Alexander Hamilton and came to personify American infamy (except for Gore Vidal), got that rule stricken and the filibuster was born. Its use was nil at first, but grew over the years.

During the Bush II debacle, Democrats used it with greater frequency, but typically infuriated their radicalized supporters with an urge to cooperate and get things done.

Under Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell (pictured), the thing has taken on a life of its own, since voters so reduced his caucus that filibusters are all he can use for leverage.

And use it McConnell has.

As Meyerson pointed out, "Unless you can get a 60-vote majority to end debate, all major bills (and some minor ones) are dead in the water."

He left out political and judicial choices, but on Nov 16, Michael Savage of the "Los Angeles Times," picked up on the meme, detailing a disparity in the judicial appointments made by his predecessor over the same time-period Obama has been in office.

"So far," Savage wrote, "only six of Obama's nominees to the lower federal courts have won approval. By comparison, President George W. Bush had 28 judges confirmed in his first year in office, even though Democrats held a narrow majority for much of the year."

The point being Democrats recognize the president's prerogatives, even when he garners less votes than his opponent and the Supreme Court shuts down a recount in a state governed by his brother (making him president).

On Nov. 17, one day later, the "New York Times" joined the chorus in an editorial generically entitled, "Obama's Judicial Nominations."

While noting the president has been tentative, the anonymous editorialist observed that Senate Republicans bear the blame on the confirmation side by, "doing their best to drag things out."

On Tuesday, a crack in the armor appeared over Obama's nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the U.S. Seventh District Court of Appeals.

The gentleman, who hails from a paternal line of Methodist ministers and enjoys the support of home-state Republican Senator Richard Lugar, apparently ran afoul of "conservative activists," because he worked for the American Civil Liberties Union before joining the bench.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) demurred in respecting the president's choice, saying "a common DNA" ran through Obama appointees in the form of an "ACLU chromosome."

And they say Republicans are "anti-science."

They tried to filibuster the nomination and, in the words of the "Washington Post's"Dana Milbank, got "Filibusted."

Which is pretty good, too.

His piece does a great job of detailing the suddenly changed views of Republicans who, just a few years ago, likened Democratic filibusters to obstruction.

By November 19, the big boys were taking a wider view of the filibuster phenomenon.

"The Washington Post's" E.J. Dionne came out with the "The GOP's no-exit strategy," which warned that it is "time to start paying attention to how Republicans, with Machievellian brilliance, have hit upon what might be called the Beltway-at-Rush-Hour Strategy, aimed at snarling legislative traffic to a standstill so Democrats have no hope of reaching the next exit."

On November 22, "The Post's" Fred Hiatt got into the act, further fleshing out the ramifications of what the "New York Times'" Charles Blow referred to as "the Republican's surprisingly effective obstructionist strategy."

Hiatt noted that, "more than a year after his electoral triumph, President Obama has filled only 55 percent of Senate-confirmed slots in his government. He has nominated few judges, won confirmation for fewer. The principal item on the agenda of the unions that went all in for him, labor law reform, is on hold. Almost everyone agrees that America's immigration laws are broken, yet no fix is in sight. Long after the collapse of our financial system, new systems of regulation have yet to emerge. There is no discernible trade policy."

Hiatt's point of departure was what all this looks like to friend and foe alike overseas. And what it looks like is that American democracy is in paralysis.

The Republicans, the party of flag-wrapped patriots, care a lot about America's image, but not so much as they do about regaining power. And they show no shame in their effort to do it.

For example, in "Help in Battling the Big Boys," highwayscribery lauded the efforts of Democrats, Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut in particular, for proposed legislation that would prevent credit card companies from imposing the arbitrary interest rates and fee increases they're dumping on customers before the new law capping such things takes effect.

But in "A Gift to Credit Card Companies," the "New York Times" reported that Sen. Thad Cochran of (R-Miss.), blocked a vote on the bill, "in yet another act of obeisance by Senate Republicans to the banking and credit card industries."

Thanks Thad.

"The Times" editorial on the judicial nominations noted that, "In March, every Republican senator signed an outrageous letter to the White House warning that they would filibuster any nominee from their home states if they did not approve the choice in advance."

That the Republican caucus is "outrageous," is not the point here. It's that "every" Republican senator signed the piece of trash.

Democrats have never enjoyed such lock-step discipline and as Meyerson and Dionne pointed out, "Blue Dog" or "centrist" or "spineless" Democrats (whatever you want to call them) are playing an important role in all of this.

Dionne said Republican use of the filibuster is making the majority look "foolish, ineffectual and incompetent." Moderate Democrats, by making their own narrow interests paramount on crucial matters like health care reform and climate change, "will only make themselves complicit in this humiliation."

The balky Democratic senators are not only betraying their own party, Myerson wrote, but simultaneously making a mockery of majority rule.

If they are "comfortable with the idea that elections shouldn't have consequences, they should say so publicly. If not, they should let the debate begin."

The word is out. Spread it around. Let's see what happens.

Lunches w/Actresses: A Five-Character Ensemble Piece

2009-11-16T15:21:00.000-08:00

The "New York Times," Modern Love column editor, Daniel Jones, just sent highwayscribery a form letter rejecting a submission of "Lunches w/Actresses: A Five-Piece Ensemble." We are now free to run it here complete with homefield advantage. It is loosely based upon the highway scribe's free-and-easy days as a bachelor/screenwriter in Los Angeles and served as the basis for a chatty and charming script collecting dust on a shelf somewhere. Enjoy and long live electronic media.

Lack of steady work can push a comely actress to the margins of society and into the company of homeless and mad persons.

Actresses might as well throw away their clocks, burn their calendars. Structured time does not matter when your life moves through celluloid. When celluloid moves through your life.

Saturn makes a date with me for Saturday at Cafe LaBrea. She likes to get the asparagus omelet and drown it in soy sauce. We've been meeting there for years now. I’ve never liked the place and wish they’d close it, but then where would she go?

It’s February and gray and I’m waiting and waiting.

Suddenly, there she is. A winter angel come to grant a glance. She has curls that drop to her shoulders like one hundred three rusty red ribbons. I want to mention my wait, but her appearance makes the complaint seem small.

Saturn's coming from a “meeting” with a “friend.” I’ve known for a while that some friends are more so than others. I can't work myself into jealousy, because I’m not sure any of us gets more than the other.

In her time, Saturn gets to each, waters us like the flowers with her liquid laugh.

“It’s so good to work again,” she informs. Of course, it is always good that actresses should work. "Act" is a verb so that your career tends to evaporate when you're an actress who doesn’t. She’s very animated, discussing her minor role in a new television series on a major network. Frisky, she appears to have been working out... or shopping.

Saturn understands the part is small, “but who knows who I’ll meet working there?” And then, counter-intuitively, “I’m such a bitch on the set. I don’t let anybody inside."

I used to believe these stories, but the world of actresses is like other microcosms. You learn its contours by touching it; its language by hearing and speaking it.

I captured Terese's phone number at a nightclub, but have spent six weeks in subsequent pursuit, which culminates with a confrontational voice message along the lines of, “How long do you expect the young prince to persist?”

She likes this. It has character, a quality of paramount importance to the actress.

We set a lunch date for Michaels. Time has passed since the drunken night I made her acquaintance. I can’t remember her face, that is, until she enters. Her eyes are frosted windows on a fathomless soul and that failed marriage to a son of Hollywood royalty hasn't melted them in the least.

Naturally, the conversation covers the fascinating topic of her own career. She’s played Dee, Laurel, La Dama, Samantha, May, Lucinda, Helena, and done a turn as a girl Shakespeare in Snoo Wilson's play. Her role as Sherry in a recent A-list production ended up on the cutting room floor, but she's taking it in her leggy stride.

“That’s all I have for you,” Terese blurts out suddenly. “Audition at three.” And she is off, irrepressible, indomitable, a heroine to me.

Hours later, still floating in her ether, I call my mother to share, because there’s nobody else around.

“Women like that aren’t worth a damn,” she counsels.

Blue is a dark-haired girl too good-looking to be a waitress, working as a waitress at the Spanish Kitchen. “Definitely an actress,” I tell myself and, seven days after first contact, am back for more of her good service.

I order crab cakes, grilled vegetables, turkey meatloaf with chili alioli, but can’t get Blue to look up. Macaroni and cheese, pesto-crusted salmon...

She surrenders, miserable with her station. “You catering your own wedding or what?”

“Just wanted you to look at me.”

Blue turns away. This is going to be easy. "You don’t like your job do you?”

“Let’s just say I’m naturally rebellious.”

“I'm anarchic myself,” I seek to strike her chord, but she turns away, soured.

Blue and I cultivate different kinds of rebellion.

Brittany has dropped me an e-mail: “I’ve moved again, but you may be surprised to hear I finally decided to live alone. Guess I’m sick of making the same mistake. (her recurring love interest, Jesse). It’s a one bedroom place; hardwood floors and kitchen with gingerbread cupboards. From the ’20s with a garage and dirt for planting. $1050. Lunch me! (818) 762-4882.

I lunch her downtown at Louie Bottega; guide Brittany into a seat against the wall so that her fabrics will play off the red brick masonry. She is sprung from hippies and dresses like a Gypsy with peasant skirts and silver rings on every slim finger.

We discuss her.

“The court ordered Jesse to pay me each month for the next year for beating me up. I don’t have to work for a while so I’m back to give acting another try. I haven’t got an agent yet, but I’m taking night classes. Method. I love my coach, J.W. He’s so vulnerable and completely connected.”

Brittany has been in San Diego for six months, sleeping on her mother's couch, trying to remember who she is before losing herself in the dream machine again. This town gave her its snake bite, although I’ve never seen the scar, what with those scarves and ankle-length skirts.

One time, she put me on the guest list at a small theater she was playing. But Saturn got wind of it and turned up at my place first, pulling a vial of cocaine from her embroidered purse and saying, “Look at what my mother gave us.”

You’ve never heard of the actresses I lunch with. Their works are of little magnitude, but important to the movie that is my life. They like what I’m offering: A role as big as they want to make it. Where are they going to get that around here?

Friends shrug. "What have they done?"

But grand actresses and diminutive actresses are one and the same. It’s not the films they're in. It’s the feelings they feel, the ups and downs. To understand you must ride the rollercoaster yourself.

I have.

Saturn calls. The hour is inappropriate and intended to flatter. She’s sure she wants to die. I drop by her apartment to scoop out soupspoons of tears from those muddy pools she strains to understand the world through. I tell her to stop, not to cry, until she is dry with the question of, “Why? Why did I want to become an actress?”

By morning she’s much better. Her horoscope says there will be work, sooner than later, and she can’t have lunch with me because a friend is coming by to talk business. I send her a bouquet of dried flowers hours later.

“What are these for?” she calls and asks me, the screenwriter nobody in town seems to “get.”

Blue and I meet Monday at Mandarette. It is a lunch composed of many tiny dramas, one of which goes like this:

(Blue) “Are you uncomfortable?”

“Maybe. It’s our first lunch that you’re not serving and I'd like it to go well.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t take it so seriously,” she suggests, but I respond, “I'm taking it seriously. I usually don’t shave until Friday.”

She’s gotten a grain of attention and opens her heart directly. It is big and bleeding slightly. A last love went poorly and ended worse, but somehow helped put Blue in touch with her sensuality. “I’m still bitter about it and not looking for anything but my own precious center.”

Blue is one of those “spiritual” actresses, seduced by the promise of peace lurking in Eastern religions, but is, at best, an unreliable Buddha babe.

We're set for Joan’s on Third, on the third, but I have to cancel when Saturn calls from the hospital, not very sure of how she got there.

Her problems vary, but are always related to the question of having work or not, of life and death for the actress.

The actress is beautiful, eternal, when the hot white light of a projector burns. She ceases to exist when it goes out. Years later, with the flip of a switch, she can inspire lust and love from the most impossible place: Death. In the prime of her life, putting on makeup before a mirror, she waits for work, name unknown, dead...until the phone rings again.

Brittany drops by on Monday, unannounced, to show me her new business card. It reads:

Brittany...
Actress,
Poetess,
Milliner,
Jeweler,

which is somehow accurate. “I paid for them with a residual check from a CSI episode I did two years ago. It ran in Australia!”

She’s in an excellent humor and humming with so much harmony that her eyes curve upwards and match the same turn to her smile.

I need to work, but Brittany pulls a bar of curry-scented soap from her burlap bag and announces a plan to bathe: “My hot water heater is broken.”

Saturn leaves me hanging at Cafe Stella on Thursday. Her voice mail says she’s gone to Arizona with a friend.

No doubt dropping dollops of dew on cactus blossoms thriving in the desert there.

Terese calls me the following Wednesday and proposes lunch for Wednesday after. Her preference is Mexican so I propose Loteria Grill and she trills, approving.

She never does the unannounced thing. Terese, after all, is a working actress with money. She enjoys sowing expectation before the grand entrance her conversation never seems to match in scale.

I’m broke, been driving a classic car, an antique even, and those olden models, not unlike actresses, are so undependable they can make you cry.

Mindful, she offers to buy and, when I finish my burrito, gives me half her own. Actresses know. They are the only ones save for a modern dancer or two.

Blue has been fired. That's five dismissals in three months. “The people there were so fake,” she complains. “Each one with their little facade. I can’t live that way. I refuse to play a role.”

It is not surprising that, of the actresses in my appointment book, Blue appears on screen least.

I’m leaving messages for Saturn, running rings around her like the planet from which she filched her stage name. A friend says she’s gotten a job on some TV show and that things are good.

Sure. I’m the one Saturn calls when she has no money. I can make her feel better for free. She comes to me after hitting bottom; the place I'm most easily found.

I drive by Cafe LaBrea to catch her unawares, but the restaurant has been shut down.

Closed for good.

Blue is hanging tough, having exchanged her pay as a production assistant, on a low budget film, for a role hardly requiring a visit to the costume trailer.

“I’m only happy when I’m on set,” she explains on a cell phone call from the set.

Terese cancels our date at Cynthias. She’s on a shoot in India. I tell her she owes me lunch and blow her a kiss long-distance.

Brittany is still having agent problems. She’s ready to abandon town and her dream, again. I tell her to get out of bed, find an audition, and move forward instead of backward. If she can.

I hang up and rub my eyes. These actresses have wearied me, but the phone beckons anew and, finally, it’s Saturn.

I attack. “New role? New stud? Kicking the rest of us mules out of your stable?'

"No role," she answers softly, sadly, "no stud. Just a baby in my belly."

I shall never possess her. Calm her. Please her. In the end, it's for the best, but doesn't feel that way.

I ask Saturn how she's surviving. The film business isn’t so keen on pregnant actresses.

“I’m working in a hotel. It’s good for me. I walk a lot.”

“Doing what?” I want to know. “What else are you good for besides acting?”

“Watering the flowers, dummy."

Letter to Lieberman: America is a Public Option

2009-11-12T22:51:00.000-08:00

Nov. 13, 2009

Senator Joseph Lieberman
706 Hart Office Building
Washington D.C. 20510

Dear Sir,

Recent news that you planned to support a Republican filibuster if the health care reform bill contained a "public option" was very disconcerting to me.

After all, as a life-long Democrat, I voted for yourself and Vice President Gore in the 2000 election. I remain convinced that it was an election of which you were robbed, setting in motion eight years of environmental degradation, preemptive war, and the abuse of our most cherished values and institutions.

All of which makes your choice of allies in this matter of the public option more perplexing. Their party filed the successful lawsuit to enjoin votes from being counted in Florida and deliver the presidential election to George W. Bush.

Your name was subsequently reduced to use in a trashy sobriquet on placards waved by rabble outside Mr. Gore's residence reading "Sore-Loserman."

I understand you've since endured some rough handling by Democrats over issues related to the Iraq war. All I can say is, you're entitled to your independence so long as you are willing to take the resulting heat.

Ours, since the debacle of Vietnam, has been the party of peace. When you decide upon hewing to a different path, the ensuing battle is of your making and not the Democratic Party's.

And for all that, you caucus with the Democrats through whom you reached your current status. They, in turn, were able to consolidate a filibuster-proof majority with your adherence.

The Republican Party is bent on defeating President Obama at any cost. Siding with them is no way to settle grievances most of us thought were smoothed over when you maintained your chairmanship of a Senate committee in spite of your support for Sen. John McCain in November 2008.

There is an amorality in your pledge to back a filibuster threatened by the party that denied you the vice presidency.

There is, senator, no two-thirds vote requirement for a measure's enactment by the Senate. Bills pass with the majority's blessing. Abuse of the filibuster has created an unfortunate state of affairs and gummed-up the nation's business, while giving a rump and regional party greater leverage than its reduced voting base warrants.

Your support of the filibuster on a matter of national importance, not parochial concern, diminishes the traditions of an institution to which you have dedicated a goodly portion of your efforts as public servant - the United States Senate.

As for the public option, the respected magazine "Miller-McCune" reports that only 10 percent of Americans could utilize the feature as presently constituted in the proposed legislation.

I'd be one of them, senator, and resent your single-handed efforts to deny me the opportunity to gain a modicum of health and economic security, through a parliamentary maneuver.

If you want to oppose reform through your vote in the Senate, that's your business, although I would disagree with that act. However, supporting a filibuster that prevents health care reform from reaching the Senate floor would be a move both anti-democratic and not unlike the lawsuit that kept Florida from doing a proper ballot count in 2000.

An issue such as reform deserves a full airing in the nation's representative bodies, not some cheap short-circuit shutdown.

I understand that Connecticut, your home state, has a high concentration of insurance companies and your are bound, in part, to represent their interests. But as the same article noted, by 2019, 168 million Americans will likely receive coverage through their employer, "no differently than they do today."

By supporting the likes of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C), you're throwing in with their Tea Partiers' interpretation that the public option represents some government takeover of health care.

It's not, because I prefer such a takeover and know it cannot be found in the the legislation.

These insurance companies are not to my, or many other Americans', liking senator. They gouge their customers and then stick them with the burden of pursuing reimbursements for treatments duly paid for through their premiums. They are an important reason the clamor for reform has accumulated lo these many decades.

Nonetheless, your colleague Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has noted that, "The bottom line is that the public option can't really hold private insurers accountable if it is only competing for 10 percent of the insurance market because private insurance companies aren't going to change their business practices if 90 percent of their customers can't take their business elsewhere."

Finally, as a policy matter, I'm advocating for the option because over the years the public space in our country has diminished and with it, our sense of engagement with one another.

America cannot prosper as a country of infinite privacies where people cultivate "My Music" and "My Videos" folders on their personal computers while walking the streets with earphones cutting them off from any awareness of the "us" and "ours" all around them.

There must be a commons, a public place and space, a civic way of being through which Americans can venture out from their gated communities and locked doors to meet and share in the life of this country. Otherwise what is the country?

The idea of America itself is a public option.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Make Your Bed, Be Happy

2009-11-06T11:59:00.000-08:00

Your happiness may depend less on what you make in bed, than simply making it.

More to the point: make your bed and be happy.

Yes, you read that correctly. Make your bed and stop searching so desperately for the secrets of life and you might find them more readily.

In the highway scribe's novel, "The Sidewalk Smokers Club," the group's no account, lung-seared leader, Randall, was, while busy saving America from itself, developing a system of thought he called "bum philosophy."

It consisted, Randall said, of "big philosophy made bite-sized for bums: the grand sentiments made pithy and repeated often."

So, make your bed, bums.

Do it first thing, not after breakfast, but right off the bat. highwayscribery does. As soon as he pops up, the scribe strips the mattress down and begins a delicate smoothing of the fitted sheet.

Taking his time, the scribe avails himself of this first opportunity to get something right. He erects a modest challenge and then meets it. highwayscribery accepts that each day, for big man and small alike, is a series of tasks.

And, being of the small variety, he gets to it, before it gets to him.

The smoothing complete, a mild satisfaction blesses the bent morning body at having done something well. It serves as encouragement to take the next step, which is done accordingly, the top sheet shucked from the bottom of the bed and floated toward the head.

Sometimes, as you know, it takes a few flings to get it right and in this exercise there is a harbinger of what kind of day may be in store, and a first shot a practicing patience and persistence.

Again, however resistant the process, it is easy compared to what awaits. And there is routine in it, which, unless you're restless for international travel and sex with people much younger than you, is soothing to the soul.

Our cat Jack, a creature of habit, loves it. Soon after the process has begun he enters, without fail, a hardy greeting at the ready. Your routine settles those around you, too.

There's no need to get into a step-by-step; only worth noting that the bedspread, the alignment of pillows and their ultimate fluffing, all beg the same tender treatment. They are mild attempts at aligning your senses of focus and coordination. And this discipline, the embrace of duty, will calm you and complete you before your teeth are even brushed.

Your best effort applied, you step back and make a date for 13 or 14 hours later. And you look forward to it because the thing looks great and, well, it's your bed.

What comes next is more daunting certainly, but you've got the first paces of a rhythm down. You've greased your wheels.

highwayscribery is at times afflicted with a low-grade depression. He has not had it diagnosed, because he doesn't need anyone to tell him he feels down. He eschews pills, choosing to remedy things in a plodding, short-term, one-foot-in front of the other fashion.

He lives with and adjusts to it.

And this is what they tell people who have been diagnosed with the real deal and plied with chemicals to keep them in balance. They tell them to list things, or stack them, or prioritize them and attend to one after the other.

It helps a person deal with that sense of being overwhelmed, which is especially acute in the morning, because all your tasks are yet to be done.

Everything stares you right in the face so that brushing your teeth is a hindrance. But once you've made your bed, brushing's nearly a next good step, except for the caffeine crowd, which prefers their medicine first and doesn't see the point in brushing until the fix is in.

Whichever. That's up to each reader. We're just saying make the bed, because once breakfast is done and the e-mails you've checked are stuck in your throat, it's a great, great thing, not to have to pass by your room and confront an unwieldy mess of knotted sheets, blankets and comforter demanding you to retreat and MAKE YOUR BED.

That's moving backward. It invites frustration. And you don't need frustration first thing in the morning and you won't have it, because you've made your bed. It's done, looks good, and is winking as a reminder of that date later in the day.

Carry on.

Moving slowly through his own maturity and development the highway scribe has come to place a great deal of importance on preparation and organization. Mostly because they do away with last-minute stresses and limit mistakes, which are harder to undo once you're out of time, and harder to do as you get older, if only because you have less time (literally and figuratively).

When you pass by your room on the way back from dumping the garbage, and prior to putting on your work clothes, that made bed will give you a sense of having things under control and at your fingertips. Unmade, it will make you want to crawl back in, and not because it looks cozy.

If and when you stay at a hotel on vacation, the respite will doubly earned. And when you leave your bedmate behind, you'll be doubly missed.

As a married man, there are positive externalities to the bed-making worthy of reporting and available to any coupled soul heeding this bum-philosophical tenet.

Mrs. Scribe has moved from the made-bed onto new demands, as wives are wont to do, but hardly a married woman exists whose eyes don't mist over at the thought of having 365 small tasks a year removed from their list of jobs.

And in a fight with a wife, it never ceases to come in handy. Mrs. Scribe, forced to address the issue in rare verbal jousts, always starts behind the eight-ball with, "yes, you make the bed every day, but..."

But what? Throw the trips to the garbage bay and something else onto the list and what you've got is a person kvetching more about their own frustrations than about your housekeeping shortcomings.

And that's big.

So take heed gents. Ladies, the advantages here are not as ample (only you know), but still invaluable. At the very least, when you go to bed...

...it will be made.

Help In Battling the Big Boys

2009-11-02T16:24:00.000-08:00

Life's not easy when it is spent jousting with the Internal Revenue Service, Bank of America, and Anthem/Blue Cross.

As it is for many of you, it is thus for the highway scribe. The American struggle is a lonely one. It is a gauntlet run without the assistance of potent unions, affordable legal help, merciful tax rules, or simple health insurance policies.

For decades, policy has exalted the myth of our rugged individualism to the point where we have been left alone to tilt at behemoths against which we are no match.

Today, via the wonder of Web banking, Bank of America helped itself to $8.95 of the highway scribe's money for services that can only be guessed at. And that's because any time the scribe actually needs something from the bank, he gets nailed with a fee.

The relationship is simple wherein the bank serves as a brief holder and dispenser of the scribe's money while checks are deposited and quickly gobbled up by expenses associated with his humble existence. It's a pretty clean collaboration, which is why the free price originally offered for the account made sense.

One day, without any notice, the price went up to $5.95. highwayscribery called to find out what was up with that and got the stock response that such increases were included in the long, illegible text of a document he signed agreeing to a free checking account.

Which is not news to any of you.

Then, sometime after the Obama administration came into power, banks found themselves in the extremely rare position of having customer gripes funneled back at them through the White House.

In "Change New World," we expressed our initial shock at having the government do our bidding.

In "Credit Card Crookery" and "Credit Card Redux," this unique pleasure was extended, in particular, to the financial industry, which had it coming.

Of course, these companies didn't get richer than the rest of us by being stupider. Soon came their response to new rules reining in the parasitical abuses.

These involved arbitrary increases to most everyone's interest rates and general account fees. The companies also kept their promise on sticking it to credit cardholders who were on the up and up all these years.

That's around the time the aforementioned bump to $8.95 on the scribe's free checking account occurred. Bank of America stretched the terms of our original agreement by $107.40 per annum with nary a "howdy-do!"

Of course, on a sliding scale, a $107 heist is relatively small when compared with what happens when a bank does one the favor of paying a series of five $6 debit charges and then hits you for $35 on each.

Which is to say, the scribe absorbed it figuring nothing in life is truly free. Mired in a 1099 hourly wage reality, the effort in going over to the bank and getting the monthly fee reduced wasn't worth the time... financially speaking.

So it was with great pleasure that highwayscribery, in its ritual perusal of the "New York Times," on Tuesday, Oct. 2, ran into a charming slice of life on page B9 wherein Sen. Chris Dodd (D) of Connecticut was calling for an "interim freeze" on further fee increases of the type just detailed for your reading pleasure.

The author of the piece, Andrew Martin, by the way, does an excellent job on the myriad ways banks and credit card companies screw people. His pieces provide the consolation that you are not alone, and that someone with a decent megaphone is pointing out the abuses of usury to which we numbly submit.

But we digress with much territory to cover.

The article explains that Congress is only too aware of the run-up in fees and rates as banks interpret the interim between when the new law goes into effect, and now, as a window in which it’s okay to loot as many customers as possible.

A bill was recently reported out of the House Financial Services Committee that would close the window more quickly, on Dec. 1, instead of February 22 of next year.

Said Dodd: "At a time when families are struggling to make ends meet, jacked-up rates can quickly create crushing debt. People need to be responsible with their money, but they shouldn't be taken to the cleaners by outrageous fees."

What the Connecticut Yankee wants, in reality, is an old-time, 1970s-style price control. highwayscribery and others of his ilk love a good price control. They had fallen very much out of favor during the free market rage, but since that worked out about as well as it did in 1929, the price control may be making a comeback.

A fellow named Talbot from something called the Financial Service Roundtable said Dodd's desire is fired by the false notion that fees and interest rates are going up because of the new law to hold them down (if you follow).

Talbot added that the increases are because the economy is so bad and people are having such a tough time paying their credit card bills.

But that's why taxpayers gave the big banks and brokerage houses those big bucks bailouts, so it won't wash. And thank heavens the Democrats are in power because we'd never have gotten this kind of love from the Tea Party Party.

Not to suggest the Dems are somehow holy and sacrosanct when it comes to protecting the naked consumer. They sat around for years bending to the will of marketeers and cultivated a lot of our current-day problems during the disappointing days of President Bill Clinton.

And that's because they're not as good as Republicans when it comes to loving their base.

GOPers can rush into a hotly contested New York congressional race and back the Conservative Party candidate (against their own!) without fear of...well, fear of anything.

National Democratic leaders jumping into a local race to back a socialist candidate, on principal, would result in their being sent straight to hell, or jail or worse. So they tend to take their left-wingers for granted because they have nowhere else to go.

Then they sit around waiting for independents and Olympia Snow (R-Maine) to give them cover.
Even as they have benefited from the change in our political landscape, Democrats have been slow to truly internalize it, which is why the public option was dead a month ago and now it’s not.
We've had 11 months of the Obama administration, but are into about the third year of the Obama era during which conventional wisepersons have seen their predictions upended again and again.

And so it goes with the public option. In his most recent column, David Broder wrote that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) finally decided upon the public option to satisfy the "labor-left" of his party. That's the highway scribe, who will avail himself of the benefit as soon as it becomes available.

But it's also a lot of other people, not necessarily for unions or anything else "left," but affordable health care.

Broder, like many in his field, think the Obama election happened in some weird vacuum that represented no shift in Americans' political thinking.

Reid thought that, too, and so did a lot of other people in Congress until the President did some decent explaining, the debate groaned on, and the public option concept grew clearer to the electorate.

The numbers don't lie. Reid can interpret them and feels safe in putting the idea forward.

But he needs some help, because oft-times, the peoples' will is thwarted.

Here's a petition asking Democratic leaders to strip any Senator supporting Republican filibuster efforts of their chairmanship.

highwayscribery calls it the "Lieberman Petition."

Here's Reid's petition asking you to help him out on the public option.

Here's former Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton, Robert Reich asking you, via video, to call your representatives on behalf of the public option.

Now, don't you feel better?

The "Times" ran an article on "Senate naysayer," John Cornyn (R-Okla.) who is hell bent on stopping health care reform, because of the "financial ruin" it represents.

The article says he has a big "No," sign behind his desk in the Hart Senate Building of which he is very proud. The reason why is a secret of Cornyn's own keeping, but highwayscribery is willing to bet his tightwad ways don't extend to arms purchases and war packages.

And we're betting a yahoo like Cornyn, effective as he may be in gumming up the legislative works, won't be able to stop this thing coming down the pike.

Once achieved, health care reform is going to make life with or without Anthem/BlueCross a lot easier for a lot of people.

All of which, dare we way, represents something of a pending victory for President Obama whose Paul Krugman noted, "The seemingly impossible dream of fundamental health care reform is just a few steps away from becoming reality, and each player has to decide whether he or she is going to help it across the finish line or stand in its way."

Wow.

Which brings us to that final phantom, the IRS.

If you follow American politics very closely, you might come away with an impression that President Obama is not faring well. That people like him, but not his policies. That Republicans are poised for a comeback. You might have been caught off guard by news that he'd won the Nobel Peace Prize and swayed by those who say he has accomplished naught to deserve it.

In an Op-ed piece penned by U2's Bono in the "New York Times" a short while back, the singer attempted to explain why Obama is beloved in Europe, where they lack an entire network dedicated to the daily trashing of his reputation.

Among these virtues are Obama’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goals of halving world poverty by 2015. Obama, Bono notes, was not around when the goals were set, “but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further -- all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.”

Such policies, wrote Bono, “are why I believe Mr. Obama could well be a force for peace and prosperity, if the words signal action.”

This does not mean the specter of the Internal Revenue Service and the crushing penalties it has visited upon the scribe's family will suddenly evaporate. Even Obama can't do that.

But, we hope, it means that WHAT we give to the government will be spent less on institutionalized violence and more on the promotion of peace, human harmony, and the vision of our better angels abroad.

And that's change you can bank on.

Letter to Zimbabwe's Ambassador

2009-10-16T21:47:00.000-07:00

October 16, 2009

Machivenyika Mapuranga
Zimbabwe Ambassador to the U.S.
1608 New Hampshire Ave NW
Washington, DC 20009-2512

Mr. Ambassador.

I urge your government to release Roy Bennett from prison and drop the ridiculous charges of "terrorism" leveled by the government against him.

Anyone can see what is going on here. "Terrorism" is the new "communism" and whenever a government wants to get rid of somebody making life uncomfortable, it characterizes the opposition activity as "terrorist" and is done with that person.

Let's be blunt here: No party or person has the right to govern a modern, and purportedly, democratic country forever.

Mr. Mugabe is an embarrassment to Zimbabwe and his horrific campaign against those who oppose him deserves naught but disdain from the international community.

He is 85. He should take himself and his party out of the equation and let a new generation determine the direction of Zimbabwe.

Respectfully,
highwayscribery

Book Report: "The Madonna of 115th Street," by Robert Orsi

2009-10-14T17:37:00.001-07:00

Like the many penitents he renders, Robert Orsi sees all things in "The Madonna of 115th Street."\

A scholar of things religious, and connoisseur of matters Italian-American, Orsi combines these two interests so that one defines and explains the other.

To the uninitiated, the Madonna of Mount Carmel is just a statue like countless others throughout Europe and the Americas that interprets the Virgin Mary in plaster relief.

But in Orsi's erudite hands La Madonna (and the faith she engenders) becomes an analytical tool that unlocks doors to discussion on Italian-American family life, the role of work, the trials of immigration, the history of colonization in the old country, and, of course, food.

His base of scholarly operations is the now-vanished Italian East Harlem, but those raised in the culture will recognize themselves, their families, and neighborhood networks in its residents.

The author did years of in-depth research, but found most of his truths on the streets of Little Italy. The resulting interviews may have informed the text, but don't make many actual appearances.

Much of "Madonna" is given over to Orsi's ornate reasoning, and even speculation, about the meanings of the religious icon, and how they can be discerned in the behaviors of mid-century Italian-Americans in urban New York.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Somebody had to do it and his thoughts mostly ring true. Where they don't, the opportunity for debate and discussion naturally arise, and that is a second service the author rendered.

Don't give this book to your Aunt Rosina in Coney Island unless she's got a college degree and a sociological bent. "Madonna" is a scholarly text that can be dense as a zeppole with academic jargon or leavened as a sfogliatelle with deeply meditative conclusions.

But it is a delightful trove of considerations on the Italian-American and immigrant experience; a beautiful piece of history that might have otherwise been lost to those who care them.

Congratulations Mr. President?

2009-10-10T14:30:00.000-07:00

Remember, "Congratulations to my worthy opponent?"

Now, you lose the Olympics, you lose. You win the Nobel Prize for Peace, you lose.

Today's rarified, fast-paced news environment means you can wake up on the West Coast to commentary -- from Glenn Greenwald on the left to the choir of crass on the right -- insulting their own president for winning the Nobel before you can read that he actually won the Nobel.

The "fallout" from an issue for which there should be no fallout, overwhelms the original news itself.

Everybody from Joan Walsh to Joe Gergen get to weigh-in on whether the award was deserved, conveniently shunting aside the group which does painstaking, year-round work to make the designation and, mind you, pony-up the accompanying prize money.

They work in media, you see. Don't think until they interpret it for you.

If any proof were needed (and none was) that nothing President Barack Obama does will ever placate the conservative hate machine, this latest wrinkle (and our marvelous president delivers them quickly) ought to do the trick.

Obama had the chestnuts to speak on behalf of his hometown's bid for the Olympics and the fortitude to take the hit, such as it was. The choir was loud and sour in jeering those efforts.

It was disjointed coming from guys who wear American flag ties and whistle George M. Cohan tunes in the shower.

After all, Hannity and cohorts are always lamenting Obama's failure to highlight "American exceptionalism" in his forays abroad. But what could be more "exceptional" than winning the Nobel Prize for Peace?

In other, smaller, countries, when a native citizen wins such a prize, it is naturally an occasion for universal celebration.

As a matter of fact, in other smaller countries, Obama's winning seems to have ushered in just such an occasion.

Only in his own country, where a television network and millions of dollars in conservative funding have turned the president into a big-eared, socialist, Kenyan-born object of loathing, is the party dampened.

The Nobel gift became a really great chance to criticize.

Once the party of blue-haired dowagers and genteel country clubbers, the current GOPers can't summon up the simple gentleman's grace of wishing one of their own countryman a terse congratulations.

Tell you what, with the kind of noise heard yesterday, highwayscribery will have to reject the Nobel Prize for Literature, when it comes, for his family's sake.

But Obama is made of sterner stuff than highwayscribery. Despite what his detractors say, the President works hard and did not win his prize in a vacuum.

What really galls his enemies is that Obama is what we call "a winner" and no sooner was the grave soil on Chicago's Olympian disappointment settling, when the President had provoked them again by bringing honor to their country.

The brayers might say those of us closer to reality on the political spectrum would have done much the same had George W. Bush won the award.

But he did not, which is the greater message in all of this.

Letter to the Honduran Embassy

2009-10-06T18:10:00.000-07:00

Roberto Flores Bermudez
Honduran Ambassador to the United States
3007 Tilden St., N.W. #4 M
Washington D.C. 20008

Mr. Ambassador,

I'm absolutely sickened by press notices regarding the treatment, not only of anti-government supporters, but of those who just happened to be in the way of government troops.

As I just wrote to your counterpart from Guinea, military coups do not work. Either they further enrage popular sentiment, which is always on the side of democracy, or they smother it. The latter instance entails nothing more than a country being occupied by its own army.

Unleashing these ill-prepared, and unscrupulous soldiers on middle-aged women, academics, and any poor soul trying to get home from the market speaks volumes as to Micheletti Government's ability to lead. This is not leading, this is repression.

Reports of tanks rolling through the poor parts of the country as a way of intimidating President Zelaya's supporters is unconscionable and hints of oligarchic forces seeking to forestall a true democratic process.

If people didn't want Zelaya to run for a third term, they would have voted down the referendum. "Fixing" things with an army that brutalizes them was probably a distant preference for Hondurans of both the left and right.

Shame on the ruling junta.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Letter to the Guinean Ambassador

2009-10-06T17:44:00.000-07:00

Guinean Embassy to the United States
2112 Leroy Place N.W.
Washington D.C. 20008

Dear Sir or Madame,

I want to express my outrage at the behavior of soldiers in your country. We do not hear much of Guinea here in the United States and it is most unfortunate that we should become familiar with your country thanks to the savage acts of men whose charge, one would suppose, is to protect a country's citizens.

These stories and images of women being raped by military forces in the streets of Conakry are abhorrent. President Moussa Dadis Camara's protestations that he could not foresee this bloodbath are unacceptable. Either he controls his army or doesn't. They should all be stripped of their commissions. These are not soldiers, but thugs.

Perhaps I am naive, but there must be a difference between the two types of person.

This is why military coups don't work. Nobody can stand in the way of those with guns if there is no system of civil law to provide prior restraint. I don't see how the trauma and tragedy can ever be revoked, but the current government might do the whole world a favor and step down so that voters might have a chance to replace them with more responsible human beings. And I emphasize "human."

Shame on your government.

Regards,
the highway scribe

Free Elliot Madison

2009-10-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

Before you get upset about all those Iranian protestors being run through the wringer over there, you might turn your attention to those enduring similar treatment over here.

In "Twitter-Patter Revolutions," highwayscribery drew parallels between what governments do in Iran, and everywhere else, by framing examples of the violent way our own government has treated its dissidents.

highwayscribery reached back to the murder of four students at Kent State University in the 1960s and moved onto some overzealous police enforcement at Democratic and Republican national conventions over the past decade.

Now, we've got a fresh example from the recent G-20 summit and corresponding protests in Pittsburgh.

Similar to the way authorities responded to the Twitter-Patter revolution in Tehran, Federal Bureau of Investigation agents invaded a house in Queens, New York on Oct. 1, and rooted around its entrails for 16 hours.

That's not a misprint: 16 hours.

As part of the FBI effort in overkill, agents arrested a 41-year old social worker named Elliot Madison. It is not clear what Mr. Madison has done other than participated in the coordination of demonstrations around the G-20 confab.

Last we checked, which was just a few minutes ago, that's not a crime, rather a protected civil right.

His attorney, Martin Stolar told "The Times, "There's absolutely nothing that he's done that should subject him to any criminal liability."

highwayscribery agrees.

The article is devoid of evidence this fellow did anything other than occupy an improvised e-communications bureau that helped demonstrators divine the movements of the police details bent knocking the snot out of them.

The attorney said he'll know what the charges are when the affidavit empowering the FBI to disembowel his home is unsealed.

That's another anti-democratic feature of our democracy that drives the highway scribe nuts. The sealed court document. In his real-life job as a reporter, the scribe must comb the PACER system for federal court documents and they are often sealed, which is a way of keeping them from public purview without explanation.

Explanation, we posit here, is the essence of democracy. For a government by and for the people to take an action, it must explain the action to those same people.

The point being we have a ways to go here before pointing the figure at other places.

A criminal complaint against Madison, in Pennsylvania, said he directed, "others, specifically protestors of the G-20 summit, in order to avoid apprehension after a lawful order to disperse."

Of course, whenever a government issues an order to disperse, it's lawful, so Pennsylvania authorities are belaboring a weak point.

Emerson reminds us, "A good man obeys the law not too well," as in a case like this where your constitutional right to assemble for political reasons is questioned by a bunch of meat-headed, truncheon-wielding yo-yos.

Meant-headed, truncheon-wielding yo-yos, by the way, hate the Constitution because of the way it makes a crime out of venting their most basic and savage urges.

So what we're saying here is the same thing we said in "Twitter Patter Revolutions" and "President Obama and The Venice Drum Circle": Countries in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

If you want to argue that there is no moral equivalent between the enforcers in Iran and those in the United States, ask those who have to breathe the spew from their teargas canisters first.

If you think highwayscribery is getting all bent out of shape over something isolated, keep in mind that on the next page, same newspaper spread, it is reported that New York City will blow $24 million -- useful in forestalling foreclosures or paying furloughed teachers -- to install an "electronic bulwark" against "terrorists" in midtown Manhattan.

Hey, we're all against terrorism right? What's the problem with that?

The problem is that "terrorists" are not the only people the forces of order will be using their new electronic toys to watch.

How do you think they found Madison and his protesting friends in Pittsburgh?

And why is highwayscribery taking potshots at the police?

Because highwayscribery wouldn't trust a policeman farther than he could throw one, and because this article, also in next page of "The Times," regarding the impunity with which officers in that once free and anarchic city operate.

Screw 'em. We're with Madison and his ilk.

Book Report: "Odd Man Out," By Matt McCarthy

2009-10-02T22:21:00.001-07:00

Odd Man Out: A Year on the Mound with a Minor League Misfit
makes clear the virtues associated with being good at two things.

Matt McCarthy's is an autobiographical account of a Yale grad with a scientific bent and the good fortune of being a southpaw.

The fact of his left-handed birth limited the competition for pitching slots nationwide. It paved the way for McCarthy to play at Yale and later be drafted by the Los Angeles Angels Baseball Club.

The dynamic here is simple and effective. A young and cerebral son of old Ivy is tossed into the social wilds of the American West and the Angels farm system as a prospect with few prospects.

Most of the players he runs into can only do one thing and their level of education has been limited by the facts that they never went to school or that their schools only required them to play ball very well.

McCarthy is not so much a minor league misfit -- he wants baseball success as much as the others -- as he is a guy who took the time to develop both mind and body.

"Odd Man Out," dissects the system by which baseball separates its winners and losers. And although it is not necessarily seamy, immoral or perverse, the game is certainly tilted in favor of certain prospects and cruel to those with lesser pedigrees.

McCarthy only lasts a year and there is nothing his learned eye beholds along the way to encourage him.

In one episode, he is on the mound tossing pitches in front of Angel manager Mike Scioscia, former general manager Bill Stoneman, and his own pitching coach.

Asked for a little background, the pitching coach, in full-voice and easily within earshot of McCarthy informs the big shots that the kid's "nothing special."

Along the way he learns that all Latino players are grouped as "Dominicans" by their American counterparts and that some of the latter would rather quit the game than room with one.

He learns a good "gay" joke will always lift the players' spirits and that the team's fortunes take a back seat to individual statistics in what the author concludes is a "numbers game."

There is a familiar assortment of desperate types doing steroids to hang in there, the obligatory Bible freak, and meat-headed, beer-guzzling jocks.

The author's brief thumbnail portrait of White Sox reliever Bobby Jenks in his early days makes for great fun if you actually know who Jenks is.

The most complete portrait achieved is that of Provo Angels manager Tom Kotchman, father of the professional Angels' former first baseman, Casey (now with the Red Sox).

It's not a novel portrait, but rather one that confirms our impression of the chaw-chewing hard-ass we expect a guy charged with squiring a bunch of young lugs around the far West to be.

Although some of the insights are grim, there is nothing over-the-top in "Odd Man Out" that marks it for a special place in the annals of baseball literature, but it's an informative, easy read with moments of sly humor.

The most appreciative audience for "Odd Man Out" would have to be among fans of the Angels. It pulls back the curtain to reveals why what was once one of baseball's clunkers is now a well-oiled winning machine.

Similarly, McCarthy's time in the minors coincided with the apprenticeship of the club's present day stars.

Erik Aybar, Ervin Santana, Joe Saunders, Mike Napoli, and Rafael Rodriguez are clearly marked as winners in system that is made up largely of losers and the few anecdotes involving them make for good stuff.

Book Report: "The Day the Cowboys Quit" by Elmer Kelton

2009-09-23T21:20:00.000-07:00

It's the rare western book that invites a Marxian analysis, but Elmer Kelton, who died recently, was the rare western writer.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit"takes place at the intersection of rugged American individualism and the collective efforts of the undercapitalized to improve their lot.

The book renders a cowboys' strike - a fascinating concept - that actually happened, on ranches in the Canadian River region of west Texas circa 1883.

By Kelton's lights, the strike occurred in the crucible of corporate encroachment upon the cattle industry that brought an end to the free range. Rationalization and greater efficiency in the beef business left the liberty loving cowboys with a beef of their own and they struck in response to it.

This novel is a beautifully paced, tightly constructed page-turner that manages to treat deeper afflictions in the American condition for those who want to see them, without boring those who just want a good western yarn.

Here's an exchange between the central protagonist, Hugh "Hitch" Hitchcock and the Kansas City corporate rancher Prosper Selkirk, who notes that:

"If I invest my entire fortune in a bad venture and lose it, nobody guarantees to take care of me the rest of my life. When a man gets on one of those bad horses he knows the risks: he implies his willingness to accept that risk when he agrees to the job."

[Hitch] "He accepts the job because he's partial to eatin'.'
"The same reason I take a risk and invest capital."
"There a difference between a man's limbs and his money."

A political writer might take pages to explain this naturally occurring friction so skillfully dispatched in a few terse exchanges by Kelton.

What do the "big ranchers" want? New rules forbidding the use of a company horse for personal affairs or keeping one's own mount without management's consent; the expulsion of "tramps and idlers" from the cowboy camp’s traditional protective care; and the outlawing of a ranch hand’s, "owning cattle in their own brand less than two fences away from the ranch where they worked, which in the Panhandle's open range country effectively canceled out their right to own cattle anywhere."

Each of these, if you're not familiar with late 19th-Century western ranch life (and who is?), comes with a back story Kelton fills in easy as an Arkansas maiden in an Dodge City cathouse.

"The Day the Cowboys Quit," treats the labor action with surprising sensitivity for a manuscript packaged as pulp fiction. Kelton had a deep comprehension of the strike psychology, of the ambiguity that plagues supporters and opponents alike.

He paints those too sure of themselves in a less flattering light than those with doubts. The pioneering, don't tread on me individuals opposing the strike are slaves to the American winner-take-all mentality and obsequious to those with more money simply because they have more money. They lack a dissident and skeptical spirit.

The strikers are scattershot in their efforts; too closely identified, and easily taken advantage of, by the cattle thieves and drifters littering the fast-closing frontier.

The author aptly develops the unspoken reasons behind labor actions that actually prop up the prosaic demands for higher wages and better working conditions.

And speaking of prosaic, Elmer Kelton has a fine ear for plain-spoken dialogue between down home folk while investing his narrator with an-all-too-familiar, but no less colorful klatch of colloquialisms that move his story along like bulls through a brier patch.

“The Day the Cowboys Quit,” alternately delivers on resolutions that leave a reader satisfied, without tying every loose end so that the story finishes in an uneven fashion that comes mighty close to looking like life beyond books.

Cantor's Song

2009-09-23T00:09:00.000-07:00

Governing and protesting are markedly different activities.

This from a daily newspaper article dated Sept. 22:

"The same actions to confront the same problems are reaping the same results: voluntary activism, heroic public protest, slogans and posters, militant loyalty and the concentration of hopes in the central figure of a leader who has yet to harness a national crisis into a viable alternative political and social organization through which multiple sectors and interests impacted by poor government can fight for more than sound bites and the next congressional elections."

A summation of the populist uprising fomented by Glenn Beck and FOX News?

No, words from the pen of "La Jornada" columnist, Julio Hernandez Lopez on the state of Mexico 's left-wing opposition.

But it crosses that screwy “virtual” border fence to sum up the Republican status quo pretty easily doesn’t it?

In yesterday's "Washington Post," another columnist, Dana Milbank, wrote a piece that might lead one to believe House Republican Whip Eric Cantor has been delving into some of Lopez's writing.

In "The Health-Care War Gets a Little More Civil," Milbank recounts the staid circumstances of a public meeting convened by Cantor on (what else?) health care.

The meeting was conducted under rather strict rules of conduct, that wouldn't be considered so strict had certain people demonstrated an ability to behave like responsible adults during this summer's nefarious health care town halls.

You can read the piece for yourself, but in summation, Cantor, a snarky, perpetual Young Republican, invited a colleague from the other side of the aisle, and the issue, to join him.

The usual cast of crazies who found the town halls such fertile ground for ranting about the president, the color of his skin and socialistic tendencies, materialized anew.

But Cantor informed them, after some predictable early outbursts, that this was not a town hall, rather a "public square" and that, "We are here today to talk about health care."

That was something of a shocking, if passive, admission that those who disrupted the town halls did everything but talk about health care.

The piece chronicles the disappointment of those who came to rumble over the fact that Cantor was more willing to engage those who came to discuss. They were aghast at the collegial treatment, once a hallmark of The Peoples' House, Cantor afforded his opposite number, Rep. Bobby Scott (D).

"I felt like pulling a Joe Wilson," one defrauded attendee told Milbank.

We know.

You have to wonder what Republican internal polls are telling them about the impact the Tea Party and 9-12 crowd's caterwauling has had on party fortunes.

highwayscribery thought he espied the first shoots of this new Republican tone when Newt Gingrich, the original braying backbencher, decided not to join in bashing the president’s school kids speech.

Let’s revisit the Mexico article and highlight the fragment which reads: "...has yet to harness a national crisis into a viable alternative political and social organization through which multiple sectors and interests impacted by poor government can fight..."

Columnists (and bloggers) can get very wordy, but that swatch of text can be reduced to: “Yelling loud is bringing us no closer to governing.”

And as we said in our opener, whether in Mexico or Richmond, Virginia (Cantor's redoubt), screaming, tearing down, and obstructing is something quite different from governing.

Gingrich, who couldn't match Sara Palin in "exciting the base,” had this epiphany and decided to make a run at being a serious, even-tempered alternative, because people don’t like to see their presidents yelling.

Just ask Howard Dean.

Cantor, as potential national leader, apparently came to the same conclusions Gingrich did. And he might have also noted, with his belated town square on the topic, that for all the media clamor about the August troubles, we're still talking health care.

Worse, for he and his party, it’s going to become a law, with all the ensuing ballyhoo and poll bumps one might expect from that miracle. There is a resolve becoming apparent and it has something to do with the guy in the White House.

The lesson here is this: The party with the votes is the party that makes the laws.

Back when highwayscribery was in the opposition he, and those of his political ilk, made a lot of angry charges about George W. Bush. This left us, or the highway scribe at least, watching the town hall ruckus with a sinking sense of (ir)responsibility.

We still feel, naturally, that our caviling about Bush's questionable legitimacy was er, um, more legitimate, because he filed a lawsuit to stop votes from being counted, which made his claims to victory fairly transparent.

And furthermore, Obama won by a landslide, not by electoral votes delivered in a questionable tally by a state his brother (Jeb Obama) governed.

But we rant when we now recognize the corrosive effects of ranting.

For all our efforts to blow holes in the prior administration’s embarrassing run guiding the ship of state, at the end of the day, the Republicans and Bush always beat us because voters had delivered power unto them.

Yes, journalists fanned rumors of moderate Republicans disagreeing with how the (p)resident and Tom Delay were going about crafting some legislative package or other, but the bottom line is that they eventually got in line and passed the bill.

And so will moderate Democrats, because, once Republicans made clear they wanted health care to be Obama’s Waterloo, there was very little value in striking out independent of the president’s wishes.

And, of course, there are conservatives who play politics because they want to legislate and participate in the majestic process by which our system has unfolded over the past 230-odd years.

They, too, were going to have their say. Not at the top of their lungs, but in the hushed tones of the cloakroom and/or country club.

And like Obama, they wisely waited for the blowhards to run out of gas and the value of their shock tactics to wear thin.

Smart Republicans have faced up to the fact that they lost the election and that cooperating with the other guys is the only path to policy input.

The rants are giving way to something like Cantor’s sweet song.

We congratulate the Republican House Whip and welcome him to the real patriots’ debate.

Jim Carroll

2009-09-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

Once an artist reaches a certain level of technical competence their focus becomes one of flavor.

Jim Carroll, who died Sept. 13, was the flavor of Manhattan Island at a time when they could not give it away.

Yes, Carroll's apprenticeship unfolded in the halcyon days of Warhol, Edie Sedgewick, The Factory, and Max's Kansas City. But his specific era of sway was the late 1970s and early '80s.

At least that's what he tasted like.

The poet's heyday does not seem so long ago to this scribe, which makes his death at 60 the more striking.

Carroll's work and personality were branded by downtown's ragged districts, and Greenwich Village, when they were a low-rent melange of Italian-Americans, factories, and freaks. He was one of those freaks by choice.

Or at least it would seem. We are not talking facts here. We are talking flavor.

His haunts were the abandoned industrial sites of a machine revolution gone south, or Far East.

Punk, that avenging black army of spoiled children, had taken over the factory warrens and turned them into seedy soundstages and impromptu galleries.

Its music and related events, its spirit, had so shaken the foundations of rock 'n roll's royal houses that the Rolling Stones quit the jet-set, moved into town, and wrote a song that captured the thrilling mess of it all...

Shattered.

With a friend, an Iranian emigre who split Tehran during The Shah's downfall, highwayscribery went to see the crystal ball drop in Times Square on New Year's Eve.

It was madness, pornography, knife fights, beer cans in raw red hands, roving bands of black youths looking for trouble, the ghost of Herbert Hunke; the anarchy John Lennon so loved and which would kill him a year later.

We saw Carroll there. Or we didn't.

The poet's "Basketball Diaries" were hot then. Or maybe not just yet. Again, we are talking flavor, not fact, and these events and sensations are what the name Jim Carroll said at the time.

Stones guitarist Keith Richards took a liking to Carroll's work and the poet read his punky screeds to the accompaniment of the famous rocker's hot licks and to the kind of audiences others of his craft can only dream about.

Shadooby.

highwayscribery did not have a book of Carroll's poems nor had he read the famed diaries, but he knew of him because, if you were young in the New York metropolitan area of those times, it was understood you damn well should.

With George "Rasta" Powell, the scribe would comb the crowds of Washington Square for kicks before heading down to St. Mark's Place where Richards owned a dive, The St. Mark's Bar and Grill.

We saw Carroll there. Or we didn't, but we could taste him.

Moved by his ever-presence, the highway scribe bought Carroll's album, which was streaked with essences of Lou Reed and the New York Dolls. It was a great thing, this musical spoken word, this idea of the writer-rocker. You could not listen to it 'round-the-clock, but it reeked of invention and daring.

"People Who Died," is the piece that sticks out, endures.

A story about tough kids of Irish or Italian pedigree who ended up bad in the streets of Queens or the Bronx or Brooklyn, it conjures a time when being born white was hardly a guarantee of success or survival.

"They were all my friends...
And they died!"

This was how highwayscribery, for better or worse, came to poetry.

Not through the big "Dreamsongs" book of John Berryman, or by way of W.H. Auden or Sexton or Merwin or Lowell. It was through the verbal gymnastics of Allen Ginsberg on a Clash album, or the Clash themselves, or Carroll.

Shattered.

Maybe it was not the best path into the worlds of verse and vision, but it was a way.

And next came Rimbaud because there was another band from the same milieu called Television whose leader had the last name Verlaine, just like Rimbaud's lover, Paul.

There was, in that time, something of an effort to sell Rimbaud as the "first punk" to a new generation living "A Season in Hell" all its own and, in highwayscribery's case, it worked well enough to set the hook.

Shadooby.

The New York we write of here is mostly gone, the dark adventure of Times Square replaced by ESPN Zone and a lot of hum-drum security.

With Carroll's death the danger recedes a little further into the past and, 40 years from now, it will be up to his written work to conjure it anew for those unborn.

Dead poets work, too.

He carried the seed of that dangerous Big Apple in his heart, chewed on it, and spit it to the sidewalk where it might be frozen by a ghostwind whipping off The Battery.

Book Report: "I Am a Teamster," by Terry Spencer Hesser

2009-09-05T15:27:00.000-07:00

In recognition of Labor Day, highwayscribery presents this review of "I Am a Teamster: A Short, Fiery Story of Regina V. Polk, Her Hats, Her Pets, Sweet Love, and the Modern-Day Labor Movement."

If departed Teamster leader Regina Polk had been a book, a thorough read would have been required before any judgment was rendered.

Terry Spencer Hesser's newly released "I Am a Teamster" details the too-short life of a woman who forged striking personal contradictions into a hybrid hellion of unique force.

The union organizer's story puts the lie to Republican detractors who can't see "real Americans" in the country's progressive ranks.

It is a story with roots in a hardscrabble western existence begun in Prescott, Arizona. Her father was a farmer who roamed from spread to spread in search of that ever-elusive American dream.

The family ultimately settled in the Sierra Nevada town of Paradise, California where the credo was, "Less Government, More Responsibility, and -- with God's help -- a Better World."

But raising a child takes a village and, in the 1960s, the village was undergoing a transformation of the kind that permitted teenaged Regina to access the sexually-charged "Kinsey Report."

At her mother's urging, Polk applied to the rich girls' school of Mills College where she was caught up in the chaos that was nearby, 1960s Berkeley.

She was permanently affected by the crosscurrents of civil rights, feminism and anti-war activism that characterized the time and place.

Freed by cheap gas at the height of automobile era, the searching Polk wound up at University of Chicago where she enrolled in a masters program for labor relations, but it was her real job where she got the true schooling.

To pay bills she found work as a receptionist at the inappropriately named Red Star Inn. Hesser writes that Regina was a "knockout by anybody's standards," and enjoyed the concomitant privileges extended by management.

But the employer's treatment of lesser types -- dishwashers, busboys, waitresses and kitchen help -- stuck in Polk's politicized craw and she contacted Bob Simpson, organizing director of Teamsters Union Local 743.

In the book, Simpson recounts that Polk struck him, "as a hippie. The way she dressed and looked. She was for all kinds of rights. Worker rights. Civil rights. Women's lib."

Simpson, who had little interest in expending precious resources on organizing the Red Star, became one of many who learned that Regina Polk did not take "no" for an answer.

She set out to organize the restaurant's workers and, when management got wind of the effort, was fired. The union filed a grievance, the restaurant paid money to get rid of Polk, and Simpson hired her as a part-time organizer.

The rest, as they say, is herstory.

By 1975, American capital's move out of the manufacturing business was in full swing and the Teamsters' saw their primary source of dues-paying members evaporate. In search of greener pastures, union researchers identified a surging class of white, middle-class, moderately educated workers.

"To organize white-collar women," Hesser writes, "the Teamsters needed a different kind of organizer to lead them out of the mire of scandal and suspicion that surrounded them on a national level."

Enter Regina Polk.

She was a college-educated, floppy-hat-wearing fashion plate with a philosophical crush on Jimmy Hoffa. Polk possessed a cosmopolite's travel lust and a farm girl’s ear for country western. A serial savior of imperiled animals, she carried an ice pick for slashing tires in the old-time Teamster way.

A culinary epicurean, she walked into one of Southside Chicago's roughest neighborhoods so that her maid Johnnie Scott didn't go without a paycheck.

"I lived on Justine on the South Side," Scott remembers in the book. "At the time, it wasn't a suitable neighborhood. It was bad. And I remember lookin' out the window and here comes Regina walking by herself. Bringing me my paycheck. She wasn't afraid of nobody. 'Have a nice vacation,' she told me, 'it's better with pay.' That's the way she phrased it: It's better with pay.'"

The anecdote is indicative of Polk's approach to both organizing and contract enforcement, which focused on individuals. None of whom were too insignificant to benefit from her assistance.

"She defended ferociously her members when managers attempted to abuse them, believing that the union should do more than just guarantee a wage, that it should also see to it that its members were treated respectfully," Gary Mamlin, a University of Chicago shop steward, told the author.

In her under-appreciated "The Other Women's Movement," Dorothy Sue Cobble posited that in between the first wave of suffragette feminists, and the second-wave feminists spawned by the Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan five decades later, thrived a special breed of "labor feminists."

These women took root and cover in their unions during the 1930s when labor syndicates enjoyed a heyday in the United States.

Polk's religious dedication to union values, and fearless confrontations with the old boys in labor and management alike, suggest she was a unique mix of the latter two waves.

As such, she neither demeaned the value of domestic work nor avoided it.

"If she was coming home late or not at all," Scott remembered, "she would cook for Tom [her husband] a beautiful plate of lamb chops and peas and wrap his dishes before she left, leaving me instructions or telling him to eat it cold."

Classified by the famed political scientist C. Wright Mills as "weak insiders," unions typically groan under the weight of servicing the least fortunate with a dearth of resources.

And so, the Teamsters promptly put Polk to work helping organize clerical workers at Blue Cross/Blue Shield in Chicago. She later reported to union bosses on the difficulty of getting "status-conscious" and "image conscious" women to join a "truck drivers union."

Nonetheless the Teamsters prevailed. The extent of Polk's contribution to the victory might be read in the 28-year old’s subsequent assignment to organize workers at the University of Chicago.

Faced with a recalcitrant university president who had successfully dislodged the union at Yale, Polk's campaign was conducted largely "underground" or secretively so as to protect those with the courage or need to join the Teamsters' drive.

The campaign prevailed, too.

"The university was stunned," writes Hesser. "It had failed to realize that over the previous twenty years the people who worked on campus were no longer faculty wives but bread-winners who needed the money. They were mothers, many of them single, whose paltry paychecks started looking worse and worse."

"I Am a Teamster," is no syrupy-sweet story about the virtues of organized labor. Hesser makes it clear that Polk had her detractors within the union.

"I think it was because she was so aggressive," said Simpson, "but I can remember specifically one guy saying to me, 'I didn't like her from fuckin' day one!' And that was exactly his words and this guy was a board member."

Regina also grew disillusioned with the union’s lackluster support of its members.

Nor is “I Am a Teamster,” the tale of perpetual triumph, because Polk's campaigns did not always prevail.

After one defeat, she came across her opposite numbers from a union-busting law firm at a local bar. One of the "bastards with briefcases," as she referred to such consultants, approached to share a conciliatory, post-battle drink. Instead, she took the one she was nursing and threw it in his face.

All of Polk’s fire was extinguished in a plane crash at the age of 32. Some years later, when her wrongful death suit was at trial, one of the jurors recognized Regina as the person who had donated the very clothes she was wearing.

Hesser's slim volume, 147-pages long, renders a large life with efficiency. The author commits the biographer’s forgivable sin of falling in love with her subject. She starts off unevenly, accumulating too many posthumous summations, inappropriate for a chapter on childhood, while applying enthusiastic adjectives to someone whose larger-than-life actions speak for themselves.

But as Polk's career takes form, so does the narrative, which is delivered in a no-frills reportorial form that leans properly on numerous interviews of people who were there at the time.

"I Am a Teamster," celebrates the difference one person, empowered and guided by the simple principal of solidarity, can have upon the lives of others through brute effort, consideration, compassion, and even joy.

One of her Teamster mentors, Ray Hamilton, eulogized Polk by saying, "She lived as she believed and felt that it was more important to actually help one person than to talk about saving the world."

Although she inspired fellow Teamsters, the union was never going to make a template of Polk from which a generation of like labor leaders could be modeled.

She was too unique and too individual. A real American if you will.

The Liberal

2009-08-26T13:05:00.000-07:00

He carried his personal flaws and tragic miscues in the same way he carried the liberal credo: slightly wearied, but unyielding.

His opponents linked them seamlessly.

If the health care debate reveals anything, it is that to believe in a government conceived with the purpose of serving the people places one in the company of someone who drives a young girl off a bridge, runs, and then hides.

Together, Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy and the large liberal constituency that thrives throughout this country, have trudged on, standing by tired platitudes that are no less virtuous for being time-worn and tested.

His loss is a terrible blow to Republican fundraisers, but not so much as it will be to an ungrateful and impatient people who take whatever they can get, while viewing the acts of sharing with or giving to the less-fortunate as foolhardy.

For those of us inspired and instructed by his political example, his like will not be seen for a long time, if ever.

Kennedy never saw a military intervention he liked. He taught, by his example, that such consistency is the stuff of being anti-war and pro-human, never falling for the slick trick of associating support for a missile system with a desire for peace.

Those of us who agreed with him were never disappointed - no matter how low the value of our philosophy sunk - when we awaited his lone and familiar voice to speak out with intelligence against organized and taxpayer-funded mayhem.

We were never disappointed when the corporations that run our lives, pirate our money and health, had come up with yet another new line of propaganda that succeeded by appealing to what was worst, rather than best, in the American spirit.

He was there, like a default setting; turning our helpless rage into articulate argument that we might carry forth onto the streets, into parties, and anywhere else informed public debate still percolates.

For those of us who retired at night, beaten by our own mistakes -- thrown into doubt -- Kennedy demonstrated how one picks-up and carries on.

The marvelous and masterful senator taught us that our questionable pasts and sorry records could be righted by doing one small thing tomorrow and another the day after and so on.

He taught us that our job is to get better at what we do and to not be undone by setbacks.

He did not define what it meant to be liberal because all of that came before his rise to power and fame. But Kennedy taught us what it cost to remain liberal, to endure the insults and continue the work of assisting those who need it.

Unlike his brothers, frozen in youth by martyrdom, his story encompassed the sloppy narrative that becomes all our narratives, which in the end, is the same effort at doing good while swimming against a current of so much evil.

Good bye you good Liberal.