Footnote

I've added an asterisked footnote to the previous entry.

Postcards From My Childhood Part 1: The Tree

"The child is the father of the man", they say. Surprisingly, I understood this even as a child. And so I willfully sent forward to my elder self some thoughts and images which I knew would be helpful, and which I suspected I'd otherwise forget. As my fiftieth birthday approaches, I'm revisiting them.

All installments in reverse chronological order

Like many kids, I was into lots of stuff. I juggled, did magic tricks, collected baseball cards, read astronomy and science fiction books, played trombone, piano, and basketball, led jazz bands, acted in school plays, published an underground newspaper, shot super 8 movies, and practiced yoga, meditation, and self-hypnosis. I didn't particularly care if I was any good at these things, though. Like Max Fischer, the lead character in Rushmore, I ran on pure fascinated zeal.

One day, while meditating, I managed to accept and forgive the entire universe, and to earnestly offer my body's component molecules to the four winds. It was perfect surrender, accompanied by a profound shift of perspective. My heart contained everything. It contained the universe. I'd had everything backwards - the universe doesn't contain us, we contain it. I knew this with the sober certainty of someone waking from a dream. I understood that it's all perfect.

My reaction, as a twelve year old, was along the lines of "Whoa, that was cool!" I told my mom, who said it sounded very nice and suggested I go outside and play.

I couldn't talk about what I'd experienced, because it was impossible to describe (the above was just a cruddy metaphor), and also because I discovered, over time, that it wasn't something people could relate to. I ranked it on par with single-ear-wiggling as another cool little trick I could do which others can't. And, as I grew busy with other activities, I lost touch with it. I did, however, foresee that I'd later try to reclaim it, and that it wouldn't be easy to do so as a grown-up. So I sent myself this image:

You're sitting on a tree branch, facing the trunk. Use a saw to cut the branch in front of you, crazy though it seems. And have faith: you won't fall, you'll float!

One reason I'd been sanguine about letting this stuff go was was that I knew it didn't matter. The underlying truth is what it is, regardless. If I were to pass decades lost in foggy delusion, it wouldn't make any difference, because upon rediscovering the perfect, timeless truth, nothing would seem to have been lost - the very notion of lostness being part of the delusion. So I sent myself that message with a playful wink, because it absolutely didn't matter. But I knew I'd forget that it didn't matter. Hence the tip.

It's paradoxical, but while it made sense at the time, after several busy and untranscendent decades, I found myself, for the past eight years, determinedly steeping in hours of daily meditation...and endlessly revisiting the tree image. How encrusted I'd become! With all that practice, I passed through the various milestones, and enjoyed some interesting experiences, but my heart, while open, wouldn't expand. I was sawing away at branches, but the damned tree was just a tree!

During Hurricane Sandy, I spent a few days cooped up in the guest room of my mother's apartment. My mom's great but....well, you know how that can be. Plus, I was stressed about the storm damage and my refugee status. I wasn't getting much sleep, and had been surviving on Chinese food delivery and skipping meditation (and stopping meditating can be worse than never having started). In that lousy condition, I trudged out to find gas at the height of the shortage.

After waiting an hour in line for a gas station still a half mile away, my tank nearly empty, a driver cut the line just ahead of me. I jumped out of my car and went apeshit. Yelling and screaming...it wasn't pretty. This was completely unlike me, and I felt deeply shocked and ashamed at myself.

Only for a minute, though. I value moments when errant bits of rabid stakedness gurgle up from my depths. If I can quickly snap back to equanimity, the door remains open for a moment, and the source - the unconscious contraction - can be sussed out, dredged up to awareness and surrendered in meditation along with my better-lit parts. You can't, after all, surrender what you're unaware of.

So a few moments after my shameful display, I caught myself, calmed deeply and probed for the source. To my horror, it wasn't some foggy fearful bit of primal grasping. Rather, it had flowed from my center; my ground zero. The rage had stemmed from the very core of my being. It wasn't something that could be shaved off!

I saw that the years I'd spent meditating, hoping to shave off all the crud, were - enjoyable and salubrious though the practice is - the ultimate example of turd polishing. It's all crud, all the way down. I'd been "letting go" only in the sense of someone standing safely on a concrete ledge, dropping unwanted baggage into a pit. I had to actually jump in, myself! It all needed to be let go of. Anything here [I gesture toward my body] is, in the end, just a mass of congealed urges, fears, and drama. One can peel away at it forever, but that's all there is. To the very core.*

So I smiled and allowed myself to fall blindly backwards into oblivion - to throw away the thrower-awayer. A quick jolt of fear made me hesitate. But suddenly I remembered: Cut the branch in front of you, crazy though it seems. And have faith: you won't fall, you'll float.

Thanks, kid.


* - which isn't to say worthiness never emerges from the crud. It does. But, tellingly, the really good stuff arrives via epiphany, eureka, and inspiration - "out of nowhere" and hard to claim credit for.


Read the next installment

I Think the Right Will Split...Hard

On election night, I posted that "Hispanics/Latinos Won". Now everyone - including Romney's staff - is chalking up Romney's loss to his immigration stance.

But I haven't seen anyone hitting upon my other point - that we are about to see both parties falling over each other to push through generous immigration reform, and to reach out, generally, to Hispanic and Asian immigrants. It will be a tremendous shift.

But xenophobic blue collar whites aren't going to like it much. So I'll make another prediction: a third party will arise to channel their fury. Like the various European ultra-nationalist parties, it won't be pretty (and it won't win many elections). It will embolden and amplify the very worst outlying elements of the current Republican base, and make the ire of the Tea Party seem mild by comparison. But it will at last finally drive the mainstream Republican party back toward the center/right.

The pendulum of the right has over-swung too far to simply swing back again. Rather, my guess is that it will split. And the portion that swings toward still farther extremes will, I'm afraid, break some windows.

What I Learned From Two Weeks Off the Grid

When the power went out a couple of weeks ago, I'd just finished watching the season finale of Doctor Who. At the end, the time traveler's companions wound up stuck in the early 20th century, forced to live out their natural lives out from there, unable to ever reconnect with modern times.

Just as I was contemplating what that might feel like, a particularly seismic wind burst roared through, knocking out the electricity. Between that and the gas shortage, I've had neither power nor fuel for most of the past two weeks. So there was plenty of time to contemplate the stuck-out-of-time scenario from an unexpectedly personal perspective.

Back then, before corporate models of human interaction had metastasized into society at large, people were friendlier and more genuine with one another. Things hadn't gone meta; the world was not yet World World, all cloned up and corporate. The fabric of daily life was much richer. Each bakery's chocolate chip cookie had a unique flavor, every bowl of chicken soup was a snowflake, and bookstores and hardware stores had distinctive personalities. Arriving in a new town made you feel like you were really somewhere else (just typing that, as if describing something remarkable, shows how sadly homogenized it's all become).

But, in spite of all that, coming off these past two weeks, I've got to confess that if I were permanently relocated in an earlier era, without my iPad, DVDs, central heating, and car (let alone antibiotics), I'd howl and whine like Eva Gabor stuck in Green Acres.

Two weeks of doing without ought to have left me feeling grateful. And it did. The problem is that I'm feeling a bit too grateful. I never realized how fundamentally tied to my gizmos, comforts, and entertainments I am. I'm chilled by the sudden recognition of what a complete ditz I am.

Blow-Out Film Sale

Tons and tons of Criterion Collection DVDs and Blu-Rays are 50% off at Barnes and Noble thru November 19. This never happens.

[Update: no, this happens twice per year. And Amazon usually quickly matches the prices for the length of the sale. However, the rest of the year, good luck getting discounts on this stuff]

For those who don't know, Criterion Collection has fantastic taste in films, and puts out brilliantly produced editions with tons of extras. Many are limited runs, and their value goes up over time. The only problem is they're a bit pricey. But not this week.

It's almost enough to make up for nine days without power and five without gas.

Note: you may want to check second-hand prices on Amazon Marketplace and Half.com.

To get you started, here are all the Criterion films I either own or have on my wish list (sorry I'm not feeling OCD enough to dig up links):

3 Women
4 by Agnès Varda
A Film Trilogy by Ingmar Bergman
Alexander Nevsky
Antonio Gaudi
Bicycle Thieves
Brand Upon the Brain!
Brazil
Breathless
Burden of Dreams
Burmese Harp
By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volumes One and Two
Contempt
Days of Heaven
Earrings of Madame de...
Eclipse Series 31: Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin
Fanny and Alexander
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Great Adaptations
Grey Gardens / The Beales of Grey Gardens
Harlan County, U.S.A.
Hiroshima Mon Amour
I Know Where I'm Going!
Ikiru
In the Mood for Love
Ingmar Bergman - Four Masterworks
Jules and Jim
La Jetee/Sans Soleil
La Ronde
Last Year at Marienbad
Le Plaisir
M. Hulot's Holiday
Mala Noche
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters
Nanook of the North
Olivier's Shakespeare
Orphic Trilogy
Pickpocket
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Pierrot le Fou
Rashomon
Rushmore
Scenes From a Marriage
Shallow Grave
Short Cuts
Solaris
Stories of Floating Weeds
Stranger Than Paradise
Tanner '88
The 39 Steps
The Battle of Algiers
The Devil & Daniel Webster
The Lady Eve
The Lady Vanishes
The Last Emperor
The Leopard
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Rules of the Game
The Seventh Seal
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
The Vanishing
This Is Spinal Tap
Throne of Blood
Tokyo Story
Umberto D.
Videodrome
Viridiana
Wild Strawberries
Withnail and I
Yi Yi

Hispanics/Latinos Won

It's a great night for Latinos and Hispanics. This was their victory as well as Obama's.

It will be a very long time before we see another mainstream national candidate scorn this segment. And Republicans will trip over themselves to work with the president to pass immigration reform this term. Spanish-speaking voters can consider themselves, from this day forward, Ohio.

It wasn't the shameless flip-flopping that cost Romney the election. It wasn't the 47% comment. What lost Romney the presidency was his anachronistically hard-assed stance on immigration - specifically, his "self-deportation" meme. Hispanics and Latinos are not just an up-and-coming population. They've already upped and come. They are our demographic future, and the Republican party committed the political blunder of the century by ignoring this.

It was especially dumb considering that the Mexican-Americans and, uh, Central American-Americans who are a large part of this population tend to be hardworking, pious, family-values, law-and-order, don't-tread-on-me squares. They are natural-born Republicans. All they needed was for the party to embrace them.

George W Bush understood this very well, and the party of his era made it a top priority to reach out to that community. But today's Republicans, utterly infatuated with - and terrorized by - the Tea Party, let that drop. The 2010 midterms frightened them into abandoning all other constituencies. So during debate after primary debate, Republican candidates outdid each other with tough talk on immigration, hoping to score points with their base of immigrant-hating blue collar whites. And Romney tacked right of every one of them, cavalierly suggesting that undocumented immigrants simply "self-deport" (and then declined to shake the Etch-A-Sketch).

That base knows its primacy is over. They understand, and fear, that "the minorities" are on the brink of becoming the majority. And Republicans short-sightedly deemed this a leverage point. Unable to resist an opportunity to stoke fear, they sided with the shrinkers. So immigrants gave Obama Virginia, Nevada, Iowa, and more. And he didn't even have to work for it. At Romney's urging, they self-deported right into the Democratic Party.

Republicans will pivot, fast and hard. They can't win a national election until they fix this. So, congratulations, Spanish-speakers (and, also, Asians). You are now personas muy, muy "grata".

The Intense Beauty of Bloomberg's Crappy Spanish

I find Mayor Bloomberg's efforts to offer Spanish language advisories in his emergency news conferences heartbreakingly beautiful. If you'll look beyond his impassive face to the heart of what he's doing, you'll see it, too.

Yes, Bloomberg's Spanish is poor, and his accent is horrendous. So why does he do it? Why would a billlionaire - who could be playing golf or throwing parties, who's been up for days handling an emergency while New Yorkers jeer at him because they want their power back on, who has nothing to prove to anyone, who faces no reeelection and therefore has no reason to pander to Latinos - put himself out there, in the hot lights, drawing ridicule by offering his crappy Spanish?

Even Rachel Figueroa, the ridiculer-in-chief, who writes the (pretty amusing) "@ElBloombito" Twitter feed, asks this same question:

"I don’t know why he does it....You get this sense that he thinks we should be honored that he would even attempt to speak Spanish"

The article's writer describes these efforts as "stilted stabs at multiculturalism".

I enjoy Figueroa's Twitter feed, but I really abhor her comment. Interestingly, she doesn't speak Spanish, though she has a Puerto Rican father. She understands it some. So I'm not sure she'd be the proper person to assign any such honor. The mayor's not speaking to you, Rachel.

He's speaking to the very large number of city residents who speak only Spanish, and who could especially use the steady, soothing reassurance from their mayor in a time of crisis that the rest of us enjoy. Even during good times, non-English-speaking immigrants feel marginalized and neglected. It's that much worse in times like these.

I feel like a fully enfranchised New Yorker, but, like everyone else, it makes me feel better to see a Bloomberg (or, god help me, even a Guiliani) on TV telling me it's all going to be ok, projecting the aura of competent authority, and offering me detailed information. It helps. It's soothing. It's part of what a mayor does. Millions listen raptly to transistor radios during these news conferences.

So he's addressing Dominican waitresses and hard-working Mexican young men and the isolated grandmas of busy Peruvian yuppies. They are as worried as the rest of us, but also confused and feeling very much out of the loop. New York City's two million Hispanics need a mayor's personal assurance more than anyone.

In order to reassure them and make them feel remembered, connected, and looked after, this hugely successful billionaire, who could easily be in a resort somewhere sipping mai tais, puts himself out there on television, letting everyone see him doing something he knows he's not good at. His sole motivation: kind compassion and earnest sense of duty. He thinks it's important. It's love.

How often does one see such a thing? Did mayors like Abe Beame, John Lindsay, or even David Dinkins give a rat's ass about personally reassuring Colombian families after a terrifying event, much less putting themselves on the spot to do so? And would any of them have kept their compassionate motivations to themselves, letting contemptuous assumptions stand unrebutted?

Bloomberg is too modest and high-minded to point out any of this, or to lash back at the criticism. His sole response to the ridicule was this:

"Tengo 69 años. Es difícil para aprender un nuevo idioma." (Translation: I’m 69 years old. It’s difficult to learn a new language.”)

This sort of selfless compassion and courage could stem only from shakti. That's why it's heartbreaking and beautiful. It doesn't appear often. As with Steve Jobs, people will only notice the shakti contrails once he dies.

In that same article, Figueroa concedes that, in light of her own lousy Spanish, "I would not be able to give a press briefing in Spanish." Oh, really? But what if you were the mayor, Rachel, and a couple million people might feel soothed in a time of crisis if you rose above your inadequacies to make a heartfelt effort to speak directly to them; to make them feel that they, too, have a mayor? Would you willingly make yourself vulnerabile on TV so you could be of service beyond the call of duty? Could you, an anonymous chick in Brooklyn, even come close to the egolessness of the city's most successful person in order to reassure a population you're related to and he's not?

Nationalism

Nationalism is always a noble-seeming mask for xenophobia. 

Show me someone who loves "Us", and I'll show you someone who hates "Them".


For more definitions, see all postings labeled "definitions" here.

Obama's Better

In the article Explaining Centrism/Moderation, I described partisan zeal as a sort of delusion. No candidate will bring us to the promised land, because 1. the promised land doesn't exist, and 2. if it did, no politician - even a president - would have the power to get us there. Politics is all about lofty statements, some of them perhaps even sincere. But governing is another thing. It's a grind, riddled with endless compromise; the unloftiest thing imaginable. So those caught up in partisan zeal at moments like this have been misdirected via tribal cues. And I'm not big on tribalism. Hence my low zeal.

That's not to say elections don't matter, or that individual policies can't hurt or help. I make my choices, but it's not a white-hats versus black-hats thing. There's no one to love, and nothing to join. The coded language coming from both sides sure ain't speaking to me. So I have, as best I could, weighed how competently these candidates would contend with the grind. I'm choosing an administrator, nothing more. It's not sexy, and it has nothing to do with my self-image or my resonance with one or the other "vision for our future", or any other such rhetorical nonsense.

I'm for Obama. It's not about belief in liberal values (not that Obama's been ruling as a liberal at all; to anyone clear-headed, he's been barely left-center). I'm for him because:

Republicans jumped the shark with that shameful debt ceiling brouhaha, one of the most unpatriotic chapters in American political history, whose long term effect hasn't even begun to be widely apparent. It deeply shocked me, as it did the world.

I want to see a balanced Supreme Court - not too liberal, not too conservative. But I'm certain that President Romney, however moderately he might rule, would need to follow through with his pledge to appoint another Scalia/Roberts/Thomas if he hoped for reelection. And we all know how craven Romney can be when it comes to elections. But as a moderate, I like balances. Another liberal judge would bring balance, but another conservative would upset balance.

I despised the Bush administration's neocon-influenced approach to foreign policy, and Romney's got a full slate of those same neocon assholes on his staff, so it's a good bet that's the direction his administration would take. I don't think the country could stand much more of that. Anyone who proudly uses the term "Exceptionalism", embracing arrogance and hypocrisy as core values, is going to make poor foreign policy decisions. Romney's recent trip to Europe revealed a tendency for Bush-ish klutzy, empty-headed conceit in dealing with the world that I don't want repeated. I prefer realpolitik, and I believe Obama's pretty good at that. He's also skilled at framing his actions to reassure the world that America's not run by petulant children (anyone with friends abroad knows that's no exaggeration of how even moderate foreigners viewed the Bush years).

Regardless of one's views about deficits (Republicans have, until lately, always loved them and blithely inflated them), a recession - or sputtering recovery therefrom - is not the time to address them. The recovery would be jeopardized if the Congressional tea partiers were accommodated in their desire to impose Hooverish austerity at this delicate time (actually, their proposals radically out-Hoover Hoover). Romney, for all his pro-austerity rhetoric, certainly knows this, but I don't believe he has the backbone, or the political base, to oppose it with any force. Counting on Romney to show backbone isn't a winning bet.

As a life-long freelancer, it's hard to express my sense of gratitude for health insurance reform. In New York state, freelancers (even young, healthy ones) pay over $1000/month for not-totally-crappy coverage. This squelches entrepreneurship and locks workers into corporate wage-slavery - a dreary, economically catastrophic long-term scenario nothing like the plucky, free-wheeling, ingenious America we love. Listen, I don't pretend to have read the Affordable Care Act...and neither have you. We all just rely on other people's talking points. But it can't be all that impractically leftist, given that it's so close to what was proposed by Bob Dole and implemented by Mitt Romney, neither fervidly Marxist. And it's a miracle that any sort of reform actually got done.

Finally, in that other entry, I wrote that government is "a never-ending series of drastic compromises which squelch idealism and favor steady-handedness." I think President Obama has the steadier hand. Nowhere near perfect, but at least reasonably steady. Even diehard Republicans know, in their hearts, that Romney is anything but that.

Rogue Winds?

So here's my Sandy story. Where I live things weren't too bad. Lots of downed trees, no one has power, but there's been no flooding or major damage. The highest reported gusts anywhere near me were around 50mph. But at 6:45pm that night, a freight train crashed into my house, which was rocked to its foundations. I've been in earthquakes less violent. A very heavy metal ladder, tightly folded, was instantly blown twenty feet across the porch. I've never experienced anything like it - and didn't again for the whole night, which was spent huddled in a windowless stairwell.

The gust had to be over 90mph, though no such winds were reported anywhere near here. We know about rogue waves at sea, but I've never heard of a rogue wind gust - at least not one twice the velocity of anything else for miles around. But there you are.

A bit later, Governor Cuomo closed the Triboro bridge, reporting that there'd been a 100 mph gust nearby. This left radio meterologists scratching their heads, since no such gusts were recorded anywhere near there. Same effect?