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OK, there was this time in college, I was dating a girl named Rhoda, and she invited me home for a weekend, and so I thought … no way am I telling that one.

–Jon Carroll, San Francisco Chronicle

There are some stories that I can’t just change the names and get away with it. Probably the most important part of that is that the individuals involved would still recognize themselves, and it would, despite all attempts at anonymity, still be an invasion of privacy. Some stories are just too intrinsically personal.

Moreover, there are some bits of personal history, that, no matter how much I might try to take all the blame for whatever bad things happen, it wouldn’t be enough, and other people would be shown in a bad light. I’m not always against that, mind you, but sometimes I am, especially when I had too great a hand in the unfortunate events.

And sometimes, making a story more generic removes all its flavor. At that point, there’s no reason to tell the thing in the first place. That’s one of the places where you opt for out-and-out fiction, keeping the flavor, but creating new characters for all the events, and distancing the events by wrapping them in the outlandish, putting them in the future, for example, or having them occur while there is a serial killer on the rampage. Even that is a risk, of course. Sometime people still recognize themselves in your fiction; sometimes they do so before the writer does. Tough. That’s the biz, baby.

The one I’m about to tell takes generification to some sort of limit, I think, but there are some philosophical points that I’ll get at, probably not the most important things in the real story, but the only nuggets that I can pull from this stream at this time.
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By Seattle

It has occurred to me several times in the last few years that I’m living in the wrong decade, if not the wrong century. I’ve got the wrong attitude when it comes to vacations. Around me are adults who, when they think of taking a vacation, they think of taking vacations AWAY from their children. To escape the grind is to escape the grind of parenthood. The concept of the shared family vacation as part of the education of the child by the parent by exposing them to new places, history, natural beauty and time spent outside the home seems a bit old fashioned. An example: a father called and left a phone message for his son from his vacation in a tropical location: “Hey, just came back from snorkling-you would have loved it. I love ya -….” Personally I find that kind of message disturbing. How is a child supposed to feel when a parent calls to let them know what a great time they’re having-without you?

So I took my sons on two vacations in the last two weekends. First we went to Kalaloch Beach in the Olympic National Park coastline. Here is the gazebo at the trail head down to the beach:

And more of the beach proper:

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By order of King George:

The Bush Rules:

I took these photographs while standing on Governors Island, in New York harbor between the southern tip of Manhattan and Red Hook, Brooklyn. This is where Reagan and Gorbachov met in December of 1988, marking the quasi-official end to the Cold War.

BTW, my buddy Tim Perper tells me that the original Gojira has been released on DVD, uncut, without Raymon Burr.

Bill Benzon, WAAGNGNP Minister of Visual Propaganda

The vast inequality of this new Gilded Age didn’t just happen. Nature didn’t ordain it, the market didn’t require it, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand doesn’t sustain it.What happened is the rich declared class war and spent what it took to win.

Not exactly a new story, of course, but the extraordinary new concentration of wealth and power created a juggernaut that makes it harder and harder for democracy to work for all.

From Bill Moyers on Class in America

About a year ago I heard an interview on Air America with a gentleman plugging something - a book, if memory serves - on labor and the working class. I can’t remember the name of the person being interviewed, so let’s call him Interviewee. Interviewee said something very interesting about the definition of “middle class”. He said that if you can’t afford to be without a job for at least six months, you aren’t middle class.

Whether you agree with this or not, it’s a vitally important concept. Why? Because until we as working people re-embrace (or, perhaps simply embrace) our very status as working people, the divide between the haves and have-nots in this country is going to continue to increase because we won’t be organizing as working people.

For quite some time now, America’s been a place where everyone who’s not flat-out rich or flat-out poor wants to define themselves as middle class. “Working class” has become a term only for the poor, and only for blue collar workers. This is bullshit.
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I had what you might call a rude awakening on a recent trip to San Diego where I enjoyed my first trip ever to the San Diego Zoo.

During the visit, we took the bus tour that gives you highlights of all of the species the zoo boasts, and provides what turns out to be a great deal of information on endangered species and conservation. I was shocked out of my complacency when the guide spoke about one critically endangered species that they had brought back from the brink of extinction. She said that they now had 14 breeding pairs that they would love to return to their natural habitat…if that natural habitat still existed.

These animals (some kind of grazing mammal that resembled a cross between an antelope, a goat, and a cow – I was so surprised by her statement that I’ve totally spaced on the name) are living in a tiny re-creation of their original ecosystem, and to keep the herd viable, are traded back and forth between other zoos, wild animal parks and refuges. There is no available habitat that they can be returned to because of the encroachment of man.

I’d always thought that the biggest danger that man posed to this planet was through pollution, waste of natural resources, and the byproducts of technology. Not so.
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Yesterday, the Decider paid a visit to New Orleans. You won’t be surprised to hear that he “delivered a message of hope”. More grating, he claimed “[Katrina] didn’t effect the spirit of a lot of citizens in this community”. Both in Washington, and in Louisiana, political games are being played.

Meanwhile, the rebuilding of New Orleans is turning into an exercise in ethnic, and class, cleansing. Many of the people who lived and worked in the city are still housed in trailers - as reported here (YouTube clip). What Americans don’t know, and what they must know, is that many Black people are not being allowed to return to their homes in New Orleans:

Among the miles and miles of devastated houses, rubble still there today in New Orleans, we found dry, beautiful homes. But their residents were told by guys dressed like Ninjas wearing “Blackwater” badges: “Try to go into your home and we’ll arrest you.”

See more details at Greg Palast’s blog, where you will also find clips (such as the YouTube one above) and info on the not-to-be-missed investigative documentary, New Orleans: Big Easy to Big Empty.

Bush got one thing right, though: the people’s spirits have not been crushed. People like Kawana Jasper are fighting for a future in New Orleans.



(Many more testimonials can be found at Voices from the Gulf).

And we can help. We can pressure politicians to have public housing in New Orleans reopened. We can throw whatever small weight we have behind the Gulf Coast Civil Works Project that envisions hiring the citizens on the Gulf Coast to rebuild their city, instead of shuffling more money to large contractor who import sub-living wage labor to do the work.

I won the raffle at a party thrown by a job agency a while back, and one of the prizes was a gift certificate from Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee; a single glass of Coke at dinner is enough to move my sleep time back an hour or more. But Starbucks sells other stuff, so I had a cup of hot chocolate and bought the Dylan No Direction Home CD.

The PBS special on Dylan was directed by Scorsese, and covered Dylan’s career up to the point where he had his motorcycle accident. It feels important, somehow, that Dylan survived the accident, that he didn’t follow the “good career move” that got so many of the other 60s icons. Dylan was always the Trickster, so it also feels appropriate, and besides, living is better than dying. I don’t care how many mediocre albums he’s made since then, how many unmemorable songs. He’s alive; good for him.

One of the things that was very obvious, and left very unmentioned, in No Direction Home was how thoroughly ripped he was for much of the time.
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In his intriguing, if overly verbose, article on “Capitalist democracy: elective affinity or beguiling illusion” (Daedalus, Summer 2007, pp. 5-13), John Dunn states:

“This much is clear: while in America, Tom Paine and James Madison both imagined that that a commercial society could coexist happily with a representative republic, others elsewhere, from Filippo Buonarroti and the first Duke of Wellington in the 1830s to the Guild Socialist G.D.H. Cole in the 1920s, were just as certain that the inequalities generated by the market economy were incompatible with a truly democratic republic. (p. 5)

To this latter position I would add not only generated but sustained for the benefit of some over others. In the article, John Dunn mentions aristocracy and monarchy as counterpoints to democracy, but fails to follow up on oligarchy, the far more relevant (in my opinion) form of aristocratic “ruling” behavior in a capitalist democracy, and a problem in Greek and Roman times as well. Can a group of leaders so constituted as to view their interests (esp. economic) as either constitutive of or superior to the general public be entrusted with power in a democracy?
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New blog banner by longtime friend of the Minister of Justice, Serafin.

Comments welcome.

The Baby Boomers. The Rock and Roll Generation. The biggest and most photographically documented generation to date, if only because we’ve been around since the day the technology became affordable to the masses (later generations will catch up).

And we’re going gray.

Like any youth, we thought we’d live and be young forever. Like no other youth before us, our heroes were frozen in time by the lens of the camera. In our mind’s (and the camera’s) eye, Mick Jagger will always be a skinny, tousle-headed kid with huge but normal shaped lips, no matter that he just turned a dissolute 64 and has a mouth that droops nearly down to his sunken chest. 60 year-old David Bowie (who’s held up much better) will always be that gender bending almost elfin fellow with the sly look and the oddly captivating voice we first saw on television 40 years ago.

What inspired me to reflect on this phenomenon?
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