. . . of Dubious Authenticity

It’s the same old story

2011-09-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

Boy meets girl.

Boy loves girl.

Girl loves boy.

Boy marries girl.

Boy and girl move to USA.

Boy files application for girl’s Greencard.

Boy and girl wait eight months.

Boy and girl receive letter from Department of Homeland Security asking for additional fees.

Boy sends Department of Homeland Security a copy of their application instructions and a letter explaining that according to their own instructions those fees don’t apply.

Boy and girl wait two months.

Boy and girl receive a notice from Department of Homeland Security asking for a copy of her immigration medical examination and tuberculosis tests.

Boy calls Department of Homeland Security to explain that girl has already submitted proof of medical tests.

Department of Homeland Security provides no answers over the phone.

Boy sends Department of Homeland Security detailed letter along with copies of DHS instructions with relevant sections highlighted to explain that the medical tests have already been submitted and accepted as part of girl’s original visa application. Boy explains that girl being in the US is actually proof that the medical tests have been submitted and accepted.

Boy and girl wait two months.

Boy and girl receive letter from Department of Homeland Security ignoring letter from boy and reiterating request for medical tests.

Boy and girl have second set of medical tests completed and send them to Department of Homeland Security.

Boy and girl wait 3 months.

Boy and girl hear nothing.

Boy calls Department of Homeland Security, is unsatisfied with answers given over the phone, and requests appointment.

Boy and girl take time off work and drive two hours for appointment.

Boy almost punches Department of Homeland Security asshole who asks stupid question.

Girl calms down boy and boy and girl meet with knowledgeable Department of Homeland Security staff.

Girl receives Greencard in mail.

Boy and girl wait two years.

Boy files application to remove restrictions on Greencard and includes tax returns and lease agreements.

Boy and girl wait six months.

Boy and girl receive letter from Department of Homeland Security asking for tax returns and lease agreements!!!

When I first started looking into how to work with the Department of Homeland Security, I ran across a statement that said that US Immigration Services are “staffed by idiots and managed by worse.” I laughed at the time. I’m not laughing now.

The Gods Might be Crazy, but even they know justice when they see it

2011-02-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

As anyone who’s been there will tell you, standing in front of a judge ready to pronounce sentence on you is an experience like no other. In my rough and tumble adolescence, I stood before several judges. One was old and nearly senile; another was young, aggressive, and politically conscious; and one, heaven forbid, was even fair. These differences aside, one constant strain runs through every court house in this nation and most others: ALL judges are absolute, unquestionable gods in their courtrooms. With their pronouncements and punctuating gavel slamming they break the strongest thugs and send mothers and wives to the floor in puddles of their own grief.

I once saw a judge—moments before I was to stand in front of him mind you—issue a string of multi-year sentences like he was ordering Chalupas at the Taco Bell drive thru. Apparently several people had been party to the same crime. They were all standing in front of him in a row clad in EBRPP orange. As he robotically read the law from a stack of papers on his desk, he started handing out sentences left and right: twelve years here, fifteen there, eighteen here, and twenty-five there and there. The panic I felt having to go in front of him, the blood from his victims still wet on the courtroom floor, sticks with me to this day.

When I heard this week that one of these assholes was finally getting his, I felt just a little warmer inside. I felt that the world was just a little bit better for it, the sun a little bit brighter, the breeze a little bit cooler, the grass just that much greener.

Here’s the story: Some cock judge in Pennsylvania had been sending a bunch of juveniles up the river for years at a stretch for such heinous infractions as going joyriding in mom’s car, getting in a fight at school, and making a blog post about how much they hated their principle. And, wouldn’tyaknowit, the fucking judge was getting kickbacks from the privately-owned juvenile detention center that benefited financially by having its cells full of low-grade delinquents. The goddamn lid was finally blown off of this insanely immoral arrangement recently. And this, and I think I’m being generous here, FUCKING piece of @#$%@#!!!! was finally convicted for it.

Soon this ex-judge will stand in front of another black-robed thug with a god complex and hear about the lives he’s ruined and the social damage he’s wreaked. And, for one tiny, yes-there-is-justice-in-the-world moment he’ll know exactly how small he’s made so many others feel.

And then he’ll be put in a cell with a child molester!

Amen.

State of the Union, a coupl'a joints, and a waste of money!

2011-01-28T14:13:00.000-08:00

The Spring semester just began, and, as has happened far more often than I care to admit, I didn’t quite have my materials in order. There was still some work left to do on the syllabus, the Blackboard menus weren’t formatted, and I hadn’t spent all that much time thinking about what I would do for the first class. Ultimately, however, I was fortunate in that I was able to leave my day job a little early so as to make it to the college in time to do a little brainstorming and give the appearance at least that I had invested hours upon hours of time crafting this first day’s lecture and discussions. And, as is often the case, I think things went pretty well. Indeed, I don’t think I’m alone in saying that instructors tend to do some of their best work under a modest amount of pressure.

Leaving the college just after 9:00pm, I turned to C-span Radio to catch the first part of the President’s State of the Union address for the short drive home. When I got home, I watched the rest on Television. All in all, I was pleased with the speech. Hell, I really can’t remember the last time I hadn’t enjoyed a State of the Union Speech, regardless of the person giving it. Maybe I’m all on my own for this one, but the State of the Union is always a good ego booster; it really gives you a kind of “fuck yea’ I’m an American!” feeling. And, I really wasn’t too surprised by the content. Paraphrasing:

“We’re the best fucking people on the planet!!”

Thunderous applause.

“We can do any goddamn thing we put our red, white, and blue minds to!!!”

Even louder thunderous applause.

“Let’s build big shit!!”

Heavy applause!!

“Let’s train our citizens in math and science!!”

Out of their seats clapping.

“And let’s pay for it!!”

Not even a cricket.

After the speech I poured a scotch, lit a cigar, and unfolded that morning’s paper. Once again, the headlines were all about how much people seem to hate spending: “Obama to address spending crisis,” “Republicans to respond with cuts to wasteful spending.” Just as I was constructing my own appropriate headline in my mind, something like “Republicans suggest balancing budgets by drowning poor people in bathtubs and repealing the 13^th Amendment,” I heard that old familiar song:

♬Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatcha gonna do ♫

Not having seen COPS in godknowshowlong, I just had to watch. It was just like I remember. The cop pulls up to some people sitting in front of their own house. Yes, I know, pretty fucking suspicious. Well, the cop runs up, they all scatter, and he eventually catches one and slugs him a few times. He then drags him back to the car and empties his pockets.

SCORE!! THE FUCKING MOTHER LOAD!!! A whole ounce of pot! According to the cop, it was worth a gazillion, trillion fucking bucks on the street. By this time there are about ten cops there for this hella bust. They’re each looking around, asking questions, and being idiotic jerks.

Needless to say, the next 15 minutes of the show proceeded just like first. More people were suspiciously standing around, tackled to the ground, and sent to jail for a couple joints. So I started doing the math in my head. Seeing as how everybody in the country seems to think that we have absolutely no money, how much does it cost to pay the salaries for all these officers, the gas for their patrol cars, and the jails for these “criminals”? But, before I could whip out the ol’ calculator I realized I was fresh out of scotch and my cigar had long since gone out.

Oh well, I guess we’ll just have to drown poor people in their own bathtubs!

A Christmas Showdown at the PO

2010-12-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

This Christmas, shopping was easier than it has been for some time. In years past, my wife has been the one in charge of the Christmas shopping. Since she likes shopping and I could care less, I've always considered this a fair deal. But, unfortunately for me, this means hours of standing and feet shuffling in one department store after another.

“What do you think about this?” my wife asks.

“It looks fine.”

Back on the rack it goes.

“How about this one for your mother?” she asks again.

“Looks good.”

Back on the rack. On to the next store.

When we lived in Massachusetts, the pain of this ritual was made slightly more tolerable by the small bar inside the mall in Springfield. I would sit, drink, and grade final exams; my wife would return periodically for quick visits, a sip of beer, and to drop off bags. Maryland, it seems, has something against boozing it up in the mall.

This time, however, I was spared the whole tiresome ordeal. With my wife overseas visiting her parents, I did the Christmas shopping with stunning efficiency. Before leaving the house I hit amazon.com and had two presents in the mail before my feet hit the front steps. BING!! I drove to the local mall and grabbed a few more. BANG!! And I cruised on past the Barnes and Nobles for the last few. BOOM!!! Done! Home in time to watch LSU loose to Arkansas. Almost a perfect day!!

But as work picked up and my free time thinned out, those gifts sat around waiting to be mailed. Finally, just a few days before Christmas, I managed to walk them down to the post office. As I passed the first box over the counter, the woman glared at me and told me she couldn’t mail the box.

“What do you mean?” I queried.

“This box had alcohol in it once.” She retorted.

She wasn't wrong. The box was one of the many I collected from a local liquor store to use during our last move.

“OK?” was my confused response.

“Alcohol is flammable!” she muttered in an exasperated tone.

Once again, Madame Curie was correct. Alcohol is indeed flammable.

Normally, when confronted with problems like this, I sigh, narrow my eyes in the most condescending manner I can muster, and haughtily walk out. Why bang my head against a brick wall? The bricks never appreciate that kind of effort. But this time I felt I had the time and the energy to try reasoning with the wall.

“Right” I said. “But you can see that no wine was spilled on this box.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she shot back.

“Does it also not matter that the box itself is far, far, far more flammable than a bottle of wine?” I went on.

“No it doesn’t,” she exclaimed.

“In fact, were this box to contain the six bottles of wine it once held, it would be far less flammable because of it. Wine is over 85% water!”

“I cannot accept the box!”

Undeterred I went on. “And I guess it doesn’t matter that the gasoline in the truck that will carry the box away is far more flammable than a bottle of wine. . . . And I guess it also is no concern of yours that the fuel in the wings of the airplane that will carry the box to Louisiana is far more flammable than that. . . . My God! The oxygen we’re breathing right now is more flammable than a bottle of wine!!”

Maybe I had gone a little far with that last one. At least she thought so. Her only reply was to gesture menacingly toward the door.

I brought the box home, wrapped it in brown paper, walked it back to the post office, and handed it over to her silently.

Brick wall 1, Logan Row 0

Merry Christmas!! Happy New Year!!

"Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court"

2010-09-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

I can see the inside of that courtroom just as clearly as if I had been there yesterday. Packed with confusion, there was little room left to stand. I arrived late, having spent a few minutes outside smoking cigarettes to cover up the pot smell. So, when I got inside I casually leaned against the back wall, opened up my well-worn copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Great Shark Hunt and began reading.

I wasn’t taking the proceedings very seriously. Hell, I thought to myself, I wasn’t here for anything serious at all. About a month before I had had the unfortunate experience of being issued a misdemeanor summons for taking advantage of a candy machine. The damn machine didn’t work. Y’see, you could put a dime in the thing and turn the knob to get your candy, or you could just turn the knob. Either way you would get the candy. Not having two nickels to rub together, I commonly chose the latter option.

Well, one evening, just after a small group of friends and I had made a withdrawal, we found ourselves surrounded by a parade of cop cars. We were all pretty young and fairly irreverent in the presence of authority figures; so I guess we caused a little more trouble than we should have. Regardless, however, the whole event seemed absurd from the beginning. The cops made a big scene, we made a bigger scene; but in less than two hours I was at the bar with a few friends laughing it off.

Two months later I was in that little courthouse watching it pump out “justice” like cheeseburgers. The clerk called the name; the judge asked for the plea; and the sentence was given. Bun, ketchup, mustard, pickle, beef and cheese! When my turn came I was confused and high. “Any questions?” the public defender asked me. Not really, I responded. “Is this all necessary? I mean, it was about eight cents worth of candy,” I commented incredulously.

I don’t think he was paying much attention. He told me that I should just make it as painless as possible and plead guilty. Fine. Hell, I was guilty!

“$500.00 fine and 250 hours of community service,” the old judge rattled out. Wrap it up, add fries and a coke!

The entire experience was dizzying, and not just because I was high. The prosecutor didn’t have my file, the arresting officer wasn’t there, the public defender seemed incompetent, and the judge clearly didn’t understand that I had been charged for taking candy from a candy machine not breaking into a vending machine. Either way, I was fucked! $500.00 was nearly an entire month’s salary for me at that time. And 250 hours of community service was going to be impossible. Any competent defense attorney could have had the frivolous charges dropped completely. Or, at the very least, the case could have been dismissed in the absence of the arresting officer. None of this happened. So, I lived on very little food, clocked a lot of hours at the Salvation Army, and spent the next year and a half worrying that any run-in with the law (however small) would result in jail time—all for less than 10 cents worth of Sweet Tarts!!!!

Reading through Amy Bach’s Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court, I was struck by how common this predicament is. In day-to-day criminal court, abuses happen with such regularity that they go almost unnoticed. Defendants spend months in jail awaiting trials for offences that, if properly defended, wouldn’t result in community service. Judges coerce guilty pleas from defendants. Public defenders fall asleep at trial. And prosecutors refuse to admit that they’ve convicted the wrong man even when confronted with indisputable proof.

Anyone who’s watched a few episodes of Law and Order is familiar with the principle of our adversarial justice system. In theory, a persuasive prosecutor argues the state’s case. A well-prepared defense attorney challenges the case. And a disinterested judge is present to ensure no one’s rights are violated. What we understand to be justice, then, emerges from this process. We accept errors (innocent men locked away for years, guilty men let loose) only because we believe so strongly in the rigorousness of the process. All too often, however, the defense attorney is over-burdened, the prosecutor is concerned only with convictions that benefit his political career, and the judge is anything but disinterested. In this way, the adversarial system of justice degenerates into a close-knit clan of professional colleagues (judge, prosecutor, defense attorney) conspiring to speed defendants through the system without any regard for the rights of the accused or even the presumption of innocence.

This book made me feel ill, angry and disgusted. I recommend it to anyone. I don't, however, recommend fucking with a candy machine.

Yes, George; you are GLENN BECK!!!!

2010-07-29T05:02:00.000-07:00

Holy Shit!! I know Glenn Beck; and he lives in Korea!

Their shore is alot of wrighting errors hear

2010-07-27T18:16:00.000-07:00

Win eye sit down and reelly think a bout it, win I really tri to reed the word’s Ive wroten, win I lock very, very, closerly, I’m shore I’ll find meany English mistakes in mine own wrighting. Hell, aye jest no that eye must write them awl the thyme. Butt, I’m knot a publisher!! And, wile eye’ve Dunn a lot of proofriding in my time, I don’t due it for a leaving.

The people that wrote this garbage (not mine above, but those below), however, do! They are not only professional publishers that claim to have hired proofreaders; but they publish books used to teach English for god’s sake! I know Korea has a race problem. I know Koreans only reluctantly and grudgingly hire English speakers to come in and teach conversational English. And, maybe Korean publishers are operating under the false assumption that Koreans are somehow better at writing and grammar than native speakers (I’ve actually had an employer in Korea make this foolish argument to me once). But, couldn’t this company hire just one of those blond-haired, blue-eyed, grudgingly-employed guys to actually read through this garbage before they print thousands of copies?

I don't know. What are some good topics to "break an ice?" How about cocktails?

Warning about being careful, huh? Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking.

Well, I "considers" it a fucking shame that you're not only using the passive construction, but that you're also pretty careless about the articles.

When "w're" writing an English textbook, it might be a good idea to write in complete sentences.

I've seen a lot of Cspan, but . . .

2010-07-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

A little background:

Is this how the other half lives?

2010-07-12T12:02:00.000-07:00

I've always been a bit of news junky. In college I typically read two or three newspapers a day (Sports section, classifieds, and Fashion excepted). I loved the smell of the paper, the ink on my fingers, and the satisfaction of reading crisp, clean copy that was researched in hours and written in minutes. It will be ball-chilling cold day in hell when I give up my warm, familiar paper for a cold, computer screen or some goddamn iPad.

But, these days I'm less attracted to the hard news than I am to the opinions. I head straight to the editorials. I read the columnists I like first and have a passing glance at those whom I tend to disagree with. It's my age, I tell myself. I'm becoming a bitter old man who would rather have his opinions validated than heard. I even find myself reading the letters to the editor. I want to dive into the complaints, the adversarial postures, the grating discord. I want to immerse myself in the hatred they feel for the opposition. I want a good argument. I want a winner.

And, every now and then I run across something in these editorials or letters that sends me flipping back to an earlier page in an earlier edition. This is what happened today when I ran across a letter that brought me to this:

American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation

This article made me absolutely furious. Fuck this kid!!! Fuck him with the rusty end of a broken pitch fork!!! And fuck this goddamn journalist too! Who are these people? How dare they muster the presumption to speak so condescendingly about an entire generation! Other than the little fuck in this article, who the hell is complaining about “entitlement?” Really, where the fuck are these people?

I don’t know about this piss ant kid or this jerk-off journalist, but I've worked my ass off my entire life. From the time I was fifteen years old I've worked cutting trees, laying concrete, washing dishes, flipping burgers, slinging hash, and turning wrenches. I walked to work, lived off potato salad made with the free condiments from the Circle K, and paid my rent on time.

I competed against little shits like this kid as an undergraduate. When the out-of-town wealth from Tulane went out partying, I was the one pouring their drinks, wiping off their tables, and mopping their vomit off the floor. While they went off each summer to fill their resumes with unpaid internships and sinecures at daddy’s office, I took on extra work to make it through the next semester.

And this little fuck has the audacity to think that his $400,000 degree should put him at the front of the line? What happened to valuing hard work, persistence, and determination? My god!! Is this kid serious? Is he really shocked that he didn't land an $80,000 executive-track position right out of college? Does he really think that merely having a degree from Colgate carries that much weight? I honestly don't know which is more depressing, the fact that this little twerp is so delusional or the fact that were it not for this recession his expectations would be realistic.

Thank you for your consideration

2010-07-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Mr. Smith
Human Resource Manager
Cocksuckers Inc.
1234 Chupame la Polla Ave.
WTFville, BS 46807

Dear Mr. Smith,

I would like to thank you again for the opportunity to interview for the Dingleberry Quality Selection Team Member position with Cocksuckers Inc. Although I am disappointed that I was not chosen, I enjoyed meeting you and your staff and learning more about your company.

I am still interested in opportunities with Cocksuckers Inc. and would appreciate it if you would keep me in mind for future openings with any of the branches here in WTFville.

If, however, you have no intention of contacting me again, please disregard everything above. And, I hope it's not too insensitive for me to reveal that I pray you slip on your own bathroom floor, bleed to death, and your children are forever traumatized by finding you there naked, surrounded in a pool of your own blood and holding a copy of LadyBoy Weekly.

Thank you again for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Logan Row

War Prayer Revisited

2010-06-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

In 2003 I worked as a staff writer for my undergraduate University newspaper. My duties were to cover Student Government (mostly because I was a good personal friend of the Student Body President, and thus had unparalleled access to him) and to cover those faculty events that other writers thought were either too boring or too difficult to develop into a story. While I agreed wholeheartedly with these characterizations, I knew something that most other staff writers didn’t—when the faculty got together to talk they always had the events catered (which at a New Orleans university means crates of wine). Many would be surprised to hear the honesty that comes out of professors whose lips are loosened with a little Yellow Tail.

But I digress . . . .

On the day the US launched the war in Iraq my rather eccentric editor printed this lesser known Twain story as a full-page insert. And, while I’m sure few people actually read it, it was a poignant tribute to the initial (and now long forgotten) popularity of that war in some circles. Now, as we send in yet another general to quell the violence, clean up the corruption, and, in general, do the fucking impossible, I though it appropriate to remind ourselves of how we got here in the first place.

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety's sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came -- next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams -- visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender! Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation

*God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest! Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!*

Then came the "long" prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory --

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher's side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued with his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, "Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord our God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!"

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside -- which the startled minister did -- and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

"I come from the Throne -- bearing a message from Almighty God!" The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. "He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such shall be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import -- that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of -- except he pause and think.

"God's servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two -- one uttered, the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him Who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this -- keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain upon your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse upon some neighbor's crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

"You have heard your servant's prayer -- the uttered part of it. I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it -- that part which the pastor -- and also you in your hearts -- fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard these words: 'Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!' That is sufficient. the *whole* of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory--*must* follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer.

He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(*After a pause.*) "Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits!"

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

Terrorism on the screen and in our heads

2010-06-22T18:27:00.000-07:00

There was a time when “terrorist” was a neat, nuance-devoid category that needed little supplementary explanation. As Hollywood-contrived eccentrics, terrorists existed as mere foils—a quintessential badness whose abhorrent existence merely reinforced the most elementary understanding of good, justice, and the American way. Their motives were rarely explored, their background only partly fleshed out.

Much of this neatness was a product of general American ignorance on the subject of terrorism. What was a terrorist? What did they do? Well, for American audiences in the 80s and 90s, they hijacked planes, blew up buildings, murdered people, and rooted for Armageddon. But, they did all of this stuff far, far away. It was this geographical and intellectual distance between the activities of terrorists and life in the US that fostered an image of terrorism that was as readily identifiable as it was patently false—a silk suit wearing, gulfstream-flying, impenetrably nonsensical lunatic like Castor Troy (Nick Cage) in “Face Off”; the cold, expressionless master criminal in “Passenger 57,” the fanatical IRA splinter groups in “Patriot Games.”

In the eighties—when everyone was luvin’ Reagan, hatin’ commies, and laying roses at the feet of rugged individualism—the Hollywood image of terrorism served to highlight bureaucratic incompetence. Maj. Scott McCoy (Chuck Norris) knew exactly how to handle a group of sweaty highjackers in “The Delta Force”—go in and kill the fuck out of ‘em! Without equivocation, without even a hint of grey, the terrorists were evil: pure, concentrated evil. There was no debate about their character, their one-dimensionality was entirely transparent. The only question was whether McCoy would allow a wavering president and a group of Posey-panty Foreign Service officers to keep holding up the show and making deals with terrorists, or whether he would paint their asses red, white and blue. Indeed, what attracted audiences to McCoy-like characters was their ability to cut through the many concentric rings of authority and inaction with a blast of hyper-realism shot through the barrel of a bazooka.

While vestiges of this attitude lingered on, the post-cold-war world brought with it a new understanding of terrorism. The world was different, smaller, more complex. But one thing hadn’t changed; for the American imagination, the battle against terrorism was still being waged internally. The argument, however, was no longer about which should be done first, ask questions or shoot; it was now a struggle to reconcile the actions of the old cold-war embroiled superpower with the new single dominant beacon of democracy. In short, the democracy-praising idealism of President James Marshall (Harrison Ford, “Air Force One”) was created to clean up the mess left by the reckless abandon of Maj. McCoy’s Delta Force.

Throughout the cold war the United States had been fighting for supremacy. Now that it was the unquestionable winner, it had to make a decision. Like Connor McCloud in “Highlander,” we had decapitated our enemies and won the prize. So, now what? Well, we actually get an inkling of what Connor does with his prize in the terrible sequel to “Highlander.” He saves the world from ultra-violet annihilation by constructing a synthetic ozone layer to replace the one destroyed by industry. And, he earns the hatred of billions who now have to live in eternal darkness.

The US of the post-cold-war nineties was in a comparable situation. The Soviet Union had been vanquished for good. The United States had won the prize. And with the prize came the unfettered condemnation of much of the world. Despite its best efforts, the US could neither quell the bitterness nor distance itself from the world it had spent decades creating. In this new light, the terrorists became human. The soldiers in “The Rock” wanted justice; the nuclear bomb carrying Yugoslav in “The Peacemaker” wanted to avenge his fallen wife and daughter. These people had to be stopped, yes. But they also had to be understood. We wanted to know what made them tick. We wanted to ask them, “why all the bitterness?” “Why don’t you forget about those things and take our hand as we walk into the bright new future?”

Yet, no matter how they might have tried, the US could not keep the ghosts of the Cold War in their graves. Osama Bin Laden, a creature of the American desire to spend the USSR out of existence, was back on the scene following the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In the wake of that rude awakening, America’s imagined terrorist lost much of his humanity (though not all of it). Interestingly enough, however, this did not bring about a revival of the Maj. McCoy archetype. In fact, these events merely escalated the post-cold war struggle for direction in a Uni-polar world. Now the battle between the ideal US and the ghosts of the past could be fought out in real time and in earnest. In “The Siege,” FBI Special Agent Anthony Hubbard (Denzel Washington) struggles to maintain his composure as he battles both the terrorist cells and the extra-constitutionality of American troops on US soil torturing US citizens. It’s the FBI verses the US military; the symbol of national order verses the symbol of global domination; the clashing interests between the metropole of a reluctant empire and the inevitable byproducts of empire building.

In this instance at least, the ideal US wins. Denzel Washington waves The Constitution in front of Bruce Willis, the soldiers put down their guns, and the president comes back to his senses. Problem averted, order returned, the march toward the future continues. September 11, 2001, however, directs the American gaze back to the mean, mean, complex world. In response to the newly realized international turmoil, Hollywood dispatches Ben Affleck and Morgan Freedman to chase international, nuke-holding terrorists around the world. Samuel L. Jackson decides to think outside the box and hire Vin Diesel to infiltrate a group of well-dressed, curiously wealthy terrorists in Prague. And Arnold Schwarzenegger took matters into his own hands by traveling to Columbia to squash the terrorists’ heads between his large Austrian paws.

But, as always happens during moments of rabid, self-righteous indignation and flag-waving super patriotism, we carried this crusade a little too far. Toward the end of the decade we were being dragged back to our senses by Tommy Lee Jones, Jake Gyllenhaal, and George Clooney. Granted, the “Valley of Elah,” “Rendition,” and “Syriana” all lacked both the hypnotic special effects of a Schwarzenegger film and the cool composure of Morgan Freedman. But the point was made. Fighting terrorists had become a nasty business. It was no longer about just cutting through the red tape to do what had to be done. Things weren’t that simple anymore. We were left asking ourselves, “Was Maj. McCoy even relevant anymore?” Or was he actually the reason we were here in the first place?

The answers to these questions haven’t been filmed yet. But, If the low-budget production, “Unthinkable,” is any indication, we’ve now entered a world of nuanced introspection. In this film about torture and deniability, the terrorist is still human and the threat is still real. But the enemy is no longer so clear or even so tangible. Unlike the final scene in “The Siege,” there is no FBI agent risking life and limb to preserve civil authority. Rather, the tenuous sometimes antagonistic relationship between CIA, FBI and the military has been replaced by an eerie cooperation. Denzel and Bruce have merged into a single character that is not only convinced of what he must do, but he’s tormented by the idea of it, and unsure of where his actions will take him.

But there is one major difference between the old world of terrorists in foreign, dusty countries and the new world of terrorism inside our heads; terrorism is no longer a temporary emergency. Before, fighting terrorism meant stretching the rules and kicking some ass. But when the fighting was done and the terrorists were hauled off, the sun came out and life went back to normal. This is no longer the case. There is no single person that can be killed, tortured or locked up that will restore order (magically or otherwise). Terrorism is, unfortunately, the new normal. Like domestic abuse, herpes and crack cocaine, terrorism is a problem without a solution; it’s a blister without an ointment. For better or worse, the image of terrorism has been grafted onto our collective consciousness as a permanent, immutable force. We’re stuck with it forever . . . or at least until the next movie.

Dear Mr. Smith,

2010-06-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Wally Smith (Director of Human Resources, Cocksuckers Inc.),

I hope you don’t think it too presumptuous of me that I write you at this moment. But I thought we left our last meeting with more to be said. And, I believe my actions required some explanation. Lord knows I was in no state to give explanations of any kind at the time.

Let me begin by apologizing to your lovely wife. I hadn’t intended to damage her home; but I would have never thought that you’d have such an ironclad security system. And, you really should thank the installation outfit; I nearly left in frustration. It was only when I noticed that open second story window that I endeavored to persevere. This is how, I’m afraid to say, your beautiful lattice work was destroyed. Though, in my defense, you must understand that there was really no other way up or in. Had I decided to smash a window or kick in the door, the damage done to your home would be no different.

Also, please send my most sincere apologies to your teenage daughter. It must have been quite a shock when I crawled through that window. Yes, we can all laugh about it now—how she bounced from the bed to the dresser in frantic panic, how she pleaded with me to spare her life, and how she finally fainted on the floor. But neither of us thought it was funny at the time. Hell, she just wanted me to leave; and I just wanted her to shut up. I hope it brings her some solace to know that I had no intention of harming her. And, with the therapist's help, I’m sure she’ll get over it in time.

I should also apologize for all the black marks I left smeared on your walls, banister, and furniture. Regardless of how easy it may appear in the movies, applying shoe polish to your entire body is no mean feat. It took hours. And, it took a lot of shoe polish. So, during the application process I managed to get quite a bit on my clothes, hands, shoes, and wherever else. But, if it makes you feel any better, you should know that my bathroom (at my former address that is) was absolutely destroyed in the process. That security deposit is gone for good.

I mention this not because I enjoy boasting. No! I say this only to correct the record. Those marks were not, as was said in court, my own feces. I would never do such a thing. Yes, as the prosecutor stated, I did have a bag of my own excrement in my back pocket. That much is true. And, I should confess, I really don’t know what I planned to do with it. Cheap vodka will make people do funny things. I really don’t think I can be held entirely responsible for my actions in that condition. But, and this is my point, I never once opened that bag. It stayed right there in my back pocket the entire time. I’m certain the prosecutor was quite conscious that he was embellishing the truth.

I’m not really a bad person. In fact, I want to let you know that I’m praying for your complete recovery. I got a little ahead of myself when I kicked you down the stairs. It was really a product of my frustration at the moment. There were so many things I wanted to say to you face to face; and nothing was really coming out right. But, I think you must admit as well, that you weren’t exactly being a model listener at that point. All that screaming, all that kicking! I can only be expected to tolerate so much.

This is not, however, an excuse for my behavior, mind you. I was in the wrong. That much is certain. When I sobered up, I realized that quite quickly. So what if it seemed like you were advertizing positions that you had no intention of filling? So what if you didn’t want to look at my resume? So what if I had spent days crafting the perfect cover letter? I had no right to make you eat them in front of me.

Nor did I have any right to say all of those terrible things to you as the police dragged me away. You are certainly not the most evil, heartless sonofabitch the world has ever known. During my sentencing, as each of your family members excoriated me in the most brutal of terms, the fact that you are a strong, well-loved family man was plainly obvious. Heartless, evil sons of bitches don’t get that kind of praise. And, I should never have called you a pig fucker. I’m not one to make unsubstantiated statements; and I had no reason to make one then. The fact is, I have no idea what your attitude is toward pigs; and I certainly have no evidence to support my wild accusations.

So I hope you’ll accept this humble apology. Who knows? In a few years, assuming the parole board looks favorably upon me and my attempts to rehabilitate myself, I might try submitting my resume to your company again. No hard feelings? I still think I’m the man for the job.

Sincerely,

Logan Row

Federal Prisoner #32-765-5654

The Interview I’d Love to Give

2010-05-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

Smug Interviewer: How did you hear about the position here at Cocksuckers Inc.?

Even more Smug Me: Well, you see these days I try to apply to just about anything that I’m capable of doing. Though, I seem to recall stumbling across your ad after I applied for a position changing bedpans at the local insane asylum.

Interviewer: Why would you like to work here at Cocksuckers Inc.?

Me: That’s a good question. And, I must confess, I haven’t spent all that long thinking up an appropriate answer. If pressed, however, I’d say my motivations were mostly gastronomical.

Interviewer: . . . gastronomical??

Me: Yes, ma’am. You see, even before the recession, my wife and I had already acquired a nasty habit of eating on a regular basis—three times a day sometimes. And, I must tell you, it’s been a terribly difficult habit to break.

Interviewer: Are there any other reasons?

Me: Well, now that you mention it, yes. We’ve also grown accustom to living indoors. Now, don’t get me wrong; we do like to go camping. But sometimes we like to be able to sit comfortably inside, wash our clothes in a machine, and use appliances that don’t require Colman fuel. Another nasty little habit, I’m afraid.

Interviewer: So what do you think your background and experience will add to this company?

Me: Well, how would you like to learn more about 19^th-century Spanish liberalism?

Interviewer: What I mean is that most of the applicants we’ve spoken with have had a background in Business Administration, Economics, or Marketing. You have a more colorful background in, let’s see . . . , oh, history. How do you think that would add to the talent here at Cocksuckers Inc.?

Me: Ah, well, depending on how you look at it, my background may add nothing to the “talent” here. I’ve never read a profit loss account, and I’ve never cared to see a balance sheet. That said, after spending two years as a Graduate TA teaching and reading the work of students with backgrounds not dissimilar to those you’ve just described, I can confidently say that many of them have never done their own research, composed a piece of readable prose, or passed a course without hiring someone to write their term papers. So, considering the field of applicants, I think my background makes me fairly competitive.

Interviewer: I see that you’ve done a lot of teaching. Why have you decided to pursue a different career at this point?

Me: You mean apart from the desire my wife and I have of eating regularly and living indoors?

Interviewer: Yes, sir. Apart from that.

Me: Well, let’s just say I had a more interesting adolescence than most.

Interviewer: I’m not sure I follow you.

Me: Oh, well, you know how in high school all your friends were joining clubs and taking the SAT each year?

Interviewer: Yes.

Me: Well, it was almost exactly the same for me and my friends, except instead of joining clubs and taking the SAT we were smoking an unfathomable amount of pot and eating copious amounts LSD. You wouldn’t believe the things you’ll do when the entire world looks like the inside of a marshmallow! And, apparently, when you apply to work at a public school in the US, they actually look into that. Considering the quality of the teachers I had in school, I tend to think this is a relatively new policy.

Interviewer: I also see that you’ve done a lot of traveling over the past decade.

Me: Yep, four continents and over forty countries—not counting the ones I was just passing through.

Interviewer: Why all that moving around?

Me: Remember how I was telling you about all that pot and LSD?

Interviewer: . . . . . . .

Me: Ha ha, just kidding. Totally unrelated. I just like to travel.

Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Me: If I don’t get this job, I imagine I’ll be emerging from bankruptcy right about then.

A New Flavor for an Old Festival

2010-05-06T06:05:00.000-07:00

Oh, yes! We’ve been anticipating this for almost three quarters of a century.

If you look closely, you can almost see the greasy film.

A little Cayenne, a few handfuls of salt, and one free-standing hydrostatic pressure gauge.

In the soft glow of a full moon, the dying plankton looks so peaceful.

In Louisiana we don’t have enough confetti. We use shrimp!!

You see, in Louisiana we’re trained to suppress our natural inclination to recognize that “one of these things is not like the other.”

A little 5w-20 Etouffe, anyone?

Immortality in the Margins

2010-04-24T18:19:00.000-07:00

My father, like many old men, has grown fascinated with his own genealogy. Indeed, the intensity of his fascination seems to rise commensurately with his age. When searching for his Christmas present last year I considered this and decided trace his family tree. Hell, it's about time I put those two history degrees I've acquired to work! I gathered what information he had, spoke to a few of our oldest living relatives, and started digging around.

Granted, there were a lot of lacunae, and I took a number of educated guesses about who fathered whom. But in the end, I managed to put together a mostly reliable and relatively interesting family tree that stretched from Louisiana to Lorraine. In fact, I was so satisfied with both the hunt and the product that I decided to research my mother’s family’s background.

Unlike on my father’s side of the family, my mother’s side had done quite a bit more record keeping over the years. Considering the socio-economic differences between these two sides—my father’s tree includes a number of property owners and doctors, while my mother’s side is populated heavily with illiterate French-speaking peasants—this seemed strangely counterintuitive. To date, I’m still mostly stumped by this apparent paradox. But, getting back to the story here . . . .

Paw-paw Logan, as my last surviving grandparent, was the logical person to speak with first. And, even at 91 years old he’s sharp as a tack. The man is still racing his Ford around Abbeville, eating Sausage, Gravy and Rice for dinner most nights, and still telling mildly off-color jokes about how dark the natives were in Borneo—something about how coal would leave a white mark on their skin.

Together we dug through several crates and wooden chests to find every old picture he had in his house. Along the way we turned up many interesting documents, like my grandmother’s baptismal certificate, his marriage license, his Army discharge papers, and a few records from the Billups Station he managed for so many years.

However, the most interesting document I found during my search was a census record that recorded the name and address of my great grandfather Louis Sarazin Mathiue in 1900. This was a huge find. With it, I now knew for sure that he was neither literate nor English-speaking. Also, since he was living with a Chiasson family at that time, I confidently deduced from this that his own family had likely either died or were so destitute they could no longer support him. Without this single page, this aspect of Louis’ life would be lost forever. And all this was possible because over one hundred and ten years ago some poor guy went from door to door in backwater Acadiana (undoubtedly accompanied by an interpreter) asking people a few simple questions.

Now, I dig this shit. (Hell, I better dig it, because it’s an interest that promises neither wealth nor even work.) But, because of this interest, I’m always conscious of the marks I’m leaving on history. I’m aware of my own immortality, if you will. How much of a trace will be left of me when I’m gone? What impression will some future historian or genealogist get of me when he/she discovers this or that bit of my life? What will one learn of me through my writing, my passports, my many addresses, my criminal record?

This year Heejung and I filled out our own census form. And, like usual, my predilection for leaving a historical trace piqued my interest in the situation immediately. Just like when my great grandfather Louis lived for a short while as a Farm hand in his benefactor’s home, we are also in a transitional place and time. Years from now (hopefully not 110 years later) one or a few of our distant progeny might stumble across a record of us (a Korean national and a Coonass) living in a house we don’t own in rural Virginia, and he’ll come to a few conclusions. He might learn finally, (if he was wondering) why his eyes are a little longer. He might pause for a minute to consider our lives and times. He might imagine what it was like to be so peripatetic back in the “good ol’ days.” At least I hope he will. I’m leaving him the fucking breadcrumbs for god’s sake!!

Gawd Damn!!! It's WORSE than I thought!

2010-04-22T15:33:00.000-07:00

I usually leave the politics off this blog. But this is just horrible! This video hit me in so many ways; it was fascinating, disturbing, depressingly funny, awful, scary, puzzling, hurtful, shocking, real, and real fucking stupid!!!

God, help US!!

This Ain’t Yo’ Father’s Walden Pond! Part IV

2010-04-19T16:46:00.000-07:00

Living on this peaceful mountain it’s easy to get lost in it all. I’m surrounded by the fresh smell of spring each morning. I wake up to the crisp, chill breeze hitting me in the face as it sweeps across Appalachia and out to the Atlantic. I amuse myself by watching the squirrels dance from tree to tree, the birds flutter from branch to branch, the bees buzz from flower to flower, the deer stroll up to the road at dusk, the springs trickle gently down the hills, and, when the wind whistles through the mountains, I watch the tops of the trees sway romantically from left to right in dazzling Technicolored, hyper-realism.

Yet, amongst all this dreamy “Bird on my Shoulder,” Song of the South bullshit, it’s easy to forget that this place was once the base for a large Confederate partisan group. Col. John S. Mosby, the “Grey Ghost,” controlled this area from 1863 until the end of the Civil War. He and the 43rd Battalion, 1st Virginia Cavalry were camped up in these hills, making raids on Union forces nearby, blending into the local farming population, and, in general, just waiting to march triumphantly into Washington, D.C.

As everyone knows full well—save for maybe the current Gov. of Virginia—there was no triumphal march; there was no victorious South. For the most part, things didn’t go at all the way the “Grey Ghost” would have hoped; and he lived long enough to see it.

I confess, however, that I don’t know exactly how his soldiers met their end. I imagine that many of them did what they had been doing throughout the war; they blended into the population, worked the land, and let the bitterness of defeat eat at their souls for years. I’d like to think that not all of them went this way. I think many of them slept and bleed on this earth. Some of them, I’m sure, died up in these hills. And, quite a number of them surely buried their friends, brothers, and fellow soldiers under these rocks and trees.

So, essentially, I’m living in a confederate graveyard! As I hike the AT each morning (which by the way skirts the Eastern Front of Mosby’s Confederacy), I’m always on the lookout for some remnant of this place’s violent past—some name or bit of misspelled vulgarity chiseled in a rock, some chunk of lead buried in the trunk of a tree, some old, half-buried skeletal hand still clinging to the slaves it never owned and a vision of the South that’s so romanticized and so idealized that it scarcely ever existed in the first place.

The Dharma [bare] Bums

2010-04-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine has recently begun a year-long experiment in religious studies. From the web diary he’s putting together it seems he’s planning to follow the doctrine and traditions of 12 major faiths (each for one month at a time). So, since the first month is Buddhism, I thought I might do a little research on my own. It didn’t take long before I found out what Buddhism is really about. SHOCKING, is the only word I can use to describe it.

Have a look!!!

And what happens to the children? Lord Knows!!

This Ain’t Yo’ Father’s Walden Pond! Part III

2010-04-12T15:23:00.000-07:00

Seventeen Steps to Accomplishing Nothing

1. Get up early to brush teeth, stretch, and get some fresh air.

2. March around the brush surrounding the house to find Heejung the perfect walking stick.

3. Shave off all the bark from the stick and neatly carve HJ in the handle.

4. Help Heejung prepare 유부초밥 and 깍두기 to bring with us.

5. Fill water bottle, get Heejung’s shoes out of the car, and gently encourage her to hurry up.

6. Load newly carved walking stick, packed backpack, and ourselves into the car.

7. Drive one mile down the road to the Appalachian Trail public car park.

8. Park, unload, cross Hwy 55 and head south on the AT; Destination, beautiful clearing at the top of the mountain about 45 min away.

9. Hike into woods about three minutes.

10. Two minutes later listen to Heejung’s complement about the trail’s natural beauty.

11. One minute later hear Heejung SCREAM WITH HORROR!!!

12. Turn around to see that I just walked over a small Ribbon Snake sunning itself on the trail.

13. Move snake off the trail and try to convince Heejung to continue on.

14. One minute later, realize this is futile and guide her back to the car.

15. Eat 유부초밥 and 깍두기 on a picnic table at AT car park.

16. Drive home having accomplished nothing.

17. Take a nap.

This Ain’t Yo’ Father’s Walden Pond! Part II

2010-04-08T10:39:00.000-07:00

Growing up in Baton Rouge, I’m familiar with the many cultural eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that always tend to flower in relatively sparsely populated areas with high numbers of blue-collar, lower-middle-class small home owners. Yet, of the many fascinating phenomena, the most intriguing to me has always been the tendency for an increase in paranoia over crime amongst groups that live in areas where criminal activity is quite rare. One would think that anxiety about crimes typically associated with inner-city life (robbery, carjacking, home invasion, gang violence, etc . . .) would be less intense in areas far removed from the city sprawl. Indeed, that these specific crimes are so common in the city is the reason most commonly given for why people move out to the suburbs and beyond. But, it’s the people that live on backwoods, gravel roads that are the quickest to grab their gun when there is a late-night knock at the door; it’s the people that live hundreds of miles from any housing project that seem the most concerned with incidents of gang violence; and it’s the people that live on acres of land, far from the next house that will have the most NO TRESPASSING signs at the entrance to their long driveway. As I hiked out from my cabin in the woods to the main road yesterday I couldn’t help but notice the many “this home is protected by ACME Home Security,” BEWARE OF DOG, and NO TRESPASSING signs. So where does this come from?

I’m sure that the concentration of irrational paranoia in these areas is in many ways a process of self-selection. This is to say that the people who have the highest levels of anxiety about inner-city crime are the most likely to move out to these areas. But I’m not convinced that this process accounts for all of it. Some of it might be a natural, almost atavistic, reaction to solitude. Remember when you were young and afraid of the dark? It wasn't merely the absence of light that frightened you; the darkness only emphasized the real fear, that of being alone. The dark loneliness could make things and ideas that would ordinarily seem, well, quite ordinary, seem frightening. Something very similar happens when people live removed from regular human contact.

The first time I remember thinking about this strange phenomenon was when a young Japanese exchange student was shot on the doorstep of a Baton Rouge man’s semi-rural home. It was in ’92 or ’93, and I was a high school student at the time. The poor boy was shot dead because he had the terrible misfortune of knocking on the wrong door. The man who shot him—a law-abiding, blue-collar everyman—didn’t think twice about grabbing his gun at the sound of an unexpected, early evening knock at the door. Why he decided to shoot after seeing that it was a high school student, is still something of a mystery to me. But I have to believe that the anxious, evening-news-filled paranoia that likely drove this man out into the sticks in the first place and stoked his fears every night had a lot to do with it.

While I’m sure he spent some time in prison, I honestly don’t remember exactly what happened to that man. (Though I do, however, remember then President Bill Clinton apologizing to Japan for the incident.) But I’m reminded of him, the Japanese boy he killed, and the strange, uniquely American rural paranoia that made that tragedy possible each time I walk down this mountain road. “No Trespassing,” indeed!!

This Ain’t yo’ Father’s Walden Pond! Part I

2010-04-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

After over two months in a cramped New York City studio, my wife and I are now living eight miles from Front Royal, eighty miles from DC, high up in the Blue Mountains, off a gravel road, and in a “not so rustic” cabin in the woods. This detour was less planned than pleasantly fortuitous; less vacation than a practical consequence of moving back to DC on short notice.

The plan is to stay here for two months as we look for an apartment and make the slow transition back to DC. But the bayou-raised Coonass in me is just diggin’ the scene and goin’ with the flow! Since we’ve been here I’ve started wandering around the house half naked and scratching myself; I’m constantly looking for a good stick to carve; I’ve been looking for two good trees to roast a pig between; I feel like rolling up my pants just above my ankles, digging my toenails into the dry dirt, sticking a wad of chew in my lip and spitting out the juice as I talk to add emphasis to the strange folksy things I seem to feel like saying now.

Who knows? We might decide to stay out here for years. I could get a pickup truck and find some coal mine to work at. Or I could write a recipe book all about dishes prepared with squirrel. I’m thinkin’ it over.

"To" Russia with Love

2010-04-03T07:55:00.000-07:00

As a child, my image of Russia was colored by Hollywood. Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Spies like Us, and a host of other films and TV series filled my mind with a pixilated, snow-covered, grey, dreary, broken, and mostly reassuring image of Russia.

Russia, I found out a few years ago, never fails to disappoint! Moscow was much cleaner than my cold-war-tainted visions allowed me to imagine. The streets were swept clean; the high-end jewelry and clothing stores were bustling; the subways were scrubbed to a shimmering polish; and the Kremlin literally sparkled. I recall searching the structure in vain for a single flake of peeling paint or a rogue weed sprouting from some crack. Nothing!!! The damn place was solid as a rock and clean as a bourgeois fantasy.

I prowled the streets and back alleys looking for remnants of that crumbling monster of my youth—the kind of place where you could trade a few cans of Coca-Cola, an I Heart NY T-shirt, and an Eight Track of punk rock for a rusty used Lada and some plutonium. I sat for hours one afternoon near the Aleksandrovskiy Sad drinking cold Dutch beer from impeccably clean pint glasses as I waited for some sign of the bitter, downtrodden masses I was convinced Russia was overflowing with. Where were the starving, toothless old women fighting over moldy bread in the street? Where were the AIDs-infested prostitutes being kicked by pimps and police? Where’s the dictators, the rat soup, the crying children, the smoke, smog, and goose-stepping soldiers? Fuck, I thought, who do I have to bribe around here to see a little corruption?

And then I saw it. Groups of large heavily intoxicated men with casks of vodka under one arm and toothless whores under the other. Ahh-ha!!! Yes, I thought; here they were!! I knew the Russia of my imagination couldn’t have been that wrong.

And so I watched as the park filled with more and more of these groups. All the men were enormous, wearing white and blue striped long-sleeve shirts; and every last one of them was shitfaced, violently drunk. As more and more flooded into the park—hooting and hollering as they did—and as I continued to drink more and more beer, panic set in. Was this some vodka fueled revolution? Am I about to be swept away in a violent throng of Slavic testosterone? What would Dr. Zhivago do? Flee to the Urals?

I didn’t have to wait long before a group of the enormous blue and white striped death machines sat down at my table.

“What’s the occasion?” I politely asked.

“Special Forces day,” he shot back.

Hmmm, I was immediately intrigued. “Are you all in the Special Forces?” I probed further.

“OF COURSE,” he replied a little too emphatically.

“So what’s it like being in the Russian Special Forces these days?” I continued undeterred.

He eventually warmed up to me, and I let him lead the conversation. Our discussion shifted from killing people, to women, to shooting guns, to women, to killing women, to women. And, then it took a hard left turn I was completely unprepared for. He became quite critical of the US’s new imperial role in Afghanistan and Iraq; and he wanted to let me know about his frustration. He made a few wild accusations about US intentions, a few clumsy historical analyses, and some rather poignant speculation about where all this could lead. At one point I did interrupt him to remind him that Russia was in the process of trouncing the Chechens, but he ignored my comment and continued on. (a word of advice, when you’re surrounded by seven-foot-tall Russian soldiers drinking their weight in vodka, be prepared to show a little humility.)

This one speed bump out of the way, the night continued merrily on—a Commie and a Cajun just shootin’ the breeze. I bought him a beer, he gave me some vodka; I showed him my American Flag tattoo, he let me wear his Special Forces Beret; I offered to cook him some gumbo, he tried to sell me his wife. In the end, I stumbled back to my hotel with a new vision of Russia and Russians, one that will last, I hope, until the next traumatic disappointment.

As Moscow now reels from the social damage wrought by two successive terrorist attacks, I remember that evening even more fondly. I wonder if that guy is preparing to go off to start a few of those imperial adventures he was so critical of five years ago (or if he’s spending time in prison for selling his wife). I guess we’ll all find out.

Good Luck, You Lovable Commies!!

Alone at the Terminal: The Lost World of the BBS

2010-03-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

Several years ago I took a required course on computer literacy at UNO. Admittedly, the course was outdated even then. Its primary function was to teach students several things any college student should be embarrassed to have had to learn—how to make a Power Point slide show, how to move files from one folder to another, how to find porn, etc . . . But there were also several lessons that appealed to the historian in me. One lesson that still stands out in my mind was on the history of the internet. In the lecture, the professor gave us the standard spiel: DARPA begets ARPANET begets, well, YouTube, facebook, and other incredible wastes of time. I remember leaving the lecture feeling angry. Hell no, I thought!! He’s left out a huge part of the story!! The internet wasn’t the product of the top-down, deliberate activities of a few professors and government organizations. Where’s the personal agency? Where’s the unpredictability? Where’s the unintended consequences of teenagers writing software just for fun or plugging in one piece of hardware to another just to see if it would work? WHERE’S THE BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM!!??!!??

Now, the few people who stumble across this blog are likely unfamiliar with the concept of a BBS. But, for anybody who grew up in the shadow of War Games and Whiz Kids, Bulletin Board Systems were the internet before the internet. More than this, they were a more intimate, more personal, more close-knit network of computer users. Essentially, a BBS was an open system run on a personal computer that other users could dial into via phone lines and modems. A system operator (Sysop) would set up his computer as a single- or multi-user host system (depending on how many phone lines he had); and other computer owners could use their 300, 1200, 2400 baud modems to access his computer for the purpose of trading files, sending messages, posting comments, chatting with the Sysop or other users, or playing multi-person online games. This may seem limited by today’s standards, but in the late eighties and early ninety’s, it was blowyourfuckingmind exciting!!!

These systems were run on very low megahertz, low memory, floppy disk storage, almost toy-like computers: TRS-80s, Commodore 64s, Apple IIes, and IBM 8086s. The boards were typically run as a hobby. In fact, many older users and Sysops shifted to the BBS world from Ham Radio. The first system I owned was a Tandy 1000 SL/2 I bought on lay-away at Radio Shack. It had a CMT monitor, an 8086 processor, 386kbs of memory, a single 720k 3.5 floppy drive, and a 2400bps modem I installed later. My current cell phone is 10,000 times more powerful than this computer was. But, at the time, that system was my vehicle into the world of the BBS.

I would spend hours and hours and hours of my days and nights dialing BBSes, looking for new BBSes locally, searching for the shareware I wanted, and learning everything I could. I can still remember the time it took to download a large file. I would select the file I wanted, run around the house disabling all the phones in the house, and then wait the 30, 45, 50 minutes to download a good-size compressed file. Any disturbance in the signal (somebody picking up the phone, somebody calling in, etc. . . ) would cause me to have to start the process all over again. But, if everything went right, I would have the game or program I wanted; and I’d be able to spend even more time playing it. This was a Basic and MSDos world—no multi-tasking, no windows, only your computer talking to another computer with a series of beeps, buzzes, clicks and clocks. It seems so low-tech and time-consuming now that it’s difficult to communicate the excitement that I would feel “surfing” these BBSes.

Between 1987 and 1994, the BBS community exploded. People all over the country were calling other computers, sharing files and sending echo-mail from one system to the next. Being a part of this community was like having one foot in the future. From my vantage point then, I imagined a coming world-wide network of computer users and Sysops exchanging information through ANSI-clouded, digital worlds. And then, seemingly as quickly as it appeared, it vanished. Occasional BBS callers became internet users and die-hard BBS supporters fought the futile fight. But, in the blink of an eye, it was over; an entire movement gone!

It’s sad to think that this stage between autonomous computers humming in living rooms around the country and the full-blown internet has been written out of the history of networking. The transition wasn’t necessarily linear—BBSes didn’t become internet websites. But the BBS world opened the door that the internet walked through. The unanticipated, viral popularity of BBSes made the dream of terminal to terminal communication and digital commerce a real possibility. Somebody should really fight to write BBSes back into the story. And, maybe somebody has. I found this fantastic eight-part documentary on the lost BBS world. This is the best attempt I’ve come across so far of someone writing the BBS back into the history of the world computer networking has made.

NO CARRIER . . . . . .

A DISH by any other name . . . .

2010-03-10T18:39:00.000-08:00

Louisianans have dealt with the commercialization of Mardi Gras pretty well. Initially at least, I considered it something of a complement to see Mardi Gras parades in cities that had absolutely no business hosting them. It was fine when audience members at the Jerry Springer show were encouraged to throw purple, green and gold beads at the half-naked freak show on the stage. I can even tolerate the bottles of Cajun hot sauce and cans of Cajun Spice made in Cleveland. I can stomach Cajun burritos, Cajun McChicken sandwiches, Cajun chicken salads, and all the other commercialized insults to my cultural heritage. Alone, they’re not that bad.

But what I absolutely refuse to accept are the far too many “Cajun” restaurants that sell food no Cajun would ever eat. Where do they come up with these menus? What self-respecting Cajun would ever make a vegetarian gumbo? What white rubber boot-wearing Coonass would dare to dip his spoon into a tofu ettouffee? Since when does an over-spiced leg of chicken constitute Cajun food?

And there are countless other examples. A few years ago I passed a small restaurant in Boston’s South Station that sold boiled crawfish by the half dozen—THE HALF DOZEN!!!! What the fuck are you going to do with six crawfish?

Some people might not understand my sensitivity here. Why, you might be asking, would this fool be so offended by bad Cajun food? Well, let me explain. Until relatively recently, the name “Cajun” was something of a derogative term, even in Louisiana. By the early 20^th century, French had effectively vanished from the few cities and urban areas in Louisiana. And, as happens in many places where the vernacular is neither the language of politics nor of business, French was relegated to the countryside. French was the language of the uneducated; and “Cajun” was the term used to describe the “stupid,” “illiterate,” “rice-farming,” country-bumpkins of Louisiana. It’s a sad fact, but Cajuns have been the victims of a very successful form of cultural extermination. My grandmother—a French-speaking child of two illiterate Cajun peasants—was beaten in school each time she spoke in her mother tongue. And this was no isolated incident. Most families in Louisiana, at least those that can claim even an ounce Cajun heritage, tell stories like this one. Like my grandmother, the few remaining true Cajun French speakers will be gone in just a few years—gone FOREVER!!

So it’s with a strange mixture of disgust and acceptance that I tolerate the ham-fisted, over-commercialized celebration of Cajun culture. But it’s more than a little insulting that any dish can become Cajun with just a touch of black pepper or a side of rice.

Several years back there was an attempt by some eccentric Louisiana legislators—God bless ‘em—to demand that any product sold in the country with the name “Cajun” in the title include some ingredient actually from Louisiana. This attempt was ridiculed at the time. And, I must be honest, I don’t remember thinking it a very wise move myself. But, consider how New Englanders would feel if cans of brown gruel swimming with unidentified seafood chunks were sold all over the country under the label “New England Clam Chowder.” How would Koreans feel if grilled ham sandwiches were sold as 삼겹살? Shit!!, how do Mexicans feel about Taco Bell? I don’t know. But I can’t imagine they’re particularly happy about it.

I don’t know where I’m going with this. But, most Irish bars in New York City actually have Irish people working there. Most Chicago-style pizza restaurants actually sell Chicago-style pizza. Is it too much to ask that a purportedly Cajun restaurant either serve Cajun food (and by this I mean food that people in South Louisiana actually eat) or, and this would be clever, hire a few random Coonasses to work the bar? Maybe it is. I don’t know.

In case anybody is wondering what real Cajun food actually looks like:

A Few Common Mistakes (that most of us are guilty of)

2010-03-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit upfront that I’ve been guilty in the past of misusing common expressions (even the few I've identified here in this post). But, even at the risk of sounding hypocritical, it’s worth at least one post to draw a little attention to these common mistakes. I hear some of these errors almost every day from intelligent, articulate people (some of which have their own TV shows for god’s sake). And, since I was pretty tough on some Korean’s English in the last post, it’s only fair that I call us native speakers out too.

   Data—Data is plural. The singular form is Datum. Don’t say “the data is conclusive.” Say “the
   data are conclusive.”  And please, unless you want to get a foot up your ass for being a pompous
   prick, don't ever say datum.

Sacred cow—People can’t be sacred cows, ideas are. People, however, can most
certainly be "fat cows," "stubborn cows," or just "cows." Certain restrictions occasionally apply.

   Immaculate Conception—I don’t know why people just don’t look this
   up before they say it. But the “immaculate conception” is not the conception of Jesus. The
   “immaculate conception” refers to Mary’s conception. According to the book of Luke (hence, ". . .
   Mary, full of grace . . ."), Mary was conceived without original sin. Regardless of how people feel
   about religion, let’s get the goddamn usage right!!

These are just a few I came up with off the top of my head.

Any other ideas? Let me know.

Absolutely NO EXCUSE!!!

2010-03-04T08:05:00.000-08:00

Alright . . . . I just couldn’t let this one go. I understand how difficult it is to write in a foreign language. Mistakes are common, even for those who’ve spent decades working diligently to improve their skill. But people who publish in second or third languages USE PROOFREADERS. Shit, foreign or native, it’s just a good idea. This is simply INEXCUSABLE!!! The Writer and Publisher should be ashamed.

Mike, how do you say 腹切 in Korean?

And this is only one example out of dozens.

March First in Korea—celebrating an “uncomfortable” past?

2010-03-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

Anyone who’s lived in Korea is familiar with the mad rush to get out of town on Chuseok and Seollal. They’ve seen the eerily empty streets and closed up shops in Seoul during those holidays. They’ve heard the stories of eating Dok-guk, of playing Yuk-nori, and of sitting in traffic for 10+ hours to cover a distance of 100km. But what happens on March First? How do Koreans—typically rabidly nationalistic—celebrate such a powerfully symbolic anniversary of Korea’s national birth? It seems as though they don’t do much. The rare Korean will put a flag out on their balcony or spend a few moments in solemn reflection on the memory Yu Gwan-sun. But most Koreans spend the day lounging about the house watching TV, sleeping in, and generally enjoying a day away from the office.

The absence of any strong tradition of celebration seems even more uncharacteristic when we consider how Koreans typically react over important symbols of Korean nationalism. Whether it’s in defense of Dok-do or in righteous indignation over a questionable judgment in the Olympics, Koreans tend to respond quickly and passionately. “You cheated, Apollo!” . . . “Go Home, Yankee!” . . . “독도 는 우리땅" . . . etc. So, what gives?

Well, I have a few ideas.

For one, popularly, Koreans are reluctant to concede Korea’s relative newness. It’s more than just the colorful, bucolic imagery of the previous Korean dynasties that contribute to the unmatched popularity of movies like 왕의남자; there are practical reasons for insisting on 5000 years of Korean history, celebrating the stories of King Sejong, and encouraging Koreans to make pilgrimages to Gyeongju. There is a natural, and understandable, aversion to tracing the roots of modern Korea back to the early twentieth century. Why would Koreans want to lend even trace amounts of legitimacy to Japanese colonialism? In a related sense, this same aversion contributes to the reification of those Korean holidays that do have strong celebration traditions: Seollal, Chuseok, Buddha’s Birthday. What do all these holidays have in common? They all draw inspiration from traditions that pre-date Japanese colonialism.

And it’s not just the Korean public that finds the convergence of Japanese colonialism and Korean nationalism difficult to reconcile; scholars have struggled with this as well. Only in Korea do historians use such strange tortuous terminology like “Colonial Modernity.” In other fields the apparent contradiction in this term is so absurd as to be laughable. Academia, in this regard, seems to reflect the discomfort Koreans feel toward their colonial past.

Secondly, the Korean established elite is uncomfortable with the surface-level imagery and symbolism of the March First Uprising. Quite understandably, a government that continues to struggle with the image of its own legitimacy might hesitate to celebrate too zealously a movement that so forcefully proclaimed the illegitimacy of the previous authority. This is most obvious during years when the commemoration of March First is decidedly more pronounced. As in most countries, the expression of Korean nationalism is most potent when directed toward external foes. In 2005, at the height of the most recent 독도 fervor, March First Movement celebrations were loud and organized. On that anniversary Roh Moo-hyun took the opportunity to excoriate Japan for not coming to terms, at least the way Korea would like it to, with its colonial past. This year, quite differently, the new president called for "national harmony to heal the economic wounds. In the absence of an identifiable "other" toward which Koreans can direct the passions of the uprising's remembrance, the rhetoric of the celebration is quite neutral.

I don't necessarily have an answer for this problem, if that's what it is. Koreans can celebrate or not celebrate their national holidays as they see fit. If on the off chance Koreans are ever looking for some traditional celebrations to institutionalize, however, I recommend hotdogs, hamburgers, a few Budweisers, and a little American football.

Spike THIS!!

2010-03-01T17:20:00.000-08:00

The other day my wife showed me a message she received from one of her coworkers about the dangers of going out in New York City. The message claimed that several women had had their drinks spiked while out at the bars. That the women “lost consciousness” after consuming several drinks, was the only evidence proffered.

Now, I’ve always been a little skeptical of the average “I think my drink was spiked” claim. Stories about GHB, Ketamine and Rohypnol finding their way into women’s drinks have in the past struck me as questionable for a couple of reasons. For one, most of the women I knew in high school and college could drink more and pop more pills than the men. And two, I could never understand why men would just give away good drugs on the uninviting prospect of humping some poor passed-out chick. What a terrible reason to spend a few years in prison!!! Indeed, why not take the drugs yourself and be assured of having a great time? Prison free, no less!

This time, however, I had a little time on my hands. So, before I let my personal preconceptions about urban legends and female vindictiveness lead me to hold unsupportable conclusions, I decided to do a bit of research. After a few simple searches I found several sites that appeared to support the spiked drink thesis. Maybe this is real, I thought.

But as I read on I found many of these sites lacking in any quantifiable evidence. In fact, the “information” they did provide seemed absurdly useless. For instance, all the sites described the symptoms of drinking a spike drink as feeling “disoriented and dizzy.” They claimed that people who’ve had their drinks spiked tend to “lose their inhibitions,” and “become unconscious, unable to defend [themselves], or unable to remember what happened.”

Now, I’m no scientist. But don’t you typically lose your inhibitions, have trouble defending yourself, become dizzy and disoriented whenever you drink a lot? Hell, I thought that was the fucking point!!!

Eventually I stumbled across an interesting article that deals with this issue head on. Published in the British Journal of Criminology, the article declares as simply implausible the (strangely unchallenged) premise that women are commonly drugged while out drinking.

“Drug-facilitated sexual assault is a culturally embedded crime fear, it has prompted the creation and distribution of ‘risk products’, and there seems to be widespread acceptance that it is a prevalent form of ‘date rape’. Yet, routinized DFSA is improbable as a widespread crime: it involves a stranger extracting an individual from her social group unnoticed, administering a substance undetected, precisely controlling drug effects, and reliably erasing memory of the experience. Indeed, the conclusions of scientific and police investigation suggest that DFSA is in fact a very limited threat.”

So why is there such a fear of a crime that seems so implausible? The article goes on to answer this question. But I won’t take up space with the interesting conclusions. Have a look for yourself.

EMBODYING UNCERTAINTY? Understanding Heightened Risk Perception of Drink ‘Spiking.’ By Adam Burgess , Pamela Donovan and Sarah E. H. Moore, British Journal of Criminology (2009) 49, 848–862.

Poo Poo Broussard goes to Hollywood

2010-02-27T15:36:00.000-08:00

Leonardo d’Broussard!!

What happened when ET show’d up down ‘n da’ Bayou.

Hey! I know that guy.

2010-02-26T06:15:00.000-08:00

Freakin' Hilarious!!

What's that called . . . ?

2010-02-25T11:04:00.000-08:00

You know, uhhmm, when you, uhh, act like a real pompous f**king jerk; and then something bad happens to you. What do we usually call that???

Oh yeah, KARMA.

Apolo Ohno is Saved!! Enter new MORTAL ENEMY

2010-02-25T07:31:00.000-08:00

For years there was a name no westerner dared utter in polite Korean society. There was one man so hated by the Korean people, so scorned by the Korean media, so seemingly worthy of the weight of all of Korea’s sternest condemnation. That man? The dreaded Apolo Anton Ohno!

Merely alluding to his existence was enough to cloud the brightest sky and make the happiest children break into screaming fits. The visceral hatred of Apolo Ohno had the power to drive Marxists into the arms Capitalists, bring protesters together with CEOs, North Korea together with South. Korea was unified in its loathing of this man.

His coercive power and blatant duplicity was legend on the Peninsula. Of course he had bribed the Olympic judges, Koreans argued in unison. Of course, he abused the diplomatic and military power of the United States to steal the gold from Korea’s poor, innocent hands (it’s a well-known secret in Korea that the United States has a long tradition of putting all of its global and domestic power in the hands of the country’s best short-track skaters). To hear a Korean speak of him, one would assume Ohno snacked on grilled Korean children for breakfast, raped Korean women for entertainment, and wiped his ass with the shredded remains of King Sejong’s own Han-bok. That this monster dared to show his face in public was an affront to Koreans everywhere.

This all changed last night. There’s a new enemy in town.

Watch out, China! Korea’s wrath knows no bounds.

The Adversarial Style in the Historiography of the Spanish Civil War—A Short Review

2010-02-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

In The Unmasterable Past, historian Charles Maier heuristically compares the historian's role to the adversarial method of a lawyer. In an American courtroom “no lawyer is responsible for truth but only for a stylized text or dialogue that places his or her client in the most favorable light.” Maier is quick to condemn this approach; he insists that few historians would be comfortable with such a comparison. He might be shocked to learn that in the passion-filled historiography of the Spanish Civil War the aversion to this method appears decidedly less pronounced. Hispanists have found in the origins of the war a unique opportunity to draw ideological lines in the sand and, therefore, contribute the failure of the Second Republic to either the zealously revolutionary character of the Left or the fascism of the Right. On both sides, tendentious historians use inflammatory language and wield clumsy counterfactuals to promote their chosen position. The inevitable consequence of this standoff is the academic equivalent of a sandbox quarrel, a veritable “they started it” style argument with no discernible end.

This polarized situation both parallels and originates with the Second Republic's short history of factious, uncompromising political behavior—itself a product of the many pronunciamients of the mid-nineteenth century. As the trials of the Second Republic bear out—the failed Sanjurjada of 1932, the Anarcho-syndicalist insurrection of 1933, the failed revolution of 1934—neither side was willing to accept the role of loyal opposition. For both Left and Right, the Republic was not a format for representing divergent ideas and interests, “but rather,” as Stanley Payne explains, merely “the institutional matrix for a series of far-reaching reforms.” Franco’s successful military dictatorship continued the tradition well into the 1970s. Not surprisingly, in the years since Franco, Spanish historians have railed against the old narrative. In dramatic contrast to the situation just a generation ago, it's now quite common for historians within Spain to emphasize the democratic pedigree of the Left to the detriment of the Right. Recently, however, a reaction to the reaction has emerged. History popularizers like Pío Moa along with venerable hispanists like Stanley Payne have increasingly vented their frustration with the now-accepted reductionist terminology that equates the Left with Republican democracy and the Right with dictatorship and democratic repression. They propose historians revisit the role the Left played in the demise of the Second Republic.

In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, Stanley Payne sketches the tortuous history of the fragile Spanish democracy and condemns both sides for anti-democratic behavior. Payne demonstrates convincingly that neither side was interested in maintaining the democratic system for anything other than the implementation of partisan reforms. After the failed insurrection of 1934, itself anti-democratic, the “CEDA sought a counterreform, especially in religious, military, and socioeconomic policy.” From their position of power, they closed down hundred of jurados mixtos, established the legal category of huelga abusiva, and attempted to reverse the agricultural reforms instituted during the previous biennium. For its part, the Popular Front, after its victory in 1936, used the comisión de actas to further minimize the few successes of the opposition. As Payne explains, this “meant in effect that the victors in each election had the power to sit in judgment on the losers and determine if their parliamentary representation should be reduced still further.” In areas where the Popular Front had decisive wins, the irregularities were mostly ignored. However, in areas where the results favored the Right, places like Cuenca and Granada, complete annulments were declared.

While Payne is careful to condemn both sides for dismantling the republic, he heaps the vast majority of his criticism on the Left. As Payne sees it, the left's anti-democratic stance springs from their support for a socialist/communist revolution. Consistent with the Comintern line, the PCE and other like-minded groups sought to use “the façade of democratic legitimacy to strengthen its position.” The proposed estrategia del desgaste advocated the use of strikes, violence and the seizure of property to weaken the capitalist system and pave the way for revolution. Propaganda and violence constituted a large part of this strategy. Payne speaks of a “reign of terror” against landowners in the countryside. He quotes Calvo Sotelo as he condemns the “violence” and “revolutionary destruction” coming from the left; he condemns the leftist propaganda for inducing states of hysteria resulting in riots, church burnings, and killings; he blames Casares Quiroga for declaring the Right “enemies” of the Republic; he demonstrates how the Popular Front used terms like “fascist” and “enemies” to conflate “the Republic itself with the policies of the left.” And, he draws a connection between the rise of the Falange and the indiscriminate repression of the Right by the Left. In essence, Payne's position is that the extreme anti-democratic policies of the Left contributed heartedly to the equally extreme anti-democratic policies of the Right.

At times Payne's conclusions seem overly tendentious and extreme. In his zeal to break with the politically correct historical narrative, he often over-states his case. This seems especially obvious in his treatment of the CEDA. He absolves the group of any complicity in the rise of violence that precipitated the 1936 golpe. He ridicules the Left for being so naïve as to believe their own extreme rhetoric—specifically that the CEDA constitutes a “fascism as fierce and inhuman as that of the Nazis.” Yet he accepts without question the statements that declare the CEDA willing to “continue to cooperate with the government.” In his mind they are accountable only for being “ambiguous about [their] ultimate goals.”

Notwithstanding these criticisms, his indictment of the Left as hearty contributors in the escalation of rhetoric is an important contribution to the historiography of the civil war. The PCE, while still marginal, was particularly overt in its support for radical reforms. They advocated the confiscation of land, the cancellation of debt, the nationalization of industry, the suppression of the military, and an alliance with the Soviet Union. Francisco Largo Caballero, enthusiastically deemed the “Spanish Lenin,” declared unambiguously that the Republic was merely the means by which a “dictatorship of the proletariat” could be achieved. Indalecio Prieto, a leading organizer of the 1934 revolution, encouraged overturning the government even while attempting to temper the escalating violence—a violence he blamed on the repression that followed the October revolution. In light of all this, Chris Ealham's criticisms of Payne seem especially ridiculous. It's true, as he so states, that a politician's words are not always the best indicator of his intentions. And for this reason, Largo's and Prieto's words should be taken with a grain of salt. However, it's quite another thing to assume that the Right was overreacting by taking them at their word. Barring any access to a magical window into the future, to accept their threats as real seems entirely reasonable. This does not absolve the right of any wrongdoing. It does, however, complicate the popularly-held notions of a democratic Left being overturned by a fascist, anti-democratic Right.

Not surprisingly, few Spanish historians have been convinced by this argument. Helen Graham, as evidenced in The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, continues to hold firmly to an interpretation of the war as the inevitable outcome of an anti-democratic Right's bid for power. Graham states unequivocally that the military coup was a shameless “rising against mass democracy [cloaked in] a traditional political veneer.” Thus, in one sentence Graham has conveniently succeeded in wiping away all relevant complexity. She divides the battle into two neat categories: “good guys” and “bad guys”, democrats and usurpers. She ignores entirely the anti-democratic revolutionary rhetoric spewing from the Left as well as the radical nature of their proposed reforms. The 1934 October Revolution is described as simply the culmination of “frustrations on the Left.” There is no mention of how this uprising might have influenced the behavior of the Right. Nor does she bother to describe it as inherently anti-democratic.

On this point the journalist and dilettantish historian Pío Moa is particularly unmoved. The bold thesis of his Los Orígenes de la Guerra Civil Española is that the October Revolution of 1934 constituted the first battle of the Spanish Civil War; and that the Left actively pursued it. He stridently attacks the charge that the revolution was defensive in origin; this is central to his argument. Like Payne, he believes it's a foolish oversimplification of history to insist, as Graham has, that the Left was pro-democracy and the Right anti-. The civil war must be put in its appropriate historical context, he demands. The era following the First World War was a time of great change and disorder: Germany went to the Nazis, France went to the Left, Spain was wracked by Anarcho-syndicalism and cries for socialist revolution. In his opinion, the PSOE and the Esquerra chose to go to war because they felt the time was ripe to “overthrow the bourgeoisie and to fulfill the socialist revolution.” They showed little concern for democracy. And because the conflict set the tone of politics over the following 21 months before the outbreak of hostilities in 1936, it’s impossible to evaluate the origins of the civil war without considering it.

If these reasonable conclusions were all he insists on, his books would hardly be so controversial. Unfortunately for him, and by extention his arguments, his antipathy for the Left is so strong as to make him seem nostalgic for Franco. He lists a litany of abuses perpetrated on the general population by the Left during the 1934 revolution: stockpiling guns, burning churches, killing women, children and priests. Yet he minimizes and rationalizes the repression in its wake. Indeed, he even seeks to absolve the late dictator and the Right in general of much of their culpability for the civil war. He insists that it was widely believed, both inside and outside the country, that the Right would break with legality and institute a dictatorship. The fact that this didn't happen in 1934 is proof that the Right was interested in maintaining democracy. As he sees it, Franco, in his position as asesora, turned down three great opportunities to start a coup. By some fit of strange deductive reasoning, Pío Moa concludes from this that Franco valued democracy and only reluctantly rose up in 1936.

It doesn't take an historian to see how some in Spain might recoil in horror at some of Pío Moa's statements. And it's unfortunate that some of his more reasonable assumptions are discounted because of this. Yet the willful oversimplification of the factors leading up to the civil war by respected historians like Helen Graham should be equally disturbing. It appears obvious that neither the Left nor the Right were able to value democracy over their own partisan interests. It's possible that Spanish historians and the Spanish public may someday come to accept this. For now, any criticism of the Left as anti-democratic remains prohibitively Francoish for mainstream opinions. For this reason, the adversarial style of history might remain a part of the debate over the origins of the Spanish Civil War for some time to come.

“Have You no DECENCY?!?!?!”

2010-02-23T13:09:00.000-08:00

No matter how many times I see this, it’s still great.

Pilgrimage to CBGB

2010-02-20T19:25:00.000-08:00

When I was 15 I was a punkrocking fool—steel-toed boots splashed with paint, chains and bandanas around both ankles, worn out blue jeans, resin-stained fingers, and Bad Religion tunes, in perfect discord, playing in a tape deck I found in a dumpster and blaring from the open windows of my ’89 Sundance. Those were the days.

Throughout high school I was fascinated by everything punk. The thick, bold, in your face beat of the anti-hero; songs that jeered and mocked the throngs of blank faces being ground up in the powerful machinery of an unforgiving world; songs that stretched laws and broke rules; songs that got people out of their chairs long enough to wonder why they were sitting there in the first place; songs that whipped up a frenzy of contradictions—youthful immortality wrapped in a melancholic self depredation.

The anti-hero wasn’t simply the subject of punk rock; punk rock was his expression. The music was a loud, guttural celebration of mediocrity. The screaming cacophonous simplicity of a fast-paced snare and high-hat, the pitchless reverberation of an out-of-tune base, and a the grinding wail of a filed-down pickup on a guitar playing three simple chords in rapid succession was a veritable monsoon of wretched talentlessness. And it was sheer magic to me.

The center of the punk rock world was at 315 Bowery, New York City: CBGB & OMFUG. Originally intended to feature, as the acronym suggests, Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers, it quickly became the center of the punk rock world and, arguably, the birthplace of American punk.

After years of imagining what it would be like, I decided to take advantage of my time here in New York and see it for myself this afternoon. I took a quick look at the map, decided I would head from the 9th ST. station through Union Square, and hopped on the PATH.

Union Square is about what I thought it would be—a paved and grassy assortment of benches, walkways, hippies, bums and storytellers. I took a spin around George Washington’s statue and headed down 6th toward CBGB. As I got closer I could see the beveled awning above the front door. And as I approached I noticed that it was black and not the white and red I remember; but this was hardly something to cry about.

Then, I saw it. “john varvatos!!??!!??” What the fuck is that??!! I strained to contain my exasperation. This wasn’t punk rock!! This was some kind of designer clothing store!!

I walked in wearing a beaming scowl. It certainly was CBGBs. They had preserved the stage, the flaking paint, graffiti, and the old flyer boards from out front. But, there were racks of sued jackets blocking the standing room, designer boots cluttering up the stage, and stacks of overpriced T-shirts lined up along the wall where the ball should have been. I walked to the back and asked one of the workers if the new owner had preserved anything else. Save the picture in the bathroom, he explained, there was nothing left.

The bathroom?? The bathroom??!! The birthplace of the Ramones and the New York Dolls, the light of my adolescence, the cultural firmament of my youth , . . . this was now a mere picture hanging in the bathroom waiting to be splashed with piss or gazed at through the strained, squinted eyes of somebody taking a big shit? To ask “what the fuck” was hardly sufficient. Screw these people! Next time I’ll leave the ideals of my youth right where they belong, in my head.

Snow Jobs, Linguistic Lunacy, and the Problem with Teachers

2010-02-18T11:23:00.001-08:00

Last weekend—after the record snowfall postponed it for a week—I attended the first job interview I’ve had in some time. I won’t mention the organization by name because, well, I think I have a good chance of getting hired. But I’ll give you some idea of the type of organization this is. Like Teach for America and other programs, this group recruits talented individuals (that’s me) who have been spared the misfortune of earning a degree in education.

Let me be frank here. I don’t begrudge educators; hell, I’m an educator myself. I do, however, believe that more often than not those who pursue a degree in education tend to be poorly prepared to educate. There are several reasons for this. But to minimize my incessant rambling—for which I have quite a penchant—I’ll confine my opinions to what I think is the most important reason. Those who advocate for degrees in education make the horribly false assumption that an ability to wield content is a natural consequence of learning to teach. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Now, one might argue, and they’d be correct, that many teachers have learned content after being exposed to it over the course of teaching the class. This argument—that a good teacher can overcome both hurdles and unpreparedness—may be sound. But by what distorted logic do we deem it reasonable to assume that most or even many teachers are capable of this feat. Why do we countenance this ridiculous argument? Of course a teacher should know how to teach. A carpenter should know the dimensions of a 2x4 (and it’s not 2x4 if that’s what you’re thinking). But you wouldn’t have someone build your house if he could only tout his ability to competently measure lumber. So why the hell would anyone let that someone into a classroom if they didn’t know what they are to teach?

But let me tear you away from my long digression for a moment. The interview process, for which I was one of approximately fifteen present applicants, included three activities and a personal interview. The first activity required that we watch a short class simulation video, and then write up a formal evaluation. The next two activities were critical thinking group exercises. Divided up into groups of four and five, we were presented with several scenarios and problems for which we were tasked with working out solutions.

It’s with the last activity that I had and continue to have real problems with. Let me explain. After coming back from a short lunch we were all, all fifteen or so of us, brought into a room and made to stand in a circle. At this point a perky little twit who had earlier identified herself as a trained linguist, an ominous enough sign at the time, dumped a large box of construction paper, string, and other odds and ends on the floor amongst us. She then told us to take ten minutes to construct a something we thought could symbolize “intelligence.” Intelligence, I thought. How fucking appropriate!

My first reaction was one of pity. Clearly, this poor idiot was unable to conceptualize intelligence herself; so she hoped we might help her by building it for her. Luckily for us we were allowed to use craft materials. In her padded room back at the monkey house she likely has only her stale feces and menstrual blood available with which to communicate with her captors.

So I dove into the junk, and, while everyone around me began pasting, cutting and folding, I decided to take a different route. I took one single strip of yellow construction paper that I bent into a circle and closed with a clothes pin. Voila!! Here’s the perfect symbol of intelligence. It’s simple, because true intelligence can make the complex seem simple. It’s yellow, the color of light, because intelligence is and should be equated with enlightenment (a natural enough metaphor, I thought). It’s a circle, no end and no beginning, because intelligence means nothing in isolation; intelligence must be shared. And, most significant of all, it showed that an intelligent person can find symbolism in not just everything but anything.

I sat proudly with my golden ring as everyone else feverishly pasted, cut and tore through paper and popsicle sticks on the floor. But then it really got weird. It quickly became clear to me that, despite all the feverish pasting, cutting and gluing, most of these people hadn’t a thought in their head about how to demonstrate “intelligence” without words. What occurred in that room, the moronic dancing, spinning, shit-faced grins, and arm waving was enough to make a retard embarrassed. It was an uncomfortably long process of sheer foolishness followed by unearned applause and a speedy exit.

So what did we learn? What piece of profound enlightenment did we walk away with? Well, I’ll give you a hint; it ends with “ALL” and starts with “FUCK.”

Wikipedia . . . and the ship you rode in on!!!

2010-02-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

After a couple years of tolerating the deplorable state of a Wikipedia article I have a particular interest and expertise in, I decided to revise the thing from top to bottom. With all the propriety I could muster, I made a point of announcing my plans in some detail on the discussion page. I told everyone concerned exactly what I planned to do, how I planned to do it, and why I thought it was necessary. At that point I had almost no experience with either Wikipedia or the poor bastards that guard the gates there. I was, however, quickly introduced.

After crafting a radical revision of the lead—turning what was before a series of clumsily-joined sentences and seemingly irrelevant facts into a cohesive argument-driven introduction—I was somewhat shocked to read a trite and testy condemnation of my work. “None of your goals were achieved in the edit,” it said; “it's wordy, unsourced [sic] opinion.”

Now, I’m well aware of the philosophy behind Wikipedia. Nobody owns an article; we are all supportive members of the collaborative process. Fine! Great! No problem! I’m not offended by criticism. Indeed, I rather welcome it. But I’m typically exposed to constructive criticism. This seemed like a tantrum in the form of a text message.

Undeterred, I responded to the criticism with a long, deliberate, subtly condescending (hence the pompous [sic]) defense of my work. I then proceeded to entirely redesign the historical background section. I changed the tone, injected some important details about how the event affected life beyond the English-speaking world, and corrected some foolish harping about the significance of this doctrine and that official.

About a week later, as I was working on the next few sections of the article, I notice that someone had made some slight corrections to a single sentence within a major edit. This person, at least, had the courtesy to post an explanation of his corrections. But his concerns were trivial and his edits left the sentence awkward and broken.

Needless to say, this continued to happen—a word change here, a clause deletion there, an occasional testy comment, and several random acts of vandalism that were quickly corrected. If I’ve lost you, I apologize. But what I’m trying to get at here is that the people running Wikipedia, the many editors and administrators with tens of thousands of edits to their credit, lines of awards on their talk pages, and clearly more time than they deserve all seem to have nothing of any real substance to add. Their criticism is often unnecessary at best, poorly rationalized vandalism at worst.

So, to any and all of you out there. . . . Thanks for being there to keep articles free from things like “Sam was here” and “America Rocks.” But, please, back off a bit and let the people who invest real time and have real experience work.