All posts by Steve Stern

The Post and the Women’s March

Americana, Around home, Bay Area Walks

Michele and I saw The Post, the other night and I liked it, a lot. Maybe because it is political, maybe because it is a sort of homage to old-timey newspaper movies, but, mostly, I think because it is so comfortably familiar. I’m not normally a Steven Spielberg fan but he was the perfect director for this movie. The scenes of Merrill Streep walking into a room of all men, all in their dark power suits, seem so familiar  from my growing-up past and Streep’s tentative reaction is perfect. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t grow up in that environment, but I did grow up in an environment that was trying to ape that life. A life in which rich, cultivated, women were close to powerless but had the time and money to look great in their clothes. It was a time when a woman  being powerful was considered crass. Merrill Streep is great as one of these powerless women, Kay Graham – trusted only to manage the family while her husband was given a newspaper to run by her father – is forced to take control.  

This movie tells of a time, that seems longer ago than it was, when it wasn’t as obvious that men were killing the world (to paraphrase Mad Max Fury Road). It takes place in 1971 and Spielberg’s suburban, optimistic, sensibility is perfect for the time, giving us scenes like Graham leaving the supreme court and walking past a group of almost Rockwellian women, seemingly waiting for change. What a difference it was getting off Bart and going up an escalator into an immense crowd of, mostly women, who are no longer waiting; they want control now. Control of their bodies, control of their lives, and, I hope, control of the world.

Almost always, however, control is not freely given, it is seized. In this case, the only way to seize political power is through the ballot box and while slightly more women vote than men, only about 68% of women voted in 2016; I would guess that that number was considerably higher in this crowd. Everybody was in a celebratory mood and the most heartening thing to me was the high turnout of young women.

To answer the President’s question

Americana, Psychological Musings

“Why Are We Having All These People From Shithole Countries Come Here?” President Donald Trump

First of all, even though it was in-artfully said, it is a legitimate question. I’m going to define shithole country as any country tourists don’t want to go to. As an example, I don’t know anybody who went to Nigeria and stayed in a hotel in the capital, Abuja, on vacation. Abuja is a pretty fair-sized city of 2,440,000  and I bet it is interesting as hell. However, for the sake of this conversion,  I’m going to call Nigeria, a shithole country by the arbitrary definition that it is not a tourist destination. I mean, nobody is going to call France a shithole country (except when they didn’t want to put troops into Iraq, but they were a shithole country then because they were hard to boss around not because nobody wants to go there). So I’m going with  Nigeria. 

As I understand Trump’s question, If we don’t want to go to Nigeria, why do we want Nigerians to come here? Well, there are already about 275,000 Nigerians that have come here and a fair question is How are they doing? Nigerians, it turns out, are a hugely successful immigrant community, as are other African immigrants. According to Bloomberg, Nigerian immigrants “have a median household income well above the American average, and above the average of many white and Asian groups, such as those of Dutch or Korean descent.” Dutch or Korean success is a pretty high bar, but Nigerians are well-educated people – who value education – whose education level is way above our National average. A high proportion are Doctors and Engineers and this is a community that adds more to the country than their less educated European immigrant brethren. 

And, if you take longer to look at it than Trump obviously took, educated, ambitious, people are more likely to leave shithole countries because these countries are usually more violent and have more limited opportunities, than, say, Belgium. To answer Trump’s question, we should invite people in from shithole countries because they are the people who will Make America great again.

 

A thought on the way to cardiac rehab

Psychological Musings

I go to a cardiac rehab class at 8:30 in the morning, three times a week. I started when I had my aorta valve replaced by a new one, manufactured out of cow parts, and I have been going pretty much ever since. When I was working, I went to the 7:00 AM class but now I go to the 8:30 class. Anyway, I hit the only traffic light on my drive at about 8:15 and, except for the lull during the Christmas season, I always have to wait at the light. This morning, waiting for the light to change, maybe ten cars in front of me, a jogger was also waiting; standing by the side of the road in the shadow of a row of trees, under an already dark and brooding sky. I could barely see her but I was surprised she was wearing pants with huge legs, what we used to call palazzo pants in the 60s, and I could just barely make out her ponytail. Then the light changed and the cars started slowly moving forward and, as I got closer, the pants got thinner until they became regular jeans. Then I saw that it was a him not a her, and he didn’t have a ponytail. 

As I drove by the guy, I realized he wasn’t even a jogger, just a guy waiting for the light to change. It got me thinking about pattern recognition and our ability to see patterns, sometimes patterns that aren’t even there. We are hardwired to see patterns, all animals are. One of the easiest patterns to read are faces – two eyes over a nose and mouth hole – which are so easy to read that even computers and dumb animals can do it. As an aside, sheep are hardwired to run away from canine faces (think wolf for canine). Shepard dogs round up and control sheep by giving them the eye, essentially showing the sheep their eyes above a nose, to move sheep away from them. However, shepherds don’t want sheep guard dogs – think Old English Sheepdog or Komondor – to spook the sheep, they don’t want the sheep running away from their guard dogs, so they bred the guard dogs to have their eyes covered with hair thus thwarting the sheeps’ pattern recognition system. End aside. 

With just a little information, a shadowy figure by the side of the road, I saw a woman jogger with palazzo pants and she even had a ponytail. But most of the heavy lifting was done by my mind, filling in the blanks. It got me thinking about how often I must do that in other, non-visual, areas. What first came to mind was reading a snippet about Trump and then filling in the missing parts with parts that match my preconceived ideas. This is what makes political “dog whistles” work; Reagan says “inner city Welfare Queen driving a Cadilac” and our pattern recognition takes over from there.   

Feeling the earth shift from Cameron to Seth to Oprah

Americana, Around home, Film

 

I watched Buffalo lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars yesterday afternoon. It was the first football game – only part of a game really – I have seen since watching Bama beat the stuffing out of Arkansas, 41 to 9, in Mobile AL. On Facebook, Karen Amy had said something like So, is everybody rooting for Buffalo? I am, and I thought Man, it’s playoff season and I have no idea who in the playoffs except, now I know Buffalo is in and Baltimore probably isn’t, and it’s playoff season and I had better catch up. I turned on the game and it ran the background until we went to the Farmer’s Market. At the end of the day, I turned on the recording of the Cougars and Saints game, again pretty much in the background, while Michele put a chicken in a Römertopf. At one point, I watched Cameron Newton get slammed. Over and over again, by David Onyemata, and I thought These guys are like Roman Gladiators, risking getting hurt, or worse, only for their glorification and our entertainment. Yes, skill counts, very much so, but skill put to the use of overpowering the other.

As the chicken cooked in the Römertopf, we watched the final two minutes of the Cougars/ Saints game before switching to the Golden Globes. Seth Meyers opened with “Good evening, ladies and remaining gentlemen. I’m Seth Meyers and I’ll be your host tonight. Welcome to the 75th annual Golden Globes, and Happy New Year, Hollywood. It’s 2018, marijuana is finally allowed, and sexual harassment finally isn’t.” and I felt the world start to shift. 

The masculine skill of overpowering the other, that football so admires and showcases, may have got us into this modern world but, in a civilization drowning in its own excess stuff and carbon excrement, that skill has turned toxic. We need change, we need cooperation and collaboration, not alpha males bragging about the size of their buttons.

Halfway through the awards, Oprah was presented with The Cecil B. DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to the world of entertainment, and we were treated to a glimpse of the future. One of the most powerful people in the world gave a speech that was both a call to action and a call for inclusion:

But it’s not just a story affecting the entertainment industry. It’s one that transcends any culture, geography, race, religion, politics, or workplace. So I want tonight to express gratitude to all the women who have endured years of abuse and assault because they, like my mother, had children to feed and bills to pay and dreams to pursue. They’re the women whose names we’ll never know. They are domestic workers and farm workers. They are working in factories and they work in restaurants and they’re in academia, engineering, medicine, and science. They’re part of the world of tech and politics and business. They’re our athletes in the Olympics and they’re our soldiers in the military.
 
And there’s someone else, Recy Taylor, a name I know and I think you should know, too. In 1944, Recy Taylor was a young wife and mother walking home from a church service she’d attended in Abbeville, Alabama, when she was abducted by six armed white men, raped, and left blindfolded by the side of the road coming home from church. They threatened to kill her if she ever told anyone, but her story was reported to the NAACP where a young worker by the name of Rosa Parks became the lead investigator on her case and together they sought justice. But justice wasn’t an option in the era of Jim Crow. The men who tried to destroy her were never persecuted. Recy Taylor died ten days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.
 
The world shifted a little more. 

First Supermoon of the month

Around home, Current Affairs, Local events, Photography

For reasons unknown to me, I have not been able to upload any pictures since the Supermoon. Last month, we watched the Moonrise from Twin Peaks but we went to Corona Heights, lower and north of Twin Peaks. Because we were lower, I thought the moon would come up slightly later but, because it was the evening of New Year’s Day the San Francisco skyline was not as lite up. The crowd, however, was local.