All posts by Steve Stern

Kicking the can

October 21, 2013Americana, Politics, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

The government is back up and running – using the running, very loosely – and nothing seems to have changed. In some ways, it seems like Congress has just kicked the can down the road. Maybe the road will look different next January when it will be closer to elections, maybe it will look different because the assessment of the players – on both sides – will be different going in, and maybe it won’t.

I started to write about an incident with a woman in a supermarket to make my point and then remembered that I told the same story in 2011 – it obviously made a big impression on me – so here it is Something like twenty-five years ago – I remember it like it was only five years ago – I was waiting in the ten items or less line, when I realized the person two or three people in front of me had an over-full cart being pushed by a crazy looking teenager. Just then, her mother came running over very embarrassed saying something like Oh! no, dear; it is not nice to put a full cart in this line. The crazy teenager just looked at us like somebody yelling in the street and said “They don’t care”. She probably wasn’t drooling but I do remember her looking slightly dangerous in a ready to go berserk way. We all looked at our feet, including the checker, and she went ahead.¹

It was a vivid demonstration of how much power the craziest person in the room has and it has, obviously, stuck with me. I am going to define crazy person – here – as someone being willing to let the government collapse if they don’t get their way. Leading up to the shutdown, the right fringe of the Republican Party – who I am calling the Tea Party, for brevity – gave every indication that they would be the only crazy person in the room. They constantly made statements indicating that they were willing to take the country down to get their way (and that the government was so bad, or so big, or so ineffectual, or so something, that taking it down wouldn’t matter or might, even, be good). The Tea Party power, however, rested on the belief that they were the only people crazy enough to actually take this government down.

Obama has a long history – as long as you can have in four and a half years of being president – of compromising (sometimes it even seemed as if he was compromising before the settlement talks started). This time however, Obama said he would not compromise, We’re not going to pay a ransom for America to pay its bills ….we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy. Like the Tea Party, his beliefs were strong enough, he was crazy enough, to let the government shutdown. Additionally, he seemed willing to not compromise to raise the debt ceiling, no matter how much damage it would do.

Obama bet that he could justify his motives for his crazy behavior better than the Tea Party could and the polls proved him right. He bet that, what Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker calls the Republican “survival caucus”, would vote for a compromise if there were two crazy people in the room. He was right. In the end, just eighty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-two Republicans in the House of Representatives, changed their collective minds, but that was enough, along with the Democratic members who compromised on the timeline.

I am not sure that the Democrats had much of a choice in this except to compromise on the timeline. They had to compromise on something to make a deal and, with Obama refusing to give on Obamacare, all that was left was the time line (the did agree to means test reimbursable payments for low-income people buying insurance but that was, apparently, already in the bill). In the end, everybody agreed to kick the can down the road.

1. https://srstern.com/2011/in-defense-of-obama-or-the-advantage-of-being-crazy/

From way too fast on the road to beauty in cyberspace

October 17, 2013Art, Cars, Web/TechSteve Stern

If you grew up in California in the 50s and were obsessed with cars, at some point you raced on the street. In my case, it was right after I got my license and I got caught about three weeks later and lost my license for the next 60 days. Our idea of racing on public roads was pretty much limited to drag racing, And, for the most part, only the first five hundred feet from a stop light. But in Europe, they were hardcore; they had real, official, racing on the street.

OK, they called it roadracing, but it was the same thing. I am not sure when they started roadracing – probably less than one week after the car was invented – but it pretty much ended by the end of 1950s. By then, racing on public roads had become truly insane with the all-out-racecars hitting speeds more commonly associated with airplanes. Probably the craziest of all these races was the Mille Miglia – meaning a thousand miles and pronounced mille mille as a sort of pun – that started at Brescia near the Alps, ran south to Rome, and then north back to Brescia. All of this on second rate Italian roads with an estimated 5,000,000 Italians watching. Usually watching from very close.

The record for the Mille Milga was set by Sterling Moss in a Mercedes Benz at an average speed of 97.96 miles per hour (on narrow, rough, windy, Italian roads). The car was called a 300SLR and was supposed to resemble the standard Mercedes Benz 300SL sports car, however, in reality, the car was a full blown, hand built, race car. Several years ago, Mercedes built 75 updated versions of this car – only about ten originals were built – to sell to very rich people at about a million dollars each (very rich people who, apparently, don’t need a windshield). But the point of all this is that Jimmy at Peak-Design – I think, it is Peak-Design, I know it is via Deviant Art – thought Wow it would be awesome with a normal hardtop and some black rims. He then resigned it on his computer. I’m impressed and would buy it in a minute, if it were real and I had several hundred million dollars.

Rush & Gravity

October 15, 2013FilmSteve Stern

Rush5 Michele and I saw Rush a couple of weeks ago and it was very good. I wish it were a transcendental movie that I could fall all over myself recommending, but it wasn’t and I can’t. Ron Howard doesn’t make transcendent movies, but he does make consistently good to very good movies.

For me, it had the added benefit of being about Formula One and an era of Formula One that I really don’t know much about.

When I was somewhere around eight to eleven, I had gone to a couple of races with my dad , but – in those days – the races were hard to see because they were held on city streets and we stood behind temporary fences and, often, trees. I remember a race in Golden Gate Park and one on the 17 Mile Drive at Pebble Beach and in both of them I could only see a short section of road and had almost no idea of what was going on. But the seed had been planted.

By the time I was a teenager, I had become car crazy and then sportscar crazy. That led to roadracing and the ultimate roadracing was Formula One. Not that we had much exposure to F1, as it is usually called now, but we could read about it – once a month about two months after the event – in Road and Track magazine. I followed it as close as a sixteen year old could follow anything in print and even had a picture of my hero, Sterling Moss, on by bedroom wall (much to the concern of my mother who didn’t understand and would have prefered I had a picture of somebody like Liz Taylor).

When I was twenty, I saw my first Formula One race at Riverside Raceway, but by my 30s I had drifted away from the fold and missed the era of Rush. When I met Michele, I didn’t watch much TV and have no idea if F1 was on TV or not but, by the time we got a DVR, I could timeshift and watch F1 races live on Sunday morning. I fell in love with F1 all over again having missed the 70s and 80s.

Rush is a story of two men during that period, specifically the 1976 fight for the championship. The two guys are wildly different – probably more so than in real life – and, I am pretty sure, it is a movie anybody would enjoy.

Gravity, on the other hand, is brilliant. Don’t take my word for it, everybody thinks it is brilliant, Stephanie Zacharek at The Village Voice pretty much sums it up: Gravity is harrowing and comforting, intimate and glorious, the kind of movie that makes you feel more connected to the world rather than less. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone is even more effusive: The Mexican-born [ director ]Cuarón is a true visionary….he turns Gravity into a thing of transcendent beauty and terror. It’s more than a movie. It’s some kind of miracle.

If you you are going to see one movie this year, go to Gravity, if you are going to see more than one, you won’t go wrong with Rush.

Shutdown, honor, and doing what ever we want

October 14, 2013Americana, Psychological Musings, UncategorizedSteve Stern

My complaint with organized religion – my fear of, really – is not in any particular belief structure. I listen to Pope Francis say If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge? – and I think , Now there is a holy man, there is a man connected to something greater than himself. My grievance, my fear of, is with that faction – that all religions seem to have – that justifies what they want by the certainty of using God. Hey! don’t blame me about my belief that homosexuality is bad, God told me to believe that way.

When I listen to the doctrinaire faction of the Republican Party, the No Compromise faction, what scares me is that they have that certainty. They seem to believe what they are saying. While what they are saying – and doing – seems cynical and hypocritical to me, I am fearful that they are doing it out of the religion of greater National Need. I am alarmed that this government shutdown isn’t a beef between the Republicans and Democrats. I am alarmed that the Republicans are shutting down the government just to shut the government down. What distresses me is that the shutdown is the goal.

Sure, not all the Republicans feel this way, maybe not even a majority feel this way, but a hardline core does and they are wagging the dog right now. That minority is looking at themselves as being honorable (much more honorable than that Kenyan President). They are what Eric Hoffer called True Believers.

To – not quite – pick an example at random, going to Michelle Bachmann’s website gives the impression that she is very happy with the government shutdown. She is so certain in her beliefs that she doesn’t even see the irony in voting – and campaigning – to shut down the Government and then working to get the WWII Memorial open, saying, on her website, Another wonderful day of greeting brave WWII veterans from across the country at their memorial. Of course part of it is that Bachmann only wants to shutdown the bits she doesn’t like, but it alarms me that she believes the parts she likes are the only legitimate parts.

While I don’t understand John Boehner’s strategy – he talks like he knows the shutdown is doing damage and then continues to keep the government from functioning – or his justification, I am sure he has one. Maybe he thinks that he is the only rational player on the right and he justifies his actions as the only way to keep the barbarians from taking over.

Everybody has a justification – a reason if you prefer – for what they do. Just saying I am doing it because I want to is not enough. Especially when what we want to do is horrible or illegal. Then the reason is often about a truth that is bigger than the immediate issue. Often that bigger truth it is a truth that other observers can’t see.

Winding down The Cousin’s trip: The Rim Fire

September 30, 2013Americana, Around home, PhotographySteve Stern

The Rim Fire started about three weeks before The Cousins were slated to arrive at Tahoe. At the end of the get together, Michele and I were going to take one of The Cousins – Marion, a British photojournalist now living in France – to Yosemite, so I started watching satellite pictures to see where the smoke was going. It was startling how fast the fire grew. It is changing now, but – for years – our National Fire policy made the fire problem worse. Smokey the bear and Bambi insisted that we put out all fires. Meanwhile the forests continued to produce kindling so that, eventually, when a fire started it would be much more powerful and destructive than if we had let nature take its course. This was one of those new, bigger, fires.

Michele went back to Napa to be with her mother, so I ended up alone with Marion on the Yosemite leg of the trip. For three weeks minus one day, Yosemite was clear and Tahoe was smoky, then – one day before we headed south through Nevada to the backside of Yosemite – the wind changed.

Driving south through the Minden-Gardnerville area, the west looked clear as we passed the very spot I had abandoned the Range Rover this spring. Only now I am looking at the view rather than a radiator hose. Every time we pass grazing cattle with mountains in the background, Marion wants to stop. It is an iconic western scene for which I have become so accustomed that I almost don’t see it. Now, seeing the same scene through Marion’s eyes, it seems almost exotic.

A little while later, we get to the Nevada-California stateline with the obligatory casino. I have never stopped here in – maybe – more than twenty five trips, but, today, the timing is perfect for lunch. The view is great and the food is cheap (to get customers in, I’m guessing).

I read recently read that dance clubs like XS at the Encore resort in Las Vegas are now making more money than gambling. Not here. Here gambling is still the draw; OK, gambling and the $6.99 all you can eat lunch (which, strangely enough, was better than the upscale restaurant we ate at in Reno the night before). And, even at that, the gambling area was dismally empty.

Running south along the eastern edge of the Sierras was a little like running along the Dagorlad Plain outside of Mordor. Looking at Matterhorn Peak and Sawtooth Ridge from Bridgeport was not comforting.

Neither was looking down on Mono Lake from the viewpoint near Conway Summit.

However, it was not until we got to Tuolumne Meadows that the full impact of the smoke from the fire really hit me. Everything was just dark and dead. The Tuolumne sparkle was gone. The Range of Light was dark and cold. I was shocked both to see my beloved Sierras this way and that Marion’s first impression was so dismal.

Sunset at Olmsted Point was a little better but not much.

That night we were supposed to meet Nicole, Claudia, and Christian’s family at the Whoa Nelly, in Lee Vining for dinner, but we got our signals crossed and semi-missed them, which seemed very appropriate.

Highway 120 was closed at Yosemite Creek – or thereabouts – because of the fire, so my old plan of going over Tioga into Yosemite Valley didn’t work. My new plan was to spend the night in Lee Vining, where we had a reservation made before the fire, and then drive around the fire if 120 remained closed. It did and the next day, we would drive north and cross the Sierras at Sonora Pass and then pick up Highway 120 and go into Yosemite Valley from the west. It was cumbersome – 200 miles of mountain roads, more than 4 hours – but I kept telling myself that it was a pain in the ass for me but this fire was disaster for alot of people, So stop complaining.

In the morning, we had an early breakfast at Latte Da where the day was bright and almost clear, and then headed north and then west into Mordor again.

By the time we got there, the Rim Fire was mostly contained and on the west side of the Sierras, we ran into Thank You signs.

Finally, at the Rim of the WorldView Turnout on Highway 120 – which is probably where the fire’s name came from – we saw the burned out hillsides of the Tuolumne Canyon. The size of the devastation was breathtaking, it went as far north as we could see.

When I was a kid, we were taught that a fire killed everything in its path (and it is easy to believe when looking at the just burned out Tuolumne Canyon). In school ,and TV ads, we were shown movies of poor Bambi left motherless by fire. However, sometime during the 1980, the BLM or the Forest Service changed their policy and started letting wild fire burn as long as they weren’t burning people or buildings. There was alot of pushback on the new policy by traditionalists (as recently as 1988, most people were up in arms when the BLM let the Yellowstone fire burn). Now, everybody is starting to understand that fires are a necessary part of the natural cycle and the forests need them to stay healthy.

We saw the proof shortly after we drove by the devastation of the Rim Fire, when we saw the rebounding site of the 2009 Big Meadow Fire.

The whole purpose of this drive was to get Marion into Yosemite and now it was becoming obvious that it would be smoke filled. There were times during the 60s that we went to Yosemite Valley almost every weekend. We would backpack in the Highcountry and end the trip in the Valley. Or take the shuttle to Glacier Point and walk down past Nevada Falls and, ending in the late afternoon, walk down the Mist Trail. It was magic.

But that was a long time ago and I had forgotten how spectacular Yosemite valley is. It was smoky and the light was flat, but Marion was still able to catch a bit of the grandeur.