All posts by Steve Stern

It’s the great Nancy Pelosi’s House

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, Politics

As an aside: Try Goggling images of Nancy Pelosi. Most of them are pretty bad – they are either shot to make her look bad or doctored to make her look bad. I am not sure why; maybe it is because the right just takes up more space – in the same way that a Hummer takes up more space than a Honda Civic – but I could be convinced that we are even more of a sexist nation than we are a racist nation. Either way, or if something else is going on that hasn't occurred to me, Nancy Pelosi doesn't seem to get the same respect that the great Sam Rayburn got, or great Tip O'Neil or, even Thomas Reed. But there is a funny thing about racism or sexism, or homophobia for that matter, once we get to know somebody and they are no longer an archetype; it is much harder to remain a racist or sexist, or homophobe.  End aside.

With all the credit that should go to President Obama – and he has done an extraordinary job of getting the Health Care Bill pushed through – without Nancy Pelosi it wouldn't have happened. Period! 

To quote NEWSER,- a sort of web Reader's Digest for those of us that think three paragraphs is just too long  –

President
Obama may be the one history remembers for pulling off the biggest
domestic policy reform in decades, but Nancy Pelosi "emerges from this
battle as the real powerhouse in Washington," Julian Zelizer writes for CNN.
Wielding both a "clear ideological agenda" and the "pragmatic political
tactics" to round up votes, Pelosi is the clear heir to Ted Kennedy's
legacy, Zelizer writes.
After Scott Brown's election, with
Harry Reid and Rahm Emanuel backing away from comprehensive health
reform, Pelosi "kept the steel in the president’s back," a Democratic
rep tells Politico.
"When Kennedy died, many Democrats wondered who would take his place as
the party's dealmaker," concludes Zelizer. "Now they have their
answer."


Speaker+Nancy+Pelosi

Obama as a Jedi master: Health Care Edition

Americana, Current Affairs, Obama, Politics

At the end of the day, Saturday, I got home after being at a event honoring women in the military – a post on that to follow – and sat down to check the news. In the New York Times, under the article on the Pope and the latest sex scandals, was an article saying Obama Rallies Democrats in Final Push for Health Care.

The article talked about exactly what the headline said but it didn't, in my opinion, really capture the moment. C-SPAN did with the meeting on video – I guess we can't really say video-tape any more – and it was truly extraordinary. Who ever called the meeting to order, first talked about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and how she was going to do something that no other House Speaker has been able to do.

About that time, Michele came in and said I am hungry. I said I am too, let's go out and get something to eat. But I want to watch this for a minute. We started watching the meeting again, at the beginning, and  and an hour later, we finally went out to dinner. Feeling much better about America. If you have an hour, watch the meeting here, you won't regret it.

To quote Michael Scherer in his article titled Without A Teleprompter, in Time's Swampland:

We knew president Obama would give a speech today to House Democrats.
We didn't know it would be this good of a speech. The video below is
just the last ten minutes of an address that lasted about 30 minutes.

I suggest you start watching at 2 minutes. The president takes his
caucus on the political equivalent of a guided meditation. Assuming the
bill passes, this is political rhetoric for the history books.

Archeology as projection or We usually find what we look for

China, Evolution, Politics, Science, Travel

Psychological projection…is the unconscious act of denial of a person's own
attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the
outside world, such as to the weather, the government, a tool, or to
other people. Thus, it involves imagining or projecting that
others have those feelings. Wikipedia

Machu Picchu

In 1988, I had the opportunity to see Machu Picchu with a native guide who was an archaeologist. When I say native, I mean an Inca. Or a decedent of one of the other tribes subjugated by the Incas. Every once in a while, I read a sort of rhetorical question along the lines of what ever happened the Incas. – or Mayas? or, for that matter, the Romans?

The answer is nothing, they are still there but, because they are the indigenous people, they are usually ignored. Anyway, this anthropologist was one of the first indigenous people, in Peru, to get a degree in Anthropology. And he immediately set out to prove that the European anthropologists were full of shit.

Hiram Bingham, who is given credit for discovering Machu Picchu thought it was the estate of an Inca emperor or high priest, and he had all sorts of theories on what the various structures were. Usually the theories revolved around some sort of bloody sacrifice. Our guide thought it was just an run of the mill small town, like an Inca Healdsburg, and the only reason it was noteworthy is because it wasn't sacked by the Christian explorers like everything else.

He also showed us, what the Europeans thought were several "sacrificial altars" that even had little channels that "carried the blood away". Except that he showed us that the channels were lines that lined up with the sun or moon's location at
the Winter and Summer equinox. They were really solar and lunar observatories. One channel was even lined up with the true North-South axis.

He went from altar to altar, site to site, saying Look, look at this, they don't even ask what it is for. They don't even speak good Spanish and they don't speak any Quechua. They don't talk to the locals. Why not, they are Incas. I am glad to say that now pretty much everybody agrees with our guide. 

I bring all this up because, yesterday, I read an article in the NYT that there is going to be a show in California of mummies and artifacts found on the Silk Road in China. It looks like it will be a great show. The Chinese have found, or re-found, an old cemetery in a desert region of western China. And in this cemetery are mummies that turn out to have European features and DNA from Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Siberia, but not China.

Small River Cemetery

According to the NYT,

As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet
tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from
some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.

So what do they think these 13 foot tall poles are? phallic symbols,
signaling an intense
interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation. The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism.

Maybe they are right, but, in reality, they have no idea. Just like Hiram Bingham had no idea so he projected the bloody rituals on the Incas, the Chinese anthropologists project their idea of sex-crazed Europeans on these 4,000 year old mummies.But it still should be a very interesting show.


Cats and dogs and big cats

Americana, Current Affairs, San Mateo County

When I was a boy, we had a dog named Zola*. Almost everybody I knew, that had a pet, had a dog. Dogs were the heroes in movies like Old Yeller. Lassie, and Rin Tin Tin. The only people that had cats were villains and old ladies. Cats were bad – well, not exactly bad, more couldn't help it evil. Think Silvester.

Now everybody I know who has a pet, has a cat. Even people who have dogs, have cats**. 

When I was that same boy, there were no longer wolves in the Bay Area and coyotes had yet to move in. There were no cougars or mountain lions, either. But, while the wolves seem to be really gone, the cougars are moving back in. And they are being embraced. The cover of our local park district magazine sports a mountain lion on the cover and an article inside promotes their virtues. So, it seems, both General U. S. Grant and mountain lions are making a comeback. Maybe health care will pass after all.

Mtn. Lion Cover 

* for Émile Zola who accused the French Army of antisemitism and obstruction of justice when they convicted a Jewish artillery captain, Alfred Dryfus, of treason. 

** except for the Obamas who only have a dog.

Put Ronald Reagan on the $50 and take Ulysses S. Grant off? Huh?

Uncategorized

Most people who know me, know that I am a big admirer of General U S Grant. Some of them think that I am just being contrary, some think it is some sort of strange idiosyncrasy, and some have concluded that I may be right – most don’t actually care one way or the other.

That’s fine; what people think of Grant is not going to change our world very much anyway. And, as Abraham Lincoln once observed, “Character is like a tree, and reputation like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of; the tree is the real thing.” Grant is still the real thing just as he was after his presidency when he was the most revered person in the reunited States. His Memorial, the largest in Washington, at one end of the Mall – with Lincoln at the other end and George Washington in the middle – testifies to that. (Double click to enlarge – Grant is wearing a oilcloth slicker and I believe the statue represents Grant when he turned south to re-engage Lee after the Battle of the Wilderness. It wasn’t going to be another skedaddle, after all.)

Statue of US Grant overlooking the Mall

But, much to my surprise, some historians are starting to come forward in praise of the good General.In an editorial in the New York Times, Sean Wilentz, the Lapidus Professor of History at Princeton University and author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008”, says In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, “on the altar of Radicalism.” That accomplished as much for freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson. 

And Wilentz continues, Though much of the public and even some historians haven’t yet heard the news, the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way. I expect that before too long Grant will be returned to the standing he deserves — not only as the military savior of the Union but as one of the great presidents of his era, and possibly one of the greatest in all American history.

And, in an in the Los Angeles Times, Joan Waugh, an Associate Professor at UCLA, says Shame on the 14 Republican congressmen who last week proposed substituting Ronald Reagan for Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill. Their action suggests they need a history lesson about the Northern general who won the Civil War and went on to lead the country. I feel better already.