All posts by Steve Stern

A Couple of Thoughts Between “Oh no”s

Politics

If you don’t get into the mind of the person you are talking to, you can say whatever you want. It won’t be heard. Norbert Haug, former Vice President of Mercedes-Benz Motorsport

When Trump started running against “an invasion” of Latin American immigrants, I thought he was wrong, thinking he should be running on the economy (which is, after all, booming). It turns out that I was wrong and I should have realized it when The New York Times ran a major article on white women Trump supporters saying that Trump is protecting them. At some point during last Tuesday night, Mark Shields commented that the only times the party in power didn’t lose seats in the election after the presidential election was Kennedy in 1962 and Bush in 2002. In both cases, we were, seemingly, on the cusp of war, the Bay of Pigs with Kennedy and Iraq with Bush. Trump campaigned on immigration being an invasion that the Democrats would allow and only he could, or would, protect us from, he turned himself into a sort of war-president – on the backs of helpless and hapless immigrants, I want to add –  like Kennedy or Bush. Anybody who thinks Trump is stupid is fooling themselves. 

The Democrats won the House and that is a big deal. I think. A lot of progressives, running as progressives, won but a lot didn’t. I had a big emotional – and small financial – investment in Beto O’Rourke, Andrew Gillum, and Stacey Abrams, and all three lost. I hadn’t expected that – I guess because I was too emotionally attached to be realistic – thinking that the three could expand the electorate.

I hope the new house doesn’t get bogged down in the Russian collusion bullshit. Yeah, the Russians helped Trump – or tried to – but, so what. Don’t get me wrong, I do think that Trump is a crook and a con-man but I don’t think the help he received rises to the level of an indictable crime and spending a lot of time on that will end up being as self-destructive as Newt Gingrich trying to impeach Clinton.  Although it would be fun to see the new  House investigate the Georgia governor’s election.   

Where the Democrats made the biggest gains seem to be the suburbs and I think that is a reflection of suburbanites being increasingly more identified with their cities. it is where the action is and where people go there on big nights out. 

 

 

“First Man” and “Free Solo”; A Couple of Movies About Superhumans

Film

First Man and Free Solo are strangely alike: both are about how far two very similar men have driven themselves beyond anything even resembling normalcy, and how that drive affects other people, especially their significant others. They are also very different movies; First Man is a Hollywood spectacular about one of the most famous men in the world, Neil Armstrong, the first human being to step on the moon, and Free Solo is a small budget portrait of an almost unknown climber, Alex Honnold, the only man to climb Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope. First Man was good – but not as good as I wanted it to be given that it was about one of my favorite subjects, the Space Race and going to the moon the first time, a trip in which Neil Armstrong’s sticks it with the gutsiest landing of all time – however, I liked Free Solo better. 

First Man stars Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong with Clair Foy as his wife and is directed by the great Damien Chazelle, of LaLa Land fame. What the movie does well is to show what a big risk going to the moon was. First Man is shot – primarily – from Armstrong’s point of view and, because of that, counter-intuitively, we don’t get a good sense of Armstrong as a person or the Space Program as history. Free Solo is shot by and directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. They are friends of Honnold – and openly worry if even making the movie increases the danger – and the movie is shot from their point of view. To my of thinking, that point of view presents both Alex Honnold as a person and puts his feat in context better than First Man did. Are the feats comparable, I think so. 

Check out their trailers, or, better yet, check out both movies. 

 

Happy Anniversary

Family

Last week, Michele and I celebrated our 25th Anniversary on the East Side of the Sierras. We had a stellar anniversary dinner at the Lakefront Restaurant – elevation 8600 feet – and two days of anniversary wandering around. We are soul mates but it has not always been an easy 25 years – for either one of us – but being together has always outweighed being apart. And for a couple of soulmates that love the desert, the mountains, and each other, this was a delightful place to be. 

 

Pangolins, yeah!

Uncategorized

Almost every time I turn on the radio, I get pissed. And, unfortunately,  I reflexively turn on the radio almost every time I get in the car. It is always on NPR because that is the primary way I get my news – but, it seems, the news is always bad. Really bad. But the world is bigger and and more wonderous than the news tells us.

Believing Is Being

Americana

In Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, Robert Pirsig writes about bringing a boat into a strange marina, in a strange river town, in the dark. He has the wrong marina or the wrong town, I don’t remember which, but the harbor lights didn’t match the charts and he kept moving the real lights around in his mind to make them fit his imagined reality. He was in the wrong place, but it seemed like the right place because he was mentally moving the data around. In other words,  Believing is seeing, not the other way around. I wrote that four years ago, I believe it, even more, today except that I want to add: Seeing is being, we are what we believe we are. 

A couple of weeks ago, Burt Kuhlman and I went to the  California State Railroad Museum. Driving to Burt’s house, I was listening to the Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testimony on the car radio and, when he got in the car, Burt said he had been watching it on TV. So, as we drove up to Sacramento, we continued to listen to the testimony of  Dr. Ford. When we got there, we both agreed the hearing was more interesting than the museum, so we skipped the museum, turned around, and drove home, listening to the start of Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony. After listening to Dr. Ford testify – and then watching and relistening on TV at home – I find it hard to see how anybody thinks she is lying. But I already believed her and her testimony just gave me a framework on which to hang that belief. I know that, but she was so vulnerable, so honest, and so strong that I thought that even some Republicans Senators would believe her. That doesn’t seem to be the case.    

I want to preach something, but first I want to tell a story. A somewhat embarrassing story. In 1966, I started a development/construction company, bas Homes, with my friend and mentor, Sam Berland. Sam was about 30 years older than me and, in many ways, he was a father figure, he certainly was one of the most influential people in my life. He had been my boss at Shapell Homes and we agreed that going in, we would continue that relationship. He would be President of  bas and, after five years of his tutelage, I would step up to President and he would stay on as an advisor. When the five years were up, I asked to become president and he agreed by saying I could be President and he would be promoted to CEO (and still boss). After a couple of months, I started whining and Sam finally agreed to an impartial referee to settle our disagreement. 

The ref moved in and watched us for a week or two and interviewed almost everybody in the company. When he got to me, he asked me if I really wanted to be President and I said: “of course”. He asked me that, he said, because in his experience, men – sorry but that’s the way it was in those days – who really wanted to be a company President, went after it “like a dog after red meat” and I wasn’t doing that. As the Ref pointed out, I was asking Sam to make me President while I was still bringing questions and problems to him, for his decisions as if he were the President. He said that if I really wanted to be President, I would make the decision and then present that decision to Sam as a  fait accompli. My priority was not taking over but having Sam like love me. I wanted to be President but not at the expense of our relationship. Sam wanted me to love him, but he was the boss and if that hurt the relationship, he was sorry. Looking back, I realize that Sam thought of himself as President; I thought of myself as his assistant. Sam was not going to give me his power, I had to take it and before I could take it, I had to own it. 

I think our country, the world really, needs women to take over and run it. And the operative word here is”take”, men are not going to give their control up. Men, especially we white men, think that the world needs us even though we are the ones who are ruining the world. Women already have more power than they are using, they control much, if not the majority, of the private money in the country – just look at the number of ads that are selling wealth management targeted towards women – and it is time to start using that leverage.