Category Archives: Americana

The horrific things we do to each other

November 2, 2013Americana, Evolution, Obama, Politics, Psychological MusingsSteve Stern

I brought a biography of Clarence Darrow – Attorney for the Damned – with me for the flight to Boston. I am not so sure that it was a great idea: I was still in Dayton, Tennessee – at the Monkey Trial – when the plane landed in Boston. And still in Tennessee on the bus ride to New Hampshire.

Darrow was in my family’s pantheon of civil heroes – or, at least, my dad’s pantheon, and by extension, mine – and I was enjoying reading about him in more detail than the stories that had been pretty much fixed in my DNA as a child. Darrow was a free-love-bohemian and I was a little taken back by how much free love and bohemianism there was back in the 1890s. He defended so many people that nobody else would touch, like Loeb and Leopold, the Western Federation of Miners who were in an industrial war with the Mine Owner’s Association in Idaho, or a black family that moved into a white neighborhood in Detroit.

The Mine Owner’s Association had the politicians backing them, and the police, and the Pinkerton’s who beat strikers to death under the banner of law and order. The miners struck back, bombing mines and buildings. The black family had everybody against them also, with the police protecting a crowd of whites who were trying to force the family out. It was a time of brutality and it was a time that resonates today, both financially and racially, although in a milder form.

A couple of years later, William Jennings Bryan ran for president as a populist hero against the powerful, the police that protected them, the Pinkertons, and even President Cleveland, of his own party, who sent Federal troops in to back the rich. Much of what Bryan said then is still germane now: There are two great theories of government. One claimed that if you would only legislate to make the well to do prosperous, their prosperity would leak through to those below. But the Democratic idea is if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity would find its way up through every class that rests upon them.

The book was about the Darrow I had been taught, the defender of the powerless, but there was a Darrow I didn’t know. A Darrow who also defended people because he wanted money, people like a white bigot who brutally killed a Hawaiian and who Darrow knew was guilty. My dad was a defense lawyer for a while and he constantly pitched that a person is innocent until proven guilty. In the same manner as Darrow, my dad defended people like a bartender who killed his wife. Daddy knew he was guilty – even I knew he was guilty hearing the stories over the dinner table – but that didn’t seem to matter to Darrow or my dad. But sitting on the airplane,above it all, it mattered to me and left me in a melancholy funk.

I had brought a New Yorker book review of a couple of books about the partition of Pakistan into two countries, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I put down my Darrow book and read the book review to improve my mood. That was even worse. Nixon was a prick and while he and Kissinger congratulated themselves on their masculinity and pragmatism, the Pakistani generals, our allies, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Bengalis who were – as Nixon said – just a bunch of brown goddamn Moslems.

I thought of Obama and our drones and how our government seems to find killing people OK as long as it suits our political needs and my melancholy grew. I went back to Darrow, and, fortunately, I was able to cheer myself up with the Monkey Trail, The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, in Dayton, Tennessee, where the Courthouse had a banner that said Read your Bible.

Today, it is easy to laugh at Dayton and the trial but it was no laughing matter then and it still isn’t. Like the Capital vs.Labor fight, Ignorance vs. Science is a conflict that is still with us.

On the bus to New Hampshire, in Dayton, it was Darrow against Bryan and Darrow was at his best. You can close your eyes, Darrow said, But your life and my life and the life of every American citizen depends, after all, on tolerance and forbearance….If men are not tolerant, if men can not respect each other’s opinions, if men can not live and let live, then no man’s life is safe. If today you can take a thing, like evolution, and make it a crime to teach it in public schools….At the next session you can ban books and newspapers.

Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant, and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one, you can do another. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding…After awhile, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man, and creed against creed until – with flying banners and beating drums – we are marching backwards to the glorious age of the 16th century, where bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Getting off the bus in New Hampshire, the sun was out and people were taking family pictures.

Back home

November 1, 2013Americana, TravelSteve Stern

It is great to be home again and we can’t wait to go back. Flying back into Silicon Valley from Back East with – mostly – Maine calibrated eyes, is slightly surprising. Both Boston’s Logan Airport and San Jose’s Mineta Airport are nearly new but that is all that is the same. At Logan, it is hard to find a place to plug in a computer, at Mineta, every seat has a plug (except the chairs in the Meditation Room across from the gate).

Wandering around the Northeast – New England? Down East? – I missed my five o’clock cappuccino, in San Jose, we passed three espresso places between the gate and picking up our luggage. When we left Boston – near noon -it was in the low 50’s, at San Jose, it was in the low 70’s at 6:30.

The most pleasant surprise was the space, the vistas when we got off the plane. To a great extent this is because of our topography; there are mountains to have vistas of. Waiting for the shuttle, to the east was the Diablo Range, pale orange in the fading light, and to the west were the Santa Cruz Mountains, soft in the haze. In New Hampshire, we would drive for miles and see nothing but the next quarter-mile of road. A beautiful quarter-mile but no view until we crossed a bridge.

The West is just plain opener than the East. Not just long vistas open, but it feels more open to change. I don’t think that Silicon Valley is a coincidence, I think that it is a result. The East is weighted down by the past – of course, if you are from the East, you might say grounded by the past and both are right – there are ghosts everywhere, waiting behind the present.

On the way home, Michele and I were already making plans to go back. We were a little too late this year

and the trip was way too short.

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/

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.