Category Archives: Americana

Tattoos and F1

Americana, Art

01731 (1)

Of all the things that I didn’t see coming down the pike from the future, I think that tattoos are at the top of the list. Much higher on the list than, say, hamburger meat manufactured in a lab – OK, we all knew that was coming – or truck farmers making a comeback, or smart phones. As an aside, to very loosely paraphrase Che Guevara, Computers are not revolutionary, they are bourgeois. Smart phones are revolutionary! End aside.

I so didn’t see tattoos coming, that they just sort of snuck up on me. I don’t watch much football on TV,  so that didn’t tip me off.  Sure, I read about Anglia Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton getting matching tattoos, still that seemed like an hyper-hip exception. By the time I saw the adorable Ana Pascal in Stranger Than Fiction, 

tumblr_maexkunpch1rub0ubo1_500

with her tattoo being a big part of her charm – even though she was played by a tattooless Maggie Gyllenhaal – I knew something was up. Nevertheless, Ana was a nonconformist. What I didn’t expect was for Formula 1 drivers to sport tattoos.

They are, after all, ambassadors for the multi-billion dollar companies, such as Mercedes-Benz, that are often pretty conservative.

Mercedes-W04-Hamilton-Rosberg

When they are working, they even disappear into the car itself.

Lewis-Hamilton-Mercedes-W03

The two best driver in Formula 1 right now are probably Fernando Alonso from Spain and Lewis Hamilton from England. Alonso drives for Ferrari which is famous for putting the car before the driver – I reminded everyone, including the drivers, that Ferrari comes before everything, the priority is the team. Rather like a family father pointing out the need to respect some family rules. Ferrari president Luca Di Montezemolo explained, after he tweaked the ear of Alonso who had the audacity to complain about his car – so I was surprised to see that he has a tattoo of a samurai on his back. Not so much that it is a samurai, but that it is there at all.

0002795355

But, when I saw Mercedes’ Hamilton’s tattoo, I knew it was a new world.

lewis-hamilton-tattoo

 

The jury says the guy who killed Trayvon Martin is not guilty

Americana

Japan-3496

Surprisingly enough, I first heard about the verdict on Facebook from Gail Cousins. (I went to Google News for details and they said The jury is still out, debating into the night. I went to theguardian and they said the same thing.) Gail said Zimmerman acquitted…. YUKK!! and my first reaction was to trump that with something more violent or, at least, more profane.

But it is morning, now, there is not a cloud in the sky and I feel differently. I am not sure that this is really about race, I think my – our, the country’s – reaction is about race, but I am not so sure that the verdict is. The fact that it took the cops  forty-four days to arrest the killer is about race (if Trayvon had been the killer of a white dude, it would not have taken forty-four days to arrest him, if Trayvon had been the killer of a white woman, it wouldn’t have taken forty-four minutes).

I think what this is about is having a good lawyer, this is about a justice system that I want to say is broken, but – really – has never been fair enough to be unbroken. OJ got off on murder charges and, at the time, I said that It proves the LA Police Department is so inept that they can’t even frame a guilty man. He also had a great lawyer and that also showcased the power of a good lawyer over a mediocre prosecution.

I am sorry that this guy walked because my attitude has pretty much been He is guilty until proven innocent and – I suspect – that may be about race, but while the defense didn’t prove him innocent, the prosecution didn’t prove him guilty. That this guy walked is not the travesty, the travesty is that so many people – especially people of color, poor people – do not have a defense that is anywhere near as good as this killer’s.

So, on this beautiful day, I feel sad about the verdict, but I think the jury is right.

 

A mea culpa

Americana, Politics

moore-5When the Robert’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional – Section 5 required that certain States and localities must get Federal permission for all voting law changes – it seemed to me that this was profiling and the Supreme Court was right in eliminating it. It seemed to me that the act said, in effect, Alabama is more likely to abuse people’s rights – especially people of color – than, say, Pennsylvania.

I have argued with several people about this since the Supreme Court decision, including Richard Taylor on the 4th, but now I realize that I was wrong. Yes, Section 5 is profiling, but it is like profiling Mohamed Atta, if he had been released from probation 50 years after driving one of the airplanes into the World Trade Center.
pb-110306-selma-cannon2.photoblog900

My change of mind is driven by two things, first a copy of the so-called literacy test Louisiana required black voters to pass in the 1960’s. It is a nasty test composed of mostly trick questions. A sample question is 21. Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order. or 24. Print a word that looks the same whether it is printed forwards or backwards.  Click through; see if you pass the test, I didn’t.

The second mind changer was an article, entitled The Color of Law, Voting Rights and the Southern Way of Life  in the combined July 8 & 15 issue of The New Yorker. The article, which is really a review of several books and movies, goes into some detail on the struggle black people went through to get the right to vote in the first place. It reminded me that people died trying to get the vote.

Think about that. There were people willing to die to get the vote. They didn’t want to die, but they were willing to take the chance. This is not like soldiers sent to war, these are people willing to march for their vote even if it means they may get killed. I didn’t vote in 1968 because I was pissed at Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, reading this article made me ashamed.

I think that it is important to remember that this law suit,  Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, was brought by Shelby County (duh! it is in the title, Steve). This is the same Shelby County that fought for a hundred years to keep black people from voting, hell! they fought for a hundred years to keep black people from using a white water fountain. To believe that everything is fine now, is to live in a world of fantasy.

JimCrowWaterFountains

 

Klan-members

(Oh, those KKK idiots above, that’s last week in a different Shelby County, Shelby County Tennessee.)

 

 

1984 Redux

Americana, Current Affairs

 

MRE

It seems we are in perpetual war, just like Oceania and Eastasia, the allies fighting Eurasia in 1984. Without missing a beat, they ended up fighting each other, with Oceania and Eurasia allied against Eastasia. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter  authorized the United States Central Intelligence Agency to conduct Operation Cyclone. That was the code name to arm and finance the mujaheddin so they could fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These are the same mujaheddin we are fighting now, with the same forces – on our side – that  the Soviets had fighting on their side.

The good news is, I guess, because war promotes innovation on a grand scale – see a 1938 fighter below and a 1948 fighter below that –

P40-W000

 

lockheed-p-80-shooting-star-02

our permanent state of war has given us all sorts of great innovations. Two of favorites are MRE’s – Meal, ready to eat – which feature meat infused with caffeine to help keep our combatants awake, and Kevlar underwear to help keep their reproductive parts safe.

Kevlar-Underwear

 

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were willing to spend that kind of money on education.

Gordon French and another thought on Oppenheimer

Americana

ISyru4u1ko7s83

I read a couple of days ago that this is the 49th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which – among other things – banned whites-only lunch counters and similar discrimination in hotels, restaurants and other places of public accommodation. It reminds me at how close we are to those times and how arbitrarily bizarre they are.

Now I want to say that I have a dog in this fight. America wasn’t just prejudged against blacks, it was prejudged against everybody but White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and I am not one of them. I was born in 1940, I was 20 in 1960, so my childhood was on the edge of the time of American institutionalized antisemitism. I only know about restricted hotels – restricted being code for No Jews, Negros being so restricted it wasn’t even worth mentioning –  from novels and plays like Gentleman’s Agreement. But I did know about restricted clubs, we lived near the Burlingame Country Club and they did not allow Jews to join or – according Richard LeVine in Awaking Waves – even into the diningroom although I did go to several dances there.

So when I read about blacks being kept out of someplace or being redlined in a community, I not only think That could have been me, I think Wow, that might have included me. One of the places that was whites only, were swimming pools in Pasadena, California in the late 1930’s.  Both Robert and Frank Oppenheimer were socially active during that time and they became involved in integrating a public pool in Pasadena. For which they were arrested. To make the pool safe for white people again, the pool was drained and refilled. In California!

And that brings me to Gordon French. My first inside job – meaning not on a construction site working with the tools – was at Gordon French Construction and a main part of that job was as Construction Manager for Silverado Country Club. But I also worked on an apartment complex in Tiburon. The complex had a great pool built on the side of a hill and one day, shortly after we finished it, a tenet and his black friend swam in the pool. (This would have been about 1967, again in California.) Another tenant was outraged and complained to the manager who passed the complaint on to Gordon.

Gordon thought about it for a minute, maybe less, and told the manager to evict the troublemaker. The troublemaker being the complainer, not the swimmers. I knew I was working in the right place.