I have to hand it to the NRA: the answer to gun violence is….wait for it, wait for it, wait a week for it….more guns.
Category Archives: Americana
Tavi Gevinson
Until I saw a sort of offhand reference – as if the reader would obviously know who she is – to Tavi Gevinson, I had never heard of her. I don’t know how I missed her as she is about as famous in her world as Fernando Alonso is in his. On the outside chance that there is atleast one other person who hasn’t heard of Tavi, she is a sixteen year old fashion blogger. The astonishing part, however, is that she started when she was eleven – she was born in 1996 – and was famous enough by the time she was 15 to interview Joss Whedon for her blog ( The Style Rookie).
By the time she was 13, Gevinson was a special guest of Vogue Magazine at the New York Fashion Week. By the time she was 15, Gevinson founded Rookie Magazine which bills itself as a website for teenage girls with advice like How to Decorate Your Room like a Movie, or Ask a Grown Man:Jon Hamm, or Breaking in a Broken Heart : How to draw power from a truly crappy experience. Looking at Rookie Magazine started out as surprising and slowly became an amazing experience. Everything I have read about teenage girls is written by someone who was a teenager years before and is – sort of – remembering their teenage years from an older perspective, this is written – or edited – by an actual teenage girl and it is so much more sophisticated.
In Breaking in a Broken Heart, Rookie says Develop compassion. Now you know what it feels like to feel like garbage. So you can recognize that feeling in others, and empathize. It strangely becomes a healing experience for both people when this happens. You get over your heartbreak even more, and so do they….Discover that you are loved. Go ahead and try to reject this because it sounds corny and you don’t like feelings. I’m sorry, it’s just the objective truth of the matter. When you understand that you are loved, that there are, really, people who love you, that you DESERVE their love, and that you really do have huge, undying support in this world, from your friends and/or family and/or pets and/or God if you believe in that, the love that you lost begins to feel smaller in comparison.
In talking about Loosing It, Rookie says To avoid having to answer a million questions, I prefer to regard “losing your virginity” as a choose-your-own-adventure. Oral, anal, vaginal, manual, sex toy, something else? YOU PICK! When it comes to identifying as a virgin, only you can decide what “counts.” Maybe you “lost your virginity” the first time you gave oral to your girlfriend. Maybe you it was the first time your boyfriend fingered you. Maybe it was your first-time P in V. There is no wrong way to decide when you’ve lost your virginity. It is an intangible characteristic that only you get to choose whether or not you identify with…That said, maybe you think the whole concept of virginity is stupid. Who’s to say that you ever had one in the first place? Who’s to say that you lost anything when you had sex for the first time? I prefer to think of first-time sexual encounters as gaining a new experience, not losing something. Instead of thinking of things in terms of virginity, feel free to tell someone that you gave oral sex for the first time, or that you haven’t tried vaginal intercourse yet. There is no wrong way to talk about first-time sexual encounters, and anyone who tells you otherwise is likely just as clueless as the rest of us.
I sometimes have a feeling that the next generation will not be able to handle the trashed world we are leaving them. While it is true that we are leaving them a country in which the average kid will not be able to live the same lifestyle as their parents – lifestyle usually being defined as having as much stuff and using as much energy – and we are leaving them a world in which our leaders refuse to even admit that the climate is changing, and we are leaving them a future world in which we did pretty much everything I was taught to believe was responsible for the fall of Rome, this, next, generation just seems better. More capable of looking at real problems.
Reading Rookie, and reading about Tavi Gevison or listening to her TED talk – yes! at something like sixteen – is a hugely reaffirming experience. Check it out, I suspect you will be shocked and thrilled as much as me.
Happy Pearl Harbor Day…I don’t get it
I don’t understand why we celebrate Pearl Harbor Day. After all, we lost, we got bombed by surprise, we bungled it.
In the early nineties when Kosovo was trying to get away from the yoke of the Serbs, much was made of the fact that a sacred Serbian battlefield was in Kosovo and the Serbs didn’t want to let that battlefield leave greater Serbia. Several newscasters, by way of showing how wrong the Serbs were, commented on how old grudges never die in Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo Field – lost by the Serbs over 600 years ago in June 1389 – was, stupidly, still a big deal.
But we do the same thing in celebrating Pearl Harbor (we even have Pearl Harbor license plates in California so, I guess, the car owner can remember – every time they go to their car – that 2400 sailors and soldiers were killed on December 7th). It is the same thing with The Alamo lost by a hearty group of volunteers fighting for their right to keep slaves which Mexico had outlawed. All three battles were loses.
Why don’t we celebrate April 18 when we killed – by surprise in semi-Pearl Harbor fashion – Isoroku Yamamoto, commander t of the Imperial Japanese Navy that launched that attack on Pearl Harbor? Or the Doolittle Raid when we bombed Tokyo on the same date one year earlier? Or some win in the Texas war against Mexico?
I have no idea. It seems we – humans – prefer to remember when we got our ass kicked sometime in the past. Anyway, Happy Pearl Harbor Day, and many more.
A stormy day at Point Reyes National Park
Over the weekend, the rainy, rainy, weekend, Michele and I went to Point Reyes National Seashore with Richard and Tracy and Gina and Courtney. The timing worked perfectly. It only rained at night, the weather during the day was just turbulent enough to be interesting, and it was much warmer and comfortable than it photographed. The best of all possible worlds. On Saturday afternoon, we into the Park and followed a small stream down to McClures Beach where the storm driven waves put on a show for us.
I love Point Reyes: the connection with Nature, the feeling of edge-of-the-world desolation. Like Death Valley or the Sierra Nevada mountains above timberline, it is a huge landscape – with almost infinite sight-lines – that work best for me when I am out in it; walking.
More years ago than I can remember, I read that the National Park Service was trying to incorporate some – for lack of a better descriptor – normal landscapes into the system. We think of the National Parks as saving the most spectacular parts of America, but, in reality, most of the National Parks are extreme areas because they are the areas that were left over. There are no National Parks in the Great Central Valley of California because it was filled with farms – very productive farms – pretty early in the western settlement cycle. (In May of 2010, on our way back from Death Valley National Park, we stopped at a small pocket of wilderness – Kern National Wildlife Refuge – that the Feds had reclaimed from the San Joaquin part of the Central Valley. It was spectacular – teaming with wildlife, mostly with birds laying over on their North-South migration – and a revelation. We consider the Central Valley the boring part of our trip when we go to the mountains or the desert and this little section of wild land was every bit as exciting as any National Park.)
Point Reyes is, in a way, reclaimed land but it was also only minimally used before it became a park. Yes, there were and still are farms, but they were always sort of hanging on farms with picturesque barns rather than rich working farms with industrial silos.
The barns seem more a part of Nature, a part of the Landscape, rather than cut off from it and, as the National Park Service lets more land revert to Wildness, the Wildness is taking center stage. With its walks and its views, with its openness and hidden intimacy, with its National Parkness, Point Reyes National Seashore has become a place to connect with Nature.
Some thoughts on the military
We Americans love our troops and especially the commanding generals. We always have. Washington was our first commanding general and our first President and the tradition has remained strong that a winning general could ride the adulation to the White House (even before it was the White House). Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and Dwight D. Eisenhower all became Presidents and – if rumors are true – Obama was worried so much about David Petraeus running for President that he made him head of the CIA rather than head of the Joint Chiefs.
But I think we are starting to get carried away with our idolatry. Or, it may be more accurate to say, everybody, including the generals, are starting to believe the bullshit. During the Vietnam war, I read and heard lots of stories of civilians – maybe mostly college students – dissing and taunting Soldiers (and Marines, Sailors, and whatever Air Force GIs are called). As an aside; I do want to emphasize that I was not a recipient of hazing although I was in the Army during the run-up to the biggest part of the war in Vietnam and I was dating a woman who lived in the Haight-Ashbury. End aside.
I think the difference was that people were afraid of being drafted, of being sent to Vietnam, and took it out on everybody from President Johnson on down. Now nobody has to do military service and people feel guilty about sending those poor bastards – over, and over, and over again – into the grinder, so they overcompensate with reverence. And, as the military has gotten smaller and more elite, the top officers, especially the generals, have become incredibly entitled.
During the Civil War, the commanding general, Ulysses S. Grant, had been a civilian just a couple of years before. Much of the time, he wore a privates uniform with his stars pinned on the shoulders, and – more to the point I am trying to make – he had a staff of only eight people and he didn’t wear his medals (he had lots of them). During World war II, Dwight D. Eisenhower wore a simple uniform and only wore his top three medals. Eisenhower had a civilian driver and a small military staff. At the end of my so-called military career, I was a driver for a three-star, General Andrew Lolly, and he had a total staff of three (me, the sergeant/driver, a Captain, and a Colonel). Now it is an entirely different story.
Former defense secretary, Robert Gates, complained I was often jealous because he had four enlisted people helping him all the time. Mullen’s got guys over there who are fixing meals for him, and I’m shoving something into the microwave. And I’m his boss. General Petraeus, who wears every medal he ever got – of which, by the way, only ONE is for bravery under fire – had a staff of fifty when he was the commanding general in Afghanistan.
When there was a draft, there was more exposure of the average person to the military and more exposure to the average person by the military. The military priesthood was not as strong and isolated as it is now.
This lack of a draft has led to an isolation and the resulting arrogance that is hurting the military and our country. I think we should bring back the draft and reading an article by Tom Ricks, sent to me by Richard Taylor, has only reinforced that belief. The thrust of the article which starts by quoting General McChrystal saying I think we ought to have a draft. I think if a nation goes to war, it shouldn’t be solely be represented by a professional force, because it gets to be unrepresentative of the population. I think if a nation goes to war, every town, every city needs to be at risk. You make that decision and everybody has skin in the game. is how it will help the country. (The article really promotes a two year National Service for everybody with only some people going into the military.) Ours is a time when almost nobody contributes to the National Collective and the sign of a good American is wearing a flag pin and paying as little taxes as possible and the article paints an alternative that I think would make us a better country. I suggest you read it.
But, maybe even more importantly, a Draft would also help end the isolation that is currently ruining the military. The Army hasn’t fired a general for not doing a good job in a long, long time. General Petraeus, even with his staff of fifty, didn’t win the war in Afghanistan or anywhere else for that matter. The military has ceased to be accountable and guys like Petraeus keep getting less accountable.