We are going to Paso Robles for a couple of nights for our anniversary because neither of us has ever been there making it new for both of us. We driven through it on the way to the Carrizo Plain or Ventura or Los Angeles but we’ve never stopped.
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Random thoughts on the road to and from a memorial
We drove down to Escondido last week for a Memorial Service and drove back home last Thursday…in a rental car. The Memorial was for Tom Halle and it was more an anthem of his life than a dirge. Still, we all knew we would never see him again and that cast a pall over the Service and the whole weekend.
Driving down, we were constantly reminded of the drought and how everything, eventually, becomes political.
We seem to live in a time when everybody wants individual rights over the collective well being and is going to have a hissy fit if they don’t get it. As a liberal, it seems crazy to me that a person’s right to own a gun, without any restriction, should trump public safety. For a conservative, it must seem crazy that the left goes ballistic over Kim Davis’ private meeting with the Pope. All this being played out center stage, in front of Europe starting to close its borders, Russia jumping into the quicksand of Syria, a growing Civil War in Libya, and Afghanistan convulsing back to tribalism.
The day after the service, we comforted ourselves by spending the morning at one of Southern California’s great beaches. Or, I should say that I spent the morning at the beach with Ophelia Ramirez while Michele and Peter Kuhlman spent it in the water, 
and then, for our last night in Southern California, we joined a birthday dinner for Ophelia, in a restaurant…wait for it…in a Lexus dealership. The food was great – no kidding – and we ate outside, in a half tent on the rooftop parking lot near a lovely group of Lexi. It both seemed like an incredible Southern California cliche and a totally unique place and experience.
The pall returned when we were driving home. Michele’s trusty Volkswagen GTI ate its water pump while we were leaving the In-N-Out Burger in Kettleman City and we ended up across the Valley in Fresno saying Why did our fucking water pump give out? and, by the way, how can VW blatantly cheat and think they are going to get away with it?
Both questions have pretty much the same answer. Volkswagen wanted to be the biggest automaker in the world and they pushed hard to make that goal. A big part of that push were diesels, clean and powerful diesels. We all thought that the diesels were clean and powerful at the same time – and so, probably, did the head of VW and the company even ran a Super Bowl ad showing its engineers sprouting angel’s wings for that incredible accomplishment – but, we now know, the diesel engines were programed to be clean or powerful, not both. They did this on purpose, so on purpose that it was wired deep into the software. Trying to make as much money as possible does not promote morality, it promotes making as much money as possible and that translates to pushing people to get desirable results.
What fascinates me is Who was the highest guy in the Volkswagen hierarchy to know? Presumably, some software engineer realized that they could cheat the tests – after all they cheated before (and got caught and fined only $120,000 in 1973) – and told his boss. It might have started innocently You know it is possible to tweak the code to make the car act differently on a dynamometer, wouldn’t that be a great rf and it would serve them right for these stupid rules and the more possible it became and the more seemingly impossible, or very difficult, to to be caught, the more plausible a solution it became. At some point, somebody must have said – or thought – You know, I don’t think I am going to tell my boss about this, he wouldn’t want to know. And he probably didn’t want to know, he wanted a cheap, powerful, and clean diesel; he wanted to be a hero in the Becoming the Biggest Company Game.
The disgraced CEO said he didn’t know, and he probably didn’t, but he set the tone of the company. He didn’t say We want to make the best cars in the world or We want to be scrupulously honest or Saving the planet for our children is our top priority, he said We want to be the biggest company, make the most money. It is sad, it is sad for our increasingly endangered Planet; it is sad for Germany and her vaulted automobile industry, but it is also sad for Volkswagen.
An American Story
Last Saturday, Edwin Peña, my Little Brother, graduated from San Francisco State University. Congratulations my Friend.
I want to quickly add that the story didn’t start with Edwin, it started with his mother, Martha.
Martha Silva was born on a ranchero near Durango Mexico, she was one of eleven children. Like millions of other people born in poor, rural, Mexico, Martha uprooted her life and moved North, coming to the United States on a Work Visa in the 1980’s.
A couple of years later, shortly after her son Edwin was born, that visa lapsed and she was faced with a dilemma that has been faced by millions of people. Whether to return to Mexico legally or to stay in the United States without papers. Martha’s son was born in booming Silicon Valley, in Stanford Hospital, he is an American, America is all he knows. Martha stayed.
There are lots of immigrants that come to America while they are living high on the hog and they continue to, but most make huge sacrifices. Almost always, those sacrifices are made for a return that will only be realized by the next generation. That is our collective American Story, almost all of our ancestors came here for a better life, not for themselves but for their children. When Martha decided to stay she became part of that collective, part of the American Story.
Martha Silva worked cleaning houses, she started her own HouseCleaning business, and she raised Edwin as a single mother. When I first met Edwin he was in the 4th or 5th grade and we were introduced by Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area. 
I fell in love with Edwin immediately. He was sweet and earnest, intensely interested in the world and in love with sports. Today, he is a man and every bit as sweet and earnest, he is still interested in the world and he is, what I would call, a jock. He is an outstanding young man and he just became the first member of his family to graduate from college.
Max Max and the new world
What an insane movie! Peter Kuhlman
Michele had her DNA tested a couple of months ago. She has about 1.2% Neanderthal DNA, about 2% Densovian DNA – which is very surprising at first glance, but may be the source of her bright blue eyes – and, of course, 96.8% good ol’ Homo sapiens from East Africa. It got me thinking how H. sapiens sapiens– our biggest genetic contributor, basically us, in other words – moving out of Africa could have interbred with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and Denisova hominins both of whom left Africa about two hundred thousand years earlier.
That small group of H. sapiens – I’m going to drop the second sapiens – migrated out of Eastern Africa, into what we used to call Asia Minor, about sixty thousand years ago. They were people with almost the same DNA as us, they were anatomically modern humans, but they were very different. They were the people we all evolved from, very dark West Africans as well as very white Finns, Chinese and Native Americans, everybody. If the few hunter gather tribes that still exist are any guide, they lived in small groups, suspicious of outsiders, and ready to fight (even today, hunter gathers spend the majority of their time fighting, getting ready to fight, or getting stirred up to fight).
As an aside, in all likelihood, our 96.8% ancestors, the smart ones, moving out of Africa into Asia Minor, were dark skinned and the Neanderthals, the less smart ones that they ran into, were light skinned. End aside.
When they met, it was not a love match like Romeo and Juliet. Think more like Boko Haram raiding the pastoral Nigerians. They probably fought and the DNA evidence strongly suggests that the intermixing of Sapiens and Neanderthals came as a result of Neanderthals stealing the Sapiens’ women. Women were currency, they were booty – sorry, I couldn’t resist – the spoils of battles.
Mad Max: Fury Road imagines this brutal world of kidnapped women in a post-apocalypse landscape with cars that are as mutant as the people driving them. The basic conceit is that the “brides” of a warlord, Immortan Joe, have been set free by another badass, Imperator Furiosa, played by a one armed Charlize Theron with a buzz cut. The movie is like Gravity in its simplicity and episodeity. A long, evolving car chase across a desert landscape, improbably complicated, and then a break and another long, different, car chase and another break and another…. To quote The Telegraph, Imagine if Cirque du Soleil reenacted a Hieronymus Bosch painting and someone set the theatre on fire.
The chasers are religious fanatics who believe that they will go to Nirvana if they die fighting for Immortan Joe and the chased are the women. The movie makes it clear that the hellish afterscape is a result of and perpetuated by men. As an aside, I once asked a woman why she thought men ruled the world, she didn’t even hesitate before saying Because they are bigger and stronger and can kick the shit out of any woman who doesn’t like it. I think that I had sort of expected a men are more devious and aggressive type answer and I tried again, a couple of days later, asking another woman the same question; I got almost the same answer, again without any hesitation. I have learned to not ask women that question again. End aside.
Reading Nuremberg Diary
After resisting it for the last six months or so, I have started reading Nuremberg Diary, by G.M. Gilbert. Ed Cooney has been pushing me to read it, saying – over and over again – that it is fascinating and revelatory. Gilbert was the prison psychologist during the Nuremberg Trials and the book covers the trials – mostly – in the words of the indicted. Ed is right, the book is revelatory and strangely fascinating.
All the German World War II characters villains we have been reading about and seeing in movies, ever since 1945, are here . General Jodl, Field Marshal Kettel, and Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering are here, of course. There are the thugs like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Himmler’s Security Forces – including the Gestapo – and intellectuals like Alfred Rosenberg, Chief Nazi philosopher and Reichsminister of Eastern Occupied Territories. I have been reading about these guys for years, but it has always been in the context of what they did.
With Hitler and Himmler dead, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering is the embattled leader, trying to save the Nazi’s and his own reputation. He both denies the horrors of Nazism and justifies them as the geopolitical necessity of Germany defending the west from the scourge of Communism. A couple of the prisoners, Albert Speer and Hans Frank in particular, are horrified art what they have done, but most of the prisoners either try to deny what happened and what they did or excuse it.
Except for Hitler, I really did not having a sense of who they were. This book was written in 1947 and it has that easy story-telling style of the period even though most of it is in the words of the people on trial. We have been taught that these are evil people – the Nazis, the World War II German military leaders, the prison camp guards – that they are the definition of Evil. Goering fits the picture perfectly, but most of the characters in this book just seem to have been sucked into something much more powerful than they are.
My default position is not to believe in Evil and I usually think of people doing evil things, not being Evil but reading the prisoners own words, as banal as they are, tries that belief at times. When Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant of Auschwitz, says You can be certain that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning. – But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong., it is not easy to believe he was only led astray.
Although it may be time to let go of World War II and the Nazis, reading this book bring it to life again.