The Lengthening Shadows

I suppose it's inconsiderate of me to disappear for a few weeks and then return with a pro forma political diatribe that offers not a word of explanation as to where I've been or why I seem to have deserted the world of electronic letters.

Yes, well, I have no explanation apart from alienation or sheer laziness or a crisis of the spirit or, erm, sheer laziness. Every day I think all sorts of thoughts, often taking the trouble to craft them into eloquent or at least elegant sentences that cause me to think, "Now that would be an excellent topic for a blog post," only to reflect further that, "Oh, but it's late, I'm tired, I have to get up early in the morning, and besides, what do I have to say that hasn't already been said and won't get me laughed at?"

Unfortunately, the answers that the cosmos (aka the space between my ears) most frequently hurls back at me are "Yes" and "Nothing." So then I stomp around in an inarticulate snit, perhaps run a few laps around the track in McCarren Park (I'm up to three miles on a regular basis now in the unlikely event that you cared), and curse the gathering darkness.

By which I don't mean the economic and political Armageddons looming on the horizon, though they're sufficiently gloom-inspiring all by themselves, but rather the inexorable retreat of the sun toward the southern hemisphere and the shorter days and chillier nights that trail behind it. The corner of the park where I do t'ai chi, a location bathed in sunshine from May until September, will spend the next six months swathed in shadows cast by nearby buildings. The running track still gets sun over all but the southern quadrant, but that won't last much longer either. And soon the feeble bits of sun that manage to work their way through the winter murk won't even put a dent in the frigid winds howling down from the north.

It seems kind of stupid to be whining about the onset of winter at the moment; apart from a coldish spell that fell upon us in the first week of October, we've been enjoying some of the most beautiful weather imaginable these past several days. Even now, after midnight, my windows are all open and I could comfortably stroll out into the street wearing no more than a t-shirt and jeans. And this is supposed to carry on for most of the week to come.

But I'm not fooled; this interval of what used to be called Indian Summer (perhaps it still is; I'm just guessing that some identity politics crackpot or other would have put a stop to that usage by now) makes it all the more clear what lies ahead: three, four, maybe even five months of bundling up in heavy clothes and dashing as quickly as possible from doorway to subway and back again. No more time for leisurely street corner chats or lolling about in the park until three in the morning on one of those summer nights when eternity doesn't seem like such a very long time after all.

Autumn used to be my favorite season and October my favorite month, and not merely because it's my birthday month (if anything, the contrary, since I've a long history of not particularly successful birthdays). But something has changed, and now it's all about summer. The whole rest of the year seems to be about wishing it was summer, anticipating summer, or grieving summer's passing. Probably not the best way to live for someone who insists on dwelling this far north. But then what would New York be like if it had Miami's (or Honolulu's) climate? Very different, I'm guessing, and not necessarily in a good way.

Anyway, I've chosen to live here and it seems as though I should at least make a stab at embracing the nine months of the year that aren't summer, especially considering that at my age, three-month years tend to spin by rather quickly. And life seems to be looking up, despite rampant disaster in the economic sphere. I'm cautiously optimistic about the election, I've just found a new apartment down the block which is about a zillion (well, half zillion, anyway) times better than my current hovel, and at the end of the week I'm off to Paris to see the Zatopeks and Copyrights and celebrate my birthday.

Of course I'm a little concerned that if things continue to deteriorate at the rate they've been, I could find myself overseas the day they close down all the banks and declare our currency worthless, and thus end my days as a vieux clochard in one of the less renowned arrondissements.

Last week my niece Gabrielle Bell and I went to see Alice Munro speak, and it filled me with dreams of Ontario, the flat, nondescript and superficially uninviting southwest corner thereof where many of my ancestors inexplicably chose to settle, and where Munro, who could at this point live anywhere she wished to, continues to dwell. There was something very comforting in her flat, slightly clipped tones that evoked memories of a dozen or more aunts and cousins who displayed that same matter-of-fact devotion to simply getting on with it, a quality I see in Gabrielle herself when she tackles her drawing, even if she's barely ever set foot in Ontario.

I think she and I will make a pilgrimage up there someday soon, the only question being whether to do it now and risk the early onset of a Canadian winter, or wait till spring, which can be a pretty fickle and unreliable commodity in those parts. For me personally, I'd prefer to ramble across Ontario in the bleakness of November than the perennially false dawn of April, but that's probably just me being moody. I should get to bed. Big day of moving tomorrow.

We're All Socialists Now, Comrade

Given that he's writing for the Telegraph, it's not likely that Simon Heffer will see the above sentiment as a salubrious development. But like it or loathe it, it recognizes an ineluctable fact: the radical, ideologically driven devotion to the principles of "free" markets and enterprise that has reigned triumphant since the days of Ronald Reagan is now dead as the Wall Street cat that hasn't managed so much as a desultory bounce during these past ten days of Black October.

It's a bit edifying to see the Masters of the Universe scramble like so many squealing mice for their bailout of government cheese, in much the same that the class bully goes bawling to his parents the minute some upstart has the temerity to bloody his nose, but given that we're the ones expected to pay for this disaster - not to mention suffer its consequences - it's scant consolation.

Like many people of my generation, I grew up steeped in parental tales of the Great Depression, riddled with a gnawing guilt about wasting money or failing to either use or save every scrap of anything that might ever come in handy, and deeply suspicious of any person, corporation or institution that seemed to exhibit a cavalier or proprietary attitude toward the nation's wealth. My father did most of the griping - a clear case of horses for courses, as I'm sure you'd agree if you'd ever met the man - but as it turns out, most of his anti-capitalist bias, including his 1936 vote for Norman Thomas, was motivated by his loss of $300 in a 1932 bank failure. Apart from that, he had a relatively cushy Depression, even going off to study at art school for a couple years in the mid-30s.

My mother, on the other hand, was made homeless when her parents' house was repossessed, leaving her family to shelter in the unheated attic of acquaintances from church, something I never knew until more than 70 years later, when she almost tearfully described the shame she had felt over something she, as a bewildered and frightened 12 year old, had had absolutely no control over.

All the worst tales of the Depression seemed to revolve around the early 1930s, even though some of the most dire economic conditions were yet to come later in the decade. But it seemed as though once the do-nothing (or, perhaps more accurately, the do-all-the-wrong-things) Hoover administration had been turned out of office and replaced by Roosevelt and his New Deal, the spirits, if not the bank balances, of the people never sunk quite so low again.

So in at least one sense we're very fortunate that the Crash of '08 has come at a time when we're only three months rather than three years from an election that could and almost certainly will alter our future as dramatically as any in memory. Note that I didn't necessarily say whether this alteration will be for the better or worse: while I grow more convinced by the day that the election of John McCain - and his eventual replacement by a President Palin that would ensue with the grim certainty of a Greek tragedy - would be a disaster of greater than Hooverian proportions. I know I'm not alone in feeling that McCain has managed to squander the fundamental respect that he enjoyed from most Americans, even dyed-in-the-wool Democrats - by resorting to a mean-spirited McCarthyism and ill-considered opportunism that - I never thought I'd see the day - actually makes the present occupant of the White House look good - well, not so bad, anyway - by comparison.

I don't say this lightly; it was less than six months ago that I could have imagined myself possibly voting for McCain. Back then I thought Barack Obama, despite his rhetorical gifts and statesmanlike demeanor, was simply too far to the left on too many issues. Although he's managed to allay my suspicions in some areas, I still fear he might turn out to be more of a Carter than the Roosevelt (either one will do, but preferably FDR) we clearly need.

And yet, just as we were told - whether correctly or not - about the bank/Wall Street bailout, we don't have a lot of options in the matter. A McCain-Palin presidency would likely usher in a depression on a scale that even veterans of the 1930s might be unable to imagine. At the beginning of that depression, Americans were without virtually all the government assurances and insurances that we've come to take for granted in the intervening 70 years. The government was able to introduce ideas like Social Security, bank deposit insurance, stock and banking regulation, job and infrastructure programs, none of which brought immediate relief, but all of which began the absolutely necessary process of restoring people's hope and confidence that things were ultimately going to turn around.

Today we have all those programs and more, to the point where one of the only tools left to the government is to flood the market with newly minted - and thus increasingly less valuable - dollars, to the point where there exists a very real possibility of the richest and most powerful country in the history of the world doing an Iceland, i.e., collapsing into national bankruptcy. When that happened to New York City in the 1970s, the rest of the country could barely suppress its snickers and Schadenfreude over how the mighty had been brought low: can we expect any different from an international community that feels - rightly or wrongly - that it has been unjustly condemned to live in America's shadow during this past half century?

Right now it looks as though Obama, despite the contemptible depths to which McCain has shown himself willing to stoop, is likely to sweep into office in a landslide, much as FDR did in 1932. Will he be up to the task of uniting and inspiring a nation on the scale necessary, not to mention bringing in the sort of brain trust that will be needed to extricate ourselves from the calamity that unregulated and unconstrained avarice has brought us to? We can only hope, comrade, we can only hope. At this point we don't have a whole lot of other options.

A Sweet Little Bittersweet Story

I was hanging out on Second Avenue, talking over old times and people with Adrian, who, it turns out, used to live in the same house in San Francisco that I did, back when it was inhabited by members of the Cockettes and Angels of Light, and, it further turns out, hightailed it out of San Francisco around the same time I did in 1973 and wound up on 11th Street - as I did.

The difference was that I went skulking back to San Francisco the following year, whereas Adrian has been in New York ever since. From time to time I kind of regret not sticking it out here in the city, but I guess I just wasn't ready back then, and sometimes wonder if I am even today. New York's a very different place - almost unrecognizably so - from what it was in the 70s, but while the sheer physical brutality and ugliness of the bad old days has all but vanished - or at least been driven to the nether reaches of the outer boroughs, there's still a metaphysical intensity that can pummel the soul with the same grim certainty and persistence that the Atlantic unleashes upon the perennially eroding shoreline.

But oh, never mind; I only meant to say that Adrian highly recommended the new movie Ghost Town, which, judging from the previews I'd seen, didn't seem particularly funny or entertaining. Well, I took Adrian's advice and headed up to Times Square to see it, and all I can say is that whoever threw together the trailer should be fired forthwith, because the movie is both hilariously funny and deeply touching. I wouldn't have thought Ricky Gervais had it in him to stretch beyond his usual drolly misanthropic schtick, but I couldn't have been more wrong: while there's plenty of the usual Gervaisian moaning and muttering, the man actually can act. Well, I assume that's what he was doing, to get all of us in the cinema to practically want to hug him by the time the credits rolled. A nice little meditation on how to live, and why. Perfect for seeing one of these melancholy nights as autumn closes in. New York (do they actually make films in any other city anymore?) has seldom looked lovelier as well.

Middlesex Update

All my kvetching of a couple days ago notwithstanding, I'm continuing to read Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex and getting quite a bit out of it. Admittedly I'm skimming over the bits where J.E. tries to get all literary on us, but now that he's managed to transport his first couple of protagonists to 1920s Detroit, there's enough period detail to keep me enthralled.

I especially liked his introduction of the Ford Rouge plant, or the Rouge, as it was known then and during my own 1950s childhood, when it continued to tower balefully over Downriver and with billowing clouds of black, acrid smoke blot out the sun and the sky and most other signs of life, love or hope.

I never actually worked at the Rouge, though I was taken there several times on school or Scout tours. Since it was assumed that half or more of us would probably end up there, I suppose they thought it made sense to get us used to the idea. If you ever get a chance to see the Diego Rivera murals in the entrance hall to the Detroit Institute of Art - the Sistine Chapel of the factory classes, I always called it - you'll notice the portrayal of tour groups who from balconies observe the assembly line workers who in Rivera's rendering have begun to inelectuably merge with the machinery. Local auto magnates tried to have the murals erased when they saw that implicit message, but in one of the rare times in Detroit history where art triumphed over philistinism, were unsuccessful.

Another aspect of Eugenides' portrayal that rang true - despite it being obvious that it had all come from assiduous research and that he himself had never set foot in the factories except possibly as a tourist - was that of the black workers being consigned to the hellish environs of the foundry, where they worked mere inches away from flames that blazed high above their heads. By the 1960s, blacks had made their way onto the assembly line and other less dangerous and more comfortable positions on the factory floor, but in the steel mill where I worked in 1969, the crew shoveling coal into the ovens was still almost uniformly black, and I remember marveling when I learned that for this work - which almost no white man, even the most recent immigrant, was expected to do - they were actually paid less than those of us who did the somewhat cushier - "cushy" being an extremely relative term on Zug Island - jobs upstairs.

Anyway, while I'm still slightly bristling over the Briggs Stadium/Thanksgiving Day parade cockups, I must give credit where it's due: Eugenides has done his homework and looks to be constructing a mighty fine portrait of that often less than mighty fine city (but we love her anyway), Detroit.

The Last Night Of Summer

When I was a wee lad one of the boys asked our Scoutmaster what the definition of summer was. He replied that it was that time of year when you could leave your house wearing only a t-shirt and not have to worry about carrying a sweater or jacket even if you were going to be out all night.

And that's always stuck with me. The true test of the summer is not the long, sunny days - you can have them almost any time of year except in the depths of winter - but the warm, almost tropical nights where you can walk around or ride your bike at 3 in the morning and never even think about putting on something warmer than the t-shirt and shorts you were wearing when you went out that afternoon.

And that's how it was last night for what was literally, i.e., chronologically, the last night of summer. I rode my bike over to McCarren Park to meet an old friend; we walked around for a couple hours, and then I retrieved my bike and got back home around midnight, never once wishing I'd worn anything warmer. Today, the first day of fall, was quite a different affair. The morning dawned sunny but much cooler, and by midday sullen clouds were scudding across and eventually overwhelming the sky.

I went out to the park to do some t'ai chi and some running - a new personal best of three miles, I note - and the weather made it easier yet more melancholy. My supposedly random iPod got in the spirit of things by serving up a topheavy diet of Joy Division and the bleaker, more wintry end of the Weakerthans catalog. In the evening I went off to the city carrying an umbrella but no jacket, my only concession to the change of season being a long rather than short-sleeved shirt, but I'd gotten it backwards. The clouds vanished and with them the remains of the day's warmth; by 9 or 10 o'clock the streets were no longer made for sweaterless walking and I reluctantly headed back to Brooklyn where, for the first time since June, I'll sleep with the windows shut.

A Sense Of Place

One of the things that can almost immediately spoil a piece of writing for me is a wrong place name. I can put up with paper-thin plots, cardboard characters, even - though with great reluctance - playing fast and loose with tense and perspective, but tell me that the action is unfolding on such-and-such street when I know perfectly well it's an avenue, and you're well on your way to losing me.

I'm not alone in this: at least two writers I admire greatly, Aaron Cometbus and John K. Samson have told me how important an accurate sense of place is to them. Aaron in particular can get extremely exercised when someone who purports to know his or her way around Berkeley misspells the name of his favorite cafe, and I don't blame him. It's bad enough when you're dealing with a memoir or a history: the immediate reaction is to wonder whether the writer was even there, or if we're just reading extrapolations from research that could have been conducted on a laptop parked in some cafe thousands of miles away.

But where it's really damaging is in a work of fiction. Unless a writer is an absolute master of the craft, he or she is depending on a certain willingness to suspend disbelief on the part of the reader. A single misspelled or misidentified place name is like the sour note that reduces an orchestra's otherwise sublime and soaring moment to bathetic farce, or when Romeo's impassioned declaration to Juliet is interrupted by a stagehand's cell phone going off.

It's probably why many of the best writers, even when they're clearly writing about the towns where they grew up or currently live, substitute a simulacrum or doppelgänger town. It's also why I've always been hesitant to write about London or New York, despite all the time I've spent in those cities: although I'd like to think I know them both reasonably well, there are always likely to be bits of knowledge that I'll have missed by not growing up there. Hell, I'm even afraid to tackle Detroit, even though I did grow up there, partly because it's been so long since I left, and partly because the city has changed nearly beyond recognition since that time.

Which brings me to my original point: for the last several years people have been telling me that since I was from Detroit, I "had to" read Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Even the Free Press, Detroit's approximate equivalent to the San Francisco Chronicle (figure out for yourself if that's a compliment), got in on the act: "At last Detroit has its great novel," it proclaimed, going on to compare it to Joyce's treatment of Dublin.

Well, that may be, but I'd only got to page 12 before the flowery if not downright rococo narrative delivered a distinct clunker. It was 1959, according to Eugenides, and the priest at Assumption Greek Orthodox Church regularly had to shush the parishioners because they "treated the church like the bleachers at Tiger Stadium." Only trouble is that in 1959, THERE WAS NO TIGER STADIUM. A small point, you say? Not to a kid who grew up attending games at Briggs Stadium, which was the name of the place until 1961 (and long after that to those who grown up under the old regime; it had taken my father at least 20 years to start calling it Briggs Stadium instead of Navin Field, and he wasn't about to change again).

Granted, Eugenides had barely been born at the time of the name change, but you have to wonder if he ever attended a game there or had any interest at all in Briggs/Tiger Stadium other than as a cheap and not particularly accurate simile: unlike some other towns, Detroit wasn't renowned for the antics of its bleacher bums, at least not in those days. But I do know that as a kid, I could have told you the entire history of the stadium, from its earliest beginnings as Bennett Park, when Ty Cobb led the Tigers to three consecutive pennants, and I wasn't half as nuts for baseball as some of the kids on my block. You'd think someone setting out to write the epic novel Middlesex is supposed to be could have at least checked with Wikipedia.

But never mind; let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was only off by a couple years, and as a prep schooler off in wealthy suburban Grosse Pointe probably never set foot anywhere near Michigan and Trumbull. But before he's even finished that paragraph, he unleashes an even more jarring solecism: something, he tells us, is "as big as a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade."

Okay, Eugenides, I know your biography says you were born in Detroit, but did you ever actually live there? If you had, wouldn't you know that Detroiters, at least not back then, did not think in terms of Macy's when it came to Thanksgiving Day parades? Why would we; we had our own J.L. Hudson Thanksgiving Day Parade that was as big and wonderful and magnificent as any kid could ever hope for. What did we care if they had some other parade at the same time in far-off New York, sponsored by some department store we'd never heard of?

Oh well. I've now read another five pages without encountering any egregious errors. And, as no doubt or more of you may take pains to point out, Eugenides wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and I'm writing a blog for a few hundred readers, so let's keep things in perspective. Also, all this fulminating has no doubt virtually guaranteed that if I ever do write something about Detroit, I'll make an ever bigger and more obvious mistake.

So I'll plow on with Middlesex and hope to be so wowed by its overall scope and excellence that my present indignation will be completely assuaged. Or nearly so, anyway. But based on what I've read so far, Eugenides is going to have to step up his game when it comes to painting a true picture of Detroit; as of now, Eminem's Eight Mile pisses all over it.

Remember Globalization? Remember Capitalism?

Seeing a MSNBC puff piece for Battle In Seattle, itself a puff piece that romanticizes and glorifies the know-nothing thugs who set out to destroy capitalism by smashing the windows at Starbucks back in 1999, I was reminded of those not-so-long-ago days when, we were told, global capitalism was rendering national governments obsolete.

Multinational or transnational corporations were too big, too powerful, too quick-moving and adaptable to be reined in or even troubled by government. The New World Order (remember that?) would see everything being run by corporations, which, depending on which end of the political spectrum you inhabited, would be either an Orwellian nightmare or a far more sensible and efficient arrangement.

All that ideological posturing and dogmatic folderol vanished faster than John Q. Public's 401(k) when things started getting scary for the financial institutions of the world. AIG may have had its tentacles in nearly every country in the developed world, but just like a trust fund kid who blew his load on whores and cocaine, wasted no time in running back to Big Daddy, Big Daddy in this case being the good old US government and its long-suffering taxpayers.

By the end of the week, capitalism itself had been put in abeyance. A couple of the crankier crankypants on CNBC and Fox were bellowing about how "We might as well be living in the Soviet Union" because their favorite hedge fund had been temporarily banned from short selling what was left of the financial system into the ground, but apart from them, there was near-unanimous agreement that the most radical governmental intervention in the marketplace since the days of FDR was not just desirable but absolutely necessary.

And it's hard to argue against that notion, regardless of what strange bedfellows it might entail. As the Guardian's Larry Elliott put it, "Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Hank Paulson, the Goldman Sachs tycoon who became US treasury secretary, have done more for socialism in the past seven days than anybody since Marx and Engels."

The question is, will it work? Although honesty requires me to confess to being as baffled as anyone up to and including President Bush about the precise nature of what is going on in the murky and opaque worlds of high finance, I do have a hunch that odds are probably no better than 50-50. Well, I hope they're better than that, not least because I'm getting a bit long in the tooth to relish the thought of living through Weimar-style hyperinflation or Mad Max Armageddon antics (when I was 20 I would have been positively salivating at the prospect). But I'm not counting on it, because it just may be that America, the banker and fiscal guarantor of last resort for much of the planet, may have already spent itself into terminal decline.

Which means, presumably, that I'd better not be counting on those Social Security payments to cushion the travails of my declining years. Question: in terms of the economy, is it likely to make much difference at this point whether McCain or Obama is elected in November? Maybe. If McCain gets elected AND if he keeps Paulson, Bernanke et al. on board AND if he keeps his own nose out of things (as Bush, in an uncharacteristic paroxysm of judiciousness, appears to be doing), we might muddle through. If, however, McCain, who has been appearing increasingly loopy and demented these past few days (or maybe he's always been a wild-eyed pathological liar and we just didn't notice) decides to put some of his own "ideas" into effect, he could have us waxing nostalgic over Herbert Hoover.

Obama, on the other hand... He has yet to display the Rooseveltian (or Kennedyesqe) timbre that the times call for, but at the same time, he hasn't said or done anything too foolishly awful. With the right staff and advisers, and some plans a bit more specific than "Change We Can Believe In," he could make a difference. For the better, I mean, though if he starts channeling his inner Jimmy Carter again, we're in big trouble.

In the long run I'm sure things will work out somehow, but we all (most of us, anyway) know what Keynes had to say about the long run. If my parents could get through the Great Depression and World War II, I suppose I can handle whatever the Masters Of The Universe (now, apparently, a wholly owned subsidiary of USA, Inc.) have cooked up for us. Eventually, should I live long enough, I may even be able to look back and laugh, but at the moment I'm more inclined to agree with Rudge, who, asked to define history, replied, "Well, it's just one fucking thing after another."

Obama: Too Wimpy To Be President?

The way things are going, you have to ask yourself if Barack Obama really wants to be President. Coming off a triumphant and nearly flawless convention, three to six points ahead in the opinion polls, facing an apparently weak opponent who wasn't particularly loved even by his own party, Obama was blindsided when McCain, who turned out to be far less moribund or dull-witted than he'd appeared, completely outmaneuvered him with his wily pick of the Alaskan pit bull for VP.

Since then the tables have turned completely, and it's Obama who looks like he's sleepwalking into oblivion. Oh sure, he's still putting forth solid, sensible proposals couched in crystal-clear and at times downright elegant language, but suddenly nobody is listening. They're too busy watching Obama get pummeled and pushed and bullied every which way from Sunday by a doddering old wreck and his strident female sidekick.

When it comes to making a scripted presentation to a stadium or lecture hall full of adoring followers, there's no one in the business who comes close to Obama (though Palin shows signs of giving him a run for his money). But in the rough and tumble cut and thrust of everyday politicking, Obama is like a deer caught in the headlights, the skinny kid on the playground who bullies naturally gravitate to, and who tries, usually with humiliating results, to reason his his way out of his predicament.

Americans like a little testosterone in their Presidents, and Obama is showing none. Joe Sixpack can be forgiven for asking how a President Obama would stand up to the Russians or Islamic terrorism if he turns to jelly in the face of insults from an inarticulate old man and a glib but ultimately silly woman. Even I, though I still want Obama to win, can't help wondering if he's up to the job.

This whole ridiculous lipstick-on-a-pig business (a phrase, by the way, that McCain used himself last year, and that Vice-President Cheney used at least three times during the 2004 campaign), for example: it's the perfect opportunity for Obama to stand up tall, and with an appropriate measure of disgust, say to the American people, "They (McCain and Palin) must think you're really stupid." He used that phrase once in reference to McCain's newfound strategy of selling himself as an agent of change, but he should make it his mantra, repeating it every time some Republican operative or talk show host tries to hijack the discussion into the realm of preposterous namecalling and accusations, every time McCain or his minions trot out yet another lie about taxes or national defense or "change."

Instead he staggers from one onslaught to the next, barely able to mount a credible defense, let alone the sort of scorched-earth offense he needs to lay on the bald-faced liars running the Republican campaign. Why isn't he? Either he's being very badly advised or he simply lacks the character.

Obviously I'm hoping for the former but fearing the latter. Could it be that Obama so resolutely plays Mr. Nicey-Nice-Above-The-Fray because he's wary of coming across to his white supporters as an Angry Black Man? Possibly, but if so he's already taken it way too far. Or maybe his mother taught him never to pick on girls, which might explain why he circles warily but speechlessly around The Palin while she's busily running off with his female voters. Or - and here's a touchy subject - could it be his experience with affirmative action, and its implicit lesson that adequate is a reasonable substitute for excellent?

Obama has refused to discuss whether he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but given the period when he went to college and the college he attended (Harvard has been especially assiduous in its pursuit of minority students, perhaps in hopes of defusing its longstanding reputation as a bastion of white male elitism) make it fairly likely. The bitter irony is that, as demonstrated daily by his obvious erudition, he had no need of affirmative action programs, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have been part of one, nor that he didn't absorb one of affirmative action's most pernicious lessons: that second or third best is more than good enough when combined with the "right" skin color.

I'd hate for any of this to be true, and love for Obama to prove me wrong by coming out kicking and screaming and cussing and punching on tomorrow morning's news. But I hope for the best while fearing the worst: that once again the Democrats will hand the country over to the radical right not through a paucity of ideas but from a failure of nerve. If nothing else - if Obama just can't bring himself to say something mean about his opponents - get Hillary Clinton on the case. Promise her Secretary of State or whatever else her little heart desires, but turn her loose on McCain and Palin and I guarantee you'll see some results. You might also get people wondering, "Tell me again why we nominated him instead of her," but that's the chance the Democrats have got to take. Unless of course they - and you - are quite happy with the way things are.

To The Post Office

I like the idea of visiting the James Farley General Post Office on 8th Avenue and 33rd to take care of some after-hours mailing business, but the reality... Not so much.

The building itself is a mighty impressive edifice, both inside and out. In fact, if delivering mail were a religion, this would surely be its cathedral. I can't walk past it, let alone enter it, without thinking of my dad, who put in 35 years or so at the considerably less glamorous Detroit Post Office. Although Dad never expressed any particular love for the Postal Service - on the contrary, he repeatedly insisted that he'd only taken a job there instead of pursuing a career in art because he needed a reliable income to support us four brats - he showed enough interest in all things postal, even years after his retirement, to convince me that at least part of his heart subscribed to the whole "Neither rain nor snow..." ethos. I remember him getting a kick out of driving last-minute letters out to Detroit Metropolitan Airport where his Post Office credentials allowed him to pretty much put it on the plane himself, and he never tired of telling my unemployed sister, with respect to the job she'd left back in 1972, "You should have stayed at the Post Office."

When I was an especially strident leftist, somewhere in the middle of the Vietnam War, I denounced my dad for being "part of the system." Having been vehemently opposed to the war for longer than I had, he was bewildered by what I was getting at (unfortunately it hadn't yet occurred to him that I was a stark, raving lunatic). "You work for the federal government," I seethed. "You're part of the war machine. You bring people their draft notices."

"I bring them their welfare checks, too," he said quietly, either having the decency or lacking the presence of mind to point out that I and much of the antiwar movement would be in a sorry state without said welfare checks. But I digress. The reason I had to make a late night visit to the Post Office yesterday was to send off a couple things to England. In the old days - e.g., when I was doing mail order for Lookout Records - I had all the mailing supplies, customs declarations, stamps, scale, etc., at home, and could just drop the packages in a mailbox at my leisure.

But no more, and anyway, one of the packages weighed over a pound, which means you can't drop it in a mailbox anyway, or use the machines at the Post Office to weigh and stamp it yourself. No, because some genius at Homeland Security decided that anything weighing more than a pound was too likely to be a bomb, you have to present it in person to the clerk at the window (who of course does absolutely nothing to ascertain whether or not it is a bomb, or who you are, or anything else other than weigh it and take your money).

So I had to line up for one of the three available clerks. As I said, in theory it's a great service to have a Post Office open all night; in practice, they keep just enough clerks on duty to make sure you'll be standing in line for the better part of an hour. And being the middle of the night - okay, it wasn't even ten o'clock when I was there, but you know - in New York City, you get, shall we say, an interesting clientele to share your space with.

All well and good, but I was mildly frantic to get my packages mailed and get back up to Times Square for a 10:35 showing of Pineapple Express (and for those of you who suspect I never see anything but trashy comedies and shoot-em-ups, I'll have you know I'd gone to see the Woody Allen picture Vicky Cristina Barcelona the night before - true, only because neither Tropic Thunder nor Pineapple Express was playing at a convenient time, but still...). And as luck would have it, I only missed the first five or ten minutes of the movie, which meant my waiting time at the Post Office was a mere... 48 minutes. I've seen worse, and don't even think about going there on tax day unless you're planning on making it an all-nighter.

Of the two things I was sending, one was a copy of the new Cometbus (#51), The Loneliness Of The Electric Menorah, which, as the title makes abundantly clear, is a nostalgic and winsome study of the booksellers of Telegraph Avenue. I'd mentioned it to a friend in England who sells books himself, and he was mightily intrigued, enough so that he's asked me three times to send him a copy.

The other was an oral history which I did with my Auntie Olivia in the year before her 80th birthday, which was in 1997. Unfortunately, we only got as far as the 1970s, but it still made for quite a story, and I had a copy of it bound, and presented it to her as a birthday present. Unfortunately there was only one copy of it, and a couple of her friends, especially Rachel, who did a great deal to care for Olivia in the last year of her life (and while Rachel herself was suffering from supposedly terminal cancer!). I saw Rachel last month in London, five years after she was given six months to live, and she let me know she'd be ever so happy to have a copy of Olivia's story, and so, after a bit of proofreading and editing, which it was sorely in need of, I printed up another copy and sent it off to her. For those of you who might be interested, here's a sample from it:

I'd left, and I'd got myself a room in Victoria. I was very broke, ever so broke. I just managed to pay the rent on the room, and I'd got a little dog, Dizzy, which Dingell had bought me. I was in this room one evening, there was just Dizzy and me, and all I had was one of these little, tiny thruppenny pieces. Teeny, like half a sixpence, but they were silver. And that's all I had, just thruppence, and I was dying for a cigarette. And poor Dizzy hadn't got anything to eat.

I went across to a news agent shop, and he used to sell five cigarettes for thruppence... Oh, this thruppenny bit, some silly ass, showing off one day, had bent it with his teeth, double. So I had a doubled-up truepenny bit, and I went across... Oh, I hammered it out, I went and asked the landlady if she'd got a hammer and tried to hammer it out straight, but it was all sort of battered. But I went across to the newsagent and got five cigarettes, and there was a butcher's just up the road, and I went and cadged a bone for Dizzy, and I went back in.

So it was Dizzy and me, lying on the bed. I'd got my cigarette, and the front door went, and the landlady answered. Then she came to me and said there's a man here to see you. And of course it was Dingell, with his bike. He'd biked all the way up from Bedford. And I thought, oh, no, I'll never get rid of this man. Well, there he was, and of course he'd got no money, nobody'd got any money. I couldn't turn him out; it was late in the evening.

At the time I was between jobs, as you might say. I'd left the office long before this. I'd left because Truda... Her father was head wine butler at the Criterion, and she was a waitress at the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch. Of course she was making a lot of money, for those days. And there's me, scraping along on seventeen and six, giving ten shillings to Auntie or something. I never had any money, and Truda always had money. And she said, 'Well, I don't know what you're doing sitting in that office with no money and what have you. Come to the Cumberland, come be a waitress.'

And I thought, well that makes sense. I don't want to work anyway, but if I do work, I might as well work and have some money as work and have none. Of course Uncle George and Auntie Nell fell about when I said I was going to be a waitress. Oh my God, that was awful. Mr. Welch and everybody said, 'Oh, Olive, you can't go and be a waitress.' But I said, yes I can, it's a lot more money. And off I went.

I became a waitress with Truda, at the Cumberland Hotel. I was earning much more, I was earning as much as Uncle George, practically, with tips. We worked long hours, mind you, and it was hard work. But I certainly had a lot more money in my pocket when I was working, but I didn't stay at one job. I went all around the hotels, I worked at the Strand Palace, at the Regent Palace... We'd just go from one to the other. We worked in the restaurants, the lounges... In the lounges everybody fiddled like mad. It was very stressful, but you made an awful lot of money.

However this was one of those times in between, when I hadn't got a job, and I was broke. Another old boyfriend, a friend of Maurice's, Jack Wall, I'd rung him up, and he came up and took me out to dinner, fed me, and lent me some money. But that had just run out as well, and I was down to my thruppenny bit when Dingell came and parked himself on my doorstep. And of course I couldn't throw him out, so I let him stay there that night. I didn't sleep with him or anything like that. And of course the next morning the landlady said, 'That's it, you've had a man in your room all night, you've got to go.'

So out me, Dizzy and Dingell went. Waifs, strays, in the heart of London, so to speak. Him and his bike, me and Dizzy. I don't know, we wandered around, we'd got to find somewhere to stay. And he wasn't going to go, so it was quite obvious that we had to take a room together.

I don't know how, but Dingell found some money somehow. It was sixteen shillings to get a room, I remember. We found this room in Mornington Crescent, in the end, and I think he had just about enough to pay for the room. So there you are. He sort of moved in with me. I still didn't sleep with him, not for ages. We slept in the same bed, but no way would I let him touch me. But there we were, the three of us, the dog, him and me, and I think the next day I went out and got myself a job at the Strand Palace Hotel.

Well, then it was very expedient to have Dingell there, because otherwise I had to leave my dog. But now I could go to work and leave Dingell to look after the dog, you see. So it was working out okay for the moment. I remember I used to save chops and things for my dog. If somebody left a piece of steak or whatever, I would gather it all together and bring it home for Dizzy. Never thinking of Dingell, just the dog. I used to eat in the Strand Palace, of course. And Dingell once said, 'Yes, I remember those days very well. You used to bring home steaks and chops for the dog, and I was eating the dog biscuits!'

A bit long, but hopefully you got the flavor of it. And as for Pineapple Express? Hilarious, I thought, but also an excellent riposte to those terminal hippies who insist that marijuana is "all about peace, maaaan." The violence, blood, guts and gore, all played up for maximum comic effect, made it pretty evident that marijuana is actually about amplifying what's already in your heart and mind, as the nonstop commentary and guffaws from a row of fat stoners just behind me made clear. Oh, and I did live in Mendocino County for ten years, where an Uzi is as common an accessory to the marijuana trade as a peacock-feathered roach clip or a handwoven God's eye. Anyway, I hope I won't be giving away any crucial plot developments by informing you that the good (i.e., the stoned but not habitually murderous) ended well and the bad badly, and that, as Oscar Wilde reminded us, is the meaning of fiction.

Take That, You Damn Community Organizers!

Back when I lived in the mountains of Northern California, our little 12 volt black and white TV only picked up one channel with any regularity, and among the shows I most avidly watched were Green Acres and The Dukes Of Hazzard.

No one needs to justify a liking for such brilliant windows into the American soul, but if I ever felt guilty about being parked in front of the TV when there was wood to chop or varmints to roust, I told myself that I was gaining insight into the ways and wherefores of my neighbors. Toss in a dash of Hee Haw, Petticoat Junction, a hefty measure of Hank Williams Jr.'s "Country Boy Will Survive", and you had your finger on the pulse of Greater Laytonville (pop. 995 or 1,036, the highway sign declared, depending which side of town you were entering from) and the back side of Iron Peak.

Well, not completely, but it was a start. I say this only to explain why VP candidate Sarah Palin and her remarkable entourage/family/posse don't appear nearly as strange to me as they do to some of my fellow cosmopolitan elitists. I lived side-by-side with people very much like them for better than ten years, and came to like and respect quite a few of them. Ever since then I've felt uncomfortable using words like "redneck" or "white trash," because they seem just as thoughtless and abusive as racial slurs like "nigger."

Which might be a little unfortunate at the moment, since it would be only too convenient to dredge up just such words to deride and dismiss the Palinistas. But I'd hate myself in the morning, and what's worse, I'd be stooping to the same level they did in attempting to whip up hatred and suspicion against big city slickers who read books and, like, know stuff. Not to mention those dreaded "community organizers."

To be fair, the term "community organizer" has been known to raise my own hackles from time to time, especially when appropriated, as it often is, by unprincipled scam artists of the Al Sharpton/Jesse Jackson ilk. If I were advising Obama, I'd tell him to think up another name for his work on Chicago's South Side, because to quite a few people, "community organizer" is always going to come off as a synonym for "rabble rouser."

Never mind that COs come in all shapes, sizes and political motivations. Someone ringing doorbells for the Natural Born American Yahoo Party or organizing a book drive for the PTA is every bit as much a community organizer as that shady beardo soliciting donations for the Communist Front to Overthrow Everything. It's just one of those phrases that's gotten stuck with a negative connotation, like "peace" or "liberal" or "tolerance and understanding."

Anyway, back to Hooterville, which is apparently where the newly energized GOP expects to find the constituency to propel it into power for another four years. As I said, I found many of my rural neighbors to be charming, down to earth, and wise in many ways of the world, and by that I don't just mean how to gut and skin deer and bear or where to lay culverts to keep dirt roads from washing out in the winter monsoons.

Once I got over my initial big city suspicions about them (and they over their country suspicions of me), we could sit and talk for hours about everything from local politics to global cosmology. We didn't always agree - far from it - but we were often able to have a good laugh about our differences.

But there was the occasional time when it stopped being funny. Like when the lady who owned the local bar - it being the only one around, she had more congregants than all the town's churches combined - was stymied in her attempt to build an asphalt batch plant on her back 40, which just happened to be smack dab in the center - such as it was - of town and next door to the high school. Not only did she shut down the bar for the day, leaving an entire community bereft and adrift, but rampaged around town with her gun muttering dark threats about anyone and everyone who might cross her.

Nobody did, and as everyone hastened to point out, she was a good old girl about 99% of the time. Just had her tetchy spells every now and again. Or the town's logging supplies baron, who despite having strong and not always well thought out views on everything, especially when it came to the desirability of cutting down trees, was an incredibly generous and community-minded fellow. Hell, he once tossed $20 in my tip basket when I was playing piano at a local restaurant, and as those of you who've heard me play can attest, that's real charity in action.

But he was also the one who spearheaded the campaign that was to briefly make Laytonville an object of international mockery when he tried to have Dr. Seuss' The Lorax removed from the elementary school reading list because it allegedly painted loggers in an uncomplimentary light. The town meeting that ensued was like having the Republican and Democratic conventions conducted simultaneously in the same rec room.

Sarah Palin would be right at home in Laytonville, and if the town should ever grow big enough to have a mayor, she'd be elected in a landslide, because not only does she share the views of the local matriarchs and patriarchs, she's a heck of a lot better looking. And if I still lived there, I'd give her a good-natured ribbing from time to time, but otherwise would probably get along with her just fine.

But if you were to propose to me that she, or any of the other colorful local characters were the second most qualified person to be President of the United States, I'd assume you'd gone clear out of your ever-loving mind. And yet, this is essentially what John McCain has just said to the country. Okay, what he's really saying is, "I've made a cold-blooded calculation that nominating this woman will give me the best chance of winning the election, and if I should croak and leave the rest of you stuck with her as President, well, that's the way the cookie crumbles," which shouldn't be too shocking coming from a politician whose primary, if not sole purpose in life is to win elections and wield power.

Only trouble is that McCain has constructed an entire career out of pretending NOT to be that kind of politician, only to blow that carefully crafted image to smithereens at the final hurdle. It's hard to imagine that six months ago, when I was more concerned about what I saw as the Democrats' overly leftist tendencies, I could have seen myself voting for him.

His willingness to risk saddling us with a right wing, religious demagogue - he is 72, after all, and not in the best of health - was more than enough to write him off all by itself, but if there were any doubt remaining, his sanctimonious yet deeply and fundamentally dishonest acceptance speech will have put paid to that.

"Change is coming," he declares? Hello, John, you and your party have been in charge for the last eight years and you've succeeded in nearly bankrupting the country. You're going to cut spending and balance the budget? Of course you are, just like you've been doing for the past... oh wait, biggest budget deficits in history, massive increases in public spending... Don't get me wrong; I'd like a tax cut as much as anyone. But as any of you who's ever had a credit card or a mortgage can attest, it's nice to get an increased credit limit, and even nicer to be told you don't have to make any payments for a year or two, but sooner or later you have to start paying off your bills or you go broke.

Not in McCain World, apparently, which is apparently the same la-la land occupied by Bush World, and which is powered by what the first, not quite so incompetent Bush correctly derided as "voodoo economics." Many if not most of our current financial troubles can be traced directly to the Republican policies of the past eight years: the plummeting value of the dollar which has made everything, particularly oil, appear to be far more expensive than it is, is a direct result of Bush attempting to run the country via a series of increasingly dodgy sub-prime loans.

McCain's only strength is, or at least appeared to be, with regard to the war. However you felt about the war at the beginning - I was neutral, perhaps very slightly in favor, but in retrospect think I should have opposed it, at least until such time as we had an administration capable of running it - it's both cowardly and irresponsible to suggest leaving the Iraqis to their own devices now that we've dismantled their country for them. But while Obama has moved toward the center - maybe not quite enough, but at least in the right direction - on this issue, McCain is resorting to cheap appeals to faux-patriotism and hey, did I mention that I was a POW?

That's not to say he doesn't also have some sound and reasoned things to say about how to oppose terrorism and Islamism, but unfortunately, I just don't believe or trust him anymore. I'm also afraid of his legendary temper. It's one thing to go off half-cocked in the Senate, where you've got 99 other Senators to act as a counterweight, but quite another when you've got your finger on the nuclear trigger.

So, blogger comes out in favor of Obama. Not exactly earth-shaking news, though it might come as such to those who for whatever reasons have come to perceive me as some sort of neo-con race-baiting lackey of Fox News and the Michael Savage show. My friend Ben Weasel, a fervent McCain supporter, warns that Obama will be a "disaster," and I'm not so sure of my opinions that I'd deny this was possible. If he's as left wing as he once appeared to be, we could have another Jimmy Carter on our hands, compared to which I'd almost welcome a President Palin. If he's as pragmatic and as reasoned as he's appeared to be lately, we could have another JFK.

It Just Keeps Getting Better

Haven't seen anything about this in the American media yet, but the Daily Mail has tracked down young Bristol Palin's boyfriend, a self-described "fucking redneck," doesn't want kids, and warns, "If ya fuck with me, I'll kick your ass."

Judging from the photo, he looks like he means it, too, but I'm counting on him being a little too busy at the present to come find me in Brooklyn. But just in case, hey dude, I totally respect your redneckness, know what I'm sayin'?

Bristol Honey, Would You Do Mummy A Favor And Go Get Knocked Up?

The news that your unmarried teenage daughter is pregnant is not usually greeted with unalloyed delight, especially when you're a politician running for office on a platform of fundamentalist Christianity and traditional family values. But Bristol Palin's just-announced pregnancy could be, if you'll pardon the expression, a godsend, as it would appear to put paid to the weekend's rumors that her mother, VP candidate Sarah Palin, faked her own pregnancy to cover up a previous indiscretion on Bristol's part.

If the chronology being put forth by the Palin campaign is correct, it would be a near-impossibility for Bristol, supposedly five months pregnant, to have also been the mother of baby Trig, born in mid-April. Still, there does seem to be something a little strange about this particular family drama, particularly the fact that Governor Sarah was never seen looking notably pregnant and seems to have been barely if at all inconvenienced by giving birth.

Nonetheless, barring further information (which, given the hyperactivity of the interblogs these past couple days, is not at all unlikely), I'll have to conclude that the faked pregnancy story, while a good soap opera or movie premise, is not true, and let Governor Sarah get on with explaining why her much-vaunted executive experience doesn't seem to have come in very handy in constraining her own home-grown teenage pregnancy epidemic. I mean, how does a teenager from an even semi-functional family manage to get knocked up these days (spare me the obvious comments)? Is this the 1950s or something? Or merely a rather stark reminder of what the fundamentalist campaign to bring back the 1950s looks like in real life?

It Didn't Take Long

Something like 24 hours, if that, before rumors about VP candidate Sarah Palin's allegedly faked pregnancy started sweeping across the internet. So far none of the mainstream media seem to be touching it, but unless some substantive evidence comes up to disprove the story, it can't be long before it surfaces.

Supposedly the five-month old baby born with Down Syndrome actually belongs to her teenage daughter, who disappeared from public view during the final five months during Governor Sarah's alleged pregnancy, and photos taken of the governor when she would have been seven months pregnant, seem to reveal little or no evidence of a baby bulge.

There is more supporting evidence (or insinuation, if you prefer): here's just a couple of the thousands of blog entries that have already popped up on the subject: Fame Crawler and the Daily Kos.

What are the chances of it being true, and if so, what effect is it likely to have on the campaign? Well, if it's not true, it should be fairly easy to put paid to the rumors with DNA evidence and/or testimony from the attending physician, though the Palin campaign might shrink from dignifying the allegations by responding to them at all. If there is anything to it, well, it might or might not derail her campaign. Think, for example, of all the cocaine-snorting charges hurled at George Bush during the 2000 election: while they provided further ammunition for Bush-haters, they didn't seem to deter his fans to any great degree.

And while Palin could be attacked on family-values and hypocrisy grounds - if she can't even keep her 16-year-old daughter on the straight and narrow, where does she come off trying to lay down fundamentalist anti-abortion policy for every woman in the land? - she could also win some sympathy votes. Most families at one time or another have had some sort of secret scandal, and while the Palin story, should it be true, is a bit more Southern, er, Northern Gothic than most, quite a few parents might see an element of nobility in a mother going to such lengths to protect her daughter's reputation and future. If, on the other hand, it can be spun as Governor Palin's attempt to protect her own reputation and future... Well, obviously it can go either way. In any event, the "official" campaign of 2008 seems to be getting off the sort of whiz-bang start that may not have been seen since the days of "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha ha ha!" (Grover Cleveland, 1884). Good news for the media and American Government teachers trying to elicit interest from bored teenagers; maybe not so good for those hoping for a sober and dignified discussion of the issues. Either way, I suspect it's going to be the most interesting election we've had in a long time.

(Not So) Beautiful Losers

Up until Obama gave his acceptance speech Thursday night, I'd been mentally composing a diatribe about how the Democrats seemed to place more of a premium on looking good in defeat than on actually gaining and wielding power. You're familiar with the syndrome, I'm sure, especially if you live in or near one of our latte-sipping capitals: people looking up from their copy of the Times or the New Yorker to deliver a pursed-lip sneer at "that idiot Bush" or "those red state morons" when in fact they are more interested in validating their own cultural and moral superiority than in actually doing the hardscrabble work necessary to effect an actual change in the way government works (or, as increasingly seems to be the case, fails to).

We saw Al Gore and John Kerry in turn throw away what should have been easy victories because of their petulant "I can do it myself, Mommy" refusal to wield the slightly tacky but still powerful weapon that was Bill Clinton, and by their slightly wonky, cerebrally aloof manner that alienated millions of potential Democratic voters who might have sensed that George W. Bush had little if anything in common with their interests, but nonetheless related to him because he came across like a normal human being instead of a computer-generated composite candidate.

I'm still concerned that Obama will manage to blow the election in a not dissimilar manner, even though - or perhaps because - he comes across as being at least twice as smart and ten times more eloquent than the disastrous Gore-Kerry diumvirate. Even though I don't particularly care for Hillary Clinton, I was astounded when Obama chose, with all due respect, an old hack like Joe Biden as his VP candidate when putting Hillary on the ticket would have virtually guaranteed him victory in November. That plus a summer of waffling and a few too many platitudes had me convinced that we had yet another presidential contender who was more concerned about looking good in defeat than doing what it took to win.

Obama's rousing football stadium performance went some way toward allaying my concerns, though I in no way thought it the masterpiece of oratory that the MSNBC and CNN talking heads seem to think it was. Are none of them old enough to have seen a Kennedy speech, I wondered (that's JFK, not Bobby, who in my opinion suffered from Obama-itis himself)? My criterion: if I'm watching something on TV, be it a political speech, a movie, a football game, whatever, and find myself gradually starting to poke around on the internet instead of paying full attention, then something's lacking. Granted, when as a young boy I listened to Kennedy speak, he didn't have to compete with the internet or much else in that pre-multimedia age. But what made his rhetoric so riveting was the way he could artfully blend the profound and the profane, mixing high concept political philosophy with down and dirty ward politics. Obama comes closer to that level of discourse than any politician I've seen since the days of JFK, but he's not there yet, and bear in mind that Kennedy barely won the election (some say it was just as surely stolen as was Bush's 2000 triumph) against an opponent considerably less attractive (though perhaps with a bit more substance) than John McCain.

Still, the Obama show was as impressive a spectacle as anyone has seen in American politics in recent memory, if ever, and if they'd gone whole hog and hired the Chinese architects of the Olympics opening ceremony to orchestrate it, the election might have been all wrapped up by Friday morning. Until, that is, wily John McCain took advantage of Obama's nixing-Hillary blunder to slip a fast one past the Democrats by nominating a VP out of far right field and instantly wipe about 90% of the orgy of wasn't-Obama-wonderful musings right off the media map.

True to form, Democrats laughed and sneered at the seemingly oddball choice of Sarah Palin, and you can't entirely blame them. While Obama's rally offered at least a whiff of Triumph Of The Will, McCain's unveiling of Palin was pure, unabashed Babbitry. To see McCain awkwardly pawing at the undeniably milfish governor was a bit like nervously watching grandpa at a wedding when he's had more than his customary glass of wine and has possibly forgotten to take his meds: part cringeworthy, part appalled fascination at the prospect of what he might say or do next.

But Palin herself, though far to the right of mainstream America, has a powerful presence that, even if it only energizes the previously uninspired or disenchanted evangelicals, is going to considerably strengthen the McCain ticket. Even though I strongly disagree with her on the great majority of issues, I found her very likable, and imagine she would be a heck of a lot more fun to hang out with than Joe Biden or perhaps even Obama himself. George Bush won his elections, despite also being ideologically out of step with most Americans, on similar grounds, even though his clownish wisecracks and self-deprecating humor never completely disguised the bullying frat boy that was also a part of his persona. Unless Palin does or says something incredibly stupid in the coming campaign (or if the thousands of researchers and bloggers already engaged in frantic archeological excavations of her entire life and career come up with some real scandal), she'll be a more formidable candidate than Bush ever was, to the point where Republican partisans might start to wonder why McCain is heading the ticket instead of her.

The election is still Obama's to lose, but none of this drama would have had to happen if he'd taken the obvious and common sense step of appointing Hillary as his running mate. Hey, JFK by all accounts could barely stand Lyndon Johnson, but he knew that all his high-faluting ideas about New Frontiers and torches being passed to a new generation would amount to zilch if he didn't first accomplish the task of winning the election. I'm not advocating an all-out Macchiavellian approach here, just a little old-fashioned pragmatism. Hell, I don't even know if Obama would turn out to be a great Kennedy-esque President, or a disastrous Carter-esque one (at this point I'd settle, albeit reluctantly, for a reprise of Bill Clinton), but in light of the crises and challenges facing the world today, I think taking a chance on Obama seems immeasurably more appealing than continuing with the dreary rendezvous with catastrophe that the Bush interregnum has proved to be. Now it just remains to be seen whether Obama wants it bad enough to make it happen.

Kayaking On the Hudson

I forgot to mention one of the coolest things Jackson and I did this past week: we were wandering along the Hudson River a bit disconsolately after having just missed the last Circle Line cruise of the day when we noticed a bunch of kayakers splashing around just offshore. Remembering something Patrick Smith had told me about free kayaking for the public, I went up to the Pier 96 Boathouse to investigate. I hadn't been misinformed: anybody who knew how to swim could simply walk up and after signing an affidavit promising not to sue them was given a few minutes instruction, a life jacket, and sent out to sea on his or her very own plastic kayak.

Well, not too far out to sea, granted; you weren't allowed to paddle out any further than the ends of two nearby piers that provided a sort of artificial inlet. But given the size of the waves on even a relatively calm day, not to mention the heavy traffic frequently encountered on the Hudson, it wasn't a bad place to practice one's kayaking skills, at least not for a neophyte like me. Jackson wasn't quite as impressed, having just recently done a 100-mile trip down Utah's rather more rapids-laden Green River, but it was an excellent opportunity for him to instruct his doofus uncle on the finer points of handling a kayak paddle, and in any event, he's always happiest when he's in, on or very near water.

In this case we were a little of each, in that the kayaks not only sit very low, but also take on a fair bit of water even if you don't manage to tip yours over (we didn't; nor did any of our fellow boaters). The downside of this is that even under the best of circumstances you get a fairly damp behind (actually a soaking wet one, if the whole truth be told), and some very wet feet as well. Normally this is not the sort of thing I aspire to, especially when I'm going to have to take a long subway ride shortly afterward, but it was a nice enough day weather-wise and the excitement of being out on the Hudson under one's own paddle-power was more than enough to make up for a mild soaking.

It brought back memories of paddling around in a canoe at my uncle's lake house in Northern Michigan when I was a kid, and made me wonder how I'd let so many years go by without repeating that experience. True, the slightly smelly and probably filthy Hudson is no Long Lake, but I suddenly was overcome with a possibly irrational desire to take a canoe down the Eel River in Northern California, something I could have done but never did during all the years I lived in close proximity to it.

Anyway, kayaking on the Hudson comes with a five-star recommendation from me, and you've got till mid-October to take advantage of it before they shut up shop for the season. And by the way, I don't know how they're funded, whether it's by the city or what, but they've got a box for "donations" at the tables where you check out kayaks, so feel free to chuck in a couple extra bucks to make up for the ones I forgot to drop in, my only excuse being that I was wandering around in a state of blissed-out (and soaking wet) bemusement by the time I set foot on dry land again.

Hello Again

It's been a while, hasn't it? I don't know if any of you out there rely on regular posts from yours truly for any part of your daily entertainment/information/inspiration quotient, but if by any chance that's the case, I apologize.

I've been playing host and tour guide to my 12-year-old nephew Jackson, and while theoretically it should still have been possible to do a bit of blogging after he went to bed, the fact of the matter is that he was usually up as late as if not later than me, and also that after a full day of trying to keep up with a 12-year-old, I didn't have a whole lot of energy left over.

I promised him this trip last year as a combined Christmas/birthday present, before, I note, I was aware of what rising fuel costs and exchange rates were going to do to the cost of it. But you don't take back a promise to a 12-year-old on economic grounds, do you? Well, I wasn't about to, and I'm glad I didn't.

We spent five days in New York - Jackson's first time ever on the East Coast - and then flew over to London for eight days. While we were there, I idly noted that the Eurostar/Channel Tunnel now made it possible to do day trips to Paris, and the next thing I knew we were getting up at 5 am to do just that. I warned him that there wasn't much to see there but old buildings and French people, but he was all right with that, and assiduously practiced three phrases of French for his trip: je m'appelle Jackson, je ne parle pas français, and mon oncle est un imbécile.

The kid is part water rat, I suspect, because in every town we visited his first impulse was to head for the nearest river, lake, ocean or drainage ditch and wistfully ponder it. As a result, we spent much of our few hours in Paris meandering along the Seine and seeing little to nothing of the buildings and street life above. Eventually I sprung for a boat ride that took us up and down the river so he could at least say he'd seen the Eiffel Tower. His mother, who's a very gifted chef, will no doubt be pleased to learn that the sum total of our experience with French cuisine consisted of a croissant on the Eurostar, a sandwich in the Gare du Nord, and a visit to a Paris branch of le Subway, where we were waited on by a very cheerful girl who helped us with our halting French and gave us coupons that gave us our order for half price. "So not all French people are mean and rude, are they?" he said, and I barely had the heart to tell him that she was actually a North African immigrant.

Seriously, I've never had the problems that some people claim to have with the French, even the Parisians. They seem perfectly nice to me, but then so do New Yorkers (except for the extremely aggressive one who rammed a shopping cart loaded with a television set that he'd no doubt recently stolen into Jackson yesterday and told him to "Get the #$*%^% out of my #$&&% way"). Even the Londoners, who are generally the rudest of the bunch, were pleasant, and that, combined with castles, funny accents, and San Francisco-style weather, caused Jackson to like London best of all. In fact I almost thought he was going to cry when we boarded the plane to leave, though being 12-almost-13, it came out a bit more like an angry scowl.

He got to attend his first Premier League match ever, and I got to my first one since November 2006, and we both had the enormous pleasure of seeing Fulham defeat Arsenal (ironically, the last two matches I've seen both involved Fulham beating Arsenal, something which otherwise hadn't happened in more than 40 years. There was also a reunion of the West Country Walking Society up in Gloucestershire that saw us tramping over some slightly muddy hillsides and then lolling about in the ancient town of Cirencester. We took a double-decker bus to Greenwich and a river boat back to Westminster, crossed the Thames about a dozen times via various bridges, and hung out in Soho and the Portobello Road Market, the latter causing me to wonder why I'd ever left the old neighborhood.

In New York, apart from the usual Empire State Building/Circle Line/Times Square/Staten Island Ferry tourist route, we also took several midnight bicycle rides (until my extra bicycle got stolen the night before we left for London) and attended Jackson's first punk rock concert ever, which happened to be Rancid at Irving Plaza (now, for reasons I don't understand, known as the Fillmore). We got to go backstage and meet the band, and Tim and Matt, who grew up about a mile from where Jackson lives, traded stories with him about middle school and other East Bay stuff. We had excellent seats in the "VIP" section looking right down on the stage, but about midway through the set Jackson pointed at the roiling mass of bodies below us and said "I want to go down there." "I don't know, Jackson, it can get pretty rough in a Rancid pit," I told him. "I know," he said, and headed for the stairs.

Well, I didn't want to tell him that I had never been in a Rancid pit, at least not since the days when they were playing living rooms and coffee houses, but I also wasn't going to let him go down there on his own and then have to explain to his parents about the missing teeth and/or stitches, so I dutifully followed. As it turned out, it wasn't nearly as violent as it had looked from above, though of course there was the usual sprinkling of obese morons who could only show their appreciation for the band by flinging their fists wildly around and trying to trample anyone smaller than themselves into the ground.

I tried to stay close to Jackson and if necessary protect him, but it quickly became obvious that it wouldn't be necessary. The kid was going crazy, like he'd been born to jump and down in a punk rock pit, and was seemingly oblivious and/or impervious to any and all mayhem transpiring around him. In fact, I came closer to getting clocked than he did, and that was probably at a moment when I stopped momentarily to laugh at the incongruous continuity of it all: 60-year-old granddad and 12-year-old neophyte bonding in what by now has become an almost timeless (well, punk rock's been around for more than 30 years, hasn't it? that's gotta be pretty timeless to someone who's 12) ritual. Like Rancid sing in Journey To The East Bay, "No premonition could have seen this."

We also had a couple chances to catch up with Jackson's cousin (and my niece) Gabrielle Bell, who was just back from the Japanese premiere of Tokyo!, a third of which was based on one of her comics, and which she co-wrote with director Michel Gondry. But then it was time for Jackson to go back to California and start 7th grade, which, I'm suspecting, might feel just a bit anticlimactic after the past couple weeks. We took the subway to JFK yesterday (which was when he had the unpleasant encounter with the shopping-cart wielding thug, the only such experience he had in his whole time in New York), and while I was busy trying to instruct him in every rudiment of going through security, boarding the plane, stowing his luggage, etc., he casually strolled away and we didn't even get to say a proper goodbye.

Now the house seems awfully quiet and empty, all except for the refrigerator, which has strangely remained full for an entire day, and any mess and clutter is strictly my own. I guess I never fully understood why people have children - well, not exactly why they have them, but why they're so willing to sacrifice for them, and put their own lives on hold for them, and to put up with all the petty and not-so-petty aggravations that come with them, but now I think I do. Not that Jackson was particularly aggravating; in fact, he was just about as perfect a child as you could ask for. But I suspect his parents have, in the course of the past 12 and a half years put up with the occasional inconvenience in order to raise him and his sister, and yet I've never in all that time heard a word of complaint out of them. Nothing, in fact, except for how proud and happy they were with their children. Now, thanks to my time with young Jackson, I can see why.

A Little Knowledge Is An Annoying Thing

I caught a little bit of the opening ceremonies from the Olympics and found myself wishing I'd kept up with my Chinese lessons. For the first time in my life, New York, Washington or the United States of America no longer seemed like the center of the world. The technological accomplishment coupled with the national pride and cohesiveness of purpose emanating from Beijing made me feel like a citizen of some minor satrapy situated somewhere on the outer fringes of the new Han Empire.

I never came close to real fluency in Chinese, but in the mid-to-late 70s I could read and write it well enough to decipher simple news articles or the cliché and catch phrase-laden speeches of Chairman Mao and discuss them with my classmates in Berkeley's Asian Studies Department. If I'd stayed at it, chances are that by now I'd qualify for a position as some sort of civil servant, perhaps even a provincial administrator, once the People's Republic completes its takeover of the country once known as America.

All kidding aside, it's hard not to see conflict looming between China and the USA, and we can only hope that it will be limited to the civil, economic and cultural level, because I wouldn't bet too much on our chances militarily. Granted, back in the 70s and 80s it was widely predicted that Japan would be ruling the world by now, but Japan didn't have 1.3 billion people and a government that, for a while now, has seemed almost incapable of putting a foot wrong.

Oh, there's that unpleasantness about Tibet, of course, and the sharp restrictions on free speech, the harsh treatment of dissidents, and all that other very un-American stuff. But so far at least, the Chinese government has not only been getting away with it, they've got away with it and still enjoyed widespread support and affection from their people. Hell, the American government is probably much less popular with Americans, land of the free and all that jazz notwithstanding.

One could be cynical and say that the reason the Chinese government is more popular is that it's delivering the goods, consumer goods, that is, in the form of rapidly increasing prosperity while America seems determined to drag all but a few of its people in the opposite direction, and one would probably be right. Nevertheless, the Mandate of Heaven, which is the classical Chinese version of "God is on our side," looks distinctly like it's residing in the Middle Kingdom these days. By the way, the name Middle Kingdom, which is the literal meaning of Zhong Guo, i.e., China, refers to the idea that China exists midway between heaven and earth, and is also quite literally the center of the world. The rest of us live in the suburbs at best. This notion has been rather fundamental to Chinese cosmology and politics for the better part of 5,000 years now.

Be that as it may, what will really be killing me about the next two weeks of nonstop Olympics coverage is the constant mispronunciation of the host city's name by American newscasters. I've been putting up with this ever since Peking became Beijing, but it's lately been reaching a tin-eared crescendo. Listen, you twits, I don't care how sophisticated and international you think you're being by pronouncing the "j" in Beijing as if were the "zh" sound associated with a French "j." The fact is, you're WRONG, and you sound like an ignorant boob to boot. The "j" in Beijing is very much like and English "j," and if you really want to display your savoir dire, why not try learning the proper tones (falling and rising for "bei", level for "jing") distinguish the words ("Beijing" is actually a compound word meaning "northern capital") from the numerous other uses of "bei" and "jing".

Oh, what's the use. It's hard enough to get people to speak or spell English correctly. But once again, if only I'd kept up my studies and been in line for that provincial administrator job. With the autocratic might of the Beijing government backing me up, you can pretty well bet there wouldn't have to be too many tongues cut out before people stopped mangling the name of the new capital of the world.

Another Inconvenient Truth

Spent a few days out on Fire Island last week, a grateful guest in a waterfront house that, I discovered, cost more than my annual income to rent for the season (May to September). "It's only that cheap," my host breezily assured me, "because it doesn't have a swimming pool or central air."

I found it more than luxurious enough for my needs, however, luxury for me having, after a couple years in New York, being any place where it's possible to get eight hours of sleep uninterrupted by car alarms, ten-ton trucks threatening to careen into one's living room, drunken, screaming neighbors, or the mingled inadvertent symphony of televisions, radios and stereos emanating from fourteen different apartments.

On the Island, the only late-sound to be heard apart from the gentle lapping of the water against the pier was the distant thump-thump of the disco in "downtown" Cherry Grove (downtown being the intersection of two boardwalks (no streets, no cars) where you can find a handful of bars and restaurants, the Lilliputian post office, and the only grocery store in town.

I use "disco" in the classic sense of the word, as there was a very 70s feel to Cherry Grove, not just in terms of the music, but also in the mores. It felt very pre-AIDS, which was odd, since the Island, like New York City in general, was hit very hard when the epidemic was at its most deadly. And even though it's rare these days to hear of someone dying from AIDS, it's equally rare to encounter a group of gay men in which several of them, if not the majority, are HIV-positive.

Yet it just doesn't seem to be much of an issue anymore. Which is good, great, in fact, on one level. I've met many men who've been positive for 20 or 25 years and are still in good health; some of them have never even had to take drugs for their condition. Most of them are carrying on with their lives as though HIV were barely an issue at all.

What's not so good is that quite a few of them are also carrying on with their sex lives on the same premise. Perhaps I'm guilty of being naive, but for many years I simply assumed that most people who were HIV-positive either had protected sex only, or, if they did have unprotected sex, only with others who were already positive. Okay, I'm not totally naive, and I figured there were bound to be some who were either too antisocial, too drug-addled, or too oblivious to care, but that they were a tiny minority.

Also, there has been an image, built up during the darkest days of the epidemic, not least through movies like Philadelphia, of AIDS victims as martyrs, almost saintlike in their forbearance and acceptance of their fate. When people were dying left and right and there was no available treatment, it seemed almost churlish to view them any other way, or to dwell on the fact that some - not all, certainly, but quite a few - had acquired the virus by way of sexual proclivities in the face of which Caligula might have blushed (sorry, Morrissey).

So it came as a rather rude awakening to me when I discovered that having promiscuous, anonymous unprotected sex has once again become so common on the gay scene that many men find it barely worth commenting on. Granted, I'm basing this on largely anecdotal evidence, but given the proportion of gay men who've unhesitatingly acknowledged having unprotected sex all or part of the time, despite having no knowledge of their partners HIV status (or, in many cases, their names), I think it's safe to say this is more than an occasional aberration.

And given the fact that most gay men I know are neither crazed drug addicts nor sociopaths, and more often than not are from the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum, I'm guessing this is a phenomenon that cuts across the whole of the gay community. And it's not something that's being talked about very much, at least not to my knowledge. Yes, a couple years there were a number of anguished discussions over why certain men would specifically seek out bareback websites or venues, but the subtext was always "certain men," i.e., some mysterious, shadowy group whose existence or motivation couldn't be explained or understood by the majority of "normal" or "responsible" gays.

But if, as it appears to me, unprotected sex has gone mainstream, it's worth asking whether there's a conspiracy of silence around it for political reasons, in much the same way that AIDS is treated differently from all other communicable diseases (it's the only one I know of, for example, in which it's not standard operating procedure to track down the partners of infected individuals). In the 1980s there were, or at least seemed to be, sound reasons for this special treatment; things are very different today. Especially in light of today's news that new HIV infections may be up to 40% more numerous than was previously believed, it's almost certainly time for a bit more candor in and from the gay community. And if you're having sex with men - regardless of whether you're male or female - you might want to think about being even more careful than you thought you had to be.

Summer's Almost Gone

There are those who view summer in New York City as the most unbearable of times, and can hardly wait scurry out of town for the milder climes of the Hamptons or Fire Island or New England.

I am not one of them. Summer in the city is "pretty much like heaven on earth," I said to Aaron as we strolled along the Hudson late last night. We reminisced about the time almost exactly a year ago we'd been walking in the same spot only to get caught in a torrential thunderstorm, the soaking we received having been entirely worth it, however, in exchange for the hour-long lightning display we'd witnessed in advance of the storm sweeping in from Jersey.

Since "a chance" of thunderstorms had been predicted for last night, we were hopeful that the spectacle would be repeated, especially since this time I'd brought an umbrella, but this time the storms passed us by and the air hung over us with the cloying thickness of mid- to late-summer, i.e., warm and moist as bathwater, making walking seem more like swimming, and lounging more like soaking. It was absolutely splendid, which is why I couldn't resist pointing out that summer's end was rapidly heaving into sight.

"Oh, you told me that way back at the beginning of July," said Aaron, "and when we had that cool spell I almost believed you." He went on to remind me that we'd then gone into a week where the temperature had climbed into the 90s every day, and that it hadn't got a whole lot cooler since then.

"I know we've still got all of August, and sometimes that's when the hottest days of the year are. But statistically we're already past the hottest part of the summer, the days are getting shorter, and everyone knows that the second half of anything good goes by way faster than the first half." Well, that's not a verbatim account of what I said, or anything close to one, to be honest, but it conveys the general sense of it. Maybe it's just my particular type of personality that starts worrying about the coming winter on the first day of summer, but I suspect there's a little bit of that craziness in all of us.

I've got a project I'm working on, if the definition of "working on" can be stretched to include "constantly procrastinating," and it's got a couple of deadlines staring me in the face. It involves editing a memoir/autobiography of a friend I know from when I lived in London. The first deadline is coming up in less than three weeks: it's when I'll next be in London and when I promised to have a first draft of my edit done for him. He'll understand if I can't keep that promise, but my second deadline is a little more inflexible: he's 80 years old and not in the best of health. I want to put a finished manuscript in his hands while he's still alive and able to read it and possibly find a publisher for it.

It's going to require some rather intensive work on my part to get this done in the next couple weeks, work which will require me being indoors much of the time when I might much prefer to be on my bike or at the beach, but considering that I've had the original draft in my possession for eight months now, including all last winter, I can't feel too sorry for myself. But it does prompt me to reflect on the passage of time, and the way it speeds up once the end of anything is in view.

I could be talking about summer, a love affair, or life itself; one of the first times this feeling really hit home with me was during the World Cup - I think it was 2002 - when there was a stretch of really good games, England were still in the hunt, and everyone - well, everyone except sourpusses, misanthropes and Americans - was practically giddy with excitement. As one match ended, and with another one due to start in a matter of minutes, I enthused to no one in particular, "This is the best World Cup ever. I wish it never had to end!"

Of course it did, and long before the end, even before England were ignominiously eliminated, the games had thinned out from their initial furious pace, and already I was looking ahead to 2006 and 2010, and that's when it hit me: when I measured out my life in quadrennial dollops of football fever, there wasn't nearly as much left of it as I might have liked. I started counting how many more World Cups I could reasonably expect to see: even if I lived to be 100, there'd be only 11 more, and since that time one of those has already come and gone.

It's like that with summers, too, and years, for that matter. They go by so much faster now, and if experience is any indicator, they're not about to slow down. Am I being morbid, or merely realistic, to recognize that I'm now reaching an age where it's no longer considered unusual if I or one of my contemporaries falls over dead. Granted, I'm probably in the best health of my life, and if I take sufficient care of myself, chances are that will continue for some time. Till I'm 70, perhaps, or even 80 or 90? Given my family history, I could easily live that long or longer, but not only do those ages no longer seem so far away - especially considering that the last 10, 20 or 30 years seem to have passed in the blink of an eye - but I also have to consider that simply being alive is hardly the be-all or end-all of existence.

How much longer, for example, will I able to hop on my bike and ride across the Williamsburg Bridge to Manhattan? Or run laps around the track in McCarren Park? Throw myself into the pit at a punk rock show? So far I have no trouble doing any of these things, but there are many people my age who would struggle just with getting up the stairs to my third floor walkup. The fact that I've defied the odds so far does nothing to contradict the reality that I won't be able to do so indefinitely. Bodies wear out, lives run out, and I have no reason to think anyone's going to make an exception in my case.

Looking at things that way, shouldn't I be in a much bigger hurry than I am? Shouldn't I be practically maniacal about putting every minute of time I still have to some productive and/or pleasurable use? Logic would seem to say so, yet I squander at least as much time as ever on lolling about, watching TV reruns, reading (or participating in) mindless message board squabbles, or simply staring off into space and feeling sorry for myself. It reminds me of when I was a kid in school, and spent all year looking forward to summer vacation. That first day of freedom was one of the most awesome sensations I've ever known: what seemed like an eternity stretching in front of me in which I could do practically anything and everything I could dream of. Then, just like that, it was August, there was a slight nip in the air, and the newspapers were full of those hated back to school ads. Those last couple weeks took on an almost desperate quality as my friends and I grasped frantically at the dwindling joys of the season and bemoaned all the time we'd wasted and the opportunities we'd let pass us by.

Then suddenly it was over, we were back into our school clothes, sitting up straight in those cramped wooden chairs and not even wanting to look at the clock or calendar because another summer might as well have been another lifetime away. But at least in those days, we had another lifetime - quite a few of them, in fact - to look forward to. One of these years, sooner rather than later for some of us, we won't.