Home Under The Lights

The lights at the top of this blog’s masthead are radio and television towers mounted on top of Mount Suppoa, known more commonly to the residents of nearby Phoenix as the tallest point of South Mountain, the name given to a small range of mountains southwest of the city proper.  The mountains themselves are part of one of the largest municipal parks in the country and are filled to the brim with Native American and other artifacts, ruins, petroglyphs and old buildings.  At night, as you see above, the towers themselves are lit up with slowly blinking red lights at night, mostly to illuminate them from the surrounding matching darkness of both sky and mountain as a courtesy to passing aircraft.  For me though, the lights hold a different significance altogether.

When my family and I moved to Arizona in 1990, we moved into a small 3 bedroom rental house in Ahwatukee, a small enclave of Phoenix proper referred to by some as “the world’s largest cul-de-sac.”  This is due to its unique geography, most notably the fact that it was backed up to South Mountain on the West and to Interstate 10 on the East.  This made it somewhat insular and thus attractive to both young middle class families and senior citizens alike.  Indeed plenty of both groups called the small village-within-a-city home, as did several golf-themed resorts and country clubs.  Basically it is a place where not much happens and the residents like that just fine, thank you very much.

One of the best qualities of our new (rented) home was its proximity to a large park, which actually happened to be right across the street.  It was not a huge park by any means, but for a nine year old it was plenty big enough, with tennis courts, basketball courts, a large field, a sizeable playground and even a little wooden bridge built over an artificial creek bed.  The bridge in particular was my most favorite feature of the park and indeed I crossed it on my small BMX too many times to count or approximate.  Something about the “thump thump thump thump” noise the wooden planks made under my bike tires was oddly satisfying.  I still cannot totally explain why.  The bridge still stands today.

One advantage of the park being across the street was convenience, as it became commonplace for me to simply leave home on my bike unannounced and spend a lot of time there, particularly as I was still new to the area and getting to know other kids my age.  But these first tastes of independence, of being able to be “out and about” without supervision laid the groundwork for years to come.  It’s something that is likely unheard of today, as parents tend to keep at least one real and one digital eye on their kids at all times lately, but I look back on those times as both formative and fun.

My school in Ahwatukee, as it happens, was only a short ten to fifteen minute bike ride away from our new home, down a main road.  Basically, I’d leave our neighborhood by setting off in a southerly direction down a street that abutted the park on one side, and then simply hung a right turn to the west where the road slowly curved me southward to my destination.  See, this town really was a giant cul-de-sac, and indeed my school resided where two parallel roads separated elsewhere in Phoenix by a good mile or so curved into each other and met in a giant loop.  Basically, my school sat at the very apex of this loop.  So, since this was such a safe town and since I had spent the summer showing my parents how good I was being out on my own, it became the regular routine for me to bike to school every day alongside my sister, and bike back home also.  Now of course sometimes circumstance and weather got in the way but a lot of the time, at least at first, this was the run of things.

It was at school when I met my friend Nathan.  But of course we did not start off as friends.  Actually we started off as mortal enemies, or at least whatever mortal enemies actually are in the fourth grade.  He would antagonize me in the playground and I would simply try my best to avoid him.  Things never came to blows but he would occasionally use verbal barbs and shoves or quick arm “taps” to make his point.  Nathan, like me, was filled with the rage that only someone with a bastard for a father can have inside of them, and he wasn’t as good at bottling it up inside as I was.  So it goes.

Eventually though, and mind you I cannot recall exactly why this is, I won him over somehow and we started to become friends.  By the fifth grade we were stuck together like glue.  It was then that my independence finally started to expand.  By the time I hit age 10 I was out at Nathan’s house, or the park, or the mountain trails that Nathan’s house had easy access to down an old drainage wash near his house, nearly every night if not every night.  It became a topic of much debate in our house, as my mother began voicing concerns about my long hours “out and about.”  My reaction to these concerns probably would resemble Cartman from South Park telling his mom “Nuh uh, I do what I want!” but at the time it seemed logical.  I was old enough.  I knew what I was doing.  I was an immature fool testing his boundaries is what I was.  I don’t think anything would or could have “happened” to me per se, but maybe I’m lucky nothing did.  I’m not sure.  But I was never very far from home so it seemed safe enough to me at the time.

But the mountains, and the towers, were always there, hovering over everything.  They hovered over my home, my school, and most everything around our house.  At night, the towers came alive, marking the approximate location of my home for miles and miles around.  During long road trips up north or west into California those first few times, we knew we were near home when we first saw the mountains looming in the distance, or the far away red flickering of the lights.  There was our destination.  There was home.  I think we saw those lights from 30-50 miles out once, back when Phoenix ended at Glendale, leaving hundreds of square miles of flat, empty expanse from the city all the way to California.

The mountains were where we lived.  They were where Nathan and I got into youthful adventures, challenged each other to bike races, and planned forts in unsafe drainage gullies and ditches.  They were where I fell while riding out by myself one time, necessitating a downhill limp home on a bike with three wounds slowly leaking a trail of blood along the way.  They were why we always had scorpions invading our house, a pest we were not used to seeing at all.  They were on fire once, the first of many times I would sit in fear of a fire that could turn and start burning toward my house and everything I knew and cared about.  The sun set over them every night.  But for all the good things and all the bad things, they were home for those first two years in Arizona.  To this day, when I visit Phoenix, one of the first landmarks I try to locate is South Mountain and the towers on top of the highest peak.  For some reason they have remained an indelible part of me, and I’ve always remembered the time we spent at home under the lights.

Detroit: A Quick Lesson in the End Result of the American Dream

As of March 1, 2013, the City of Detroit is no longer in control of its own affairs.  On Friday, the state government of Michigan, led by Republican governor Rick Snyder, stepped in and decided to appoint an Emergency Manager to take over and manage Detroit's day-to-day business and finances.  Decades of corruption, decline, decay, greed and graft finally culminated in one of America's most historic and significant cities being reduced to a bankrupt debtor unable to pay its bills.  Detroit is to date one of the largest cities or towns to have ever gone into receivership. 

But how did it get to such a dire point?  How did the former "Paris of the West," the former "Arsenal of Democracy" or so it was called during World War II, the Famed "Motor City," become a city teetering on the brink of ruin?  I am 31.  For me, I cannot remember a time when Detroit wasn't having some sort of financial, social, economic or racial problem.  Detroit has been a city facing difficult problems for so long that it's become a bit of a fad to document the huge amount of urban decay found throughout the city.  Beverly Hills Cop, a movie depicting Detroit of the early 1980s as a place rife with crime and poverty, was made nearly thirty years ago.  RoboCop, which depicted a fictional, dystopic future Detroit on the brink of being "bought" by a large corporation interested only in razing it to develop an idyllic supercity for wealthy elites was released twenty-six years ago.  Point being?  Most Americans struggle to think of Detroit as something other than a hard scrabble place on the wrong end of history, a place gradually decaying bit by bit.

But there was a time when Detroit was one of America's most prosperous and most important cities.  Situated on the Detroit River and between two Great Lakes, its strategic importance led the British to capture it during the War of 1812.  By the end of the 1800s it was a transportation hub, and during the Gilded Age, many of its most beautiful buildings and mansions were constructed.  Some of its main boulevards were electrified by Thomas Edison.  Its status as a hub of industry allowed a young Henry Ford to open a small shop there and begin building one of the first automobiles in America.  In the decades to come, many more would follow.  Little did the residents of Detroit know that this seemingly good development foretold the city's death in years to come.

The new prosperity brought on by businessmen like Henry Ford, and later other automotive pioneers like William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, James Packard and Walter Chrysler, caused Detroit to expand tremendously and gobble up several of the towns and villages that had sprung up around it.  Greater prosperity and an increasing influx of workers eager to cash in on the automotive craze pushed Detroit to be the nation's fifth largest city by 1950, with nearly 2,000,000 residents calling the city proper home, along with many more in the surrounding towns and suburbs.  In the early 20th century, Detroit was also home to one of the nation's finest urban streetcar systems, but by mid-century, the more prosperous residents demanded highways to be built which would allow expansion into suburbs that offered more open space and less noise and traffic.  Coupled with easy highway dollars from the federal government, several interstates were constructed and the streetcars fell into disuse before being shut down altogether in 1956.  For all intents and purposes, the streetcar was dead in Detroit, and would remain so ever since, despite many attempts to establish a new one.

In many ways, this was the beginning of what now can be seen as a precipitous fall from grace for Detroit.  White flight began in earnest, and outlying suburban cities around Detroit saw population surges while the city proper lost over a quarter of a million people by 1970, with the overall metro area population swelling to 4.5 million that same year.  The remaining urban areas were now slowly being abandoned, and the urban poverty that had existed for decades in the city proper began to be the most dominant way of life.  Riots, fueled by decades of racial tension, famously occurred in 1943 and 1967.  Fleeing residents left huge swaths of empty neighborhoods in what used to be nice areas, which soon became slums as the city's population continued to dwindle, alongside city coffers that found it more and more difficult to fund and service a city that was rapidly losing residents.

History will likely see the fall of Detroit as being part of the failure of the domestic auto industry itself, which culminated in bailouts for GM and a buyout of Chrysler in 2008.  During Detroit's peak as a city in the 1950s, over half of the cars sold in the United States were made by General Motors, whose headquarters was always right in downtown Detroit.  Today that number stands at 18.4%.  It was the automakers, primarily GM, that wanted Detroit to be built to allow for people to drive their cars around and be able to live in one place and work in another.  It could be said that Detroit's greatest contributing industry also was its greatest downfall.

But it wasn't all the automakers' fault.  Detroit has long been a home for corruption, going back all the way to Prohibition times when the Purple Gang dominated local crime as liquor was moved across the river from Canada.  Several bloody gang wars and massacres occurred from the 1920s until well after Prohibition ended in the 1940s and 1950s.  The decimation of the Purple Gang left a void that was soon filled by Mafiosi from nearby Chicago and New York.  In short, Detroit politics has long rivaled the more well-known corruption found in bigger cities like Chicago, and the public coffers were always open to both reputable and non-reputable businessmen who had enough "pull" with local lawmakers.  In the 1950s and 1960s such excesses were hardly noticed, but as populations dwindled and tax revenues followed suit, there was gradually less and less money to steal and more modern corrupt mayors and the like tended to stand out more.  The most recent former Mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, was convicted of, and accused of, so many breaches of mayoral power and corruption I won't even bother repeating them here (go click that link if you're curious!).  The current mayor, former NBA hall of fame player Dave Bing, seems to be on the up-and-up but in Detroit you never really know.

To me, all of this is a culmination of the American way of life in many ways.  When one surveys the nation as it is today, they see many of the same problems plaguing other cities from coast to coast.  Many other large cities are also being robbed blind by thugs and charlatans.  Many other large cities are far too big, with nicer suburbs surrounding a rotting central urban core.  Many other cities are plagued by chronic poverty, corrupt law enforcement, broken education systems and a collapse in property values.  One could say that the American system breeds an unholy union of wealthy business interests and government bureaucrats, causing a culture of corruption that has frequently existed for so long, it's an ingrained and inextricable way of life for the governments of many cities.  One can only rob the piggy bank so many times, after all, before there is simply nothing left to steal.  An urban population of neglected poor, many of whom do not or cannot work, many of whom do not have access to proper healthcare or education, many of whom are sucked into an inescapable cycle of crime and incarceration, which further prevents them from ever bettering their situation, they cannot be expected to carry the financial load of a city that was once big and prosperous and that now teeters on the brink of insolvency and crushing debt.  Detroit kept borrowing against the future and did not ever see a time when perhaps the future would have no money to lend.  One can easily see the parallels to the "this gravy train is never going to stop" excesses of the early and mid-2000s, and that's when the lesson of Detroit hits home: anyplace in America, even America itself, could be the next Detroit.  Growth cannot, and should not, be constant and infinite.  Eventually such excesses correct themselves, often painfully.

Detroit is the canary in the coal mine.  What has happened there could happen in lots of places.  Wealthy business interests do not have the population of a city in mind when it makes its decisions.  Nor do politicians that collude with them.  I'm not sure I could ever envision a system in which this unholy alliance would not be the natural order of things, but I feel like I have enough intelligence to look at a series of events and understand cause vs effect.  Detroit's bones were picked clean and now it staggers along as a once-great city that has long ago fallen into neglect and decay. Its future?  Well, if recently approved plans to construct urban farms in large swaths of the city that were razed due to blight and disrepair come to fruition, Detroit could end up being a beacon, a new way forward for many other cities that grew just a bit too big for their britches.  Let's just all hope that their future turns brighter in the coming years, giving hope to other cities experiencing similar problems.  Perhaps Detroit's problems could prevent similar problems elsewhere.  Here's hoping.

--Joe

Randian Objectivism: Justification For Selfishness At All Costs Or Legitimate Philosophy?

Many people are at least somewhat familiar with Russian-born author and Objectivist philosopher Ayn Rand (1905-1982), or at the very least her two most famous novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, respectively. The former was turned into a two-part movie series recently, but did not fare very well at the box office. Both are very well known, and very criticized, pieces of literature dealing with man's primary nature as being of self-interest that are frequently stifled and stymied by government regulation and "interference." I will not go chapter and verse into Objectivism itself herein, mostly because I trust you as the reader to educate yourself and I do not want to be accused of putting my own slant on the definition. Go ahead, read up for yourself here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)

To Ayn Rand enthusiasts, the phrase "Who is John Galt?"carries a certain significance and conveys, as Rand did, a certain frustration with meddlesome government regulations, with supposed intrusions into people's lives by the welfare state, or something similar. The notion, postulated by Rand, is that creators create, and that government regulations are naturally directly opposed to such efforts, and seek only to capture them and exploit them to feed the machine of collectivism and statism. A man's invention is not his to sell, market or profit from; nay, it belongs to society itself and will be managed by the government for the enrichment of everyone. The notion that gave birth to the plot of Atlas Shrugged was fairly simple: Rand thought, what if all these "prime movers," the wealthy businessmen, the inventors of widgets, the creative folks of the world that just want profit from their ideas, all "went on strike" and held back their talents from the rest of us? What kind of world would result from this? The novel itself seeks to explore and answer this question. Its dystopian, Depression Era-like setting and Gilded Age robber baron type characters seem to convey a certain bloodlessness on both sides of society's spectrum are all meant to convey Rand's central notion: leave the creators and inventors of products alone to profit from their creation with impunity, lest society itself crumble.

Obviously, especially today in light of a new financial collapse and a predictable era of austerity, "fiscal cliffs," and ballooning debt in America and Europe, notions like Rand's are once again front and center as the debate over government's role in our lives rages on. Those who seek to simply slash the debt correctly point out that the US federal government is simply doing too much and has become a Leviathan that simply takes in large amounts of revenue and debt, and pushes out a disproportionate amount of that same money in public programs, bureaucracy and defense spending, among others. They say this is a reason to slash and burn, although some have left defense spending off the table. The other side is just as predictable, calling for higher taxes and less deductions. Feed the beast, as it were.

You know what I think though? The debate, as it is being framed in the US Congress and the media, is a complete and total crock of shit that misses what I see as the central problem entirely. The central problem is that, in light of most wealth in the country being controlled by a smaller and smaller minority of the country's population, what we're seeing is the super-rich interests and fiefdoms, with their lobbyist cronies that by and large are former members of the government who have jumped over to the private sector leading the charge, concentrating their power and making sure that government, above all, is there to let them continue accumulating wealth and power with impunity. Why are we discussing slashing social programs with a record number of people starving or in poverty in the US, when the government still sends out billions in subsidies to big agriculture consortiums like Monsanto, or billions to oil and natural gas companies that are already rolling around in record profits, or billions more to big defense contractors or big pharma? Have you noticed that neitherside seems particularly interested in slashing defense all that much, or even cancelling gigantic wastes of money like the F-35 program that has missed so many deadlines and cost ceilings that it passed "boondoggle" status over a decade ago? Why is it that subsidies to giant corporate interests are never on the table when talk of slashing budgets comes up? Ask yourself that and then ask yourself why five or six large corporations control all of the media we consume in this country. One question begs another and so on.

What does this have to do with Randian philosophy, you ask? The truth is, the sort of world Rand envisioned is very contextual and it would behoove people who espouse her philosophies today to remember the sort of world that existed at the time she wrote her novels and came up with her philosophies of Objectivism. The facts of today are simple: people do not need to contribute anything unique to "society" or create something useful to become stupidly rich and powerful. Being rich and powerful, today, does not mean the person in question is smart, unique, clever or innovative in any way. With the proliferation of internet-based day trading and the evolution of the modern Wall Street Casino, people can now simply exploit a simple mathematic algorithm and make millions with a few clicks of a mouse. The collapse of 2008 should show us without a doubt that fake wealth created by mathematic wonks who know how to exploit a bloated profit machine holds no inherent value, and just because some of these jerks knew when to bail out before the house of cards collapsed does not make them modern-day "John Galts." The point is, there are so manyrich people these days, people that were simply lucky to have gotten into and then out of an upward economic trend at the right times, that the very notion of rich=smart or rich=innovative is as antiquated as hand-cranked record players or the Pony Express. Simply put, our world of today is not the world Rand knew, and in my opinion that should change many of her notions when they are applied to modern society.

Objectivism, in my view, is primarily a "fuck you, got mine" philosophy that completely ignores things like economic inequalities, racism and oppression of minorities, biased law enforcement and prison policy, and unequal access to education. It relies on a "just world fallacy" that simply assumes that each person, regardless of race or economic class, is born into this world with an exact equal chance at success, with an equal upbringing with the same exact access to all the tools a successful person might use to become successful. It, in my opinion, ignores many key questions, some of which were discussed in a recent Malcom Gladwell book called Outliers. Ask yourself this: would Bill Gates have been the richest man in America if he were not born and raised in Seattle? What if he never went to the Lakeside private school, or what if he had not been able to get so many programming hours under his belt at the exact right time to apply them to his later innovations? The book explores many of these questions, and how "luck of the draw" had just as much to do with a certain person's success as skills, talent and hard work did. Can one exist without the other? Rand says yes. Gladwell, for one, says no.  Simply put, the opportunity to be successful, in some people's cases, was placed right in front of them, ready for the taking.  Does it make them smart that they took the chances they were given or does it simply make them lucky, or both?  These are the central questions behind the notion of "You didn't build that."

Let us also look at the issue of race and success. "But Joe," you might say, "plenty of African Americans are successful and for Christ's sake, the President is black!" True. But these are the lucky few and are not indicative of an overall trend. The numbers do not lie and the numbers say that African Americans and Latinos, to name two groups, are marginalized, segregated, disproportionately imprisoned, disproportionately policed, and basically locked into a cycle of poverty and crime that is nearly impossible to escape. The schools that serve these groups are broken and are intentionally left to rot, and in many cases are simply turned into "school to prison pipelines" that feed the private prison industry. No, seriously, it'strue. Is it simply the fault of someone raised under such circumstances when they do not somehow become rich and successful as adults later in life? Did they simply not work hard enough? Or were they simply products of their environment, just as children of rich and successful people are products of theirs? Ask yourself: how did Tagg Romney, for one, establish his own successful investment firm? Could it be his massive trust fund and his super-rich father staking him at the beginning? Maybe.

In closing, I just want to point out that while I am obviously not a Randian, I am also not a complete Communist either. I do believe in people working hard, on people earning their own living if they are physically able to and have the means to, and I do not believe in a government that does much more than it absolutely has to. However, for me that "has to" list includes giving everyone in this country tax-funded healthcare at no direct cost to all citizens of this country per the French model, includes giving aid to those physically or mentally unable to care for themselves, includes helping those who are demonstrably and chronically poor better their situation and care for themselves, etc. It includes programs to ensure no child goes hungry in this country. It includes a military that can defend against aggressors but not one so large it makes the US look like an empire across the globe for the sole purpose of enriching Raytheon and Halliburton as it does now. It includes funding education in a way that is equal and gives kids the tools they need to succeed. It even includes a healthy and vibrant space program that helps the cause of education along by giving kids something to aspire to and work towards. It would not include giant subsidies to big agriculture, big pharma, big oil or big anything else. You believe in the free market? Stop sending your lobbyists to Washington to have them pick winners and losers.

We have problems, but having a government that does nothing, to me, does nothing to solve any of these problems. Rand had it all wrong, and acknowledging that humans have a predisposition towards selfish hedonism does not mean we need to encourage such behaviors in society at large. We should want to do better.

--Joe

Election 2012: Waterloo For Old, Rich White Dudes

As the results poured in on election night, it became more and more clear that the delusional dream world the Republican Party, and their various spokespeople and pundits, had created for themselves has been set on fire and completely destroyed in an avalanche of votes from Latinos, African Americans, women and college educated white men.  Their Golden Boy Mitt Romney, despite his chameleon-like dash to the center that went ignored by those who expected him to lean more to the right, had lost by the exact same margin that his aides had thought Obama would lose to him by.  The polls literally were the opposite of what was predicted by the Romney camp and his surrogates.  But what had happened?

The first explanation is really simple: no one on the Republican side, from pundits like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh to Ann Coulter and others, paid attention to any polls that mattered and preferred simply to believe Rasmussen and Gallup when it predicted a Romney lead right up until the last second, even though it was obvious both before and after election night that these were outlier polls, and they did not reflect the actual polling data, notably from Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight Blog, showing a very likely Obama victory in nearly all battleground states.  All scenarios discussed before election night by these jokers simply assumed Romney could, by throwing money at states like Colorado, Nevada and Pennsylvania late and criss-crossing those states barnstorm style in the waning days of the campaign, secure a path to victory that did not require Ohio to win.  They were wrong, and the election returns in the aforementioned states made crystal clear that Romney had no chance in any of them and that the pundits were simply dreaming up these winning scenarios.

The second  explanation is even simpler: the so-called "experts" on the Republican side, specifically Dick Morris and Romney's own aides, simply misread the electorate and grossly miscalculated the potential turnout of women, Latinos and African Americans.  Obama won amongst all of these groups by double digits, as well as with voters under 30, college-educated whites and Asian Americans.  The main two demographic groups Obama lost with?  White voters (overall) and voters over 65.  No, really, it's all right here.    Dick Morris, for one, has since tried to explain all of his wrong information with a mixture of mea culpa and Sandy culpa, blaming the hurricane that Obama had to respond to in the closing days of the campaign and the praise he received from erstwhile Tea Party Golden Boy Chris Christie for Romney's defeat.  But what excuse does Romney's campaign staff have for so grossly miscalculating their chances for victory to the point that Romney himself was "shell-shocked" by the news of his defeat?  Their own internal polls were predicting 337 electoral votes for Romney and a decisive win, including a one point advantage in Ohio and a tie in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  Obama won all three states, along with other so-called battleground states New Hampshire, Florida, Virginia and Nevada, many by 3% or better.

The fallout, predictably, has been sweet Schadenfreude for anyone who was betting against these Fox news types being correct.  The reactions of those on the right have been fairly predictable, from Karl Rove refusing to concede Ohio to Bill O'Reilly declaring "the white establishment is now the minority" and that "fifty percent of the electorate wants....stuff" to pretty much everything Rush Limbaugh said on his show last week.  All of them are dancing around the obvious, which to my mind was indicated more in the fact that Washington and Colorado just legalized recreational marijuana, and the fact that gay marriage is now legal in Maine, Maryland and Washington, along with voters in Minnesota rejecting a ban on same-sex marriage.  The new reality is that this country is getting more tolerant of alternative lifestyles, not less.  This country is getting more tolerant of minorities and women holding positions of power, not less, which is reflected by the Senate now containing the first openly gay Senator, the first Asian American Senator and more women serving than ever before.  What is it the Fox types are trying to say, but cannot?  That you don't only need a majority of whites and seniors to get elected anymore.  The "traditional America" they speak of, the one where whites are the majority and women, minorities and homosexuals don't count?  That's gone.  And the defeat of Romney, along with all of the other results nationwide, speaks this simple truth loud and clear.

Predictably, this is a distressing development on the right.  They have been struggling to define themselves post-Bush and, apart from taking the House in 2010, in what might be known as the old white people's Waterloo, they have had little electoral success on their road to relevance.  To understand this struggle, try to answer the following question: what exactly is the Republican Party today?  Is it the far-right fundamentalist party of Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock who believe the government's place is in a woman's uterus and that rape children are "gifts from God?"  Is it the party of rich businessmen like Romney who favor slashing taxes for the rich and entitlements for the not-rich?  Is it the party of Ron Paul with a progressive social policy of "live and let live" along with a strict conservative fiscal policy of "audit/end the Fed" and international non-interventionism?  I think most would agree after this election that the Republican Party of this exact moment is most clearly defined by Clint Eastwood arguing with an empty chair at the convention.  I can think of no better image for today's Republican Party than an old man arguing with an imaginary person.  The simple reality is that minorities and women are not going away, and the current Republican electorate is dying off.  The exit polls bear this out.  Dick Morris predicted that voter turnout amongst minorities and women in 2008 was "a fluke."  He was wrong.

No matter how you define Republicans right now, it is likely that the party itself will be unrecognizable by the election of 2016.  It's entirely possible that it won't even be recognizable in 2014.  As much as George W. Bush was said to have left the party in a shambles after his disastrous two terms in office, I would argue that the nomination and defeat of Mitt Romney, who contradicted himself so many times it made most logical people's heads spin, has done far more damage.  Even with him as the present de facto leader of the party, it is completely up in the air what Republicans stand for, and who will carry that message forward from this point on.  It is likely that the infighting that has already begun will continue and will probably result in the party splitting over ideological fractures, with each of the splinter groups I mentioned fighting for the right to dominate the party's message and image going forward, and the next strongest faction splitting off to possibly form their own party when they lose the fight.

Above all, it is clear the United States is a starkly different place in 2012.  Obama won but faces many challenges with a looming fiscal cliff, and challenges to federal authority all over when you include the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage, along with the nullification of Obama Care.  It is increasingly becoming clear that both parties, Republican and Democrat, will ignore the will of the people at their peril.  All through the election of 2012 we were all afraid the proliferation of huge Super-PACs funded by a handful of rich businessmen would squelch the voice of the people.  Now, in the light of day, with the likes of Karl Rove, Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers being on the losing side even after all the millions, and really billions, of dollars that were spent, one wonders how important all this spending is when you focus on the bigger picture.  Either way, the future promises some interesting days ahead.

--Joe

Southwest Airlines' Big Fat Problem

Southwest Airlines has a problem, and it is not related to scheduling snags or lost luggage.  No, their problem is closely related to America's ever-expanding waistline, and how they handle the increasingly more frequent "passenger of size" conflicts that come up.  You may recall hearing about Kevin Smith being kicked off a Southwest flight a couple of years ago, but you may not have heard about the dozen or so other incidents involving not-so-famous people linked here in an article detailing the Smith incident.  But this post is not only about Kevin Smith, for he is far from the only one to have such problems.

The debate about this has raged for some time, especially in an era when airplane seats seem to get smaller and smaller, and an era in which there are fewer flights, less planes, and way more people on each flight.  Let me state just once for the record: I support these policies in principle.  I understand that if someone just does not fit in one seat, that if they are significantly encroaching on another seat or the aisle, there is a legitimate safety and comfort issue there, not only for the overweight passenger but other passengers and the crew.  I understand that larger travelers need to be aware of this and plan accordingly.  But let me shed a bit of light on this from the other side of the issue.

So alright, in the interest of full disclosure I will say this much: I am what you would call a large gentleman.  I was well aware, at a certain point, that I had reached a "borderline" size and was reminded of this often from 2008 to 2010 because I travelled often, all on Southwest Airlines.  I never had a problem and was never required to buy two seats during this period, but I was "profiled" once during a work day trip by a gate agent in San Diego.  She was discreet and sat right next to me to ask if I wanted to pre-board to "make sure" I could fit in one seat.  I was flying a half dozen times or more a month during this time so I knew I'd be fine, but I took the pre-board offer anyway, and indeed everything was fine.  I did, however, familiarize myself with the Southwest "Customers Of Size" policy after this flight.

Things for me came to a crossroads last fall, October 2011, when I knew I was probably too far over the borderline to not be "too fat to fly" in only one seat.  A friend of mine who lived in Massachusetts passed away suddenly and unexpectedly, and to put it mildly the last minute purchase meant I could only afford one seat to make it out for the memorial service.  And so, I simply bought a ticket for one seat and hoped for empty flights.  I had no problem flying out, but the flight back was tougher because the flight was completely full, and I got a late B boarding number and as a result, had no seat I could "hide" in once I got on the plane, like a window seat in the middle of the plane, where there's more width between the seat and the window to squish over into.  I ended up in the very last row in the most pinched seats on the plane inconveniencing two ladies who were travelling from England.  The flight was delayed about 15 minutes over this as Southwest flight attendants agreed to let me fly despite my size and offered the ladies refunds on their tickets.  I was very apologetic and indeed I did accept full blame for all of this, as I did know my size was an issue but was hoping I could skate so I could be able to fly last minute.  I thought this would be the most embarrassed I would ever be on a flight, but I was sorely mistaken.

A couple of months ago I booked a trip to Virginia, with a brief swing up to Boston to visit my now passed-away friend's family on the occasion of my friend's birthday.  Now, obviously after my last experience, I know I am a customer in need of "special treatment" unless and until I go on a radical diet or pay for a lap band, so in an effort to prevent any further embarrassing mishaps, I scheduled my somewhat-tricky itinerary by phone and called back a week after booking my flight to confirm everything was in order.  I arranged to fly back from Boston first class on another airline, mostly because I was able to get a deal on that leg of the trip, and that leg ended up cheaper than buying two seats from Southwest and you cannot beat first class.  But for most of my trip, I was on Southwest's good graces.

So I want to stress again: by the time I got up to the gate an hour before my flight was due to start boarding, I had been told by no less than three people (the two agents I spoke with on the phone and the ticketing agent at check-in) that I was set and had two seats booked for both legs: from San Diego to Virginia and from Virginia to Boston.  But, just to quadruple check, I still went straight to the gate agent (who later told me her name was "Sigi" but would not give her last name) and handed her both of my boarding passes to inform her of my "special needs" and give her advance notice in case I needed to pre-board or something similar.

For some reason, this is where things went insane.  Five minutes of her furrowing her brow at her computer monitor and furiously typing and clicking turned into fifteen, then thirty, and soon enough forty-five.  After asking her several times what the problem was, I heard her vaguely say there was a problem with my Virginia to Boston leg but she never once spoke to me about this in complete sentences and did not indicate there was a problem with the reservation itself or the quantity of seats as purchased, merely the ticket type and how it was entered originally.

So, as I stood at the counter still waiting on "Sigi" to finish her work, my flight starts lining up to board.  I show my mother, who was travelling with me to Virginia, where to stand and then go back to see what is going on.  It was at this point I was informed that I needed to purchase a second seat for my second trip, which was not happening for nine more days.  I was required to do this before I would be allowed to board a flight I, and they, agreed I had paid for in full.  As my protestations caused the gate agent to turn the situation from a minor disagreement into a full-on hostage taking once everyone started boarding the flight I was due to leave on, a fracas that did make me the center of attention for twenty feet around, a snide and discourteous supervisor named Rich Koeing entered the scene to inform me I was an idiot who "booked my trip wrong" and that I had to pay $225 or I would not be allowed to board my airplane. 

By this point my mother was on the plane saving two seats all by herself, seats I had paid for in full, while I tried to ask an unreceptive prick why I should be required to change a trip I was not due to take for nearly nine days when the flight we all agreed I had paid for in full was sitting on the tarmac waiting for me to board?  I was never given an answer to any of these questions, and throughout the whole ordeal I was talked down to, condescended to and basically held against my will.  I finally threw a credit card at the supervisor and cursed him while he proceeded to take his ransom money.  I made sure to take his name and the gate agent's name, promising consequences would follow.  His reply was, "I enjoy your threats very much, sir," which he said with a smug smile of satisfaction.  Oh, he had gotten what he wanted.  But I wasn't through.

I did lodge a complaint when I finally got to my destination, after finally getting on my plane and finding my seats.  In fact, I lodged several, and stressed each time how I was singled out by these two employees and basically made the center of attention because I was a "customer of size" who is admittedly and obviously fat, but also did their level best to make themselves known and accommodate their situation, efforts that of course were all for naught in the end.  This should come as no surprise because as I point out above, Southwest Airlines has a long and sordid history of discrimination of the large.  It is quite obvious they see the large as an annoyance, and a group to be called attention to and inconvenienced, out of pure spite if for no other reason.

In the end, I was refunded the extra seat I had purchased on both of my flights and was told the two employees I named would be "re-trained and reprimanded" but I am not through yet, not by a long shot.  It may take me a bit of time, but I will be pursuing my legal options concerning this and Southwest, if I am able to bring enough attention to this, will be embarrassed once again for treating human beings as garbage.

Southwest Airlines, on the off chance any of your employees are reading this, know the following: your airline hires and harbors a bunch of bigots that make it their personal mission to single out and humiliate large customers for their own personal amusement.  You deserve to be sued into oblivion each and every time this happens to another person, and I, along with Kevin Smith, Kenlie Tiggeman and many others you have humiliated, will devote our energies into making you pay for it by embarrassing you for your lack of sensitivity and discretion.  I, for one, will never fly your airline again for any price, no matter how cheap, and I used to be an A-list frequent flyer.  Your pathetic "refund" was not enough to settle this for me, but nice try anyway.

I may be fat as hell, but I'm still deserving of basic human dignity, at the very least.

--Joe

Why You Should Care About Kelly Thomas

You may have seen this on the news lately and you may not.  That is the video of two Fullerton police officers that have been ordered to stand trial for the beating death of a homeless man, which you can see by clicking that link.  I need to warn you that many people who have viewed that video have been shaken to their core in disbelief, and while I cannot claim the same because police abuse of power and law enforcement overreach is something I research actively and pay close attention to, what amazed me about that video is its brutality and naked brazenness.  These two, and later six, individuals committed a murder last July, period.  And hopefully they will pay for their crimes.

People may wonder: what happens when one of our homeless, mentally disturbed citizens has an encounter with our boys in blue?  The aforementioned link might give you an idea.  Now, of course mileage may vary, but in my opinion based on the things I read, awareness of the mentally disturbed and the training to be able to deal with them are both sorely lacking amongst the rank and file of the police, and I dare anyone who watches that video to tell me that is not painfully obvious, at least in the case of the Fullerton Police Department.  I will not accept any less than the dishonorable firing of all officers involved, some significant jail time for the two officers who primarily instigated this incident, and some heavy fines, probation and community service and perhaps some jail time of their own for the other officers who arrived later and not only did nothing to calm the situation, they continued to escalate things until Kelly Thomas was in a coma.  He died five days later after being taken off life support.  I am told many large police departments have officers on staff trained to deal with the mentally ill.  These people have degrees in psychology and/or social work and are able to restrain and neutralize threatening mentally ill folks without injuring or killing them.  It begs the question: does the Fullerton Police Department not have such people on staff, or did these meatheads simply choose to not call them?

What was Kelly Thomas' crime, you may ask?  The one he paid for with his life?  Well, someone saw him being homeless in a public place (a bus depot) and thought perhaps, maybe, possibly, he was vandalizing and/or stealing cars.  It turns out he was doing nothing of the sort, and no proof has surfaced that he did.  He was a very well-known homeless presence in the area and nothing has surfaced about any sort of criminal record.  His father is a former Orange County Sherriff's Deputy.  He had no weapons on his person and was not directly threatening anyone.  He was not even threatening the officers; he simply lacked the mental awareness to comply with their instructions.  For that, he died.

People need to pay attention to the Kelly Thomases of the world.  Kelly Thomas could have been anyone, really.  The police overstep their bounds all the time and have since time in memoriam.  It is only now, with the rise of social media and the proliferation of recording devices, that the people have a weapon with which to fight back.  Maybe next time someone will think twice when a police officer asks them to do something.  Maybe they'll hit the "record" button on a camera first.  And maybe they should.

Be sure to check out a new episode of the Edge of Chaos podcast (linked on the right) in which we discuss this issue, and other issues concerning overreach of law enforcement.

Joe

A Different Perspective, and a Rocking 90s Band

Some may have noticed a title change at the top of this page and a few more things shuffling around lately. To make a long story short, I simply decided that since I have way more interests than just the day-to-day tussle of American politics, why should I have a blog that's so limited in its subject matter? When I launched this space I did it from the perspective of a regular blowhard with an opinion. Commenting on sports, music, cars and whatever else fits nicely into that, and quite frankly sometimes a person needs to not focus on politics for a while or they will surely go insane.

That is not to say this blog will not get political at times. It will, believe me. There are a few social causes that I believe are worthy of mentioning also, so those will get their day in the sun at some point. But right now, an upcoming event this Friday makes me want to go back into music history a bit, and discuss the band Soundgarden.

I started getting into music slowly starting around the age of 9 or 10. Before that I definitely had interests, tapes I liked to listen to and the like, but aside from a few favorites I didn't know any artists or band names, I did not follow music careers of anyone and really my musical taste consisted solely of things my parents listened to, simply because at that young an age I had no ability or inclination to dig any further.

From the time I was 9 to when I turned 10, two really significant albums came out of the Seattle grunge scene. The most remembered and culturally significant of these of course was Nirvana's Nevermind. But a month or two later, Soundgarden released Badmotorfinger. It was, in many ways, unlike any album they had released before. It was labeled "grunge" simply because of geography, but it was unlike a lot of its contemporaries. While Nirvana was still very much rooted in shorter songs with simpler lyrics and a typical punk-like song structure, Badmotorfinger pushed ahead with a grinding intensity that included longer songs, deeper lyrics, Kim Thayil's experimental guitar shredding, Matt Cameron's jazz-inspired drumming, and Chris Cornell's urgent banshee-like screaming over the whole thing. It was a powerful musical statement, and it put the band on the map. They never looked back.

The band's creative high point, obviously, was 1994's Superunknown. I was 12 years old by then, just entering middle school. For me, this album resonated in a way few albums have with me, either before or since. It was a very formative thing. To this day I hear songs like Spoonman, Let Me Drown, Fell On Black Days, and of course Black Hole Sun with its nightmare-inducing music video, and it always takes me back to how I felt when I heard each of these songs the very first time. It expanded my musical horizons and really set off a love of collecting, listening to, and eventually playing music, that lives on to this day.

In 1996, Soundgarden released the self-produced Down On The Upside, which spun off the classic songs Burden In My Hand, Pretty Noose and Blow Up The Outside World. It was not as tight or focused as their previous album but I didn't care. I devoured it voraciously then and I still enjoy many of those songs today. I was beginning high school by then, and after a year or so of enjoying this newest album, I wondered if I could ever manage to get my parents to buy me tickets and let me see the band live in concert.

But then the announcement came over the airwaves: Soundgarden was breaking up. Apparently tensions had been building during the recording of Down On The Upside and culminated during the subsequent tour but I had no way of knowing that. My favorite band was calling it quits. The era was over. For my generation that was like The Police breaking up at the height of their popularity nearly two decades before. I figured I'd never actually see them play the songs I loved so much live, and that was that.

In 2007 I saw Chris Cornell perform with a solo band he put together, and it satisfied the urge somewhat. He had put together a decent enough band, and they played a random collection of his various solo stuff alongside songs from both Soundgarden and Audioslave. Each show was a really fun experience and it was really something to hear him scream out those vocals live on stage.  I saw him on three separate occasions and each was an event to remember.

But it wasn't Soundgarden. That drummer wasn't Matt Cameron. That guitarist wasn't Kim Thayil, and that bassist wasn't Ben Shepherd. Maybe it's splitting hairs but for me it was like seeing Roger Waters performing Pink Floyd tunes. Sure it was the same songs but the rest of the band wasn't there. Something was missing.

A full year and a half of rumors finally resulted in the reunion tour we all knew was coming one of these days, and this coming Friday, July 22, I have GA floor tickets to see my favorite band from my youth perform at the LA Forum. They have done a few slots on this and that late night talk show, so I know for a fact the guys still have it. I guess you could say my expectations are a bit on the high side for this, and you would be right. I'm going to go wild at this show, I mean really let go and go crazy and just enjoy every second. Seeing the songs you listened to hundreds of times be performed live and with amazing skill by the guys who made them famous in the first place, it really can be a transcendent experience.

Now all I need to do is talk myself out of driving out to Vegas on the 23rd and see them all over again!

Keep rocking.

--Joe