Lunch with Fred Moseley

Fred and I had lunch today at the Mandarin Gourmet. When we first walked in we knew something was amiss. The man who greeted us looked more like someone who had wandered in from the street than like a Maitre d. He said, "Sit wherever you want. We're short on staff today." You would have thought the place was operating according to a Seinfeld script -- it was really wacky. Many of the tables hadn't been cleaned from the previous tenants. The waiter was running around giving people the wrong food, making off handed comments about Americans poor taste and the fact that a lot of what they order isn't really Chinese food, etc. Fred and I both got a pretty good laugh watching the keystone cops routine. He gave Fred a plate then came back a few minutes later and took it back and gave it to someone else. The nicest thing about the lunch was, however, listening to Fred. I'm not about to recap what was said, since he and I didn't talk about my doing a blog, but suffice it to say that he has both had a fascinating life and is a very special person. I've decided that it is far too rare that a person is touched in their life by what they see around them, taps into their inner compassion, transcends the limitations of their enculturation (usually quite conservative), and seeks to do something positive for others. If people did that as a matter of course, the world would be (pardon the cliché) a much better place.

Twilight Zone

One day I woke up in the Twilight Zone. Everything had changed. People were accepting things that would have been thought insane as normal. Arnold Schwartzenegger is governor of California. Paris Hilton is a star. George W. Bush is president and has declared it a sin to oppose any of his court appointments. Oil is trading at $55 a barrel (and people who drive trucks voted overwhelmingly for the man responsible). Cancer is epidemic (and this epidemic is a direct result of environmental causes) but no one seems to notice. Being tattoed has become mainstream. God is supposed to have favored Bush-Cheney. God is supposed to have favored Bush and Cheney? Are there people who actually believe that? What sort of God are they thinking about? Is that laughter coming from down below? Behavior that should be sanctioned has become completely acceptable and behavior that would have been thought nearly saintly has become "gross." That's the word of this particular corner of the Twilight Zone, by the way. "Gross." What happened to "cool" or even the really nerdy version --- "neat"? Now everything is "gross" at least in this little corner of the Twilight Zone. There are other corners, of course, where the rules are just as wacky. Such as those places where people are regularly gunned down or stabbed or otherwise maimed or killed and it is considered not even worthy of a newspaper story. I know I'm in the Twilight Zone but I can't figure out what to do about it. Guess I'll just have to accept it and hope to one day find that other dimensional portal out.

China: the New Leader of the Disaffected?

China made a good showing at the Bandung Conference, a showplace for those nations that share some degree of alienation from the superpowers (now the USA and, to the extent it can act cohesively, the European Union). China both offers an alternative to USA mono-hegemony and an example of a "Third World nation" that is transforming itself into a superpower (not an inevitability but certainly a strong possibility) and everyone at the Bandung Conference knows it. This is why the governments and firms of so many of the participating nations have turned to China for economic agreements and advice. And China needs to develop these closer ties because many of the nations at Bandung represent potential (or current) sources of raw materials, other inputs, and output markets to serve the future growth of the Chinese economy. Thus, while the U.S.A. continues to alienate more and more of those in the Bandung universe, China is doing its best to court them.

Alan Greenspan is a Good Communist

The Federal Reserve System is a central planning agency with the same detachment from popular democracy as was made infamous in the former Soviet states. The fact that he is so popular with bankers and transnational corporations is precisely because he is a bureaucrat who works so diligently for the interests of those superorganic entities and is so unmoved by the needs of the "common folk." This is why it was so easy for him to say, in so many words, that we need to let the common folk know that when they retire (especially the common baby boomer folk) they will be on their own and should not expect the social security system to live up to their expectations. This new social contract that Alan Greenspan is talking about calls for the future retirees to "paddle their own damned canoes" and if the canoes have holes then they had better be good swimmers. Or, as Scrooge would have put it, die and decrease the surplus baby boomer population.

Is That a Poem --- link to a muse on e.e. cummings

Is that a Poem on Slate.com

Patriot (sic) Act

First of all, I'm disgusted that the term "patriot" has been appropriated by the neocons in this way, attached to a body of legislation (it isn't a single law but a set of laws and changed regulations) that has absolutely nothing to do with patriotism, but has everything to do with restricting freedom. It should be called the Restriction on Freedom Act. Now that would be honest.

Secondly, why is it acceptable to hold anyone, even if he is not a citizen of this country, indefinitely without even charging this person with a crime? Is that consistent with human rights? Whose view of human rights? What kind of country have we become? It seems that in addition to destroying the meaning of words like "patriot," this current regime and its ideological backers are unashamed hypocrites, parroting words about "freedom" and "liberty," while working for its destruction.

No wonder Vladimir Putin has told us, more than once, to mind our own business when we complained about human rights violations in Russia or that the leaders in Zhongnanhai, Beijing have viewed U.S. government complaints about mistreatment of Uighur muslims and Tibetan buddhists as disingenuous. In other words, this administration's reputation as anti-democratic, corrupt, and prone to demogoguery has generated a negative moral endowment to deploy in any attempt to influence foreign governments or public opinion.

China Manuscript Bound for London

Two unexpected deaths of close family members and a long string of lesser calamities along the path to the completion of the China manuscript but it is done and on its merry way to London. Ah, but no rest for the weary. I had other writing projects just queued up and waiting their turn. Noisey lot, demanding attention the moment I'm free. But hopefully they will proceed with fewer disasters, great or small, along the way. As Bilbo Baggins might say, "More adventures? No thank you."