I'm Goshen Be Silly

My son Benny has been in Chile for nearly a year.   Back nearly a week, he, his sister, Abby, and I took an outing the other night to play miniature golf at Coal Country Miniature Golf, and eat a meals in the retro diner Pokie Dot in Fairmont WVa.   (Coal Country Miniature Golf is notable for having:
1.  Real machinery out of coal mines.
2. Good music about coal mining
3. Educational placards at each hole explaining coal mining history and process.

Well first of all it was fun!

On the way home we passed the Goshen Road Exit from I-79 N.  Well I have tended for all these chidrens' lives to make (VERY!) bad puns off of passing road signs.   So as we passed I said something (inane) like,  "Well, now we're goshen on home."    The kids, realizing that this may have been the worst pun I have ever tried, and aware that there was some family tradition involved, broke out laughing......and giggling.....and hooting.   We tried a number of other puns in which we Goshened this or that.   By the end, our sides were aching.   I know that on the written page this isn't even vaguely funny.   Yet we all three had an incredible laugh.  

A family moment, yes.   A funny moment, yes.   A fun and loving moment,  VERY YES!

Save Capitalism??????????

The Economist recently published an opinion piece that began with an analysis of Pres Obama's response to the BP Oil Spill.   In this piece, they called for Obama to seize the political moment to make the larger point.  That point is that two of his crises, the oil spill and the financial meltdown, were both due to the same problem.   That problem was identified as capitalism's inclination to act through a level of greed that was ultimately destructive to the world, its peoples, and to capitalism's own survival.   And specifically the Economist cited the last thirty years in which regulatory rules in the U.S. were systematically rolled back, allowing business to be its own worst enemy.   Obama was advised to connect the two crises and note that unregulated business was not good for America and that we needed to revive reasonable regulations.   Again,  according to Economist, the reasoning was not just to make political hay for Obama, but to save capitalism from imploding.

I also read Business Week, which also takes "liberal" positions on finance and corporate greed (Business Week has been editorializing against excessive executive salaries for more than a decade..)

The idea that forward looking capitalists or business men would desire reasonable social compacts, reforms, and regulations was eloquently stated by James Weinstein in his book Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State.   In his introduction, Weinstein states:

"This book is not based upon a conspiracy theory of history, but it does posit a conscious and successful effort to guide and control the economic and social policies of federal, state, and municipal governments by various business groupings in their own long-range interest as they perceived it. Businessmen were not always, or even normally, the first to advocate reforms or regulation in the common interest. The original impetus for many reforms came from those at or near the bottom of the American social structure, from those who benefited least from the rapid increase in the productivity of the industrial plant of the United States and from expansion at home and abroad. But in the current century, particularly on the federal level, few reforms were enacted without the tacit approval, if not the guidance, of the large corporate interests. And, much more important, businessmen were able to harness to their own ends the desire of intellectuals and middle class reformers to bring together "thoughtful men of all classes" in "a vanguard for the building of the good community." These ends were the stabilization, rationalization, and continued expansion of the existing political economy, and, subsumed under that, the circumscription of the Socialist movement with its ill-formed, but nevertheless dangerous ideas for an alternative form of social organization."

I guess we used to call this cooptations

Urban Underground Graphic

In 1968 I was a member of the Urban Underground, a left organization of city planners in NYC.   They were a chapter of Movement for Democratic Society (MDS) which sought to continue SDS organizing off campus within careers that college graduates were taking, thus Teachers for a Democratic Society (TDS), Welfare  MDS (welfare workers), etc.

Ultimately the name Urban Underground was taken as the name of a citywide tabloid newspaper published by MDS, the Urban Underground.   A classic full page cover photo (simulation) was of a man with a business suit and fancy briefcase descending a subway stairs wearing gas mask.  It was a very powerful graphic, and I wish I had a copy.   Maybe somewhere deep in the archives I do.

(Urban air pollution was the subject of that issue.)

Israel is self corroding

Going back to assassinations by Israeli secret service, collective punishment of arab families, and documentation of torture, I have been very saddened by the anticipation of the way in which these actions, and Israelis' compliance and complicity with them corrodes the "jewishness" of the "Jewish" state.

Upon Israeli denial of entry of Naom Chomsky to the West Bank of Naom Chomsky, Gideon Levy (editor of Ha'aretz) is quoted in an interview:

"In the last year there have been real cracks in the democratic system of Israel...It's systematic - it's not here and there.   Things are becoming much harder."

and in Ha'aretz:

"When Israel closes its gates to anyone who doesn't fall in line with our official positions, we are quickly becoming similar to North Korea.   When right-wing parties increase their number of anti-democratic bills, and from all sides there are calls to make certain groups illegal, we must worry, of course.   But when all this is engulfed in silence, and when even academia is increasingly falling in line with dangerous and dark views...the situations apparently far beyond desperate."

Excellent NYTimes article documenting oil rig's known risks

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/us/21blowout.html?hp

Nose Blueberries

Sometime befor age 5, my mother and I would spend most of summers at a country "resort" called Maple Manor.  The place was a former farm somewhere Dingman's Ferry, PA (but in NJ)  There was a "lodge" with a big old fashioned porch where we ate,  individual cabins for families, and a swimming pool.   It was close to Child's State Park (now national forest) with wonderful waterfalls.

Generally the women and children stayed much of the summer and the father's drove up on weekends.  We went with our friends the Dorothy (mother) and Susan (daughter) Nadels from Brooklyn.

Some events I recall were an annual costume party.   I remember getting one of those foldup crepes paper toys that you whizzed around your head and it made a singing buzzing noise.   Also once or more a summer someone would bring horses for us to ride.   I remember sings that happened in the farmhouse.   I remember loving the words to "Grandfather's Clock"   There was one family with a governess and children who stayed in the main house.

Once I recall floating on a blowup mattress on the pool.   I didn't yet know how to swim.  Somehow, next thing I knew I rolled off into the water and sank straight towards the bottom.   As you can see, I was rescued.   It was VERY scary....partly because of the big fuss everyone made afternwards.   (Later my son Benny repeated exactly this experience in a pool owned by my brother and sister in law in Long Island.   He was rescued by quick action by Peter Hein.)   (Another time Benny just walked off the side of my sailboat Cygnus into the water.   Either he had a life preserver on or could swim at that point, since there was no scare.)

One day several of us children went into the woods to play.   Somehow we got the idea of stuffing blueberries up our noses.   We did it so thoroughly that they got jammed in and we all got scared.   We ran to our Mommies, who extricated the blueberries from nasal passages.   I do remember being pretty worried that we would be in trouble.   I think my mom was just happy to conduct the rescue.

This reminds me of some other similar adventure at an unspecified time and place where I busted bubble gum on my face and couldn't get it off.   I was totally plastered.   Mom to the rescue again!

Which Obama will history remember?

Will it be the one who appointed wall street "bigs" to run the US governments financial institutions?  The one who calls for scaling back Congress's efforts to regulate the financial sector post the 2008 financial melt down?

Or the Obama who twists corporate arms to reduce financial executive pay, fire a General Motors CEO, and gets BP to set up a free standing fund to pay financial losses due to the oil spill.

Will trying to do both lead to a perception that he is an astute, pragmatic, and successful politician, or will he please no one and fail to be reelected because he doesn't excite his natural supporters enough to really care?

Pt Reyes National Seashore

Took a hike to the end of the Pt. Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco.  The seashore is a peninsula with incredible Tamales Bay on the east and the ocean on the West.  The hike was a decent workout at five miles each way.   It was almost overwhelmingly beautiful.  Perhaps Californians are so environmentalist because their land is so beautiful.

The views on the walk were 360 degrees.  There were cliffs on three sides, with crashing water.  The walk was through a variety of grasses and shrubs.   The smells were delicious.   At times all you could see was white, yellow, purple, orange wildflowers, sometimes up to your waist.   Birds were flying.  They came unnaturally close, so I guess were not scared of humans.  Saw some floating raptors...probably red tailed hawks.  Also sat under one of the few trees and watched a humming bird for about 15 minutes.

I've done climbs where you think you're scaling the last peak, but there's always another one behind.  This went the other way.   As I descended, I thought It was going to be at the point of the peninsula, but there was always another lower point that had not been visible.   The last 2 miles were through a variety of brushy tracks, with no clear trail, but just keep heading toward the point of land.

Walking like this does not still my thinking....but I do find it tends to allow a relaxed process that ultimately yields up a lot of clarity.