April Fool's Day

 April Fool's Day or as it originally was known as "All Fools Day" originated during The Hundred Years War. (1337 to 1453). The House of Plantagenet and The House of Valois were the main combatants and were struggling over who would rule the Kingdom of France. Because it was such a long and protracted war many generations died. In 1415 both kings decided to start a tradition during the war to "lighten the mood" for at least one day during these battles. When the Lancastrian phase of the war started almost 80 years into this bloody conflict the King of England and the King of France chose April 1 under the old calendar, BTW, which probably made it somewhere in the middle of April these days. Anyway, the Kings decided to send their respective Fools (or Jesters) out into the battlefield to play pranks on unsuspecting soldiers. Usually that resulted in the Fools' deaths by cruel and unusual means because the pranks really weren't very funny but their deaths for all to see caused much merriment among the troops and a few kegs of rotgut wine were broken out (you expect the kings to give away the good stuff?) and everyone had a party.

Going No Place

I own a bungalow in a co-operative in the Shawangunks, south of the Catskills, just off Route 209 in Spring Glen, N.Y. The area abounds in history, that is, if you consider places like the Nevele in Ellenville or Kutchers to the north in Monticello significant. (Both gone now)  Personally, I'm not familiar with the history of resorts, but the significance of the Catskills area, especially for New Yorkers of previous generations, it matters. 

The borscht belt of old was the training ground for many who went on to be famous entertainers. Like the Coney Island of old, the Catskills was a playground for the not-so-rich. In the sixties and seventies, the Catskill region fell on hard times, and it suffered the way so many other poor areas in New York State have suffered.        

Many of the bungalow colonies, that undoubtedly did fabulous business, folded up. Most were deserted and still remain looking like small decaying ramshackle towns.  Some such as ours have been turned into co-ops and the summertime occupants have brought in telephones and TVs, indoor toilets and even baseboard heating for those cool evenings.  And today we have colony wide WiFi. We have to keep up I guess. Our colony, in addition, has a refurbished pool, a tennis court in need of repair, a decent playground and a sometimes basketball hoop.        

Initially, this was not my idea of a vacation. But after renting one summer for two weeks and seeing how attached the kids became, my wife (at the time) and I decided to buy in. That was in 1989. Then there used to be about twenty-five kids running around all summer at our co-op, and the place thrived with laughter and fun, barbecues and swimming.  So it's 1992 when this was written. Everyone is up late and they all sleep in mornings. Nothing gets locked up and you can hear the crickets and tree frogs all night, the bubbling stream not far away and the wasps warming their nests just before the sun rises. From the middle of April to the middle of October Spring Glen is our home, while the house in Brooklyn becomes a place to stay during the work week. Opening day is a wild day, mixing memory with desire, as the poet says, and on closing day, you can feel the leaves fall from your heart.        

I've made some good friends in the last three years at the co-op, but the thing I've grown most attached to is the relief from this nightmare we call living in New York City. And how does that relief come about? Mainly just from watching things grow, or hearing people speak unhurriedly, or bicycling up a mountain before the sun sets to watch the deer cavort in the fields, or just going no place at all.  But in all honesty I have lots of places to go.        

On the mornings it doesn't rain, and drought watchers know it doesn't rain much, I walk about four miles as early after sunrise as I can. There are two directions I can go and one has an alternate walk besides. I can walk past the Homowack resort (also defunct these days) up beyond Poplar Grove Cemetery or I can walk up the Mountaindale road where the trees are thick and darkening and glints of morning sun streams through, the way light streams in a cathedral. I always go by myself. And though the excuse is to go exercise, it is not my intent to succumb myself to physical exercise and miss everything that happens.  So what happens? Not much.     

  

I know every inch of my walks and can shut my eyes and replay every inch of them as well. The road past Homowack I've laid out in miles from my bungalow. At the first sign announcing the resort, I'm 9/10's of a mile away. At 1.2 miles, I've reached the telephone pole with the noisy electrical box attached to it, just alongside the golf course. At the end of a small New England style stone fence on my right is an apple tree; it's 1.6 miles.  The cemetery is 1.9, and if I go the extra distance I'd make it to the gravel pits almost 2 1/2 miles away where some flea bag hound won't stop woofing.

The way is marked by the changing seasons; in particular, there are the masses of wild flowers and the indistinguishable growths that jut out alongside the road and the stream that parallels it. Somehow the way these flowers have avoided the wheels of cars and the fumes that the cars spew, clarify for me, in some heady manner, the drift and hue of life. I don't know the names of the flowers and I guess that doesn't matter since they don't know my name either. I remember them by their shapes and their color and the time of the year that they appear. At some point all the colors appear at once, and they become flaming carpets as they sway from the road's edge into the fields leading to the mountains in the background.        

In the early spring there are the white and purplish almost onion-like looking things, prodding up from the soil like little fingers. Next as the deciduous trees burst with leaves and the flight and twitter of insects and birds in pursuit of survival takes place, small yellow balls sit on top of tender shoots. Among them white parasols of lace shoot up and bend in the breezes. As the weather warms bell-shaped fleshy blue climbers attach themselves to road signs, trees and fences, growing up out of soil looking like hardscrabble. By midsummer, everywhere the eye looks is taken over by the reds.  Amid the glow and glisten in the fields, yellow and black striped birds glide and land. The red passes on to the nodding heads of heavy golden flowers fiercely challenging the onset of the fall colors and the coming winter.        

I really don't know why this scene performs so well for me each and every season. It's not like watching my own children and their friends or even my friends who grow and change and objectively seem different every year.  Perhaps I will grow tired of it all soon, and sleep late like the others.  Maybe it's just that predictability doesn't disappoint, but instead grows weary, a little the way all relationships can grow weary.        

My favorite walk is to veer off away from the cemetery past the Homowack golf course which is seldom played and walk up Myerson road. Defunct colonies of Bungalows lay rotting on either side and the forest encases them like a tomb. Tall pines and scabrous looking hard woods with nary a distinguishing color in the depths hold fast my eye and my heart. I keep walking up the hill, the sun hidden from view, and then suddenly an open field, one a farmer had either forgotten or is letting lay fallow for years, spreads before me. It just bursts in an explosion of green, white, red, blues and yellow. And then I know why I'm there and why I'll never get tired of that scene and what it is about the wild flowers--it's so I can jump up and down and shout "whoopee" at the top of my lungs in total abandonment.

The Price of gasoline

So we've had cheap gasoline, relatively speaking, since the end of summer 2014. Instead of the $3+ per gallon which I believe people had grown used to, I know I had, and by getting used to I mean that people used various strategies to offset the costs associated with more expensive gasoline. My belief is based solely on logic and not with facts that when something costs less than what you've been used to paying for it that you will buy and use more of it than you did when the cost was higher. That extends to any consumable and gasoline is a consumable. So what does this mean that more gasoline is being consumed? It means that more carbon is being put into the environment thereby raising the prospect that we are adding more greenhouse gasses, that it is anti-environmental and ultimately global warming is costing us more economically than any savings due to the energy efficiency efforts that have been made over the years, damaging any good efforts towards slowing global warming. So what is the answer? One possibly is (and I'm sure many will think impossible) raise the price of gasoline so that it is never below $3.00 making the cost when it is cheaper to be offset with an added tax. Develop regulations for the oil markets so that the predictive price of refined gasoline on the market stays far more consistent and doesn't fluctuate from day to day due to the gamblers in the commodities market. Whether that will work is way beyond my knowledge of economics, governmental regulations and market forces but I still believe that when something is too cheap people will buy more of it. And as of this writing we would have to rely on the voluntary efforts of people to not use more gasoline because it costs less. And that in my book is not a win win, but a lose lose.

 

Seasons of Awards

We are entering the season of awards programs. Each week until the Oscar ceremony, there is a similar ceremony each with any number of categories and each category most of the time has five nominees to choose from. Some more, a few less. And of course each ceremony has in the days and hours prior to the ceremony, a series of little ceremonies oft times called "the red carpet." In this ceremonial atmosphere both nominees and associated non-nominees dress in their finery and parade benignly before adoring fans with cameras and phone devices along with the professional camera jockeys amid squeals of delight, pleasurable gushes, and much outpouring of emotion. Back in the studios of the broadcasters, the commentariat hired for these events, gather in numbers of two to five both male and female and talk about what the viewer has just seen proffering approval or tut tutting less than approval so the viewer herself can make the appropriate judgment so desired by the broadcaster whose advertisers are paying for it all.

But everyone is in on the act so that in the hours before and in the hours after judgment upon judgment is heaped, sifted, sorted and presented and the comments by the anonymous and non anonymous both are also part of the event. And commenting upon commenters comments both for and against rage hour after hour oft times overlapping with the next set of awards, thundering along in tweets and Facebook postings and whatever else as if there is actual thundering and not the sound of keyboard clicks.  Did I mention that these ceremonies are accompanied by so much snark that it is impossible to hear one honest expression?

And why is everyone in on the act. It's cold out? Nothing to do? There is a need to be heard? The human psyche likes to root for favorite things? Well it's that last thing rooting for something that I think is the crux of what I am trying to say. Because it's not just the awards ceremonies going on for this window of time, but every season seems to bring some kind of award need. Let's examine sports, for example.

We are in the process of finishing up the college football awards. The "fifty" odd bowl games if you tried to watch them all and each with a rooting interest on your part might just drive you mad. Except everything is already decided for the big one in a week or so. The endless sports interview programs. More broadcaster commenters commenting. The secret knowledge that you, yes you, know for sure how the win will be achieved. And you fearlessly comment yourself on these matters. And then there's the thundering keyboard clicks of the Twitter and the Facebook.

This week the MLB hall of fame nominees are in and thus much speculation about who will be awarded the honors are being bandied about with associated like and dislikes not to mention statistics gleaned from a myriad of sources.

Now the professional NFL awards games have begun and it will roll in like a gathering storm and ultimately spin about like a cyclone and end in a hoopla of everything I've just said. And on and on and on. March madness. NBA finals. The NHL. Then baseball. Ultimately everything ends with an award. Or maybe it ends with turned over cars, fires, shootings and arrests.

And then we start all over again.

And did I leave out politics? Tsk tsk. The Presidential race awards are coming up in less than two years and so far we've had a few teasers to get our juices flowing or our tweets tweeting and our Facebooks defacing in those moments when we're not engaged in the other associated award shows and events.

And of course we do have liberal/conservative endless debates that never end, never provide an award and ultimately never have a result. Yet there we are rooting for one POV or the other. Yes there we are once again rooting for something.

What is this fundamental need that we who do not directly participate in these endless games and shows and presidential elections (remember that little thing called the electoral college?) must glean from them some kind of joy or thrill as if the award itself is a badge we wear? Is the award itself on our mantle? Because our candidate has won does that mean we are now in control? Do we have that Super Bowl ring? That player who has five World Series rings are those rings ours too just because we rooted for the player?

What is this "rooting?" Wishful thinking made real for the moment? The fear of being by oneself with one's thoughts? The worries and concerns that up till now everything you've done is wrong? Your death. . .which will come?  Maybe death can be postponed while you root? Or maybe we're just looking for a fight. Or maybe we just want to say: nyah nyah I'm better than you, you who rooted for a loser. I rooted for the winner.  

Oh fan. Oh fanatic, contemporary life has come down to this: either we're the lonely man/woman in the desert raising our fist and cursing the stars or we're the sideline chorus egging on the performers. In every case we suffer for our inauthenticity. We have lost all meaning and our own true experiences are nothing.

Michael Brown and the language of white racism

Calling Michael Brown a "demon" underscores for me language in the subconscious of a majority of white policemen and a good majority of white people in general that see black men, in particular young black men and teens, as a danger no matter what they are doing. Do you walk on the other side of the street when you see black teen(s) coming towards you?  Do you lock your car doors at a traffic light when a young black man walks in front of your car? Do you do the same when you see white young men? That is not to say that crimes don't occur, but the majority of crimes that occur are white on white and black on black.  It is just our subconscious alerting us  and the fight or flight principal takes over. We could be thinking of absolutely nothing or thinking about buying that new car or when our next break for coffee and donuts is, but our subconscious takes over and anything else but fear freezes and disappears well into the background.

White slave owners had to be fearful any time they were in the midst of their slaves. Thus, they carried weapons and hired violent overseers. And it is this fear which evolved over hundreds of years like any idea that evolves from a small group to the overall population until it becomes so acceptable that to say it is now hard wired in our brains would not be that much of a stretch though in reality it is something that we have to be taught. 

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!  -- South Pacific (you've got to be carefully taught)  

You can do your own simple test. If you are white and the police pass you, do they look at you? If you are black don't you feel all eyes are on you at all times? I've done this test many times. An old white man like me is hardly ever worth a second look or even a first look either from police or store owners or any other person walking towards me. I'm not a subconscious alert mainly because I'm white and look like I'm about to set off to sea like the ancient mariner in a sailing vessel. 

Ferguson, MO, where the black population outnumbers the white population by more than 3-1 I think provoked the subconscious within the individuals of the majority white police force and even today makes them feel the same way the white slave owners felt being among their slaves. The police in Ferguson is the opposite of the population where its white force members outnumber by way more than 3-1 its black force members. This story is not a new story. It is an ancient story older even than the foundation of American slavery. It is fear of the other. Fear of the other in this country  could be understandable if say black people suddenly turned up for the first time in the 21st century. But our histories intertwined, examined and shared should bring us different results by now. This country had a horrific war over slavery.This country marched and protested and many including whites were beaten and killed in the name of civil rights. Jim Crow laws were eventually crushed. Six years ago America elected a black man (51% black BTW) for President.  Yet what is the one result from all of that? Fear of the other persists  and in its extreme form racism (including some white responses to our President) 

What is the language of racism? 

"An integral part of any culture is its language. Language not
only develops in conjunction with society’s historical, economic and political evolution, but
also reflects that society’s attitudes and thinking. Language not only expresses ideas and
concepts, but actually shapes thought. If one accepts that our dominant white culture is
racist, then one would expect our language- an indispensable transmitter of culture- to be
racist as well. Whites, as the dominant group, are not subjected to the same abusive
characterization by our language that people of color receive." (https://www.pcc.edu/resources/illumination/documents/racism-in-the-english-language.pdf) 

I believe subjugated peoples have always been called derogatory names by their oppressors. It's part of the psychological war to give the oppressor the upper hand and to feel as though he is dealing with a lesser being. And conversely I think the subjugated individual internalizes this language and agrees with the oppressor that he is a lesser being in order to find some kind of homeostasis or otherwise he will go mad.  He knows fighting back individually is a thoroughly losing battle. However, when derogatory names don't seem to be enough violence is used.

Does white racism persist here and now even in our language covert as it might be?  You're goddamn right it does though for the most part out of fear of being excoriated in public it doesn't reveal itself until an event such as  a white policeman killing another young black man occurs. Then we hear the cheers for the white policeman and hear of the grotesqueness of his victim. And once again the truth of racial hatred is revealed in the language used to justify that slaying. Demon, he said.

Eight years and counting: My retirement as told through the window of our evolving technology and the demise of great cultural institutions.

I retired on Oct 2, 2006. My final day of work was Sept 29, 2006. I had been a computer programmer, a systems analyst and finally in my last dozen years a technical manager and director. No one at my retirement dinner was checking their pocket devices because at that time there were no smartphones. (Of course today that's all you see in restaurants) Yes, there had been attempts prior to 2006, PDAs, some mobile devices that integrated telephony & data, but not until the iPhone in the summer of 2007 did the explosion of smartphones occur. Android phones soon appeared after the iPhone. And the clam shell phone died (only to be resurrected by a small group of rebellious hipsters.) And Windows phones way after that. And then cometh the tablet. There were text messages you could send with the clam shell phone and Blackberry had the ability to message with QWERTY keyboard but texting wasn't well used then as it is now. 

In 2006 Gmail had almost arrived for everyone but was still invitation only. Twitter could only be accessed by PC/Mac type technology and was hardly used. Up until late 2006, Twitter was mainly a communication application within the Twitter start up. Facebook launched for everyone the week I retired. Till then it was only for university students. So up until that time the best way to communicate with your aunt Tillie or some individual you fancied was by land line, cell phones that were only phones and email or IM on your desktop or notebooks or for that matter by card or letter which would take days or you could pass a note under the door or leave a mash one for someone you liked in the cubicle down the hall. 

In 2006 you still shared music with your fellows mainly by cassette tapes or burning CDs if you could afford a CD burner. Yes there were the peer to peer networks Napster and others but were soon deemed illegal and Bit Torrrent was not widely used yet and was considered controversial. The music

industry was still selling CDs and even cassette tapes were still being sold. Tower records did go out of business in late 2006. Sam Goody stores died around the same time. Best Buy was still selling CDs. Newspapers were already in decline at the time but there were plenty of viable companies and the NY Times cost $1.00. The e-Reader was yet to arrive. So there were books and bookstores still and newspapers and magazines.  Used to be when you got on the subway most people were hidden behind newspapers. 

There were some social networking precedents like Friendster and MySpace and some others though these had more specific maybe more niche like approaches. Myspace was largely a site that was dominated by music groups and fans and Friendster was a rising popular network but ultimately had limited appeal and ultimately declined. Maybe if there had been smartphones at their height of popularity they might have dominated since they had been up and running since 2002. But the world of social networking had not really begun to take over our internet existence. Perhaps you might even say, social networking created our internet existence. Also realize there were no selfies or photobombing or gifs or instagram or vine or snapchats or dick pics or internet bullying and so on. 

There were no net books, no tablets, etc. Microsoft sold a pocket computer but it was fairly useless. There was email. There were corporate intranets and of course the internet and the discussion was about Internet 2.0., the new safer, smarter internet. Still the really big thing that year in 2006 was the Blu Ray DVD player. And to fully enjoy the Blu Ray player you had to have an HD TV. Am I ignoring HD TVs? No, they started cropping up in the early 2000s but boy were they expensive and a little difficult to set up. There was no streaming Netflix service, no Amazon Prime, none of the hundreds of streaming services that exist today. You tube was in its toddlerhood having launched the year or so before, but you needed a computer to watch it not your phone.

In the fall of 2006 I set up my first router and connected with my Gateway XP windows notebook and hard wired my Dell desktop also running XP. The main internet browser was IE. I first started using Firefox then. I think they had a 5% market share. Then along in 2008 came the Chrome browser and together Mozilla and Google made the IE largely a joke. DVR technology was limited and there were court challenges. I did have an iPod that held 5 gigs of data, mainly music. (iPod had been around since 2001.) 

So that was 8 years ago. What will the next 8 years bring? Some new revolutionary way to communicate and share information? Or just bigger smartphones, more tablets, clunkier buggier software. And more hype & bullshit so that the corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon,

Facebook and Verizon etc. continue to dominate the field and are now lacking any kind of startling innovation and continue to make and hog all the money to prevent real technical innovation? We shall see. Meanwhile we've lost bookstores,  newspapers, TV broadcast viewing and most of all our privacy.

An email I sent to friends about the Iraq War and the march I was on March 23, 2003

Dear Folks,

I wonder how people are actually feeling about the push to war in Iraq. Is this really a legal or illegal war? (Can there be an application of such terms to war?) How unprecedented is this assault on what is, for all intents and purposes, still a third world country? After all we have a 400 billion dollar defense budget and Iraq has 1.4 billion dollar defense budget. . . And 50% of Iraq's population is under age 14. . .Is this an attack on children?  Is this a battle of the rich against the poor? Is there a racist component to this war?  Or do you feel as if there is some emotional link for you between the 9/11 destruction and the taking down of Saddam Hussein that gives you some small sense of satisfaction? Can any of us honestly make an open and shut case for or against this current war?

Is anyone who is opposed to this war in any facet guilty of being "unpatriotic?"  (Is patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel?) Or are those who feel that we have to now fight, since our troops are caught up in it and it would seem untoward to not feel sympathy for them or to not support them, subconsciously "baby killers?"  What do you think of the message being sent by our political leaders who "oppose" the war but still "support" the troops?  Shouldn't we be sympathetic to all the troops?  After all "troops" don't really want to go to war. It's not normal to feel dying is in one's interest. . .

What should we do and say now?  The war has started. The violence is under way. What do we do? Most of our political leaders even if they are opposed to the war are in a state of paralysis and at best are engaged in wishful thinking, believing that we can have business as usual, and at worst they are still manipulating us, our emotions, our beliefs. . .

After participating in yesterday's demonstration down Broadway I was interested to see that in fact this was a true representation of New York City.  Granted the bulk of the people were white 20 and 30 somethings, but for the most part it looked like the same people I travel to work with in the mornings. Every group and category was obviously represented, from small children to the aged.  You could see broad representations of every color of the human spectrum, many individuals wearing definable ethnic clothing. Truly we live in an international city.  Thus in some ways we are the voice of the world.   And that voice stretched from Washington Square to Times Square for almost 5 hours.  Do the actual numbers matter?  It was huge and the reports of "violence" marring the march were overblown as usual by the news media who can't report anything without some kind of contrary view in their goal of "objective" reporting.  Is New York City out of step with the rest of the country?

At first I went to the march feeling a little ambivalent, asking myself what is the point?  The point came to me very simply: This is democracy in action. Democracy is a participatory form of political action. There were no leaders here telling us what to do or what to say. Democracy is not just voting or saying and doing the "right" thing at the convenient time and then sitting down in Starbucks and fretting over the NY Times. Democracy of course is an idea and not a political system.  But we shouldn't give up on an idea that ultimately is the foundation for this nation.  This democracy is a strong message being sent to the (appointed and paid for) leadership of this country that their policy, however it is defined, is wrong!  And that message comes from the city that has suffered the worst from a over half a century of bad US policy, a policy that seems to have an inexorable bent toward empire. If we don't, at the least, practice our rights to be who we are as citizens of this country, we have lost.  All is lost!  That was my ultimate justification for marching yesterday.  That is the most patriotic thing I can do at this time.

But questions remain. What do we do now, today?  How do we proceed in the future? Can marching in the streets ultimately lead to another kind of war?  Are we doomed to repeat history again and again? Are we doing this for future generations?  How do we get back our country?  And finally if the Bush war on Iraq is the war on terrorism would anyone rather take their chances with terrorism? At this point I am still mulling that question over. . .