Step up to the plate, guys!

What happened?

The feminist movement peaked in my middle teens; I remember reading The Second Sex when I was fifteen or so. When I was eighteen, Brownmiller came out with her classic work, Against Our Will, which had a famous, and very controversial statement, coming to you here through Wikipedia:

Brownmiller argues that rape had been hitherto defined by men rather than women, and that men use, and all men benefit from the use of, rape as a means of perpetuating male dominance by keeping all women in a state of fear.

As a gay man, it seemed pretty hard, that phrase “all men benefit from the use of,” but reading the book several times helped get it clear. Her point, if I remember it correctly, is that all women live in a state of fear, of some degree of intensity; it’s part of the warp and weft of our society. And that fear is used, consciously or not, to men’s advantage.

It was an invigorating time, a time of political correctness that I miss, in a sense. Women burning bras? Well, that was women taking back their bodies; no, I’m not gonna be uncomfortable to please you. Women boycotting beauty contests? Hey, has any guy ever stood up in a scanty thong and paraded his ass around a stage for the world to see? Oh, and then get asked how they would solve world hunger?

So for a few years women said to men, “it’s fifty / fifty, buddy; you clean the bathroom, I’ll clean the kitchen….”

Then, all of a sudden I began to hear the first chinks, “I’m not a feminist,” women would say, “but I do believe in equal rights for women.”

This message was puzzling. I had no problem with being a feminist—I considered myself one, although whether that was possible was argued among radical theorists. But if they wanted me, I was willing to be in their trenches.

Then it appeared men were subtly pushing back, and women were retreating. About that time, I moved to Puerto Rico; my finger was off the cultural pulse of the United States. But I can tell you that—always with exceptions—women in Puerto Rico were not faring well. My first reaction, seeing them going to work, was, “hunh? Who goes to a party at 9AM?” Wearing three-inch stiletto heels for eight hours a day seemed a little over the top.

They were especially not doing very well, because many, many of them were working eight hours a day, picking up the kids from Mamita, grabbing “food” at KFC, studying with the kids until nine PM, doing a load of wash, organizing clothes and food for the next day, and falling into bed, for six hours sleep. They did this for five days; Saturday they cleaned the house.

Nor, I’m sorry to say—and again with exceptions—was the average Puerto Rican guy much use. Look, my father and mother had this deal going: he would go out and deal with the world; she would stay put and deal with the house and kids. They modified it, tweaked it, but he was always there, and holding up his share of the bargain. Puerto Rican men tend to marry at age 18, and then drift off by age 23.

So all of this was in my mind when I saw a clip on CNN about revenge porn. Right, I live in a different age—I know that—so I had to check it out: what was revenge porn?

You’re a young woman, you’ve had some wine, you’re back home, undressing with your boyfriend, who takes—perhaps with your permission, perhaps not—a photo of you, appearing not as you usually present yourself to the world. But that’s OK because you trust him, and he would never do anything to harm you, and…

Three years later, you break up. And what does the guy do? Goes on to a website and posts your picture, with your name, last name, and telephone number.

It can get worse. That gray-haired lady you call “Mother?” She gets an email with the heading, “your daughter is a slut.” The boss gets one, too. Oh, forget the boss—you don’t have one because this cyber criminal has put the photos over your Facebook page and guess what? Every recruiter is checking Facebook. So no job for you!

You were stupid, of course. You should never have allowed him to take the picture. Your passwords—of course you shouldn’t have shared them. You were also young, and he weighed 200 pounds, you weighed 110. So that bottle of wine hit you harder.

And as a victim pointed out, statements like the ones above—however true—are just victim-blaming, the equivalent of “what were you wearing at the time of the attack?”

Much of this happened to a woman, Holly Jacobs, who has spent four years trying to get her photos taken off websites, who has taken her aggressor to court in a civil suit, and who has started a website called endrevengeporn.com. She has also started a petition, which I’ve just signed, to make this form of harassment a crime. Here’s the link: http://www.endrevengeporn.com/petition.html

Maybe it’s time to go back to Brownmiller, regain some of that militant fervor, restart the work of raising boys, not future predators.

It may also be time to hear male voices speaking up and claiming, as the TED speaker below does, that “women’s issues” are also men’s issues. Molly Jacobs presumably has a father—is he unaffected by this “women’s issue?” Is he gonna snigger when someone calls a woman a “slut?” Wink, when someone puts a hand on a woman’s rump?

Maybe it’s time to be responsible, guys.

Added Value

....as we used to say at Wal-Mart. 

Thanks, Readers, for getting Iguanas over the 20,000 hits mark. And thanks, Susan, via Facebook, for this clip!

When she doesn't show up

I liked her book; Jeanne didn’t.

“I found it indulgent,” she said. “I mean, it may just be me, but very few women have the resources to go off to three parts of the world for four months at a time and then come home and write about it….”

So you’ll have guessed, I’m talking about Elizabeth Gilbert, whose book Eat, Pray, Love was a mega hit. How mega, you ask? Well, according to Gilbert’s website, the book sold over 10 million copies, and was translated into over 30 languages. For all of that, Time made her one of the 100 most influential people of the year. Oh, and Julia Roberts starred in the movie.

So that presented a problem: what in God’s name do you write after that? And people started coming up to her and asking, “aren’t you afraid that your next book will flop?”

Which made Gilbert question—what’s with the myth of the fucked-up artist? More, why do we buy in to it so much that many of us are, in fact, fucked up?

Well, you can hear Gilberts thoughts on the subject below—and yes, she’s bright and funny and articulate. More to the point, she may be right.

It comes down to this—anybody who has every done anything creative has felt that chilling feeling: “who’s writing this? Who’s playing this? Am I writing or taking dictation? Am I dancing or being danced?”

I felt it first, and strongest, on 4 January 2011; I had written, or rather rewritten, the epilogue of my book, and I was in a fever of creative sweat. Taí, here at the time, was supervising the computer guy, who needed my MacBook to check about something on my iTunes. I passed the computer over and raced to a spare laptop, repeating the last line I had written so that I could go on.

I felt it various times since then. Some days the muse comes, some days I am a journeyman; the post yesterday was good, today’s less so. OK—it was somebody else’s turn to get the muse—there are other writers, you know.

And I also like what Gilbert says—if we are just scribes, that takes a lot of pressure off. The book bombed? The post stank? Not entirely all my fault….

Curiously, this notion seems to be akin to the preoccupation of another writer, though he may consider himself a singer. Ian Bostridge is fascinated with the hundred years or so when rational, intelligent thinkers went from believing in witches, demons, succubae, and the devil to not believing in any of that. People knew no more than they had previously; there was no test or technology or philosophical argument that had disproved the existence of the paranormal world.

People had simply decided to invest in another theory—the rational world. The cow died in the village—it was no longer a witch who had entered the cow and poisoned her; it was something in the air, something she ate, some physical illness that, if we didn’t know now, one day we would.

Bostridge wonders, first, why? What prompted this sea change of thinking? He also wonders whether it’s rational. And, in fact, not all of us have bought on—it was usual for my Evangelical students to tell me that so-and-so had a demon: that was the reason the guy had shot up the movie house, or blasted the kids into infinity in the school.

Conversely, there are any number of people who are convinced: angels are all around us. And even some very rational people believe in them. Once, my philosopher friend Harry was taking his 18-year old daughter to be interviewed for admission at the Art Institute of Chicago. They were late, they were lost, and they were trying to orient themselves, when a woman showed up, as if out of nowhere.

“Where do you need to go,” she said, and Harry said her speech was pressured, the words spilling out. She was looking at them with a peculiar intensity, her upper body pressed in slightly toward them.

“Here, I’ll take you,” she said rapidly, and grabbed Chris’s hand. She almost ran with them to the Institute, and then disappeared as fast, and as mysteriously, as she had appeared.

“She was an angel,” said Harry to his daughter, and he meant it.

There are also the documented cases of spirit possession in Haiti in the Voodoo (Vodou) rituals. Actually, aren’t there cases of spirit possession in all religions? People whirling into ecstasy, people talking in tongues, people seeing visions—not much normal goes on in the religious world….

Lastly, I think it’s the very randomness of the process that make the case for there being a muse. I was just as rested, just as focused, working just as hard on Sunday, when she came as I was today, when she was off somewhere else. She’s promiscuous, that lady who is now caressing some other writer’s ear, who has chosen another body to dance in. Which may be a good thing. If she stayed all the time, would I get bored with her? Could I sustain the pressure of working non-stop, batting out her words? Isn’t that the definition of mania?

Everybody needs just an average day.

Treason, Anyone?

Readers will know—a group of people and I have been reading 30,000 randomly generated names for weeks now. Why 30,000? That’s the number of people killed by gunshot every year; using information from the CDC, I compiled a list of 720 pages.

I had been nervous about doing the reading, since I don’t do confrontation well. And I had thought that I would run into a lot of NRA supporters. So in all these weeks of talking to people, how many card-carrying NRA members have I spoken with?

Two.

And I have spoken to many, many people. So what’s the story? Yes, I am in Puerto Rico, but there are many tourists here. There are days, in fact, when two or three cruise ships come into the harbor—the city becomes Des Moines, linguistically and culturally.

The two cases of pro-NRA folk were identical; they were white, middle-aged men. They didn’t want to talk, one saying frankly, “I’m not interested in your views,” after I had asked him why he was in favor of the NRA. The other engaged briefly in debate, but declined to sit in front of the camera and give his point of view.

Generally, I would prefer to be wrong rather than right—you learn something. And if someone can tell me, for example, why gun shops require background checks but gun shows do not, I’m willing to listen.

And I started out this project wanting to know—what is it that fuels this debate about guns and gun control? What is it that stirs such strong feelings on both sides?

I’m hard-pressed to think of a more potent symbol than a gun. Yes, I considered briefly the image of Christ on the cross, or the swastika (please note—I’m not likening the two) or the sickle and hammer. Strong, yes—but as strong as a gun?

And I’ve come to believe—the NRA advocates, based on my brief encounters personally and my longer encounters electronically, are deeply fearful people.

And whom do they fear?

The government.

They see their guns as the only thing stopping the government from tyranny. And I’ll go further.

They see their world disappearing. There’s a black guy in the White House. Gay people are getting married, and Spanish is spoken everywhere. Hillary may well be president in 2017, and that will drive them nuts.

They see their guns as protection, and each day brings with it added urgency; more need for bigger, more destructive weapons.

But there’s a problem. And a journalism professor at the University of Kentucky brought it out, as reported by the Daily Caller:

In a bizarre op-ed in The Charleston Gazette last week, journalism professor Christopher Swindell argued that the National Rifle Association “advocates armed rebellion against the duly elected government of the United States of America.”

Bizarre? How so? The most extreme gun advocates quite openly state—their guns are their defense against the government. And how far is it that defense become offense?

A Libertarian wants to get 10,000 people carrying loaded weapons to march through Washington DC on the Fourth of July. He says it will be peaceful, but who knows? To me, it’s a pretty provocative act.

It’s also provocative to argue, as the new president of the NRA has, that Obama is a “fake president.” In olden days, it would be called unpatriotic; I still think it is.

People are reacting to a series of threats to our liberties. The media calls it fear. That’s not it, that not it. It’s a sense of rational outrage that’s been building for a very long time. It’s not going to diminish. It’s not going to go away….

I hear some Americans say with the last election the country is lost. No. No. An election was lost. There’s another election more important to the Second Amendment right around the corner. With the U.S. Senate and the House up for grabs, we as individual N.R.A. members can direct the massive energy of spontaneous combustion to regain the political high ground. We do that, and Obama can be stopped.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/jim-porter-and-the-nras-challenge-to-america.html

That was Porter speaking recently at the NRA national convention, and it’s clear—the NRA is playing out the demagogue’s favorite trick: create a false crisis and stir up the masses.

God save us all.

Bucky to the Rescue!

No, no, no, no, no—I had intended to take the weekend off. I had met, you see, my goal—or very nearly so. It had taken a year for this blog to reach 10,000 hits. It had taken six months to reach (almost) 20,000 hits. Given that there are no busty blondes with bouncing boobies in this respectable venture, that’s not bad.

Well, there’s no rest for the weary, as the adage has it. Susan dropped in, electronically, to tell me that my blog is being reposted in Democratic Underground. Great—checked that out, came back negative, but did come upon the following headline:

Far-Right Extremists Chased Through London by Women Dressed as Badgers

OK, as much as some part of my brain screamed ‘NO,’ another part was reflexively hitting whatever nerve rules the right index finger, which responded with a click. So here, Dear Readers, are the comely but still respectable women dressed as badgers….

Well, I’m from Wisconsin, which is, as you know, the Badger State. In fact, we even have a song about it, called “If you want to be a Badger, just come along with me.” I give you the video below, for anyone unfamiliar with the song, and for anyone who wants to be nostalgic for student days long past….



OK, let’s be orderly. First question: why are women dressed as badgers (not Badgers) chasing far-right extremists down the street? Well, reading the article gave me the first clue—the women were protesting the badger cull planned by the British government to reduce the incidence of bovine tuberculosis.

Badger cull?

Badgers, Wikipedia informed me, spread widely at night, and their urine contains high concentrations of the bacteria that cause tuberculosis…but wait, I give you Wikipedia itself:

Once an animal has contracted bTB, the disease spreads to other animals in the same group or herd when healthy animals come into contact with exhalations or excretions from infected ones. Modern cow housing arrangements, which have good ventilation, make this a relatively slow process in cattle but in older-style cow housing or in badger setts, it can spread more rapidly. Badgers range widely at night and one infected badger can spread bTB over a long distance. Badgers mark their territory with urine, which can contain a very high proportion of bTB bacteria. According to the RSPCA, the infection rate among badgers is 4-6%.

Wow—this is turning into an interesting Sunday morning. Who knew that cows abide in “modern cow housing arrangements?” My impression, from a childhood very dimly visible in the rearview mirror, is that they lived in pens—or was it stalls? Anyway, modern cows are apparently living in arrangements with infinity pools and wood cabinets and stainless-steel countered kitchens. (Perhaps more precisely termed “food preparation activity centers….”) Great to know….

Moving digressively forward, the British government is intending to go and cull—which I presume means kill—badgers. But the British—perhaps being pre-Wisconsinites, or maybe even latent Wisconsinites—have a special love of badgers. In fact, well, here’s Wikipedia again on the subject:

Parliament responded by passing the Badgers Act 1973, which made it an offence to attempt to kill, take, injure badgers or interfere with their setts without a licence. These laws are now enshrined in the Protection of Badgers Act 1992.

Right—trust the British to act firmly and timely (sorry, but isn’t “timely” already an adverb? Why do I have to say, “in a timely manner?”) in an emergency. And also, of course, to take to the streets in defense of their badgers. Anyone can see that. As can you, by watching the second video.

OK—so we’ve got that taken care off. Now why were the badger protesters chasing right-wing extremists down the streets?

The badger protesters had encountered another group of protesters, from the British National Party and the English Defence League—do I need to tell who those guys are? So the good British ladies, their blood boiling on benefit of badgers, gave chase—their second finest hour!

Well, this Badger (not badger) has the answer, which I derived from reading Wikipedia….

Although vaccination is a recognised means to prevent the spread of the disease without killing wildlife, cattle that had been vaccinated would technically fail legally mandatory tuberculin tests, and therefore could not be declared officially tuberculosis-free, which is required by a 1964 European Economic Community directive.[7] Given that there is as yet no bovine tuberculosis vaccine for cattle that does not interfere with the tuberculin tests, such vaccination is prohibited under EU law.

Guys? There’s a vaccine for cattle against tuberculosis, but giving it would mean that the cows would violate a “directive” meant to achieve the same thing as the vaccine? So now you’re gonna kill a third of the badgers? Go to the damn European  Economic Community and get the “directive” redirected, or dedirected / undirected / disdirected.

Well, I started out laughing at the wonderful inanity of it all, but now I’m mad. Dammed mad. Arise, Badgers, badgerphiliacs, animals lovers everywhere! Send this post everywhere! Spread the news. Get Bucky’s message out!

Hands off my bros, boys!

Fertile Fields

This being a decent blog, I can’t repeat what I said when I saw them, that day with Harry, but it was something like, “what the fuh…?”

Harry was driving; we were on the highway to Ponce, the island’s second largest city. And right there, where Santa Isabel should be, was this:

Yup, 44 windmills in a plain between two mountains. Quite a cite / sight it was, and a bit difficult to overlook.

“They’re completely worthless,” said Harry. “They’re not producing any energy, really. It was another stupid plan of your governor….”

It was a joke—OK, maybe the slightest of jabs. Harry favors independence, but fears gravely that I am a statehooder.

“I’m not surprised,” I said, “that it’s not producing any energy. I tried for years to get Wal-Mart to install windmills, and the sustainability guy told me there’s nowhere on the island with enough wind.”

Actually, if memory serves, the only place with enough wind was alongside of the expressway we were driving on. Cars moving at 65 miles per hour create a lot of air movement.

We had been talking, Harry and I, of the wonderful developments in Puerto Rico. The statue of Christopher Colombus, a monstrosity bigger than the Statue of Liberty, had been shipped off to Arecibo, a town west of San Juan, where it was to be erected. It had been offered to several cities in the US, but curiously, nobody wanted it. Could it be because it looked like this?

“Well, not every statue has to be beautiful,” I said to Harry. And he agreed: there has to be a place for diversity of aesthetics in our society. And went on to tell me that the windmill parts had been stored in his neighborhood, and that each blade was exactly one city block long. He even showed me the block.

“There are two over at Bacardi,” I said, “and one sitting on the municipal dump.”

Right, so Harry had to tell me the story on that.

The governor, wanting to promote this excellent scheme, had erected the windmill on the dump, and they had all watched breathlessly for the majestic white—symbolic for clean and renewable—blades to spin. They were as still as corpses.

Well, that was a problem, but not for long, and not for our governor. What did he do? Rigged it up with electricity, and we now have, as Harry explained it, an enormous fan slowly twirling in public view. See? Instead of producing any energy, it is in fact consuming it….

This made perfect sense, in a tropical sort of way; it was a precise example of a previous, also statehood, governor’s campaign motto: “¿Problema? ¡Resuelto!”

(Problem? Fixed!)

Well, it was a thing to know about, so I looked it up, after I got home. And found that a company, Pattern Energy, had invested 215 million bucks into this project, and were intending to sell the power company 95 MW, enough to power 33 thousand homes.

Yes, and this would be a savings of $13,000 per hour for the company, and thus for us!

Well, the news came out, a week ago. The windmills have been stopped, for the time being. And why? It seems that the turbines have an unfortunate habit—the blades are flying off. So, shut down until further notice.

Fear not, Readers, that we will be sitting in the dark, reduced to rubbing sticks to light the fires to heat our food. For the new director of the energy company—for we have a new governor, so everybody has to change, even the president of the University of Puerto Rico—has just stated what Marc and Harry knew that day in September.

There’s no wind.

The project, in fact, generates all of 3% of the energy on the island. And the turbines are working at only 20% of capacity, not the 40%-50% that is expected. So Pattern Energy, “one of North America’s leading independent wind and transmission companies,” according to their website, has just stuck in $215,000,000 to Puerto Rico, and is getting back…

…what?

“Did García Márquez really say that about Puerto Rico?” I asked Harry. He knew immediately the remark; it’s part of Puerto Rican folklore. When asked why he didn’t write about Puerto Rico, García Márquez said something like, “they didn’t believe me when I wrote about Macondo, so they really wouldn’t believe me if I wrote about Puerto Rico….”

“Absolutely,” returned Harry. 

Good to know. What would I write about, if I woke up and found everything normal?

Monsanto Marches On

Is there anything this company does that doesn’t piss me off?

Look, I worked for Wal-Mart for seven years, and I still shop at Wal-Mart, even after they laid me off. And yes, they get it wrong sometimes; yes, they do colossally stupid things like tell Joe Biden they’re too “busy” to run up to Washington to talk about gun violence. Then everybody jumps on them and they get a guy out there to do the PR stuff—in short to mop up.

And they could be paranoid. The people from DACO, our local consumer protection department, were in the stores at 4AM every Black Friday, watching us—note that pronoun—like a cat hovering over a fishbowl. So why didn’t they check the local toy stores, my students would complain. “Get over it,” I would say, “it’s the price we pay for being number one.”

I’m trying to tell you—I’m not intrinsically against big business. But I’m finding it hard not to be completely annoyed by Monsanto.

This perhaps won’t make anybody in the corporate office in Creve Coeur, Missouri, wince. But they are, I’m sure, wincing at the news that nine years after testing genetically altered wheat, that same wheat turned up unexpectedly in a farmer’s field in Oregon.

Back up for people just coming in on the story. Monsanto was set up in 1901 by a guy named John Francis Queeny—stop that sniggering out there—and named after his wife’s maiden name. Queeny’s father-in-law, in fact, was Puerto Rican, a wealthy sugar producer in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Queeny’s expertise was in pharmaceuticals, and the company’s first product was saccharine.

Over the years, the company produced mainly chemicals. Then it got into herbicides, and struck it rich with a product called Roundup. Introduced in the ‘70s, it was touted as being completely safe and wonderfully effective at killing anything green.

Monsanto then churned its way into the world of genetically modified seeds. And came up with a brilliant idea—they could make a seed that was resistant to Roundup—their very own product—and sell it to farmers. Then, the farmers would plant the crop, spray the hell out of the field with Roundup, which would kill everything but the Roundup-resistant crop. Think napalm, or maybe Agent Orange.

There were predictable glitches, of course, and those damn fussy Europeans got it into their heads that they didn’t want genetically modified food. And what’s wrong with Canada, normally a quiet, well-behaved country? They don’t want the stuff either. Fine, you say, let ‘em. They can eat whatever they want.

Well, there is a problem—we sell half of our wheat, the world’s largest crop, overseas. And if our trading partners don’t want genetically modified wheat, and especially if they don’t trust us not to be mixing genetically modified wheat into the regular wheat—well, we’re screwed.

And yes, Monsanto was doing testing on genetically modified wheat between 1998 and 2005.

You know what’s coming. A farmer in Oregon was preparing a field that had been lying fallow for the upcoming planting. There were a few stray wheat plants, so he nuked them with Roundup. No luck, try again. And again. So sometime in early May of this year he yanked the plants, which looked identical to regular wheat, and sent them to Oregon State. And yes, they were the genetically modified wheat plants that Monsanto had been testing…

…in 2005.

That’s eight years ago. More, here is the list of states in which the testing took place:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington and Wyoming. 

Seventeen states, over 100 field tests, and all this approved by the United States Department of Agriculture.

Nor is this the first time. Monsanto, according to one report, in the past 13 years has sued 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses, almost always settling out of court (the few farmers that can afford to go to trial are always defeated).

Oh, and what’s the size of the problem? According to the same source, thinkprogress.org:

Organic and conventional seeds are fast becoming extinct — 93 percent of soybeans, 88 percent of cotton, and 86 percent of corn in the US are grown from Monsanto’s patented seeds. A recent study discovered that at least half of the organic seeds in the US are contaminated with some genetically modified material.

So that tofu you’ve been eating virtuously—no Big Mac for you—is likely made with genetically modified soy seed. Is it a problem? Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know, but the Europeans, the Canadians have logically decided—why find out? Why be the guinea pigs in Monsanto’s experiment?

All right, let’s turn onto a different, though parallel, street. Remember that stuff, Roundup, that farmers have been dumping on crops since the 70’s? It turns out—it may be making us fat.

According to a peer-reviewed paper published in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) journal Entropy, even small amounts of Roundup can build up over time—one of the researchers compares it to arsenic. There are no effects at first, but then you get sick.

How? Apparently, Roundup contains antibiotic properties, which attack the gastrointestinal microbes that—thanks, guys—digest our food. So that leads to an overgrowth of the pathological bacteria, which in turn leads to absorption problems. So we eat and eat—we don’t feel full.

As well, Roundup interferes with the production of the amino acid tryptophan, which is needed to make the neurotransmitter serotonin, which regulates mood and also—get ready—appetite. So I just ate a tuna fish sandwich—am I OK? Have I just gotten a little zap of Roundup? Here’s the author of the study on the subject:

 “If you are eating the typical Western non-organic diet that includes anything made from corn, soy, canola, wheat, sugar (both cane and sugar beet), cottonseed oil, sunflower, carrots, okra, potatoes, lentils, beans, and peas, or meat, then you’re almost certainly consuming glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup),” notes Samsel.

Still want to defend Monsanto? Consider the list of products made by this wonderful company:

1.     Saccharine

2.     PCBs

3.     Polystyrene

4.     Plutonium for the A bomb

5.     DDT

6.     Dioxin

7.     Agent Orange

8.     Petroleum based fertilizer

9.     Roundup

10.  Aspartame

11.  Bovine Growth Hormone

12.  Genetically modified organisms

Sure is quiet around here….

America's Guantanamo

I really, really want to tell you about the Rijksmuseum’s website, which has to be the most totally cool museum website around. Where else can you get a tab for “immoral women” and then see a collection of scandalous ladies—all right, women—from eight centuries of Western Art? Oh, and you can download these immoral women—quite a feat—and the resolution is high quality. No more blurry images. And best of all, the good Dutch have decided to give all away for free. So that means that if you want a tattoo of the night watchmen on your chest—and I’m very much considering it—you can go right ahead.

I also really, really want to tell about Amanda Palmer, who is following a parallel track with the Rijksmuseum. She has a band—a mixture of cabaret and something-or-other-else—and she has decided to give her music away for free. It seems her CD with a major label sold “only” 25,000 copies and that wasn’t good enough. So she cut loose from the label, and gave her music away. Why? Well, a fan approached her after the show, gave her ten bucks, and told her sheepishly that he had burned a copy of her CD from a friend’s CD. And he felt bad. So then Amanda decided to give her music away, but ask for donations. And guess what? It’s working!

In addition, I really, really want to tell you about a seriously unlucky or untalented guy working on ripping up the street in front of my apartment. What he is supposed to be doing is making six inch holes in the pavement. What he has just done is perforated a water main—for the second time in three days. Yes, last Friday there was a geyser of water spewing ten feet upward in the air; Puerto Ricans were merrily saluting him, tourists were snapping photos. Today, more ingeniously, he has covered the geyser with a plywood plank, and is using the jackhammer contraption on his tractor to hold it down.

As interesting as all this is—and you should definitely check out the Rijksmuseum website—I cannot, as a responsible blogger, neglect my duties. So here it is—a pop quiz of only one question….

1.     The country that has held a political prisoner for the longest period of time is

a.     China

b.     Nigeria

c.     Cuba

d.     The United States of America

And the answer is…

The USA. Yes, our country—OK, my country—jailed Oscar López Rivera, a Puerto Rican Vietnam veteran, 32 years ago for something called seditious conspiracy. And today, 54 minutes ago, the mayoress of San Juan got into a replica of the cell in which López Rivera currently resides. In this, she is joined by several other mayors, writers, entertainers, and noteworthy folk.

So what did López Rivera do to warrant 32 years in the can? After all, the average murder sentence is a bit over 10 years—so was he a multiple killer?

No. His crime was to be associated with FALN—the Puerto Rican nationalist group which yes, did over 100 bombings. However, López Rivera never was charged with any bombings, but was instead brought in on seditious conspiracy, armed robbery, and moving stolen vehicles across state lines.

He wasn’t alone—there were at least 14 Puerto Rican political prisoners who had received, in one case, 90 years in jail. That prompted Bill Clinton, in 1999, to offer commutation with parole to all of them. Twelve said yes, López Rivera and another said no. López Rivera’s sister explained that he felt that exchanging prison for parole was simply to move the prison outside.

OK—you can argue: he had his chance, he didn’t take Clinton’s offer, why feel sorry for him?

You can also say that it is totally unreasonable—no, let’s not mince words. It is outrageous and a heinous violation of human rights to be holding this guy in jail for 32 years for nothing more than armed robbery, moving stolen vehicles and—essentially—bad think.

Oh, and the sentence—how long will it last? Well, his next parole review will be in January of 2026, at which point López Rivera will be 83—not an age routinely associated with violent behavior.

Nor is it only the length of time that López Rivera has served—it’s also the fact that for twelve years of that time, he was in total isolation. The prison has also refused to let him speak to the press since 1999, and they have refused as well to allow him to attend the funerals of his father, mother, and sister. They even refused to let him purchase more telephone time so that he could be in contact with his family during the illnesses preceding these deaths.

Everything on this island is political. But today, members of all three parties are getting into cages built on town squares in protest against this outrageous jailing.

Well, you may be wondering, how long is his sentence? 70 years.

He’ll be 107 years old.

Our Glorious Gobe

It’s not a jackhammer; it’s actually a tractor with a super-sized jackhammer attached. And it’s right outside my apartment, making enough noise that I cannot hear loud music played at full volume on my iPod.

The purpose? The jackhammer is drilling 6-inch diameter holes in the pavement of the street. After the street has been completely pockmarked, another tractor will come, scoop up the asphalt, and dump it into a truck. Then, the street will be remade in brick.

Why? Well, parts of San Juan have the famous iridescent blue adoquines or cobblestones. Here—have a look….

Very beautiful, very slippery when wet. So the mayor, or rather ex-mayor, decided to make all the streets in Old San Juan adoquined.

The problem? The real adoquines got their lustrous shiny blue because of slag put in the ballast of ships transporting goods to the island. Now, however, there is either no slag, or there are no ships—I’ve no idea which. And anyway, the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, which defends greatly the patrimony of Old San Juan, would never allow anything new which looked old. Anything new has to look new—see? Otherwise a new thing could be mistaken for an old thing and that would be very, very bad.

The solution, therefore, is to pave the street with a dullish, blue-gray brick—which very quickly becomes stained with whatever fluids cars leak—and that means removing the asphalt and preparing the ground to receive the bricks.

And does anyone need the streets to be brick, you ask?

Of course not. The city doesn’t have a library, much less a zoo. There are very few parks, and those that exist tend to be vacant and disheveled. That means that the only thing a parent with a child can do in San Juan is

1.     go to the movies

2.     go to the mall

The point of this all, then, is not to beautify a city already very beautiful but to spend some federal funds, employ some people, and do something visible in a visible place.

Oh, and speaking of money—everybody wants to know: what happened to the billion dollars that were earmarked for the special communities fund, set up by the redoubtable Sila Calderón? Yes, she was our very first lady governor—evil tongues dubbed her “the governess”—and she was a tigress in championing her special communities.

Yes, these derelict communities of (usually) squatters needed all the help they could get—the roads were unpaved, water and electricity spotty, no recreation fields or basketball courts or baseball diamonds. So Sila stepped into the picture, or rather into one particularly down-at-the-heels community, Barrio Obrero, or the Workers Neighborhood. And speaking of heels, there Sila was, wearing her trademark canary yellow dress with Armani shoes to match, tittering on a plank of plywood stretched over a sea of mud; her eyes narrow with terror, her mouth clenched in a smile. Once in the house, she demonstrated the presence of water in the new kitchen sink by washing dishes—something she had never done before, since her father sold virtually all the ice cream on the island for decades; the lady is loaded. But dishes she did, as a large and very black woman—presumably the missis of the house—stood by and watched in puzzlement.

Well, I was once asked what exactly Sila built with that billion dollars, and wanting to be truthful, I responded—signs. Yes, signs that got put up next to the basketball court with no baskets or the community center with the broken out windows, and which remained there for four years, resting in glorious silence as residents of the special community strolled past with their midday beers.

So—where did the money go? Well, Sila harbors dark thoughts about her successor, a man from her own party who would go on to be hauled into Federal court for various shades of fraud. Oh, and then there was the next governor, of the opposite party—so he’s a likely suspect as well. So now the new governor—of Sila’s political ilk and so to be trusted—is gonna investigate, since the money is gone and the neighborhoods continue special, instead of ordinary.

But here’s the great part. Is La Gobe, as disrespectful tongues dubbed her, content to sit back and let the current governor conduct the investigation? Not she! She’s gonna start her own investigation—to be absolutely sure that there’s no trickery, no chicanery, no playing footsy with the truth.

Well, well—she’s a powerhouse, our Sila. And no, it’s not true that her disappearance for a month after winning the election—time lesser individuals spend thinking about their cabinet choices—was spent recovering from a facelift.

Some people naturally have their eyebrows tickling their ears….

Sort of looks Chinese, doesn’t she? And no, she doesn’t go to the same hairdresser as Ronald MacDonald….