Just Gale (reposted)

I wrote the post below exactly one year ago today, and since I don't feel like writing a new one at the moment, I'm happy to repost it, instead. It's good to revisit ourselves!
 

It’s December 12, the old year is ending, and comparisons are inevitable. Where am I now, versus where was I a year ago?

Answer—much better off.

Financially, no. But in every other way, yes. A year ago I was still reeling from the loss of a job. Today, nothing would compel me to go back to where I misspent seven long years.

Because for those seven years, I was on autopilot. I had no time to think, much less to write. One small thing—a need to visit a store, a phone call—could upset the rigid and delicate structure of the day. A pebble was a colossus.

And if the day got upended, then everything fell apart and it was scramble scramble scramble to put it back and then go on and watch out because maybe there’s another pebble and if there is wait I think there IS a pebble oh SHIT I can’t go through another disruption to my day.

Feel the tension in your shoulder?

That’s where it got me, in those days of waiting for the end. I would go down to Amilda, in Sam’s, and she would sigh and open her desk and give me the patch that smelled of Ben-Gay and I would stick it on and struggle through the rest of the day.

Relaxation was something that was structured, as well. Or at least scheduled. There was no “hey, let’s go to the beach.” That had to be planned, and every day had something in it—something to do. Something, usually, I HAD to do.

When all that goes away, it’s like experiencing the world after the big bang. There’s a lot of time, a lot of space, a lot of nothing. What to put into the nothing?

A structure.

Another structure.

So I learned—every day begins with a trot. But I learned as well—sometimes the interruption is as valid as the trot.

Which is why I was talking to Gale, yesterday. She’s one step up from homeless—living in a housing project that she describes as “crack hell.” And she’s a bit worried—three people have died recently on her floor. Is it the huge puddle of water that accumulates after every rain, a perfect breeding pond for mosquitoes and then dengue fever? Nobody, of course, bothers to unclog the drains….

Gale looks to me like a bipolar who is currently on a slight manic phase. Pressured speech, restless movement, emotional lability, and some pretty fantastic stories.

How the government ripped her off of 75,000 dollars. Her daughter, who is bedridden in a hospital in New York and whom Gale cannot see because if she does, she’ll freak out, and the daughter can’t handle that.

So I generally give Gale some money, because I respect what she does. She combs the beach every day looking for shells, coral, interesting vegetation or indeed any object. Then she glues them together into an interesting, occasionally beautiful object, and tries to sell it.

‘Another thing to dust,’ I think. So I give Gale the money and refuse the object.

So we were chatting, yesterday, because just giving the money didn’t seem enough. She’s lonely and depressed—went into the Old City a night or two ago, but the bright lights and party spirit made her feel more alone. And since she doesn’t speak Spanish—she’s got an accent that booms Long Island—she’s even more alone.

“Call me,” she says, “I’ll clean your house. It would be an honor to clean your house. I love to work….”

I consider this briefly. At this point on the spiraling curve downward to pure chaos, only a manic could reverse the trend in this house.

This is now my pebble. A near-homeless person scrambling to get by whom I, having more money than she, give money to because…

…well, she needs it.

As much as she needs to tell me that the cops are abusive—they see people robbing people and they KNOW they’re robbing people and she TELLS THEM they’re robbing people and what do they do?

Nothing! Stupid idiots! “No comprendo,” she imitates.

She’s had to pull a knife twice, just to protect herself.

The pebble of Gale would have entirely upended my day in those Wal-Mart years. First of all because I didn’t have five minutes to spend talking to a person.

‘I can’t believe that that woman waits until the bus comes to a complete stop and then she looks around like she’s never seen a bus stop and then of course she has to take 25 years to look around for the door to exit and does she get it—NO!—she goes out the front and not the back which is totally my pet peeve people trying to get on the bus but can’t because stupid idiots, and oh my God now she’s kissing everybody on the bus and showing pictures of her grandchildren to the bus driver and doesn’t she realize SHE HAS WASTED THIRTY MINUTES COLLECTIVELY OF OUR TIME!’

Or how about this.

‘No, you are not gonna put that sauce in a stupid little sauceboat because in the first place it will take 8 million years to find the damn sauceboat, and then you will have to rinse it, and then I will have to dry it, and I don’t have time, and then the ladle will have to be washed as well as the little dish that goes UNDER the stupid little sauceboat and I woke up at 5:30 and I’m tired AND I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR A SAUCEBOAT!’ 

So—if I didn’t have time for a sauceboat, did I have time to listen to a lady down on her luck (also probably down on her Lithium….)? A lady from whom the government stole 75,000$? 

I have time, now, and generally use it well. I spent, for example, an hour looking at Laurie Anderson on YouTube. Well, that would have appalled me, those years ago. But now?

Well, it’s interesting to hear music I don’t like, but in a sense admire. I certainly think she’s an interesting person. And like all people from the “dear” suburbs of Chicago (“Winnetka, dear,” or “Highland Park, dear,” they always responded—the “dear” took some of the sting off) she doesn’t open her mouth.

And it’s interesting to ponder the question.

I think she’s right. I think we may not have a society anymore. Looking at my life as it was, there was no point in which I interacted with people as people. They were units—the cashier who took my money, the driver who guided the bus, the student who had to be taught.

And I, of course, was a unit too.

Until the day when I was bumped off the treadmill, feel rudely on my ass, and picked myself up and looked around me.

There’s a woman worse off than me out collecting flotsam and jetsam and she’s hungry and I’m in her path and I have the five bucks she needs. And should I let her into my house because what if she breaks something? And as well, she may be OK now, but what if she gets REALLY manic? Do I really want her to know where I live? But what can I do for her?

She’s no longer a pebble.

Is she a problem?

Or is she just Gale?

Is the Closet Ever Justified?

SOMETIMES even I get tired of looking at aggregate data, so I asked a psychiatrist in Mississippi who specializes in helping closeted gay men if any of his patients might want to talk to me. One man contacted me. He told me he was a retired professor, in his 60s, married to the same woman for more than 40 years.

About 10 years ago, overwhelmed with stress, he saw the therapist and finally acknowledged his sexuality. He has always known he was attracted to men, he says, but thought that that was normal and something that men hid. Shortly after beginning therapy, he had his first, and only, gay sexual encounter, with a student of his in his late 20s, an experience he describes as “wonderful.”

He and his wife do not have sex. He says that he would feel guilty ever ending his marriage or openly dating a man. He regrets virtually every one of his major life decisions.

The retired professor and his wife will go another night without romantic love, without sex. Despite enormous progress, the persistence of intolerance will cause millions of other Americans to do the same.

So writes Seth Stephens-Davidowitz in The New York Times, in an opinion piece entitled “How Many American Men Are Gay?” (And the answer, culled from Gallup polls, porn sites, Craigslist, and other sources is 5%....)

The article is interesting, but the anecdote above is what fascinates. Start with the guy’s profession—a professor thinks that men are attracted to men but hide it, and that’s normal? A professor? Has this guy ever read any of the research about gender studies in the last 40 years? Has he even turned on a television?

And then his age. A young man in his twenties—OK, I get that. It can be hard to figure it out, hard to come out, though increasingly people are coming out at younger ages. But to get into your sixties and still be so clueless?

So then we come to the fact that he’s had one gay sexual experience, which he calls wonderful. Oh, and he doesn’t have sex with his wife. Surely a professor could put together those two facts and comes to a logical conclusion?

OK—those of us who are out can be logical: we’ve faced our fears, we’ve come out and dealt with the consequences. Even if rejected by friends or family, it’s at least an external rejection, rather than the self-condemnation of the closet.

But those living in the closet are living in a system of fear that requires elaborate scaffolds of denial to support. And as Michelangelo Signorile writes in the Huffington Post, life in the closet leads to two often-disastrous results.

It’s well known in the gay world: the guy waving the biggest anti-gay flag in the parade (as well as heading it) is the most closeted queer. Nor is it just gay people who have noticed this; clinical psychologists will recognize this as reaction formation, defined here by Wikipedia:

In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation is a defensive process (defense mechanism) in which anxiety-producing or unacceptable emotions and impulses are mastered by exaggeration (hypertrophy) of the directly opposing tendency.[ 

Nor is it just psychoanalysts and gay people—Shakespeare got it, too. Remember “the lady doth protest too much, methinks?”

The second thing that guys in the closet do is to have risky, stupid sex. Part of it, of course, is because they can’t have safe, protected sex. Because if you see me going into a gay bar? Well, you’re not gonna get much horror or moral indignation from my boss, my friends, my family.

So what does Senator X do? He bottles it in until his need for sex is overwhelming, and then he seeks relief in the worst possible ways—hustlers, Craigslist, porn sites. But there’s something worse. He may well turn to those over whom he has some power—a student, an altar boy, an employee. Sound familiar?  

So far, I completely agree with Signorile in his analysis of the dynamics of the closet. But then he writes the following sentence:

While many people are forced to be remain closeted in a society that is still often homophobic, the closet nonetheless should never be seen as a healthy place.

I’ve known few people who didn’t face obstacles—some of them great—to coming out. In fact, in the great majority of cases, gay people create the supportive family and friends from people who were either un-accepting or hostile. Coming out, in fact, is a two-way street—as any devastated parent can tell you. But is it really true that a person is forced to stay in the closet?

Consider the professor cited above—is it really too late for him? Well, men in their 60s do find love and partners; people do change professions late in life; no one has to live in an intolerant state forever.

I generally toe the established line about outing people: I’ll let anyone be in the closet as long as you’re not hurting—by words or actions—other gay people. But I wonder about this belief that the closet might be justified.

“The saddest experience I ever had as a pastor,” said Pablo, “was of a kid of 14 or 15 whose mother went to her Evangelical church and got the message: gay people are possessed by the devil. So she came home and threw her kid out of the house: she didn’t want Satan in her house. And they lived way out in the country, so there he was, miles from town, walking and sobbing down a dark road toward town. Eventually, he ended up with a couple of gay people who tried to take care of him, but the trauma was too great. The kid returned to the streets, and then dropped out of sight.”

We speculated: was he hustling? Was he in a bordello? If so, could he get out, or was he being held? Drugs or drink?

So, should he have stayed in the closet? Certainly looks that way, doesn’t it? But wait—what if he had come out in a different way? What if he had called a gay hotline, or gone to PFLAG, or found a friend he could trust?

I’m trying to think of a situation where being in the closet is the preferred alternative, but sorry—I can’t. And does it matter?

I think so—because saying that it might be better for some of us to stay in the closet empowers…

…the closet.

Julia Child Steps Onto the Stage

OK—I could tell you that the buzz on the island is that the secretary of justice, a guy by the name of Luis Sánchez Betances, ran over to the police station last Friday night, since a buddy of his, Jaime Sifre Rodríguez, who is also a partner in Sánchez’s law firm, got picked up for drunk driving.

In fact, his blood alcohol was .215%, which is high indeed.

Sour minds on the island are wondering what Sánchez Betances was doing there, and some have even gone so far as to breathe aspersions. But relax, dear Reader, there was no impropriety involved—in fact, Sánchez Betances was there to make absolutely sure that the rules were being followed, and that no special treatment was given. He was just there for a friend! Something anyone would do!

And now, of course, warped and twisted minds are attempting to misconstrue a perfectly normal action—how dare they! Here, for example, is an ex district attorney, Osvaldo Carlo:

El exfiscal Osvaldo Carlo dijo en NotiUno que “la mera presencia del secretario de Justicia allí, sin decir una palabra, crea una presión indebida sobre estos agentes de la Policía. Porque, por qué un secretario de Justicia va a estar en el lugar de los hechos si no es para crear un ambiente negativo de la investigación. No tenía ni que decir una sola palabra. Él tenía otras maneras de trabajar con ese asunto que no fuese presentarse allí, porque al presentarse allí iban a sentir la presión del cargo”.

(The ex attorney Osvaldo Carlo said to NotiUno that “the mere presence of the secretary of justice there, without saying a word, creates undue pressure on those police agents. Why? Because why is a secretary of justice going to be there if not to create a negative environment for the investigation? He doesn’t have to say a word. He has other ways of working this affair without being there, because by being there they were going to feel the pressure.”)

Poppycock!

Turning away from such negativity, what’s the deal with Lee Hoiby?

Why, you may ask, am I worrying about Hoiby? Because over the weekend, I was watching Renée Fleming talk about Leontyne Price, who had championed Hoiby’s work. So what was up with Hoiby?

Well, I knew he had a Wisconsin connection, but I didn’t know that he was actually born in Madison in 1926, had studied with Gunnar Johansen, and had later attended Mills College. His compositions draw the attention of Gian Carlo Menotti, who showed them to Samuel Barber. Menotti also invited Hoiby to Curtis to study with him: no small thing, since Menotti was the leading opera composer of the time.

And Hoiby didn’t follow the fashion of the time—which was to compose highly dissonant music. Instead, his music is tuneful, lyrical, and sophisticated. And his specialty? Here’s what he told Zachary Woolfe:

“It was the singers, not the instrumentalists,” he said. “The instrumentalists didn’t know who the fuck I was. I didn’t have any instrumental music played. Singers, you can’t fool them. When they hear a song, they can tell right away if it’s going to make them sound good. And mine do.”

Here’s what Woolfe has to say about the songs:

Indeed, it seems likely that his songs-whose brilliant and varied texts, chosen by Mr. Shulgasser, range from Bishop to Roethke to Stevens to Rilke-will be what last the longest of his work. Perfectly honed little worlds, they benefit most from his modesty. Small shifts, like the opening into ecstatic brightness of the third stanza of “The Message” (set to a John Donne poem), take on a kind of humble grandeur.

In the interview with Woolfe, Hoiby said the following: “All I did was compose. I never went anywhere, I didn’t know anybody. I never went to any parties. I never met anybody. I’m basically not interested in social life, I guess.”

Well, he must have watched television, because his spoof on Julia Child is bang on. In the words of Joseph Dalton:

All of Child’s lovable foibles and self-deprecating humor come through. She puts egg yolks into a pan and then drops it on the kitchen floor and carries on undaunted. She also sets up a race between an electric mixer and a hand-cranked one. Hoiby wisely doesn’t interfere with the chef’s magic. There’s no additional jokes or layers of irony in the tuneful score, which includes a light and colorful orchestration.

And as light as the piece—and the cake—is, there’s also something tinged with melancholy about Hoiby’s work. Is it because I know that he must have been dealing with being gay in a decade—the fifties—that was perhaps the most homophobic of the century? Is it because he never quite attained the celebrity of Gian Carlo Menotti? I feel about him what I feel about Barber: at the end, he must have felt he had given too much, and gotten too little.

The State Journal Goes Underground

For a considerable time yesterday, I considered the improbable but apparently true idea that I was dealing with a newspaper with an unlisted number.

Nor was that the strangest part of the affair. The real question was why the death of Marvin Rabin had hit me so hard. I knew he was in his nineties, I knew that his hearing was bad, but nothing in the video I had seen looked like a man who could die. Is that silly? Yes, but there’s nothing logical about grief.

And so there I was, sobbing in the café, remembering the Saturday mornings, remembering the temper tantrums followed by impassioned appeals—we were better than that, we could play it better. Then I remembered the toilet bowl brush, and I lost it again.

I had house-sat for the Rabins, and everyone had warned me—Rhoda, Rabin’s wife, was neurotically attached to her house. In fact, Rabin had threatened more than once never to take Rhoda anywhere: she spent the whole vacation worrying about her house.

Más sabe el diablo por viejo que por diablo… runs an expression in Puerto Rico: translated loosely, it means the devil knows more due to old age than for being the devil. If true, I must have an old young man, because I knew what I had to do. And that was?

Well, I went out and bought a notebook, and arrived promptly at the door. And for the next two hours, I terrorized Rhoda. We started in the kitchen, where I instantly confronted her on the sea of medicines next to the stove. And where, I asked her, was her expiration medication log?

Rhoda’s eyes dilated.

I didn’t let up—I quizzed her on everything, we probed ever corner of the house. I took ceaseless notes, sighed frequently, frowned incessantly. I made a British nanny look like Santa Claus.

“I don’t imagine you’ll need to come in here,” said Rhoda, at the entrance to the master bedroom. But I was having none of that.

“I need to inspect every room of the house if I am to be responsible for it in your absence,” I told her, and so we spent ten minutes opening the curtains, making sure the closet doors were hung correctly, noting any stains on the walls and carpet.

And then we came to the bathroom, which of course was spotless. I decided to pounce.

“And where is your toilet bowl brush?” I couldn’t keep the acid out of my voice.

Rhoda blanched.

“I really don’t know,” she stammered, “Joyce—the cleaning lady—does…”

I had to interrupt.

“You don’t know how your staff cleans?”

Two days later, I got the report from Martha, the daughter. Rhoda had gone to bed for three hours after the inspection. And ten minutes after I started the housesitting, I ventured up to the bathroom.

Do I have to tell you?

I will tell you—if you are lucky enough not to know—that this is grief. Because there’s no middle, nothing except the extremes. Which is why I was sobbing, yes, but also laughing hysterically yesterday. Nor was I in any control, especially when I heard Ralph’s voice—sounding completely the same as his father’s. Oddly, he was doing better than I.

Not surprising—that’s another thing about grief. You often find yourself comforting people who are calling to comfort you. So what do you do? Well, it may sound heartless, but we took turns answering the phone, after Franny died.

What else happens? Well, for me, I get jittery, to the extent that I can’t type. So how, yesterday, was I going to do Bach and Beer? Could I play the cello—no, I decided, and then told Lady, the owner of the café, who had been hugging me and crying with me and who, like a good Sanjuanera  had come down the street to call up to me in my apartment to see if I was all right.

Why was I there? Because I wanted to be alone, and the moment I was, it wasn’t right., but I didn’t have the energy, somehow, to get up and go back to the café. But seeing her made me realize—I have to get out of the apartment.

Then I was hungry, and didn’t feel like asking for anything. Eventually I realized—the kids were eating pizza.

“Naïa, do you think some of that pizza wants to be eaten by me?”

“Ask it…”

Then I became obsessed—I had to call the paper. What kind of son of a newspaperman could forget to call the Wisconsin State Journal? I could feel Jack frowning down at me. At least I hope it’s down….

And here I confess—I couldn’t find the number anywhere. And today, when I was thinking better, I finally got it through switchboard.com. And why there? Because in all of Madison.com (the electronic version of the State Journal), I couldn’t locate one number, except for the individual reporters. Those were there, but where was the city desk, dammit?

“People forget you when you get older,” said Franny matter-of-factly. Not quite true—Facebook went wild, and my post on Rabin got 341 hits (a normal day is 100).

Nor is it the lack of a telephone number for the city desk, but doesn’t a city of over a quarter of a million have an arts editor? You know, somebody who goes to concerts and knows everyone artistically in town?

I spoke to somebody today—a nice Wisconsin person who cheerfully took my call and promised to follow through.

That stiff breeze, chilling you from the north? It’s my father—Jack—up there spinning….

Requiescat in Pace

Marvin Rabin

I Think Continually Of Those Who Were Truly Great

Stephen Spender

I think continually of those who were truly great.

Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history

Through corridors of light where the hours are suns

Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition

Was that their lips, still touched with fire,

Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.

And who hoarded from the Spring branches

The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget

The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs

Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.

Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light

Nor its grave evening demand for love.

Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother

With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life

Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.

Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,

And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

(Note: The writer of this blog wishes to re-post the following, as a tribute to Marvin Rabin, who has just passed away. It was originally published in this blog on February 18, 2013.)

The Open World of Marv Rabin

Want to see a guy go from his mid-nineties to about age fifty in thirty seconds or less?

Marvin Rabin does it, unbelievably, just by talking about music, his lifelong passion and profession.

Interesting what you know and don’t know about adults when you’re a kid. Rabin was the founder of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra; he was imported—OK, lured—to the UW from Boston. So I figured he was from a musical family, a long line of cultured, genteel, well-heeled patrician people.

Wrong, his father was a store keeper, and didn’t play an instrument. But his father, a Jewish immigrant from the Ukraine, did realize—vaudeville kept a lot of musicians fed and shod. Remember, the talking picture hadn’t been invented, and that meant every movie house had a pit orchestra. So his father put a violin in young Marvin’s hands, which changed his life and a lot of other lives.

Mine, for example. When Rabin believed in you…

But wait…

Rabin believed in EVERY kid, which is to say that he was always looking for that special talent, or spark, or curiosity that made a kid unique. Nor was he just a music teacher, a conductor, an educator; he came to music relatively late, having gotten a Bachelor’s degree in history and political science. He wanted kids to grow up and develop and keep developing through their lives, and if that meant music—great.

“Don’t commit closure,” he told me once, and as you can see, he’s still banging that drum.

But it’s a message that’s worth spreading, and that I may have heeded. My brothers didn’t play an instrument, went into their careers of journalism and law, stayed there, and have done well.

They haven’t, however, been a musician, a nurse, a teacher or a writer. And if I’ve had four professions and moved to a foreign (in a domestic sense—it’s like being pregnant in a virginal sense…) country and learned another language, well, to what do I attribute it?

Hours of practice at the cello.

It does something to you neurologically—something that was discovered only in the last twenty years. Musicians’ brains are different, wired differently. Significantly, the same areas of the brain that are activated in speaking and comprehension are activated when playing an instrument. Giving a kid a cello is really giving him a second language.

And like language, it can be done both singly or in a group. So every Saturday for four years in High School my father would drive me in the green Buick Skylark to the Humanities Building. For many of those Saturdays, Marvin Rabin would be charging down the halls shortly before 9AM, shouting “Sharon!”

Sharon Leventhal, now a fine musician, then a fine musician and concertmistress of WYSO. Which meant she stood up, gestured to Emily Auerbach who tweeted an A, and tuned the orchestra—winds, brass, and finally strings.

He was mercurial and temperamental. Yes, he could throw a temper tantrum, explode, rage. But it was always followed by an impassioned appeal—he knew we were great, he knew we had it in us, he couldn’t stand our not giving our best.

“HOWIE!” Rabin would shout, and the orchestra would cringe. It was Howard Metzenberg and Shostakovich Fifth, which Rabin didn’t much like but everybody else did. And Howard played the contrabassoon, for which there is a gorgeous solo in the Shostakovich.

It was almost comical, almost a personal thing going on between them. The solo was never right, the phrasing wasn’t there, the notes cracked, Howie entered at the wrong time or got the rhythm wrong. The orchestra would tense just before the solo—how would Howie screw it up this time? It was unbelievable that there was any new, fresh disaster to be found in the solo, but Howie never failed in mutilating it in new and terrible ways.

Until, of course the day that Howie—perhaps having practiced that week?—played it perfectly. The orchestra stopped spontaneously and cheered, Rabin leapt off the podium and bounded to Howie, the two embraced.

People have commented on the anti-aging effect of music, how musicians go on and on. Certainly Rabin is just the same—his voice as much a viola as he is a violist, the hands always in movement. When he talks about playing an instrument, he lifts an unseen viola under his chin—he’s playing even as he speaks.

He was one of two great musicians who had a message for me—you’re good, this can be your life if you want it, don’t give up, believe in yourself.

“That was a miracle,” he told me, after learning that I had put together the recital with Gunnar in three months, after years of not playing.

It may have been, but if so, who had performed it? Myself, of course—you don’t do that without a lot of practicing. Gunnar, who was always not flowing but flooding with encouragement.

And WYSO and Marvin Rabin. It was the one beacon in my life during those black years, those years in which I thought I fooled everybody around me, all those people who were so discerning about everybody else and so mistaken about me.

Rabin never stopped believing. Years later, I used to play music with a fine pianist who lived up the street. And for the first time, I worked out the frustration and neuroticism that had plagued me for decades about music and the cello. I dropped it all and played.

The best playing of my life.

Was it Marvin Rabin, up there, still passionate, still encouraging, still finding the unique and wonderful in all the others and me?

Maybe.

Or had just I listened at last?

Interview – Marvin Rabin from Loyola University on Vimeo.

Personhood for Chimpanzees!

Whew—that’s a relief. In the course of sifting and winnowing (all right, a good of scrounging, too) an email dropped into my lap and luck with the news: the bastards are still up to their bastardry.

No surprise, right? What’s surprising is the astonishing breadth and depth of the affair. For it seems that twelve countries—United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, Malaysia, Chile, Singapore, Peru, Vietnam, and Brunei—are getting together to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP), a little venture which, according to Julian Assange “would trample over individual rights and free expression.”

Well, he should know, because he released the 30,000-word draft of the document on November 13 of this year, and that was pretty much the first time anybody had any idea what it was all about. Here’s The Guardian—surprise, surprise!—on the issue:

In case you were wondering why we had to get this information from WikiLeaks, it's because the draft negotiating texts are kept secret from the public. Even members of the US Congress and their staff have extremely limited access. Thus the much-maligned WikiLeaks has once again proven how valuable and justified are their efforts to bring transparency to important policy-making that is done in the darkness – whether it is "collateral murder", or other forms of life-threatening unaccountability.

Is it just me, or does anybody else have a knee-jerk reaction to anything done at this level of secrecy? And what, exactly, does the TTP intend to do? The Guardian quotes Public Citizen’s Global TradeWatch:

…set US policy on non-tariff, and indeed not-trade, issues in the context of 'trade' negotiations.

Ummmh?

At least that was my reaction, so I read and then reread and then figured it out—there are some concepts simple guys like me can’t get. So would the answer come later in the article? Quite possibly, and it did. Check this out:

Laws to protect the environment, food safety, consumers (from monopoly pricing), and other public interest concerns can now be traded away in "trade" negotiations. And US law must be made to conform to the treaty.

Well, the email that I got from Alice Jay at Avaaz.org put it a bit more graphically:

Monsanto’s about to celebrate their biggest coup ever, but we’ve got until the weekend to stop them.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is a huge, ultra-secret deal among twelve major countries that would give corporations unprecedented power -- allowing them to use new global tribunals to sue our governments for passing laws that protect us, but reduce their profits! This could apply to everything from labeling GMO foods to protecting internet freedom. Wikileaks has broken the story and opposition is building fast, but the countries are rushing to seal the deal in 48 hours.

OK—let me imagine it. The US decides, at long last, to ban genetically altered wheat, since our foreign market doesn’t want the stuff. But Monsanto decides to raise the middle finger, and argues that the ban infringes on their right to make a profit. So they take us to a new global court, and sue us on the basis of this treaty.

All of this, asserts Assange, is an attempt to impose the United States’ strict interpretation of intellectual property rights, under which a seed becomes an idea, as long as you’ve altered its DNA.

Wonderful, isn’t it, what corporations are doing, and what they’ve become. They’re no longer things, or legal concepts—but people. So under Citizens United, corporations, like people, can donate money to political campaigns. Oh, and they can have religions, too, which is why Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood Supplies will argue this year before the US. Supreme Court that they have the right to not offer certain types of contraception through their employee health plans. Nor, by the way, are these particularly small companies: Hobby Lobby employs over 13, 000 people, Conestoga over 1000.

The following information, by the way, comes from the liberal website Slate.com. But it seems that the sword cuts both ways, because I’ve just read that animal rights activists, citing Citizen’s United, are now looking for jurisdictions that would take the adventurous step of declaring chimpanzees legal persons. (The article was entitled “Seeking Citizen’s United Victory for Chimpanzees”—of course I had to read it….)

Back paddling hard back to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, there’s one thing to bear in mind: the process in the US may be fast-tracked. And that is, you ask? The Guardian comes through again:

…fast track, which first began under Nixon in 1974, was not only a usurpation of the US Congress' constitutional authority "to regulate commerce with foreign nations".

It also gave the executive branch – which is generally much less accountable to public pressure than the Congress – a means of negating and pre-empting important legislation by our elected representatives.

So what’s our time frame? According to the email which alerted me to the issue, it’s 48 hours.

Here’s the link, dear Reader. You know what you have to do….

    http://www.avaaz.org/en/no_champagne_for_monsanto_loc/?bpRuwbb&v=32155  

The Colicky Babies of Puerto Rico

It’s one of those “ouch” moments—like the fact that nine of the ten zip codes with the highest rate of Medicare / Social Security abuse are in Puerto Rico. So what is it today? Well, The WIC program in Puerto Rico has a budget of over 200 million, and serves 184,000 people. Monthly, the government issues 700,000 checks, 80% of which are cashed at small businesses.

And who gets these benefits? Well, the majority are kids: 36, 000 under one year of age; 111, 000 from one to five. So that’s a total of 137, 000 kids. That in itself is a bit of a surprise, because according to Pew Research, there are 232,000 kids under 5 on the island. So over half of the kids on the island are participating in the program.

Curiously, this is not unusual; here’s the Urban Institute on the subject:

WIC serves many in need. More than half of all infants and more than a quarter of all children through age 4, pregnant women, and postpartum women participate. Nearly two-thirds of all WIC participants live below the federal poverty level (FPL) even though individuals with incomes less than 185 percent of FPL are eligible to participate. 

Right—and while it’s true that Puerto Rico leads the nation in WIC coverage, it’s not by much. The same Urban Institute has this to say:

The five states with the highest WIC coverage rates are Puerto Rico (78.7 percent), Vermont (76.3), the District of Columbia (76.2), California (73.7), and Minnesota (73.5). 

So none of this is particularly surprising. What is surprising? Well, 62% of the kids in Puerto Rico require special formulae, and in gringolandia? Only two percent. 

Nor is the special formula cheap—The New Day reports in its print edition of today that the special formula can reach up to 50 bucks a can. In addition, The New Day reports that some merchants are doing a bit of gouging:

“Sé que la administración no estaba administrando bien los fondos federales desde finales del año pasado. Estamos hablando como desde noviembre, por ahí... que se quedó sin administrador y ahí empezaron a haber malas decisiones. Un ejemplo, la leche Nutramigen en el mercado –para los efectos– se debe cobrar a $32. Los comercios regulares cobraban cuarenta y pico y el programa se los pagaba”, dijo [José Díaz, presidente de la Asociación de Comerciantes del WIC] al hablar de un esquema fraudulento que, según dijo, denunció a la “pasada administradora del WIC”.

(“I know the administration hasn’t been administering the federal funds well since the end of last year. We’re talking about from November on—when we haven’t had an administrator and then they started to make bad decisions. One example—the milk Nutrtamigen in the market costs 32$. The merchants charge forty something and the program pays it,” said José Díaz, head of the WIC Merchants Association, on speaking of a fraudulent scheme that, according to him, he reported to the “past administrator of WIC.” 

And it’s not just the merchants, according to one source, cited in the same article:

“Hay de todo. Hay comerciantes, hay participantes… pueden haber empleados. Hay médicos involucrados en una serie de esquemas. Están trabajando con ello. Se tardan más tiempo en hacer este tipo de investigaciones”, dijo [Dana Miró] la licenciada en nutrición.

(“There’s everything. There are merchants, there are participants, there could be employees. There are doctors involved in a series of schemes. They’re working with them. It takes a long time to do this type of investigation,” said Dana Miró, a specialist in nutrition.)

So the feds came to town, and will let us know—sometime in December—whether they will paralyze the program. It depends, apparently, on what they find and whether we can clean up our act.
The good news? We can, because that 62% that required special formulae?

Now down to 40!