Who Are the People in Your Neighborhood?

Well, a new statistic—there are some 315 million people in the USA, and 750,000 sex offenders. So that means that one person in 420 in the United States is a sex offender. And there’s a little problem—where do you put these guys?

I know about this because the New York Times had a video this morning about a sex offender village in Florida. And I can also tell you—nothing reveals the deep prudery of the United States better than this video. One man, living with his mother, had sex at the age of 18 with a girlfriend, age 16. Another guy was in “gay rehab”—wow, didn’t know we could do that, have to check it out—and mentioned to his counselor that he had touched a boy inappropriately. Still another “computer solicited a minor”—whom he never met.

Granted, no criminal comes right out and says, “yeah, I sadistically assaulted and tortured a little girl, and hey, I’d do it again, in a flash!” But the Times video does make several points. It shows the church member who says that the church got involved because there is almost nowhere to live that isn’t within whatever state limit has been established from a place where kids congregate. So they found a community that had been built to house sugar cane workers; the workers are mostly gone, but the sugar cane fields remain.

Then there is the public defender of Palm Beach, 35 miles away, who makes the point: there’s a big difference between an 18-year old kid screwing his 16-year old girlfriend and a rapist. But they are both “sex offenders” and they both have a label for life.

There’s also the point that not one complaint of a sex offense has occurred in the sex offenders village.

So there are over 100 sex offenders living in the village of Pahokee, Florida—isolated from the rest of Florida by sugar cane. Right, so who are the people in my neighborhood?  Are kids safe?

Don’t have the answer, but according to the NSOPW website, there are eight sex offenders in my zip code.

OK—anything I need to worry about?

Yeah—a guy who tried to commit rape and sodomy in 1974. Another who intentionally committed child abuse. A couple of men who committed lewd acts, and one who attempted to commit a lewd act. (Sorry, but I can’t quite get my head around that. Was he just about to pull down his pants? Was he intercepted in a grope?) Several have moved in from other jurisdictions, and no details are given.

Mind you, there is a school three blocks away from where I live, as well as a school across the street from where two of the offenders live (if the database is accurate).   

All right—another statistic: one in six women will be raped in the course of her lifetime.

That’s serious—that’s something I’d like to know about. What I’m not interested in knowing is what an 18-year-old kid did with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Assuming it was done consensually, assuming no one got hurt, I couldn’t care less. And the video makes a good point—there’s not a lot of work out there for registered sex offenders. Once you’re on the list, that’s it—you can kiss that promising career in food preparation at Burger King goodbye.

We’ve all gone a little crazy, I think. We have the courts giving sentences to kids having sex with kids two years younger than them. At the same time, we have the Catholic Church, which is reportedly still harboring real sex offenders. And, as well, we have a Catholic bishop who has been convicted of not reporting the case of a predator priest.

Yes, I bring you the sorry case of Robert W. Finn, the bishop of Kansas City, who was convicted last year on one account of failure to report Shawn Ratigan, a priest who had hundred of pictures of the private parts of little girls. The pictures were apparently so shocking that the computer technician who discovered them on the laptop Ratigan had brought in for repair later stated: “my hands were shaking so much, I could barely turn off the machine.”

So what did the bishop do? Transferred Ratigan to another place, and told Ratigan to stay away from kids. And what did Ratigan do? Got right back involved with a youth group. Oh, and went to dinner at a parishioner’s house, and got caught by Poppa, photographing with his cellphone the daughter under the table.

For all of this, the bishop has received a suspended sentence, and has agreed to meet monthly with court officials. But the gay guy—or did the rehab work?—down there in the sex offender village, how much time did he get?

A year in the county jail.

Clothes make the man, it’s said, and it’s evidently true. Who knew that a Roman Collar was a pass to touch any child anywhere at any time?  

The Dancing Libertarian

Right, here’s a guy with a truly wonderful idea. He wants to get 10,000 lunatics together on the Fourth of July, all of them heavily armed with rifles slung against their backs, gather them at Arlington Cemetery, march them across the Potomac into Washington, troop around the Senate, White House, and Supreme Court, and then march over the bridge into Virginia again.

Adam Kokesh, the intellectual author of this plan, is planning to do this—if he gets the support—to send out a little message. He invokes Tom Jefferson, and the famous line, “when the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Well, there is a little problem. The only guns allowed in DC are handguns, which have to be registered in the city. So the police chief came out sounding quite reasonable—he’s willing to work with any group that wants to come in peaceably and protest. But no, boys, leave the guns at home.

There’s serious craziness out there. But wait—let me go check Adam out.

OK—I’ve just spent 25 minutes with Adam, having watched two clips. The first is a 21 minute affair, and covers his libertarian beliefs, his role in the Afghanistan war, his realization that the war was unjust and illegal, and then his realization that Obama, far from sticking up for the rights and freedoms of the people, was just as bad and in fact worse at jumping into bed with the rich and powerful. The second clip was of Adam standing and being filmed in a no-film zone in front of the White House. A clearly peeved cop, exercising all his patience, has decided not to arrest him.

He’s articulate and intelligent, is Adam, and makes a good spokesman. And yes, there are things I can agree with. Of course he has the right to stand on a sidewalk in front of the White House and be filmed, for which he was not arrested; he also has the right to dance at the Jefferson Memorial, which he did, and for which he was arrested.

And he may be right in his assertion that the cops are abusive and generally disrespective. In fact, I started this day by reading that Puerto Rico is going to have to put 600 million bucks into upgrading our police department over the next ten years. Given that we have a deficit of over 2 billion and are facing likely credit downgrades into junk status, it’s a little difficult to see how we are going to do this. The United States Department of Justice, however, has mandated that the police department correct what Justice deems civil rights violations. So a local federal judge is overseeing the process.

OK—that’s the local news. Adam and I can probably also join hands on the issue of the maker of my computer—a MacBook Pro. Apple, it seems, has shielded billions in taxes by employing multiple schemes that are, by the way, perfectly legal. Corporations can do things that you and I can’t do; here’s The New York Times on the subject.

Congressional investigators found that some of Apple’s subsidiaries had no employees and were largely run by top officials from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif. But by officially locating them in places like Ireland, Apple was able to, in effect, make them stateless — exempt from taxes, record-keeping laws and the need for the subsidiaries to even file tax returns anywhere in the world.

Beautiful! And I also agree with Adam—the statistics on the economy are bogus. Unemployment at 8 point-whatever percent? Does that count everybody who has stopped looking for work? And yes, the rich have certainly gotten richer.

It’s hard, in some ways, not to be cynical, not to feel that in almost every facet of our society we have consistently gone backward. We let our government take away significant liberties in the fear-drenched days after 9 / 11. We’ve engaged in unjust wars and gotten the whole world to hate us. Our cops have too often used force against us.

So I’m happy to report good news; last Friday, May 17, I took part in a march against homophobia, and what an affair it was! Best, how many groups came out and protested, how organized the whole affair was! And despite some estimates of only 200 participants, there were, I can tell you, many, many more.

The mood was great; spirits were high. And yes, there were many kids there—teenagers and people in their early twenties. For the first time in Puerto Rico, there was a large, organized and multilateral march for gay rights, and against homophobia.

Our hour had come. And no, Adam, not with armed weapons slung across our backs….

On Teaching

For over twenty years I’ve been doing something with no real idea of how I’m doing it, or how it should be done.

Apparently, I do it well, however I do it. Well enough to work 13 years at a language school, well enough to convince Wal-Mart Puerto Rico that it should hire me as a full-time teacher. And well enough that old students, when I come across them, greet me with affection, and tell me they only learned English from me.

For years I felt like an impostor—if they knew that I knew absolutely nothing about what I was doing, they’d have to kick me out, right? And shouldn’t I go to school, since I was pretending to be a teacher, and figure out the right way to do it? How to confess—I have no idea what a lesson plan is, or how to conduct group activities, or how to assess a student’s progress, or lack thereof.

I had vague theories, of course. Nobody learns in a boring classroom. If I’m talking, the students aren't learning. I don’t teach, I observe learning. The teacher makes an environment in which learning can occur.

The above four statements are about all I know about what I do. But it appears that I may be faring slightly better than the men and women who know what they’re doing. Less than10% of Puerto Ricans, The New Day reported yesterday, are fluent in English, despite having twelve years of instruction in the subject.

Say what?

Twelve years is a lot of time. We’re talking, I presume, of an hour-long class five times a week, forty weeks a year for twelve years. That’s 2400 hours of instruction. Could I get a group of kids fluent in English in that time?

I think so.

And the crazy thing, as I read the article yesterday, is that the public school system in Puerto Rico isn’t doing the one thing that I would do, were I in any position to do it. It’s so simple—you want to get out of high school? Then sit down and talk to me in English for half an hour.

That kind of stuff was my metric—could a student go to Bentonville? Could he pick up the phone and talk to a supplier in the States? Wal-Mart made a big deal about “coaching by walking around”—it was abbreviated CBWA. Mine was TBWA—the T being “teaching.” And nothing was more exciting than hearing a student stammer his or her way through a business call in English.

Well, I began wondering about all this last week, when I saw a brief clip of a teacher explaining contractions to a group of students in a summer baseball camp. The teacher is at the board, she is explaining that she takes out the letter “o” and replaces it with an apostrophe.

As a teacher / non-teacher, that made no sense to me. I began to wonder—how would I get that concept across? And that, of course, made me remember the time I taught a seven-year old nephew about negative numbers.

We were in the restaurant Macaroni and Grill, which has good food and terrible service. Fortunately, however, they have paper on the table and crayons. So I began drawing the one thing I can draw, and then, to amuse myself, instructing Luis Enrique about negative numbers. Which happened quite naturally—he had asked me what six minus two was.

OK—it was a test; he had thrown down the gauntlet. Luis Enrique to this day is unconvinced of my general intelligence, and he may well be right. But if a kid asks a question—actually, if any student asks a question—you grab it and run.

Nor was it my intention to get into the negative numbers thing, since I am a complete math idiot. But in seconds we were challenging each other—I replied that 6-2 was 4, now what’s 6-3? He got that and asked me 6-4? And so we got to the question—what was 6-7?

Luis Enrique was stumped. Was it zero? Was 6-7 even possible? I said it was, he was unconvinced.

Without thinking, I drew the famous line with the two little arrows in opposing direction and marked and marked from 0 to 6. And left, of course, plenty of space to the left of 0. And then we repeated the whole thing—what was Luis Enrique doing when he subtracted 6-2? He put his little finger on the number 6, and counted two numbers down to 4. We got to 6-6 with no problem. Then the question became: what to do about 6-7? Instinctively, I grabbed the crayon and marked in the vertical slash for -1.

I didn’t, of course, tell him the number. We had a discussion—what should it be called? When I finally did tell him the name of the number, he got quite easily the hang of it. Which meant that we could tweak it—if he could subtract into the negative numbers, could he add out of them? And then could he do multiplication or division?

In the time it took Macaroni and Grill to cook a pizza, I had Luis Enrique dividing -4 by-2; that’s something that I could barely do, I was learning the stuff as fast as I was teaching it.

Granted, I could do it with one kid—could I do it with 30? That’s a tall order. But rereading Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Most Likely to Succeed” this morning was revealing: there is absolutely no way of knowing who a good teacher will be until they have taught for three or four years. And the only thing that has been shown to make a difference, academically, to a kid? The quality of the teacher. A good teacher can teach a year and a half of material in one year. 

So Gladwell argues that we should forget about requiring master’s degrees or incorporating technology or lowering class size. Anybody with a pulse and a college degree should be able to teach. Then, we track the teachers and isolate the ones who are great, and these we pay A LOT of money. We can the ones that don’t make the grade.

All of this, of course, will be met with howls from teachers, teacher unions, educational authorities, parents (possibly).

But tell me—does anybody have a better idea?

Fifth Shade of Grey—A Walk on the Slow Side

OK—if you’ve been to more than ten weddings in your life, you’ve heard it: the Pachelbel Canon. What’s interesting is that, up until the 70’s, nobody had ever heard of it. Then, it was everywhere—especially after the movie Ordinary People used it.

Two things about the piece—it’s got a ground bass, the musical way of saying that the cello plays the same damn thing over and over. Trust me, any cellist who doesn’t have the Pachelbel Canon memorized has a serious problem.

And yes, it’s a true canon. Nope, it doesn’t fire a ball—it has three violins all playing the same thing two bars apart. It a more sophisticated version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

It’s a bit ironic that Pachelbel is known, now, for just one work, because in his life his music was well known and well received. But there’s a lot of music, only a bit of which I’ve listened to. So let’s start, yes, with the famous Canon.  

And here, because I couldn’t resist…..

Right, so it may just have gone over the edge, there, but it’s actually in the good baroque tradition, which was to deem the written music as a starting point, never an end, for playing. So yes, there was always room for invention, for throwing in a new riff, for ornamenting. Music at the time was like jazz—much more open.

OK—enough Canon. How about a chaconne?



The chaconne is a musical form that takes a short fragment of music and spins off endless variations of it. And this chaconne has a ground bass, as did the canon, and as do many chaconnes.

Oh, and speaking of chaconnes, there’s a great chaconne by Monteverdi. Here it is, with our old friends from L’Arpeggiata.

OK—that was a bit not on the slow side. But how’s this—the famous Adagio from Albinoni?  
  

There are other famous adagios—not the least of which is Barber’s Adagio for Strings. But that’s the work of a different day!

Fourth Shade of Grey—When Opera Isn't Sung

OK—there are some times when opera is not sung, but played. There’s the overture, for example, which starts the opera and which does a couple of things. First of all, it gets people to their seats, if not to stop talking (the tradition had been to ignore the overture and just keep chatting—hint, don’t try it today…). It introduces the themes, perhaps, as well as sets the mood. Finally, it’s just traditional.

Any orchestral music played at any other point in the opera gets called something else. Often, it will be called a prelude, sometimes an intermezzo, perhaps a dance like a waltz or polonaise. And here again, the idea is to set the mood and introduce the themes that will be heard—and sung—later.

So James, in 50 Shades of Grey, has the heroine listening at one point to the Prelude to the first act of La traviata. And it’s typical Verdi—tuneful, cheerful, and sticky. Get ready, you may be whistling this all week.  

Nice, hunh? Right—nothing substantial, but there's a place in the world for light and pleasant. 

But if you want heavy, I can give you heavy. In fact, Richard Wagner mines heavy like Reynolds mines aluminum. And here, I gotta come out—Wagner is one composer that makes me want to run screaming out of the opera hall. Nor am I alone—Clara Schumann wrote that the opera from which the clip below is taken “was the most repugnant thing I have heard or seen in all my life.” And a young Richard Strauss said that the opera, Tristan und Isolde, "would kill a cat and would turn rocks into scrambled eggs from fear of [its] hideous discords.”

To be fair, the conductor Bruno Walter said, “So there I sat in the topmost gallery of the Berlin Opera House, and from the first sound of the cellos my heart contracted spasmodically... Never before has my soul been deluged with such floods of sound and passion, never had my heart been consumed by such yearning and sublime bliss... A new epoch had begun: Wagner was my god, and I wanted to become his prophet.”

So there are two camps on Wagner, and very few people who are neutral. Oh, and be sure to eat a full meal before embarking on a performance of any opera Wagner wrote, because after hours five hours of sturm und drang, you’ll emerge famished if you haven’t. Granted, as Mr. Fernández once said, there are beautiful moments in the opera—and hours in between them.

Here, at any rate, is the prelude from the first act of Tristan und Isolde—you be the judge.

Sometimes, for apparently no reason, the people in the opera decide, “hey, let’s dance!” In fact, it was the tradition in the Paris Opera that every opera also had to have a ballet. So Gounod, in his opera Faust, decided to stick a ballet into the last act; in the ballet Faust, having sold his soul to the devil, is presented a series of visions of a particularly ghoulish nature. And though it is often omitted—Faust is an expensive opera to mount, and throwing a ballet into it seriously ups the tab—it adds a lot to the opera.   

The final two pieces are right on the border of terminal sweetness. The first, Massenet’s Meditation from the opera Thaïs, is frequently hauled out as an encore piece, as it clearly is here. The second piece, the Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana is also frequently performed as a concert piece.

Of God and Jellyfish

All right, we do many things well down here. Friendships, for example—we have wonderful friends. Oh, and family—also very big. And nobody has ever said we can’t dance, much less party.

But it has to be said: we’re behind in a few areas. Which is why I’ve been rubbing my eyes, this morning, trying to figure out the hoopla accompanying what is a major triumph for LGBT folks—the passage in the Senate of Puerto Rico of a law prohibiting discrimination based on homosexuality in employment, housing, public places, businesses and public transportation.

Does this seem a little 80’s?

Well, it was the topic of morning radio, both yesterday and today, which may be why the essential weirdness of it all seemed greater than perhaps it is—I was half asleep when mulling it all.

Consider, for example, the senator whose vote was seen as crucial. She only voted in favor if the phrase “real or perceived” after the word “homosexuality” was removed.  Why? What was her objection? Is it OK to discriminate a perceived homosexual but not a real one? Oh, and another senator popped in to the debate—would couples be forced to demonstrate in a court of law that they were truly homosexual, not perceivedly homosexual?

Then we have the religious leaders—all of whom are saying words like the following:

Respetamos los derechos de la comunidad gay y lesbiana, pero nosotros entendemos que esto es un comienzo. No ha perdido nadie aquí. Esto es una batalla y la vamos a seguir. Entendemos que esto va a llegar a que sea el pueblo el que decida en un referéndum nacional”, dijo Robert Gómez, obispo de la Iglesia Evangélica Jesucristo Fuente de Amor.

OK—short translation:

We respect the rights of the gay and lesbian community, BUT (knew that word was coming, didn’t you?) we believe this is a beginning. Nothing has been lost here. It’s a battle that we will follow. We believe this is going to come to a referendum and that the people will decide, said Robert Gómez, bishop of the Jesus Christ Fountain of Love Evangelical Church.

Well, Robert Gómez, bishop of the Jesus Christ Fountain of Love Evangelical Church, I’m not sure how much respect I have for you. Oh, and by the way, did you get to be “bishop” without taking a class or two of church history? Because there was a time when you guys were not too popular, and might not have fared so well in a referendum.

I don’t get it—this absolute love we have for these crazy Evangelical churches and their loopy ministers. All of my students at Wal-Mart were incredibly devout—even now I wince when I’m on Facebook and wade through the syrupy pastel messages of unconditional love from you-know-whom. All of the students also knew someone who was gay—someone they loved and would do anything for. Oh, and someone they would ardently defend, were he or she actively persecuted.

That said, it was almost a relief to come upon an actual Catholic, though what has become of the Catholic Church recently is terrifying. (I heard Whitney Houston blaring out of a 17^th century church recently….)

It’s the blurring of the lines between religion, entertainment, and commerce that gets me. Consider, for example, La Iglesia Fuente de Agua Viva, which in fact you will consider, if you make a left turn leaving the airport. Because soon you’ll come upon an enormous tower, called La Torre de Oración, or The Prayer Tower. Here—have a look…..  

The exterior is impressive, but really, it’s the interior that stands out. On entering, after the half mile walk through the parking lot—and no, I’m not exaggerating—you are immediately confronted with shops. Shops selling religious items, candles, books. Oh, but also there is a popcorn stand, and little rides for the kids. It is, in short, not much different from Plaza las Américas.

Oh, but wait until you go in to the Sala de Adoración, or the Worship Hall—you’re in the largest space—oh forget it, just look at the picture below… 

Oh, and pews? Nah, let's get comfortable because we're gonna be here for hours, and besides, where to put the popcorn? So we have movie theater seats. And this is just one part of the building, which also houses a radio station as well as a TV station. Because the Fuente has splashed over into Florida, as well. So it nice—you can be connected at all times.

Fussy readers may be wondering about the theological underpinnings of it all, and here I can help, since it was explained to me a decade ago. I remembered it for its startling lack of imagination—hold on, you’re gonna be swept off your feet. Right—so let me present it as a play:

(The scene is the stage of the Sala de Oración. The Reverend Otoniel Font steps out, visible only on the large screen behind him. He extends his arms and looks heavenward….)

Reverend Otoniel: “God wants you to be rich. He wants me to be rich, he wants you to be rich, he wants everyone to be rich. Here’s my wife—honey, come out and show them what you bought at Cartier’s on our most recent trip to Paris, where we stayed in the penthouse of the Paris Ritz!”

(The Reverendess Omayra Font steps forward, wearing a diamond necklace. The diamonds are as big as ice cubes. The crowd roars approval! The Reverendess looks adoringly at her husband!)

Reverend Otoniel: “And how much did that necklace cost!”

Reverendess Omayra: “Who knows! If ya gotta ask, you can't afford 'em!”

(The reverend paces the stage, animatedly telling his story.)

Reverend: “Don’t think we always had money. There were times, right out of college, that I didn’t have money for lunch. We were living check to check, and I hated the thought that Omayra might have to work. But there didn’t seem any way out. One day, I entered a church, began to cry, and then to pray. I asked God for help, and he told me, ‘as much as you give me, as much shall I reward thee!’ And I realized, the secret to wealth was to give, give, give as much as you can to spread the word of God and to allow him to spread his wealth on you. And from that day on….”

Yes, Dear Reader—it’s the oldest song a religious huckster ever sang. And it seemed, for a time, to be working. The church built a Bible Museum, they commissioned an architectural firm to design a huge campus, they got into debt, and then, last October, declared bankruptcy.

Or rather, their two corporations did. So my bank is out 15 million bucks to these idiots, and I, through the bank’s outrageous fees and miniscule interest rates, am paying for it all. In the meantime, the Reverends Font are continuing their message: homosexuality is made, not born, and comes directly from, yes…

…Satan.

Take a look, finally, at the clip below. But first, let me assure you…

God really, really, REALLY wants you to be rich!