Lady Prevails!

You know all about it—the 73 billion bucks that the 16 or so public agencies plus the general government in Puerto Rico owe. And you know that the governor came out last Sunday in The New York Times saying that the debt was “non-payable.” So we are in full crisis, or near full crisis, since we did manage to pay 1.9 billion bucks that we owed. And you even have read the Krueger report, which details all the various paths that led inexorably to the edge of this cliff.

But while the island has been in crisis, the café where I write has been in crisis, too.

“I have to raise $60,000 by the end of the month, Marc,” said Lady, who was faced with the twin challenge of just getting to the bathroom, since about half of her shin had been removed in a recent surgery. So she was crippled on various fronts.

Well, there were various attempts at help, though there was also a certain lack of coordination. In fact, for insouciant going-your-own-way, poets could teach even cats a trick or two.

There was Geronimo, who declared that he would cook a delicious dinner, all with the finest ingredients that he had himself collected from remote and mountainous locations on the island.

“He made lasagna out of nettles, Marc,” reported Sunshine the next day. “I mean, I saw him making the stuff, and he couldn’t even touch the things. So he was using this!” Sunshine then held up the large tongs that bakeries use to get the doughnuts out of the cases.

“And he expected anyone to eat this stuff? I mean look at this.”

So he showed me a completely untouched tray of lasagna, each piece of which was adorned with, yes, a nettle.

“So did anyone come?”

“That’s what I asked Lady…”

“And?”

“Seis de mis proprios gatos….”

Right—six of her own cats, which is twice the usual number for describing an event failure, but still not very good.

“Then Geronimo turned around and told Lady that she owed him $170, since he had spent that on ingredients! Can you believe that?”

“Well, those nettles don’t come cheap….”

It had been rather unpromising from the beginning, since Geronimo had conceived the affair based on the purchase of tickets, the minimum price being $60 per person. The only trouble was that even the person nominally in charge of the event—as well, putatively, of Geronimo—couldn’t understand the concept. So that boiled over into hurt feelings and recriminations and then, when another friend (who had not incidentally contributed 1000 bucks to help) had stepped in to mediate, Geronimo had ordered her out of the kitchen. Well, well—we all know that chefs can be fussy.

The next step was to set up a crowd funding site, and so Lady’s sister-in-law—her Latin blood at full boil—stepped up and created a site on GoFundMe.com. She described with the pen of Dickens the dastardly actions of the legal foe that had brought Lady and the Passage to the brink, nor did she spare the adjectives, of which “petty, vindictive, mean-spirited” were the more palatable. Ah, it was vigorous indeed but…

“Lady, you have GOT to take that thing off the Internet, and you’d better hope your step-father or whoever he is hasn’t seen it. Oh, and especially the judge!”

“BUT IT’S TRUE!” cried Lady, who was anyway not at her best, since now it wasn’t going to the bathroom, but rather going down the 25 steps out of her apartment that had been the challenge.

“So write it to me and text me…”

Right—do that, and then to the work of….well, what? Shouldn’t there be signs? How are people going to know that there’s a crisis? I decided to try to make a flyer, since my version of Word has templates for such things, but guess what? The photo—which anyway was upside down and refused to get right side up, and who knew that a photo could get so drunk?—was either swallowing the headline—Save The Poet’s Passage—or the headline was swallowing the photo. The point was, they were't not cooperating, which meant that the good Taí, always my cavalry coming over whatever technological hill I’m in front, had to step in. This she did, efficiently, and even refused payment! Thanks, Taí.

So now it’s time to herd up the many people who love the Poet’s Passage, who kiss Lady every time they see her, and ask her for twenty or thirty bucks half the time they see her. If Lady could find the word “no” in her capacious and poetic vocabulary, she’d have the 60 grand.

“I’ll join you, just as soon as I finish this poem,” says Carly, a poet and ex-worker, who was exed after some financial unpleasantness.

“MOTHERFUH! I can’t believe that Niggah ain’t out here with us, pounding these damn streets under this fuckin’ sun!”

So said Montalvo, whom I had enlisted, along with Norma. So it’s just the three of us out there, since Carly is grappling with the double weight of double paternity, which means that he is absorbing the poetic and air-conditioned atmosphere of the Passage, while his girlfriend calmly observes the twins shitting on the all-white sofa.

“Well, I’ve certainly found out who the sharks are,” said Lady, since she had been fielding various proposals to buy the building at ridiculous sums, or buy the café for the purpose of turning it into a cat café—brilliant, but impossible according to the Health Department—or other schemes, all very much not to the benefit of Lady.

So it all worked out, though a day before Lady had to go into court and tell the judge if she had the sixty grand, she was still over ten thousand short. But no problem, since 10 grand materialized in an “off-line donation,” and somebody just donated 15 bucks 26 minutes ago, even though the goal has been reached (we’re at $60, 720) and the crisis is officially over.

So we’ve moved on, or rather not, since the point of it all was that nobody wanted to move on—not Elizabeth’s two children who have valiantly responding to the crisis by alternately playing video games or snoozing, and not Carly nor his girl friend nor their progeny, doing what progeny do in the first year of life, and not the tall grey-haired gringo in the corner, who knows—slightly—how Lady got the sixty grand she needed to keep us all in place.

What don’t I know?

Where in the hell Puerto Rico is gonna get 73 billion!        

On Marriage and Dominicans, etc...

Yes, yesterday was a good day, since I spent the earliest decade of my life being sick, the second and third decades being criminal, and the last decade being married in some places and single in others. None of that matters, in quotidian life, but it might have been an issue if one or the other of us had been hit by a bus. Potentially, I could have been seeing my husband’s family stream into the ICU, while the nurses and doctors barred me.

So yes, it was a good day, and I went to the march and waved the flag, since that was what I had done off and on for decades. But it was miniscule to what so many other people had done, and minor compared to what I had done, which was come out to everyone including the guy who parks cars on the street (OK—I didn’t actually come out, but he saw me with the flag, gave me a special look, and don’t you think that counts?)

Between being in tears for most of the day, I read all the Facebook posts from all my religious former-students-now-FB-friends, who were writing things like this:

En mi opinión la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo de los Estados Unidos de legalizar el matrimonio entre personas de mismo sexo es un paso más de esta nación hacia un abismo de autodestrucción, no solo en lo que respecta a lo moral y espiritual sino también como potencia mundial.

My apologies to anyone who needs translation, but in fact, does anyone need translation? Because for the last month or so, we’ve been hearing that the sky was falling, or maybe that the jaws of Hell were opening up—right, that may be a mixed metaphor, but don’t worry, because the whole subject is so emotionally charged that nobody will notice—and the United States was going to be cast into the flames and the stench of sulfur and the cries of the anguished souls who have languished there….

So I waved the flag and walked hand-in-hand into Old San Juan, and had the happy discovery that people were on the streets, snapping photos and, in almost every case, applauding and cheering. It hasn’t always been that way: ON my first pride march in Puerto Rico, someone threw a bottle at me from a hotel window. Luckily, it was one of my life’s many disconnects.

Well, wouldn't you celebrate, too, if you had just torpedoed Western Civilization?

Then it was time to do that scandalous thing we gays do—we ate dinner. OK, he cooked, I did the dishes, and we had a bottle of champagne, since we learned a long time ago: In a world where not much can be expected, you have to create your family and celebrate your own milestones. And today? Well, I woke up and didn’t need to get out of bed to know that the world was still with us, since the same construction work that has been going on all week was still very audibly going on today.

So the world hasn’t fallen apart in any significant sense for anyone except that yes it has, if you are Dominican of Haitian descent, since what some are calling the biggest Humanitarian crisis in recent times is about to take place. Or rather, is taking place, but at night and in the early morning, since Dominican authorities are taking somewhat less bureaucratic routes, and travelling down the well-established paths of intimidation and brutalization. There is, for example, the Dominican guy who had the army guy pound on his door, order him to leave the house and, if he didn’t, he would return with gasoline and matches. Oh, and it’s a wood house (all right, more like a shack…).

Well, it was a situation we all had seen coming, since in 2010, the government announced that anyone born in the Dominican Republic was not automatically a Dominican, as had been the case. Then, the Supreme Court went further and announced that anyone without at least one Dominican parent was illegal. Oh, and that went back to 1927.

The court got around that by declaring that the Haitians had not been living in the Dominican Republic for all those years, cutting the sugar cane and harvesting the plantains and building and then cleaning the houses and doing all the things that immigrants do. No, they had been passing through, those guys who arrived in the 1960’s, and now have grandchildren, who—like so many immigrants—don’t speak Creole, don’t know anyone in Haiti, and consider themselves, very justifiably, Dominican.

In fact, the international pressure was intense, so then the Dominican Republic instituted a program designed to help those people who could be naturalized be naturalized. Although sometimes that was a trick, since some of these people were illiterate, many were without any papers, and therefore couldn’t ride a bus, since the bus would be stopped and identification demanded. Then, there were the reports that the lines were humongous, the people were waiting for days on end, bribes were being solicited and paid for people to jump in line. Oh, and for those who simply had a birth certificate from the Dominican Republic? Well, they had to provide an unwieldy pile of documents, which may explain that—out of hundreds of thousands of people—only 8,775 people completed the process, and all of that is under review, except for some 300 people who have been granted citizenship.

Well, the world watched all this being played out, and the social networks came through, but did the mass deportations happen? Because it had been reported—the government or the army (if there’s any difference) had rented 12 big busses, and had constructed seven deportation centers, and the situation looked all set for the deportations to begin.

So then the government announced that the deportations would begin after a 45-day period, during which those 8,775-minus-300-out-of-500,000 people’s papers would be examined.

So last week was a tense week, since what would the U.S. Supreme Court do, and what was going on at the border of Dominican Republic and Haiti? Were the deportations going on? And where was the press? Yes, it had been reported, but it was hardly being played in the way that a beheading in France or the Charleston murders were being played. So hundreds of thousands of people were—potentially—going to be upped and put into Haiti, and the president of Haiti has said that he won’t welcome any Dominicans of Haitian descent, and anyway, how much of a welcome is Haiti able to give? They’ve cut down most of the trees to cook the food that now they don’t have, so what’s left? Sharing dirt with their third-cousins from across the border?

So I was Googling, and then hit upon one of my many absurd schemes: I would download Google Earth, and then spy in on the border by satellite from the next island over! See? Technology wins again, just like love!

Except that it didn’t, since I couldn’t figure out how to download the program, nor how to enlist an army of will volunteers, to sit at their computers and monitors various spots along the Dominican / Haitian border.

Fortunately, a more connected generation has started a new twist on journalism, since now, anybody with a smart phone can be a journalist, as Vice News is proving, and if television brought the Vietnam War home more than the New York Times ever could, the Internet and YouTube is just as revolutionary. And so I watched, today, and absorbed the fact that some 14,000 Dominican / Haitians have already crossed the border—some of them, presumably, are Haitian and getting out before “voluntarily” before they’re evicted. So they’re selling off all their stuff and guess what? This is not how you want to plan a move….

Well, it’s an interesting world, since one of my questions has always been, well, isn’t it stretching the imagination that all of those concentration camps were built in Nazi Germany, but the good German people didn’t know anything about it? Now, of course, Vice News would be showing the trains, and anyone with an Internet connection and an interest would be able to see it. It being, of course, whatever atrocity was going on at the moment.

So now I’m married and that was nice but now I have to be worried about what is happening now and may happen in the next month on the next island over. And to all of my students for whom I still have a great affection, and who are reposting the rants of their Evangelical friends, let me ask a question….

…isn’t it time to move on, and worry about something real?

                                     

Dumbing Down for Dummies

Lately I’ve busied myself teaching a very nice Chilean woman the 100 citizenship questions that every foreigner has to study, since during the interview with the INS every candidate is asked ten questions; of these, he or she must answer six correctly. So how do the candidates do? Well, according to the National Review, 91% pass. OK—and what about our high school kids? In the same article, only 4% of kids in Oklahoma and Arizona passed.

Each time I prep someone for citizenship, I come away feeling that I’ve gypped the student, that my own teachers had done so much better for me, that they had brought more depth and subtlety and passion to the subject. Oti, my student, tells me that the Constitution has to be obsolete, since it was written in 1787 (which is, by the way, one of the one hundred questions). I counter by telling her that the framers of the Constitution very deliberately couched their language in general terms, allowing for interpretation as time and technology change.

As an example, I gave her the case of a zookeeper in Milwaukee, who had posted on Facebook that the white clientele of the zoo had lousy manners. Somehow, his supervisor read the post, and fired him. Apparently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the zoo’s favor.

Or maybe it didn’t—I’ve looked it up just now, and can’t find anything about the affair. But that was hardly the point, since Oti and I went on to talk about the merits of the case: Didn’t the zookeeper have the right to free speech? Shouldn’t a person be able to post what he likes on Facebook? Could you argue that a zookeeper with that attitude was unlikely to perform his job adequately, since one part of that is to deal with the public? All of those questions my old civics teacher would have pounced on, and many more.

That said, it also may be true that I don’t do too badly, since reading the 100 questions can be a dismal affair. Does anyone care that the constitution was written in 1787? Of course not—more interesting is the fact that the Colonialists fought a revolution, and then had the thought dawn on them: How in the world were they going to govern themselves?

That’s hardly the worst: One question is why the Pilgrims came to America. Well, good liberal that I am, you know my answer: They were so hideously intolerant in their religion that even the Dutch couldn’t stand them. Wrong—they came seeking religious freedom, at least in the INS’s view.

And so we come to the dismal fact: If anybody is teaching Civics, they’re doing a singularly lousy job of it. But that might not be surprising, since two years ago, I discovered that my niece, a professor of English pedagogy, was set to go off to Vienna, to teach a course on teaching English grammar to ESL teachers.

“I’m sort of worried about that, since the students tend to get so hung up on the pluperfect and continuous tenses, and I don’t know anything about that stuff….”

Yeah? She was a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, her specialty was teaching teachers to teach English, and she couldn’t conjugate a verb? Even more troubling, in several conversations with her, I attempted to understand what her thesis was all about: I couldn’t understand it then, nor can I now. The best I can say is that it had something to do with racial stereotyping on children’s reading abilities—but that’s just a guess.

What’s happening in our schools? Well, we seem to be trading learning basic facts and information for dealing in broad concepts and critical thinking—all of which would be fine, if having a basic bed of knowledge weren’t the first step in being able to engage in critical thinking. 

It’s all part of the dumbing down of our schools, and anyone who hasn’t tried to pass the 1912 Eighth Grade Bullitt County (KY) knows: We’ve all been victims. Sure—I aced the Grammar section, but the question, “Through what waters would a vessel pass going from England through the Suez Canal to Manila?” Remember looking at the floor, at your shoes, or indeed anywhere, all to avoid making eye contact with the teacher?

In fact, one symptom of our dumbing down is that we are now preferring video versus print, and so I went to YouTube—of course!—for a very instructive clip on the problem. Teachers, it seems, are no longer correcting spelling errors, since my “because” has equal weight to your “cuz.” Did I believe this? Wasn’t sure, but my interest was piqued by the allegation that schools were bumming out their students by teaching “death education.” Yeah? So I looked that up, and got the following paragraph from a New York University professor:

From twenty years of teaching a college course, I can see the value of a course offered as an elective. As for requiring high school and elementary school students to study death and dying, I am skeptical. Advocates of death education say that the traditional college age is too late for beginning ones education in this area. That is true and I return below to the need to begin death education as early as possible. Before describing how to answer the need, however, are we certain about the need itself.

Why do I feel that no eighth grader who could navigate—or at least identify the waters to be navigated—from Britain to Manila would navigate so ineptly through that paragraph? Consider punctuation—there’s no question mark on the last statement, and no apostrophe on the “one’s.” But even worse is the logic problem posed by the author’s first saying that he is skeptical about requiring high school and elementary students to undergo death education, and then averring that “death education as early as possible” is necessary. But wait—then we are told that we might be uncertain about the need itself! Is it just me that doesn’t get all that?

Nor is it the case that this is some adjunct professor. Rather, it is—probably—by a man named G. Moran, where he would eventually become Director of the Program of Religious Education at NYU.
Rather curiously, believing that the education of our time has been deliberately dumbed down leads you straight into the arms of the conspiracy theorists, since why has this happened, and at whose direction? Of course—it’s the New World Order, otherwise known as the Illuminati, that sinister oligarchy and plutocracy that pulls the strings and moves the world. Obviously, the last thing they want is to have an informed citizenry, so what have they done? Fed us with the drugs of materialism, nationalism, religious fervor, and emotional non-rational discourse. Think George Orwell, only on an order of magnitude many times worse.
Is it true? Probably not. What is true is that if anyone wanted to create a mindless, malleable proletariat, well…

…wouldn’t that be the way to do it?

And now, for someone who hasn't been dumbed down….

On White Supremacists and Naked Violinists

Full confession: I have spent half an hour watching Mr. Bean, because there’s nothing for it, there’s no sandbox deep enough to bury my head, the truth is as blinding as it is numbing. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and what can I do about it? Precious little.

Again, a kid had too much time on his hands, too little to do, began brooding about the soon-to-be-disappeared white race, and got it into his head to grab a gun, go and sit for an hour in a Bible study group, and then kill nine people.

As always, it’s the details. That hour that he spent—what was he thinking? Was he studying the group? Was he identifying which people he would kill first? Which he would spare? Was he wrestling with his conscience? Or was he gathering up the “courage” to act?

As always, it’s the reaction. An Episcopal bishop writes that the attack wrote that the attack was “unimaginable.” Was it? Wasn’t it almost predictable, since insane attacks have now happened in movie theaters, elementary schools, and now Bible study groups in churches. Oh, and pretty much anybody in the black community can tell you: There’s a long history of attacking and often torching the black churches. The liberals are saying that this is terrorism, as much as a Muslim planting bombs at the marathon in Boston was terrorism. The gun-loving crazies are…well, I don’t know what they are saying because, guess what? So polarized have we become that neither side is listening to the other, which means that nothing will ever get done, because the money is with the guns, and anyway, they’re out there, and so how do you lure the genie back into the bottle?

As, always, it’s not the individual. Although it will be painted that way—this “terrible tragedy” had nothing to do with systemic racism, failed educational systems, fractured society, warped values, and lax gun laws. No—it was an isolated incident, regrettable but not indicative of anything that need be done, except perhaps to be more vigilant.

And does anyone really think that our police departments are not waging a war against black people? Because, in 2006, the FBI published a paper entitled “White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement.” Who knew? And by the way, even I could be a white supremacist, since I could be cloaked in what I now know is a “ghost skin,” a term referring to a white supremacist passing as a liberal, or at least not as a crazy.

Then, of course, there’s the rest of the world to consider, since absolutely everybody is the developed world is convinced that we are bloodthirsty savages, and who’s to say they’re not right? Consider the case of Stefan Arzberger, the first violinist of the Leipzig Quartet, who went out after a concert, met and took a transsexual prostitute to his hotel in New York City, got rolled, and, according to him, was drugged. So what happened? At 8 in the morning, he was naked and roaming the halls of the hotel, pounding on doors. An older woman opened the door, and the violinist nearly killed her. So she is suing him, he is claiming that he was the victim of a drugging and a robbery, and the entire classical music world is scratching its head. Oh, and making comments like this:

The problem of “drugging” other people at a bar in order to rape, rob or murder them is, fortunately for the rest of the world, a rather unique and peculiar American reality, more or less unknown and unheard of in Europe, Japan and in other developed countries.

See more at: http://slippedisc.com/2015/06/new-york-times-awakes-to-a-crime-on-its-doorstep/#sthash.Jq5ofyJn.dpuf   

Well, it’s all familiar ground: People who are not classical musicians or lovers of classical music are questioning why no one can believe that a violinist would be roaming the halls naked at 8 AM attacking older ladies unless drugged. Just because he plays the violin, does he get a free pass? Evidently not, since he is still in New York, facing huge legal bills—he may have to sell one of his violins to get out from under them—and his string quartet has been scrambling to find other violinists to replace him. Oh, and they got into a nasty scrap when they substituted Arzberger but neglected to tell Wigmore Hall.

So we have just a nice normal 21-year old who shot nine black people, and we have a drug-maybe-crazed violinist running very amok through the halls of his hotel, very much seeking “whom he may devour,” and why do I feel it’s my job to do anything about it? Although I now know, thanks to the comments section of the article sited above, that most likely it wasn’t a date rape drug, but rather a bath salts drug which apparently acts as a stimulant, and which anway would be self-induced, and not slipped into Arzberger’s drink.

And that means I should Google it, since it’s vital to tell you all, my legions of readers, exactly what it is, the dangers of it, and precisely why you shouldn’t experiment with it. And in fact, I have done just that, and can tell you not to bother running to your bathroom to dispose of the offending item, since the ordinary bath salts are just bath salts. But since they were sold at times as real bath salts, the name stuck. Anyway, they are apparently the fourth most consumed drugs in the nightclubs. Oh—and they can’t be detected in urine tests.

So it’s a melancholy business—and who can tell when it will finish? But here’s a start: Beware of the white dude in your black Bible group, and think really hard before you open your door to naked violinists!