Circular Logic

Water Under the Gate

Chickens seem to be coming home to roost for the Bush Administration, and comparisons to Nixon and Watergate are on the rise. These comparisons go back years, however, and with every fresh scandal the press floats a raft of new "Could This Be Bush's Watergate?" stories.

I'm not sure what it says about our culture that we are continually shocked...shocked!...to discover our elected leaders monkeying with facts. Carl Bernstein calls this administration the most dishonest he's ever seen. Fair enough. But as readers of this blog know, I hesitate to take modern superlatives at face value. In fact, while all the lies and deceit of the Bush Administration fill the nightly news, HBO dresses up some good old-fashioned Roman history every weekend to help us put things in salacious perspective.

Bush and his cronies are amateurs when compared to those ancient Romans and their realpolitik. Want to outflank the Senate? Call their leader a traitor, send an assassin to cut off his hands and nail them to the chamber door. Need to fund a surge of troops? Kill the richest families in town and pocket their fortunes. Worried about securing delivery of a key commodity from an unstable foreign land? Provoke a war based on trumped-up evidence (oh wait, I guess our guys read that chapter after all).

Sizing Things Up

Today's New York Times has a story (registration required) about the remnants of Saddam Hussein's so-called "supergun," a Dr. Evil-ish example of meglomaniacal military hubris. The gun, which was never produced, would have had a barrel over 500 feet long. It would have shot a 300 pound projectile 600 miles, or even fired things into orbit!

The whole thing has elements of a crazy SCTV skit about it as well, due to the fact that the gun was supposedly designed by Dr. Gerald Bull, a Canadian genius who once fired a small projectile 100 miles into the air as part of a research project (no mention of where it came down), and who was later assassinated for helping Hussein.

There is some precedent for this idea. In fact, a notable supergun in the 15th Century known as "The Basilic" played a role in the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire. That gun could only be fired a few times a day, and ultimately collapsed under its own recoil.

About 100 years later, what the Guinness Book of World Records calls "the largest howitzer ever made" was cast in Moscow. The 18 ton monster, known as the Tsar Cannon, was never fired. It accomplished its PR goal, however, and remains on display to this day.

There is surely something Freudian in all of this. Cannons are the quintessential masculine symbol, embraced by military leaders throughout the ages as symbols of strength, virility and power.

Yet today, at the 5-year anniversary of 9/11, the idea of a big imposing cannon is slightly ridiculous as we turn our thoughts to innocent victims and a castrated skyline that once thrust two enormous symbols of world trade dominance into the sky.

 

Right to Exist

Hamas, the radical and decidedly terroristic party voted into power by the downtrodden Palestinians, does not recognize Israel's right to exist. I was reminded of this earlier in the week after hearing news reports about President Bush's meeting with the new Israeli prime minister.

Presumably, Hamas leadership thinks Israel should never have been created as a country. If so, they join a painfully long list of displaced and conquered peoples who feel similarly about their neighbors. It is likely that Crazy Horse, strident on the Dakota plains, refused to recognize the existence of the white man's United States. Aztec Montezuma may have harbored similar feelings about King Charles V's cruel Spanish empire. Hundreds of years later, the descendants of mixed Spanish-Aztec culture besieged The Alamo, no doubt refusing to acknowledge the existence of the upstart Republic of Texas.

On a day-to-day level, I wonder how you go about not recognizing one's right to exist? Is it like not recognizing -- or acknowledging -- a homeless person? Or is it more like not recognizing an annoying co-worker seated nearby when you're out to dinner? What if you're just no good with names and accidentally forget to recognize someone's right to exist? Is that subversive, or just a sign that you're getting old?

Also, how can something have a "right to exist?" It either exists, or it doesn't. Israel exists. Bush exists. Terrorists exist. Whether those things should exist is beside the point. During Bush's first term, many people refused to recognize his presidency. Others, citing his bubble of self-reflecting news reports, note that Bush himself refuses to recognize reality. Yet Bush remains Oilman in Chief, and the reality of Iraq does not require his validation.

Normally in this country, arguments over something's right to exist are more personal: Terry Schiavo, unborn children, death row inmates. Countries and ideas rarely make the cut, although Intelligent Design did come close for a while.

Still, I can't help thinking that Hamas is a bit confused. Refusing to recognize an existing country's right to exist is like refusing to recognize that Enron was a catastrophe (oh wait, that was the crux of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's defense). To get the Palestinian leadership back in sync with the world, I'd suggest that there are more appropriate things in existence they could refuse to recognize. Global warming. Nuclear waste. Hanging chad. The San Andreas Fault. Trans fats.

History.

Short Changing

It appears that the rebuilt levees in New Orleans have been "underfunded." This according to a report from the Associated Press today.

One would think that the first objective of any government would be to protect its people. True, we are gleefully lining defense contractor pockets to the tune of nearly $100 billion for a non-functioning missile shield. And we seem to have no problem spending ungodly amounts on the War in Iraq, presumably protecting...our oil supply?

One wonders what kind of spending we'll be doing come this year's hurricaine season?

Hey Judas, Don't Look So Sad

The publication of the 1700-year-old Judas Gospel this week created a minor media event, and presumably some theological soul searching among Christians. The document is one of many early Christian texts found disintegrating in a cave in 1945 and recently published after painstaking re-assembly and translation.

The news here is that Judas, famous betrayer of Jesus and symbol of back-stabbing throughout the ages, may have just been following orders. In other words, Judas was actually a misunderstood loyal partisan doing his part for the greater good.

One would think that the overtly religious Bush administration would grab onto this at a time when betrayal is in the air. Scooter Libby festers, pointing fingers ever-higher to explain his role in leaking sensitive intelligence data about Iraq. Michael Brown continues trying to deflect blame for FEMA's Katrina debacle by implicating his boss, Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff. And a modern day version of betrayal with a kiss is playing out among the viper's nest of Tom Delay associates.

What better time to have a moral examination of the nature of betrayal, and about how reality may be different than appearances?

Then again, there is a good chance that this administration may have a hard time telling the difference.

The Lifeboat Principle

After a ship sinks, survivors paddle toward any floating item and hang on for dear life. Some lucky few end up in lifeboats. Others make due with scraps of wood or buoyant detrius. Inevitably, conflict arises as there are more survivors than lifeboats. It is a harsh scenario in which brutal, life-and-death decisions are made.

The lifeboat analogy seems apt to me these days as the U.S. is wrestling with the perilous issue of immigration and illegal aliens. The rhetoric is being particularly inflamed by Lou Dobbs, who appears to take it personally -- perhaps reminding him of his failed venture, Space.com, which dealt with aliens of an entirely different sort.

Jared Diamond, in his recent book, Collapse, noted that past cultures such as the Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and ancient Mayans may have wrestled with this same issue. As they outstripped the resources available to support their growing numbers, people began gathering where food, shelter, and work was more plentiful. The implications are somewhat ominous, and it isn't clear what those societies could have done differently (other than not grow and consume so much).

Our ship is far from sunk, but a quick glance at the past suggests that demonizing immigrants and building fences isn't a solution. It may get the Lou Dobbs vote, but it ignores the reasons for the problem in the first place. Living together is tough, especially when there isn't enough to go around. There are always haves and have-nots, but when the scales begin to tip too far out of balance the lifeboat rocks for everyone.

Lou Dobbs takes this personally. But in the word's of Connie Porter, Hitchcock's spoiled fashion journalist in the classic 1944 movie, Lifeboat: "Dying together's even more personal than living together."

The Circles of October

October is my favorite month. It begins with our wedding anniversary and ends with Halloween. A perfect cycle.

Actually, the entire fall season is great in my book. It is something about the weather, the crisp leading edge of winter. Fall gets your attention and makes you want to live every moment to the fullest before the darkness comes.

In the business world, Fall is the season of conferences. Here in San Francisco, the tech world is gushing over the recent Web 2.0 conference. Elsewhere you have gatherings of a less "frothy" nature -- to paraphrase Alan Greenspan. You have, for example, gatherings of teachers, quality gurus, accident investigators, collection attorneys, fluid power manufacturers, ecologists, cardiologists, and analysts, just to name a few.

The conference culture is a Brobdingnagian landscape -- something that might get some attention among those who like those kinds of words, or those who specialize in studying such vastness.

Elections in the U.S. occur in the fall, too. Here in California we've got a thick ballot bursting with initiatives. Advertising is crowding the airwaves, full of froth and fury, signifying...well, signifying that it is Fall, and the weather's getting cold, and the darkness is just around the corner so you'd better stoke the fires of moral outrage and pull up a chair.

Joyce explored this sentiment in his favorite of the Dubliner's stories: "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." As the men huddle close to the fire, drinking and complaining about the candidates for office, the only candidate on which they can all agree -- Parnell -- is the one who can never be elected.

Perhaps that is why Fall is so wonderful. It is the golden present pushing up against a sublime wall of darkness. It is a time when people congregate, as if to reassure each other that the sun will shine again once we get through the winter. It is a time of ceremony, of hotel conference rooms, of baseball stadiums, of things "political."

And to my mind, the embodiment of Fall is October, the only month starting with a circle ("O"). A beginning, and an end.

Circular. Logical.

riverrun, past Eve and Adam's

Finnegans Wake, James Joyce's nearly unreadable final work, is a book of dreams, eternal cycles, and, in the famous closing section, a personified river Liffey flowing through Ireland and the city of Dublin toward her "cold mad feary father" the ocean.

The scenes I'm witnessing when I turn on the news make me think of Finnegans Wake. No other American city is as much a dreamscape as New Orleans. It is -- or was -- a sordidly literary place. Home to outcasts and artists of all stripes. Set beside (and beneath) the meandering final miles of the Mississippi River and swimming in a French-Latin-Southern cultural soup, the place is a confusing and colorful dream. Visitors (myself included) over the years never completely understand what they're seeing through the fog of alcohol and sheer otherness that pervades the atmosphere. The city's hot, humid summers are both the miasma of fantasy as well as the engine of nightmarish storms.

Like New Orleans itself, Finnegans Wake is endlessly debated. Is it just decadent rubbish? No doubt Dennis Hastert wouldn't shed a tear over the loss of the city or the book. Is it the manifestation of artistic genius, appreciated by a dedicated and self-satisfied few? It isn't difficult to imagine jazz fans and Joyce fans facing common enemies on that front.

(Dislcaimer required here: I have not traveled extensively beyond the tourist zones in New Orleans. I have not read the entirety of Finnegans Wake.)

To me, the passages in "the Wake" that have the most power have to do with the eternal cycles of life, of time, of history, of geology...you name it. You've got a sleeping narrator, religion and folklore about death and rebirth, the cycle of the seasons, and through it all a meandering river fed by the skies that are in turn fed by the ocean, the river's ultimate destination.

The tragedy unfolding in New Orleans has many currents, and will undoubtably fuel a torrent of issues once the immediate human needs are resolved. Ironically, given Katrina's Category 4 status when she hit the city, the aftermath appears to be taking shape along four major categories: political, racial, environmental, and financial. Some might argue that there is also a moral dimension to this as well, but that really spreads across all the categories.

A wake is a celebration of the life of someone recently deceased. It is also the outward ripples of a boat crossing water. There will be plenty of wakes in New Orleans in the coming months. As the people and the city come to terms with a great cycle of reconstruction and rebirth, Joyce reminds us that we are Finnegans all.

Music in the Meadow of Good & Evil

San Francisco's Stern Grove music festival kicked off this past weekend in a spectacularly renovated Rhoda Goldman Concert Meadow (photo below). The park is right next to our house, so we usually head down to catch a few of the free concerts every season.

The season opener couldn't have been better, but the concert (John Doe and Lucinda Williams) was secondary to the festive atmosphere under warm afternoon sunshine.

The festival is apparently one of the oldest continuously running free concerts in the U.S.

It is inspiring that you can still find free concerts and public arts (both musical and architectural) of this caliber even while funding has been slashed for many public programs throughout California.

Music and the arts do have a way of bringing people together, which may be why they are so often the target of fearful politicians. In fact, Pan, the Roman god of music, was also the god of shepherds and their flocks. He later became the embodiment of evil to early Christians, who appropriated his horns and cloven hooves into images of Satan.

Today's reactionary politicians prefer to attack the arts indirectly. Case in point: music education in California schools has declined more than 50 percent over the past five years according to a recent study by the Music for All Foundation. The report criticizes the kind of prioritization being forced on schools as a result of No Child Left Behind, although from a PR perspective I think the authors undercut their own gravitas when they resort to quoting David Cassidy and Sheila E (neither of whom have played Stern Grove, by the way).

Be that as it may, it is good to see the triumph of good sense, good design, and good times on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Living in Black and White

Karen and I found ourselves dancing the night away this past weekend at San Francisco's Black & White Ball.

For those who don't know about this distinctively San Francisco affair, it happens every two years. Streets and buildings around City Hall are barricaded, and tents, lights, and music fill the plaza. A gala celebration of extravagance proceeds, with food, music, and, of course, plenty of alcohol.

I thought this summary on SFist captured the spirit rather well (including a photograph of someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to my company's founding CEO).

It was truly a wonderful time -- a scene not unlike the Sventitsky Christmas Party in Dr. Zhivago. Thankfully, no one was shot, but there were more than a few Julie Christie-ish women lurking about. Like most everyone there, we heartily enjoyed the glitz, the music, and the overall pomp and camp of the occasion.

Attire for the evening was strictly black and white. Tuxedos mostly, and sleek dresses. Plunging necklines, feathered boas, top hats, you name it. As Violent Femmes lead singer Gordon Gano said in the middle of their set, "You are the best dressed audience we have ever played for."

I am tempted to say something about Versailles and the grand balls of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Like Paris, San Francisco has always been a city of grand public gestures -- think Haight/Ashbury, the Golden Gate Bridge, and, more darkly, the assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk by former Supervisor Dan White in the very halls in which we found ourselves dancing.

I admit that it is hard to reconcile such frivolity with the perilous state of the world today -- fiddling while Rome burns? -- but the Black and White Ball brought home the truth of Yuri Zhivago's (and Pasternak's) view: "Man is born to live, not to prepare for life."

This weekend, I'm happy to say we lived.