I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain.
We’ve “moved in” to the new apartment in one sense but not the other. We and all our stuff are in. On the other hand, very little has found its permanent place, and it may be months before it all does. About forty boxes, mostly full of books, are stacked up against the dining alcove wall. Most of them are white boxes with the green triangle logo of Cary Reconstruction, the disaster specialists who moved us. A night or two ago J cast a jaundiced eye on the stack and said, “What’s all that beer doing here?” I cracked up, because that’s how it does look, even to me, who never owned a bar.
I needn’t have worried about feeling eerily as if I was back in the old apartment. Despite having the same layout, this one feels very different. I’m somehow very aware of the different compass orientation, not only because of the sunlight that pours in on clear afternoons, but geomagnetically, or something — I can feel it. And the place has different problems. It’s pouring out today, and we’re lower. Rising streams and puddles turning to small ponds outside the window and porch threaten to creep into the foundations and over the threshold, reminding me that I just signed an obligatory renter’s insurance policy that specifically excludes flood.
The cheapness of the construction and maintenance here is both comical and disheartening. The “hardwood” floor is actually a thin, plastic-treated hardwood veneer that goes “pat, pat” like linoleum when you walk on it. It’s fine with me — very easy to clean, and far preferable to the puked-up-oatmeal-beige carpeting — but the maintenance guys installed it themselves with endearing amateurism, leaving a few scraps or screws under it that make large boils in the “wood” that aren’t fun to step on barefoot. There’s a big gap in the weather stripping of the front door through which, on cold nights, cold air pours directly into our heating bill. One of the maintenance guys patched it with sticky-backed weather stripping that came off the second time the door was opened.
Oddly, too, we seem to have moved into the tenements of our prefabricated “neighborhood.” Crying newborns, rowdy kids, and vicious marital quarrels in the breezeway are all part of the new soundscape, making our former milieu at the top of the hill seem downright genteel.
It’s still an improvement (hey, when we come back from a walk I don’t have to push the wheelchair up that hill!), and a chance to start fresh in a more orderly way. Kitty litter and cat hair show up on the shiny floor as they did not on the oatmealy carpet, prompting good new habits of near-daily sweeping. The absence of the hideous carpet, and the slow seeping-in of acceptance that, Toto, we’re not in Manhattan any more, make me more disposed to try to make this place into a home I kind of like.
But life goes on, and there isn’t time (or bookcase space, yet) to devote to an orgy of “moving in” in the second sense. As much as I would like to have a cozy home in time for the holidays, I’m going to have to content myself with doing it — as Bookaholics Anonymous would say — one box at a time.
“Now is not the time to withdraw.”
A timely read on Afghanistan from a most unlikely source:
We were a group of eight women and one man organized by Code Pink, Women for Peace, and we arrived in Kabul believing the U.S. should withdraw its troops and spend more money on development.
After eight days, our presumptions were turned upside down, splitting us into camps with conflicting opinions. Some still wanted an exit strategy, but one woman who’s spent 40 years in non-violent peace work reversed her lifelong stand, believing the military should stay and more troops might be helpful. “It shocks me to admit this,” she said. […]
[M]eeting with a wide range of Afghans […w]hat surprises us is that almost all say they want U.S. troops to stay, for security and to train the Afghan army. Even those who are hostile to U.S. policy say, “Now is not the time to withdraw.” […]
Asad Farhad, a former minister of finance, tells us that if all foreign troops are withdrawn, “This government collapses in 48 hours and we have what we had before: killing, looting, rape.”
Paul [the lone male peace activist] is perplexed. “I’d read that only 20 per cent of Afghans want American troops to stay, but that’s not what we’re finding.”
One woman, an attorney, wonders out loud whether the group ought to reconsider its call for a quick exit strategy. Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin jumps in, warning that believing is more important than seeing:
Medea breaks in, “Let’s not be so quick to change our thinking. In the first days you get bombarded with new ideas. At the end we’ll see what we want to integrate in our bedrock beliefs.” I ask what those beliefs are. “The military can’t defeat the Taliban,” she says. “Countries have to work out democracy on their own and women have to find ways to liberate themselves.”
So much for solidarity with oppressed sisters.
The story continues with a visit to a group of women, from their 20s to their 50s, “on fire for learning.” The stories of women’s fate are harrowing, the questions and the answers far from simple. For Afghan women, the Taliban is not the only enemy: tradition and ignorance are even worse. Can we Americans fight that?
Can we not?
I have more to say on this, but will save it for dialog in the comments.
Ne’er So Well Expressed
Doctor Zero at Hot Air’s Greenroom just said something that has been knocking and nagging at me to get said, too. I concede with relief: it has found a much better outlet. This is what has been lost in the partisan and ideological tug-of-war between alternating derangement syndromes. This is the country, one nation, under God, indivisible, to which too many have abandoned allegiance in favor of allegiance to their “side,” their team, their half a brain. I will try to resist the temptation to quote it all.
I wonder how truly desirable these uncompromising contests between capitalism and socialism are. Aren’t elected officials, especially Congress and the President, supposed to represent all of their constituents? Wouldn’t that mean listening to the concerns of both liberals and conservatives, and trying to craft legislation that satisfies both sides to some degree? Are the members of a winning political coalition supposed to have absolute power to do whatever they want, even if they won with only about half the popular vote, while the other side sits in obedient silence until their next chance at the ballot box?
In the course of endorsing a Dick Cheney run for the Presidency in 2012, Jon Meacham of Newsweek writes:
One of the problems with governance since the election of Bill Clinton has been the resolute refusal of the opposition party (the GOP from 1993 to 2001, the Democrats from 2001 to 2009, and now the GOP again in the Obama years) to concede that the president, by virtue of his victory, has a mandate to take the country in a given direction.
I don’t think most Americans are under the impression they’re voting for a dictator every four years. Bill Clinton won the Presidency with a mere 43% of the popular vote. What sort of “mandate” did that give him to “take the country in a given direction?”
Of course, we cannot parcel out presidential powers based on the scale of the candidate’s electoral victory. The proper functioning of our government, and the harmony of our democracy, demand that we acknowledge the full legitimacy of the man or woman who sits in the Oval Office. The Left did their country no favors by bitterly dragging the 2000 elections out until 2008. The complementary aspect of this principle is that strong electoral victories cannot logically yield enhanced “mandates” to take the country in various radical directions. If close elections don’t produce miniature Presidents who just keep the seat warm until the next election, then landslide victories don’t produce super-Presidents with turbocharged authority. A President who carries 49 states, and wins 70% of the popular vote, is not entitled to stuff the opposing 30% of the electorate in the trunk and take America out for a joy ride. […]
The American understanding of democracy does not envision voters as slaves who enjoy the privilege of voting for a new master every few years. When the Declaration speaks of the right – and, later the duty – of the people to abolish tyrannical governments, it renders the notion of “mandates” to impose radical change on unwilling citizens absurd. […]
The dissent of a minority is not rendered irrelevant by victory in a popular vote… but the health-care debate in the Senate proceeds on the assumption that victory in a parliamentary struggle between a hundred elected officials will compel the consent of the millions of citizens – now a sizable majority of the population, based on the latest polls – who strenuously object to ObamaCare. […]
The vital role of consent in the structure of a just government is one of the most powerful ideas ever advanced by the human race. […] The need for your consent is not respected when your only hope of withholding it lies in historic midterm electoral victories and the rapid construction of huge Congressional majorities.
Go, read the whole thing. Now how to put this (I’m in an inarticulate phase): I do not quite see the health care bill in such dire terms as Doctor Zero does. I see it as unacceptable — burdensome, bureaucratic, inefficient, vastly overpriced, with many little pit traps hidden in its obfuscating length — but not as the calculated first step in a Stalinist power grab. Democratic socialism, European style, may not ever suit America, but neither is it dictatorship.
What bothers me more than the health care bill itself, or inseparably from it, is the way it is being rushed and rammed through. The majority of Democrats, the Congressional leadership above all, care only about party power and vanity. They have to grab their chance to piss on the country and put their territorial mark, their stink, on it. Many Republicans would do exactly the same (thank God or the BFFs — Best Founding Fathers evah — it takes more votes than most majorities get to amend the Constitution), but it’s hard to separate out their motives right now because all they can do is try to stop this juggernaut — whether for partisan or nonpartisan reasons.
But what kind of country is it when whichever rogue fragment is in power tries to impose its will, while the other merely does its best to sandbag that? The best that can happen is that we go nowhere, because each loco motive is trying to drag the train off the rails. Why has Afghanistan been subjected to an exhaustive review of all points of view, while health care has been all hugger-mugger? If you really cared about the state of the country, why would you try to force a prefabricated and dated agenda on it? Wouldn’t you start fresh, take your time, listen to your citizens, and invite the best ideas from all sides?
Wouldn’t that, among many other things, have been the best way to get reelected?
What’s On My Mind
My “tweet cloud” for the past month:
words (ordered by most used)
- people
- time
- maybe
- love
- makes
- true
- obama
- actually
- look
- read
- palin
- wall
- theyre
- mean
- hasan
- party
- probably
- remember
- kids
- theres
- friend
- word
- thanks
- women
- book
- life
- world
- name
- care
- else
- hate
- tweet
- berlin
- president
- sound
- trying
- quotes
- taking
- funny
- guess
- seen
- story
- call
- looks
- hear
- wrong
- words
- real
- list
- anyway
- reading
- sleep
- bill
- understand
- sounds
- house
- gotta
- heard
- matter
- start
I just love that “maybe” is one of the top three words. Ambivalence is my middle name!
(Where’s “time” in the cloud, though? I don’t have time — that’s probably the sense in which I most often tweet the word!)
So Much to Be Thankful For!
That we and everyone else (two-legged and four-legged) escaped the fire unhurt.
That blogfriends gathered around and wove me a magic carpet to camp out on.
That by so doing, they gave my steadfast and uncomplaining family a welcome break from doing the same.
That my parents are not only still alive but enjoying it to the hilt. (That the state of Florida just renewed their drivers’ licenses at 86 and 92. That settles it, I know where I’m spending my golden years. VROOOM.)
That my sibs and their growing and grown kids and new grandkids are all healthy — incredible! So blessed!
That I still have my health and strength, enough to keep J home, enough to move 35 boxes of books by myself and not have to lean on everyone for everything.
Hospice, just in time.
That hospice and the Red Cross and the landlord and the emergency reconstruction/relocation service they hired have made the dislocation as easy as it could possibly be for us.
That I get to practice slash-and-burn (oh no!) housekeeping — to move into a fresh new apartment instead of cleaning up!
That my rent has actually gone down.
That J slept through all of the moving this morning, including my getting him dressed and up and into his wheelchair so the movers could move the bed.
That friends IRL are being friends this year, and making the holidays holidays instead of hellidays:
- Chris the physical therapist, who (putting to shame my complaints about her one-time no-show) warned me to mop the dust off the floor of the newly renovated apartment (she wanted to get down on her knees and do it herself, but she was going out of town; I easily did it dojo-style, scooting a folded wet towel back and forth across the floor), and who then came back and cleaned the whole kitchen for us before we moved into it; who found me a wool Oriental rug for the bedroom at the thrift shop for $100 (I was worried that J would pee on it; he already has). (Thankfully, not much.)
- Chris (another Chris), the attentive and courteous dojo student/young father in his 30s, who came over today with his wife, moved all our kitchen stuff and much more while we were at J’s gym (this I slept through), and then welcomed us back with a coffee housewarming.
- Kris (I know, it’s ridiculous, like half of Russia being named Sasha), the sole residential karate student, in his 20s, who’s unquestioningly moved stuff for us and regaled us with tales of his native Hawaiian/Southern/German/Cherokee clan. He and Chris (#1 above) are coming over for sage-and-garlic-butter-basted turkey breast tomorrow.
- Erin, another student in the dojo, young mother (including of a baby girl adopted from Somalia) who’s invited us and Kris for a second Thanksgiving on Saturday.
- Nathan, the karate instructor, and the reason we moved here in the first place, with whom we’ve had our ups and downs (which just goes to show that the relationship is a close one), but who showed an amazing efficiency at coping with crisis on the day of the fire, and who (while out of town himself) may be quietly behind this flurry of hospitality.
That after the housewarming, we wheeled into our southwest-facing new bedroom — and a rose and violet sunset.
My new tree. (More when I figure out where I put the photo-transfer cable.)
Ron! (Yeesh! So many close calls!)
Lucy!
Someone new on the way who is fiercely anticipated and celebrated (just not public news yet). A Cat, perhaps.
And neither last nor least (this list could go on and on) — mysterious rumblings of optimism from my beleaguered employer, made palpable and plausible by an unexpected paycheck in full.
I can’t improve on the way Charlie Miller’s father put it: “Yeah, times are tough for everyone […] and the world may be going to hell in countless ways — but I have never in my life had a Thanksgiving in which I was so filled to the brim with gratitude.”
Me neither! I mean, me too!
The Signal Must Be Costly.
This explains so much, somehow.
The basic idea behind [the costly-signaling] hypothesis is that animals need a means to communicate, i.e., to signal to kin and strangers their abilities, intentions, and fears. In order for individuals to trust the veracity of the information that is presented, it is argued that the signal must be costly to produce. If it were not costly to communicate, then individuals would regularly lie and cheat.
The classic costly signal is the peacock’s tail. The tail makes the bird more vulnerable to predators, but the message to the potential mate is, “I have survived in spite of this huge tail, hence I am fitter.” Similarly, it is possible that mobbing behavior is an honest signal by which adult male tarsiers advertise their quality as potential mates. The idea of mobbing as a costly signal is intriguing, because by approaching a predator, an individual can advertise very specific information. While aggregating around a potentially lethal snake, tarsier males may demonstrate their current physical condition, agility, and speed. This information would be very useful for a subadult female who is making a decision about whether to stay longer in her parental group, or disperse and establish her own group. Mobbing may be a way for young females to evaluate the ability and willingness of males to protect them and their future offspring against potential predators. The observation that males are more likely to join mobbings outside their territory [especially when subadult females are present] provides some potential indication that intense mobbing by spectral tarsiers males may represent costly signaling.
~ Sharon Gursky, “Function of Snake Mobbing in Spectral Tarsiers”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology 129:601–608 (2006)
Phone Store Hell, Part Deux [UPDATED]
J was sleeping soundly yesterday evening, so on my way to get milk and eggs at Whole Foods, on a side trip I darted into the AT&T phone store to switch out my defective phone. (This is the crappy model that cost $1 to make somewhere offshore, for which they charge $29.99; the “Select” button would scroll instead of select — I’d pick a ringtone, press “Select,” and it would go to the next one. I’d also have to make several tries to unlock the keypad.) All three cash registers were busy, but I managed to get a floating floor rep to cut in on one during long negotiations between another rep and a customer.
While I was waiting (the state sales tax percentage had apparently changed in the past month, making the swap mathematically challenging), I read, upside down, a printout on the service podium that was titled, I kid you not, TRIAGE. It was a script, detailing word for word how to elicit, massage, and shepherd the customer’s concerns. [wording approximate] “I understand that you are frustrated with your phone. If I can’t help you with that, I’ll connect you with someone who can.” “While you’re waiting for your [product], why don’t you take a look at this one?”
He told me I didn’t have to return the box to avoid the $35 “restocking fee,” but I did have to try one more time with the same model phone. No upgrade without punishment for having been a cheapskate the first time. I felt as if I’d married the damn phone, had gone in for an annulment on the grounds that it had misrepresented itself, and was getting marriage counseling instead.
He told me it’s a very good model and they’d never had this problem with it before. (He acknowledged that he himself had the problem when trying to work the phone.) He switched the SIM card into an identical model and, all in all, the transaction with wait time only took about half an hour. (I wondered if J was freaking out and slinging his leg over the bed railing. It can happen if I’m gone for more than half an hour. I had set up the old-fashioned corded phone for him — he doesn’t understand the cordless — but was afraid to call him because I’d put the phone in the bed beside his hip, the only place it would fit, and there was a good chance he wouldn’t be able to figure out where it was and would then freak out, if he hadn’t before. Fortunately, he was fine this time.)
When I got home I forgot to plug the phone in immediately. I’m not that into cell phones, brain tumors, etc. So maybe what happened next is my fault.
When it started peeping piteously this morning, begging for juice, I plugged it in and it immediately said, “SmartChip registration failed.”
I called the local-looking number below the store address on the receipt. Ten minutes of phone tree later, I was talking to someone in India. I hung up.
Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe the guy in India, reading from his own TRIAGE script, would have held my hand and guided me through taking the SIM card out and putting it back in. Maybe he could have sent it a remote signal all the way from Bangalore that would have straightened it up.
I just had this sinking feeling that after another half hour on the phone, he was going to send me back to phone store hell.
UPDATE: Theologically corrected, per Ruth Anne: phone store purgatory.
As I wrote in the comments: “I went over to the phone store. The guy turned the phone off, turned it back on again, and it worked. The guy on the phone in India could’ve told me that. This one was from India, too. Those guys from India are smart!”
I spoke too soon.
I got it home, and the first time I tried to do something with it, it said again, “Smart Chip Registration Failed.”
Sarah on Oprah
I recorded “Oprah” today (because it was nuts here at that hour — ask Ron) to be able to watch Sarah Palin’s first book-blitz interview, late and out of sync with the whole culture as usual. I watched it this evening.
Here’s the crazy thing:
I liked her!
It surprised me, because earlier I’d been reading The Anchoress’s tweets, and they were wince, wince, wince. She talked too much here, she was too defensive and “rattled” there. I think I know exactly what Anchoress is going through, because I’m that way with Obama: wince, wince, wince. My family thinks I’ve become a right-winger who is looking for him to fail. Actually, I want him to succeed, but I can’t lie to myself that he’s succeeding when he isn’t. If anything, I’m hypersensitive to every time he’s less than felicitous and candid and brave. He’s from the same world I am, so I hold him to a mercilessly high standard. I want him to be so much better than he is. I want him to stop clinging to the teleprompter and the cheat sheet — why is he so afraid to speak extemporaneously? I want him to wean himself from voter adulation and political trimming and act on principle. I want him to have principles to act on. I want them to be firm and generous and embracingly American. I’m so relieved at those moments when he hits a good note and I can momentarily relax my rictus of anticipatory wince. I get a cramp in my face.
In contrast, I don’t need or expect anything particular from Sarah Palin. She doesn’t have to hold up my side. [Note that the “side” I share with Obama is, as I’ve often said, not the left but the worlds-traveler — cosmopolitan, chameleon, amphibian. Oh, and the ex-left — if only.] I don’t see her as a yokel or a political savior. I’m really kinda neutral on her. And from that perspective, I didn’t see any awful gaffes in her “Oprah” interview at all. I found her voice grating at times and I did wish she’d be less coy and evasive about whether she was running for president, but aren’t they all? Hillary, too. On the whole she seemed to me authentic (for a politician), guileless yet also shrewd in her own time signature — you can hear her marching to a different drummer than the interviewer, and therefore sometimes seeming off the beat or slow on the uptake — impulsive, but also grounded. She takes off in flights like a flustered pigeon, but then circles back home.
She didn’t seem extreme to me, either. It might have been a slip when she said Bristol’s pregnancy could have been a teaching moment on the perils of “unprotected sex.” Whoops! But if so, the slip that showed was realism, realness, common sense.
Is she qualified to be president of the United States? Trick question: what are the qualifications, and how many presidents were short a few? Did she abort her developing qualification by resigning as governor? Maybe. It was a big risk to take, in particular a risk of making it all about her as a personality instead of all about the office and the country — a cult of personality that threatens to become the mirror image of Obama’s. I agree with Camille Paglia that her qualification also “will depend on her willingness to hit the books at some point and absorb more information about international history and politics.” But her candidacy doesn’t strike me as the outlandish joke it seems to be even to some Republicans. The extreme caricaturing and mockery of her that goes on strikes me as much more outlandish than she is.
Customer Therapy
For the most part, we roam the aisles of big-box stores alone, hunter-gatherers fending for ourselves. At most, a multitasking cashier on the periphery might holler out an aisle number for us. But have you noticed how in certain places, like phone stores and banks, customer service reps now lavish an inordinate amount of time and attention on each customer? How they lay out every option available, elicit an autobiography on the spot, and dwell lovingly on every possible customizable feature that would suit that person’s “needs” (how I hate the cosseting use of that word for adults — so infantilizing!), lacing the presentation with a simulacrum of personal chat? And that many people — especially women — and always, the person ahead of you — lingers gratefully in the warmth of this exclusive regard, body gathered close into the booth of commercial intimacy, shy shoulders rounded like a child’s receiving praise?
At first I thought this was just Southern manners. Every transaction down here has to be embellished with a little faux-small-town, front-porch gossip, joking, and dissection of the weather. There’s always time for this nostalgic and incongruous ritual. It’s enough to drive a foot-stamping New Yorker nuts (especially since it’s hypocritical — all bets are off when the same people get behind the wheels of their cars. They become killers). But it’s happening in national-brand, franchise places where the reps are given standard training, like the AT&T store where, in a hurry as usual, I wasted twenty minutes waiting behind one of these therapy sessions before finally leaving with nothing accomplished. (I had bought the cheapest, “candy bar” style cell phone, which probably cost $1 to make and $30 to buy, and punishes you with tiny, ugly, illegible graphics and the threat that they will not exchange it for credit if you break down and beg to trade up. But mine really doesn’t work right; half the time the “Select” button scrolls instead of selecting. I was told that I had to ask the manager if they would accept its return even though — the shame! — I may have thrown out the box. The manager, however, was busy crafting every detail of an anorexic-looking woman’s “plan,” with an air of “However long it takes.”)
You could find this complaint of other customers’ narcissism ironic — and narcissistic — given that a big part of my problem is that it’s not my turn. But when it is, I usually try to get the transaction over with quickly. Cordially, but with a minimum of both confession and chit-chat. (Though I’m not above using “My husband is disabled and I can’t leave him alone for long” to get faster service, which is admittedly sickening, though true.)
In what’s been called an “attention economy,” these encounters do mimic the validating and cherishing functions of therapy: having another person’s attention focused solely on you. Balm for one’s loneliness and ever-menacing sense of insignificance is the new soft sell. Like the fetishistic way people build their one-in-six-billion Starbuck’s lattes, the customizing of our bank accounts, cell phone plans, and almost certainly our automobiles (though I’ve never bought a new one, so don’t know) seems designed to console us for, or distract us from, the erosion of real individuality, autonomy, and love.
Ambiance 