Cerebral Flatulence

Superuseless Superpowers!

How To Cook An Alien!

The Most Annoying Websites!

Several Capitalized Words!

Karen DeYoung and Peter Finn of the WaPo report that the Obama Administration has yet more work to do to clean up after Cousin Dubya and his gang. And all of a sudden, now that Our Problem is finally in our laps and back yards (where it was all the time, while many of us were getting high on jingoism and xenophobia), everyone’s yelling and screaming about how “We CAN’T put these terrorists and Spawn of Satan near MY [school][country club][gym][soccer field].”

Um, grow up. Do you still think that America is a small Texas town, run by the judge and the car dealer and the insurance agent, where everyone stays in their place and the ‘disruptive elements’ get shot on a country road or tossed into solitary on a state plantation?

We deliberately set out to create this problem with no interest in a solution. Perhaps the True Believers thought that Karl Rove’s “Permanent Republican Majority” would make real planning for trials irrelevant.

There’s a goofy idea floating around to return Alcatraz Island to its former role as the nation’s top SuperMax prison. Frankly, I like it. From 1935 to 1962 Alcratraz was watertight, unless Clint Eastwood really did make it to shore the last year the prison was open. Every escape attempt ended badly, and there are more great whites in California waters than there used to be. With modern techniques, DHS could turn Alcatraz into a Lucite paperweight with Bad Guys embedded inside.
Add a Navy or Coast Guard gunboat, ready to shell the island into rubble if there’s trouble.

The best part? We couldn’t shut away our “worst of the worst” out of sight in some undisclosed location. No, the most dangerous people to the USA would be kept in a box in the middle of one of our largest cities and ports, in full view of the world and us citizens. Anyone could at any time see where the detainees are and how they’re doing. And, we’d most publicly own our s**t.

Let me also say that I lived in The City for six years and got my undergraduate degree at S. F. State, so I’m not out to foist a turd on Baghdad by the Bay.. (Herb Caen’s old tag would take an unfortunate turn, wouldn’t it?) If anything, San Franciscans would make the best guardians of danger and of American principles.

Yes, it’s all over the air, a tune you’ve heard somewhere, one from an old American original, that first Great Revival:

‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

‘Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain’d,

To bow and to bend we shan’t be asham’d,

To turn, turn will be our delight,

Till by turning, turning we come round right.

– Shaker Elder Joseph Brackett, 1848

2008 was a tough, tough year for me personally and for my community. Major fires, a flurry of deaths, evacuations, and financial disruptions piled on to the stack of mundane concerns that are part of every life. The hardships produced a response often experienced, yet curiously hard to remember during the blues — a creative eruption of energy, ideas and action.

Here in Big Sur the locals dove in to recovery mode even as government agencies dithered and blithered. The Coast Property Owners’ Association rapidly organized a relief effort that led to real money and processed paperwork for dozens and dozens of residents. My landlord Jali Morgenrath and his son Tevye went to town on the property; before they were through they and their crew built reinforced concrete bunkers, hung steel shutters, piled earth berms and stacked 40-foot containers like so many Legos, on their own time and nickel, to prepare for potentially catastrophic landslides. (I live literally on Ground Zero; my apartment sits next to flood-prone Pheneger Creek, on the site of a building blown away by a post-fire slide in the late 1970’s.)

Fact: I’ve yet to receive a dime from the governments I pay for, for two weeks evacuation and loss of business and income. The Bush Administration never declared California’s worst-ever fire season a federal disaster, and the nincompoops in Sacramento have no money or interest for the rest of us anyway. NOTE: The government scientists and surveyors have been on the ball and full-throated in their response, including advanced slide and flood prediction from the USGS and a portable Doppler unit from NOAA, to help us through the winter without our forests and shrubs.

In my own affairs, I responded to the discomfort and disruption of last year by returning to some pleasures of childhood with a man’s spirit and focus. I rediscovered the stimulation of tactile crafts, of sanding and filling and carving and painting scale models; and I reconnected with a world of popular culture, of pulp magazines from the 30’s and 40’s, of sci-fi paperbacks from the 60’s and 70’s, of classic American films from the past century. And I did all this through the Medium of our time, the Internet. In our era we, the aficionados of whatever, can find each other across the developed world and convene in online communities to rub our enthusiasms together and foster growth in our chosen passions. Who knew, for example, that so many other people besides me are enthralled by Clark Ashton Smith? Or stop-motion animation? Or retro tales about Mars? Or highly-detailed model kits of fossil spacecraft?

In the process of feeding my head I reconnected with my own Muse, and transfused an old project with fresh life and spirit. Look for a five-minute trailer at ComicCon 2009 in San Diego this July.

Thank you, Mr. President, for a class act as a start to your watch. Keep going; we’re right behind you.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, photographed by Annie Liebovitz (who somehow managed to capture Vermeer’s light on film — mysterious wonder!) in the autumn of her long, remarkable reign.

Many great authors have flowered or continued to illuminate this Second Elizabethan Age. Coward, Maugham, Greene, Fleming, Pinter, Shaffer, Burgess, Brunner, Moorcock, Rice & Lloyd Webber, Merchant & Ivory, and, of course, Rowling have graced her nation, and the world, with British storytelling and notions for nearly as long as Dickens, Tennyson, Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle graced Victoria’s.

Elizabeth II has had to reign over a painful and vexing era in British history, that of the dismantling of the British Empire and the rise of the Commonwealth. The Empire required a Sovereign; The Commonwealth and the monarchy are awkwardly exploring the role of Nobility in our times. On the whole the British footprint had as much cushioned sole as hobnails. Colonialism’s blighted legacy is nowhere good, and the Boer War, Amritsar, the Mau Mau, and Malaya were only the worst imperial terrors, but in general (in my opinion) the British sought to do well for their subjects after the shouting.

They still do a great deal to of good, as Oxfam and many other British humanitarian organizations demonstrate in their ongoing efforts. In a poetic way, rather as Gondor preserved of the best of Numenor, so the modern UK preserves the best of the Empire’s impulses.

Her Majesty’s style was recently remarked upon by Simon Doonan; he recounted an exchange with The Queen’s wardrobe designer. The gentleman sharply brushed aside suggestions for making Her Majesty’s style more chic, replying that Her Majesty must always appear kind and welcoming. Chic was unkind, he said, implying (I think) that high fashion emphasizes the competitive in women.

There is, in Liebovitz’s portrait, a sense of the Queen of the Hobbits in the picture; of the Matriarch, quietly determined to preserve all that is homely and good and nourishing about the Shire. The man who in times to come may be remembered as the greatest author of her reign, J.R.R. Tolkien, distilled so much that he loved about his country into that literary creation, which is why it still resonates so deeply in the public’s consciousness. I mean no disrespect to Her Majesty when I league her with Frodo and Bilbo, for Tolkien’s epic is truly about the virtue and value of those very British characters.

The New York Times’ Scott Shane analyzes AG nominee Eric Holder’s statements yesterday at his Senate confirmation hearing. Mr. Holder emphatically stated that waterboarding is torture, which is obvious, and opened a big ol’ can of worms for (soon-to-be) former Bush Administration officials, and possibly career civil servants.

Yet his statement, amounting to an admission that the United States may have committed war crimes, opens the door to an unpredictable train of legal and political consequences. It could potentially require a full-scale legal investigation, complicate prosecutions of individuals suspected of committing terrorism and mire the new administration in just the kind of backward look that Mr. Obama has said he would like to avoid.

[…]

In recent weeks, Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other officials have strongly defended their counterterrorism methods and credited them with preventing attacks on the United States since 2001. Their implicit argument — that the Obama administration should not question policies that protected Americans — was made more explicit and personal by Michael V. Hayden, the departing C.I.A. director, in a session with reporters on Thursday.

“If I’m going to go to an officer and say, ‘I’ve got a truth commission, or I want to post all your e-mails, or, well, we’ve got this guy from the bureau who wants to talk to you,’ ” Mr. Hayden said, it would discourage such a C.I.A. officer from taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.

“We have no right to ask this guy to bet his kid’s college education on who’s going to win the off-year election,” Mr. Hayden said, alluding to legal fees that such a C.I.A. officer might face.

Excuse me?

We, The People, elected by popular vote, and the Electoral College confirmed, the incoming Commander-in-Chief, and we expect his principles to be followed by his subordinates.

We, The People, would like some real, public proof that the secret policemen have in fact protected us from the Bad Guys.

We, The People, would like to stop having our phones tapped, our persons searched, our travel interfered with, and our lives endangered by overaged cowboys.

We, The People, expect that when a person takes the CIA’s oath and pay that (s)he knows what they’re getting into, which especially includes “taking risks on behalf of the new president’s policies.”

We, The People, are paying for that CIA officer’s kid’s college education, often to the detriment of our own kids’ needs.

We, The People, are not holding a gun to this CIA officer’s head and forcing him to remain in our service. As so many stiffs have brayed over that last few years, personal choices entail personal accountability. If you choose to follow an order to commit criminal acts, you can choose to say No. The 20th Century taught us that much.

Dave Davies of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks, “When a shady pol squeezes, where do you turn?”

“It’s a big step, but I think we’d have less mischief if now and then one of those who gets a shady proposal from a pol called back and said, ‘You know, I’m going to take this down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and if they say this is cool, we’ll talk about it.’ “

Yes, politicians are fellow citizens doing their jobs, so hey, I should lighten up, huh?

No.

These fellow citizens use other peoples’ money to get jobs that give them power tell the rest of us how to run our lives. The folks who pay the piper call the tune, and despite much effort, the power brokers who fund our politicians will not permit the rest of us to meddle in their deliberations. We, the hoi polloi, must buy back our governments from the perennnial few. And politicians should remember that they are temp workers, hired for the moment to manage our collective affairs.

Maybe we should have citizen “minders” to act as revolving Jiminy Crickets for our hard-pressed legislators and executives. Joe and Jane Bleaux’s who’d keep an eye on things for a week at a time, like jury duty.

If politicians don’t like the new order, why, then, they can find other work. You know, just like the rest of us.

On this New Year’s Eve, it’s appropriate to remember the band most famously associated with the the Holiday — no, not Guy Lombardo and his Orchestra, that’s Dad’s era — I mean the Grateful Dead.
What began as a house band for Esalen fests and acid tests evolved into one of the great American phenomena. We hear how many scientists and engineers reached for the Moon with the inspiration of science fiction stories; less often you hear about how the Deadheads created the Internet that we enjoy today.

Think about it. The very first link in what became the Internet went live between UCLA and UC Berkeley in 1969. The Homebrew Computer Club, that petrie dish of the personal computer, met regularly on the Stanford campus in the mid 70’s to show off results from the garages around town. And it was there that the battle was joined over the Future: the Deadheads who shared software code for free, just as they recorded and swapped Dead show tapes for free, against an embryonic Microsoft whose CEO, a young Bill Gates, sent the Homebrew Computer Club an angry letter denouncing software sharing as theft. Gates and Paul Allen got rich, but despite a big ugly museum and a big, ugly corporation, they still don’t understand music or community.

What if the Internet had been invented in Seattle? Or Dallas? Or London or Beijing? I’m pretty sure it would’nt look anything like it does today. Despite every effort to turn a scientific paper publishing system into uber-TV, its communal, open-minded roots have (so far) kept it from becoming a censored, faux-filled, pay-for-play morass.

But long after Jerry Garcia’s passing and the band’s official demise, nuggets of wonder turn up from their glorious history. Here’s a quiet, special example.

“When I joined the Screen Actors Guild in 1973, I signed the loyalty oath that, 20 years earlier, the SAG Board of Directors had made a requirement for membership. I never stopped to consider what it was I was signing. It was one in a series of papers I needed to fill out, and I was so eager to join the Guild, I probably would have signed anything they put in front of me. And I did. That’s one of the most frightening legacies of the Blacklist Era: the institutionalization of fear and prejudice.

You see, the Guild Board had not yet removed the loyalty oath from our bylaws. In fact, no action was taken until some new members refused to sign it. Those new members were the rock group The Grateful Dead, and the year was 1967.

Only after The Grateful Dead refused to sign did the Board of Directors reconsider the necessity of a loyalty oath as a precondition for joining a union of artists.”

– SAG President Richard Masur at the Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist event

Whe-he-hell, if it isn’t the Phantom Blatherer.

I’m off, like a prom dress, on another holiday cruise with Mom. This time it’s Valparaiso to Buenos Aires, with stops in Chilean fjords, Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia and other rugged places. Just the thing for a bracing hike after stuffing oneself with shipboard viands. Mom is mad for tango, so Clubfoot here may be hustled onto a dance floor. No pictures, please.

2008 was a very full year; the American Presidential election (bueno!), the Big Sur fires (muy malo), several deaths in our small community (tan triste), and, for me personally, a burst of creative productivity (ole!). A lot of cool new people came into my life, and for all the good things, as well as the mighty lessons, I am profoundly grateful.

Winter Solstice

On this Pausing Day,
When so many nod to their ancestors’ wisdom
And feel again the sacred thrum
Of celestial spirituality and a longing for the Light,
May that Light, upon its return,
Return us all to itself.