Update @ 0728 on 27 August: From The Guardian:

Donald Trump’s campaign chief has moved his voter registration to the home of one his website’s writers, after the Guardian disclosed that he was previously registered at an empty house in Florida where he did not live.

Stephen Bannon is now registered to vote at the Florida house of Andy Badolato, who reports for Breitbart News and has worked with Bannon in the past on the production of political films.

According to public records, Badolato, 52, and two of his adult sons are also registered to vote at the property, which he co-owns with his ex-wife.

A spokeswoman for Bannon, a spokesman for Trump, and Badolato did not respond to emailed questions about whether Bannon lives at the single-family house, which is listed as his residence on his new voter registration record in Sarasota County.

Alexandra Preate, a spokeswoman for Bannon, said earlier in an email that “Mr Bannon moved to a different residence in Florida”, repeating a statement about the issue that was previously released by Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller.

The Sarasota County supervisor of elections advises new registrants that they must use the address of their legal residence, and notes prominently that applying with untrue information can result in [again, the part I really love.] a felony charge punishable by five years in prison or a fine of up to $5,000.

I think I smell a trend. Every newspaper (and possibly a bodacious of bloggers) are going to start cross matching voter registration data with political campaign staff.

From The Guardian—Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon is registered voter at vacant Florida home:

Donald Trump’s new presidential campaign chief is registered to vote in a key swing state at an empty house where he does not live, in an apparent breach of election laws.

Stephen Bannon, the chief executive of Trump’s election campaign, has an active voter registration at the house in Miami-Dade County, Florida, which is vacant and due to be demolished to make way for a new development.

“I have emptied the property,” Luis Guevara, the owner of the house, which is in the Coconut Grove section of the city, said in an interview. “Nobody lives there … we are going to make a construction there.” Neighbors said the property had been abandoned for several months.

Bannon, 62, formerly rented the house for use by his ex-wife, Diane Clohesy, but did not live there himself. Clohesy, a Tea Party activist, moved out of the house earlier this year and has her own irregular voting registration arrangement. According to public records, Bannon and Clohesy divorced seven years ago.

This is the bit I really love:

Under Florida law, voters must be legal residents of the state and of the county where they register to vote. Guidelines from the Florida department of state say that Florida courts and state authorities have defined legal residency as the place “where a person mentally intends to make his or her permanent residence”.

Willfully submitting false information on a Florida voter registration—or helping someone to do so—is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Gee, you think maybe Little Marco can make that happen?

When I was growing up I took a lot stupid actions. (I did even more as a young adult, but that’s another story.) My friends and I rode old car hoods down snowy hills, we touched moving trains, we swam across lakes in the deep woods, we swung across deep ravines on vines, we, well you get the idea.

I never broke any bones, but three times I knocked myself out. The first time was when I rode my tricycle down the back steps, resulting in a hospital visit and crossed eyes.The second time was when my sled hit a patch of ice and I careened into a culvert at the base of our farm pond. The third time was when we were playing chicken (seeing who could stay off the brakes the longest) down Henthorne’s hill and I won, until I hit a patch of loose gravel and wiped out.

In those days we didn’t know about helmets (although later when I got my first mini-bike, my dad did give me a real helmet), but fast forward 30 years and I recall a conversation with a writer friend of mine on the subject. We would take bike rides to clear our heads (and our arteries, we hoped) but we never used bike helmets. Never, that was until the day someone ran a stop sign and tossed my friend over the hood of his car. He wasn’t badly hurt, but that was a wake up call for him. He told me that he realized that what he did, how he made his living, was literally all in his head and that he needed to protect his livelihood.

Insanely, I still don’t wear, although I do own, a bike helmet.

All of this is a longish lede to Nicola Davis’ Childhood concussion linked to lifelong health and social problems for The Guardian. She writes:

Children who suffer a traumatic brain injury, including mild concussion from a blow to the head, are less likely to do well at school and are at increased risk of early death, researchers have revealed.

As adults they are also more likely to receive a disability pension, have failed to gain secondary school qualifications and nearly twice as likely to have been hospitalised for psychiatric reasons.

So, I dodged (I think) that bullet, but I’m thinking now about my parents refusal to not allow me to play high school football (I did play intramural rugby in college) and all the sports my students play.

Davis continues:

The team analysed data from more than a million people born between 1973 and 1985, finding that around 9% had been diagnosed with at least one traumatic brain injury before the age of 25. More than 75% of these were mild injuries.

The researchers compared the outcomes for these individuals with those of others who had not experienced a head injury, as well as carrying out a second comparison, where possible, with siblings who had not been injured.

What’s a parent to do?

[E]xperts are quick to warn that the new study does not mean that parents should prevent their children from taking part in sports. “What we also know is that across a range of health-related conditions sport is very good for you,” said Alan Carson from the Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in the study. He added that exercise is also good for the brain as it thought to reduce the risk of dementia.

The researchers say more should be done to prevent children and adolescents from experiencing head injuries, and to make sure that any problems arising from such an injury are picked up early on.

“[Design of] playgrounds, helmets, the use of helmets, even certain rules in certain collision sports may need to be thought about,” said Seena Fazel, co-author of the research from the University of Oxford. With many head injuries in young adults down to traffic accidents, messages around road safety and drink driving are also important, he added.

All we are, all we do, depends upon the mass of jelly between our ears. Brain transplants are not on the agenda anytime soon.

Never accept any gift that you’re not prepared to either pay for at some future time or hand back and walk away from. TANSTAAFL

So, Facebook drones are upset. Dan Tynan, in WhatsApp privacy backlash: Facebook angers users by harvesting their data for The Guardian writes:

Stop us if you’ve heard this one: Facebook rolls out a new feature and/or acquires a new company, vowing to protect the privacy of its users’ personal information with its last dying breath. A year or two later, it backtracks and decides it wants spin your data into gold after all – and if users don’t like it, they can delete their accounts.

And so it is with today’s news about WhatsApp, the messaging service acquired by the world’s most unavoidable social network in February 2014. In a blogpost, WhatsApp announced it would begin sharing names and phone numbers with its parent company, to allow its more than 1 billion users “to communicate with businesses that matter to you too” – like notifications from airlines, delivery services or your bank, for example.

Facebook will also use that data to make friend suggestions and combine that data with the reams of information it has already collected so that it can tailor ads even more specifically to your interests.

Facebook did not want to comment on the change.

The reaction was nothing if not predictable.

Tynan is right about that. Anyone could have timed the outrage after reading yesterday’s headline: WhatsApp to give users’ phone numbers to Facebook for targeted ads.

This is precisely why twelve years ago I decided to pay the annual registration and hosting fees for Have Coffee Will Write (and later, The Writing On The Wal) and not to post my blogs on one of the free platforms like Blogger. I knew that I wanted to own the press, that when the Founders wrote Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of… the press in the Constitution they did not mean to protect the freedom of the people writing the news, but rather the people publishing the news, the people who actually owned printing presses.

Freedom is literally never free.

Always, always, always look the gift horse in the mouth because the catch is lurking in the shadows.

What got Mayor Frank Jackson so agitated that he acted as if he were the Mayor of Cleveland’s residents and not just its business community? ¶Maybe a princess kissed him and he woke up to what he’s been done in the last decade. ¶He finally admitted he was the servant of Cleveland’s powerful corporate community. Not that he put it that way. ¶He’s been giving them ANYTHING they want in denominations they ask.

It has really been a corporate internship.

“We have facilitated billions—billions—of dollars in development and wealth in this city,” Jackson said. “And all we ask is that a small portion of that come to the benefit of the people we represent. Whether they are in the building trades or contractors or the constituents who live in our neighborhoods. … So we can begin to deal with the disparity in the quality of life.”

Now he’s worried about that?

This was his cry.

You mean he hasn’t already experienced the results of his give-aways.

Somebody woke him up!

I viewed TV news coverage of his press conference, called an hour before it took place, according to one newsperson, who agreed he was unusually animated. “He was pretty worked up,” said the news person.

I tried watching the entire press conference on the city’s home channel (20) but as so much that escapes city hall it was garbled. Here’s Leila Atassi’s coverage of Jackson’s defense of his jobs measure, an exchange for the “BILLIONS” he’s given as incentive to hire city residents on the subsidized projects. That’s what the press conference involved.

The State of Ohio was cooperating. Did Jackson really expect Gov. John Kasich to repay him for favors done by allowing him to go forward with awarding Cleveland Continue Reading »

In the insanity that is Texas, the state legislature decided that students should be able to carry guns to class. Students, thinking out of the box, have taken a brilliant civil disobedience action.

Tom Dart, reporting in Cocks Not Glocks: Texas students carry dildos on campus to protest gun law for The Guardian, writes:

Demonstrators gathered to brandish sex toys in the air or strap them to their backpacks. Or other places. “We have crazy laws here but this is by far the craziest, that you can’t bring a dildo on to campus legally but you can bring your gun. We’re just trying to fight absurdity with absurdity,” said Rosie Zander, a 20-year-old history student.

“We wanted something fun that people could really engage in. Because it’s hard to get involved in the political process at our age, people our age don’t tend to vote or get involved, and this is so easy. Strap a dildo on and you’re showing the Texas legislature this is not a decision we wanted.”

Much has happened in the past year to radicalize young voters in America in ways that we have not seen since the ’60s. The elected representatives sitting in Austin may have just given these new voters yet another reason to take up the gauntlet.

Oh gawd! I do not need another suggested reading list to make me feel even less informed and lazy. Curse you Ralph Nader!

Ralph Nader, writing in Readers Think. Thinkers Read, suggests:

Here are my recommended books to read for the late summer holidays.

The Green Cowboy: An Energetic Life, by S. David Freeman, Authorhouse. A powerhouse in energy policy and clean energy reform for over thirty years, Freeman ran the Tennessee Valley Authority and other large public utilities over the course of his career. In The Green Cowboy, he recounts the struggles, setbacks and triumphs of a life driven to provoke change in America’s use of energy. This book is a handbook on bending corporate power toward progressive change.

How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path from the Caribbean to Siberia, by Stan Cox and Paul Cox, The New Press. This is a world tour of actual disasters where nature’s fury and man’s folly often combine to provoke acts of stunning courage and resilience. Unfortunately,many practices of prevention for a safer future were not deployed post-disaster. A gripping series of accounts by this intrepid father/son team.

Power Wars: Inside Obama’s Post-9/11 Presidency, by Pulitzer Prize winner Charlie Savage, Little, Brown. The New York Times reporter explains how Barack Obama, “the most lawyerly of American presidents,” contrary to his 2008 campaign promises, in Yale Law professor Bruce Ackerman’s words, “will leave office confirming and extending many of the worst Bush precedents in the conduct of foreign and military affairs.”

Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, by Diane Ravitch, Alfred A. Knopf. Ravitch cuts through misguided or profiteering propaganda and, without sugarcoating, shows the value in improving our country’s public schools.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, by Gabriel Zucman, University of Chicago Press. A short, pioneering guide to estimating the trillions of dollars moved to tax havens to evade or avoid paying taxes to the nations from which this expanding mountain of money was made. Mr. Zucman proposes Continue Reading »

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 8” with Ralph Ellison.

INTERVIEWER: Would you say that the search for identity is primarily an American theme?

ELLISON: It is the American theme. The nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who we are. It is still a young society, and this is an integral part of its development.

INTERVIEWER: A common criticism of first novels is that the central incident is either omitted or weak. Invisible Man seems to suffer here; shouldn’t we have been present at the scenes which are the dividing lines in the book—namely, when the Brotherhood organization moves the narrator downtown, then back uptown?

ELLISON: I think you missed the point. The major flaw in the hero’s character is his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success, and this was the specific form of his “innocence.” He goes where he is told to go; he does what he is told to do; he does not even choose his Brotherhood name. It is chosen for him and he accepts it. He has accepted party discipline and thus cannot be present at the scene since it is not the will of the Brotherhood leaders. What is important is not the scene but his failure to question their decision. There is also the fact that no single person can be everywhere at once, nor can a single consciousness be aware of all the nuances of a large social action. What happens uptown while he is downtown is part of his darkness, both symbolic and actual. No, I don’t feel that any vital scenes have been left out.

I have struggled this summer with my own current novel in progress and reading the interview with Ralph Ellison helped me tremendously. This is precisely why I suggest to other writers that reading The Paris Review interviews may be one of the best time investments they can make.

I didn’t begin to understand my own privilege until I enlisted in the Navy. That was the first time this ignorant white boy from rural Southeastern Ohio was exposed to African Americans and Hispanic Americans and Filipino Americans up close and personal. Seriously.

My personal education (I learned zip on the subject in school, my high school was 99.996 percent White, for real) included reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and I knew about the Black Panthers and I kind of knew, but not really, about Martin Luther King and the ’60s riots. I really was that ignorant, yet privileged, white boy.

Five years in the Navy taught me, as Louis CK describes, that I was born with a triple blessing: I was born with a penis, I was born of White Christian parents and I was born a citizen of the United States of America. There are literally billions who would consider killing for that trifecta.

So, all of that is a longish introduction for why I agree with Matt Taibbi: Curt Schilling is an asshole.

Taibbi, in Curt Schilling Is the Next Donald Trump writes:

Having proven incapable of running a business, being a good steward of either his own money or the taxpayers’, or holding down the world’s cushiest job, Schilling naturally decided to get into politics.

Don’t bet against him winning a Senate seat in my home state of Massachusetts, either. His would be a victory for the cause of ignorance and tone-deafness perhaps even exceeding Trump’s capture of the Republican nomination.

Schilling’s biggest political crime isn’t his ranting about subjects he knows nothing about, his insistence on arguing science with scientists, or his pathological touchiness about being labeled a racist even as he makes endless unprovoked sorties into explosive racial/ethnic controversies.

No, the baffling thing is how miserable he is in the face of great fortune.

Understanding that there’s a distinction between being smart and being educated, Schilling got to be filthy rich without being either, thanks to that winning genetic lottery ticket hanging off his right shoulder.

He lived the good life in the majors for 19 years, and even after he blew all his money, he kept getting second and third and fourth chances. In a classic example of failing upward, Schilling may even ultimately get elected to the U.S. Senate precisely because of the “bad decisions” that got him fired from his ESPN gig.

He’s living proof of a truism H.L. Mencken noted nearly 100 years ago, i.e. that for a certain kind of person in America, failure is something you’ve got to sprint after at full speed to catch—it won’t come to you.

In the United States the business of getting a living is enormously easier than it is in any other Christian land—so easy, in fact, that a forehanded man who fails at it must almost make deliberate efforts to that end.

Here the general average of intelligence, of knowledge, of competence, of integrity, of self-respect, of honor is so low that any man who knows his trade, does not fear ghosts, has read fifty good books, and practices the common decencies stands out as brilliantly as a wart on a bald head.

I doubt Schilling has read 50 good books. I’d put the over/under at three, including whatever abridged version of the Bible he owns.

The campaign of Donald Trump has awakened a dark beast in the minds of some ignorant and scared-shitless white christian males in America and given them permission to gibber that their privilege is threatened and they need to take action now or be relegated to minority status. No greater threat could motivate these men. (Recent events from England indicate that the malady is alive and thriving in that bastion of Waspishness as well.)

Hillary Clinton may, but I wouldn’t bet the mortgage, defeat Trump, but her becoming president will not fix the problem.

Just one more reason why I’m voting for Jill Stein.

Finally, to help me, and all of us maintain perspective, I give you Carl Sagan.

If you haven’t ordered a copy of Dan Guman’s The Kid Who Ran for President, do so.

I have.

So, last evening I attended an informational meeting for the Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus and, unlike a similar meeting I attended for MoveOn several election cycles ago, I was impressed. The crowd was small, about 32 or so, but the energy was good and people were articulately intelligent and informed. I walked away from MoveOn, seeing the organization as just an astroturf organization for New (center-right) Democrats. I think the CCPC has potential.

I’ll be going to another CCPC meeting tonight; a watch party for Bernie’s kickoff of Our Revolution. Bernie’s website seems to have fallen behind the curve on getting the word out, but locally, CCPC is listing three watch parties tonight beginning at 8 p.m. (Bernie is scheduled to speak at 9 p.m.; one each on the east side (at the home of Yvonka Hall, 18115 Harvard Ave.), the west side (at the CCPC office, 11910 Detroit Ave.) and the south side (at the home of Liz Schulte, 10037 Hickory Ridge Dr. in Brecksville) of Cuyahoga County. (I’ll be attending the Brecksville event.)

CCPC is fueled from the left, mostly, as near as I could tell, by Bernie voters with only one participant last evening openly advocating for the support of Hillary Clinton. This is an organization worth looking at, and, if you’re impressed, as I am, supporting with your time and money.

[Welcome. Please let me know in a comment why there is a sudden interest in this post. JH]

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 8” with Ralph Ellison.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have everything thought out before you began to write Invisible Man?

ELLISON: The symbols and their connections were known to me. I began it with a chart of the three-part division. It was a conceptual frame with most of the ideas and some incidents indicated. The three parts represent the narrator’s movement from, using Kenneth Burke’s terms, purpose to passion to perception. These three major sections are built up of smaller units of three which mark the course of the action and which depend for their development upon what I hoped was a consistent and developing motivation. However, you’ll note that the maximum insight on the hero’s part isn’t reached until the final section. After all, it’s a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality. Each section begins with a sheet of paper; each piece of paper is exchanged for another and contains a definition of his identity, or the social role he is to play as defined for him by others. But all say essentially the same thing: “Keep this nigger boy running.” Before he could have some voice in his own destiny, he had to discard these old identities and illusions; his enlightenment couldn’t come until then. Once he recognizes the hole of darkness into which these papers put him, he has to burn them. That’s the plan and the intention; whether I achieved this is something else.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 8” with Ralph Ellison.

INTERVIEWER: Can you give us an example of the use of folklore in your own novel?

ELLISON: There are certain themes, symbols, and images which are based on folk material. For example, there is the old saying among Negroes: If you’re black, stay back; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re white, you’re right. And there is the joke Negroes tell on themselves about their being so black they can’t be seen in the dark. In my book this sort of thing was merged with the meanings which blackness and light have long had in Western mythology: evil and goodness, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. In my novel the narrator’s development is one through blackness to light; that is, from ignorance to enlightenment, invisibility to visibility. He leaves the South and goes North; this, as you will notice in reading Negro folk tales, is always the road to freedom—the movement upward. You have the same thing again when he leaves his underground cave for the open.

It took me a long time to learn how to adapt such examples of myth into my work—also ritual. The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process. I learned a few things from Eliot, Joyce and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them. When I started writing, I knew that in both “The Waste Land” and Ulysses, ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way. In my first attempt at a novel, which I was unable to complete, I began by trying to manipulate the simple structural unities of beginning, middle, and end, but when I attempted to deal with the psychological strata—the images, symbols, and emotional configurations—of the experience at hand, I discovered that the unities were simply cool points of stability on which one could suspend the narrative line, and that beneath the surface of apparently rational human relationships there seethed a chaos before which I was helpless. People rationalize what they shun or are incapable of dealing with; these superstitions and their rationalizations become ritual as they govern behavior. The rituals become social forms, and it is one of the functions of the artist to recognize them and raise them to the level of art.

I don’t know whether I’m getting this over or not. Let’s put it this way: Take the “Battle Royal” passage in my novel, where the boys are blindfolded and forced to fight each other for the amusement of the white observers. This is a vital part of behavior pattern in the South, which both Negroes and whites thoughtlessly accept. It is a ritual in preservation of caste lines, a keeping of taboo to appease the gods and ward off bad luck. It is also the initiation ritual to which all greenhorns are subjected. This passage states what Negroes will see I did not have to invent; the patterns were already there in society so that all I had to do was present them in a broader context of meaning. In any society there are many rituals of situation which, for the most part, go unquestioned. They can be simple or elaborate, but they are the connective tissue between the work of art and the audience.

Of course, Ohio—with White Hat Management at the fore—comes in for the lion’s share of Oliver’s piece. As for the question of Cyber Charters, I can say from 10+ years of working with online classes in multiple districts that unless the student is working in a classroom with a knowledgeable educator (or receiving at-home instruction from a teacher), cyber education is shit.

So Larry Wilmore and The Nightly Show have moved on. While I’m sure that Bill Cosby is ecstatic, the rest of us are feeling a hole right now. I actually don’t know if I can switch to another show.

Seamus Kirst, writing in Larry Wilmore on The Nightly Show’s end: ‘I don’t mind going down trying’ for The Guardian, talked with Wilmore about his experience, but this one exchange leapt our for me:

His other proudest accomplishment, he said, was his unfailing commitment to “keeping it 100”.

“Many times when you do what I do, or work in journalism, in general, people try to not explicitly present their opinions on topics,” he said. “I think the term ‘fair reporting’ is overused when it comes to journalism. I think saying they want to report evenly is more accurate.”

Though Wilmore said he thought “even reporting” was an admirable approach, it was far from his goal: he wanted to be 100% honest, all of the time.

“To keep it 100, I couldn’t always be even,” he said. “I had to drop that pretense and if I thought a certain side was wrong, I had to call it that way. I couldn’t be concerned with what side that was.”

As an example, Wilmore said he has criticized Hillary Clinton almost as much as he has criticized Donald Trump.

“I’ve had people mad at me for doing that, but what can I do if I want to keep it 100?” he said. “Do they want me to act like I don’t think the things I’m saying? It wouldn’t be right.”

If I were a young journalism student today, I would make Keep It 100 my motto. That would make any journalists life tough, and doubly so for someone just starting out, but at the end of the day, at the end of the career, I think the regrets will be far fewer.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 8” with Ralph Ellison:

INTERVIEWER: But isn’t it going to be difficult for the Negro writer to escape provincialism when his literature is concerned with a minority?

ELLISON: All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel—and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days?—is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.

INTERVIEWER: But still, how is the Negro writer, in terms of what is expected of him by critics and readers, going to escape his particular need for social protest and reach the “universal” you speak of?

ELLISON: If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he’s lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms. Perhaps, though, this thing cuts both ways: the Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write—that’s what the antiprotest critics believe—but perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read. He doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on the deeper human level identification can become compelling when the situation is revealed artistically. The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary recreation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.

Too many books by Negro writers are addressed to a white audience. By doing this the authors run the risk of limiting themselves to the audience’s presumptions of what a Negro is or should be; the tendency is to become involved in polemics, to plead the Negro’s humanity. You know, many white people question that humanity, but I don’t think that Negroes can afford to indulge in such a false issue. For us, the question should be, what are the specific forms of that humanity, and what in our background is worth preserving or abandoning. The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought, and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group’s will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. These drawings may be crude, but they are nonetheless profound in that they represent the group’s attempt to humanize the world. It’s no accident that great literature, the product of individual artists, is erected upon this humble base. The hero of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take Picasso—

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Bread and butter. Chocolate and peanut butter. Drinking and college.

Anyone who thinks that making the drinking age 21 will keep 18- (and even some 17-year-olds) from drinking on campus is blind to a very simple reality. There’s a reason high school juniors and senior quietly shortlist party schools when they’re looking at colleges. After four, or more, years of grinding away at Advance Placement and Honors classes; of losing sleep over extra-curricular activities for the purpose of buffing up their resumes, students are wound tighter than a weasel on turnips.

They need to let go.

When I went back to college in 1980 the drinking age for low-test beer in Ohio was 18. I was 25 and recently discharged from Navy, so I didn’t care, but I had experienced higher drinking ages in Washington where I could get beer on, but not off, base.

That always struck me as fundamentally wrong. At 18 I was considered old enough to volunteer to fight and die for my country but I couldn’t get a fucking shot of Wild Turkey.

Our nation’s destructive experiment with prohibition didn’t end in 1933 with the 21st Amendment. Fluctuating thresholds—low-test beer vs. high-test beer, wine vs. liquor—don’t make a lot of sense, especially when we give 18-year-olds the vote and the military draft, but not alcohol (and of course our present debate over recreational marijuana).

The laws and the stress to excel has created a phenomenon that probably existed in the ’80s but not one I saw during that first Reagan administration: binge drinking. Not drinking to relax. Not drinking to get drunk. Not even drinking to get plastered. Drinking to blackout.

Caitlin Flanagan, reporting in in How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking for The Atlantic, wants to talk about the Good Parents vs. The Get-Real Parents. She writes:

At high-school gatherings that include parents—sports events, back-to-school nights, college fairs—you can overhear the adults gingerly sounding out one another. They speak in a kind of code, but this is what they want to know: Are you a Good Parent or a Get-Real Parent?

Good Parents think that alcohol is dangerous for young people and that riotous drunkenness and its various consequences have nothing to recommend them. These parents enforce the law and create a family culture that supports their beliefs.

Get-Real Parents think that high-school kids have been drinking since Jesus left Chicago, and that it’s folly to pretend the new generation won’t as well. The horror stories (awful accidents, alcohol poisoning, lawsuits) tend to involve parents who didn’t do it right—who neglected to provide some level of adult supervision, or who forgot to forbid anyone to get in a car after drinking.

Get-Real Parents understand that learning to drink takes a while and often starts with a baptism of fire. Better for Charlotte to barf her guts out on the new sectional than in the shadowy basement of a distant fraternity house. On the nights of big high-school events, Get-Real Parents pay for limos, party buses, Ubers—whatever it takes to ensure that their kids are safe. What is an Uber except a new kind of bike helmet?

In the beginning, everyone is a Good Parent. Bring up teen drinking among parents of elementary-school students and it will elicit the same shiver of horror as the word adolescence itself. But slowly people start defecting. At first, it’s easy to demonize the ones who chuckle fondly about their kids’ boozy misadventures. But by junior year, it feels as though everyone is telling these funny stories. The Good Parents comprise a smaller and smaller cohort, one that tends to stay quiet about its beliefs. Get-Real Parents can be bullies—they love to roll their eyes at the Good Parents, so it’s best not to expose yourself.

The top colleges reward intensity, and binge drinking is a perfected form of that quality.

People who succeed don’t accept half-measures. You either go big or you go home. In disgrace. That’s the message. Flanagan continues:

Professional-class parents and their children are tightly bound to each other in the relentless pursuit of admission to a fancy college. A kid on that track can’t really separate from her parents, as their close involvement in this shared goal is essential. Replicating the social class across a generation is a joint project. That’s why it’s so hard to break into the professional stratum of society: The few available spots are being handed down within families.

Dynasties, even nascent ones, count. Flanagan nails what she sees as the inevitable result:

What 80-hour-a-week executive doesn’t drop her handbag on the console table and head to the wine fridge the second she gets home? Her teenager can’t loosen the pressure valve that way—he has hours of work ahead. A bump of Ritalin is what he needs, not a mellowing half bottle of Shiraz. But come Saturday night? He’ll get his release.

In the United States we worship the manic. We put our Type A Personalities on pedestals, we pay them insane amounts of money, even make movies about them. We even forgive them when they come off the rails because we recognize that only a tiny minority can maintain that level of intensity day and after day after day.

For that tiny minority, with their extraordinary support system of coaches and personal assistants and platinum health care and legal teams, going of the rails is just a cost of doing business. For the rest of us, for our children, with only flimsy, if that, support systems, the costs are much, much higher.

We have spent billions creating a security infrastructure to keep us safe from a threat that pales in comparison to the existential danger to humanity: Global Warming/Climate Change. We are playing shuffleboard on the Titanic while the waters rush in.

Writing in Green Party candidate Jill Stein calls for climate state of emergency for The Guardian, Edward Helmore reports:

Dr Jill Stein called for a national state of emergency to be declared over the rapidly worsening effects of global warming, during a campaign swing through New York.

Promoting her party’s Green New Deal – an agenda designed to address the interconnected problems of climate change and the economy – Stein said the still uncontained Blue Cut fire in California and the record flooding in Louisiana were ample evidence of the worsening effects of climate change.

“We need to acknowledge the true state of emergency we are in,” Stein said. “The fires in California and floods in Louisiana are going to become day-by-day occurrences, and, within our lifetimes, there is going to be potentially catastrophic sea-level rise.

“We need to ensure that these disasters do not become a daily way of life for all Americans and people all over the world,” she said, “and this is why we need to declare a climate state of emergency so that we can respond in real time in the ways that we need to.”

In poll after poll, Stein added, the American people say they want substantial action on climate change that meets the severity of the crisis. She called for empowering Americans to instruct their elected officials—namely Congress—to act in their interests, not in the interests of lobbyists.

Emails and walls are distractions, serious distractions but distractions all the same, from a threat that is killing Americans with the relentless swell of a tsunami. Every day that our attention is pulled away pushes us closer to the edge of a global warming cliff.

Once we go over, humanity is done.