DCJSept2005

Volume 24

SEPTEMBER 2005

24. 8: VOYAGES TO NOWHERE 9.26.2005

As with so many other areas of contemporary social life, cruising has evolved into a niche industry . The experience one might have, or one might be inclined to have, aboard a cruise ship, can vary greatly. There are cruises for younger people who like to dance and party into the wee hours of the morning, cruises for senior citizens (perhaps the fattest part of the market, although such cruises are not marketed specifically for oldies). There are Disney cruises for kids, cruises for eco-travelers, jazz cruises, cruises for gays and lesbians (not together though), New Age spiritualists, even nudists. Cruising has gone the way of TV, the movies, popular music, and most other dimensions of life where the market and bean-counters hold the reigns of popular taste.

There was a time before cruising, when ships were used for transportation that actually went somewhere. It was also a time when people of different social classes sailed in the same ship. Typically they were segregated by social class, or economic status, and confined to their separate parts of the ship designated for their respective class of service. Remember Jack, from steerage class aboard the movie version of Titanic ? But at least in the film the differences sparked the possibility of some drama and adventure from the very contrasts of the ship's passengers. The social homogeneity of the niche cruiseship is a recipe for boredom.

This is perhaps why the cruise industry is afraid you might have a moment to figure that out. As much as it might seem to contradict the popular impression about cruising, these ships are probably the last place one should go for a little peace and quiet. Any ship creates plenty of ambient noise: the thrum of the engines, the hiss of the waves against the hull, the unencumbered wind whistling through the open decks. But the interior of a cruise ship is a cacophony of intrusive racket that either reflects or encourages the sort of frenetic activity that ‘cruisers' feel compelled to engage in to “get their money's worth,” and to convince themselves that they are indeed having “the time of their lives,” as the brochure promised. Just to make sure that nobody misses a chance at some activity in its micro-managed environment, almost constant public address announcements remind the cruiser that “the Bingo jackpot is up to $2,500,” that the “Cocktail of the Day” (usually with some stupid name like a “Fuzzy Navel” or “Bermuda Bombshell”) is being served in the Shangri-La Bar on Deck 9, that all T-shirts and sweatshirts are half-price today in the Boutique, the bridge tournament is about to begin in the game room, that we shouldn't miss tonight's Las Vegas-style Show in the Flotsam Forum, or meet with the coordinators for the passenger talent show.

The deck with the ship's casino is awash in the plinking, bonging, and bleeping sounds of the various swindle machines, and the clanking of chips being won, and mostly lost. A large cruise ship also has several bars and lounges, which, if they do not have “live” music, will have “dead” music that is piped in over the public address system between activity announcements. “Dead” music is also piped into hallways, public areas, elevators, game rooms, and restrooms. There is almost no escape from the droning elevator music or “proszacian” New Age monotony.

Added to this is, particularly on the newer generation of “megaships,” the visual assault of neon, garish lighting reflected in mirrors, complete with legions of intrusive waiters and waitresses roving every deck in search of customers and tips. In addition to the floorshows and movie theater, there are televisions in most of the bars, and also in each cabin where one can view other films, or video tapes of port lectures and excursions. There is even a channel for those who prefer to remain hermetically sealed off from the environment they are traveling in. It consists of a camera that is focused on the ship's bows and the horizon.

Contrary to the nostalgic image of passengers snoozing in lounge chairs, contemplating the horizon for hours at a time, and taking leisurely walks on the promenade (as opposed to power-walking and jogging in spandex workout gear), the contemporary cruise ship is a perverse form of conveyance that regards even a millisecond in which one might have a contemplative thought, or engage in unorganized activity, as a felony against the hospitality industry, or a signal of incipient mutiny.

In most cases cruising is not really “travel,” but a packaged experience that almost incidentally involves “destinations,” or ports of call. Increasingly, the industry that provides these “packages” has come to the conclusion that destinations can be made less and less important to their clientele. The ship itself, particularly the “megaship,” can itself become the “destination.” After all, cruising is a business, and if cruise lines can get their passengers to spend more of their money on board rather than in those shops in port, well then, all the happier are the stockholders. And so the cruise ship, being built to ever larger sizes, has become a fusion of those two most salient features of American economic and recreational life—the shopping mall and the theme park, wrapped in the garish taste and décor of Las Vegas.

For all the frenetic fun that supposedly happens aboard cruise ships one wonders if anything of existential significance happened to anyone aboard. It seems that a sea voyage should have some life-altering, even if not terribly significant, result. I wonder how many love affairs were born and died during the two weeks aboard. One cruise line regularly sends me its newsletter, which always contains an item about some happily-married couple that first met aboard one of their ships (often they were widowed or divorced at the time).

Has cruising become so cheapened by its over-use—some of those aboard had been on dozens of cruises, many times on the same itinerary—that there was nothing left for discovery, nothing new, or renewing? One of the famous cruise ship films was An Affair to Remember , but if it's your 43rd cruise, one might be lucky to remember the count, much less what happened, unless it was that time you got an upgrade to a cabin on a higher deck.

In the final analysis, unlike a voyage , a cruise comes to an end not, as a true journey does, with arrival at a new destination, but takes you back to where you started. It's a journey where you really haven't been anywhere and “getting there” isn't half the fun ; now it's designed to be all of the fun .

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24. 7: CORPORATE U 9.21.2005

After a sabbatical abroad a few years ago I was appalled when I returned to campus to find a huge billboard—the kind that has lights that can change the announcements and ads—looming over the freeway from the edge of campus. It was advertising a musical group coming to perform at the university's new indoor arena, called Cox Arena in behalf of its major corporate donor, Cox Communications. I dashed of an email to the President, congratulating him on the sign, and adding that it will prove useful when he opens a casino on campus (no reply).

The sign, which depressed many faculty members, and angered residential communities across the freeway forced to read that some washed up entertainer was coming to campus, or were urged to buy season tickets for SDSU's sports teams, was just what I needed to help me decide about the retirement I had been considering. Not a small part of that decision was a longer forming disillusionment with the university, its inexorable selling out to values—what I would call corporate values—of managerial mentality, “productivity,” and outright hucksterism with the coin of its already plummeting academic standards. I had had enough.

Sometimes I miss the classroom, especially the seminars, but I don't rue my decision to retire. Not when I can hear a report on public radio of how SDSU proudly offers, through its Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, a degree in Tribal Gaming Management. I am not making this up! Apparently this is made possible by a nice chunk of greasy money from the Indian casinos. (See, grandma isn't really squandering your tuition in those slot machines; it's coming right back to support your education.) This is the kind of stuff that used to be offered in those trade schools, but hey, ya gotta follow the money. (I wonder if they have a course in how to fill out those “Hi, My Name Is . . .” badges. Is there a course in how to spot card counters?) This process of the sleazing of universities started with the State Lottery, sold to parsimonious California taxpayers (other states have done the same) on the idea that rather than pay taxes we could let people gamble for their higher education. What the campuses ended up getting was chump change, while the people who know what these slimy enterprises are about skimmed the big bucks.

And over in the SDSU Division of Extended Studies Division are some certificates that can be earned in Casino Gambling . It offers a course in “Introduction to Indian Gaming – Past and Present.” Past and present? (The past ? Were the Sioux of old betting on which buffalo would make the next meadow muffin?) There's also a course in “Understanding the Profit Picture” of casinos. Great, does this include how to make sure the “house” always comes out ahead? You can take a course in “Casino Surveillance and Security.” I saw a commercial with a clip of a student saying how hard head had “studied” how to deal from a Black Jack deck. I guess the public's cards are coming off the bottom.

In fairness it must be said that our stingy legislators have contributed to this situation. Too terrified by the anti-tax crusaders they have forgotten that more than any other factor that has made California the fifth largest economy in the world is it's (erstwhile?) world class higher education system. Today it seems that campus presidents and administrators in pursuit of bucks to fill the revenue void are measured more by the bottom line as they hob-nob with car dealers and porta-potty millionaires in their stadium sky boxes, or on the golf courses.

So, why not ride the thing all the way to the bottom. I think that SDSU might be missing out on some real opportunities here. There are a several allied areas to casino gambling that also need university-level courses and degrees. Prostitution Management, for example, with required courses in the “Theory and Practice of Pimping,” “Rolling Drunks,” and “Brothel Design and Management.” Booze is another area. University administrators, who are not above a little whoring themselves, have long courted the beer distributors to support those expensive football and basketball programs. Small wonder that those Miller Lite signs festoon the indoor arena, while out of the other side of its mouth the University expresses its “concern” over the rise in binge drinking and frat house rapes on campus. The film department could have a real winner in “Porn Flick Production,” especially if those students over in Drama are willing to let it all hang out in their “Doing the ‘Money Shot'” course. And let us not ignore the prospects for porno website design over in the Computer Science department, or a good course in “Computer Hacking for Identity Theft.”

But let's not just blame the administrators. Showing some profiteering profs a little green has already been bringing about some faculty free enterprise. We're leaving out drugs, one of the potentially most lucrative areas for corporate sell-outs. Some Professors of Pharmacy have sold out to drug companies for research funds, consultancies, and, in Texas, seats on state boards overseeing drug protocols for patients in state hospitals. Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company offered UC Berkeley $25 million over five years to enter into a “research partnership.” In return, Novartis wanted to sift through the research of the department of plant and microbial biology at Berkeley's College of Natural Resources, and hold the licenses up to about one-third of the researchers' output. The corporate boys wouldn't ask if they didn't think they could pull of such deals.

Corporate fascism always lies not far beneath the surface of the norms of capitalism. These days, emboldened by the favoritism of the Bush administration and its de-regulationist posture, corporations are insinuating themselves into the few remaining institutions that have not been corrupted or bought off. I regularly get emails offering me a “Christian refinance” on my residence; the congressman representing my district is being investigated for taking bribes from defense contractors. There are already dozens of “fast-food” educational institutions that rent space in shopping centers offering quickie Ph.Ds in a few weeks (you can get years of academic credit for your “life experiencve”) .

So I can only wonder what passing motorists on the freeway thought that Prof. James Clapp was being thanked for, since there is no mention of his retirement from 33 years of teaching. Maybe they are just glad I'm gone. Since I am an “Emeritus Professor of City Planning” I could return to contribute to the university's new mission. I've been tinkering with a new course idea: “Whorehouses, Casinos and Strip Joints: Iniquitous Land Uses and the Sustainable City of Tomorrow.” I would have a lot field trips; the university likes it when you do things to boost enrollment.

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24. 6: THE BLANCOCRUXIANS 9.16.2005

Casey's Fields, Crawford, Texas American Military Cemetery, Belgium Mt. Soledad, San Diego, California

Crawford, TX — "The Camp Casey Memorial on Prairie Chapel Road was removed by thieves earlier today. Not a single item is left at the memorial site.”

I remember when my daughter's gold fish died. Laura was about eight years old at the time, and when we buried Annabelle (the fish) in the side yard Laura made a little wooden cross out of twigs to stand over the deceased pet's grave. I had set aside the thought I had at the time—really a question—of how my daughter knew that Annabelle was a Christian (they were close, but I don't think the matter of religion ever came up between them).

It was the same question that also arose in my mind when I used to see those long rows of white crosses at military cemeteries and other Elysian Fields, even ones that said “a soldier known only to God.” Apparently that meant only known to a Christian god. Sure, some cemeteries have markers with a Star of David; but I don't recall seeing any with a Muslim Crescent, or a (what?) “scarlet A” for atheists. So the default faith for the fallen in our society, whether warrior or goldfish, is apparently to be represented by the white cross.

I find that a bit presumptuous. But, of course, it is an extension of that more odious presumption that the white cross represents the faith of American society. I am well on record in these pages with my distaste for the feeble barrier between church and state that is besieged by Christian fundamentalists with a fervor only matched by zealots in other evangelical religions. I am ready to do battle with any mind that claims they can “know God” better than me, and I have contempt for anyone who claims along with their ignorance an equivalent moral or mystical superiority. Ahhh, that felt good, but it is tangential to But my theme de jour . Which is . . .

The Camp Casey desecration a few weeks ago, and now the theft of the white crosses erected by Cindy Sheehan (her son's military boots were stolen, too) leads me to believe that only some people—people of the correct, right, political views—get to use the cross to express a blend of faith and patriotism. (Never mind that the person who died on that cross expressed pacific and love-thy-neighbor and help-the-poor views that are the antithesis of the war mongers and KKK cross-burners who wrap the cross in the flag.)

One can only image the outrage if someone removed the huge white cross atop San Diego's Mt. Soledad in the middle of the night. Mind you, there are some of us who want it removed from what is public land . Courts have decreed for years that it must go, but a gutless City government has been complicit with the “Blancocruxians” in measures to keep it there. Meantime, a veterans group has installed a war memorial of sorts around the cross, attempting to fuse the cross and patriotism in a inviolable bond. Would they object to removing the cross and keeping the memorial? I don't think so. And so, after years of litigation the “Blancocruxians” have managed to get the matter on the ballot of a special election to fill the seat of the resigned mayor.

Like the flag, the cross has been appropriated by partisan politics, right-wing politics, shoved in the face of the people who are all but expected to be idolatrous of both, to be “good Americans” who presumably go to the right churches on Sunday and support the right politicians who support the right war, which is in part at least a war of the right religion.

A Buddhist acquaintance once questioned the logic Christianity by asking why any person would want to go about displaying a symbol (the cross or crucifix) that represented or showed their god being cruelly put to death. It seemed to him to fly in the face of the notion of a god being a superhuman being. The notion of my former theology professor's concept of Christ's “death-victory” was something I decided not to inflict upon him in response. But I wonder how those who repose, with appropriateness or irony, under those white crosses feel about all this white cross stuff. If there is indeed a place where that are , and where they can know (if the even care), what do they think of the hypocrisy of things like burning crosses, crosses used for blatant political advantage, crosses that are used to justify war and then mark the graves of dead soldiers, crosses for the fallen that are stolen under the cover of darkness.

I'd like to know what they think about it. I'd like to know what Christ thinks about it. Heck, I'd like to know what Annabelle Goldfish* thinks about it. [Any of them can reach me at urbmedia@mac.com]

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*Isn't Goldfish a Jewish name? I don't think I'll tell Laura though; it might upset her to learn that Annabelle really sleeps with the loaves.

24. 5: DA SUPREMES 9.13.2005

That great terror that just couldn't seem to energize the Democrats enough, couldn't cure John Kerry of his temporizing, or get the gays and lesbians to hold off a bit longer on those Red-State-galvanizing same-sex marriages -- that great fear of George Bush getting two Supreme Court appointments -- now that Judge Renquist has himself gone on to be judged , that moment is nigh.

The prospect of our dim-witted daddy's-boy president getting to influence poor judicial decision-making to compliment his executive disasters – how can we forgive, much less forget, that it was Da Supremes that crowned him president in the first place – over so many issues of great moment for so many years, is chilling. But through a prospect of such darkness there beams a faint ray of hope. At least I think I see one. But to appreciate how I see it, I should first explain how I see Da Supremes in the overall scheme of things.

Da Congress, the Legislative Branch, I regard principally as performing a normative function in government. They are the closest to the people, weighing and sifting the axiological winds of the electorate and fashioning laws to address their concerns, needs and wants (in addition to submitting budgets full of pork barrel projects to suck up to them and appease lobbyists and big campaign donors).

Da Prez, the head of the Executive Branch, I see as primarily hortatory in function, proposing agendas and seeking to influence policy. I also see the executive as the head of what is for all but in name a fourth branch of government, usually referred to as Da Bureaucracy, which has the dual purposes of carrying out public policy and providing an intelligence function (cf. DCJ No. 24.2), especially when Da Prez is personally lacking in intelligence.

Then there are Da Supremes, the nine judges who compose the highest court in the land, the last secular court of resort. Their function is make sure that the actions of the other branches square with Da Constitution, under which all three branches operate, and to adjudicate those cases that it wishes to review or re-try from lower courts. In my view I regard Da Supremes as exercising the role of reason in government. (And that's not easy to say when the face of Antonin Scalia comes before me). Da Supremes are all but untouchable. They are appointed for life, answer to nobody, and can't be removed by anybody for the decisions they make. They are free and unfettered to bring to government a quality that is precious for its great rarity— wisdom.

In my less cynical years I used to regard the Da Supremes as men (they were mostly men, then) of wisdom. They were usually older, gray-haired or bald, and their leaders had that central casting look of wisdom; Chief Justices like Earl Warren and Warren Burger (Warren being a good Chief Justice name) both looked like versions of Any Hardy's father. This was of course, a little naïve on my part and, as I got a little older (and grayer and hairless myself, I acquired a little wisdom myself. But think about it; this is what Da Supremes should be: our wise men (OK, make that wise people ). They live in their little temple of justice up on the hill, walk around in robes, have clerks to do their bidding, and sit above those who come before them. They are like gods. They should be able to concern themselves only with what is right and good for the people, not for some ideology or political interest, not for some personal religious or moral inclination. They should be independent and worthy of such lofty and momentous powers.

Not being gods, they have to be replaced from time to time and, alas, this is not how those who nominate justices to Da Supremes see their role. The courts has always been susceptible to the “packing” intents of presidents of either party who are less interested in independence of mind than in ideological conformity. So the justices are often less than Olympian as well, which explains how a mediocre mind like Clarence Thomas came to be an associate justice, and Antonin Scalia, a better mind, but basically a right-wing-religious-bigot -greaseball (I can say that, I'm a wop), come to have a judicial hand in steering our nation toward ignominy.

Presently there are two chairs to be filled on the Supreme Court. But to see that the process will be more about politics than what is best for the court and, ultimately, the people one needs only to follow a process in which the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are doing their obfuscatory best to keep the questioning getting anywhere close to the nominee's values, his judicial philosophy, or his feelings about the most important issues of our time. If there is any doubt that John Roberts is expected to be another of “their boys” on the court one need only watch this tug of ideological war. Already, the Bush administration has refused to make available great numbers of documents that would have provided the committee and us more in formation about a man who is about to be elevated to an Olympian height on the basis of his “impressive résumé” and altar boy smile. The Republicans want the country to buy a “pig in a poke.”

But the ray of hope lies in the fact that sometimes the pig grows into something quite different than what was expected. A young man as the leader of Da Supremes might just grow beyond the things he did to get the kind of recognition from the people who could put him there. He might just mature to see that the purpose of the court is to protect and expand the liberty of the people, not to carve liberty to fit some preconceived ideology, or worse, the moral strictures of some faith. He might acquire (the bald spot and a few gray hairs are already there) some wisdom .

It's just too bad that have to be left with our hopes.

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24. 4: ‘NAWLINS,' A Streetcar Named Deluge 9.10.2005

I have only visited New Orleans on time, back in the mid 1960s. I was studying urban planning and I wanted to see this fabled city, with its Vieux Carré of streets colonnaded with wrought iron filigree, Jackson Square and the trams. I wanted to hear the jazz and taste the tangy food. Later, I read up on some of its history and lore, and have always been drawn to films that were shot there. I don't care much for Mardi Gras, but it is part of the special character of the place, part of the stew of licentiousness, voodoo, blues and beignets, that give the place the sense of what someone once called “a banana republic that floated up the gulf and attached itself to the United States.”

Yet what immediately comes to mind when I hear someone say ‘Nawlins' are two personal incidents. Experience and locus go together, the space-time nexus. At my hotel one morning I went down for an early breakfast at the counter, manned (woman-ed?) by a gum-cracking waitress with the proverbial “Madge” like demeanor. I ordered a breakfast and asked to begin with a half grapefruit. “Madge” brought the coffee, the eggs and toast, but not the grapefruit. I asked her if she would still bring it, but she didn't reply. I ate, had more coffee and asked her one more time. She tore off the little order-form bill and, placing it upon the counter leaned over and drawl-whispered rather too-loudly, “Sir, grapefruits is ‘nigger' food.” I did not leave even a “niggardly” tip.

I was pissed off at “Madge” for putting that memory front and center on a day when I was going to explore a fables and fascinating city. I couldn't look at Negro (it would be anachronistic to use the proper African-American, which didn't come into use for several years) without seeing a grapefruit and Madge's condescending smirk. I was getting over it until the evening before we left when we were dining at a renowned restaurant that Patty had read about in Gourmet Magazine . We resolved not to concern ourselves with the cost of the meal; it would be out special treat of the trip. The meal was memorable, but for more than one reason. A finely-dressed young mixed couple (she was White) came in and sat at a nearby table just as we were settling out check. It was counting the tip out when our waiter, a young white man came by for no other purpose than to whisper, intentionally loudly, and with a indicating head motion, “sorry, but we can't do anything to prevent those kinda people from coming in here anymore.” We used his tip to have a chicory coffee and a beignets in Jackson Square.

Those two incidents returned to me as I watched the bedraggled, sick, bewildered, hungry, terrified, dispossessed, mostly African-Americans chaotically encamped on the Super Dome playing floor (or were those African-Africans on some dusty plain in Darfur?). Forty years later I wonder how much progress we have made in the most salient feature of the American experience: race. There, for all the world to see on CNN, was our failure, not our Oprah, Michael Jordan, and Denzel Washington, but the dirty little secret, visual proof for the statistics of infant mortality, people without health care, unemployment, and poverty. Proof of our residual racism. Proof, to the rest of the world why the “richest, most powerful nation in the world” has a capital city where the rate of infant mortality is twice as high as it is in Beijing, and has risen under the current president for the first time since 1958; where the “richest, most powerful nation in the world” ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio, and the rate of those without any health insurance approaches forty percent; where tax cuts for the rich and a foolish war in Iraq were more important than improvements to the levees and canals of New Orleans.

Behind the New Orleans of Mardi Gras revelry, of the old guys at Preservation Hall playing “The Saints Go Marching In,” of legends of Jean Lafitte and Old Hickory, of the pleasures of Storyville and the stories of voodoo, of the Vieux Carré and Jackson Square, of a town named after French city and streets named after French Royalty, that drawls or speaks a Cajun-accented patois, behind all of that character and charm and off the tourist paths is an uglier, more shameful ‘Nawlins' of neglect, insensitivity (did Speaker Dennis Hastert really suggest the place might be “bulldozed?!) and poverty. Hurricane Katrina flushed that all out into the open, onto the rooftops and into the inundated streets, and into the Super Dome. If there is any silver lining (did Barbara Bush really suggest that the people who were relocated to Huston were “better off”?!) it is that the country and the world has been exposed to this underlying reality, which cannot be laid entirely at the feet of the Bush administration, but that administration has worsened that reality and its “response” is itself indicative of the lack of concern for it persistence. It has produced a crisis that rubs the nose of our often-hubristic Americanism into the toxic sludge that represents the corruption at all levels of government, a crisis we made for ourselves.

Thanks to Katrina I now have nasty images of Nawlins that trump “Madge” and a racist waiter.

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24. 3: DINNER WITH PERSEPHONE, by Patricia Storace [BR]

Is it because my father always maintained that there were a few Greek corpuscles floating around in our Italian blood that I have long had a special affection for Greece? Dad's people came from near Naples ( newpolis ), a city whose Greek-rooted name owes to the people who knew a beautiful setting for a city when they saw one, and took advantage of it. A lot of family names in this region are Greek-influenced, and our might have been one of them.

Or, was it because in Fr, White's Classical Greek class in high school we translated big chunks of The Odyssey , making it my all-time favorite book, that I have a philhellenic ( filws + ellas ) streak in me? For three academic years we sailed with Odysseus and his fellow Ithicans through the waters of the Mediterranean, helped him blind Polyphemous, got stoned on lotus, and struggled against the wiles of the Sirens and Circe. It would make a Greek of any boy with a hunger for adventure and faraway shores.

But I am not Greek. Neither is Patricia Storace (neither was Lord Byron, for that matter). But her approach to Greece, one in which she seeks out and elucidates the presence and immediacy of Greek history and myth as they poke through and season everyday life, in thought, speech, ceremony and everyday deeds is precisely how I would wish to delve into this culture. On language, for example, she offers that “Greek is not a voluptuous language, or a lilting one, but stoney and earthy, a language full of mud, volcanic rock, and glittering precious stones.” She is referring to modern Greek, of course, but we could not say what Homer or Pericles sounded like when they spoke “classical” Greek; they way we spoke it in Greek class might have been unintelligible to them. But both versions cannot be heard without English cognates sticking out of them like pot shards out of an archeological dig. Acropolis ( akropwlis ) in the classic, or kafenio (what a Greek Starbucks would be), and thousands of word prefixes ond suffixes—peri-, epi-, philos- and –sophus—are the archeology of our speech. Storace employs both versions of the language to enrich her narrative.

What makes this a special book is that it is not just travelogue, but it is good story-telling of the experience of engaging another culture. Storace sifts history and anthropology in the experience of settling in (“I lived in Athens, at the intersection of a prostitute and a saint.”), or setting up a bank account, in which she receives a lesson in the male chauvinism of some Greek men (she gets propositioned a few other times, once by a man who will keep her in his house if she would like to be “kept,” another time by a drunken sailor who boasts of Olympian feats of coitus. Storace remains un-flatters and and dis-interested, but not un-interested in Greek men. She seems to enjoy relating on festive practice of transvestism in which the most popular manifestation she discovered was a “. . . room . . . crammed with whisky-sipping men, smoking relentlessly, in the Greek style, many in various stages of pregnancy.

That vignette merits relating because the author often finds that the Greece of the great heroes and heroines of antiquity contrast with the present day. Like other countries with long ago empires, or “golden ages,” Greece lives, like Egypt, off the bones of its ancestors. Like Egypt, the contemporary Greek is not likely a direct descendant of a pharaoh or a philosopher, of an Ahkenaten or an Alexander. There is a sense in her descriptions that the present age in Greece is somewhat like a son who has a very famous father whose achievements he will never exceed.

So what comes through in Dinner With Persephone is a Greece composed mostly of a folk culture that sits upon the ruins and less so the reputation of its classical antecedents. Aside from the Athens-Piraeus metropolis Greece is a country of villages and islands scattered around the Aegean and Mediterranean. Its principal faith is Eastern Orthodox sometimes mixed with folk elements like evil eyes and talismans, and its cuisine is principally simple, coarse, and flavored with the tastes of the Eastern Mediterranean, and the men seem to prefer dancing with one another. Greece has had little of its own hegemony and was ruled and dominated by the Ottoman Empire until the early part of this century and retains perennial border issues with neighboring Turkey and the Macedonians to the north.

But Storace sums it up better:

“Athens is a city that brims with people, but can often seem like no one lives in; it has a haunted quality. All the unseen worlds of the past, classical, medieval, Ottoman (of which there are few reminders left, except in the language, because the Greeks so hate the evidence), surround you, above and beneath. The underworld is always present, the world of the dead. And the jumble of houses--abandoned nineteenth-century mansions in odd corners, the tiny houses that were built at the turn of the century by villagers and look exactly like village houses, the withered boxes built for refugees from Asia Minor in the 1920s, now overshadowed by large apartment buildings on either side like grown-ups holding the hands of a child about to cross the street—gives Athens the feeling that everyone here is both himself and his own ghost.”

Storace is an astute reporter who seems always able to place herself in the circumstance of a story, and can even become a part of that story without corrupting it, but helping to bring out its narrative and the essences of its characters. It is travelogue as close to be “classical” as the form can achieve. It delivers on the Greek kalo taxidi to have a “good trip.” It's the next best thing to being there.

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24. 2: THE AMERICAN AD-HOC-RACY 9.4.2005

(Paraphrase) “You know, sometimes when people get freedom they do crazy things with it.” Donald Rumsfeld at press briefing after the looting and anarchy in the capture of Baghdad

“No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon . . . into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile.” Condolezza Rice in the 9-11 Commission Hearings

“I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,” George W. Bush to Diane Sawyer on hurricane Katrina

Before spending some thirty years teaching grad students about city planning and urbanism I was for several years I was a professional urban planner. Planning, I used to tell my students in the very first lecture in planning theory, is one way in which we might define ourselves as being “human.” This was not hubris about my field. What I meant was this: we humans are the only creatures in creation who have a sense of our future (and its limit). Second, we seem to be the only ones that have goals for our future. And third, we seem to be the only ones who try to make that future meet those goals.

Put another way, we humans are rationalists. We use our brains and minds to try to understand the world, life, human behavior. Call it being “scientific” if you will. We try to acquire knowledge about what we want to act upon to try to shape our future. If you know that action x causes result y, you can choose (or avoid) action x. Choice , what we call the normative side of planning, is also something that defines what makes us human. Choosing actions is how we try to shape our lives, our environment, our future, to our goals and desires. We engage in this sort of action when we are planning a picnic, our education, or our finances. When we act as a city, a society, planning is more complicated because there are multiple (and differing) values involved. But the process is essentially the same.

That is where politics intersects with planning. Politics helps to choose among those values. Since you can't plan without choosing, planning is inherently a “political” (small “p”) act. [Are you still with me here?] So you can see how planning and politics can fit together. Something like this.

The People want to be safe (for example) Politics, we value safety
What do we need to know to be safe (from floods, for example) Planning
Oh, water and weather and land interact this way under these circumstances Knowledge
Then we can posit and examine alternatives (Modeling, testing, experiment, etc.; we can consider dams, levees, land use regulations, etc.) Planning
Next we choosing an appropriate action (or set of actions) Politics again .
Implementing ( planning the design of the actions; politics , funding, legislation)
Evaluating ( Planning ; feedback, more knowledge )

All of this together is what we call planning. But here's the main point of bringing all this up – it is rational , it is not based on belief, or just outright supposition . It is based on knowledge about the world, not how we would wish it to be.

Take another look at those quotes above. They are not quotes about people who act rationally: Rice denies that the plane scenario pre-dated 9-11 (not true); Rumsfeld flat out admits that he had no idea how de-Saddamized Iraqis might behave (Gen.Shinseki told him he needed twice the number of troops to control it, so he canned Shinseki); and Bush is flat wrong and making his excuse (the scientific models and articles have been around for years, even television documentaries showing burst levees). These are things these “leaders” want us to believe , but they are not true. If they indeed did not know the truth of what they said that is non-rational behavior. If the knew those statements not to be true, then they are lying, to themselves and us. Actions taken on such untruths are what we call irrational behavior .

I allege that they know the truth, and so these people place PR (what you can make people believe is true ) over truth. Political power can run for a long time on what you can make people believe . Perception is often the result of deception. That woman from Colorado who believes her son fighting in Iraq is protecting her from being forced to “wear a burkha” is not acting on knowledge, but her misapprehension plays into the administration's politics.

Bush's denial of knowledge, his irrationality, are becoming legendary. Global warming, which might be implicated in the severity of hurricane Katrina—it is a very complicated interaction of variables—is “not yet proven” to Bush. “Intelligent Design,” a smokescreen for “creationism” that was cocked up in some Christian fundamentalist back room, deserves, according to Bush, to be “taught along with evolution” in the nation's classrooms. And moral beliefs trump applied knowledge in his opposition to stem cell research based on human embryos.

Since even the Second Law of Thermodynamics might not hold in another dimension, no knowledge is completely perfect. But to act without knowledge, or worse, in defiance of it, is ad-hoc-ery, and stupidity. This administration has bowdlerized scientific reports on the environment and on pharmaceuticals to satisfy the profit interests of corporations. When knowledge gets in the way of political interest, they “redact” it.

There is one other element of planning that is very much in our face these days. These people are in office mainly because they have convinced enough voters that they can keep America safe and secure. They have made enough believers out of enough voters to maintain their power. But, more and more, they are being seen for the fools they really are. Winging it with counterintuitive policies makes us less safe in the world. And now, in our own country, they demonstrate an almost criminally negligent lassitude and indecisiveness. Where was the rational, coordinated, contingency plan for an act of nature we knew to be dangerously imminent, whose course could be followed in the Doppler views on the Weather Channel?

This administration, already exposed for its incompetence and myopia in waging what it has mis-targeted as a “global war on terrorism” that is wrapped up in a wasteful and deadly preemptive strike against Iraq, now dithers and fusses while the citizens it is pledged to protect die in filth and for lack of sustenance. Unable, or unwilling to drop supplies to its stranded citizens, the government were inexplicably incapable of going where news helicopters seemed to go with relative ease. Meanwhile, a veritable imbecile placed as the head of FEMA told news reporters he was waiting for “official reports” from his people days after news footage indisputably showed the breadth and depth of the disaster. If America ever needed proof of the placement of belief and political calculus over solid information and scientific knowledge they now have it in the words and falsehoods of their “leaders.”

At this writing it was announced that Gideons International was sending 40,000 bibles to New Orleans where many thousands remain stranded and in peril (wouldn't just regular toilet paper do?). This is the sort of mentality that keeps fools in power. This is the sort of mentality that rather than employ intelligence and knowledge alleges that “ God is at work, and we are called by Him to Serve His Will. There was a purpose for Katrina, let us not fail to fulfill our duties.” [http://gadflyer.com/flytrap/] Don't they ever wonder why God give us brains? Is it only to be religious fatalists? Are all those people in New Orleans and Mississippi supposed to be dead?

It is true that “the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry”; but those who choose to only pray are naked and helpless before the Category 5 winds of change.

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24. 1: THE BIG DIS-EASY 9.2.2005

God and Allah seem to have shown their wrath on the same day. Was God smiting that notorious “Sodom” on the Bayou for its licentious “Storyville” or all that bare-breasted revelry at Mardi Gras? Maybe, we'll have to consult His local oracles Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who provided us with a divine motivation for 9-11. But what was Allah up to when He decided to let a panic happen on an incredibly crowded bridge during a religious observance in His honor? As if the poor people of Baghdad (mostly from the Sadr City slum) have not endured enough torment with being collaterals for the insurgents and the Americans, He had to let over 1,000 of them be crushed and drowned. At least God was an equal opportunity angry deity and flattened some expensive homes and cars, and some casinos. Is this what those Muslims get for praying five times a day, or those Red State Fundamentalist Christians get for putting the Ten Commandments in public buildings? The Lord and Allah work their wonders in mysterious ways.

Maybe I should leave divine interpretations to the credulous. But I am just as mystified at human behavior at such times. For all those who do not have their head in the sand, or are residing in a Red State, the new millennium is producing enough scientific evidence that such catastrophes that , if they are not caused by human behavior, they are at least abetted by it. You have to be the kind of useful idiot that believes the earth was created in six days to trust George Bush's denial of global warming and the exacerbating policies that flow from his administration. Three years ago Scientific American, which is not written in chapter and verse, published a prescient article predicting just what happened the past couple of days in New Orleans. A public television documentary aired a few months ago, in which several public officials from that city were on camera worrying over just such a level of hurricane, showed computer simulations of what happened the past couple of days.

It is rather cliché now to say “disasters bring out the best and the worst in people.” I can understand some of the looting, especially if it's of food, water, diapers, and other necessities of life (like DVD players and Rolex watches?) After all, it's not really “stealing” if insurance is going to have to pay for it anyway. A lot of guns were apparently stolen as well, so that real idiots could fire at local rescue workers and personnel would have top be diverted from rescue work to dealing with them. Wouldn't it be nice for the NRA to issue a public announcement asking these new gun owners to hold off a bit before going on a shooting rampage. (Not a chance)

And there must be one hell of a lot of guns down there, or perhaps some “insurgents” from Iraq have made their way over to Loosianna and Misssippi, because there are now large numbers of National Guardsmen from several states there or on the way. One wonders what good are they going to do when the news reported that a couple of sniper shots forced them to stop removing sick from a hospital for the day.

Chicken George wasn't much faster out of the blocks on this one that he was on 9-11. I guess he was finished reading The Hungry Caterpillar, but was still busy hiding from Cindy Sheehan. After his “fly by,” if you happened to see his Rose Garden pep talk, one could not help notice the same ouch-my-hemorrhoids-are-acting-up-face and the sort of “everything's gonna be just fine” blather he tells his screened audiences about Iraq. Meanwhile people are dying. Where are the air drops of food and water, like we did in Afghanistan, where are the SEAL teams to take out those snipers, where the use of communications systems that the military uses? Where is the technological ingenuity for the world's most bloated defense budget? Bush fiddles while the Gulf Coast drowns.

We can't pin this one on AQ or the Muslim extremists. But if they needed a lesson in how we behave when we are confronted with a situation that creates panic in an entire city we sure have given them a lesson in civic ineptitude. 9-11 happened fast and was so confined in its targets that our response was perhaps as good as it could be. But if an enemy is able to create a situation anything similar to what Katrina created—a biological or chemical, or a dirty bomb—we don't inspire much confidence in our ability to respond effectively, or sufficiently, and especially to control the sort of anarchy that results if that control is not brought to bear efficaciously. They will certainly know what it takes to get Americans robbing and shooting one another.

Homeland Security is a joke. Nobody seemed to be in charge, or wanted to assume leadership. If it weren't so tragic it would have seemed like a re-run of the Keystone Cops. This was perhaps to be expected after Bush first appointed a Texas buddy as head of FEMA, then a estate planning lawyer, neither with any disaster experience, then took it out of a cabinet-level position and folded it into Homeland Security(?). During the same time Mr. Bush was raiding the funds that were earmarked for improvement of the levees in New Orleans. Just wait for the Scott McClellan spin ‘n grin on that one.

All in all, Katrina not only is a national tragedy that might have been a lot less tragic but for the failure of government at several levels, but Bush's behavior and the ineptitude of his administration have made it an international embarrassment to add to the international opprobrium it has earned America for its bungled war in Iraq. The USA, the country that is always touting itself as the “richest, most powerful country in the world,” looks like a clumsy, racist, tragic-comic bunch of fools in front of the whole world. Now, other countries are beginning to offer us aid, noteworthy among them, Venezuela, whose president Pat Robertson has placed a Christian fatwa upon, and who this administration tried to unseat. President Chavez is offering us some free oil, and Fidel Castro is offering doctors and medical supplies!

Speaking if aid. Where does Bush get off preying on the good will of most Americans to cough up charity (“The ‘private sector' must do its part . . .”) when he has squandered tens of billions, much of it into the accounts of Halliburton and the other big Republican donors feeding off the Iraq war, of the taxes we have paid? This jerk has run this country (which he inherited from Bill Clinton with a $296 billion surplus ) so far into the red our great-grandchildren will be paying it off, and it is us, not his corporate cronies who are apparently not “the private sector.” Anyway, isn't it Bush's policies that have encouraged the rest of us to go out and buy our SUVs, RV's, trucks and muscle cars? At $4 or $5 bucks a gallon we're going to need some assistance in filling our tanks. Still, Americans will come through for their fellow citizens; unfortunately, they will be helping to bail out the Bush administration's ineptitude and insensitivity.

The only thing that smells worse than a corpse floating in the filthy streets of America's New Atlantis is the administration in Washington, D.C.

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