VOLUME 35

SEPTEMBER 2006

35. 8: ON BACCALA STREET 9.29.2006

There is a street near where I lived in Hong Kong a few years ago that I stumbled onto one day. I called it “Baccala Street” (Italian for salted, dried codfish) because it was almost exclusively shops, stalls and small warehouses that sold dried fish and other dried foods. The whole area around Baccala Street was one of desiccation. There were all sorts of dried foods, many sorts of vegetables, and animals, most of which I couldn't identify, but among those that I could were dried beetles, shark fins and something that looked either like a sea cucumber (or where someone didn't pick up after their dog). A proprietor told me the beetles were good to eat if you broke a bone (have a cicada, they're high in calcium). Even more curious were the lizards that were gutted and “crucified” on sticks, complete with heads, legs and tails. There were huge piles of them, all staring out at me, mouths agape. These are streets where the moisture is sucked out of most everything—roots, herbs, tubers, insects, flowers, twigs, giant mushrooms, you name it, they're dried it. Just looking at this stuff is to risk dehydration.

There still must be many Chinese homes without refrigeration, which is the likely reason for drying out food, because the area also has large warehouses of this stuff, and Chinese trucks, the sort with cloth sides painted with Chinese characters, are being unloaded in the streets every day. There is an almost constant clattering of little push carts in the narrow lanes, maneuvered like racers by bare-torsoed, tautly-muscled youths in shorts and cheap knock-off running shoes. They are tough-looking, tattooed guys, often with spikey or bleached hair, and with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. There are also a few women doing this work, some even tougher-looking than the men. They are stout and sturdy, ethnically swarthy women who look at me as they push their carts past me as though they would shove a majong tile up my nose if I got in their way.

I love listening to the constant patter of Cantonese these workers shout to one another. I can't understand more than a couple of words, but I know it must be the same taunting and ball-breaking that I remember while working on construction sites back in New York, and it is probably characteristic of people who do hard, sweaty work everywhere.

There is another aspect of Baccala Street that appeals to me. It is a reminder of an economic concept that I used to discuss in my classes in urban planning and urban theory. For many years I used to enjoy explaining and illustrating what are called by urban economists agglomeration economies. A more colloquial name for these economies might be “districts,” but that term doesn't quite tell their story. Agglomeration economies are those parts ofn cities where land uses that compete with one another juxtapose themselves because by doing so they collectively enjoy an economic advantage over similar land uses that do not join together. Sometimes called the “Macy/Gimbel's effect” for the competing New York department stores that were located next to one another, the effect is to create in economic geography terms “gravity.” This is gravity, in a metaphorical sense, is the extra added attraction that multiple similar land uses create. More customers are attracted to an area where there are several car dealers, art galleries, theaters, outlet stores, even “adult” oriented land uses. Of the latter, I wrote in a French journal several years ago, that what I called “X-rated” land uses in American cities tend to locate with proximity to one another because they profit (literally) from the attractiveness they create for the same customer. [1] Thus someone who goes to adult district of a city to buy a book or magazine from an adult bookstore, is also likely to patronize the adult movie theater nearby and maybe, upon leaving that establishment, purchases the services of a massage parlor or a lady of the night. Everybody gets a piece of the economic action, so to speak.

Such districts are nothing new to cities. They probably extend to the very beginnings of urbanization, when people realized that some degree of order needed to be applied to the organization of urban land (hence the profession of urban planning). Certainly planners learned that some land uses did not get along well with one another (the residential area and the abbatoir, for example) and others tended to cluster together (the residential and the school). Later, with the emergence of guilds, different parts of cities specialized in the occupations of the people who both lived and worked in different districts. Indeed, such districts were often populated mostly by people of a specific ethnicity, and/or religion as well. Though the guilds are long gone, the residue if their past can still be glimpsed in the names of the areas, or streets called the Street of the Tinsmiths, etc., or in the religious buildings that were built by the guilds. These “social” agglomeration economies extended well beyond simple occupational association into almost every aspect of urban life. The concept was picked up and imitated by Chinese communists in the form of the dan wei, or work place, which combined the workers job with housing, social facilities, schools, and clinics, all contained within an urban geographical context.

In many cities around the world—before Wal Mart plants their ugly boxes everywhere—the “department store,” that emporium of everything you need in one building (and at discount prices), exists in the form of districts, souks and bazaars. Here one can still find areas where manufacturer/vendors still exist, side by side, in usually friendly competition. These areas are usually a microcosm of the larger city. But gradually, this form of urbanism is giving way to outsourcing, modern merchandising, the internet, and, of course Wal Mart. That's why it is such a pleasurable experience for an urbanist to wander through Baccala Street, a rich and varied agglomeration economy of the senses.

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[1] "'X' Marks the Spot: The Problem of the Erogenous Zone of the American City," Revue Francaise d'Etudes Americaines, Vol. 13, No. 36, April 1988, Pp. 225-34

36. 7: THIS IS GONNA HURT A LITTLE 9.24.2006

Inquisitor's Chair, Spanish Inquisition

Someone left a bumper sticker on my care the other day. They must know my politics. The sticker says, “Proud of My Country, Ashamed of My President.” Close, but not quite there. First of all, I don't use bumper stickers; I like my car without those long, ugly key scratches down the sides and the kick dents in the fenders. And I remember well the UCLA study back in the Vietnam days when a prof sent half his students out with antiwar bumper stickers on their cars and the others as a control group without stickers. Guess which group got all the traffic citations. Second, I'm not as proud of my country as I would like to be. I admit its president goniffed his office, but the country that impeached a president for quasi-adultery re-elected a lying s.o.b. who has shamed us before the entire world. As far as I'm concerned he's not my president. And now this president wants to become the Torquemada of the 21 st Century. Sorry, the bumper sticker just doesn't quite do it for me.

America is probably rather new to the torture game. Not sufficiently horrified by the Abu Ghraib photos it has lapsed into debating not the morality or propriety of it, but its definition. The political answer is easy: If the people want more guard dogs to chew off Iraqi genitals then that's what the people should have. That's politics. [1]

The Public relations answer is that “torture” is what the enemy does to our people, and “interrogation techniques” are what we use on them. Now that we have an administration in Washington that uses the definition of things as what their PR people can get voters to believe they are (e.g. the Clean Skies Initiative), they just keep insisting that this is a “war on terror” and using any method of interrogation is justified to “keep American safe” and our women from not having to wear burkhas . Oh, I forgot, you also have to keep insisting that this is a new and “different kind of war,” and all those old rules just don't apply any longer.

The latest has been the Lawyers' (many of them members of Congress) answer. A lawyer acquaintance of mine (not a member of Congress) told me recently that I was overreacting to the torture thing. “What's a little slapping on the belly? You can't go calling that torture,” he admonished me. [2] Easy for him to say. By that ridiculous logic there also wouldn't be much reason for the slappee to confess to anything with just a little belly slapping. What the lawyer doesn't comprehend is that you have to slap the detainee on the belly for a few days, maybe weeks, morning, noon and night, you know, just little slaps, and, voila, he's ready to give up his whole family as well as his country and comrades. Let me slap his belly for as long as it takes and I'll get this lawyer to confess he sodomized Judge Judy at home plate in front of capacity crowd at Yankee Stadium. [3]

But that wasn't my main point, which is that lawyers just love to parse things out to where they find the “line.” That's what Bush is trying to do (yes, I know he's not a lawyer); he wants, he says, a clearer definition of cruel and unusual punishment, of the section of the Geneva Conventions that he claims is unclear. He doesn't get it either. What's a few drops of water falling on your head, George? “A shower?” Right. Now what's a few drops of water on your head for a week, George? “A, ah, long shower?” See what I mean? George doesn't get that you wouldn't want to be in a shower that long with Angelina Jolie. [4] (But George is a very stupid guy, so I'm not sending this to him.)

Then there is the matter of what one is trying to achieve with torture. What torture generally proves that: a) you can cause somebody to die rather cruelly without saying anything, in which case you have wasted some good time and torture instruments for nothing; b) you show them the thumb screw and they'll tell you anything you want to hear (Heck, they got Galileo to say the sun revolved around the earth). So you get a lot of useless bullshit to waste you time on; c) some people really get their jollies brutalizing other people. All that creaming is music to their ears. Yes, you can get some useful information, like where you can find more people to torture. Of course the image put in everyone's mind is that the person being tortured has immediate information on when and where a bomb has been placed. Even were that information available, do you believe that the idiots that botched the chance to apprehend the 911 perpetrators would know what to do with it? Condi would call it “historical background.”

Real torturers know that its not so much what you do, but how, and how long you do it. Mind you, these brutal bastards can outdo Abu Ghraib. Read a real history of the Roman Empire, the Inquisition, American Indians, hell, anywhere and anytime , and you'll find torture. Think of the worst thing that you would not want to have happen to you—drowning, having all your bones broken, being eaten by rats, being immersed in a tank of human waste, being roasted on a rotisserie (getting sick yet?), OK, being eaten alive, being sexually humiliated, being forced to listen to an endless loop of the speeches of George Bush—had enough? Well, make it worse, imagine watching it being done to someone you love. Well, it's all been done, it's being done. Auschwitz, SR21, Abu Ghraib, Unit 731, and in countless dark, nameless places, places where Bush has detainees “renditioned” off to so the blood won't splash on him, because the light is too strong on Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Sure, we can all think of a few people who deserve what even the worst tortures we can inflict. But the fact is, that these people usually die in the beds at a ripe old age; it's the innocent people that usually get the torture. Like Mr. Arar, the Canadian engineer that was swept up in the American torture net and sent off to Syria for a little rendition and rough stuff. An investigation buy the Canadians finds him completely innocent, but his life was made a mess, his career ruined, name smeared, and what happened to him in Syria yet to be disclosed. Alberto Gonzales, that champion of justice, blew it all off with “it was all done within our laws.” Like I said, lawyers.

I just don't get it. How come we are trying to keep from being conquered by people who are religious fundamentalists that believe religious people should run the state, that treat women as second class citizens who have no rights over their own bodies, who have schools that do not teach what science has learned if it does not agree with their scared texts, who believe there is one true religion, who detain people without charging them and deny them due process of law, who spy on their own people and abridge their rights to privacy, and who feel it is OK to torture anyone who threatens their society? Let ‘em in, they'll feel right at home. That's the genius of those Islamic religious extremists—with surprisingly little effort they are terrorizing us into become mirror images of them.

As to defining torture, well you can get rather torturous with how much, what kind, how long, etc. Maybe, it is, what one hears a lot of by way of definition these days, “what it is.” Believe me, you'll know it when you feel it.

Translation of “regulations” at SR21 torture facility Phnom Penh, Cambodia

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[1] Three Republican senators that originally opposed Bush's desire to skirt the Geneva Conventions went up to the White House this week and emerges with what might be the most (excuse me) tortured compromise that essentially makes Bush & Co, immune from prosecution, and in contravening out own Constitution withdraws habeas corpus rights from detainees. One of the senators was John McCain, who had his integrity gland removed when he was being tortured as POW in Vietnam.

[2] I confess that I had not heard of the belly-slapping torture technique until this exchange. So I administered it on my own belly for a while and, damn it, now my belly seems larger!

[3] That's not true, of course; but torture has little to do with truth. (Anyway, it was Wrigley Field.)

[4] Hello, Jim. This is Brad. I agree with everything else you are saying; brilliant, if you ask me. But I don't think you should knock the long shower with Angelina thing until you've actually tried it.

35. 5: THE ABYSSINIAN, by Jean-Christophe Rufin (1997) 9.22.2006

Darfur, Somalia. How many of us can explain to anyone, mush less ourselves, what all the mayhem and human carnage is about? You can't even tell who the players are with a program. Worse yet, how many of us even give enough of a damn to find out? Somehow this area that includes other exotic names that call to mind black people killing black people, [1] names like Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan, that comprise the Horn of Africa that juts into the Indian Ocean, seems to jut onto our evening news screens with a terrible regularity.

Most of this novel, by French physician and writer Jean-Christophe Rufin, takes place in Cairo, a city marvelously recreated in the age of Louis XIV by his deft and imaginative pen. He writes: “A good walker could in those days make a tour of Cairo in three hours. It was still a small city, one that travelers universally found ugly, worn, and charmless. From afar, the fretwork of its slender minarets and tall, tufted palms lent it a certain character. But as one entered its narrow streets, the view was blocked by ranks of two-story houses, undecorated except for the mashrabiyya , or cedar lattices, jutting dangerously above the passerby.” It takes three hours to go just about anywhere in present-day Cairo, and the mashrabiyyas are would only admit the polluted air its clogged traffic generates.

For the French in the late 17 th century, who retain their embassy there at the sufferance of the city's Moslem overlords, this is the age in which their most daring explorers were often missionaries, and where the pursuit of commerce and converts were not easily distinguishable. But it is also regarded as The Age of Reason, where European philosophy was finally beginning to emerge from the long period of Medieval scholasticism's

Inability to reconcile faith and rational human thought.

Enter Rufin's hero, Jean-Baptiste Poncet. He's somewhat of a product of his age, not a lettered doctor, but an apothecary/physician, sort of between the ages of alchemy and chemistry. He collects, grows and studies the curative properties of all manner of plants, prepares, with the assistance of his friend, le Maitre Juremi, poultices, salves, and potions, by which he relieves and cures a variety ailments not yet named, or familiar to us only buy some of their symptoms, or their early names like catarrh and consumption. Poncet does not appear to have the religiosity of his contemporaries, as befits, perhaps, a man of “science”. His friend and fencing instructor, Juremi, is however, a Heugenot, and hence a man “on the run” as it were, in French society at least.

And so, Rufin's historically rich novel is enlivened by the rather picaresque tendencies of these central characters when they are persuaded to bring an embassy to Abyssinia, whose king is relatively unknown to the French other than that he has a distaste for Jesuits, who earlier attempted to convert him, and who happens to suffer from a chronic and painful skin disorder. In those days it took a brave man to venture into those regions of Africa, but the commercial prospects, along with the political and religious, were a heady stew for the French, ad Poncet is enlisted to cure the king and ingratiate the French to him.

Part of what motivates Poncet is that the daughter of the French consul to Cairo, Monsieur de Maillet, has a ravishingly beautiful daughter. If Poncet can raise his social standing with a successful mission to Abyssinia, well . . .

Enough of plot; Rufin does a far better job of telling his own story, and I risk making it sound like so much of the pulp thriller fiction that temporarily occupies the space between out forests and landfills.

It is, in some ways, a heroic adventure of the sort that could be set in any period, but The Abyssinian is so densely rich in atmospherics, so clever and convincing in the drawing of its characters, that it does for this reader, precisely what I am looking for in a reading “experience”— it takes me there. I have never been to the lands that used to be Abyssinia, the closest being up (down?) the Nile to near the Egyptian-Sudanese border alongside Lake Nasser. Today it is just the eastern Sahara, where sandblasting winds always seem to be blowing against the gaunt and frightened faces of refugees of one hapless people or another caught in the vortex where religions and post-colonial warlords contend for what seems to be worthless territory. [2]

Abyssinia, whatever else it has been called, has long been a treacherous place for outsiders; Burton received a Somali spear through his cheek, back in his day, American soldiers were dragged through Mogadishu streets in our time. Rufin takes us back to there to another time, just as risky as today, but we get out of there with no more than the prospect of a paper cut.

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[1] Not to shortchange Rwanda, whose national anthem is “Tut-Tut-Tutsi, Goodbye.” It should also be noted that the murder has not always been black on black. The Italian Fascists, in WWII, in their revived imperialistic aims, did some nasty things to the locals. I recommend reading A Café on the Nile , by Bartle Bull, for some interesting background on that debacle.

[2] I take that back. Coffee, which takes its name from Kaffa, Ethiopia, was discovered here, by goatherders, in AD 1000. At the time the Kaffa was ruled by a King Starbukia. (Just kidding about the king)

35. 5: ROADWEILERS 9.18.2006

Back in the Pleistocene, when I was a kid, a favored form of leisure was “the Sunday Drive.” The whole family would pile into the (only) family car and head out of town for a ride through the (not very faraway) countryside. We might stop for a lunch somewhere, but mostly it was the slow drive through the local scenery that was the objective. Very often, car advertisements in those years (the later 1940s and early 50s) would show a family, often dressed in their “church-goin'” clothes, out for the Sunday Drive. Pretty lame, huh? Pretty tame, too.

I often think of those days when I watch today's car commercials on television. Cars tear through (almost always totally vacant) city streets and buildings are (computer graphically) blown away, roads literally roll up as muscular sedans roars into the countryside, leaves flying, and all sorts of speed enhancements tell you that you and your car are masters of your domain; city and country are merely tracks for you to give reign to all that horsepower. Trucks, of course, are portrayed in ways to show their manly durability and power; SUVs and Hummers roar over unpaved mountains, splash through creeks and up mountainsides, and smash through landscapes of rocks and boulders, their 4-wheel drives undaunted by anything that Nature puts in its path. They all have husky, manly names.

Like so much of merchandize today, the niche is the thing. That family sedan has given way to the multi-car family, a truck for NASCAR dad, an SUV for soccer mom, a muscle car for Junior or a VW neo-Beetle with the little flower holder for Sis. “You are what you drive” as they say in LA. And you're nobody if you don't have “a ride.” [1] But even if you do, nobody goes for a family Sunday Drive. In a society in which the “niche” rules marketing, it is also a reflection that the family is fragmented into its niches. They don't eat together, recreate together, why should they ride together.

My family also used to pile into the car and go to the Drive-In for a double feature. We watched the same movies, parents and children. Usually it was an Abbot and Costello, or a dean Martin and Jerry Lewis flick, tame stuff, or maybe a formula Western or a Disney animated fairy-tale. There were genre then, but not niches; everybody watched the same stuff, from the same car. Later, when kids got their own cars the movies didn't matter, and the drive-in became “the passion pit.” But all of it, the family sedan, the movies, the drive-ins are all gone now. Today, in a narcissistic society, your car is your identity more than anything else

The day I got my driver's license and my father let me take the family car for a drive I felt like a man must feel when he is released from prison. The whole city and the countryside were available to me at my whim (and at $.29/gallon). I eventually got a used 1952 Ford and I was, in neighborhood terms, a “made guy”; girls treated you differently when you had a car. You thought it was you, but it was probably the car. But I'm drifting off onto the shoulder of the road of reverie.

I confess to having done a little racing in the streets and at times taken some chances that, even in distant memory, give me a chill. But that was because I was hanging out with guys for whom souped-up cars were a passion. 99% of the time I was law-abiding and came to a full stop at stop signs and didn't run red lights. Most of the time we cruised around showing off our cars and, if we attracted them, the girls riding along. Favored destinations were a drive-in (like Mel's Diner) in American Grafitti and, of course, the drive-in movie.

I used to like having a car, and liked driving. Not any longer. Without exaggeration, I was boxed in on three sides the other day by three SUVs and all three drivers were on cell phones . [2] I couldn't make this up. Nor would I repeat what I called them because one of them, a young woman in that Cadillac version of an SUV nearly rammed me into one of the others. She glared down (I mean DOWN) at me from her Escalade SUV like somebody with an attack dog they could unleash at you at will. I said something to her and she reflexively gave me one of the fingers she was probably racing to take to a nail salon.

A few minutes later I was reflecting on the incident at the café I frequent, co-incidentally an excellent vantage to observe the uncivil driving habits of drivers passing through its intersection. There's a lot of swearing, gesticulation and horn blowing when people don't make right turns on red fast enough. I reflected that I just returned from Hong Kong where I almost exclusively use public transit. People get jostled, their toes stepped on and such, but they would never do or say, or gesticulate on a bus, tram, or subway the way we do in the relatively safe confines of our vehicles. I think that there ‘s a master's thesis for some student to study the difference that being up close and personal makes in civility. [3]

Driving today has become scarcely controlled aggression. What should we expect when we sell radar detectors to allow us to exceed the speed limit, and people became outraged in San Diego when the city installed cameras to catch people who run red lights. Is there any better way of saying that they don't care if you happen to be crossing at the time?

Yes, there is. Hey, and while you're tearing through streets and roads and perilous speeds you can also be not only checking your text messages on your cell phone or chatting up a friend, but also be consulting the screen of your new on-board GPS system, which has a display to get you right to the front door of that nail salon.

I would be remiss in not adding to my list of complaints about contemporary American driving customs and mores if I did not vent my feelings about the seismic effects of those thunder speakers that have been installed mainly in trucks and various vehicles that seem to be the favorites of hip hop youth and drug dealers. These would not be quite as offensive if they had not emerged in (maybe because of) the age of rap music. Now I might not be sounding like the liberal cultural relativist, but rap is to music what tagging was to urban adornment. This cannot be regarded as racist since there is every likelihood that the booming truck that pulls up beside me emitting decibels that only the people who make hearing aid batteries could love, is being driven by a brain dead suburban white kid who is destined to spend from middle-age on saying “huh?”

It's a lethal permutation: monster vehicles, cell phones, and selfish, stupid, arrogant, “Roadweilers.” Oh, for one of those quiet Sunday drives with my brother and mom and dad.

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[1] “Pimp my ride” is an apparently cool things to say, but I don't know—or care—what it means; it sounds plain stupid.

[2] California, which accounts 1100 vehicular accidents last year to people on cell phones while driving, will have a “hands free” law in force by 1908. Two concerns, it's still 1906; and what will Californians be doing with their free hands.

[3] There recently was an incident that, by its exceptionality, proves this rule. A man called “bus uncle” made his fame on YouTube when a passenger with a camera-cell phone recorded his upbraiding a young man speaking “too loudly” on a cell phone. Generally, people just put up with annoying cell phone users.

35. 4: ASK THE ID, PART DEUX 9.14.2006

Brrrrrring-brrrrring.

ID: C'est moi. Et toi?

DCJ: Hello, is this the ID? This is Ba Feng Gu of Dragon City Journal calling again. Remember our interview of a couple of weeks ago?

ID: No, sorry, I don't. What was it about?

DCJ: You know, the things you design. You design everything, right?

[Hey, Jim, does this guy sound different to you; you know, the French, and a little . . . a . . . lispy, too?]

ID: Well, I'm thinking of specializing more these days. There's so many different styles.

DCJ: Really? You design in different styles ?

ID: Of course, silly. I can do them all, but I'm trying to specialize in sort of a postmodern style. I'm really weary of that New Age look that so many clients seem to want. Boooooring! I think we need to evolve from that, to keep thinks looking ah . . . a fresh.

DCJ: Evolve, of course. Can you give us an example of what you mean? Like the way Darwin's finches evolved? Have you been working on the different beaks for different functions?

ID: Never worked with bird beaks before, but maybe I'll give it a try someday. No, I'm trying to evolve a style that uses a lot of indirect light.

DCJ: Why sure, like the way Einstein discovered how light bends and its speed as a constant in the universe. That was brilliant.

ID: Einstein? Oh, you must mean Sara Einstein of Einstein and Faub. She's a competitor— quelle Bitch! No, these days I'm pushing a lot of wall sconces, especially in dining rooms where you can effect that very intimate dining feeling.

DCJ: But what about global warming, aren't you going to do something about that? The fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance.

ID: I don't know about global, but I very much like to have those warming racks for towels in the bathrooms I design. Oh, and while we're in the poopatorium—don'tcha just love that?—I have to tell you that bidets are back, they're going to be all the rage. Remember, you heard it here first.

DCJ: I'm writing it down (I just don't know why). Look, I feel that we've drifted off a little bit here. We were going to open today's interview with the question “why flatulence.”

ID: Well why not, sweetie. It can really liven up a party. I used it as a charades theme once, and it was hilarious. You know, with titles like Gone With the Wind and The Far Tortugas —clever elision, huh? I've even designed whoopee cushions into some of those period Louis XVI chairs. People are just too ashamed of bodily functions, don'tcha think?

DCJ: Well, there's a time and a place for everything.

ID: Ain't it the truth. Like I designed an entire sound system for my own condo so that you can choose your favorite Barbra Streisand or Michael Feinsten records from any room. I like to do things in different rooms, if you know what I mean. Hint, hint.

DCJ: No heavy metal music?

ID: Oh you naughty, naughty boy, you. Now you want to know what secrets I have for bedroom design, don'tcha? You'll be surprised to know that I once designed a bedroom entirely in a dragon motif. Yes, I did. It was for this cute little Chinese guy who said he was born in the year of the dragon. He loved heavy meal music; it really brought out the dragon in him, if you know what I mean.

DCJ: We're beginning to. Look here, just so this interview isn't a complete waste, we're wondering if you had any design modifications in mind for your creation that might result in something that really improves the human condition.

ID: Can you give me a little hint?

DCJ: Like world peace. Why don't you design some world peace.

ID: Hmmmmm. A world piece. Tres Interesting. You mean like something that would sort of be big and round, in nice blues and greens, something to go on a coffee table, or maybe as an accent piece in a hallway?

DCJ: No, you twit! Like p-e-a-c-e; love, harmony, no violence!

ID: Ohhhh, that! Why sure. I think we need to design a big parade. We can all get into drag—and don't come as Judy Garland, she's my specialty—and we can sing show tunes and shake our booties . . .

DCJ: For a reputedly “Intelligent Designer” you aren't sounding very intelligent today.

ID: Moi, the Intelligent Designer. Silly! I'm pretty good at Trivial Pursuit, especially on show tunes, but I'm no genius. I only do interiors, Silly! Call me when your ready to change your color scheme.

DCJ: We like red and yellow. But now we're not so sure about our dragon motif.

ID: Toodles.

[Jim, Sorry. He was right below “Intelligent Designer” in the Yellow Pages, Ba]*

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* Dragon City Journal wishes to apologize for any unintended offense that might have been given to members of the American Association of Interior Designers and Judy Garland Impersonators by this interview, and we are returning the remains of your “gift” of the French brocade loveseat with the improvised explosive device.

35. 3: ASK THE INTELLIGENT DESIGNER 9.9.2006

Have the religious zealots who are trying to sneak Creationism into school curricula in the guise of “Intelligent Design” really thought the premise of their argument through? You know the premise: that nature is so complex that it could only have been the result of an “intelligent designer” (are you thinking God yet? OK, but just think it, don't say it).

Well, taking the proponents of this argument at their word, Dragon City Journal (DCJ) arranged a little Q & A with—GUESS WHO?— the Intelligent Designer himself. Sorry feminists, but the ID is a guy (we think, we didn't check).

So, we phoned him up:

DCJ: Hello, ID, thank you for taking the time to answer some of our questions.

ID: Time. I got all the time I want. More than you, you can bet.

DCJ: (Hmmm, he's got some attitude) Well, let's get right to it then. So, ID, looks like you are going to be in all the textbooks in Kansas.

ID: Well, it beats being in those night stand drawers in cheap hotels. What the hell were those Gideons thinking anyway. How would they like their story to be stuck in drawers with snotty tissues and condom wrappers.

DCJ: Ya got us there. Look, let's jump right in here with some things that have been on our minds for some time.

ID: Go for it, you can't be any dumber than those Kansas City school kids.

DCJ: Flies. Why did you have to go and design flies? You could just let poop dry up and blow away. No, you had to go and make poop-eating insects that land on our picnic lunches. We think that's stupid, bad design, bad for health, good for flies, we suppose. By the way, how many lenses do your have on your eyes?

ID: I don't do picnics. So why should I care. But while we're on the subject of picnics, how do you like the ants?

DCJ: You need to talk with your writers if you're going to do comedy. Pressing on: so what's the big deal with cholesterol? Why didn't you just leave it out? No, we have to worry about it, try to reach our numbers, and then you don't make it fair—some people get to eat KFC and their high density lipoproteins go down (or is that up? damn, we still don't know), the rest of us have to ask to be seated in the non-cholesterol section of a restaurant and have a salad with Lipitor croutons. You screwed up again, ID.

ID: So sue me; does having at load of stock in pharmaceuticals make me a bad guy? I'm trying to catch up with Gates. And remember it was Bush that came up with that sneaky drug program for seniors, not me. I might have designed this universe, but I'm not driving it.

DCJ: Did you have to design a people with half and brain and half an ass. Yes, I'm talking about Americans. A majority of them still do not accept evolution as good science (they would say “believe” in evolution, which they call “Darwinism” to give it a sinister taint). I guess then, they wouldn't accept the idea of evolution as the method of “intelligent design,” would they?

ID: Hey, people don't use more than a fraction of their brains anyway. But you missed the picture about Americans: they have no brains at all. I don't do politics, but have you looked at your political leadership lately? Your problem isn't evolution; it's de volution!

DCJ: OK, now we have to ask you the biggie. The people who are proposing that you have a place in school science curricula keep going on about how the wonderful design of the universe means there must be an “intelligent designer”. So, if it's so wonderful, why did you design us to die?

ID: I'm surprised that you missed this one. Quite simple, actually— everybody's afraid of dying and where they are going after they die, right? If they're afraid they need religion, if they need religion they need, guess who?

DCJ: Falwell?

ID: No, you idiot. No death means no fear, and I'm out of a job . Do I need to connect the dots for you?

DCJ: OK, OK, ease up; we're just journalists here. So, we read somewhere that some 98 percent of the species that ever lived are now extinct. EXTINCT! Now if you're such and “intelligent designer” how come there have been so many what could be called “failed” species?

ID: Goin' for the old gonads this time, are you? [1] Simple. Sometimes you design something and you don't like how it came out; so you dump it. What's wrong with that?

DCJ: Just this: the you you are talking about is you , not us fallible humans. You should be able to get it right the first time. Why waste all this time getting to the 2 percent that you want to keep? OK, I'm gonna have to say it. Have you been messing around with the “E” word? C'mon, out with it. You made Charlie Darwin so he could give us a clue as to how you operate your little engineering experiments with us. That finch business in the Galapagos was your idea, right? You like random selection, don'tcha; watching those little different versions scurry around to see if they can fit in and survive on for a few more generations. And then if things get a little boring you toss in some major environmental change, a meteor or something, or a virus, and suddenly, “game over” and you shove another quarter in and the fun starts over.

ID: Hey, what are you doing, interviewing yourself? Was that a question or you campaigning for my job? Anyway, You said the “E” word, not me. So I change things around a little. You sit around per saecula saeculorum , as your churchy types like to say, and see if you don't get a little bored. Speaking of which, this interview is keeping me from watching my favorite reality television show, Survivor . Now ya starting to get it? I'm outta here. Wait a sec, how can I be outta here when I'm everywhere. You 're outta here!

DCJ: Thanks ID.

Check into Dragon City Journal for Part II of our interview with the Intelligent Designer, when correspondent Ba Feng Gu asks the ID “why flatulence?” And send in your questions to DCJ to be put to the ID. [2]

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[1] Feminists, did you catch that? Frankly, we think we would like the ID much better if he were a woman.

[2] Do not send your questions to IntelligentDesigner@ID.deity or you will start receiving emails that offer you fake Viagra if you contribute to the Republican National Campaign fund.

35. 2: WAL-MARKET CAPITALISM 9.5.2006

Some Labor Day ruminations from a former member of the following labor organizations: The International Brotherhood of Teamsters; The Rochester, New York Local of Hod Carriers; The California Faculty Association. [1]

Doctored AP Photo of Chinese Wal-Mart employees in Shenzhen (UrbisMedia, 2006)

From the first day that somebody begins to make more of a commodity or service than they need for themselves by exploiting their talents or abilities they become a capitalists. That statement was the lead in one of the lectures I enjoyed giving in my graduate course in Urban Theory years ago.

At about the same time I was giving that lecture I recall the administrators at the university were being served up a 38% pay raise; the faculty, which had not received an increase for a few years, were getting something like 2.8%. This was not too long after unionization had come to our campus.

I begin with these two seemingly unrelated points; one theoretical, the other historical because they are partly illustrative of what has been going on with economics these days. One could really choose other illustrations, but these are the ones that jump to mind this Labor Day.

We are all capitalists because we “sell” our personal specialties to the marketplace for labor. They market has something it needs and you have the ability or talent to do that thing. You have a job, you get paid for what you add to productivity, and you contribute to the economy by buying things, and you pay your taxes for public services.

That's pretty much the way things work in a general way with market capitalism. So what's wrong with that? Nothing, really. It's really more complicated than that, but I'm not writing a Econ 101 textbook here. So let;'s jump to today, where we have an economy that by a couple of measures of capitalism seems to be doing pretty well: the stock market is rising or stable, and productivity is up. In other words, there is profit, which we know is what capitalism is all about.

So why is consumer confidence so low, and why are more people below the poverty line, and why are people having such difficulty keeping up, even with two incomes in more and more families? Well, part of the answer is in what those university administrators have been paying themselves. Management has decided that it is worth a lot more in the marketplace for management than it really is. University presidents began to liken themselves after corporate CEOs, arguing that their universities are like corporations. And we know what CEO's have been paying themselves, with the complicity of those Boards of Directors and stockholders—some of them make 600 times more than their average worker.

Time to bring in the D word—Distribution. Sure the stock market is rising, sure productivity and profits are up (Wow! Just look at those oil company profits), and so the CEO's are regarded as wonder-boys, so why nit give them those hundred-million dollar salaries. Why distribute some of those profits down to (this is what “trickle-down” is all about, isn't it?) [2] those workers when you are in charge of the distribution of the company's profits. After all, you're the wonder-boy who came up with the idea that you can increase productivity and profit by shipping production off to China or India, pay workers one-twentieth the wages (with no benefits) and give the stockholders and yourself a nice pretty profit. It's globalism, baby; deal with it.

Wonder-boy CEO's don't have to necessarily do that. You can terrorize your labor to keep their mouths shut and not organize in other ways than threaten to go off-shore. They can force you to work overtime for no compensation, reduce your benefits, cut or eliminate employer contributions to you pension—which, by the way, they might be pilfering, or even decide that they are going to take back your pension (American Airlines).

If you wonder why Democrats have been on the case of Wal-Mart it is because the model for the emerging economy is Wal-Mart: high corporate profits, from selling 90% Chinese made goods out of a huge box, and paying their worker squat with no benefits. That's the formula a lot of corporations would like to emulate, a descent into cheapness.

American's might be getting the message, which may be why consumer confidence is not up there with the stock market and productivity figures. Unemployment might me low, but the purchasing power of wages is lower than it was back in 1998.

There's this notion about market economies tat the market is some magical thing that works like what the old economists used to call the “invisible guiding hand”, or the hand of “providence”. Things will work themselves to the greatest social benefit if the market is just left alone (laissez-faire) to keep things in balance. It is a point-of-view that has been buttressed by the fall of communism, the rocketing rise of China's post-Deng market capitalism, and the illusion that the stock market and low unemployment rates are accurate indicators of a healthy economy.

But the market is not some transcendent invisible guiding hand of Providence. It is operated and manipulated, admittedly in a competitive arena (and often a collusive arena). But its operators cozy up to political power (and not just the political power in their own countries), influence social policy, stymie regulations that might compromise their profits or competitiveness, hire accountants to fiddle the books, pay ex-politicians as lobbyists or to sit on their boards so that tax policies like those of the Bush administrations will pour more of that trickle down money into their person al bank accounts, and if their companies get in trouble they will have friends in high places to argue that their industry is essential to the national interest and needs some nice loans to keep them afloat.

This is not a brief for socialism, or communism, or any –ism. Systems don't corrupt people— people corrupt systems.

And so on Labor Day, the workers, the people who sell the talents, abilities, and sometimes just their sore backs to the market for labor that make the economy function, go to the beach or a park and have their picnics, tossing balls and sitting on lounge chairs made in China, eating their burgers and hotdogs, enjoying a respite from their daily travails and wondering how they will pay their bills and send their kids to college, and if there will be enough for them to retire on—while the “invisible guiding hand of Wal-market Capitalism picks their pocket.

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[1] To Republicans this makes me the equivalent of a terrorist. See,

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/09/04/EDG3BKSCQI1.DTL

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of a country club.

[2] Trickle-down theory is that we should give high salaries and tax breaks to the rich, so they will give the rest of us jobs building their mansions and yachts. “Piddle-down” theory would be more apt.

35. 1: ARE REPUBLICANS IDIOTS, OR WHAT? 9.2.2006

The “F” Word

The current Rovian crusade to justify the disastrous foreign policy releases the Idiot Triumvirate to appear before carefully chosen friendly audiences to invoke the F word: that is the so-called war on terror is now a war on Fascism, and the job is to link mid-eastern terrorists with Hitler and to equate Bush's war with the efforts of the Allies against Nazi Germany, and to link anti-war attitudes with appeasement. You have to be an idiot to make that comparison, and you have to be an idiot to believe it. How ironic that the most fascist administration in American history should raise the F word in their own defense. [1]

You may have a parent, an in-law, a friend, a spouse, and (God forbid!) a child who is one. They can turn up most anywhere, although they are mostly in Red states. Republicans. And now the truth must be told: Republicans are idiots. Well, you knew it all along; even some Republicans knew it.

Let's start with idiot George Allen, Senator from Virginia, who is running for re-election (and contemplating running for president in 2008). Here is a guy who is so freakin' stupid that he singles out and makes racist slur at a cameraman (reputedly the only non-Caucasian face in the gathering) while the camera is filming and recording him! He wants to be president someday!

Even Georgie Bush didn't have somebody film him boozing in Alabama bars instead of showing up for National Guard duty.

Even Trent Lott, when he publicly said at Strom Thurmond's birthday party that the country would have been better off if the racist and segregationist had been elected president in 1948.

Even Bill Frist, who famously made a medical judgment (out of his field) about Terry Shiavo's medical condition from a video tape, hasn't diagnosed Floyd Landis's urine sample by consulting a weegee board.

Even Dick Cheney, who publicly said “F**k you” (Cheney likes this F word) to a Democratic Senator didn't add “and the horse you rode in on.”

Even Condoleeza Rice, who call a presidential briefing memo that had a warning of a terror attack with everything by the time of day on it “just historical background” is not that big and idiot (although George Alan would probably regard her as a “Macaca,” too).

Even Dick Nixon, who said “I am not a crook” knew better than to add “but I am a liar.”

Even Ronald Reagan, who claimed he didn't know Iran-Contra, didn't say that he could, however, know the “Macarena”.

Even “Duke” Cunningham had the sense to store his loot, from taking bribes from defense contractors, in another state.

Even John McCain, who defied Ho Chi Minh but kissed George Bush's butt after Bush used a racist lie on him, and for good measure put his lips on Jerry Falwell's butt, is not as big an idiot and George Allen.

But they are all idiots, and anybody who joins or remains in, or supports such a party is an idiot, too.

Do you have to take an idiot test to get into this political party? These are people who are called “dittoheads” by one of their talk show toadies, Rush Limbaugh, and “useful idiots” (see, you can't blame me for this) by their own political strategists. And the idiots continue to be easily persuaded to vote against their own best interests, to support people who are responsible for raising the cost of the pharmaceuticals and gasoline, outsourcing their jobs, obstructing medical advances that would make them healthier, and abridging their rights. These idiots need help!

One could go on, but this should be enough. The one thing Republicans are not so stupid about is lying and stealing. They just don't know when to stop. They may get their due this November, but remember that there are still a lot of die-hard Republican idiots out there ready to go the distance, er, “stay the course,” no matter what. A recent poll showed that 50% of them still believe Saddam had WMD. A majority still believe that it was Iraqis who hijacked the planes on 9-11. The rest believe that prayer will keep terrorists' bombs from working—“faith-based homeland security.”

They are the idiots that ignored all the warnings of pre-9-11. They are the idiots who botched the response to hurricane Katrina, have cut funds for needed areas of homeland security, and squander them for political advantage by giving them to states and cities that no respectable terrorist would attacked because , like us, they can find them on a map either.

Mind you it is these idiots and their supporters who have put us at war with a country that never attacked us, killed nearly 3000 Americans and maimed 20,000 others, started a civil war that's killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, and is responsible for making more new terrorists than McDonald's makes fries, and made Americans the most vilified people in the world.

Now their mantra that their idiot supporters will repeat to you is that Democrats will not be willing or able to protect you as well as the people who have made us more unsafe—at home or abroad—than we have ever been in our history. These idiots want you to believe this even though they would be blathering their ridiculous mantra in German and Japanese were it not for Democratic administrations. They love to invoke their little loaded interrogative—What would the Democrats do (fill in the blank)? Implied negative. It's a nice cover—if you're one of their idiot supporters—for “What have the Republicans DONE?”

Beyond taking our country to the bottom in a very short space of time they seem to want to make us not only the evil, crusading, gas-guzzling imperialists to the rest of world, but to destroy any intellectual legacy we have acquired. They want our schools to be Christian madrrassas that will have libraries full of The Left Behind series and the complete fallacious works of that psychotic, bitchy, bag of bones, Ann Coulter.

OK, I know, I know, this is all so illiberal, so unfair, so castigating of a huge cohort of people, of generalizing about Republicans. Surely there must be some Democrats that are idiots as well.

OK, OK, I'll give you that. Take Joe Leiberman. The same Joe Leiberman who is a staunch supporter of Bush's war and supposedly a supporter of Israel—except, when it comes to groveling for votes, he can say: “I have respect for him . . . I admire what Minister Farrakhan is doing.”

Like I said, take Joe Leiberman . . . Please! . . . Idiots.

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[1] We have addressed Facism before in these pages, See, for example, 32.6, Fascism Creep and 17.6, Slouching Towards Fascism

35. 1: ARE REPUBLICANS IDIOTS, OR WHAT? 9.2.2006

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The “F” Word