Strange moon

The view of the world from Keyes Toyota

I'm at Keyes Toyota in Van Nuys, waiting while my 2007 Camry is serviced.  I brought my laptop here, planning to write.  The goal was to loosen my tongue by viewing the world from a new perspective, that of Keyes Toyota.  It seems to be working.

It's ironic that, after two months of writing nothing, I am set free in this distracting venue.  Van Nuys was an early grab at the San Fernando Valley by Los Angeles.  Van Nuys Boulevard features the 70 year old art deco Valley Municipal Center and several miles of car dealerships, of which Keyes Toyota is one.  I'm in the waiting room, sitting at a high round table attended by two bar stools, perfect for writing. A counter nearby offers apples (uneaten) and donuts (going fast) and a luxurious coffee dispenser that produces a latte much sweeter than Starbucks'.  On the wall two feet to my right, looming over my head, is a flat screen TV tuned to CNN.  The volume is low, but I hear the murmur of the lawyer for the lawyer who is defending President Trump from charges he mistreated a porn star.  The dealership's sound system is louder than the TV; as I write it fills the room with a Taylor Swift song which I associate with my granddaughters, who sing the words and dance to it.  Now Taylor Swift has competition for my attention from a man in a baseball cap who has his cell on speaker and is listening to a comedian tell jokes to a laughing audience.  He continually chuckles and turns the volume too high, then lowers it, then turns it up again.  I should point out to him that some people might be trying to view the whole world from Keyes Toyota; I should ask the management to turn off all music and get rid of the flat screen whose scroll continually mesmerizes me- like right now with the story of how the Kentucky legislature pulled an end-run around state teachers by weakening their pensions in a bill about sewers.  I can hear people cheering: "Yay, stick it to the greedy teachers!"  That is a distracting thought.  A man two tables away just asked the lady next to me if she would watch his stuff while he went to the restroom.  As soon as he left she went to the donut counter.  I wondered if the ethics of the situation demanded that I watch his stuff while she was away.  Are ethics like theoretical physics, where if no one sees something happen, it may not have happened?  The man came back from the restroom at the moment the lady returned with her donut.  He observed her apparent indifference to his stuff, then my eyes and his locked briefly.  It was distracting for sure.

Yet in spite of the continual distractions, or because of them, I sit here and write.  How does the world look from Keyes Toyota?  It looks like a fantasy, like a science fiction novel about a society of engineers that is engineering itself out of existence, embracing its replacement and waging wars to keep from thinking too much about it.

Keyes Toyota is not part of the fantasy.  This place is sane.  The peaceable customers; the efficient, friendly service; the donuts- it's all sane, none of it part of the sci-fi horror outside.  

But I'm the writer here, I remind myself, which gives me pretend god-like powers over make-believe things.  I wonder if, to enhance its palatability, I should insert an idea about sensible people into the sci-fi story unfolding outside, and suggest that, even in a human world run largely by emotion, the right mix of sensible people might handle the politics of animal dominance and turn that politics, in the case of the United States, into something that, if not a true democracy, at least would not be a true kleptocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy or military coup.

"But how would the sensible people accomplish that?" I ask myself.  "Would they form a new political party, the Sensible People's Party?  Would only sensible people join?  How many people would that be?  Would the party have any money?"

I retract the idea.  The view from Keyes Toyota is that even in a sci-fi horror fantasy, the Sensible People's Party would fall on its ass, too much a fantasy even for fantasy.  People are just not that sensible.

Real new parties may be coming, I ponder, but they are not here yet.  There was a tentative gesture in a full page ad last week in the Los Angeles Times, announcing a new party as an alternative to the Democrats and Republicans, called by the acronym "SAM," for "Sure Aggravates Me!" or something, which seems to have fallen into the void the day it was posted. 

Minus real-world new parties or the hope of a Sensible Peoples' Party, what can a sci-fi horror story bring us? 

Keye's Toyota's large east facing windows are allowing in the glare of the rising sun; it's getting warm in here.  I'm going to write an anti-war party into my sci-fi horror story- plausible or not- because hopeful stories get better ratings.  This party will not be called an "Anti-War Party"; it won't oppose war per se, only war that is mediated through profit motive and/or designed to manipulate our side rather than win.  We can think of this party as an informed assessment of likely reaction to the coming elimination of almost all human jobs due to automation. The party platform will assert that when the world's managers realized the difficulties inherent in virtual total human unemployment, they determined that the best way to control the restless unemployed would be to set all definable groups against each other, leading to a multiplicity of wars of such complex and convoluted origins that no anti-war movement could keep up with the process.  War, in its backers' estimation, will serve to occupy the unemployed and drastically reduce their numbers, while making vast fortunes for the war industry, fortunes that will then be used to further war politics.  

The new anti-war party will sound the alarm about how painful and deadly war is- for those who might not know- and will suggest alternative emotional therapies to group hatred of the "other."  

The new party will be able to keep up with the war parties because it will be backed by visionary billionaires who are outside the war profit network, and it will have some sense of what the electorate sees, feels and understands, a sense that only Trump and his operatives had in the 2016 presidential campaign.  

In my story the new party will be ready by the 2020 campaign.  It will reflect not just a wish to conduct foreign and domestic policy outside the dictates of the military-industrial complex (which will no longer be a jokey term) but a desire to make the transition from traditional human civilization to the new engineered civilization as peaceful and trauma-free as possible.  The sci-fi story unfolding in the world around Keyes Toyota will feature a new American party that at least tries to be sensible, because hopeful stories do get better ratings.

[Update, 12/18/21: Obviously no new party was ready in 2020. I'm through making predictions. Maybe the Republicans and Democrats will continue their useless maneuvering right up to the bitter end. Or maybe their rapidly deteriorating condition will stop them in time for something intersting to happen. Time will tell]

Political winds of high school debate

The California High School Speech and Debate Association (CHSSA) held its annual state championship last April, 2018, near Livermore.  As a high school debate coach I've been attending state tournaments (when students qualify) for about 14 years, and I've noticed a shift in the political expression of students.  This tournament in particular was different.

California is, numerically, a blue state, but CHSSA includes many school districts in red regions: in suburbs, non-urban coastal areas, and inland.  Through the W. Bush years the political commentary from debaters at state tournaments, and even at local tournaments in Southern California, tended to be conservative and relatively kind to Republican presidents.  There were frequent references to the wisdom of President Ronald Reagan.  I recall little criticism of W. Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The new crop of high school debaters is ready to question the official line in a bipartisan way. At this year's states I judged Extemporaneous Speech, in which students have thirty minutes to prepare a five to seven minute speech on political topics that often involve foreign policy.  The speeches were eye-opening.  Below is a list of three topics from the rounds I watched, followed by a sampling of student points.

Topic: Trump's strike on the Syrian military

Student point:          

The strike made no strategic sense beyond enhancing the President's image and was counterproductive by generating bad PR for the U.S.

Topic: President Trump's handling of the North Korean crisis.

Negation point:                  

There is no crisis.  North Korea has been firing missiles into the ocean for years without any crisis.  Trump is manufacturing the crisis for his own political benefit.

President Trump's use of the "Mother of All Bombs" (MOAB)

Negation point:  

Trump continues Obama's policy of drone strikes in Afghanistan and the Middle East that has killed hundreds of civilians and turned people in those regions against us.  On top of this, Trump dropped the MOAB- creating a high profile destructive act with no apparent strategic purpose beyond helping the President politically.

Granted this is a small sampling of students, but they are representative of a high achieving group that is sensitive to the relative persuasiveness of various arguments.  In previous years I heard very few arguments questioning the foundation of government spin, especially on questions of war and peace, even in pursuit of advantage in argument.  For students today, the prevailing wind is skeptical.

[Update, 6/24/18: I just returned from the 2018 National Speech and Debate tournament in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where I watched the final round of Lincoln-Douglas Debate (known for its complex values-based format) in which the resolution was, "U.S. targeted assassinations via drone strikes, by killing civilians, work against U.S. interests."  The Affirmative stated that killing civilians, whether intentionally or not, promotes terrorism by making the U.S. appear callous, warlike and hypocritical, considering how Americans would feel if a foreign power killed American civilians on our soil in pursuit of its enemies.  The Negation, who lost the round, seemed uncomfortable in negation, at one point conceding, "I understand that the U.S. government may not reveal truthful information about civilian casualties it causes...."]

What makes this seeming shift in students' political views especially interesting is that high school debate is often prep school for future politicians. Many presidents and other political leaders competed in high school debate (former Secretary of State John Kerry is said to have had a formidable "kill shot").  This batch of kids, whom we call Millennials (or, since 2011, iGens) has apparently either noticed on its own or picked up from its parents the idea that, even in the case of national security, or especially in that case, the government's actions and claims should be viewed skeptically.  

Could this trend in young people be part of an overall post-partisan trend that includes adults?  Listening to NPR's "Wait wait don't tell me!" on my way to the state tournament Saturday morning, I heard a harsh assessment of former President Obama's hands-off posture towards Trumpism, with a fair amount of outrage that instead of helping a troubled nation figure itself out, Obama allocated time to earn $400,000 for speaking to an investment group.  I don't recall the Clintons being reviled by NPR for the millions they squeezed from the 1%.  Is American political thought waking up?

It's an exhilarating idea, but I'm not sure that people who fear our military industrial complex as much as they fear North Korea should take much heart in this partial awakening.  Bear in mind that it won't be represented in the media.  None of the student positions detailed above has been aired on CBS, NBC or ABC network news, the organs of our state. Quite the reverse: the North Korean crisis is presented as a real thing, requiring breathless presentation of fast breaking events; the attack on Syria, we were told, made Trump look "presidential," not crazy; the MOAB was necessary because of a North Korean threat 3,000 miles from its target.

More hopefully, in Florida, after students at Stoneman Douglas High School were traumatized by a shooter who killed 17 of their classmates, several Stoneman debate team members appeared in national media and pre-empted the gun control discussion.  Unlike matters of foreign policy, which are theoretical to most people, gun control in this case is personal, and the Stoneman debate students used this to maximum effect to move the Florida legislature to enact gun control measures that no lobbying group or single politician could have done.

Judging by the trends in high school debate, the dominant attitude among young people entering government seems likely to remain skeptical.

The Ten Commandments are boilerplate

"Boilerplate" refers to "standardized pieces of text for use as clauses in contracts" (Webster).   Between the standardized clauses are blank lines where the user adds information that gives meaning to the contract.  For example, the boilerplate rental contract available at Staples provides legal text about the renting process, but only in areas that are common to all rental contracts, so that these sections can be repeated verbatim in all of them.  But the contract is incomplete until someone fills in the renter's name, the rent amount, the landlord's and renter's obligations, etc.  Boilerplate is a convenience designed to deliver the necessary framework for legal transactions, but just as the boilerplate at Staples is incomplete, so are the Ten Commandments, with blank lines needing to be filled in.  

This is easy to demonstrate with commandments 5-10, which prohibit (in this order) mistreatment of parents, murder, adultery, stealing, lying about your neighbor or coveting his/her possessions or spouse.  Are there any major religions that have doctrinal problems with any of that?  There don't appear to be.  Every religion or system for human behavior asserts these kinds of things, usually like the Ten Commandments do, in general terms without specific definitions or examples, making it boilerplate.

Commandments 1- 4 need some discussion.

1. I am the Lord thy God; thou shall not have any gods before me.

This is arguably a specifically Jewish (and by extension Christian and Muslim) commandment, as it applies only to the Judeo/Christian/Muslim god, commonly capitalized to suggest that "He" is the only such entity in the universe.  There are variants in the world's religions: Hindus believe there are millions of gods, but the chief god is Vishnu (who rules along with his feminine aspect, Parvathi).  The idea that your top god is the top god is common among religions and is thus boilerplate.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

The Judeo/Christian/Muslim god is invisible to "His" adherents, who know next to nothing about "His" thoughts, nature, ambitions, and certainly nothing of what "He" looks like.  Other religions might allow people to draw pictures and make statues of how they think their gods appear, but their doctrines do not assert that people are equal to gods, that we can understand a god the way we understand each other.  Therefore the intent of the restriction on artistic expression in the 2nd Commandment is common to all religions and is boilerplate.

3. Thou shalt not use the name of the Lord your God in vain.

The phrase "in vain" was translated from the Hebrew, shav, meaning "emptiness of speech, lying," and may have referred specifically to lying under oath.  In the modern conception, this commandment is taken to prohibit references to God in swearing or cussing, as I learned in middle-school when a friend punched me in the shoulder for saying "goddammit!," which my friend said was taking the Lord's name in vain.  Seriously, must one-tenth of humanity's foundational guidance be that you can't say "goddammit!"?  That's so silly it must be a human idea that God just puts up with.  Arbitrary human pretensions to understanding divine will of this sort are common to most religions, so Commandment 3 is boilerplate.

4. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.

Recently on a road trip to Reno my wife and I saw a billboard outside a small town that claimed that all Christians who observe Sunday as the Sabbath will go to hell and be tormented forever because the actual Sabbath is Saturday.  There was no mention of whether Jews, who also consider the Sabbath to be Saturday, will get any benefit from this (in terms of treatment after they're dead).  Since the day of the week ordained for worship is a blank line in the 4th Commandment, it is boilerplate.

As noted, there is nothing wrong with boilerplate.  We certainly need to be told not to kill or rob or otherwise hurt each other.  But we do all the prohibited things frequently and without concern because we define the terms used in the Commandments to suit our needs.  Is it murder to kill in war, or to terminate a newly fertilized human egg?  Can people who are starving steal to feed their children?  Are there abusive parents who should be disobeyed?  The answers are concealed in blank lines in the boilerplate of the Ten Commandments.  

Nor is there anything to suggest how or if we should curb the human desires that lead to transgression of the Commandments.  Should we drug people who have such desires?  Or kill them?  Or give them therapy?  Such questions are not addressed.

Of course most people don't do critical studies of their religion's doctrine in the course of adopting it; they adopt it because their culture adopted it, and they disassociate themselves from other religious doctrines because other cultures adopted them.  Such people are susceptible to rhetoric leading to religious wars.

When it comes to war, we don't even have the boilerplate of a commandment.  War might be noble and divinely inspired; it might be stupid and a sign of our impending extinction.  We're given nothing on the question.

The Ten Commandments are important for providing general goals we can try to attain.  They are not very useful for immediate problems, unless you fill in the blanks.

My dad, 1919- 2012

My dad, Leonard Lasken, died at 93, shortly after the 2012 Obama/Romney presidential election.   It had been a long slow descent into grief and Parkinson’s for him, ever since my mom died four years earlier.   He told me that one thing that kept him going was that he wanted to “see what’s going to happen.”  He didn't live long enough to see Trump happen, but he wouldn't have been surprised.

A lifelong Democrat, he had recently come to reject both parties, and I felt, as we watched the primary and then the presidential debates together, that the electoral process itself had come to represent corruption to him. He used expressions like “six of one, half a dozen of the other,” to describe the policy differences we heard during the Obama/Romney debates. My dad lived long enough to see the Democratic Party betray him, and the Republican Party shut him out as much as it ever had.

After serving as a naval officer in World War II, my dad got his pharmacy degree from the University of Minnesota, after which we moved to L.A. in 1948, in time for my third birthday.

My dad came politically of age during this period. He was hired as a pharmacist by Thrifty Drug Stores (currently reincarnated as Rite Aide) the only pharmacy chain in L.A., at the time, that would hire Jewish pharmacists. We rented a house in South Central (then all white), which my dad struggled to afford on his pharmacist pay of $1.98 per hour. He became an activist in the Retail Clerks Union (which represented pharmacists as well as clerks), running for (and losing) the union presidency, with both support and later opposition from legendary union powerhouse Joseph DeSilva. My dad’s political heroes then included Jimmie Hoffa, the godfather-like head of the Teamster's Union.  He flung our copy of Time Magazine into the trash when its cover featured Hoffa’s face with a caption about corruption.

At this time my parents experimented with the Communist Party. I recall a backyard barbecue and the showing in someone’s living room of a beautiful Russian cartoon. I was enrolled in a communist affiliated pre-school. I had no idea what communism was, of course. To my dad, the party probably represented a rebellion against his father (I expressed my rebellion later by joining the GOP during Watergate). My grandfather was the retired owner of a successful liquor store and pharmacy in North Dakota, where he had fled after a pogram killed his father in Ukraine. He was a founding member of the Brentwood Country Club in L.A. (he and my grandmother had not been permitted into the Bismarck Country Club), but my parents made us live in near poverty out of, I guess, idealism. I've been suspicious of idealism ever since.

My parents' fling with communism faltered when my dad objected to the party’s practice of putting people in the position of martyr, then hanging them out to dry. The end was confirmed when his local group rejected my dad's application for party membership because, they said, he was “too bourgeois.”

How right they were! Leonard had noticed, as a Thrifty pharmacist, that Thrifty was no longer thrifty, as it had been when it started in the 1920’s. By the 1950's, retail prescription prices were routinely marked-up to exorbitant levels above wholesale- for rich and poor alike- in a tacit monopoly maintained by all the pharmacy chains and most of the independents. My dad hooked up with a membership discount store in Torrance to start one of the first real discount pharmacies in the state, instantly undercutting just about every pharmacy in L.A. County. With this success he was able to secure the pharmacy concession for the White Front Discount Department Stores (White Front began in the 1920's as a single store in a black neighborhood started by a white man named Blackman).  When my dad joined White Front it comprised ten successful stores.  White Front was later purchased by Interstate Department Stores (owner of the late Toy's 'R Us) which expanded to thirty White Front stores up and down the state.  My dad's contract forced him to open a pharmacy in every location, but not all were profitable.  The situation started to look bad, but then White Front went bankrupt (from over-expanding) giving my dad a way out.  He relocated the profitable stores to independent locations and sold them to the pharmacist/managers (several are in business today). To my relief, and to the amazement of many around him, my dad landed on his feet, a hallmark of his life.

When he went into business, my dad's life and politics changed. He told the family that he was making money by following his social conscience- he believed that people should not face extortion over life-saving medicine- and his political heroes changed accordingly. He liked his first Republican, Nelson Rockefeller, whom he saw as a levelheaded, business savvy guy. The vagaries of Nixon kept my dad a Democrat, but things started changing when Bill Clinton ushered in the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which my dad correctly predicted would decimate American manufacturing.  Leonard was opposed as well to the Democratic deregulation of Wall Street that ended up in the economic collapse of 2008. The Democrats, for my dad, became the slightly lesser of two evils, as opposed to the force for good he had previously supported.

We rather liked Mitt Romney. He seemed to have some of the business sense of a Rockefeller, and hopefully good sense in general. But we shared our dismay that the Republican party had loaded Romney with so much useless baggage that he could not win. In essence, Romney had no choice but to put up and shut up regarding the Tea Party agenda as expressed then by Senator Rick Santorum, e.g. that abortion doctors should be charged with murder; that homosexuality is a sin hated by God; that contraception reduces sex to "mere pleasure."  This left Obama with an easy road to victory. All the Democrats had to do was make a fuss about the Santorum platform- viscerally unpopular throughout Obama’s base and far beyond (most voters are in favor of pleasure)- and Obama would never have to answer the difficult questions (e.g. Why have you done nothing about Wall Street, which, with help from both parties, caused the Great Recession? Since you have done nothing about Wall Street, do you believe, as Republicans do, that we do not need regulation? What is the purpose of your drone strikes? When a drone killed forty people in a wedding party in Pakistan, and not one militant was killed, why did you say nothing? Are you trying to start a war?).

My dad and I marveled together at the clever tricks of party operatives on both sides, placing social issues like gay marriage right next to unrelated economic ideas, blurring the distinctions between voters and robbing them of a voice.

My dad wanted to see what is going to happen to the world, but he had to die not seeing what he most wanted to see: the salvaging of the American democratic process from the end-game we are now witnessing, a manipulated game mediated by short-term thinkers for short-term goals.  If there are long term goals, we don't know what they are, or whose they are.  My dad opposed this darkness, and taught me to do the same.

Rest in peace, Dad. We’ll keep up the fight.

Lasken op-ed in the Orange County Register

Prop. 58: A Trojan Horse to stop English instruction

By Doug Lasken

Re-posted from the Orange County Register- https://www.ocregister.com/2016/10/20/guest-commentary-prop-58-is-a-trojan-horse-to-stop-english-instruction/"[The link will only work cut-and-pasted into a browser]

Public memory is short when it comes to complex education policy, such as that concerning bilingual education.  That is why the backers of Proposition 58, which would gut key provisions of California’s landmark Prop. 227 (1998) feel free to re-write pre-227 history.  

I was there and this is the true history.

Prior to passage of 227, native Spanish speaking students in California were placed in classes where the only language of instruction permitted was Spanish. Prop. 58 supporters deny this, but I taught in such classes for Los Angeles Unified and it is true.  The district Bilingual Master Plan decreed that all textbooks for native Spanish speakers must be in Spanish and the language of instruction must be Spanish only.  If the teacher was not fluent in Spanish, an aide, usually without a college degree, taught the academic subjects- math, social studies, history- in Spanish.  Thirty minutes per day was set aside for English as a Second Language (ESL), but this was conversational only: No phonics, spelling, grammar or advanced English vocabulary could be used or taught.  The only way for Spanish-speaking students to study English was to pass an extremely difficult test in Spanish.  Most kids could not pass this test until middle or high school, if ever.  The result: the majority of Spanish speaking kids received almost no English instruction.

LAUSD had its own flourishes: Native Spanish speaking parents were advised not to speak English with their children because it would confuse them.  At one staff development we heard about “research” showing that people acquire languages better the older they are.  Yes, you read that right.

No wonder then, as a high school teacher several years later, I encountered Hispanic teenagers who asked me why they had not been taught English in elementary or middle school.  I had to explain that 227 had come too late for them.  

The forces behind the misnamed "bilingual education" policies included the textbook publishing lobby, which procured vast fortunes printing Spanish textbooks, and lobbies within teachers unions on behalf of Spanish speaking teachers who made $5,000 a year extra.  The system was also a job creator for administrators, with hundreds of positions like “bilingual coordinator.” 

It is disingenuous of Prop. 58 author State Senator Ricardo Lara to say that Prop. 227 prohibited “multilingual education”.  On the contrary, 227 mandated study of more than one’s native language.  Lara also throws the phrase “English only” at 227, one of the great slanders from “bilingual” supporters.  227 had nothing to do with “English Only.”

Voters should read the text of Prop. 58 carefully.   It starts on a soothing note: “(Prop. 58) preserves the requirement that public schools ensure students become proficient in English.”   

A problem soon appears: “(Prop. 58) requires that school districts provide students with limited English proficiency the option to be taught English nearly all in English.”  Under 227, learning English is not an “option,” but a right.  This significant and unsettling change is followed up with calls for dual-immersion programs (though they are already allowed by 227), and for parents’ right to pick how their children learn English (also provided in 227). 

Because of the distortions of 227 from Prop. 58’s author and the lack of clear need for any of its provisions, voters should be wary of this proposition.  On November 8, vote No on Prop. 58.

Doug Lasken is a retired Los Angeles Unified teacher, current debate coach and freelancer.  Reach him at doug.lasken@gmail.com.

Richard Nixon: Bad actor or bad actor?

I came home from school recently laughing about a kid on my debate team whose response, each time his spar opponent made a claim, was: "Honestly, I don't understand what my opponent is saying."  One of the things coaches have to teach students is how to dissemble.  

There's an important life lesson in the need to dissemble, whether in a game or in life.  We claim that we loathe liars, but in fact we expect people to lie, and lie well.  Take President Richard Nixon, for example.  Why is he the poster-child for bad president?  In policy, he wasn't much different from his predecessors or successors, of either party.  He waged war on about the same level of barbarity as they did. His opening to China is hailed by everyone as a good thing.  His economic moves were not the worst or the best.  How does his record merit particular scorn?

Yes, Nixon had an enemies list and supervised a break-in at the Watergate Hotel to get dirt on his Democratic rivals, but this pales in contrast to the National Security Administration's Obama-sanctioned ability to read at will everyone's private correspondence.  Imagine this speech from Richard Nixon:

"My fellow Americans, tonight I am proposing a new department of the federal government, the National Security Administration, whose job will be to monitor every electronic communication of every American, no warrant or other evidence of probable cause or due process required.  Only in this way can we keep America safe."

Anyone who was of age during Nixon's term as president knows exactly what would have happened had he said such words: Riots in the streets.

Yet this hypothetical speech is exactly what President Obama said repeatedly- in so many words- after the Snowden story broke.  Why is the nation so calm?  Because Obama is a good liar. If he says something keeps the nation safe, people believe him.  Nixon looked and sounded like a liar, so words that already carried significant negative weight fell through the floor when he said them. 

It's ironic that Nixon did acting and debate in school, because he must have known the basics of melodramatic presentation: 

A person who is telling the truth will look you straight in the eye, speak clearly and give you a smile that fills you with warmth, and a truly villainous liar will do the same.  

The melodramatic liar, while looking you in the eyes briefly, will frequently glance to the right or left- looking "shifty," like a schemer whose machinations might creep up on you.  Liars sweat profusely and appear uncomfortable.

Nixon played the melodramatic liar, with shifty eyes, bumbling with words as if he were juggling so many stories he couldn't keep them straight.  When he debated John F. Kennedy on black-and-white TV, his "five o'clock shadow" looked like a gangster's. His upper lip and brow sweated under the hot lights and he had to continuously mop them with a handkerchief. One of his nervous slips was: "We have to get rid of the farmer...er, the subsidies...."  Kennedy was suave and confident throughout.  He did not appear to sweat.

Nixon was a skilled and successful speaker in his youth and early career.  What happened to him later? He faced a tough transition in life from a background of blue-collar religious zealotry to the academic and industrial elites.  Something about that transition may have scared him, perhaps a conflict between rebellion and a desire to assimilate, and it may be that this pressure ruined his acting.

Whatever the cause, Nixon sounded like a liar, so the actual words he said didn't really matter- they were lies, while Kennedy sounded like he was telling the truth, and his words didn't matter, and they were deemed truth.

Thus derives our everlasting scorn of Richard Nixon, who played Snidely Whiplash to the American electorate, tying the widow to the railroad tracks. Barak Obama is trying to play the guy who unties her.  He's got the acting down tight; now he'd better hurry up and untie her.

Photo-aggression

My wife and I spent two weeks this summer on a tour of Spanish museums, wherein an insightful art professor led twenty-six retired, worldly, under- employed people to places of their dreams.  I could write about the art in the cities we visited- Madrid, Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Valencia and Barcelona- or the hotels or the heat (we arrived during a historic August heat wave), but those things are well covered elsewhere.  What I want to write about is the photo-aggression committed by tourists, both American and otherwise. 

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not self-righteous about it.  I took my Droid, with its swift camera, and shot one or two photos per museum.  So I know the feeling people who love travel have, that they want to share something of what they’ve seen, to bring a bit of it back, to "own" it (and of course the more crass feeling of, “Look, this is where I went and you didn't”).   Such feelings used to be expressed in journals and letters, but now, as the spoken word is increasingly demoted to short text expressions- these even freed from the syntax of sentences (Las Meninas, OMG!)- the photographic image is the way we enhance our memories.

Fine, but how interesting can your memories be to others if they include every painting and sculpture you see?  That’s right, everything.  The goal of our group (who were otherwise congenial and intelligent- I hope they’ll forgive me for this little critique!) and of groups all around us from many countries, appeared to be to photograph each and every piece of art, along with its descriptive plaque.  As soon as we exited the bus, an advance squad, mostly men, would fan out to snap the exterior of the museum, catching every column, angle and perspective, fighting for space with young couples holding out sticks like fishing poles with narcissism as bait.  Some of the men, as they rushed the museum gates, appeared to have worked as soccer refs, coming to sudden halts before their targets, devices held out front, ready to inform the eye and make the call, knees slightly bent for speed in moving to the next target.

Indeed, the invasion of the image-snatchers broke free of museum walls.  Any element of the environment with potential to be interesting, which was pretty much everything, was subject to photography: lampposts, signs in windows, graffiti, bad reproductions of Vermeer in restaurants, manhole covers, and, of course, each other.

How do tourists represent their countries when they commit photo-aggression?  I learned, from the beautiful paintings of Joaquin Sorolla, who is making a well-deserved comeback, of the arresting custom at Spanish beaches of permitting young boys to swim nude (if you've never heard of Sorolla it's because he was nearly snuffed out by Picasso's gang).  At a beach on the way to Salvador Dali’s house in Port Lligat, I beheld a real-life Sorrola at a small cove dotted with families. As I took off my shoes to wander over the stones into the gently lapping Mediterranean, a nude boy of about four walked past with his mother.   The serene Sorolla moment was destroyed when several Americans from a nearby group spotted a Kodak moment and whipped out their devices, no permission to photograph having been requested or received.  I wondered what the reaction would be on one of L.A.’s beaches if a group of tourists, cameras upraised, approached family groups to photograph the children.   Maybe the Inuit were right that having your picture taken steals your soul.

I'm sure my fellow tourists are not trying to steal souls, but if it's not to steal souls, what’s it for, this compulsive creation of images?  If you were the first person on Mars, you would certainly want to record everything you saw.  Here on earth, however, everything is amply recorded.  I found no work of art too obscure or counter-culture that I could not find its reproduction on my cell phone, for free.  Archeologist of the future will love our age, which they might call, “The Age of Record Keeping.” 

Maybe there’s some psychological need at work.  Marshall McLuhan posited in the 60's that “the medium is the message,” meaning that the medium impacts the message and modifies it.  Perhaps we feel that works of art need to be processed through a mechanical medium, like a camera, in addition to the medium of our minds, in order to be modern, or post-modern, or something.  If that’s what people think, they’re wrong. 

"But," you might counter, "What’s so bad about taking pictures of great art in a museum setting if that’s what people want to do?"

For starters, museum photo-aggression eliminates, for everyone in the space, the contemplative and peaceful state of mind required to appreciate art.  How peaceful can you be when you have to be two feet from a painting before you can see it because, from further away, your view is obstructed by multiple hands raised high, positioning devices as if at a Stones reunion.  When at last you're close enough to see the painting, it doesn’t help that, while you’re finally viewing, say, Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” which you waited your whole life to see, a chorus of whir whir, click clicks attends you, along with multiple red dots that move across the surface of the painting like targeting lights from snipers trying to kill art itself.

I saw the same behavior last summer on another museum tour of the Netherlands, Belgium and London (the only relief I found, in London, was in the Tate Gallery’s almost empty William Blake room, where I learned that no one cares about Blake anymore).  It’s a puzzle to me why so many great European art museums tolerate unbridled photography, particularly in Spain, where museum staff are as alert to transgression as the TSA.  That alertness to respect for the art of their country, though it can be off-putting at first, is ultimately beneficial to the viewer.  In the Prado in Madrid, for instance, museum staff constantly monitor noise levels, emitting a harsh “Shh!” when decibels exceed a certain point- often a welcome service. Yet the only museum I visited that forbade photography was the Picasso in Barcelona.  Why do most museums permit unrestricted camera use, which causes at least as much distraction as noise? 

I implore museums to ban the use of cameras.  People would be able to look at art again, and sales of postcards and prints would dramatically increase at the gift shop! 

One sin too many

One sin too many

tipped the scales,

mortality, not life

prevails.

For Eve, you know

just could not wait,

her female hunger

hard to sate.

The serpent eyed her

thinking how

he'd transfer all his weakness now:

The weakness of not wanting much

the weakness of

his cold dark touch.

Take this, he hissed,

God won't be pissed;

the obedient creature

is not missed.

Eve was not sure

and for a while

thought this is naughty,

not my style.

But then she thought

our life is hard in

this infernally pleasant

garden;

God must know

that stories need

a conflict

for the mind to heed.

Thus did the serpent

choose most fit

she who knew

before she bit

The fleshy fruit

raised to her jaw,

the story is our god's,

she saw.

And Adam

more prone to be led

saw the truth of what she said.

Swallowing hard

he looked about

in mortal fear

he turned to shout:

"Oh no! We're in

the story line,

we'll have to be interesting,

not devine!"

Creation's ratings, now assured,

though we'd rather not have any.

We wonder, should we have demurred

before one sin too many?