Category Archives: Ground Level Conditions

Biography Collage Ground Level Conditions Poetry

An Inside-Out Outsider: Jack Grapes and the Cherished Nouns of Stand Up Haiku

August 10, 2016 – 6:44 pm

Monday, August 10, 2016

The Phantom Dwelling of an Inside-Out Outsider: Jack Grapes and the Cherished Nouns of Stand Up Haiku

“So much ink wasted on verbs. / Stand still — cherished nouns.”

When Jack Grapes sent me a copy of WIDE ROAD to the edge of the world: 301 haiku and One Long Essay: “A Windswept Spirit” a month or so ago, I was surprised by both the size of the book and the print run. It’s an odd size, around three inches high and four inches wide, but at an inch thick, it’s enough of a block of paper to shoulder its way onto your bookshelf. Well over two-thirds of its 600 plus pages are devoted to a long essay on haiku, which specialists might read in its entirety, but I am going to pass on it. For one thing, the type is just too small; moreover, a spot check of randomly selected passages did not rev up my curiosity enough to want to start at the beginning and read it all the way through. I must be getting more impatient in my old age than I ever realized: an uninteresting look at WC Williams’s classic poem about a red wheelbarrow was in itself almost enough to deter any further perusal of this long treatise. Fortunately, I did keep browsing and encountered another section about a haiku club established by Grapes with a fellow fifth grade student back when the Brooklyn Dodgers won their only World Series. Inspired by one of Issa’s lesser known haiku, the elementary school haiku club ended up naming itself “The Bats.” Though I recollect a chapbook by C.K. Williams devoted to translations of Issa’s haiku, he is still not known as well as he should be in the United States, and you will probably find at least one of his poems in Grapes’s essay that you had not previously encountered.
Writing shit about new snow
for the rich
is not art.
Perhaps Grapes published the essay in a limited edition book out of a distrust of the permanence of the electronic library. The recent case of Dennis Cooper’s on-line material being completely jettisoned by corporate overlords is a cautionary tale about the internet, and so I’m happy that Grapes has chosen the road less traveled on these days to preserve his meandering essay. Nevertheless, having invested so much time on this project, he should post it in larger print on some website posthaste, and I do mean larger print. Obviously, the advantage of public distribution on a website is that there isn’t any limit to an essay’s length, but the scroll bar is actually a tougher adjudicator of a reader’s attention span. Not only does it not take long to let up on that descending pressure point, but nothing about the experience rewards one on a sensory level with anything comparable to the solace of paper’s caress of a fingertip. In the case of this essay, I would still cast my lot with a much shorter essay on paper.

For those who love short poems and who still prefer an experience of reading embedded in print culture, then I would recommend a magazine that I wish Grapes had sent some of his haiku to before he published this collection. If any periodical would have proved hospitable to Grapes’s renewed devotion to haiku, it would be none other than Hummingbird, which is currently edited by CX Dillhunt. The saddle-stitched magazine was founded over twenty years ago by Phyllis Walsh, and it almost folded after she died, but it’s a tribute to the inspiring quality of her editing that her admiring readership refused to let it expire. For those who read Grapes’s haiku and wish they could receive some regular infusion of short poems, then I urge you to subscribe to this magazine:
HUMMINGBIRD
7129 Lindfield Road
Madison, Wisconsin 53719

Until your first issue of HUMMINGBIRD arrives, I offer you several of my favorite haiku in “Wide Road”:

Circumcision day.
Little brother in his crib.
The bloody diaper.

Why is it five seven five?
Seven five seven
works just fine, if you ask me.

Okay pal, hands up
Gimme all your money, punk,
and your heartache, too.

The dialectic’s
undeniable power:
appropriation.

Once I was a dog.
No one was afraid of me.
I licked people’s hands.

I would be with you
if I could not be alone.
But I can. I can.

Where are we going?
Body outside of body
Mind inside of mind

We’re fresh in the grave
when the grim minister speaks:
blah blah blah blah blah

This last one I’ve cited is Grapes’s response to one of the haiku by Issa that he cites in his essay. Like Issa, Grapes is by his own account “an inside-out outsider.” As uneven as this book is, it still remains worth tracking down, and any serious library will want to have a copy on its shelves.

Jack will be reading along with other contributors (Meg Eden and Mari Werner) to recent issues of RATTLE poetry magazine on Sunday, August 14, at the La Canada/Flintridge Bookstore and Coffee House,
1010 Foothill Blvd, at 5pm.
www.flintridgebooks.com

His featured poem in the most recent issue of RATTLE is “Any Style,” and you can find it at: http://www.rattle.com/any-style-by-jack-grapes/

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Ground Level Conditions Philosophy Presidental Election

The New Covenant of Public Mobility: Public Transportation as Beneficial Employment

August 7, 2016 – 9:58 pm

Monday, August 8, 2016

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-metro-rail-cars-20160807-snap-story.html

If you use the above link, you will find a report in the LA Times to the effect that ridership on the Metro system has surpassed the capacity of rail cars available to carry passengers. While this is bad news for those who are making use of public transportation, it is also an encouraging sign of a shift away from automobile driving. Nevertheless, the fact remains that freeways are more jammed than ever, and it will take a radical solution to relieve this ecological catastrophe. Hence, today’s blog entry:

THE NEW COVENANT OF PUBLIC MOBILITY:
Public Transportation as Beneficial Employment

Southern California has almost seven percent of the nation’s population. This regional density cannot help but make transporting residents out of and back into their residential neighborhoods a daily, massive spasm of wasted energy. While freeway congestion in the Los Angeles metropolitan area was renown even a half century ago, those who lived here in the early 1970s can remember being on a major freeway at midnight and seeing relatively few cars. By the late 1980s, however, freeway traffic became a constantly whirling ferris wheel, and it has only intensified in the years since. As Los Angeles has become the first county in the United States to surpass the 10,000,000 mark in population, and the economy has rebounded from the Great Recession, traffic now imposes debilitating stress on every driver and passenger at every moment of the day and night.

The expansion of a rail system has done almost nothing to alleviate the cantankerous average speeds of driving on the 405, the 710, the 101, the 60, and the 10. The larger regional flow is nothing short of being even more exasperating: the drive from DTLA to downtown San Diego can take four to five hours. I am not certain that getting even a third of the people currently in cars to use some combination of rail and bus will alter and significantly reduce the congested circulation of public movement, but unless that target has a feasible plan to accompany it, the air quality, public health and the emotional well being of Southern California’s frustrated citizens are going to continue to decline.

The problem with getting people to use public transportation is that it costs people too much to use it. I do not at all mean the cost of the ticket. I am talking about time and the pressures each individual faces in maximizing the cost-income ratio of each unit of time. Let me be blunt: this article does not merely propose that public rail and bus transportation be free, but that individuals riding that transportation be paid for doing so. There is no other way that a significant number of people are going to start using non-automotive transportation unless it is in their best interests, and by that I mean their pocketbook.

In this renovation of the social covenant, each time a person who is a resident of Southern California boards a bus or a metro rail car or an Amtrack rail car in Southern California, she or he would swipe a card at the turnstile entrance, and this card registers the journey, for which the person receives a reduction in their state income tax. Given that California’s state income tax is already far below what it should be, the commitment by each person to use public transportation would quickly shift on each domestic ledger to being a rebate at the end of the year that would put the average federal tax return to shame.

In other words, time spent getting to and from work would be paid labor. One wouldn’t, of course, make as much on the bus or metro car as on the job, but it would not be idle time spent among desultory strangers.

Unless each person is recognized as someone whose time is valuable enough to be compensated for when they board a form of public transportation, then we will never reduce the insanity of automobile addiction. As for individuals who bicycle to work, such self-motivated movement would provide even greater percentages of payment.

I am perfectly aware of the effrontery of my proposal and how it will be met with scornful disbelief by those who regard public transportation as a necessary evil. Who rides buses? – Why, the poor and the disenfranchised! Why should they be paid to ride the bus? Well, yes, it’s true that they will now be paid to do something that they are already doing, and what’s the benefit in that? How would that increase ridership by those who may grouse about traffic, but all the while also enjoy showing their social status in the form of their expensive automobiles?

The benefit that the working poor receive, it should be made clear, would be only in proportion to their income. If someone is only taking home $25,000 a year, their rebate for riding public transportation is not going to be the same as someone who takes home $75,000 a year. If we want to get the well-off from behind their steering wheels, I propose an ever escalating rebate for those who make more money when they ride public transportation.

It may disappoint some friends for them to hear this, but I am not some socialist egalitarian. I believe in a performative meritocracy that is extremely imperfect, but nevertheless is the only feasible means to adjudicate any system of social rewards. I am not putting you, Ms. or Mister Executive, on the same footing as the janitor or the person who clears your dishes at the restaurant. If you board a bus, your rebate will be significantly higher. If you still choose to drive your BMW to work, fine. Those who work under you, however, have not had substantial cost of living raises for many years, and this is one of the ways to begin to redistribute the wealth of the one percent.

Now the obvious question becomes one of paying for this. Someone has to foot the bill, and it is high time for California to stop being the tax trough for the federal government, which makes daily stops to feed at our economy but provides proportionately little support for our infrastructure. If this nation wishes to run on individual cars operated by gasoline, then the cost of gasoline in the rest of the country must go up. Public health in Southern California is not a local issue. If we are to improve the health of seven percent of the nation’s population, it is going to take a national investment, and it begins with a radical and yes – hostile takeover – of ideological self-identity. Our sense of income entitlement must be transformed if the flow of public life is to become sustainable for the rest of this century in this crucial corridor of cultural production. We move; we are moved: the boundaries between public transportation and privatized income must be intermingled. It is time for the populace of Southern California to stop playing by house rules of consumer individuality, and to demand an equity stake in the very manner in which we engage in the commerce of public economics and cultural development.

This is an improvised manifesto, and it is meant to start a conversation, not to be some definitive solution. I would be more than happy to hear about other, even more radical proposals that might shift the balance of environmental and economic power.

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Baseball Ground Level Conditions

The Baseball Races of 2016: Two Months to Go

August 7, 2016 – 8:36 am

August 7, 2016

If the baseball season were a race track, this year could be said to be leaving the backstretch and heading into the far turn, With slightly more than fifty games left to play, the teams that have floundered are spread out like listless mounts being ridden by wistful jockeys, while the superior teams are holding their respective positions at a steady clip. Here is a ten day spread of the total win records of the top teams in the National League:

Midnight, Thursday, July 28, 2016
Chicago Cubs – 60 wins
Washington – 59 wins
San Francisco – 59 wins
LA Dodgers – 57 wins

Miami – 55 wins
St. Louis Cardinals 54 wins
NY Mets – 53 wins
Pittsburgh Pirates — 52 wins

Midnight, August 7, 2016

Chicago Cubs – 68 wins
Washington – 65 wins
San Francisco – 63 wins
LA Dodgers – 61 wins

Miami – 58 wins
St. Louis Cardinals 58 wins
NY Mets – 56 wins
Pittsburgh Pirates — 55 wins

With the acquisition of Arnoldis Chapman for the duration of this season, the Cubs are virtually a sure bet to be in the playoffs. In a similar manner, if the Nationals and Giants fall short of making the playoffs, it will be a long winter for their fans. They will not be saying, “Wait til next year,” but “What the hell went wrong last year?” For the second quartet of teams, however, the allure of the only possible playoff spot has already reached postseason intensity.

The Pirates, sad to say, have emphatically run up the flag and signaled that their season is not going to finish in the post-season win, place, or show list. In trading Mark Melancon, their very consistently successful closer from the past two seasons, the management of the Pirates has all but said to their team’s locker room that they have fallen short this year. Three rookies have already started games this season as fill-ins for faltering or injured veterans. The majority of the starting rotation (Niese, Liriano, and Locke) has performed at a level that one would more often associate with the pitching staff of the Minnesota Twins the past couple of seasons. (Niese and Liriano have also gotten shipped out, in separate transactions from Melancon’s eviction.) Even so, if Andrew McCutchen was having another All-Star season, the team might still be in the Wild Card race. Unfortunately, McCutchen is having a season as disappointing as Bryce Harper’s. As it stands, it’s highly likely that the Pirates could revert to their more familiar pattern of a losing record.

In some ways, I feel as if I have already entered the Hot Stove League portion of the year. This is especially true since the presidential election is in full swing and getting more and more of the attention that it deserves. Still, one needs some means of keeping one’s distance from that which one has little control over, and my childhood affection for baseball still provides the best escape. I am not unaware of the irony that most fans of professional baseball teams are probably voting for Trump. Certainly those who attend MLB games on any regular basis are probably supporting Trump. All of us succumb to some level of cognitive dissonance, and I pretend that the company I keep in this hobby is not relevant to the pleasure I experience. On the other hand, my appreciation for baseball derives in part because at least the players are individuals whose talents are judged objectively. Unlike the fashion show of American poetry, in which talent and knowledge are far less important than your professional connections, baseball players have to make it on their skills and determination to get better. Poetry, as a public art, is a social game. The game of baseball is a democracy of merit.

Though I lacked any athletic skill as a youth, the abstracted and rule-bound choreography of the game always fascinated me. One youthful memory of baseball, in particular, involves rulebook questions. The idea of this language game was to test one’s knowledge of the rulebook by creating improbable situations and asking what you would do if you were the umpire. The historic triple play that the National pulled off against the Giants the other day, in which the first baseman snagged a low line drive (first out), stepped on first to catch the runner off the bag (second out), and threw to third, where the fielder stepped on that bag to nab the runner way down the line (third out), made me think of a variant on that play.

Suppose, instead, the runner on first keeps complete balance as the ball is hit almost parallel – and just barely fair — down the first base foul line, and he lunges back to the base so quickly that the first baseman doesn’t try to double him up after making a catch just six inches off the ground, but instead throws directly to the third baseman, where the runner has been more careless and anticipated too intensely the chance to sprint home. This runner, who plays catcher and has far below average speed, twists his ankle slightly as he scrambles back to third and sees the first baseman’s throw go astray, bouncing off the fence behind third base and rolling towards the left fielder, who is charging in. Both the runners on second and third use this error to tag up and advance, and when the left fielder fumbles the ball, the runner from second base decides to head to the plate, too, for he stayed closer to the bag and had tagged up in the instant the first baseman’s throw was darting towards third, and took off for third the instant the ball skipped past the third baseman’s glove.

Unfortunately for the team at bat, the exceptionally quick runner on second — sprinting head down once he sees the third base coach’s signal to head home — passes the runner hobbling from third before he gets to the plate (second out), and the runner on third ends up being tagged out on an extraordinarily precise throw by the left fielder. Now that would be the most unusual triple play ever.

One way this outcome could turn into a trick question would be to imagine that the throw from the left fielder hits the runner from second base, thereby allowing the runner from third to touch home plate without being tagged. Does the runner from second being out (at the instant he passes the runner on third) affect the status of the ball in play?

Whatever answer you might give, the chances are that this century will end without a 3-7-2 triple play (with an “E” inserted for the first baseman’s errant throw), except in my private tape loop pleasure of watching the slow motion uncoiling of each existential, imaginary pitch, and that is the exquisite solace this game has given me for over a half-century.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

The President-Elect and the Inflationary Crisis of 2018

August 6, 2016 – 3:29 pm

Saturday, August 6, 2016

President-Elect HILLARY CLINTON AND THE INFLATIONARY CRISIS OF 2018

The presidential election dial has been set to the volume level of “monotony,” and it is only early August. The thought of having to endure another three months of political posturing is more than cruel and unusual punishment. Does anyone really need a debate at this point between Trump and Clinton? During the GOP primary debates, the entire nation saw how Trump treated political opponents, and most of the nation should be able to vouch for how well Hillary Clinton held her own in debating Barack Obama, who has gone on to become a fairly popular president. Is anything to be gained from Trump’s attempt to impose a vitriolic conversation onto prime time?

My anguish is genuine. This election seems like an animal afflicted with a terminal disease. Please, I beg of the electorate, euthanize this election’s interminable, pointless campaigning. Hold the vote now. Declare a state of national emergency in which everyone gets two days off. On the first day, everyone should sit down and think about their vote, and then the next day vote.

With sanity restored, those who voted for Clinton can quietly celebrate and those who preferred someone else (which is, in fact, the majority of people who regard themselves as Republicans) can begin to figure out how to move forward from here. For the most part, in fact, the “historical” aspect of Clinton’s election will soon fade from the public sphere, and will primarily surface within the more private, domestic evolution of feminist history as it continues to affect the Millennials and their daughters and sons.

In electing a proud policy wonk, in fact, let’s cut to the chase. President-elect Hillary Clinton will face an unusual situation: she will be the first Democrat to be elected President in the past sixty years to have a fairly good economy in place on her inauguration day. Note that I didn’t say it was a “solid” or “vibrant” economy, but compare the economy of the past four years with the following Presidential terms:

1972-1976 – Presidents Nixon and Ford — Does no one except me and academic economists remember the WIN buttons of 1975? “Whip Inflation Now.” The recession of 1974 was the first economic punch in the gut of young baby boomers, and little did we realize how harder future punches were too get.

1980 – 1988 – The Recession of 1982 ended up with unemployment topping 12 percent. If anyone doubts that Reagan was born with a golden voice and an ability to make any critic look unpatriotic, then consider how easily he won reelection with a dismal economy squeezing every working person’s kitchen table. The savings and loan crisis in 1987-1988 just about torpedoed his vice-president’s candidacy, but negative campaigning won the day for the first President Bush.

1988-1992 – The first Bush presidency ended with an economy that was reeling so badly that Bill Clinton should have won much more handily than he did.

2000-2008 – When the second President Bush left office, he would have been thrilled if the economy of the country had only been as dismal as it was back in 1992, under his father’s administration.

All of this is to say that Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all took office when the nation had experienced some degree of recession in the previous four years, ranging from a significant economic contraction to one so grave that it verged on catastrophe for the wealthy, and was an outright catastrophe for working people.

In contrast, President-elect Hillary Clinton will be called upon to manage a different kind of crisis, and I am puzzled as to why no one has yet brought this up. Jimmy Carter ended up serving as President for only one term in large part because the rampant inflation of the late 1970s was even more debilitating than the recession under President Ford. How will Hillary Clinton manage to help workers, whose wages have long been held down, gain a greater share of economic prosperity without initiating another round of inflation? In answering that question, she will need to remember the consequences of inflation on the baby boomer generation, a huge swath of which will be in peril of seeing their retirement years sink into the morass of ignominious poverty. Pay raises for working people are long overdue, but if the minimum age becomes $15 an hour, how will those on the fixed incomes of social security ever survive the inevitable inflation to follow?

These are questions that President-Elect Hillary Clinton needs to answer as soon as possible, if she wants to overcome the distrust that many people have of her, including those who intend to vote for her. I await her immediate response.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016

August 5, 2016 – 3:23 pm

Friday, August 5, 2016

Trump Towers as the Berlin Bunker of 2016

Earlier today, I posted on the theme of “President-Elect Hillary Clinton,” in part because I believe that it’s important to speak out loud the reality that we must bring to pass, if this planet is to have even the slightest chance of playing host to human civilization for another century. While it is true that my personal political inclination is the left of Bernie Sanders, I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton in November, and I hope that anyone who wavers on making a similar commitment takes serious note of what is happening in her opponent’s campaign.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie, for instance, recently rebuked his party’s nominee for his disgraceful attacks on a Gold Star family. Now mind you: Chris Christie is the politician Trump appointed to be the head of the official Presidential Transition Team, which each candidate has in place to help accelerate the process of establishing a new administration. It’s hard to top something like Trump’s own hand-picked, most trusted assistant publicly telling him off, but there are still 100 odd days to go til Election Day, and I do mean “odd days.” My rule of thumb for judging anyone who runs for public office has always been very simple: If you can’t run a campaign, you won’t be able to run the office you’re on the ballot for.

I predict that Trump’s campaign will go down as the most ignominiously managed one in the entire history of the United States. I doubt it will be any consolation to his supporters that someone has to finish last in any ranking, whether it be in an athletic competition or in the political arena; and I would rush to remind them that their support of Trump does not mean they are equivalent losers. On the other hand, I ask them to reconsider their vote before they cast it in November, and thereby spare themselves the shame of having to lie twenty years from now about supporting him on Election Day, 2016.

In particular, Trump’s advocates should take a long, hard look at how he has bragged that he received over 14,000,000 votes in the primaries, “more than Dwight D. Eisenhower received, and he won World War II.”
How can any person in the electorate not tremble and quail at the unfathomable ego of Donald Trump? Let’s rephrase it slightly so that its full import is heard: “Eisenhower won World War II,” he says,” and I got more votes in the primaries than he did.” The implication is easy to detect, and if it’s not, go get a huge cup of very strong coffee.

Do those of you who support Trump not understand his megalomania? Donald Trump is not worthy of driving Eisenhower’s jeep! Is there anyone who believes that we would have won World War II with Trump in charge of the Normandy Invasion? Pleeeaazzzzzeee…. there is no laugh track that matches this preposterous absurdity.

As a final side-note, Trump’s ignorance of basic mathematical ratios is rather disturbing. There are many more people in the United States now than in 1952. Of course you might well get more total votes, but did you get more votes in proportion to the number of eligible voters, Mr. Trump. His boast is like a movie company saying that “our new film had a bigger box office than The Sound of Music.” The obvious problem is that not only are there more people in the United States available to attend a movie theater in 2016, but they also pay more for a ticket. Of course the ticket gross will be larger for your movie, one would say to a contemporary movie producer. It doesn’t mean your movie is better than one that premiered 50 years ago. Such basic use of information seems to be beyond Trump’s ability to make relevant comparisons.

I am, of course, not the only one to point this discrepancy out, but in the flurry of daily sound-bites, we must not let the most provocative comments lose their importance in the defamiliarization sweepstakes. Trump’s grandiosity needs continual puncturing, given that he has proven capable of an insidious degree of instantaneous political triage.

For additional information on Donald Trump’s comparison of himself with General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower, see:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-most-votes-reagan-eisenhower_us_577d5f52e4b01edea78c4336

In the end, anyone so deluded as to rank himself above Dwight D. Eisenhower is in such serious psychological trouble that it can only be categorized as a death spiral of psychotic fantasy. When — not if, but when — Trump loses, he should be immediately put under a suicide watch. One must have compassion even for those who exploit the prejudice of others to whip up fear and loathing. Let us hope that he seeks professional psychological help in 2017, instead of turning Trump Towers into a parody of Hitler in his Berlin bunker.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

President-Elect Hillary Clinton: You’ll Soon Get Used to Saying It

August 5, 2016 – 2:34 pm

President-Elect Hillary Clinton: You’ll Soon Get Used to Saying it

Back in the summer and fall of 1992, my first wife. Cathay Gleeson, and I worked very hard for the election of Bill Clinton. Cathay was a two-decade active union member of the CWA (Communication Workers of America) through her job as line maintenance specialist for GTE (which is now known as Verizon), and I was a typesetter at a major weekly newspaper for the music industry. I distinctly remember the moment when we began to smell victory: Bill Clinton scheduled a rally in Orange County in the campaign’s closing weeks, and that was the crucial hint about how the election would turn out. Nobody who is worried about winning an election wastes time in the opponent’s heartland.

Labor Day is the traditional start of the final sprint to Election Day, but Clinton had not repeated Michael Dukakis’s mistake, in 1988, of believing he could coast on favorable poll numbers and kick back and relax after the Democratic convention. Rather, Clinton had hit the road with VP-nominee Al Gore the morning after the convention, and they were going full speed by Labor Day. The sign that things were going well is that they did not merely hold an event in Los Angeles, but took the fight directly to the ideological reservoir of the GOP in California. I remember that Cathay and I did not, in fact, get into the standing-room only rally, and that after waiting for a couple of hours, we left the parking lot somewhat disappointed not to have seen Clinton. We heard later that he had come out and briefly addressed those who couldn’t get in.

Despite the enormous proclivity that Donald Trump has for self-inflicted dismemberment, it is too early to get over-confident about the upcoming election; three months in politics is the academic equivalent of two full semesters, and any dean of a college or chair of a department knows how quickly things can change from September to June. Nevertheless the news that Meg Whitman has decided to support Hillary Clinton and to help raise money for her has to be regarded as at least the equivalent of Bill Clinton holding a rally in Orange County. The words “President-Elect Hillary Clinton” already simmer with a tantalizing degree of palpable anticipation.

For Democratic liberals, however, Ms. Whitman’s declaration of support is an additional dollop of sobering news. How likely is Hillary Clinton to be at all liberal in her economic policies if she has actively sought the support of a Republican such as Ms. Whitman? The supporters of Bernie Sanders had better get used to Clinton’s policy choices, though. If Bill Clinton was the best Republican president of the 20th century (as some in the Democratic party labeled him by the end of his second term), then Hillary Clinton seems destined to secure her husband’s legacy even more so than Barack Obama’s.

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Ground Level Conditions Presidental Election

Hillary Clinton’s Nomination

July 28, 2016 – 5:59 pm

A Glass Ceiling Breaking, or a Generation’s Windshield Smash-Up

(The Forecast)
…. the sound of Hillary Clinton breaking the Glass Ceiling is echoed by the tape loop of another sound of artery-severing, splintering glass: impoverished baby boomers still hearing in their heads the horrible crashing noise of their lives going through the Windshield of the Great Recession.

(The Larger Weather Map)

Tonight, the Democratic National Convention will feature Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech of her nomination to be the next President of the United States. As she was no doubt going through a final rehearsal for that speech in Philadelphia, an infinitely more ordinary citizen (which is to say, the author of this blog) was going about yet another day, during his so-called summer off from teaching, of trying to find an affordable place for his mother to live at, as she descends into the mists of cognitive disability.

Oddly enough, Linda and I watched a film last night that struck more closely home than I anticipated. Redwood Highway stars Shirley Knight as a grandmother who undertakes a 60 mile walk to her granddaughter’s wedding. In the course of her journey, we get glimpses of the oncoming dissolution of her mental faculties, but her hallucinations also show the depth of love she still feels for her dead husband, who was an enlisted sailor when they first met. All in all, it was not a film that I want my mother to see right now. It would simply make her feel too sad. I would recommend it, though, as an independent film more than worth the viewing.

My mother’s situation is rather complex, with both things to be grateful for and things that are worrisome. Like my father, my mother is a World War II veteran, and she is therefore eligible for support from the VA. About two years ago, I initiated her application for this assistance, and the money she receives is very helpful. It is not enough, though, to supplement her social security to the point where she can afford the kind of care she requires. It’s a very tough challenge at this point, and I am scheduled to visit Rowentree Gardens, a place run by the Quakers in Stanton, California, which might possibly work out.

In the meantime, I am all too aware of how little has been said at the DNC about the oncoming crisis of baby boomers growing old. The attention paid to the young is in striking contrast to the silence about the baby boom generation, which suffered from a one-two punch of unemployment and pension devastation not seen since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, both Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders seemed utterly oblivious to the one-sidedness of their “visions” for the consequences of this election:

“In this election and every election, it is about who will have the power to shape our children for the next four or eight years of their lives.”
First Lady Michelle Obama on her support for Hillary Clinton

“This election is about, and must be about, the needs of the American people and the kind of future we create for our children and our grandchildren.”
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders

Do not the needs of the American people include the generation born between 1946 and 1954? “This election is about ending the 40 year decline of the American middle class,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, in addressing the Democratic National Convention on July 25, 2016. That decline fell most heavily on the millions of workers born between 1946 and 1954. After working very hard for decade after decade, this segment of Americans found itself not only unemployed and too old to find a new job during the Great Recession, but also found that its retirement pensions had been totally gutted. Obama threw this generation of workers under the bus, but it will get even worse if Paul Ryan and Company get empowered by a Republican in the White House. If Trump is elected President, this unfortunate generation will find itself crushed under the heel of a contemptuous and ungrateful ruling class that will cackle with delight at their plight. Anyone between the age of 62 and 70 who votes for Trump is voting for an absolutely miserable end of life experience.

But it is not just the GOP that is the problem. It must be pointed out that Sanders left unanswered one important question when he cited a “40 year decline of the American middle class”: Which party held the White House for 20 of those years. Here’s the roll call — Jimmy Carter (4 years); Bill Clinton (8 years); Barack Obama (8 years). So doesn’t the Democratic party deserve at least some of the “credit” for this decline? If the Sanders faction remains insidiously contumacious, it is in large part because the Democratic party wants to pretend that it did not acquiesce in this decline. In point of fact, it actively collaborated with those economic forces that accelerated this decline. To believe that the spouse of Bill Clinton is going to reverse the very decline that Bill Clinton himself helped organize and enforce is living in a hemisphere of massive denial.

All of this is to say that the sound of Hillary Clinton breaking the Glass Ceiling is echoed by the tape loop of another sound of breaking glass: impoverished baby boomers still hearing in their heads the horrible crashing noise of their lives going through the Windshield of the Great Recession.

It’s possible — unlikely, but still possible — that Hillary Clinton will prove to be a better President than her spouse or Barack Obama. The latter, in fact, said that she was more qualified and prepared to take on the rigors of the Oval Office than either Bill or himself. It’s possible that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be remembered as one of the ten most important and effective presidents in our nation’s history. It’s possible that Baby Boomers floundering at minimum wage jobs at the age of 67 will be offered more than the starvation pension of social security. For the sake of the young people, as well as the Baby Boomers who are their grandparents, aunts, and uncles, I hope that the possibility of political redemption for the Democratic party ripens into actuality.

Finally, it must be said that it was a childish fantasy on the part of the Sanders’ faction to reinforce the GOP’s mantra of “Lock her up.” What were these pathetic, petulant brats thinking? Any voter self-categorized as independent who was watching the convention would have to wonder about the possible truthfulness of Trump’s egregious distortions. “Gee, if even Democrats are chanting ‘Lock her up,’ maybe Trump is right.” In yet another election that might be decided by less a thousand votes, the supporters of Sanders really ought to stop living with the make-believe that their candidate was robbed of the nomination. Sanders lost, and by a much larger margin than Hillary Clinton did to Obama in 2008. To those who still keeping fanning the embers of “Feel the Bern,” I say, start organizing for 2024, when your generation had better have someone ready to step up to the plate.

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The Plasticity of Reenactment’s Homage

July 27, 2016 – 1:07 pm

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

The Plasticity of Reenactment’s Homage

I first read John Rechy’s novels back in the late 1960s, when my roommate Tony Landmesser loaned me his copies of City of Night and Numbers. In many ways, Rechy’s forthright accounts of hustling on the streets of Los Angeles enabled me to have an immediate context for the poetry of Leland Hickman, when he sent me the first five sections of “Tiresias” to publish in Bachy magazine’s second issue. There is more of an echo of Rechy in Lee’s writing than he was ever willing to admit; the echo, however, is not so much an imitation as a complementary flowering of the compressed chaos that both Rechy and Hickman drew upon as the groundswell of their internal muses.
A pair of Rechy’s novels are the current project of Los Angeles artist Tim Youd, who has embarked on the close reading of typing up 100 novels. He finished his reiteration of City of Night about three weeks ago, and I would guess that he has almost finished – if not in fact finished – typing up Numbers. According to an article in the L.A. Times, he began working on Numbers at the Fern Dell entrance to Griffith Park on July 6. Given the heat wave of recent weeks, I wouldn’t blame him if his pace had slowed down a bit, and he were still working on this book.
For those who might be working as scholars on Rechy’s writing, I would recommend taking a look at the interview that Lee Hickman conducted with Rechy on February 7, 1980. It was published in issue number 17 of Bachy magazine. To read an interview with Tim Youd about his experience of typing up Rechy’s City of Night, see:

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-tim-youd-city-of-night-20160628-snap-story.html

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A Petition to Restore Dennis Cooper’s Blog

July 24, 2016 – 1:34 pm

Sunday, July 24, 2016

A Petition on Behalf of Dennis Cooper’s Blog and E-Mail Account

Thanks to a notice posted by Brian Kim Stefans, I became aware yesterday of a major literary crisis. Dennis Cooper’s blog and e-mail accounts have been summarily deleted by Google. He was not given any prior notification or warning about this public dismemberment of his creative and cultural work, nor has he received a single sentence from Google explaining their actions.

Mark Doten has started a petition to demand the restoration of Dennis Cooper’s writing to a domain of his own control. You can join me in signing this petition at:
https://www.change.org/p/google-restore-dennis-cooper-s-blog-and-email/u/17375624?tk=BQ7EC_yqjQ5JU3WsELxKKMVO0pMDJkdX5wonCb2tAGQ&utm_source=petition_update&utm_medium=email

As Mark Doten pointed out in a post on his July 21st Facebook page, “….surely the blog contained 10,000 hours or more of Dennis’s labor.” I myself can testify to the longstanding work ethic that Dennis possesses. No one, including me, worked as hard as Dennis did back in the late 1970s and early 1980s to make poetry more visible in Los Angeles. It seemed as if every time I stopped by Beyond Baroque’s New Comp Graphics to do some typesetting for my own Momentum press, there was Dennis at the Compugraphic keyboard, pounding out page after page for some issue of his magazine, Little Caesar or a book for his press. What part of work does Google not understand? It takes substantial work to accomplish the body of work produced by Dennis Cooper. In contrast, anybody in a state slightly more alert than torpor can sit at a machine and with a couple dozen keystrokes, gleaned from an operations manual, obliterate another person’s thoughtful cultural work. It doesn’t take much effort to figure out who is more admirable.

I suspect, by the way, that the hand of a censor is at work in this instance. Many of us might think that the trial of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the mid-1950s settled once and for all the rights of serious writers to have their work protected from censorship. I am afraid that the battle to keep the censoring hand from the writer’s keyboard is never completely won. The situation is rather like that of abortion rights and the issue of a woman’s control over her own body. Roe versus Wade was just an important turning point; so, too, was Ferlinghetti’s victory in a San Francisco court. I certainly hope that Dennis Cooper does not have to take this case to court. Doten’s petition, if it receives the vigorous support it deserves, might well help resolve this crisis before it reaches that point.

Fortunately, in promoting this petition, Dennis is not without friends and allies who are willing to speak up on his behalf. If you want to find out more about this crisis of imagination and censorship, please read Jennifer Krasinski’s article at the “Culture Desk” at The New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/why-did-google-erase-dennis-coopers-beloved-literary-blog

And once again, I urge you to join me and over 3,000 other people in signing Mark Doten’s petition to Google.

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Why Lift One’s Arms? They’ll Shoot You Anyway — The Election Cycle: 2016’s Home Stretch

July 22, 2016 – 1:31 pm

Friday, July 22, 2016
Why Lift One’s Arms: They’ll Shoot You Anyway —
THE ELECTION CYCLE: 2016’s Home Stretch

Part One: “not merely a party with little future, but one without any past, either”

The line-up of speakers at next week’s Democratic National Convention is unusually remarkable for its two-term presidential presence. Compared to the just completed RNC, the DNC verges on superfluity. When was the last time that a national political convention had a current two-term president addressing party activists and donors as well as a two-term former president? The GOP has had no such back-to-back figures in its convention’s confabulations for well nigh a century. A combination of scandalous or dismal Republican presidencies in the past half-century led up to the current convention, in which no one who significantly contributed to any of that parties successful campaigns for the White House has had any role. It would seem to be not merely a party with little future, but one without any past, either.

The absence of President George W. Bush from this convention is even more striking than the token role he was consigned to four years ago in Tampa, Florida. For a two-term president to have his nationally broadcast endorsement speech in 2012 limited to a videotaped infomercial is the political equivalent of having to drive an ice cream truck in a neighborhood of the very elderly and having to watch what little ice cream is purchased melt in their hands because they can’t remember what they just bought. Bush had to have felt humiliated. Deservedly so, but still a stinging slight.

George W.’s decision to skip the coronation in Cleveland, therefore, probably has as much to do with his desire to even the score for the 2012 putdown as it does with his distaste for Trump. Jeb Bush cannot, of course, be blamed for absenting himself, either. His father, the former President George H.W. Bush, and his mother, are nearing the end of their lives, and who in either political party would prefer to have your nose rubbed in your rejection by a wealthy, smug prevaricator instead of sharing quiet recollections with your parents?

In contrast, the Democratic Party has a line-up that would be nothing short of the shining envy of political operatives at any point in this perishing republic’s history:

Monday: First Lady Michelle Obama and Senator Bernie Sanders
Tuesday: Former President Bill Clinton
Wednesday: Current President Barack Obama
Thursday: Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton

On oratorical skill and charisma alone, the first three nights will be worth intermittently taking in, and it’s hard to believe that Hillary won’t experience some slight bounce. She will need it: despite having a huge lead in fundraising, HRC is not so much mired in distaste as disbelief. She is without doubt the most experienced and qualified politician running for President right now, and if elected, she will most likely soldier on in the same stolid manner that President Obama has done. Obamacare will continue to have its quirks resolves; abortion rights will be upheld; gay marriage will remain viable; and climate change will receive at least token attention. But the keywords are qualified politician. She is a brilliant bureaucrat with a background as a lawyer, but she sees social problems as being primarily legitimation narratives for her right to power. The problem is that the following questions under her administration have no other outcome than an emphatic negative: Will my life as an aging person significantly change for the better? Will my students really find that their post-degree lives suddenly have more entry-level options? Will I be able to worry less that each time I say hello and goodbye to an African-American acquaintance or friend that this is the last time I will see them alive? She has no actual plan to improve matters on the ground.

The last question, by the way, is not hyperbole. Yes, it has gotten that bad. The open season on African-Americans has reached the point where even a man flat on his back on the ground, completely motionless, with his arms up in the air, fingers like talons of powerlessness spread tautly wide open, is shot by a police officer. With his arms up, I might add, longer than I would be able to hold my arms up.

If voters’ hands are up, raised high in despondency, it is because “power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” and the secret Second Amendment reads: “the rights of a well-regulated police review board shall not be infringed upon by those whose neighborhoods are subject to police assault.” If Clinton wanted to show leadership, she would directly address the concerns of the Black Lives Matter movement in her acceptance speech.

Trust me, though, with the following exercise: if you hold up your arms up long enough during her speech this coming week, you’ll not only hear the words better, but the unctuous tepidity of her vision will become slow motion torture, the syllables elongated by her neoliberal blandness. Yes, you should vote for her in November, and I intend to do so. But my heart will be as heavy as my hopelessly lifted arms.

(to be continued on as needed basis)

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