Listics

Time and the airbrush removed
reality from the photo I carry
in my wallet, a portrait rescued
from a box of family memorabilia,
a picture to remind me of you.

Decades ago, as a high school student in a privileged, white USian community, I was proud to observe young women rejecting scholarship awards from the Daughters of the American Revolution. The awards then, I think, were reserved for those who were actual descendants of Revolutionary War veterans, and the organization itself was known as a reactionary group that had until the fifties enforced a “whites only” policy at their Constitution Hall venue in Washington D.C. As recently as 1984 they maintained a whites only membership practice, if not policy.

Each year the DAR would single out a young woman who exemplified virtues such as excellent academic achievement and anglo-saxon patrimony and the young woman would ascend the stage and reject the award. These were my role models.

Today at the University of Chicago Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions in the Divinity School. I wonder if she has searched her heart about accepting a seat named for Mircea Eliade, someone the Wikipedia reports as a Nazi sympathizer, a right wing Romanian ethnic nationalist, and reportedly an author of Iron Guard propaganda. I wonder if Ms. Doniger has thought as much about the politics of the man for whom her professorship is named as those high school girls thought when rejecting their DAR awards.

This question comes to mind mostly because I’ve been thinking about the fix we as a nation find ourselves in, having rejected all that is good about government in conformity to the right wing vision of Ms. Doniger’s predecessors (Eliade and Hayek) on the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and their colleagues at the University, Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman, and their followers.

I’m afraid that having eliminated principled economic controls on rapacious capitalists, we find ourselves today in much the same predicament our grandparents and great grandparents faced in 1929.

I can not imagine the grief you feel. But I read that it’s important to say his name to each other, to inform and remind ourselves that he really was alive, to listen to our own feelings and acknowledge the feelings of others, and to some day accept his passing and to remember him as we live and grow.

Technorati Tags: Joshua Beasley, sympathy to cj

There once was a woman who swapped me out for my academic adviser. I subsequently dropped out of grad school and went to San Francisco where I sat on the floor at Winterland with Hells Angels and hippies crumbling hash into tobacco and hand rolling some fairly potent cigarettes to share while we immersed ourselves in the Grateful Dead. I belong to a generation that titrated psychedelics measured in micrograms onto sugar cubes and ingested our own chemistry experiments. It wasn’t all bad.

The woman in question had a rough patch back in those days, an unwanted pregnancy with that feckless adviser, a pregnancy that she chose to terminate. This was reported to me recently by a common acquaintance who, when I asked him what news he might have of her, displayed an uncommon tactlessness, gracelessness, and lack of good will by sharing gossip that had better remained private, gossip that was rooted in a private matter that the feckless adviser had shared with him back in the day. There was a lot of sharing back in the day. Anyway, fast forwarding more decades than I care to count, the story continued. According to our mutual acquaintance, the woman had profound regrets regarding her choice to terminate that early pregnancy. She had found god and wanted to engage the now distant professor in some kind of spiritual healing ritual. Priests and that whole elaborate catholic take on a hierarchical afterlife were involved. Some mortification and ritual were required to get the babe into heaven and to clear the stain of sin from the souls of the parents. I don’t know if she was able to draw her former lover into that scene, nor do I quite understand why his presence would have been required for what sounds like a depressive exercise in self abuse. Whatever.

When I read this post at La Vache Qui Lit, I was reminded of that story… the story of the loss of an imaginary child and an obsession with setting things right. And I was led to so much more:

Alice Miller… two reactions to the loss of love in childhood, depression and grandiosity; the inner prison, the vicious circle of contempt, repressed memories, the etiology of depression, and how childhood trauma manifests itself in the adult.

Mohawks, skins, trendies, punks, hippies, everything… sadobabies

For your own good… “they gave me thorazine because they said I was hyper”

“…even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood no longer must remain shrouded in darkness.”

…signals depolarize the dendritic arbor and provide a crucial component toward synapse modulation and long-term potentiation. Furthermore, a train of backpropagating action potentials artificially generated at the soma can induce a calcium action potential at the dendritic initiation zone in certain types of neurons. Whether or not this mechanism is of physiological importance remains an open question.

It was all about making “an effort to look flamboyant in an attractive, luxuriant, beautiful, narcissistic way”

Laurie Frisch…

The Indian Adoption Project operated between 1958 and 1967 under the auspices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, with support and funding from the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA). CWLA participation bestowed an air of legitimacy on the practice of removing Indian children from their families basically because the “white man knew better,” and while adoptive placements under the Project itself were limited, it is estimated that more than one quarter of all Indian children were removed from their families and placed into white adoptive and foster homes or orphanages before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978.

Selling dolls that have been cunningly crafted to look so much like babies that you would have to smell them to know whether or not they are alive smacks of something perverse. I don’t get it. Buying these objects seems similarly perverse. I want to name mine Firenze Ghia.

Technorati Tags: if this isn’t sing-sing it must be baden baden, slavery, lifelike lawn jockeys

It’s not about politics. But it’s about people.

(… thanks to Bill for passing along the link)

We have two sons and we are very proud of both of them. But in this blog I seem to write much more about Ben than about Matt. That’s natural, because Ben is a writer, so when he publishes something I often link to it.

This post is about Matt, a man on a very different path from his brother. Matt lives in San Diego and works for a large company that has its headquarters on the east coast. He recently won an award that usually goes to an employee at headquarters. We were very proud of him.

Matt is an athlete. He’s a sociable and disciplined young man, academically talented, and completely bi-lingual. He has a wonderful wife named Wendy, and a pug named Lily. He’s earnest and diligent. He graduated from UCLA with honors a few years ago, a double major in International Economics and Spanish. A lot of the kids he competed with were native speakers of Spanish so we were very proud when our gringo graduated at the top of his class. He did post grad language training in Mexico, and went on to teach school in Honduras where he met Wendy.

Corporate success is a quiet thing, woven from successful projects, respect of one’s co-workers and managers, and a broad range of talents and skills. It’s often marked by increased responsibilities, steps along a promotional path, so we were very happy to hear that Matt will be starting a new job next month for his company. He’s been promoted to a more responsible position in a line unit. He gets a raise, a new job title, some support for a graduate program he plans to enter, and best of all…

His commute has been cut in half! Instead of fighting traffic for an hour each way every day, he will bounce down the freeway to an office about half-way between his house and the dog beach. That’s him in the picture with Lily at the dog beach on Thanksgiving Day.

Technorati Tags: Matt Paynter, Matt and Lily, Proud dad

Tagged to dig deep and reveal my inner-most bean…

First, the O’Neils lived next door to us when I was twelve and they had the best raspberries on Bridge Road (but not as many as they might have had if I hadn’t been such a raspberry gourmand).

b) Chuck was mean to my little brother and I’ve felt conflicted about my inadequate defense ever since. Chuck is now an Anglican priest in Kentucky, or he was the last I heard. This proves that even if you were born and raised fundamentalist, you can still beat up on people smaller than you and the grace of god may be given to you and you can climb the social ladder.

iii) I’m as mean as i ever was, but that’s no secret.

4) I read about the girls who were fighting at school and their odd interaction through MySpace with an anonymous mom chipping in and causing trouble and so forth, and I thought that I have no clue WTF is going on there, just as no one had a clue last spring when that troubled woman in Boulder and her mate used the PR power of the web to lash out and hurt people. I know how bad I felt though.

v. I don’t own my own tractor. I rent or borrow. Renting is cheaper, because if you borrow you have to come up with something nice to pay your neighbor back, and he won’t necessarily remember your attempts at finding the quid pro quo and so will probably think you owe him something anyway.

six I am a link whore, and Technorati exists to show me how bad business is on my street corner.

fin I think I would be happiest if I could simply be a food blogger. My Aunt Karen, Uncle Don’s wife, made the best red velvet cake. She had a secret recipe that she wouldn’t even share with Grandma.

do-over on iii) I like Google, I like Amazon, and my business, Sandhill Technologies, is a “Microsoft partner.” But then I also worked for Bank of America back in the day when the phrase “belly of the beast” was in common usage.

These tag deals usually require you to tag others in the hope that they will reveal seamy secrets of their own. “As if,” is the expected response from these tagstravaganzas, but just in case someone wants to grin and bare their souls, how about if we ask Helga, Ronni, Tamar, Norm, Doug, Winston, and Dean. Oh yeah, and Brian and Scruggs and Tom and Zo.

As if.