Bumping up again

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I’ll be bumping this post up to the top for only a couple more days. Please scroll down for new posts.]

[ADDENDUM 6/17: For those who mentioned that I should change from PayPal because of what they did to Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs, I’m happy to report that Paypal has restored her account and apologized for the offense. So I feel okay staying with them, since it’s such a bother to change.]

I’m passing the hat once again. I’ve decided to do this twice-yearly, so as not to overwhelm you with my pleas, and the time’s come round once more (time passes so quickly when you’re enjoying yourselves).

Profuse and heartfelt thanks to everyone who originally donated last fall, and profuse and heartfelt thanks to those who made donations in the meantime, and profuse and heartfelt thanks to those who are about to do so.

Here’s a repost of my original explanation:

passhat.jpg

Well, I’ve done it; I’m officially passing the hat.

Ever since PJ ads disappeared last spring I’ve been mulling it over, and I’ve finally succumbed and placed a Paypal button on my right sidebar. It’s the yellow one that says, “Donate.”

I would appreciate donations, but they’re hardly required. Nor should you feel the least bit bad if you decide not to click on that button. I’d do all of this anyway, for free—as I did at the beginning, and as I have for the last few months.

But I would be deeply grateful if you do decide to contribute, whether it be a penny or quite a few dollars. Every single bit— be it large or be it small—adds up, and it all helps a great deal. And so I thank you in advance.

I will probably repeat this notice every now and then, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat. But I’ll be discreet about it. And it’s a lot better than those fund-raising drives they have on NPR, isn’t it? No interruption of the scheduled programming.

Father’s Day musings and poetry

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Obama, knave or fool, latest edition

The New Neo Posted on by

Mort Zuckerman, former Obama supporter, answers the question and says “fool.”

I beg to differ (I believe the answer is that he is both). But it’s still interesting to see Zuckerman come this far in his condemnation. He doesn’t quite get that what he may see as a bug (our declining influence and power in the world) Obama sees as a feature.

Zuckerman writes, “Obama clearly wishes to do good and means well.” Why that is so clear he does not say; it’s not at all clear to me, but perhaps it’s clear to Zuckerman because he’s a Democrat.

However, for a guy who wants to do good and means well, the list of Obama negatives in foreign policy that Zuckerman notes is unconscionably long and very serious. Zuckerman also brings up the following additional point, which is a part of the picture I hadn’t really thought much about before:

Obama’s meeting with the [Saudi] king was widely described as a disaster. This is but one example of an absence of the personal chemistry that characterized the relationships that Presidents Clinton and Bush had with world leaders. This is a serious matter because foreign policy entails an understanding of the personal and political circumstances of the leaders as well as the cultural and historical factors of the countries we deal with.

Whatever it is that Obama lacks in personal terms—call it warmth, call it empathy, call it what you will—it has apparently been duly noted by those heads of state with whom he has interacted in person.

There are over 800 comments to the Zuckerman article as of this moment, and there is no way I’m going to read them all. But, just looking at the first twenty or so, I see that most of them are saying what I’m saying: Obama’s a knave, Mr. Zuckerman; and if he’s a fool, too, he’s probably not been foolish or incompetent enough at getting his agenda implemented.

Changing minds: George Wallace

The New Neo Posted on by

The recent news that the federal government is planning to mount a legal challenge to the state of Arizona’s new immigration law is just another outrage in a long series of outrages by the Obama administration. Even though the state of Arizona is only trying to protect its citizens and enforce policies consistent with federal law, Obama and Holder have chosen to take it to task for doing so.

I am in agreement with the Arizona side in this particular dispute, as are the majority of the American people. But, although the situation is profoundly different in most respects, it sparked a memory of another battle between the federal government and a state, which featured a dramatic visual from my youth: the 1963 moment in which Governor George Wallace of Alabama stood in the doorway of an auditorium at the University of Alabama to block the federal-court-ordered entry of black students there.

It was a dramatic act of theater by Wallace, who knew his cause was doomed and the federal government would win; he ended up stepping aside. Later on, after a shooting had left him a lifelong paraplegic and chronic pain sufferer, Wallace had a conversion experience and became a born-again Christian, renouncing his former segregationist views and trying to right the wrongs he’d perpetrated.

It is a complex story, made even more complex by the fact that when Wallace had started out as a politician (and this I had not known before; I just learned it while doing research for this post), he was considered a racial moderate compared to those against whom he was running. He substantially hardened his segregationist views for political reasons, and it seemed to work for him, since he became a very successful politician. So in Wallace’s case, it may be that he didn’t have quite so far to go for his change experience as one might think.

I learned a few other new facts while researching this piece. For example, Arthur Bremer, the man who shot Wallace, had no political beef with him; he merely wanted to assassinate some public figure and become famous, and Wallace was a target of opportunity. Then, after Bremer’s diary was published as a book, it became the basis (in a fictionalized version) for the movie “Taxi Driver,” which later served as inspiration for John Hinckley’s shooting of President Reagan. Art imitates life, and then life imitates art.

I also learned that one of the two black students whom Wallace attempted to block on the steps that day was named Vivian Malone Jones. Jones, who died in 2005, had a career in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. One portion of her life story that engendered a bit of a lump in my throat was this:

In October 1996, she was chosen by the George Wallace Family Foundation to be the first recipient of its Lurleen B. Wallace Award of Courage. At the ceremony, Wallace said, “Vivian Malone Jones was at the center of the fight over states’ rights and conducted herself with grace, strength and, above all, courage.”

And, in a last, probably tangential, but rather strange twist, there is the following connection:

[Jones’s] brother-in-law is Eric Holder, the current U.S. Attorney General.

Update on Clive Wearing: amnesia, a love story

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you may recall a post I wrote in 2005 about Clive Wearing, the man with such profound memory loss that he lived in a single repeating and ever-changing present moment disconnected from those that had gone before.

To refresh your memory (or if you’ve never heard of Wearing in the first place) I strongly urge you to read it. Wearing’s story is both fascinating and profound—in human, spiritual, emotional, and scientific terms. You may also want to view some YouTube videos based on a documentary about Wearing and his devoted wife.

I have recently been reading the book Musicophilia by neurologist/author Oliver Sacks, in the expanded 2008 edition, which offers an update on Clive’s plight. It shows that, even over twenty years after the brain insult that in 1985 robbed him of so much of what we consider ordinary human life and thought, things can still change (at least slightly) for the better.

One of the aspects of Wearing’s story I did not emphasize much in my earlier post was the fact that his condition changed over time. Initially very frightened—in fact, terrified—because he realized something was deeply amiss but could not understand what it was, he later became profoundly depressed. These states lasted for months and even years, but ultimately, new learning on an emotional level (or some sort of global cognitive level) seemed to kick in, and he achieved a certain equanimity and even joie de vivre (many of the YouTube tapes from the original documentary come from a time before this happier period).

Wearing was able to draw on several strengths: the stability of a newer and more home-like residence; the love he felt towards and received from his wife; the continuing place of music in his life; and his formidable intellect and sense of humor, which gave him increasing ability to converse and interact, albeit in limited and somewhat repetitive ways.

Recently, however, he seems to have actually regained a small ability to put down new memories. This is astounding after all these years. Sacks reports that in the spring of 2008 he received a note from Wearing’s wife Deborah that stated:

Clive continues to surprise us. Recently he looked at my mobile phone and asked, “Does it take pictures?”…Earlier this month I’d been with Clive, then went outside for about ten minutes. I rang the doorbell to get back in and Clive opened the door with the care assistant who had been with him the whole time. Clive said, “Welcome back!,” perfectly aware that I’d been there previously. His care assistant commented on this change. The staff also told me how one day a care assistant had lost her lighter. Ten or fifteen minutes after hearing this, Clive came up to the same lady and gave her the lost lighter, saying, “Is this your lighter?” The staff could find no explanation for his remembering who had lost the lighter or that she had lost the lighter…

It may not seem like much. But for a man who initially was reduced to saying over and over things such as this—“I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It’s like being dead”—or crying inconsolably for months on end, or greeting his wife each time he saw her as though they had been separated for a lengthy and almost unendurable period, it is quite an achievement; a testament to the plasticity of the human brain, the mystery of healing, and the power of love.

Obama and the individual mandate: tax, or no tax?

The New Neo Posted on by

it’s a little challenging to follow all the twisting and turnings, but let’s give it a go.

One of Obama’s most oft-repeated campaign pledges was that he would not raise taxes on anyone but the rich (defined variously, but usually as income over $250 K).

He also excoriated Hillary during the campaign for including an individual mandate in her HCR proposals.

Then, when the Congressional HCR bill included an individual mandate to buy health insurance because otherwise it would be grossly underfunded, he argued that it didn’t involve a tax at all, merely a penalty.

Now, because some states have begun lawsuits against the federal government’s HCR law, the Obama administration is arguing that such suits are unconstitutional because—why, because they violate “the Anti-Injunction Act, which restricts courts from interfering with the government’s ability to collect taxes.” The administration is arguing that it’s actually just like a tax, don’t you see, because it is “assessed and collected in the same manner” as taxes, by the IRS.

Kinda makes your head spin, doesn’t it?

Jindal, the Coast Guard, and the barges: government efficiency at its finest

The New Neo Posted on by

President Obama famously said he can’t personally fix the oil spill by sucking it up with a straw.

But when the oil-sucking barges that Bobby Jindal had ordered to do just that (minus the straws) arrived and got to work, they were stopped by the feds and now sit idle, waiting, on this—the 60th day since the oil spill occurred:

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

“These barges work. You’ve seen them work. You’ve seen them suck oil out of the water,” said Jindal.

So why stop now?…

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

I’m all for safety, and if life vests are required, fine. But have these people never heard of emergencies? Or the concept of expediting matters? Color me confused, but it seems it should be possible for the Coast Guard to board a ship and inspect it to see whether these things are there or not. And it doesn’t seem as though it would take all that long to do so.

It would almost be comical if it weren’t so serious. And anyone who knows anything about government and the way it operates knows that this sort of “efficiency” is what we will get in all areas into which the government manages to insert its graspy, tangled tendrils.

President Obama’s comment about not being able to suck it up with a straw has gotten a lot of coverage. But how many people are aware of what he said immediately afterwards?:

All I can do is make sure that I put honest, hard-working smart people in place … to implement this thing.

Honest, hard-working, and smart—sounds good. How about adding “efficient and full of common sense?” While we’re at it, let’s throw in “creative in their ability to come up innovative solutions?” And “willing and able to cut through needless red tape?”

Or am I asking too much?

Sarah Jessica Parker’s shoes: the sequel

The New Neo Posted on by

The Manolo, he has spoken.

And he has a lot more to say on the subject than I did:

The second, and more perplexing matter, is the Charlotte Olypmia platform pumps, of which the Manolo’s friends have inquired “How? Why?”

The problem is that unless you are the Japanese Lolita Princess Fairy, you cannot credibly mix these outrageous shoes with anything that is itself outrageous. If these shoes are to be worn you must first be absolutely certain you can walk in them (which if anyone can walk in these it is the Sarah Jessica Parker) and secondly, they can only be paired with something that allows them to be the focus of the total outfit.

The Manolo would have advised the SJP against the dress, as lovely as it is. However, if she were intent on wearing the dress, the Manolo would have softened the makeup, put the hair down, removed the belt, ditched the necklace, and changed the shoes for something elegant and minimalistic, something that would be the next thing to barefeetedness, for this dress is adornment enough.

Of the course, the problem is that we are no longer in the era of elegant and minimalistic shoes. In the stead, now we are in the era of fantastical and expressive shoes-as-art-and-armor, heavy shoes with greaves and metal plates. While this is perhaps somewhat satisfying for the Manolo, such shoes preclude certain ornate dresses from being worn in seriousness.

More simply put, you cannot mix statement shoes with statement dresses.

I may have taken some wrong turnings in my life, but I am proud and relieved to say that I have never committed the faux pas of mixing statement shoes with statement dresses. In fact, I’ve probably never even worn either, although I’m not completely clear on the parameters of the genres.