is what i do

Dan Savage is a wonder! He makes the most persuasive case I’ve seen/heard for gay adoption, coming at it from a number of different perspectives, including an evolutionary perspective. He does it calmly, clearly, and lovingly. If I had a child I was, for whatever reason, unable to raise, I can think of no more fortunate fate for that child than to be adopted by Dan and his partner. Watch, listen, learn.

We went caroling Friday evening at Frank and Mary’s, and had a great time. And the Buddhist Peace Fellowship weekly trip to our local state penitentiary is on Wednesday, and we’re going to do some caroling with the sangha there. To prepare for the caroling sessions, I put together a book of lyrics of some of my favorite carols. It’s set up to print nicely in the very few browsers that understand print media css, particularly the page-break directives. Opera and MS Internet Explorer 8 do that; Safari and Firefox do not. I’d be grateful for any additional info about what works and what doesn’t.

Before I put my own book together, I looked on the web for something that I could use, and found little. There are a lot of carol lyric collections out there, which gave me the starting text for my book, but none of them are formatted well for print, and most of them are (a) pretty unselective, so that there’s a lot of cruft in the collection, and (b) pretty ugly. I’ve tried to stick with the carols that many, and possibly most people know, and I’ve gone for maximum simplicity in the page layout: fairly large type, not much color, and no illustrations. These pages are designed for functionality. I hope they function well for you. Please feel free to pass the link along to anyone who might find it useful.

And a very Merry Christmas, from a confirmed and comfortable atheist.

Incompletely developed thoughts, loosely connected:

• It’s not spending. It’s buying. The government is not spending our money when it builds roads and subsidizes the employment of teachers and health care workers; it’s buying us better roads, better schools, better hospitals.
• Economics is not an empirical science. It’s reasoned guessing. That’s why there’s no Standard Theory in economics, like there is in Biology and Physics.
• What’s happened in the past 30 years is new, radically new. The development of information technology, and the use of that technology to control machines, requires that we think differently about cost, price, and profit: no theories developed before about 1975 can deal with the dramatic drop in manufacturing and service delivery costs that have happened since then.
• Steady or gently rising prices, plus plummeting costs, have created enormous profits, inflating investor wealth and expectations way beyond what was reasonable before 1975.
• The general idea that we have been pretty much immune to inflation in recent times is an illusion. Falling costs (which involve stagnant or falling wages and fewer jobs) have very much the same effect as classical inflation.
• By the same token, deflation, when the disparity between price and cost has gotten so out of line, is not the horrendous event that classical economic theory imagines the word to describe.
• When costs drop, innovative effort requires less capital investment; the big losers in a deflationary economy are the capitalists. Fuck ‘em.
• The cost to government of stimulating innovation and increased production of commodities (including commodity services like education and health care) is not great in an economy in which costs are dropping dramatically and steadily. Government is in a better position to measure its return on stimulus investment in terms appropriate to the well-being of the society and is not (or should not be) concerned, as a private investor must be, about maximizing the monetary return on its investment.
• There are a lot of people used to working who have lost their jobs. Deflation doesn’t help them much; if there’s no money coming in, it doesn’t really matter much how low prices fall. Those people need jobs, which intelligent government stimulus will generate, and, until those jobs materialize, they need help getting by.
• I don’t need direct help, at least right now. I don’t need tax cuts or checks in the mail; deflation will take care of me in that regard. I want the government to buy me stuff that it’s unrealistic to expect private capitalism to buy me, and to create jobs in the process, so that civic order and individual pride and responsibility can be maintained.

How much sense is there in all this?

Ishmael muses:

Source: Pantone Selects Color of the Year for 2009: PANTONE 14-0848 Mimosa

 

“The color yellow exemplifies the warmth and nurturing quality of the sun, properties we as humans are naturally drawn to for reassurance,” explains Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®. “Mimosa also speaks to enlightenment, as it is a hue that sparks imagination and innovation.”

Pantone has a lot of clout. The color in the box above is as close as I can come to Pantone’s “Mimosa”, and it’s is likely to be what you’ll be wearing next year. Assuming, that is, that you still have a job and there are still a few stores open.

We went for a walk in Spring Grove Cemetary yesterday. The afternoon was a little chilly and overcast, and we probably missed the height of the Spring display by about a week, but it was still beautiful. As it turned out, we parked our car, very much by accident, by the grave of Nancy Shapiro, whom I met when we worked together on the Gene McCarthy campaign and who became a much loved friend. She died far too young, and we miss her still.

Here’s a selection of photos from our walk:

I turned 71 yesterday. And I started on a project that I’ve been contemplating for a while. I’m going to try to take at least one photograph each day and post it here. If I wind up taking more than one, I’ll try to pick the best or most interesting. I haven’t ruled out the possibility of posting more than one if I can’t choose.

The picture for today (yesterday, actually; the pix will be posted the next day) is at the end of the following story, which sets the scene.

After Alex’s wedding in August, Joan and I went to Rochester to spend the night with the Wilsons. The next morning, we were sitting around the kitchen table, and the talk turned, for some reason that I don’t remember, to the deep roots of our white American racism; no matter how liberal we are or how hard we work to free ourselves from instinctively racist responses to events, those responses occur, and the best we can do is recognize them quickly, recognize them for what they are—harmful and delusional vestiges of our cultural upbringing—and try not to act on them but to act rationally instead.

Paul told the story of an incident that happened to him more than 40 years ago, when he was a grad student at the University of Illinois. He had been driving back to Cincinnati alone; it was evening; he’d stopped for gas in Lafayette, and in talking with the gas station attendant, revealed that he was on his way to Cincinnati. There were three other people in the station—as Paul described them, a very large black man with a powerful husky voice, a white woman, and another black man, smaller, lighter, wearing shades and a dashiki. The big guy approached Paul, told him that they’d heard he was on his way to Cincinnati. “Our car broke down,” the guy told Paul. “We’re musicians, and we have to get to a gig in Cincinnati; can you give us a ride.”

That’s when the culturally inculcated racism kicked in; first, with Paul’s instinctive fear; then, with his recognition that he couldn’t refuse without revealing the racism; and, finally, with his consequent decision: “Sure, I’ll give you a ride.”

Paul went on to describe the ride home; his diminishing terror as his passenger (the guy who had asked for the ride; the woman and the other guy sat in the back and, according to Paul, remained silent throughout the trip) proved to be a smart, entertaining traveling companion: knowledgeable, experienced, a good raconteur. Paul wound up, later that night, going with a friend to the club where his passenger and his group were playing. Paul’s friend left early, but Paul stayed until the club closed, and then went with his new friend to an after hours club for a little more music before the guy drove him home; Paul realized, as he was being driven home, that the black guy was just as frightened driving into a white neighborhood at 3:00AM as Paul had been driving into the musician’s black neighborhood earlier in the evening.

They never saw one another again; Paul had no idea what happened to the guy. But he remembered the guy’s name: Leroy something. Not Leroy Brown. “Leroy Jones, that was his name. And his band, I think, was Leroy and the Drifters, or something like that.”

“Not Leroy,” I said. “Lee Roi. And the band was Lee Roi and the Drivers.”

Here we are, two white guys sitting in a kitchen in Rochester, New York, and Paul’s telling me about this accidental meeting 40 years earlier, that had taught him a memorable lesson about his own racism. And I knew the guy in the story!

Lee Roi Jones is a pretty prominent guy in Cincinnati these days, with an insurance agency, a bail bonding business, multiple real estate properties, and a solid reputation as a nightclub operator. And he’s a lunch time regular at the Brew House, as am I. We’ve known each other casually for some years now. When I saw Lee Roi a few days later, I told him about my conversation with Paul. As my story unfolded, Lee Roi began to realize that the guy in the story was, in fact, him. And his jaw dropped. He remembered the evening vividly; it was, no doubt, as odd an experience for him as it had been for Paul. Lee Roi gave me his card and made me promise to give his number to Paul and ask Paul to call him.

I did that, and Paul did that, and they had a good conversation. Paul called Lee Roi again last week to tell him that he was coming to town for a baby shower that his ex-wife was giving for their daughter, and he and Lee Roi arranged to meet for lunch at the Brew House. Joan and I joined Paul and his wife Jo, and met Lee Roi and his old friend Kenny, and we had a spectacularly interesting and enjoyable lunch. Lee Roi and Kenny both tell great stories, and so does Paul, and we all laughed uproariously. And when the talk turned to where it all began, to the pervasive racism of our culture and its pernicious effects, Lee Roi and Kenny, once again, helped us white people understand that, while things have, indeed, changed since the sixties, the changes have not made things much better, and, in fact, have made some things worse. Kenny described being stopped, recently, in a rural county in Southern Michigan, for no other reason than that there were “zero blacks” in the county, and his mere presence on the road was sufficient cause for the police officer’s suspicion.

Lee Roi, for his part, had understood Paul’s fear on that long-ago evening. He had known, as Paul, had not, that Paul had nothing to fear from him. But he’d also known, as Paul, again, had not, that Paul did have a very legitimate cause for fear, which is that he was driving on Indiana state highways with two black men and a white woman in his car.That simple fact would have been more than enough cause for any state trooper, in that state, at that time, to stop them, throw them all in jail, and probably knock them around a bit to show them the error of their ways. Stupid white kid.

Lee Roi treated us all to lunch; it was payback to Paul for the ride, and it was my birthday treat.

So thanks, Lee Roi. Thanks for lunch, and for your friendship, and for your courage and your good stories and your good humor, and for hanging in there and making a good place for yourself in a society that doesn’t go out of its way to make any place at all for you, and for your patient teaching.

And here’s the picture I promised at the beginning, of the six of us at the Brew House. From left to right, Joan, Jo, Kenny, Lee Roi, Paul, and me.

Thanks, Danielle, for snapping such a great picture.

The work on this site is published under a Creative Commons licence, which says that the work is free for anyone to use, as long as they give proper attribution, don’t charge for it, and, if they republish it, do so under the same license. Creative Commons is the creation of Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was motivated by the desire to find something less restrictive, and less damaging to the creative exchange of ideas, than standard copyright, but which still reserved to the author of a work some say about how that work got used.

There are a number of different Creative Commons licenses; you can go to their website and select just what set of restrictions you want to place on works that you create, and the website then generates a license for you, complete with a graphic image that links to a human readable version of the license; that in turn links to a full legal version of the license that should get by even the most nit-picky lawyers.

This video tells you a little more about the CC concept:

And the best thing about the video is that every time you watch it, or get someone else to watch it, you help support the Creative Commons Foundation. The Foundation has formed a partnership with Revver, a new viral video network that generates revenue by tacking a short, very unobtrusive ad onto the tail end of every video placed on their site. They share the revenue generated by the advertising 50-50 with the video’s creator. Until the end of the year, they are giving 100% of the revenue generated by the several Creative Commons videos on their site to the CC Foundation.

So please, click away. And then go watch some of the other CC videos; they are interesting and entertaining, and each time you play one through, you’re doing a little bit to help a very good and innovative enterprise.

And if you want to do more, I urge you to support the Commons by buying CC-branded merchandise or donating to their fund-raising campaign.