More western Maryland

I took my camera with me today, but the dismal gray light kept me from the pictures of fall color I wanted. These are two of the better ones.

The Potomac River near Paw Paw.


And near the mouth of Town Creek.

the weird things people read about

The device I had been using to listen to cds in my car died this summer, and I have nearly exhausted my library's supply of books on cassette tape. Scanning the titles last week, I decided to try The Bonesetter's Daughter by Amy Tan. My wife likes Amy Tan, as do several other people I know, and she is a reasonably famous American author. Plus, I just went to China.

So, driving back and forth to western Maryland, I listened to The Bonesetter's Daughter. The story is split between the US in the 1990s and China from about 1910 to 1945. I gather this is typical for Tan. The part about China concern the travails of a Chinese girl and her family amidst family feuds, murders, suicides, civil war, revolution, the Japanese invasion, the discovery of Peking Man, and all sorts of other exciting events. There is a great deal of folklore about ghosts, curses, ghost-catchers, and traditional medicine. I loved it. The American part concerns a 40-ish woman dealing with her demented mother and trying to revive or escape from her relationship with her boyfriend. I hated it. I simply cannot imagine why anyone would want to read a fictional account of a troubled couple touring an assisted living facility where they may put one's mother. It isn't just that much of the American part is depressing -- much worse things happen in the Chinese sections. It's that the American part is both depressing and mundane.

What is the point? Because life is really like that? So? Why would I want to read about things that happen around me all the time, when I could read about exciting adventures set in exotic places? Don't get me wrong, the Chinese part of The Bonesetter's Daughter is still by Amy Tan, and it is much concerned with family dynamics and the emotions of the mostly female characters. But these are women from a culture about which I know little, engaged in life and death struggles against the backdrop of history, not San Francisco yuppies fretting over their self-inflicted psychic wounds.

Well, to each his (or her) own.

A Question about Vanitas

What does it mean when a group of classical musicians calls themselves the something-or-other "soloists"?

Western Maryland

Sometimes, as I work along the C&O Canal in western Maryland, I am awed by the beauty of the scenery.

This is Town Creek, named, we think, after the Shawnee Indian town that was not far from its mouth:


And this is the wide floodplain of the Potomac River, a beautiful place to dig and a site of human habitation for at least 10,000 years:

Fall goes on

Sunday night we had our first frost, and it froze again on Monday and Tuesday. This put an end to all of the tender plants in the garden, and things were looking pretty dead. But since Wednesday it has gotten a little warmer, and yesterday we had our first real rain in three weeks. It rained all day, sometimes gently and sometimes torrents. Today the sun is out and everything looks green and glowing again. The mums are still lovely,and the zinnias are hanging on. This afternoon I will go out and finish planting bulbs, taking advantage of what is probably one of the few lovely warm Sundays left in the year.

Sarah Palin's clothes

So the McCain campaign spent $150,000 on Sarah Palin's clothes, about as much as they are spending each week for television ads in Colorado, and $11,000 a week on her traveling make-up artist. This may have been stupid, but I don't see anything particularly scandalous about it. Top of the line clothes are expensive -- Cindy McCain was wearing about $300,000 worth of clothes and jewelry at her husband's nomination, mostly in the form of diamonds -- and her beauty is part of Palin's charisma.

What I find interesting is what this says about the two-faced nature of Sarah Palin's appeal. On the one hand she presents herself as an ordinary, small-town "hockey mom," who shops at WalMart and knows what it's like to face the problems you face. Except that she isn't an ordinary mom, she's a glamorous celebrity. She isn't like you, she's like what you would be like if you were beautiful, rich, and charismatic. For her real fans, I bet the revelation of this shopping spree only increases her appeal, because a new wardrobe is an essential part of the ordinary woman's celebrity fantasies (see "Cinderella" and "Pretty Woman"). Given sudden access to unlimited money, she spent it just the way they would. Her religious faith and her decision to keep a baby with Down Syndrome serve as anchors, showing that despite her meteoric rise she has held on to what is best in her small-town background. It's another part of the fantasy -- if I got rich, it wouldn't change who I really am.

African witches attack McCain

From the Department of Weird Americans, this "action item":

Two days ago, I listened to a 9-6-08 message by Bree Keyton, a young woman evangelist who had just traveled to Kenya and visited Obama's home village and what she found out about his relations with his tribal people was chilling.... She said the witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected.

Bree Keyton told the tribal "Christians" you are NOT Christian if you practice "tribalism" where they do voodoo to conjure up a goddess spirit or a "genie" and then come to church on Sunday to worship Jesus! What she discovered there is apparent in most churches around the world; namely, mixture in the church. Some renounced their devilish practices of blood covenant by killing sheep, goats, humans to be inducted into the tribe or to get a wife or to get revenge.

She said the current president of Kenya is a Christian. However, Obama's cousin Odinga ran aganist him and said he rigged the election and stirred up the masses to rape woman and boys, kill and burn and torture Christians, etc. until Obama contacted Condeleeza Rice and she granted Obama the right to contact Odinga and other ruling elders and he "convinced" them to stop terrorizing the Christians. Bree Keyton said the current Christian President was forced by our government (!) to "create" an office for Odinga (to make "peace") so he was made the Prime Minister (!) to make peace between the Christians and Odinga's Muslim religion!

Bree Keyton went and visited Obama's tribal people and she found out Obama is 75% Arab and his family are Muslims. Odinga is strill trying to become the President of Kenya. If he does, he will make a law forbidding all public preaching and institute Sharia Law. Bree K. said Odinga has made a pact with satan.

Bree K. also said when Obama visited his tribe in '06 and as late as Jan. '08 he went to every elder's home which has a "shrine" inside to worship the genie and asked for their blessing. She was told Obama and Odinga were both "destined" before they were born to be president/leader of their nation. They say "he is the chosen one". She said Obama's grandmother sacrificed a black and a white chicken to the "goddess of the river" so both whites and blacks will vote for Obama. All Islam loves and worships Obama. The world is mesmerized by him. Oprah's 200 million followers are out to elect Obama. Also, Dick Morris of Fox News was sent to Kenya to help Odinga run his campaign! I find that unbelievable.

The occultists are "weaving lazy 8's around McCain's mind to make him look confused and like an idiot". Bree K. said we need to break these curses off of him that are being sent from Kenya.

Well, that explains McCain's behavior over the past few months; it's Kenyan curses that are making him look like an idiot.

For the record, Odinga is an Anglican. He has lately claimed to be Barack Obama's cousin, but so have thousands of other Kenyans. The 2007 Kenyan presidental election was rigged by his opponent, leading to the rioting and militia combat that claimed thousands of lives.

the rain of vomit

After a morning of meetings in southeastern Maryland, I got back to Washington around 1:00. I was thrilled to find a free, two-hour parking space in the closest possible spot to the office, in the mysterious grove of gingko trees in Rose Park. I say mysterious because everyone else in the world plants only male gingko trees, and these are the first female trees I had ever seen. People (other than, I suppose, nurseries that breed gingkoes) plant only male trees because the females make thousands of little fruit that smell exactly like vomit. These are about the size of crab apples and ripen in the fall. I had not thought about this when I backed into this space, but as I was gathering up my stuff a gust of wind came and gingko fruit began to rain down on my car. It was, for a few seconds, like sitting in a car in a thunderstorm, as dozens of fruit banged loudly on the roof and hood. I was idly musing on whether gingko fruit were heavy and hard enough to hurt my car, when it occurred to me that even if they did no damage each one was spraying the car without a teaspoon or so of vomitous gingko pulp. So I moved my car, but when I got out and had a look I saw that the car was thoroughly spattered with yellowish pulp and smelled very strongly of vomit.

the mysterious obsession

I just finished listening to The Mysterious Flame of Queen of Loana by Umberto Eco. This concerns a 60-year-old man who has a stroke and loses all of his personal memories but remembers everything he ever read in books. It has its moments. But the ending was badly written (actually I suspect it consisted, quite intentionally, entirely of brief quotations from other authors strung together) and it annoyed me. The narrator gets much of his memory back but as he is dying he obsesses over one thing he still can’t remember, the face of the first girl he ever loved. She was his obsession during his junior year of high school, but she dated older boys and he never spoke to her except for a few very casual words. He filled a notebook full of poems about her. But then her family moved away and he never saw her again. He gradually reconstructs his lifelong obsession with her, realizing that he picked his wife and all of the other women he dated because they reminded him of her.

I just don’t get this obsession with female faces. I mean, they’re nice enough, but no prettier than mountains or puppies or flowers. The glory of women is talking to them -- you can gaze longingly at a mountain but you can't share your soul with one. To the extent that I do concern myself with the appearance of women I care at least as much about bodies as faces. Are there really many men like Eco's narrator, or is this mainly a literary trope? Can one spend a lifetime obsession about a woman just because she is beautiful? Why? The narrator relates that his priest told the teenage boys that they should distract themselves from impure thoughts by contemplating the perfect beauty of the Virgin Mary, reminding themselves that sin might keep them from every really beholding her. And this is certainly something a priest might have said.

It’s crazy, and I just don’t get it.

On trying to be a writer and a parent

This morning, after feeding three kids breakfast and getting one dressed and generally moving past the morning rush, I sat down at the computer to write. I opened my unfinished chapter, read over what I had written, and started to type. I got one paragraph written when three-year-old Zhen Zhen appeared at my elbow with a book in her hands saying, "Daddy, read story?"

What was I supposed to do? I really hadn't given her any attention yet today, and she is usually too wriggly to read to. She was so cute and earnest. I read to her, and that paragraph is still all the writing I got done today.

Duckbill crests

Certain duckbilled dinosaurs known to every parent who reads dino books out loud these days -- corythosaurus, parasaurolophus -- have elaborate crests on their heads. The dinosaurs' nasal passages wind through these crests. Why? The two main theories have long been 1) to make low-frequency sounds for communication and 2) for smelling. Modeling of duckbill brains now suggests that explanation 1 is correct. The parts of the brain responsible for olfactory processing in these animals were small, so they are unlikely to have relied much on their sense of smell, but they do have very elaborate inner ears that could have processed low-frequency sound.

This may not sound like much to you, but when you have said "nobody really knows what the crests on their heads were for" as many times over the past ten years as I have, this is a pretty big deal.

the babysitting recession

In honor of Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, Slate is rerunning one of his most famous columns, on the bankruptcy of a Capitol Hill babysitting co-op, and it really is quite fascinating.

Witches of Cornwall

Some wonderful archaeological discoveries in Cornwall, providing what looks like good evidence of fertility magic in the 17th century:

But as Wood and her team excavated the platform over the next few seasons, unusual features began to emerge. They came across strange rectangular holes, about 15 by 10 inches, in the clay. "At first we thought they must be postholes or something," says Wood. But the first of the holes, about 6 inches deep, was lined with white feathers. . . . . "We guessed it might have been a bird-plucking pit, a common farming practice at the turn of the 19th century," says Wood.

But that couldn't be the case--Wood found that the feathers were still attached to the skin, which had been laid in the pit with the feathers facing inward. A bird expert from the local zoo confirmed they came from a swan. On top of the swan skin, Wood found a pile of pebbles and a number of claws from different birds. She later learned that the stones came from a coastal region 15 miles away, though no one knows why they were brought from so far. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to gather the contents of this pit. That season, Wood and her colleagues found eight pits, two of which contained odd collections of bird parts, and six of which had been emptied, but with a few telltale feathers and stones left behind. [The first pit was lated radiocarbon dated to ca. 1640.]

More unusual finds came in 2005. Sandwiched between two of the rectangular pits was a round pit with a swan-feather lining. On top of the swan feathers nestled 55 eggs, seven of which contained chicks that would have been close to hatching. The shells of the eggs had dissolved, but the moist environment had preserved their membranes. Remains of magpies--birds associated with luck and superstition even today--had been placed on each side of the eggs. . . .

One explanation is that some of the pits contained offerings to St. Bridget (or Bride) of Ireland, the patron saint of babies and infants, who may be associated with the pagan goddess Brigid. "My theory is that maybe if you got married and didn't become pregnant in the first year, you might make an offering to St. Bride in a feather pit," says Wood. Women who then became pregnant might have had to empty their pits and burn the contents, she postulates.

Wood and her colleagues had further spooky discoveries ahead. Not far from the three pits, they uncovered the remains of a spring-fed pool, carefully lined with white quartz, and containing 128 textile scraps, six medieval straight pins, shoe parts, heather branches (associated with luck), fingernail clippings, human hair, and--it doesn't get more witch-like--part of a cauldron. . . .

Wood's 2008 field season brought more unusual discoveries. "We have been uncovering some extraordinary animal pits," says Wood. One was lined with the skin of a black cat and contained 22 eggs, all with chicks close to hatching, in addition to cat claws, teeth, and whiskers. Another held a dog skin, dog teeth, and a baked pig jaw. The week prior to my arrival, Wood's students uncovered a pit that contained a mysterious seven-inch iron disk with a swan skin on one side and animal fur on the other. The biggest shock of all came from the radiocarbon dates for these pits. The cat pit dated to the 18th century, while the dog pit dated to the 1950s. "And I doubt it just suddenly stopped in the 1950s," says Wood. "It is plausible that it could still be continuing now."

Connoisseurs of long-lasting folkloric traditions will be reminded of the Holy Greyhound, subject of one of my favorite books, and about which you can read here.

The Garden through the Year

In early May

In June


In September

October Saturday

Yesterday was a perfect day in Catonsville, and I spent it the way I spend most of my fall Saturdays. I got up, made pancakes for such of the brood as wanted them, rounded up soccer uniforms, and delivered my boys to their three soccer games, watching at least half of each. The Bedell boys were 2-0-1 on the day. Ben, who is nearly 6, has after four games figured out what he is supposed to do, and he scored his first goals. Because he is the biggest kid in his class and has hardened himself in battle with his older brothers, I thought he would be an instant star in U-6 soccer, but at first he found the struggling packs of boys alarming. "They're maniacs!" he said after his first game. But now he loves it and only wants to play more. Clara, who is 3, was with me through all of it, running along the sidelines and charming bored parents in her delightful way.

One of the most striking things to me about my children is how outgoing and social they all are. Sociability seems to have skipped a generation and passed to them directly from their grandfathers, skipping their shy, nerdy parents. I suppose, though, that there is always time for them to change. My elder daughter Mary seems to have gotten a little shy around strangers lately, although this could be part of her new Goth pose. Meanwhile, though, none of my children exhibits even a tenth of the anxiety I felt especially around strange grown-ups. I remember sitting in the dining hall with a couple of my college friends as we wondered what we would do if we had normal, outgoing, athletic children. Funny how life throws these unexpected little things at you, and how easy it can be to adapt.

To get back to my day: in the afternoon Clara and I went to the library, and then I spent some time in the garden. I love my garden in the fall. In the spring I am always full of energy to plant and weed, and it usually looks great. Then in the heat and drought of the summer it usually gets tired, especially when we are gone on vacation. But then in the fall it perks back up again as the Cosmos and mums come into bloom and the zinnias surge with color. Then I had a swordfight with three children, did some laundry, read the news, and by then it was time to cook dinner.

It was a great day.

for Latin fans

Maureen Dowd has an amusing column up on the Presidential campaign, in dog Latin.

too much money

The more I think about the financial crisis, the more one thing puzzles me: there seems to be too much money on Wall Street. Why were people pouring billions into sub-prime mortgages, or securities backed by them? Because, it seems, they couldn't think of anything better to do with their money than lend it to people who couldn't pay it back. I remember reading, during the late 1990s stock run-up, that some investors had pulled all their money out of the market and were letting it sit in very low interest accounts because they couldn't find any investments worth buying.

Think about this. It is the basic mantra of modern economics that everything depends on investment. Economic growth is created by investment, so it is essentially limited by how much money there is to invest. Whenever economic times in America get bad, economists are all over the place saying that we need to raise our savings rate so there is more money to invest. But that doesn't seem to be our situation at all. Our situation seems to be that Wall Street guys are spending all their time dreaming up more and more exotic financial instruments because there aren't any growing companies or new technologies worth putting their money into.

At the moment people pulling money out of stocks and other places have put so much into US government bonds that the effective interest rate is down to 0.4%. Surely there is some businessman in the world, or some worthwhile project, that would offer a better return than that.

Is the problem that there just really aren't any investments worth making out there, or is it that Wall Street guys are too lazy to figure out what they are?

Secretary Gates on war

After the first Bush term, one got the impression that there was no wisdom or even sense left in the conservative establishment. One man more than any other has helped to bring American military policy, in Iraq and elsewhere, back toward sanity, and that is Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. From his latest speech:

BALANCE

The defining principle driving our strategy is balance. I note at the outset that balance is not the same as treating all challenges as having equal priority. We cannot expect to eliminate risk through higher defense budgets, to, in effect "do everything, buy everything."

LIMITS & MODESTY

First, limits about what the United States - still the strongest and greatest nation on earth - can do. The power of our military's global reach has been an indispensable contributor to world peace - and must remain so. But not every outrage, every act of aggression, every crisis can or should elicit an American military response, and we should acknowledge such.

Be modest about what military force can accomplish, and what technology can accomplish. The advances in precision, sensor, information and satellite technology have led to extraordinary gains in what the U.S. military can do. The Taliban dispatched within three months, Saddam's regime toppled in three weeks. Where a button is pushed in Nevada and seconds later a pickup truck explodes in Mosul. Where a bomb destroys the targeted house on the right, leaving intact the one on the left.

But also never neglect the psychological, cultural, political, and human dimensions of warfare, which is inevitably tragic, inefficient, and uncertain. Be skeptical of systems analysis, computer models, game theories, or doctrines that suggest otherwise. Look askance at idealized, triumphalist, or ethnocentric notions of future conflict that aspire to upend the immutable principles of war: where the enemy is killed, but our troops and innocent civilians are spared. Where adversaries can be cowed, shocked, or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.

And here Gates dismisses the fear of Iran, Russia and China that is the main plank of McCain's platform and, I am sorry to say, too big a part of Obama's:

...the recent past vividly demonstrated the consequences of failing adequately to address the dangers posed by insurgencies or failing states. Terrorist networks can find sanctuary within the borders of a weak nation and strength within the chaos of social breakdown. A nuclear-armed state could collapse into chaos, and criminality. Let's be honest with ourselves. The most likely catastrophic threats to our homeland - for example, an American city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack - are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states.

This is the kind of thinking we need more of. Yes, the world is dangerous, but that doesn't mean unlimited defense budgets (Obama and McCain are both calling for more defense spending), because defense must be balanced against all of our other priorities, and it doesn't mean responding aggressively to every possible threat. Some "threats" are just not very dangerous (nobody, and I mean nobody, in China wants a war with the US) and most of the rest are well within our capability to deal with.

I would like to see a major decrease in US military spending. I think our Navy is far too big -- according to some estimates, one US carrier battle group has more striking power than all of the other surface navies in the world combined -- our nuclear arsenal is far too big, and we could make do with smaller ground and air forces. I think we would do more to strengthen our nation by spending that money on education, or just not spending it all and bringing our budget into line with our means.

But, realistically, that is not likely to happen under an Obama administration. Obama is too careful and moderate a politician, and too worried about seeming weak on defense, to undertake a real draw-down. Perhaps if he successfully extricates us from Iraq in his first term he might try it in his second. I do hope he will slow the growth in defense spending, but that is about all I am hoping for any time soon.

But maybe an Obama administration could continue to promote the kind of thinking we see here from Gates, so that over the next decade the climate of fear in America will recede, the influence of the neocons will continue to decline, and both our defense spending and our aggressiveness can be brought under control.

The Other America

I am spending a few days in Hancock, Maryland, two hours west of Washington. Things don't seem so good here. There was only one restaurant in town nicer than the diner and the Pizza Hut, and it closed over the summer. The Subway has been converted to a convenience store by a guy who says the sign is still up because he can't afford to take it down. The Save-a-Lot is the most depressing grocery store I've seen in years, selling mostly off brands I've never heard of. At the visitors' center for the C&O Canal park they have several pictures of Hancock around 1900, and it's eerie how much still looks exactly the same. And, let me assure you, those buildings aren't still there because someone has lovingly preserved them, they are falling apart and they are there because there is no better use for the land.

You can get the wrong image of rural America from these forgotten towns. There is money out here, but the people who have it live on 10-acre spreads out in the country, and they drive 45 minutes to Hagerstown to do their shopping. But there is also poverty, and the low expectations that go with it. I met a guy from out here last year, and he joked that western Maryland is "the world capital of men living in shacks on half disability payments."

And it's sad to see these towns rot away.

compassionate conservatism that works

Seen much about homelessness in the news lately? Neither have I. Not, of course, that homelessness has gone away. But the press only focuses on problems when they are getting worse, and the problem of homelessness in the US is actually getting better. Given the Bush administration's terrible record on almost everything else, and the overall increase in poverty in recent years, it is worth pondering why that has happened.

A big part of the answer is the administration's point man on homelessness, Philip Mangano.

Mangano was inspired by the example of St. Francis to give up his career as an agent in Hollywood and devote his life to helping the poor. He has made homelessness in the US his mission for 30 years now. But he brings a hard-headed, un-Franciscan, thoroughly modern attitude to his work. He sees his mission as not helping the homeless as ending homelessness altogether. He bases his approach on an understanding of homelessness developed by sociologists over the past 20 years, especially Dennis Culhane. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in a great piece for the New Yorker:

In the nineteen-eighties, when homelessness first surfaced as a national issue, the assumption was that the problem fit a normal distribution: that the vast majority of the homeless were in the same state of semi-permanent distress. It was an assumption that bred despair: if there were so many homeless, with so many problems, what could be done to help them? Then, fifteen years ago, a young Boston College graduate student named Dennis Culhane lived in a shelter in Philadelphia for seven weeks as part of the research for his dissertation. A few months later he went back, and was surprised to discover that he couldn't find any of the people he had recently spent so much time with. "It made me realize that most of these people were getting on with their own lives," he said.

Culhane then put together a database—the first of its kind—to track who was coming in and out of the shelter system. What he discovered profoundly changed the way homelessness is understood. Homelessness doesn't have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. [i.e., the curve is shaped like a hockey stick.] "We found that eighty per cent of the homeless were in and out really quickly," he said. "In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back."

The next ten per cent were what Culhane calls episodic users. They would come for three weeks at a time, and return periodically, particularly in the winter. They were quite young, and they were often heavy drug users. It was the last ten per cent—the group at the farthest edge of the curve—that interested Culhane the most. They were the chronically homeless, who lived in the shelters, sometimes for years at a time. They were older. Many were mentally ill or physically disabled, and when we think about homelessness as a social problem—the people sleeping on the sidewalk, aggressively panhandling, lying drunk in doorways, huddled on subway grates and under bridges—it's this group that we have in mind. In the early nineteen-nineties, Culhane's database suggested that New York City had a quarter of a million people who were homeless at some point in the previous half decade —which was a surprisingly high number. But only about twenty-five hundred were chronically homeless.

It turns out, furthermore, that this group costs the health-care and social-services systems far more than anyone had ever anticipated. Culhane estimates that in New York at least sixty-two million dollars was being spent annually to shelter just those twenty-five hundred hard-core homeless. "It costs twenty-four thousand dollars a year for one of these shelter beds," Culhane said. "We're talking about a cot eighteen inches away from the next cot." Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, a leading service group for the homeless in Boston, recently tracked the medical expenses of a hundred and nineteen chronically homeless people. In the course of five years, thirty-three people died and seven more were sent to nursing homes, and the group still accounted for 18,834 emergency-room visits—at a minimum cost of a thousand dollars a visit. The University of California, San Diego Medical Center followed fifteen chronically homeless inebriates and found that over eighteen months those fifteen people were treated at the hospital's emergency room four hundred and seventeen times, and ran up bills that averaged a hundred thousand dollars each. One person . . . came to the emergency room eighty-seven times.

"If it's a medical admission, it's likely to be the guys with the really complex pneumonia," James Dunford, the city of San Diego's emergency medical director and the author of the observational study, said. "They are drunk and they aspirate and get vomit in their lungs and develop a lung abscess, and they get hypothermia on top of that, because they're out in the rain. They end up in the intensive-care unit with these very complicated medical infections. These are the guys who typically get hit by cars and buses and trucks. They often have a neurosurgical catastrophe as well. So they are very prone to just falling down and cracking their head and getting a subdural hematoma, which, if not drained, could kill them, and it's the guy who falls down and hits his head who ends up costing you at least fifty thousand dollars. Meanwhile, they are going through alcoholic withdrawal and have devastating liver disease that only adds to their inability to fight infections. There is no end to the issues. We do this huge drill. We run up big lab fees, and the nurses want to quit, because they see the same guys come in over and over, and all we're doing is making them capable of walking down the block."

Once you understand what homelessness is, you can develop programs to fight the problem. Most people who end up in homeless shelters are just going through a rough spot -- divorce, job loss, mental breakdown -- and what they need is some transitional assistance to get back on their feet. Since over the past 15 year we have re-oriented our whole welfare system around providing such assistance (rather than long-term benefits), help is available for many of these people.

The hard core homeless need much more help. Part of Culhane's insight was in recognizing that these people already cost the government so much in medical care that getting them off the street, at almost any price, still saves money. So, says Mangano, let's give them free apartments and all the other help they need, spending whatever it takes, because that's what they need and what we're doing effectively pays for itself anyway. People have resisted Mangano's approach to helping these chronically homeless people because it seems unjust. Why give those who have only moderately screwed up their lives a meal voucher and a pat on the back while giving those who have really screwed up free apartments and intensive help from social workers? But, to quote a certain out of fashion philosopher, to each according to his needs. I don't need special help from the government and I don't want any. Some people need a little help from time to time, and I think that help should be there for them. Some people need a lot of help, all the time. Unless we are going to let these people die at the hospital door (which I hope we won't), we are going to be paying out a lot of money for them anyway, so I agree with Mangano that we ought to be spending that money in a way that will help at least some of them put together livable lives.

The California Academy of Sciences

Gazing around me at all the modernist buildings that depress me with their functional plainness, and all the copies of ancient masterpieces that I like better but have to admit are out of time and place in the 21st century, I have often wondered what sort of architecture could be contemporary without being grim. What has occurred to me is a sort of return to nature. I was fascinated by some of the architectural details at Disney World -- columns like trees, squirrel-tail capitals, carved animal heads -- and that set me wondering about how such an aesthetic could be rendered fully grown-up.

Renzo Piano, it seems, has been wondering the same thing. The New York Times loves his new building for the California Academy of sciences, and I have to say it does look interesting.

On the other hand it combines natural vegetation with some very spare modernist elements. What is not glass or greenery is mostly plan steel or stone. There is still this affection modern architects have for vast, bare, rectangular surfaces, plain tubular columns, industrial lighting fixtures, and the like.

I also wonder about the museum's highly touted "green" design. The dirt and plants on the roof are supposed to be great insulation, but they're no better than fiberglass. The museum has solar panels, but they will only produce 5 to 10 percent of its electricity consumption. (Of course, it is in San Francisco.) They have a recharging station for electric cars, but wouldn't it have been better to put the museum near a metro or streetcar stop? The interior insulation is made from recycled blue jeans, which is kind of cool, but if you've ever read about recycling you know that the energy costs of collecting and transporting heavy materials often outweighs any savings from recycling them.

Still, they're trying, and that can only be a good thing.

When reading was best

From an article in the City Paper on reading:

"You know, I'm an English lit major, but I've never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old."

Ray Bradbury once said that 10 or 11 is the best time of life because that is when we can completely disappear into a book and forget anything else. I know I could. In the sixth grade I spent two solid weeks reading The Lord of the Rings, thinking of nothing else the whole time. Not long before then I read Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles and the Narnia books. In the seventh and eight grades I read stacks of fantasy novels but little that really grabbed me; what I remember best is the science fiction, especially Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov.

The City Paper piece also discusses adolescent reading, things like Vonnegut, Salinger and Ayn Rand that captivate 16 to 20-year-olds. I missed that phase. Most of those books are cyncial, and by then I already regarded it as old news that adult society is hypocritical and corrupt. I was looking for something more positive, but on the other hand I had never patience for simple solutions like the one Ayn Rand peddled.

I feel it as a sort of character flaw that I have never been able to enjoy reading the kind of adult novels that deal with life in all its complexity. Tolstoy bored me, Dostoevsky repelled me, and I have never gotten around to Proust. The books I have loved most in the past twenty years have mostly been non-fiction. I can think of only one real exception, and that is 100 Years of Solitude. I bet one of the reasons that book has such a huge worldwide audience is that many grownups have been able, as I was, to disappear into its world in just the way they did with their favorite books when they were 11. For that, if nothing else, Garcia Marquez deserves his Nobel prize.

But, honestly, if I am down or burdened and need something to comfort me or distract me, I still turn to the books I loved when I was 11.

Russian playgrounds

It seems that in Russia making equipment and sculptures for playgrounds has become a folk art, and, also, that some Russians still adhere to the Baba Yaga / Big Bad Wolf school of children's literature.



I just love these, and these. And here's another.

confidence

“I’m ready,” Ms. Palin answered without any hesitation in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, saying she had felt no doubt about accepting Senator John McCain ’s offer to run as his vice-presidential nominee.

“I answered him yes, because I have the confidence in that readiness and knowing that you can’t blink,” Ms. Palin told her interviewer, Charles Gibson. “You have to be wired in a way of being so committed to the mission, the mission that we’re on, reform of this country and victory in the war.”

* * *

Is this sort of confidence a good thing or a bad thing in a political leader?

Certainly a lot of Americans are impressed by it. They like people who believe in themselves and radiant certainty about what they are doing. People loved W after 9-11 because he came across as absolutely certain that we are right, our enemies are wrong, and we will defeat them. And maybe it was good for the country, in that time, to have something to believe in. Come to think of it, Roosevelt showed the same kind of confidence in opposing the Depression, and in fighting fascism.

But W's confidence led us into the disaster of Iraq. His belief in the justness of his cause obscured the realities of world politics and led him to see close allies like the French and the Germans as enemies. His confident pose hid a deep ignorance of world affairs, of the nature of warfare, and of the difficulty of establishing democracy.

And what about Sarah Palin? Her confidence has carried her from hockey mom to mayor to governor to vice presidential nominee in a decade. People see her and think, wow, she is something, she is going somewhere, she can change things -- because that is how she sees herself, and she projects that self-image to the world. Actually, so far as I can tell, she has been a mediocre mayor and a worse governor, and the thought of her having any real influence on US foreign policy is chilling. But she won't blink.

I think she is a narcissist, maybe even a sociopath. She believes that she deserves to lead others because she is just that special. She is incapable of thinking that she has done anything wrong or of understanding her own faults.

But I don't think she is alone. I would say exactly the same thing about W, John McCain, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Ronald Reagan. The reason I have a soft spot in my heart for Bush I is that I never thought he saw himself as a demigod. Now, there are some people who have good reasons to be full of themselves -- Churchill thought he was the man to lead the opposition to Hitler, and if this sometimes led him to interfere stupidly in the decisions of his generals, he really did show extraordinary leadership in one of the world's greatest crises. And there are a lot of politicians who think that mastering government policy is part of their job as leaders, which is why I always forgave Bill his outrageous vanity. He believed he was a man of destiny, but he saw his own very hard work as part of that destiny. I suppose that is part of why Hillary appeals to so many people -- she has always been willing to do the work that goes along with power. Other leaders attach themselves to causes and come to see themselves as the representatives of those causes, as Reagan saw himself as the leader of anti-communism.

But the whole lot of them, as far as I can see, are sociopathic narcissists. And maybe, really, that is almost a requirement for being a political leader. Who else would make decisions that might condemn thousands to death, or millions to poverty? The questions that hangs in the air whenever any leader makes an important decision for others is, "Who does he think he is?" And if he didn't believe himself to be some kind of superman, how could he do it?

I don't know about Obama. To believe, as a fatherless black man, that he could be President, he must have an extraordinary ego. People talk about how cool he has been throughout the ups and downs of the campaign, never getting upset when things look bad -- is this just the reflection of a belief in his own destiny? But he seems to like listening to advice, and he has a fondness for consulting the top academic experts in everything. His books suggest a degree of real self-reflection and a keen sense of his own deficiencies. So maybe, just maybe, he is that rare thing, a man who reaches the top without being in some way seriously deranged.

Which raises another question: if he really doesn't believe in himself at a positively made level, can he make the decisions necessary for a President? I suspect so, but I guess you never know.

But to get back to Sarah Palin and John McCain: I think they are a very dangerous pair. They are both absolutely certain of their own superior morality and judgment, convinced that their opponents are corrupt and wicked. McCain, at least, has a disturbing fondness for violence and war, and from what little Palin has said on the issue she also seems fond of acting out God's will on the battlefield.

I am not sure what disaster will befall the nation if they are elected, but I am sure it will be bloody and expensive.

Head Whacking

So I was reading an ok novel yesterday by a highly regarded author, and in the course of one chapter-long action sequence the good guys control three people by hitting them on the head and "knocking them out." Just like, bam, lie there for a while until we're done with our mission, ok? I put the book down. It was "Lost" soured me on the whole business. In the course of the first season half a dozen people must get "knocked out" and left to lie unconscious for a while. It is portrayed as something that anybody with a club can do, a super convenient way to get your enemies out of the way for a while without killing them. Nobody ever suffers any long-term consequences.

But this is fantasy. Really, getting knocked unconscious by a blow to the head is very serious. It often leads to severe brain injury or death. When a head injury patient comes into the ER, what do they ask? "Did he lose consciousness?" And if the answer is yes, they get ready for a really serious case.

Knocking someone unconcscious is also rather difficult to do -- people can be beaten to death without losing consciousness until the final blow.

I am sick of this trope. It is a lame cliche and an act of gross laziness on the part of the writer. Enough already.

Sarah Palin and Family Values

For the record, I despise Sarah Palin. I think she has all of W's faults: she thinks she's on a mission from God, she has no ability to question her own actions or admit that she is wrong, she lies, she is mean and vindictive, she pretends to be a fiscal conservative while spending lots of money and running up debt, and she hides her ignorance of the world behind folksy, regular girl mannerisms. She would be disastrous vice president. And Americans, having learned nothing from their experience with Bush, seem to be falling for her. Sigh.

But what I find most interesting in her story is what it tells us about the whole issue of conservative "family values." This phrase entered the national debate in the 1980s as a package deal. Opposition to abortion and gay rights was expressed as a defense of the stable nuclear family, which was under siege from divorce, drugs, and a general slide into immorality.

The praise heaped on Palin by evangelical conservatives exposes the contradictions in the family values program. Palin's family is frankly something of a mess. She is feuding with her ex-brother-in-law, her teenage daughter is pregnant, her husband left his job so she could have her unexpected baby and keep working at her own. The tabloids are saying she has had affairs. But all the evangelicals love her because she is living her opposition to abortion, keeping her own Downs Syndrome baby and pressuring her daughter to have her own baby and marry the father.

Haven't Palin and her admirers noticed that the divorce rate for 17-year-olds is over 50%? That girls who have babies before they turn 18 are much less likely to finish college or earn a good living? That children born to teen mothers, married or not, are much more likely to have trouble in school, take drugs, and end up in prison? Is that the kind of choice that really represents "family values"?

If what you want is for every child to be raised in a stable, two-parent family, then what you want is for everybody to wait until they are 25 to marry and wait until they are married to have children. We have moved a long way toward this goal in the past 30 years largely because of abortion. Without abortion there would be millions more unwed teenage mothers, millions more shotgun marriages ending in divorce, millions more troubled children. Opposition to abortion therefore undercuts other parts of the family values agenda.

I wonder whether understanding how this works would undermine support for repealing Roe vs. Wade among the kind of conservatives who long for an orderly society. Because in our world abortion is a force for order, not some sort of chaos agent.

exotics and diversity

From the NY Times, some exciting research on the effect of introduced, exotic organisms on native species. We all have the impression that this is an ongoing catastrophe, but this is not necessarily so. Introduced predators sometimes wipe out native species by eating them, but otherwise introduced species rarely cause the extinction of natives.

As the authors of the study point out, 2,069 species of non-native plants have become established in New Zealand, and this has led to the extinction of exactly three native species. The net result of the introduction of new species has been a doubling of the number of wild plant species in the islands. Some native species have become much rarer, but that does not necessarily mean they will become extinct.