Thanks for the Memories

Usually on Thanksgivings I won’t give thanks for anything, because the whole concept of a day set aside to apply peer pressure upon everyone to force them to give thanks for every damn thing was dreamed up by the same bozos who invented uniforms, flags, floggings, genocides, and wars. Come to think of it, whenever anyone tells me to “Have a nice day!” my natural instinct is to say, “Take a hike, bozo – you’re not the boss of me.”

So the fact that I feel like giving some thanks this Thanksgiving tells you I might be coming down with something. All the more reason to share: I am thankful to Bill Speidel for introducing me to my home, the Pioneer Square District, and for teaching me so much about Seattle and how Seattle works, with a little help from my Dad.

Bill Speidel was a local author. When I met him in the middle of the Sixties I was a teenager who had never read anything he had written. I had to take his word for it that he was an author. Fortunately, he wasn’t shy about it.

I met Speidel in connection with a project he was doing. He wanted to get parts of Seattle that had been buried in the Jackson-Yesler regrade dug out, so he could draw tourists to them and so revitalize the Pioneer Square neighborhood. He got word out that he was looking for high school kids to volunteer for the excavation, and I was one of the ones who showed up.

The beginning of the first day we crowded into his office just off 1st Avenue to listen to him talk about the underground and what his plans were. One of the things that struck me was that the walls were exposed bricks. During his talk Speidel took credit for that interior decorating innovation that has since become de rigueur in that part of town. He admitted it wasn’t historic (historically the walls were plastered and wallpapered) but it looked historic, and looks are everything, he said.

As a suicidal sixteen year old with bad skin, crooked teeth, and disproportionately long legs, nicknamed grasshopper of all things, I resented that remark. Beauty had to be more than skin deep or I was screwed. Bill and I were not hitting it off.

But I hung in there, and I helped dig out what we now call the Seattle Underground. I spent several hours on two separate days in those dark dusty tunnels shoveling dirt and debris into wheelbarrows.

The dust got so thick we could only see a few feet in front of us. Sometimes I couldn’t see my feet. I had a cough for several days later and it made my mouth taste like dust. Even my Father, who usually didn’t care about me breathing or not, noticed. He asked me how I got like that.

When he found out I had excavated tunnels without the benefit of hard hat, face mask, or minimum wage, he got all union-y on me and started screaming about chains and slave-masters and something about “line them all up against the wall” and I don’t remember the rest, except that he said he wouldn’t let me go back.

Then my Father pointed out something that I had totally missed. He said that after the Underground was cleaned out it would be possible for Speidel to charge tourists to see it. So by helping clean it out without pay or safety gear I was investing my labor toward Speidel’s future wealth, and I had not been guaranteed any financial return on that investment. All I was getting for my sweat and my bad health was a little bit of a history education.

My Dad said, “You want an education? Come here and I’ll whack you upside the head with a board just like they did the strikers in 1919. It’ll teach you what it’s all about.”

Just then, I experienced satori. Thanks, Dad. Thanks, Bill.

Going Gaga for Google

The word of the day: commandeer.

Some sentences using the word of the day: The dictator commandeers the airwaves. The pirate commandeers the gold shipment. During the national emergency, the authorities commandeered private buses to aid in evacuation. Admiral James T. Kirk commandeers a self-cloaking Klingon Warship and flies it to the Seventies. The Bush administration’s Department of Justice commandeers Google.

The word of the day tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with Department of Justice’s subpoena of Google records pertaining to pornographic searches. It isn’t about privacy; it’s about piracy. Where’s the emergency that justifies the commandeering of a company’s one service? Where’s the legislation that permits it? Since when did the United States become a dictatorship whose administration can commandeer any business at will?

Where does government commandeering come from? Exactly where I have told you it comes from, in this very column, before. It comes from fear and cowardice. I said as much in a column for October 17, 2002, at which time I said I thought I was onto a grand unifying principle of the workings of the universe, possibly involving vinyl. I didn’t say so at the time, but I had in mind vinyl automobile seating, rather than recording media. But I will not rule out recording media as a factor in the grand unifying principle.

Let me recall the principle. The principle is that reacting from fear, rather than reason, just gets you more stuff to be afraid of. So, generally, whenever the public is afraid of some so-called threat, even a threat that is non-emergent, that’s been around since the beginning of time, and didn’t just land on our doorsteps today, the public can be induced to look the other way when the government orders everybody but its own employees to do something about it, resulting in illegality.

I illustrated the problem with a practice I learned about in my cab-driving days. When the police in Seattle want to break up a domestic violence situation, they often commandeer cabs and order the drivers to kidnap one of the parties. They don’t call it kidnapping, they call it telling the driver to take them where they (the police) say to take them, but you know it’s kidnapping when the party in question says, “I don’t want to go where the police say I should go, I want to go to the Seven-Eleven, and if you don’t take me there I’m jumping out of this cab while it’s moving and getting a lawyer and suing you from here to Jankistan.”

So far as I know this practice is still going on. No legislature ever authorized it. No cab driver has ever been deputized to do the police’s business and take people places against their will. The police never offer to even pay for the commandeering of the cab drivers’ services, the kidnap-ees are supposed to pay to be kidnapped! The practice isn’t enforced with court orders; it’s enforced with physical intimidation. Or, as in my case, with actual police violence, following a “failure of communication.”

Which is what we have in this instance, with Google. The government demands they turn over their records of searches. Now, farmers farm dirt. Bus companies bus people and luggage. Mercenaries deal in hurt and death, anything but mercy. Search engines store and move information. And here it comes to pass that the Department of Justice demands that they turn such information over, at their own cost and at their own liability, without one stitch of legislation authorizing the commandeering of any company for such purposes. Communism!

Presented with demands from a government that has all the biggest guns and the world’s biggest army in history, it wouldn’t be surprising if Google caved and preferred to risk litigation from the ACLU rather than from the United States. Why not? Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL all wimped out.

But Google didn’t. Way to go, Google!

Rocks Are Hard Dirt

I want to tell you all to stop controlling my mind. I tell you dirt is nutritious. You are trying to stop me from knowing that, by focusing contrary brain waves on my truth receptors. You are wrong to do that. Smart people like me, who read, know eating dirt is good for you. Ask any smart person like me who reads, like Jesus or Moses. (Moses used to read stuff on rocks.)

Did you know that rocks are hard dirt? Yes, it’s true. It shows you how much God loves dirt, that He wrote the Ten Commandments on a hard form of it. Praise dirt. (It is also highly nutritious.)

I don’t know if this has anything to do with dirt (?), but this week the Seattle Times reported that Kate Joncas, a human, said that establishing two hygiene centers downtown was “right”. She said that it can’t be good for a neighborhood “to concentrate that many needy and damaged people in one place.”

I agree totally with that, which is exactly why I steer clear of neighborhoods where I see too many television antennas on the roofs.

So I was very sorry to hear that Kate Joncas, also Downtown Seattle Association President, said she was sorry to have said what she was misquoted saying. Because it was so true. Homeless people and people like me who have been homeless are damaged. By homelessness! That’s why we don’t like it! “Duh!”

Speaking of duh, I’m reminded of the Third Man Theme by Anton Karas, which has no words, and was originally performed on a zither, which has a sound that is extremely difficult to reproduce vocally.

So when I “sing” the Third Man Theme, it sounds like this: “DUH duh duh duh DUH, duh duh, *dum dum*, DUH duh duh duh DUH, duh duh, *dum dum*, etc. What a great movie theme! It rocks!

So what does this have to do with dirt, you ask? Well long ago, between the first time I was homeless, and the second time, I spent four cool days in Vienna, or as I like to call it, the Third Man Theme Park. (The Third Man was a movie that was made in 1949.)

I went there precisely to see all the sights from the movie. I wanted to see the street (Stiftgasse) where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) was run over by a car according to the porter in the movie. I wanted to see where the porter lived. I wanted to see the Mozart Cafe. I wanted to see the Bahnhof (train station), I wanted to see rubble left over from World War II. I wanted to see a small scary man holding a puny dog.

And I did! It was great. It was all there, and I got to see it, all the while thinking to myself, “DUH duh duh duh DUH, duh duh...”

Well almost everything was there. There were no underground tours of the Vienna sewer system where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) took that fatal bullet from Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten). I really missed that, and I’m hoping that Vienna’s city council or whatever they’re called will eventually get with it and offer tours of the sewers, preferably with zither music piped in.

But all the best stuff was there. The high point of my trip was my visit to the Prater, where, on the ferris wheel, Harry Lime (Orson Welles) almost shoots Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten), before he finds out that Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) has already told the police about him. While I was in the Prater (http://www.wiener-prater.at) it was very crowded, not like the movie, but at one point I passed a man with one leg who looked liked the balloon salesman in the film. I thought, “Cool! The Balloon salesman! DUH duh duh...” and then an old woman started shrieking at him in German.

She screamed how dare he appear in public where so many tourists could see him. She shrieked that he was disgracing Vienna and Austria by exposing his shame (his missing leg) for all the world to see.

At first I thought, “COOL! Anna Shmidt’s (Alida Valli’s) landlady!” Then I thought, “How wonderful it is that I live in a country where we don’t hide our damaged and disabled, where we actually do what we can to help our most injured to live full healthy public lives, where we care about people themselves and not about how they appear.“

That thought made my trip to Vienna the perfect fantasy! Thank you Vienna! Thank you America!

Pooky For President

People often wonder how I can be so cheerful all the time. After all, they observe, I am dirt poor. Also I don’t have any compensating assets. Also Dan Quayle is running for president. Then there are the things that they don’t mention, like my brain-implant, remote controlled by Ted Turner and Jane Fonda, or the fact that David McCallum hated being thought of as Ilya Kuryakin.

Well! What keeps me going is my friends — especially my extraterrestrial friends, whom I know will some day, soon, come in force to vanquish my enemies and create an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel.

Meanwhile: Dan Quayle’s candidacy has motivated one of my best friends to enter the presidential race himself, so that there can be a “clear alternative” to Quayle.

“I’m not an alien at all,” Pooky Glax is quick to point out, “as much as fifteen percent of my birth probably occurred in Idaho, New Mexico, and Disneyland.”

In fact, Mr. Glax, or Pooky, as he prefers that I call him, is proud to call himself an Extraterrestrial-American. He is a sentient life-form of the quantum-disturbance type. He is over forty, at least fifty percent of the time, but don’t try to pin him to an age or he just might lurch through a wall!

I met Pooky Glax a few years ago when we were both homeless in the University District. Even back then I was deeply impressed not only by the depth of his ideas but by his deep compassion for his fellow sentient beings. Such as, when he dumpster-dove for transistors Pooky always saved out dill pickles and donuts for me, even though he had only half a pocket to put them in. That’s noble!

It’s probably not surprising that, given his background, Pooky assigns such a high priority to making housing more generally available in this country. (He favors a rotation plan.)

Though Pooky may not technically be an alien, he must constantly feel marginalized in a world that will always have far more certainty than even his own boundaries. Or at least parts of him must feel that way at different times and places. Thus, much of his platform naturally expresses his own personal struggle against that certainty of our world that so violates Pooky’s diffuse sense of being.

Take for example his call for universal bagpipes. If you ask him for clarification, Pooky chitters, and forms what passes for a grin on his presenting surfaces. Then he says it louder, “UNIVERSAL! BAGPIPES! [Chitter! - Chitter! - Chitter!]” Clearly he does not intend to be clear on this plank.

Then there is his interest in seeing that Tahiti is eventually selected as the site of a future Winter Olympics. On the face of it, this would seem to be a quite definite goal, although one that certainly should not concern the President of the United States of America. But then Pooky talks about where Tahiti might be towed, once they have learned to really trust us, and all sorts of possibilities emerge.

What would be the consequences of a national licensing of ducks? Who knows? And that puts Pooky firmly in his element.

Pooky Glax’s most radical proposal: a random national wage, so that everyone who works can, as he says, know from time to time what it means to have their work undervalued. Characteristically, Pooky declines to say how a random national wage would be implemented.

“Chitter!” is his only comment, but the impression I get from talking to him about it is that the implementation would be very confusing to everyone, in somewhat the same way that our current system now is so confusing to janitors and others like them who have to clean up after it every day.

Pooky says to me, “people think they need more certainty in their lives,” as a large fraction of his right side flickers and momentarily tunnels to Prague and back, “but actually they need less. I hope that during the course of the coming campaign I will be able to convince them of this: that in our time, the less sure we are, the better.” And he continues, “If we go where we are sure, at best it will be like a life in line at Disneyland, never getting on a ride. Is that what you want? Just to be sure that Mickey will say Hiya, Hiya, and shake your hand, before you die?”

I suppose I should mention that Pooky is not always so predictably in support of uncertainty. He is definite in his insistence that the Food Stamp Program be expanded to cover glass, transistors, computer chips and other silicon products, every third Thursday, in prime numbered years.

And of course, as you could have predicted, Pooky promises that if elected he will seek federal funding to bring about an all Man from U.N.C.L.E. channel. So he has my vote... as we knew he would!