Tweet Like an Egyptian

Above: A 1919 Egyptian uprising had a flag that clearly acknowledged the revolutionaries' debt to computers.

Like everyone else in the world I’ve been watching the events unfolding in Egypt with great concern. How can people be so cruel to one another? I’m referring, of course, to the shutdown of the internet and Twitter. It’s insidious.

We all know why it was done. The authorities felt besieged by revolutionaries. Naturally, they (the authorities) sought to deprive the revolutionaries of their power, so they unplugged them. I’m sure I would have done the same, if I were a dictatorial regime propped up by a rich foreign power, because I am also a walking moral vacuum, abhorred by nature.

That got me thinking, though. How would the history of the world been different if this sort of cruel drastic measure had been resorted to in the past?

For example, we’ve all heard of the American Revolution, and how, because of it, we live in George Washington State, instead of George William Frederick State, and we call ourselves Americans, after the continent, instead of British, after the fraction of the island. These are good things. But what would have happened had King George III done what Mubarak did, and cut off the colonists’ internet and Twitter?

One good thing: I’m sure that if they were cut off early enough the Boston Tea Party couldn’t have happened. They could never have pulled off that kind of organization without the aid of selectively distributed electronic communication. Consequently there would be no Tea Bagger Party today, which would be a relief. On the other hand, we wouldn’t know they could have existed, so we wouldn’t feel the relief, so we’d just complain about some other yahoos. Probably the Australians.

Then there’s the Declaration of Independence, which I learned in school was actually finished on MySpace, a sucky 18th Century predecessor of Facebook, on July 2, 1776, and only tweeted two days later. The British people were having their own problems and King George had already (this is real history!) shut down Twitter on their island. That’s why the British, including King George himself, didn’t know about the Declaration of Independence tweet until weeks later, when the ban was lifted and someone did a #revolution search.

That was what did happen. But if King George had shut down the internet and Twitter in the colonies that summer, the American colonists wouldn’t have been able to declare independence, so they wouldn’t know they were really having a revolution. No one would ever know they could pursue happiness, so we’d all be couch potatoes today.

No one would know what a “John Hancock” was. If you said to someone “put your John Hancock there,” they’d think you meant something dirty.

That’s just one minor revolution, hardly even the most serious one! What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution of 1911, the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Velvet Revolution, the Velcro Revolution?

As we know now, without the internet and Twitter, none of those revolutions could have happened. Now I’m sure that some of you would say, good riddance to bad history. But you aren’t thinking how cool it was that all that went down. Just the French Revolution, for example, got us “Let them eat cake” and guillotines. Come on! That’s some cool s#*t!

Further hypotheticals to learn by:

It’s long been said that if the internet had never existed, children wouldn’t have learned violence from internet games. Discuss how the absence of violent tendencies among children would have affected history. First, pay attention to the Childrens’ Crusades, the development of the Mother Goose rhyming industry, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the world-wide stick and rock trade. Then, look away.

It’s also long been an established truism that without internet porn, men would never view women as sex objects. What would they have viewed as sex objects instead? List five possibilities and their relative likelihoods. Take into account the prevailing forms of agribusiness in ancient times and more recently, the rise of little tiny battery powered thingies.

Gratuitous Annual Christmas References

[from 12/22/10]

Let’s talk about a stupid sentence!

I heard this sentence on a stupid TV news show, uttered by a stupid “conservative” member of Congress: “You can’t balance budgets by taxing.” Whaaa?!

We don’t need to know who said that. We don’t want to get personal here at Adventures in Irony. We just want to laugh at the stupidity of stupid, stupid ideas. And this Dumbo’s idea is a doozy!

Let’s eliminate all our taxes then, and balance our budgets your way, “conservative” Dumbo! Start flapping your ears! Hey, everybody, clear the room! Elephant flapping his ears!

I’m sorry. Not only was that last comment entirely based on supposition, in that I don’t really know how the stupid “conservative” thinks budgets can be balanced without taxing, I also used a reference to a movie that 95% of my readers are too young to remember. I should have found a way to get my point across using Lady Gaga.

No, let me go back even before the flying elephant movie. Let’s go back to Joseph & Mary. That’s right. It’s Christmas. Here’s my gratuitous Christmas reference. Joseph & Mary knew all about taxes. They traveled by donkey 100 miles to pay their taxes in tax season, without a hotel reservation.

“So, what’s your point this time, Wes?” Well, I’ll tell you, Wes. Two thousand years ago the parents of JESUS didn’t have to be defeated in Congress to pay THEIR taxes, they paid them willingly, even when it meant riding a stinking donkey for over a week.

And how does all that fit in with this “conservative” label? How is balancing budgets using taxes some new-fangled liberal idea, when 2000 years ago the Romans were funding THEIR empire by taxing?

OK, let’s turn that observation around. How SHOULD the Romans have funded their Empire? Setting aside for the moment the notion that the Romans ought not to have had an empire, should they have funded it with bake sales? Rummage sales? Used book sales? Rock music benefits? Pledge drives? Subscriptions? “Your ad on this shield?” Selling naming rights to monuments?

I don’t know that they didn’t do all that and a lot more! The Romans, give credit where credit is due, were very creative. They invented ipso facto. They invented indoor heated flush toilets. They invented bat spit crazy politics. They were the real inventors of French fries, which are misnamed, as you all know, only they didn’t make them out of potatoes, they used parsnips. The French today call them “Panais frits” and make you wait an hour for them, then only bring two bites worth with a teaspoon of gravy on top.

But that’s beside the point! You can’t fund a whole empire charging a quarter quadrans per toilet use, or exporting fried parsnips to the Teutons. Even those and all the other tricks I’ve mentioned put together aren’t enough. Empires are very expensive.

So what’s it going to be, “conservatives”? Are we going to go so far back to the good old days that we don’t even have an empire? Seriously? Are we withdrawing from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, our German bases, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Kosovo?

Hell no, we won’t go. We never go. We’re going to be the Empire of a Thousand Years. So how do you fund an empire? How do you ALWAYS fund an empire? What’s the plain old normal way that all conservative governments that do things plain old-fashioned old normal ways use to fund an empire? They tax. Tax, tax and tax some more.

Going into Christmas time, or whatever you heathens call it, “End of the personal year” “No COLA Time”, “Unemployment”, let’s try to keep in mind that there could be no War on Christmas if there were no Christmas, and there’d be no Christmas without imperial tax collectors.

This is real conservatism: You balance budgets any way you can, and if that means raising taxes, you get on it. Grow up, people who want to call themselves conservatives.

We Are Not Brad Pitt

[from 10/27/10]

Having received a numerous accolade for last week’s History of Culture, I have decided to favor all with a History of Halloween this week. I began my research yesterday after dinner, so I should be finished by the end of my last paragraph.

There’s a lot of confusion about whether Halloween is a Pagan holiday or a Christian holiday. The name means “the day before All Saint’s Day,” which is the day Christians celebrate all the spare saints in the spare saint bin, all your Tom, Dick, and Harry saints. By that account it’s a Christian holiday.

But there’s also those who say Halloween is leftover from the Pagan Celtic holiday called Samhain. Samhain is a Gaelic word written with Gaelic spelling rules, so it’s not pronounced the way it looks. I believe it was pronounced “tooth decay” (silent final “n”.)

Samhain was much different from today’s Halloween, however. For example, there were no Jack-o-Lanterns carved from pumpkins. Instead they made Sean-o-Lanterns from hollowed out turnips. You probably think I’m kidding! We’re having fun now!

The Celtic year was divided between a dark half and a light half, with Samhain one dividing line. It was a time to let the dark and the dead mingle with the light and the living. That’s good reason to have people walking around pretending to be ghosts. It is not good reason to have people walking around being sexy cats, or dressed as packs of cigarettes, as Mario and Luigi, as an M&M, or as Karl Rove.

Samhain coincided with the turnip harvest. They had games like Bobbing for Turnips and Pin the Tail on the Turnip. By the end of Samhain, huge piles of turnips were set fire and people danced around them with glee, because by that time everybody despised turnips.

This brings us to the reason Trick or Treating started, which is the core of what we now think the holiday is about. It all began when the Celtic middle class vanished.

One day, the Celtic people looked around themselves, and there were no middle classes. There were only rich people and poor people. The rich people had candy and coins and fancy clothes and candles and soap, and the poor people had soot, sheets, and turnips. The poor people put their sheets on with the holes cut in them for their eyes and went door to door in the rich people’s neighborhoods, doing clever poor people dances to improvised armpit music, and expected candied turnips. When they didn’t get them, they shouted “Treat! Treat!” and burned the rich people’s houses down.

No, they didn’t burn the houses down. That was a fantasy of mine. Instead, having no toilet paper, only turnips, they “turniped” the rich people’s houses.

Today’s Halloween doesn’t look anything like that. We use Halloween to prove we are culturally savvy. It has nothing to do with dark versus light, nothing to do with the fact that we are not yet dead, and everything to do with the fact that we are not packs of cigarettes, not Brad Pitt, and not Karl Rove. We barely notice that it’s harvest season. Our Trick or Treaters don’t dance for their candy. They are lazy.

In spite of all that there are still those who persist in thinking that Halloween is a Christian holiday that somehow remains contaminated by Pagan influences, in much the same way that yoga is contaminated by demonic influences, and democracy is contaminated by Democrats.

What the Christians need is a Christian Halloween that gets rid of all Pagan influences once and for all, so there’s no more confusion about it.

My recommendation is for everyone involved to realized it’s just about what you’re afraid of, so if you are like Christine O’Donnell and you’re afraid of witches, then by all means dress as a witch for Halloween, just like old times. It isn’t contamination, it’s just something to fear.

The rest of us can Trick or Treat in Christine O’Donnell costumes.

Custom History

[from 10/20/10]

This week Angela Merkel, the hot Chancellor of Germany that George W Bush couldn’t keep his hands off, said multiCulturalism has failed in Germany. She didn’t say it has failed elsewhere, raising the possibility that it might rather be Germany that has failed multiCulturalism.

I am going to prove that neither has happened. The sentences “MultiCulturalism has failed Germany” and “Germany has failed multiCulturalism” are both logically equivalent to “We lost in Vietnam because the Earth is as flat as a plate and held aloft by a giant French waiter.”

We need to understand what German-ness and “A Culture” are. We’ll look back into history and see how those things were invented.

It started when some tribes overran sort-of northern Europe from the even-more northern Europe and were caught by the Romans in the midst of doing it. The Romans said, hey, this is OUR Europe. They named the land the tribes had already overrun Germania, because they felt like it. To this day, Germans don’t really call themselves Germans, but that’s beside the point.

The Romans were all about kicking the “Germans” out of Germania, and the “Germans” were all about sneaking around into Austria and other places like that, whose spellings I don’t feel like looking up right now. Then the Roman Empire fell, and what was left was a whole bunch of little countries where people spoke German types of languages and enjoyed oom-pa music and ate too much sausage.

Around 1815 these little countries formed a confederation. This was way hard. They had to confederate not only Austria and Hungary but an additional 4 “kingdoms”, 10 “principalities”, 14 “duchies”, 6 “grand duchies”, 4 “free cities”, 1 “electorate”, 1 “landgraviate”, and a partridge in a pear tree.

In order to pull off this confederation all involved had to be convinced that they were all in one club. This provided work for philosophers just at a time when it was getting hard to make a living philosophizing, what with the Industrial Revolution and science getting all the glory.

Where would this club come from? Going on many years, the big idea was the Holy Roman Empire, modeled on the Profane Roman Empire, based on the idea of citizenship. You were expected to know Latin for formal occasions and hearings and such, but you could speak anything you liked at home, and people did.

So came the big breakthrough: Kultur. I mean, A Culture.

Long before all this, you grew stuff in cultures. Then people started using it metaphorically. There was the social culture, consisting of language, literature and customs, that children grew up in that made them who they were. But that was still a local thing. I grew up in a culture. That guy, who lives in that village over that hill, grew up in a different culture. No two people could experience exactly the same social soil.

Thus the great idea was, hey, we’ll pretend that all of these artifacts of culture, spread throughout all of these lands, are all manifestations of One Culture, A German Culture, characterized by One Language, but including disparate non-linguistic cultural characteristics as well (because simple linguistic identification wasn’t considered enough, especially in view of the fact that some of their dialects were so far apart that not all “German” speakers could understand each other.)

German-ness and the concept of A Culture (as distinct from cultural influences) were thus born together, and the latter idea was the export version of the package.

It was accepted all around the world, though embellished. The United States didn’t leap back into England’s arms just because we all spoke English here. It was figured that because of a revolution, we had created A New Culture, better than English Culture.

But wherever the idea has been adopted it’s been as stupid as it was in the beginning. There is no such thing as A Culture. So, no such thing as multiCulturalism. So of course it fails. It gets a big fat goose-egg.

Zoned Out

Today our ongoing History of Poverty is continued with Parts R1, R2, R3, and Parts U1 through U6: Zoning ordinances. Let the hilarity ensue!

Last time we danced around construction regulations. We said those have deprived poor people of the kind of cheap housing they've used in times past. To the degree that is so, the government (that means all of us -- it's our government) is responsible for that much homelessness and has a moral obligation to correct the negative effects of those regulations.

That in itself justifies increasing subsidized housing in this country. But the government has not only meddled in the housing market by regulating construction. There is also zoning, the institutionalization of across-the-board NIMBY-ism: Not In My Backyard, Not In My Neighbor's Backyard, Not In Anyone's Backyard.

I know all about zoning, having spent 1998 in a cave playing Classic Sim City 18 hours a day until I became emaciated. The trick is to put commerce between the residential and industrial zones. Duh.

You might think they'd been around since the reign of Henry III, but actually city-wide zoning ordinances didn't happen in this country until the time of WW I. They were first enacted in New York City to help preserve sunlight for residents finding themselves too much in the shadows of newly built skyscrapers.

Zoning was controversial then. Some thought it violated the Constitution, amounting to a taking without due process. In fact a court struck down the zoning law of Euclid, Ohio, as unconstitutional. But the ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court, which decided in 1926 that Euclid's zoning ordinances were Okey Dokey after all. I tried to read the ruling so I could explain it here, but it's all "averred this", and "alleged that", and appell-ees, and appell-ants, and nuisances and such, and I had appointments to keep with my life, so I gave up. But the gist seems to be the court upheld restrictions on industrial uses, while saying little to nothing about restrictions on residential uses, on account of those not being at issue in that case.


[Above: From zoning maps on the Seattle.gov website.]

Still, the Supreme Court had said the Euclid, Ohio, model was fine, and a precedent is a precedent, so just about every other town and city in the country latched onto the Euclid model, so that now everybody's zoning ordinances are called "Euclidean," and we're pretty much stuck with them, including the residential restrictions the court didn't have to address.

This is a pity. I think we all agree it's reasonable that pulp mills, which stink, should not be built next door to me, Dr. Wes Browning. Other uses of property that I'm sure all will agree should not be allowed next door to me include slaughterhouses, and fish canneries, which likewise both stink, airports (too loud), fire departments (too loud), dog parks (too many wet dogs), flower gardens (make me sneeze), and nail-care shops (too strip-mall-ish). But is it right, really, that my city government should be able to pass a law prohibiting my neighbor from renting a room out?

That's what we have now in the descendants of the Euclid zoning ordinances. Cities and towns tell us all where we can build apartments and where there must be single family housing. In Seattle, single family housing has its own god and he lives in our zoning law, and he makes it illegal for poor people to be housed in rooms rented by home-owners.

The wrong people sued the city of Euclid. Instead of a business suing, it should have been a class-action suit by all the homeless people of today, visited upon the Supreme Court of 1926 by time machine.

Pregnant Exercises

1. If the test case for zoning law had involved Sim City, wouldn't most of the zoning ordinances in use today be called Simian? Ha.

2. The ancients believed that if you could name a god you could destroy it. Do us a favor and name the god of single family housing.

Nuclear Families Explode

Time for another installment in our epic History of the Poor! Today's chapter concerns homelessness and the breakdown of the nuclear family.

Periodically, I read other people's opinions. Usually, it's by accident. My eyes are open, writing is in front of them, and I read it, mistaking it for a recipe for soda crackers. Suddenly I am shocked to find myself immersed in an alien world-view. The other day someone stuck a lament for the nuclear family in front of me.

It went like this: "In my day the nuclear family was strong. Mothers stayed home and took care of the kids. Dads put food on the table. They instilled their children with values, and the children always had a home. We didn't have youth homelessness in those days, because kids weren't estranged from their parents."

According to this lament, the nuclear family was the normal family until Roosevelt and the New Deal began destroying it.

Well, I got news for all these lamentators. Even the term "nuclear family" only dates to just after WW II. It's true there have been nuclear families since prehistoric times, here and there, but they have not been the norm.

Prior to WW II there were "families." Lets review, then, the history of families.

The word "family" comes from the Latin familia. It's the same word that "familiar" comes from, as in black cats and all. It meant servant or assistant. "You can undress in front of Grovulus; he's just one of our familiars." Since Rome was patriarchal, the wife and children were familiars to the ruling patriarch, who could therefore sit around in his skivvies all day long. So the family consisted of the patriarch, his wife, their children, their children's children, and whoever else he owned.

Variations, some matriarchal, of this scheme are called extended families. The extended family, not the nuclear family, is the norm among those cultures that have low rates of homelessness. If you want to blame homelessness on a breakdown of families, you have to lament the replacement of the extended family by the nuclear family, rather than the breakdown of the nuclear family. By the time the nuclear family has replaced the extended family social disintegration is inevitable, because the nuclear family sucks.

I'll explain that below. But first, why do people think the nuclear family is the norm? The reason is corporatism. The rise of corporate power and the establishment of legal rights for corporations, overwhelming the rights of human individuals, led to the geographical breakup of extended families. Employees faced choices such as lose work or relocate to the new plant. Mergers and corporate restructures that served only stock holders and management added to the problem. There might not be a new plant to relocate to; somebody still has to move out to find work in another county or another state.

At first these pressures were minor and rare. But they increased steadily, so much so that the breakup of extended families has become a part of our tradition.

Recent US Census data on internal migration shows that one out of every five people living in the United States over the age of one year lived in a different state one year before. Another one out of five lived in the same state, but a different county. With that kind of mobility there's no hope of reinventing extended families anytime soon.

We think nuclear families are the norm because corporations promote them. They don't want us nostalgic for extended families. They like us mobile and fluid. So corporations have used images of nuclear families in the majority of their advertising since Sears Catalogs. The propaganda has worked.

As for nuclear families sucking? Well, it took corporations, a massive civil war, a couple of massive depressions, a Dust Bowl, and two world wars to shatter the extended family. Whereas nuclear families collapse every day from their own inadequacy.

You can't expect a husband and wife team to handle that much stress alone.

History of the Poor, Part I

As this great Nation prepares to change, it's time for us all to look at the lessons of the past for inspiration and guidance in changing. A particularly important part of history is the economic part.

Usually, when someone proposes to talk about economic history, they mean the history of making and spending money. But to waste space today, I would like to talk about the opposite, namely the history of not making and spending money. I want to talk about the history of poverty.

The poor have always been with us. According to Amos, a minor prophet, the going price for a poor person in Israel ca 750 BC was a cheap pair of sandals. So you know they had poor people in fairly large supply. In fact they had so many poor people that they made it a practice to talk of THE poor, as opposed to this poor guy or that poor guy.

[Above: A pair of sandals and change.]

In those days, the poor were mainly used to determine who was a good person or not. If you treated the poor justly you were good. But if you showed favoritism, by, say, not lashing them when they stole bread, that showed you were in need of correction. The idea that you might favor poor people may sound strange today, but in those times it was the equivalent of Populism.

The poor were so numerous in Biblical times that they became the cool people. Jesus hung with them, and there were poor-wannabes. To satisfy the people who wanted to be poor but couldn't quite go the extra mile it took, a new category called "the poor in spirit" was invented. Just like today's categories of "middle class" or "black" or "zen", anybody in those times could say they were poor in spirit. No one could disprove it. Especially since they had no surveillance cameras.

[Above Right: Jesus with poor homies and wannabes.]

It was the practical Romans who said "let's get real" about this and first defined poverty. They called it paupertas and had ways to measure it. You had to empty your pockets and they'd count your cash and tell you if you qualified. In some cases they would just take your word for it. That has come down to us as the rule of "in forma pauperis" by which you can get some relief by swearing a "pauper's oath." The point was, they had a definition, so they could always check if you were lying.

In the Middle Ages there was a period beginning around the 13th Century when there was some confusion of beggars with the poor. Monks would take vows of poverty and go around begging (the word "beggar" comes from the name of such an order) and people would get annoyed (especially at fakers among them) and take their annoyance out on all the poor. Things got so far out of hand that by the 16th Century the Council of Trent had to get behind the virtues of owning property, to stem the tide of mendicants.

[Left: Typical faking fake beggar, ruining it for real beggars everywhere.]

For many centuries the idea of poverty was mainly of concern to churches and courts. It wasn't until the late 1800s that sociologists came up with the term "underprivileged." To understand this term you have to know that the word "privilege" really means "private law." In other words to have privilege is to have laws on your own personal side. So the underprivileged are people who have less of that. In other words, it means, "poor in laws." Recognizing that there could be such a thing was a great leap forward which required the invention of many new college departments and degrees.

When I was growing up in the 1950s the poor divided neatly into three categories. There was 1) the Salt Of The Earth poor. That was your basic Appalachian poor, your coal miners, your sand farmers, and such. There were 2) the vagabonds and the hobos. And there were 3) minorities.

Then, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and invented homelessness. And here we are.

Plato Was Right, Too

As I’ve often said, if you want to write stuff but you’re too drunk, or hung-over, or you don’t have any ideas, write about whatever it is that’s keeping you from writing. Today, for me, as I will explain shortly, that would be history.

History. It's like belly button lint. It happens when you aren't looking. One day you find a bush baby nesting in your tummy dock. You had previously forgot you had a tummy dock. Next, a strange glib man you've never met before is an expert on your belly button lint and he's teaching a course on it at the U. You audit his course without notifying the bursar and find out your lint was originally funded by the CIA as part of Operation BAJAX, aimed at world dominance, one belly at a time. Knowing this, or thinking you know it, never seems to make any difference to your life.

And yet, history, whether it's true or not, does affect you even when you can't use it to your own purposes. That's because history is about more than the truth of what really happened. It's about myth. Myth is a living agent. You don't use it; it uses you.

Myth comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “story telling,” but connoting “horse hockey.” Poets, like Homer, often tell historic myth. Seattle poet and editorial committee colleague Stan “Rail-rider” Burriss frequently illustrates his points at the committee table by reciting a history of Real Change. “It's like a dozen years ago when Tim Harris rode the rails into town with nothing but the shoes on his back, a song in his pocket, a computer strapped to his head, and 10 hungry kids tied to his toes. But Tim had a vision. Writing on the backs of unpaid bills in a cold wet cellar, and using his computer in some magical way none of us will ever understand, he pasted together the first Real Change, which he sold out of a friend's garage in downtown Seattle.” These tales usually introduce a motion to use the word “human” in a sentence. They also provide Stan with an opportunity to say “speaks to all of us,” again.

Pretty soon, though, people catch on to what the poets are up to, and they start to employ all the poets at writing satires and sit-coms, precisely to keep them from telling histories, because they only make crap up. People begin listening to the survivors of the history rather than the rhymers of it. Since the survivors are usually identical to the winners, this accounts for the saying, “History is told by the winners.” The correct saying should be, “History is told by the still breathing.”

Even though the survivors tell a truer story than the poets, the resulting history is still myth. Contrary to popular myth, myth is not less myth because it's true. In fact the most powerful myths are the ones that are unassailable fact. In the phrase, “Tell it like it is,” the truth part is the “like it is” part of the phrase. The myth part is the beginning, the “tell it” part. The “tell it” part is an essential component.

“So, Wes, What are you trying to tell us?” I'm trying to tell you I didn't accumulate the usual pile of news stories to comment on this morning because I spent all last night jerking around with the Real Change History page, a work in progress begun by Tim Harris on the new Real Change Wiki. There was a lot of stuff in there that spoke to me, stuff wrapped up with Real Change like homelessness in Seattle, homeless activists, and advocates. I was moved to speak back, because it was the human thing to do.

That's how it is with myth. It draws you into itself. As always, Stan is right, on the other side of my morning coffee.

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.

Old Fart Wises Off

Good news! Thanks to the Democratic Convention occupying the media, there has been no actual news lately.

This gives us here at Adventures in Poetry – meaning by us, me, Copyright Dr. Wes Browning – a chance to take stock of our life. A chance to sniff the winds of our change and dip our toes into the pools of our stagnation. To audit the account books of the psycho-social-biological records of our historic being. To see to whence we have arrived, and from whence we have departed. And to see who or what is all that in the cargo hold, and why is there a woman in our bed wanting something.

Well, first of all, we are old. We just did the dreaded calculation and discovered that our current incarnation has been breathing air for 20,000 days and a little more than an extra hundred. As a mathematician, let us put that number in perspective. That's one more than 19,999. If he saw 20,000 Republicans laid end to end, Rush Limbaugh wouldn't raise any moral objections. Jules Verne talked about 20,000 leagues, but we don't know what a league is, we're a mathematician, not a damn encyclopedia. If you saw 20,000 pigeons flying toward you, you'd wish you had an umbrella, etc.

We once saw a guy walk on the moon live on television. We saw the assassination of an assassin live on television. We saw several wars live on television, so many that we lost count, sometime around about Panama. Most of them we're unnecessary and a huge waste of lives, health, and money.

History used to happen in black and white, but now it's always in color. Conversely Red Square isn't red anymore. There's nothing left for conservatives to be better dead than, which must be disorienting for them.

We have lived to see the amazing Wolf Blitzer ask Jesse Jackson, in Jesse's capacity as a black spokesperson, why did Barack Obama, a black African immigrant running for the Senate, not speak before the Democratic Convention in Boston using the same kind of rhetoric as did Al Sharpton, a black African-American reverend who had been running for president. Why oh why, Jesse?

Just yesterday, after living a thought-filled and examined life for over 5 decades, we arrived for the first time ever at an adequate working philosophy. This was facilitated by the able conversation and intellectual assistance of our regular companion, the afore-mentioned wanting-something woman and person on whose kitchen floor we have sometimes slept, Anitra Freeman. With her help we came up with this: "Good things now, bad things later." When in doubt always refer to that formula. It's a plan of action that can't go wrong. For example, by using it, you will never force yourself to save dessert for after the asparagus again. You will know all the times that it would be better to be home in bed than. You will learn to appreciate the paper plates of life, and the other disposables. You will shower for the fun of it, not because you have to. There is the way of wisdom.

We have been homeless four times in our life. We mention this in part to fulfill our unwritten contract with Real Change and the Real Change Editorial Committee. Every column we write is required to make at least one mention of homelessness, directly or indirectly, or one local politician must be made fun of, or two national politicians, or we must directly advocate for at least two of the following: minority rights, free pizza for Real Change volunteers writers and "editors", free/more/better treatment for recovering [insert addiction here], cats.

Duck licking. Speaking of speaking of duck licking, every column should contain at least one non sequitur, and one abuse of logical accuracy, which may be the same. But that has nothing to do with the unwritten contract. We have digressed.

We have lived in the same subsidized housing for almost 7 years now, the same housing funded by the Housing Agency Formerly Known As Seattle Housing Authority, the housing that was granted after 14 months on a waiting list, the housing that was promised to me as being permanent, the housing that is now threatened by Bush Administration cuts in Section 8 funding, the housing that we will never move from until they haul my cold lifeless never-to-be-homeless-again body out of it. Or until they come up with something better. Like that'll happen.

It's a Happ'nin!

Recently I was talking about how I am stupid. I was saying, actually, that everyone is stupid. The trick is to figure out, for each one of us, how. One of the ways that I am stupid is that I suck at history.

I don't completely suck at history. For example, I can be a part of history, no problem. You could in theory go back to certain of those old news tapes of events ("happ'nins") in the sixties and find me. OK, I would be the guy on the edge of the shot looking like I got lost on the way to the chess club, but I'm, like, there.

My problem is, I don't know where there was. In the case of the sixties this makes me good at history, because there wasn't any there there, actually. But it doesn't work for other times.

I first realized how much I was going to suck at history right at the beginning, when my third grade teacher was explaining to my class that history had to do with things like the Hundred Years War and some French girl who got herself burned at the stake and that that would be on the test. I looked around and I didn't see any charred remains, know what I mean? How should I know this girl got roasted? Then I found out that we were even supposed to know WHEN she got roasted, down to the exact year, and that it was HUNDREDS of years ago, and I knew this history thing was not for me.

One of my big problems with history was figuring out why, when we were talking about battles and what famous people were getting burned at the stake, THAT was history, but when we were talking about, say, ancient customs and what kind of culture they had, our history books were supposed to be closed because talking about culture was some kind of social studies. If history isn't social studies, what is it? I still don't get that.

Sometimes people come along with audio-visual aids that help. So back when Masterpiece Theater showed its TV version of Winston Churchill's book, the First Churchills, I learned a thing or two about history then. I learned, among other things, what papists were, that there were such people as Roundheads, that in the olden days (at least ca 1700) everybody was incredibly erudite, and that there might be worse things than just being burned at the stake, parts of you could be burned separately in front of you. Ouch!

The other thing I learned was that Winston Churchill, a former prime minister of England, who wrote the book, must have been incredibly erudite himself. Or else he couldn't have wrote it.

Speaking of audio-visual aids, I believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who also must suck at history but unlike me doesn't know it, has been watching too much of the History Channel. Mr. Rumsfeld is displaying all the signs of a man whose knowledge of the history of the world consists mainly in knowing how to make blowing up sounds. I wouldn't mind but now he's favorably comparing George W. Bush to the afore-mentioned Winston Churchill.

I mean, I didn't know Churchill. He wasn't a friend of mine. But shee-yeah, right.

I'd be less likely to scoff if Rumsfeld wanted to call GW Bush the William McKinley of the new millennium. Not that Churchill wasn't an imperialist in his own day, he was, he was, but I can visualize Bush being McKinleyesque without cracking up.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about in this column. What I wanted to talk about was the art of making blowing up sounds. I don't think it's wrong to be good at making blowing up sounds. I think it's a shame that more people aren't practiced at making convincing explosive noises with their mouths.

I firmly believe that the reason Rumsfeld and Bush want war with Iraq is because they have no buddies to play war with who can make good artillery and blowing up sounds.

I urge everyone who is adept at making blowing up sounds to contact the White House and offer their services in this regard. Thank you.