Talk About Unfunded Mandates

Toby Nixon says he knows what it's like to be homeless. Thirty-five years ago his dad took him, age 11, and his two younger brothers to a new town, and they didn't have a place to stay until some government agency found them an $8 per night motel room. Toby doesn't say how long they had to wait to get into that motel room. It could have been all of one afternoon. But in his opinion piece last Friday in the P-I Toby does say that for him and his brothers it was all an adventure.

Arrrgh! It was an adventure for him, but he "knows" what its like to be homeless? No, Toby, you don't know. Nobody knows until they had to do it long enough that it wasn't an adventure anymore.

I hear this sort of nonsense all the time: some college kids decide they're going to write a joint term paper on "what it's really like" to be homeless. So they gather up tents and sleeping bags and live outdoors in city parks for a few days or maybe even a couple of weeks. Then they write that it wasn't so bad. It was "all an adventure." "It was nice not to have to do chores for mom for a change."

Now I don't want to disparage anyone's experiences, but when it comes to listening to people say "I know what it's like to be homeless," I have a little rule. I call it the Eight-Week Rule. The rule is simply that if you haven't been continuously homeless for at least eight weeks, I'm not listening. I know the rule is arbitrary. But you have to draw the line somewhere. I draw it at eight weeks. It's based on the theory that it takes eight weeks for some people before they hit "The Wall." I'll explain what "The Wall" is some other time.

But right now I have to talk about HB 1585. The whole reason Toby Nixon, a state legislator, wanted us to know that he knew what homelessness was "like" was so he could justify introducing HB 1585, a bill that would require tent cities which get any public funding to meet standards in line with the state's standards for migrant worker housing. HB 1585 would require, among other things, 7-foot ceilings for all the tents and ceiling-type lighting in each "housing unit".

Sounds great, except for one little catch. The bill establishes standards without providing the means to achieve them. It doesn't say that public funding has to be increased sufficiently to achieve those standards. HB 1585 in fact defines homeless people as temporary workers, even if they are unemployed, and what is the worst, defines the managers of a tent city as equivalent to the landlords of migrant farm workers. No additional funding is provided, the tent city "operators" are supposed to provide the improvements.

But, guess what? Existing tent cities in the Seattle area are self-managed! So Toby Nixon's law requires the homeless to supply themselves with better housing!

What freakin' genius!

I've just learned about some other brilliant legislation being contemplated by Toby Nixon and his Republican friends:

A bill inspired by Toby Nixon's memory of how hard it was for his next door neighbor when she didn't get a pony for Christmas, which would require all 12 year-old girls to save up their lunch money for however long it takes and buy themselves ponies. (For the purpose of this bill, 12 year-old girls will be defined as "farmers.")

A bill to provide health insurance to all citizens. It would do so by defining the term "insurance company" to include all individual citizens. If you're a citizen, you are your own insurance. It's not magic, it's Toby-ic!

A bill to solve transportation problems in Washington State. It would define "Washington State" as Sherman, Nebraska, and "transportation" as a big fat goose. You can eat your transportation, Washington!

You Can't Say That!

It's a good time to recall the standard disclaimer: the author of this column, me, Dr. Wes Browning, is solely responsible for its content. Real Change, its management, staff, and volunteers have all said on many occasions that I, Dr. Wes, am nuts, and they assume no liability for anything I say here or anywhere else.

I had just finished saying, last week, that Susan Sontag was right about something and that Ed Koch may or may not have been. I also mentioned the Planters Nut Company. What you all may not have known, because I didn't tell you, was that last week's entire column was an attempt to write about Ward Churchill that got sidetracked.

Ward Churchill is the Colorado University professor who has taken a lot of flak for an essay he wrote after the 9-11 attacks in which he pointed out that the Pentagon was a military target and added that many (not all) of the people in the World Trade Towers at the time of the attack were willing participants in "America's global financial empire." One particular phrase that fetched Mr. Churchill a heap of heat was "little Eichmanns."

"Oh boy, talking about this will be fun!" That's what I've been thinking. I thought, "Let's talk about Nazi technocrats and the Americans who can be compared to them, ha, ha!" That's when I remembered what Susan Sontag said and got distracted.

Now Bill Maher has got back in the news and distracted me. Bill Maher said essentially the same thing that Sontag said, that the 9-11 attackers had not been cowards, whatever else they were, and got his show yanked from TV. Now he's back with a new TV show and he's getting himself in deep by disparaging evangelical Christians, and the conservative Christians are romping all over him.

OK, he said something real bad about Christians in general, and it was TOTALLY inappropriate. Christians do NOT all have neurological disorders. Bad talk-show man! BAD! No talk-show man cookie!

As if that isn't distracting enough, Chris Rock gets picked to host the Oscars and he lets fly that he thinks no straight black man would ever watch the Oscars and that, in general, awards for art are f-ing idiotic. You might think that would mostly offend gays, but actually right-wing conservatives are doing most of the complaining, with the same ones calling for his dismissal from the Oscars as are calling for Bill Maher's new show to be cancelled.

Just as I'm hearing about all this and I'm reassuring myself that everything is all right, we still have First Amendment protection of freedom of speech in this country, I find out that the House of Representatives passes a so-called Broadcast Decency Act which will give federal regulators power to levy massive fines against broadcasters for airing material they deem indecent.

Remember when conservatives used to oppose regulation of markets?

There I go again, digressing. Which as I see it is the continuing problem, and what's wrong with the whole picture.

Instead of having a serious national discussion about what Ward Churchill said, we are immersed in a war of words over whether he should be allowed to keep his job, having said that much. We are all forced to join the fight to keep the debate open rather than debating. Things like the Broadcast Decency Act only serve to prove that we are right to be concerned. Today they would fine CBS for an exposed breast; tomorrow it will be for a quote from Chris Rock (or even Alfred Kinsey); the next day it will be for "unpatriotic" speech.

All of which keeps all of us from talking about the extent to which Ward Churchill was right, and in all the confusion no one notes what the corporations that built the World Trade Towers do to the rest of the world in our names.

My Place in Hell Is Reserved

Six weeks ago, annoyed by some injustice or other, I was moved to prattle on and on about the idea of justice and what I didn't know about it. Now let's talk about another subject that I know nothing about, even though some people who claim to love me say I incarnate it: Evil.

One reason I don't know anything about Evil is that it doesn't exist. There, I said it. I'll say it plainer: evil (small e) exists, in the sense that there are things in the world that I must by my nature oppose. But no objective Evil exists.

Here is where I insert the "prattling on" part. Going back to six weeks ago, I then said some words to the effect that righteous outrage is a moral neutral like a 5 on the gray-scale, whereas all the different kinds of justice in the world put together would be a moral rainbow, or maybe a Jackson Pollock.

To at least one reader on our very own "editorial" committee, that discussion was reminiscent of the late Susan Sontag's comments on the 9-11 attackers. Sontag was not talking about righteous outrage; she spoke of the moral neutrality of courage. She said the attackers didn't lack courage and couldn't be called cowards. Our reader, let's call her L with one big L, thought that I might have even cribbed from Susan, but actually I cribbed from some old friends of mine who hadn't heard of her.

But I'm interrupting my own prattle. The point is that moral neutralities are a lot more common than most folks in these parts give them credit for. That's because most folks in these parts are dualists. They believe there's Good and there's Evil and everything lies on one side or t'other, as my mother would've put it.

So let's say we contemplate a thing, like a bag of rice. A bag of rice has got to be Good, or a bag of rice has got to be Evil. Or take a box of ribbed grape-flavored condoms. It's got to be Good or Evil. Or take Susan Sontag, before she died. Susan Sontag has got to be Good or Evil. Well, which is she?

Ed Koch, the former mayor of New York, decided a while ago that Susan Sontag was Evil, based on other unspecified but presumably similar statements she'd made concerning Israel. In fact he said that upon her death she would occupy the Ninth Circle of Hell for all eternity. That would be the innermost Dantean Circle of Hell reserved for traitors to family, country, guests, lords and benefactors, which is also the Circle occupied by Satan himself. I'm sure that Mr. Koch didn't change his mind when Sontag made her remarks about the 9-11 attackers.

What others identify as treason in Sontag's remarks was actually reason and the honesty to speak it. Courage IS morally neutral. A charging bull elephant doesn't earn a special place in heaven for disregarding the elephant gun. The 9-11 attackers were on a suicide mission. To deny the courage that their mission required is to forever deny a key ingredient in understanding them and understanding what happened.

Here are some prattling questions to round out the discussion. Would you think I was Evil if I said that peanuts kill people? How about if you were the head of Planters? What if I were an employee of Planters? To be a traitor you first have to be a loyal servant. But what if you serve an Evil master? What if you serve Satan? Does disloyalty to Satan get you into the Ninth Circle?

[No, I am not suggesting that Planters is Evil. There IS no Evil!]

Incidentally, this column should get me to the Seventh Circle of Hell, for violence to God, art, and nature. Two more Circles to go, and I'll make a bull's-eye – maybe next week.

Mammary Metaphors Amok

For a long time I've been hearing about the "Continuum of Care." The expression only seems to come out of the mouths of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) officials and people who are busy trying to suck money out of them. As best as I can determine the Continuum of Care is meant to be like the Space-Time Continuum, all smooth and easy to swallow in every bit, but in reality it's much lumpier and full of big chunks of cockroach butt and old tennis shoes.

Here's how it works. First, we pay taxes. Yes, even I have paid taxes. My taxes may not have been as much as yours were, but I'm sure they hurt as much. Second, the federal government allocates a fraction of your taxes to HUD. Then HUD turns back around and gives your money to your local community in order to provide a "Continuum of Care."

Now, here's the tricky part. Let's say that HUD has decided that, after giving your own particular local community money to provide a "Continuum of Care" last year, your local community did not in fact fully achieve the sort of "Continuum" HUD had in mind. Then HUD withholds a whole bunch of your money from your local community to punish it for having such lousy services. This then in turn guarantees that your local community will have even lousier services next year, hence less of your money, hence more cockroach butt, more old tennis shoes, on your horizon.

Or, you could move to California.

California has just seen an increase in HUD funding for homeless services. Arnold Schwarzenegger takes credit for this, saying that he is the "Collectinator" for the state of California. He also says he has succeeded in sucking more money out of HUD because of the way he has been "nurturing" the relationship between California and the federal government since gaining office.

The whole situation has me confused. If Arnold is a better nurturer than the rest of us, doesn't that make him a girlie man? On the other hand, if it's sucking he's doing, and it is, shouldn't we understand that the nurturing is being done by federal government? Hey, let's run with that analogy!

In fact, HUD has the nipples. There are two. There is the Continuum of Care nipple. There is the Emergency Shelter Services nipple. And the rules as they stand now grant access to the nipples only to the strongest babies. Let the weak get weaker, until they starve to death.

For example, Louisville, Kentucky, is a weak baby and HUD will starve it. Louisville is weak because it only got 81 out of 100 points for its latest HUD grant application, in part because HUD has determined that the city has failed to move families quickly enough from temporary shelters into permanent housing. So Louisville had its funding for homeless programs cut by more than $3 million this year, amounting to a 55% reduction from last year's funding.

That's supposed to teach those slackers in charge of homeless services in Louisville that they should be moving more people into permanent housing like the federal government told them to do. But, aw shucks, turns out there never was any permanent housing to move people to. And now the situation has just gotten worse. The weak baby will get weaker. Thank you HUD, Mommy Dearest.

Meanwhile, Bush wants to cut HUD grants drastically over the remainder of his term. In particular he wants to cut Section 8 funding by a third, on top of recent roll-backs. But the Section 8 program is the only program that actually creates the kind of affordable housing that's needed in order for cities like Louisville to get a decent score on their HUD applications. So the cutbacks proposed will guarantee failure for every other city and state.

Except maybe California, because the Collectinator nurtures so much better than you do.

Goodbye Carrot-Head

We've got your Real Change right here! Out with the Old! In with the New!

When I started writing this column in the dim past I was beardless and thin and my head somewhat resembled a carrot. Thus "carrot-head man" was born as a self-portrait and we used him to represent me all these years on this page. But I am now bearded, fat, and my head somewhat resembles a bell pepper. Moreover, I can't draw bell peppers. So, goodbye carrot-head man. Hello some photograph, one that we will try to doctor to keep from scaring anyone.

As Real Change marches forward into its brave new future of weekly publication, I find myself pausing to reflect on the past. Mostly when I do this I reflect on my own past because other people's past would be history and I would have to study to reflect on that.

I reflect on poorer days, when I would sell myself to university psych professors and students as an experimental subject. I did so occasionally when I was a homeless college student. It made more sense to me than being a medical subject, because I figured they'd be less likely to do permanent damage. Plus, on my campus, they always paid $5 just for applying, even if they turned you down.

I got turned down once because I knew too much. The experimenters wanted someone who hadn't heard about Milgram's study of obedience to authority. That was the one where Stanley Milgram found that more than 60% of people studied, when told forcefully enough to do so, would administer dangerous and painful electroshocks to innocent strangers, even when it appeared that the victims might die. Since I knew that all I got was $5 that time.

All of this jumped into focus this week when I read an article in the Seattle P-I about a new study planned to find out if believing in God helps you deal with pain.

Now, a lesser-known aspect of Milgram's study and it's spawns were indications that the more religious subjects in such experiments were more likely to obediently torture their victims than were the less religious.

Of course, religious doesn't equate with believing in God. Still, I see a host of ironies rising up to drag me into a fiery pit of flaming sulfurous irony-hell.

In the new study volunteers will submit to pain and experimenters will see whose brains show the most pain activity, those of the believers or those of the non-believers. Then, to make things more interesting, they'll show various religious symbols, to "see if that helps."

What a great idea! Let's show a crucifix to a guy in agony and see if he gets the message! How about a nail or a martyr's knuckle? OK, maybe we should consider other sorts of symbols. How about one of those pictures of a lamb being led by Jesus? That would probably work.

Isn't it just wonderful that religion has now come full circle since the Inquisition? In the Olden Days it was a bitch rounding up heathens for torture. Nobody wanted to hurt. But now everyone wants to be the newest and best Jackass for Jesus.

First, you get paid. All of these kinds of studies pay their "volunteers," who are invariably impoverished college students and poor people living near colleges. Secondly, if you are at all religious, this is your chance to prove to the world that your gospel/doctrine/prophet/or whatever really works the one miracle everyone wants the most: numbness.

This might work: apply, but tell them you're a masochist. Get disqualified, take the $5 and run.

Furry Snarks All About

Senses of humor: what are they? How many are there? Where do they come from? Why do some people seem not to have them? Why do Germans like toilet jokes so much? Why is George Bush so snarky? How did snarky get to be a word? Why did the expression "elephant that sticks to the roof of your mouth" make me squirt Pepsi out my nose, once?

Those are just some of the questions I have no answer for. I wanted to devote today's column to things I don't know. But that's such a big subject I've had to narrow it down to just the things I don't know that have recently come to my attention.

In particular, as I was telling my life story to a captive audience last week, it dawned on me that although I was talking about dreadful, horrible, catastrophes that had befallen me in my innocent childhood, I was breaking out into giggles. I was talking about disaster after disaster happening to a poor defenseless child, the sort of stories that can make grown men cry. But since it all happened to me over fifty years ago I was on the verge of giggling like any three teenage girls in the same room.

Another odd sense of humor is the Seinfeld sense. I'm not speaking of the Seinfeld stand-up sense of humor, but the Seinfeld sit-com sense of humor. I watch reruns of Seinfeld, the sit-com, all the time. While I watch, Anitra "Netmama" Freeman, Upon Whose Kitchen Floor I Have Sometimes Slept, is almost always trying to surf the internet while at the same time holding her hands over her ears and making "la-la" noises to block out the Seinfeld dialog. To sweet caring sensitive Anitra, the Seinfeld dialog is mean and Seinfeld characters are the dregs of human society and she finds nothing funny about them

Whereas, to me, the Seinfeld dialog is mean and Seinfeld characters are the dregs of human society, and I laugh and laugh no matter how often I see them.

Perhaps what got me thinking about this is the latest issue of Time Magazine, which has a set of short stories that all amuse me.

First, there's the PETA fur coat story. PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) has organized boycotts of stores selling fur coats, even stores selling only vintage fur coats. But they also give fur coats away to the homeless. Now they are giving fur coats to homeless people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, speaking of things I do not know, "eccentric former basketball star" Dennis Rodman has something called the Dennis Rodman Foundation, which helps the homeless. I did not know that. But I guess I know it now, because Dennis heard about how PETA was helping the homeless stay warm by giving them clothes made from tortured animals, and thought "I'm down with that," or something to that effect, so he agreed to participate in PETA's "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" campaign.

Meanwhile, homeless men in Amsterdam are voluntarily wearing winter jackets that advertise Ben & Jerry's, in return for money from Ben and Jerry going to local nuns who in turn help the needy.

But that's not all! The New Hampshire Fish and Game Department is now giving away confiscated meat from illegally killed moose and deer. Moose jerky, anyone? "Say, what are you going to do with that moose-hide, Mister Fish and Game man? That'd make a fine pair of pants for a homeless guy…" "Oh, rats, there's a bullet hole in mine."

Allow me to summarize.

I don't know everything. I know that I have a weird sense of humor, but I don't know why. I know that Dennis Rodman would rather be naked than wear fur, but homeless people would rather wear furs than freeze to death. I know that PETA and Dennis are OK with that. I know that Anitra would wear a jacket with a Ben & Jerry's ad on it, just to promote ice-cream. I know that I will never see a squirrel ice-skating on the Potomac in July.

But I might wear him for a hat some winter if I were homeless again. I'd get a pass from PETA.

Plain Right

Let's talk about justice!

Here at Real Change we are always talking about justice, but do we know what it is? My answer to that question is, who cares? All I care about is if I know what justice is.

Upon close examination and careful study and other redundant picking about of that last question, I realize that answering it is problematical, and hinges a lot on what "knowing" is. If by "knowing" a thing, I can mean I "know" what it isn't, well, then I am really on top of this justice thing. For example, justice is not a number 2 pencil. Nor is it an egg salad sandwich or a Ford Bronco or a genetically engineered grapefruit. Whereas, if to "know" a thing, I have to actually "know" what it is, I could easily be in over my head.

Part of what confuses me about justice is that I get it all mixed up with righteousness. I notice that I'm not the only one who does this. Perhaps that's where I should start.

Instead, I'm going to start with an idea of righteousness that was inculcated in me at the malleable age of three. At that age I had been wronged considerably by someone and I desperately needed to understand how that could be. An informal teacher of mine then taught me a concept that he wrapped in his own language, which concept he translated into English as "standing up happens."

Notice what he didn't say: he didn't say "sh*t happens, get used to it." What he also didn't say was, "God will set things right some day and slay your enemies; yea, verily, unto the seven times seventh generation of your enemies will He slay them." He said that whatever people are made to lie down will stand up. He said the rest of us have basically three choices. We can either help the fallen get to their feet, or we can be in the way, or we can be utterly irrelevant. But the standing up will happen. Get used to it. Standing up is a force of nature.

By contrast, justice is a force of humankind. Justice isn't about the standing up; justice is about the helping or the getting in the way or the being irrelevant. My teacher's version of righteousness, as uprightedness, was morally neutral. If uprightedness happens eventually, no matter what, there's no good or bad uprightedness, there's only early or late. But there's definitely excellent, good, mediocre, poor, and bad justice. There's timely justice, there's stingy justice, there's belated justice, there's Roman justice, there's English justice, there's Papal justice, there's martial justice, there's poetic justice, there's sweet justice, there's sour justice, there's even surreal justice, to the point of Kafkaesque justice.

Now is the time in this column when I like to turn to concrete examples, examples similar to bricks, only more cement-like, to illustrate my musings.

Here's an instance of justice and standing up: Rep. Robert Matsui died at the age of 63 on New Years Day. Matsui spent his earliest childhood in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II. Later he stood up to become a US Congressman for California, a job he held for 26 years, from 1979 on. One of his achievements in Congress was helping to gain the passage of an official apology for the wartime internment, together with compensation for the survivors. That would be justice. We should all honor his life and the justice he helped create.

Ironically, at the same time that Robert Matsui was dying, the Pentagon and the CIA were asking the White House to make arrangements to keep some alleged enemy combatants at Guantanamo in prison for life. Specifically, the Defense Department wants 25 million dollars to build a prison for about 200 detainees for whom there is likely not enough evidence to convict in a military tribunal, and whom the government acknowledges do not even have any intelligence to give up.

That would be bad justice, even Kafkaesque justice. I remember when it was supposed that Kafkaesque justice only happened in KGB dominated USSR and Soviet satellite states. Welcome to the new world. But remember this too: standing up happens.