Unity: Good

The other day Pope Benedict XVI got a whole lot of people upset with him for saying, among other things, that Protestant churches aren't really churches. He said they're karaoke bars.

Ha, that was me having fun all by myself again. What he said was Protestant "organizations", or "dealies", "do not enjoy apostolic succession in the sacrament of Orders, and are, therefore, deprived of a constitutive element of the Church." So they can't be called churches "in the proper sense". If you don't have a constitutive element of a thing, you can't be that thing.

[Right: His Holy Apostolic Succession.]

This is quite clear. So if you don't have a constitutive element of a trucker, such as a truck, say, you can't be a trucker. Or if you don't have a constitutive element of a world leader, you can't be a world leader. You can be a factional leader. Or, if you have a truck, you can be a trucker. But not a world leader.

Some popes, like the last one, just seem to be angling for a Nobel Peace Prize every step of the way, until we frankly get sick of them. I know I was. And some popes, like this one, are refreshingly free of that Nobel Peace Prize-groveling taint.

I mean, who needs world ecumenical leadership anyway? If you're going to have a church shouldn't you think it's the best damn church ever? Even all the way to hell? I mean, if not, what's the point? Pope Benedict doesn't owe the Protestants any favors.

So I don't go along with these people who say Pope Benedict XVI is being divisive. I think what he's saying is just something on the order of, "You're baby is uglier than my baby. Ha, ha, look at your ugly, ugly, baby! How can you stand having such an ugly baby? I'd drown that baby if it was my baby. DAMN, that is one butt-ugly baby!" What's wrong with saying things like that?


I'll tell you who's being divisive. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki is being divisive.

Let's say I'm at a party with my wife. Not a current wife or any wife I've ever had, but a "wife for the sake of illustration." Let's say she says we should leave the party while I'm just getting my groove on, if you know what I mean. I've only had, say, two beers. I've only flirted with two or three other women. I've only done my patented guaranteed-to-win-comments lap-dance once. Just getting STARTED. And she says, "It's time to go home, HONEY," with that Nancy Pelosi-ish emphasis on the honey, that means it was time to go before I ever got here.

Let's say my wife and I are having it out over this, and I'm saying, "Oh, no I'm NOT leaving," and she's saying, "Oh, yes you ARE," over and over again, and let's say the host of the party comes over and says, "It's alright, Dr. Browning, we won't mind if you two leave early."

You see what that is? That's divisive. He's about to be punched.


OK, maybe that illustration was too abstract. Let's try this. I'm having my soldiers duke it out in some foreign country with, um, belligerent sectarian factions, and I'm telling my people back home that I can't pull my troops out to safety because they have a mission to complete, and this jerk comes over and says, "We can handle this; you can go, anytime."

That is divisive behavior unbecoming of a puppet.

In fact I would go so for as to say that man lacks a constitutive element of puppethood. He is not a proper puppet at all. How am I supposed to milk this conflict to the advantage of my friends while using it to distract the American people from the way I am ruining their country, if the so-called Prime Minister won't back me up?

What kind of satellite are we running there?

Now Roll Over

Here's an example of how I think.

I was walking down 3rd Avenue yesterday and saw a couple outside their car. They looked like they were preparing to drive off, but first, a Boston Terrier attached by leash to the female half of the couple performed a work of nature. Then the male half said, "Good boy! Good job!" and I thought about liberal movements.


I mean, you have your liberal movements, and the public either approves or it doesn't. If they approve, it's "Good boy! Good job!" But do they let you off the leash? No. Do they let you drive? Never.

That's not the example of how I think I was going to show you. I'll go on.

When I got home I learned about Live Earth. I hadn't learned much about Live Earth earlier, because I knew it was a liberal movement, and so I was too busy looking away to get the details. I now know that it was 7000 concerts all over the world and that it had to do with Madonna and Sting, in different places and ways, that the South African concert ended with the audience clapping out an SOS, and that you could see the famous giant statue of Christ the Redeemer from where they held the concert in Rio. I hope there were good drugs for that, that's awesome. (Giant statues of Jesus really put me in the mood.)

In Toronto, other concerts from around the world were shown on a gigantic TV screen fashioned by modern technology from the residue of acres of Jurassic ferns laced with rare earths that in twenty years will only be found in toxic dumps and powered by "wind and low-impact water sources." If only we could find a way to harness the unlimited power emanating from the performers' egos.

In London, critics were complaining that Springsteen hadn't been booked, and they got Spinal Tap instead. They're so stuck in the Eighties in London.

So I'm thinking, if they'd got Springsteen, they'd get "Good liberals! Good job!" and maybe a check in the mail, but ten minutes later it would be all about whether the cable was paid and the liberals would be on the floor in the back having nothing to say about it.

That's not the example of how I think I was going to show you. I'll go on.

The public often likes liberal movements. The anti-slavery movement was a good example. The public likes that there was an anti-slavery movement. In my entire life I've only met one guy who expressed regrets about the anti-slavery movement. He didn't want slaves but wanted to be able to have one if he ever changed his mind. Everybody else has said "Good liberals! Good job!" on that one, but the only way it affects how things are done is that they elect Republicans. “Lincoln was a Republican, you know.”

People love the GI Bill. After WWII a liberal clause added to the GI Bill enabled millions of Americans to get college educations, many of whom were the first in their families ever to do so. The result was booming middle-class like no country had ever seen before. The public says, "Good job!" to the GI Bill, then votes in a George Bush, who gives us No Child Left Behind, the choke-collar of education.

The people who brought us Live Earth know all this. That's why they couldn't just ask the public for help stopping the mistakes being made that cause global warming. The people would all just look the other way down the street and wait for the liberals to finish their business. The liberals know they have to get their attention some how.

So, I get this image in my head of a Boston Terrier engaging the sidewalk while doing a cover of Bon Jovi's "You Want to Make a Memory," so he'll have your attention.

There, that's the example. That's how my mind works.

SOP

I followed the story of the guy put off a train in The Middle Of Nowhere Arizona with great interest.

The story was, a man appeared drunk to train conductors. So they put him off the train at a unmanned stop without running water five miles from the nearest town in the middle of a forest, without his luggage, and therefore without his medication, which he was going to need as he wandered aimlessly in his drunken state toward civilization, because it so happens he was not drunk, he was in diabetic shock.

Since the story first appeared the man was found. In four days he'd gone two miles and was down to his underwear. As the story has been retold it's got muddier. His doctor had not prescribed medication, so there was no medication in that luggage left behind on the train. We don't really know he was in diabetic shock, that's what the family believes, and they weren't there.

The conductors have been reported saying that they and the train waited for the police to arrive and that the man slipped away into the forest just when the police got there. So it's not like they just abandoned him, exactly.


But never mind that. Here's what makes the story interesting. The train officials accept no blame for the fact that a dazed man ended up lost without food or water in an northern Arizona forest for four days, on the grounds that "standard procedures were followed." I mean, what can you do? You follow standard procedures and the drunk, or diabetic, or whatever he says he is, isn't cooperative, or the sun gets in your eye, or you slip on something a wild dingo left, and the drunk, or diabetic, or whatever he says he is, wriggles away. Well, it's his own fault, isn't it? Standard procedures were followed.

Then there's this bit. As I said, the story now is that the local police arrived at the train stop to pick our man up. They were going to take him into custody, but he slipped away, we're told. We're told they then looked for him but couldn't find him. So they stopped looking. And continued to not bother looking for our man until relatives in St. Louis inquired as to his whereabouts. That was, again, OK, because standard procedures had been followed.

So let's summarize. If you are ever drunk and disorderly on an Amtrak train, or just appear so, standard procedure is to put you off into the hands of local police as far from civilization as possible, preferably at a train stop a hundred miles north of the Sea of Tranquility, without food, water, air, Cheetos, or love. If you then leap away in a cloud of dust as the men in the space suits with the billy clubs show up, it is standard procedure for them to look for you for a minute and then when they don't find you shrug and say, "Lets wait and see if he has relatives, and if not he can just die in this wasteland -- that'll teach him."

Meanwhile vendors regularly tell me of campsites raided and all belongings trashed, often including medicine. So, yes, it's standard procedure all right.

Speaking of standard procedure. If a review board arrives at an unfavorable conclusion regarding our beloved police chief, it is of course standard procedure here in Seattle for an entirely new review board to be appointed so that better results might be obtained. And naturally, standard procedure calls for the new board to if possible include big names like Gary Locke and Ron Sims on it, to give it legitimacy.

Now let's see if Greg Nickels follows standard procedure all the way and farms this new board's review work out as a project for Leadership Tomorrow.

Standard procedure is that standard procedures stay in place, no matter how many people get hurt or how badly.

Tokens at the Top

The online list of members of the King County Governing Board of the Committee to End Homelessness (CEH) may be out of date. But we can use it as a rough indication of the Governing Board's makeup.

Let's see, the list includes: Ron Sims, Greg Nickels, Tom Rasmussen, Mike Lowry, Dean Robert Taylor, Norm Rice, Blake Nordstrom, and OK now I'm tired of typing these names, but so far I haven't found any dimwits.

Likewise, a similarly scientific half-assed glance at the Interagency Council, which implements CEH policies, didn't turn up more than a couple of hollow headed chair warmers, too few to significantly lower the group IQ of the IAC.

So why, given that, has the CEH outsourced its brains?

"Wes," you say, "there's no way they've done that! You are surely making that up!"

It's a fact! I found it out like I find out everything I know about the CEH. I go to meetings, get the handouts, then find out from someone else. Two weeks ago I learned through people in SHARE/WHEEL that the Consumer Advisory Council (CAC), yet another CEH subcommittee, would be forming a speakers bureau. The CAC consists of "consumers", i.e. consumers of homeless people's services, i.e. homeless and formerly homeless people. So who better to form a speaker's bureau, to go out and tell the people of King County what homelessness in King County is all about?

Leadership Tomorrow, that's who! The very same day I found out about the speakers bureau plan, the same people in SHARE/WHEEL who told me about it also handed me 15 pages of stuff with the CEH logo on it including a Q&A about homelessness and a guide to a slide show about homelessness. The Q&A part of the handout SAID on its own page one it was "a sampling of questions posed to [CEH chairperson] Bill Block and his responses" and that it may "serve as a guide for managing the Q&A portion" of the slide show.

The contents of the Q&A and the commentary for the slide show included real genuine information mixed with misleading statements (about the one night counts, for example) smashed up with opinion masquerading as information (propaganda) such as whether the tent cities are really about shelter, or how panhandlers ought to be dealt with, or whose problem homelessness is, the cities or the suburbs.

Normally you think that when people are solicited to form a speakers bureau in accordance with their experiential expertise on a subject, you do not tell them what to say. So those of us at Real Change who subsequently read the 15 page handout could be heard all the way from our offices in Belltown to the Exchange Building shrieking and hooting about it, like monkeys in the jungle that just saw a big gnarly cat.

Well, Bill Block heard our hoots and he reassured us. No, no, no, he said, that handout wasn't for the CAC homeless speaker's bureau, it was for the rest of the CEH. And it wasn't written by him, he told us, it was put together by Leadership Tomorrow. Why did it have his name on it, I wondered. Would heads roll? Not likely.

So my question now is, who the freak are Leadership Tomorrow and when did they get to be the brains of the CEH? Whatever happened to "Leadership Today", the big geniuses that were appointed to the Governing Board and the IAC because they were such hot and sweaty kick-ass leaders?

Does the fact that Leadership Tomorrow is doing the thinking about homelessness for the CEH mean that not only are all the homeless and formerly homeless members of the CAC and the other CEH subcommittees just tokens, like we all knew, but so are Norm Rice, Lowry, Sims, Nordstrom and all the other big names on the top committees?

Is Greg Nickels just on the Governing Board for show?

I sure hope so. That's funny.

[Right: Just another pretty face?]

Criminal Song Requests Rampant

Last week, the P-I ran a story titled "Solutions sought at crime-plagued Steinbrueck Park". The story had a picture of a shirtless man bending forward talking to a woman holding a map. It looks like he's giving her directions, but the caption says he was a homeless man and was persistently yelling at the woman, who was a German tourist. It said he was demanding that she sing a song for him on his guitar.

The article also had a nice chart, which showed how the number of park notices handed out in the park have increased 1997. It said that according to the police there has been an increase in the total amount of crime, which has been mostly non-violent and similar to that of other cities!


[Above: Other charts that the P-I did NOT use tell a radically different story, however.]

The title says solutions are sought. Let's solve these problems in this column!

The problems: The yelling man. An increase in park notices, and in arrests for mostly nonviolent crime, similar to that of other cities! (Aren't Sodom and Gomorrah other cities?) Plus, homeless people coming back to the park, even after they've been told to leave and not come back! Plus, how does a homeless man get a guitar, when he should be saving every dime to move into a room? I'd like to be able to lie around all day shirtless, making Germans sing for me. Wouldn't we all?


[New Orleans: Yet another "other city" we don't want to be!]

We need to know a cause, and one look at the chart and I knew what the cause was. Me!

That's right. I stopped being homeless at the end of 1997, and thereby deprived the streets of my good example! None of this trouble ever happened when I was on the streets. People even wrote it on their backpacks. WWWD: What Would Wes Do? Would Wes take his shirt off and tell a lost German to sing for him on his guitar? Duhhh... No! No, he would not! So we won't either!

OK, that was today's irony quota. Ha, ha, no, that was just stupid.

Let's try to find some other "real" or "intelligent" explanations. I mean, this is serious business. "I want to hear 99 Luftballons! Now!"

My first clue as to what has been going on was to look back at when the Parks Exclusion law was passed. Hmm. It was passed in 1997. Aha! So the number of park notices has dramatically increased ever since there was a law to give them out! Damn those homeless people, getting laws written against them!

Then I remembered that Real Change, the people who print this crap, are putting on a book sale and that hundreds of books will be sold at Trinity United Methodist Church in Ballard at the end of the month. As a result the office is packed with donated books. I cracked one open. It was a psych book by some Dr. Phil or Dr. Jesus. I opened it to a random page and it said if something someone does annoys you, you might think how their actions mirror yours.

So the idea is, we look at the yelling shirtless man, and ask if we ever did anything to him or people like him that was similar. That might be the key to his behavior.

And I had it! Throughout the 90s, we took almost away all the public benches downtown, and made it so he couldn't lie on the ones that were left. In 1994 we passed a law that prohibited people him from sitting or lying on downtown sidewalks, and by 1997 that law was out of litigation and began to be enforced, by armed men.

[Right: "Cease lying down, or I shall be compelled to take all appropriate measures!"]

So we want to create laws that use the police to yell at the homeless for us and drive them from "our" sidewalks and benches into parks. Then we want to moan that there's a homeless man at Steinbrueck Park who drives tourists from "his" end of the park to the other.

The solution: Arrest the mirror?

Be Silent, Consume, Die

[The title above was on the first Real Change T-shirt]

I'm a Consumer of Homeless Services. I'm not homeless now, but I was homeless, ten years ago, for so long I moved far down a waiting list for housing and I got housed. You don't hear that happening much anymore. Anyway, that means that just by virtue of having asylum, I am now a Consumer of a Homeless Service, until I'm evicted, move, or die.

[Right: Politicians invented "Consumers" originally as a substitute for the more problematic concept "Citizens".]

Homeless people are now all called Consumers of Homeless Services, even if they don't consume any. When I was homeless I never consumed any, except for food stamps. I've done all my homeless-service consuming post-homeless. But if things were then the way they are now, I would have been called a Consumer anyway.

A couple weeks ago I finally figured out why the service providers love to call us Consumers. It defines us relative to the service providers. It means that our meaning, our purpose in being, our purpose in being talked about, is entirely attached to our role as users of homeless services, which they provide.

What a great way to assert power over people! Don't even acknowledge their being except to note their dependence on the services you provide! Impressive. Most impressive. They are well on their way to becoming formidable Jedi.

I am trying to think of ways to return the favor. I want to call them something that says they barely provide services and have no other significance to me. I've thought of Stale Rice Cakes, but it's too metaphorical. Maybe someone can help me come up with something more straight-forward.

Speaking of stale rice cakes, I'd like to share my intercom story.

When I attained this asylum run by the Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC), it had an intercom so I could cry for help in emergencies. I didn't think about it at all.

Then one day, after I'd been here four years, I was told my intercom had never worked. I said, no problem, I don't need it. They said, "Problem! You need it for emergencies". I said, I haven't had an emergency for four years, I don't need it. They said, "We're fixing it."

They fixed my intercom against my will. Immediately, I got called mornings for free breakfasts. I got weekly messages, "It's Bingo night, come on down!" 10:30 pm alternate Saturdays I heard, "There's pizza in the community room!" One random night every month, around midnight, it was "The church group has sandwiches out front, hurry down before they're all gone!"

There is no volume control, it was permanently on loud. They said if I snipped the wires to the speaker they could tell downstairs. I doubted that but decided on the direct approach. I went down to the front desk every time they woke me up and told them I wanted them to shut themselves up.

I complained to higher-ups. They repeated my complaints to me to show me they heard my pain. But nothing happened, because the conflict resolution course they took only talks about talk. Doing things is a whole different course.

So I got a notebook, set it by the bed, and took down times and dates my peace was interrupted by intercom. Within a month the first page was full. I took it to the management and read off instances in which I had been woke up at midnight and then again at 7am the same morning. I said does this mean that I'm officially only allotted 7 hours of sleep per night in a DESC building? Because if that's my ration, I need to plan for day naps. Might I be allowed to sleep siestas? Would they let me have 2pm to 4pm each day?

It worked! Within days we had an agreement that no calls would be made 10pm to 8am. I would be allotted a full ten hour window of peace every night!

Because of sarcasm, I sleep better, and my health has improved. I recommend it to everyone!

Do the Wes!

Last week for all of ten minutes you could have thought Real Change was a cult. Almost all us "staff" showed up around the big table for the monthly staff meeting. We're collectively reading Class Matters, a book about class and class-activism by Betsy Leondar-Wright, and working through the discussion questions. That's like Number 5 amid the Top Ten Signs you are in a cult.

[Above: Typical Real Change staff meeting.]

We were pretty much in agreement about everything, talking about identity politics, when the illusion that we were a cult was shattered by an exchange that condenses to: "White People don't have a culture," "Nuh-uh. Do so," "Like what?" "Give me time, I'll think of some." I won't say who any of these people were, because it would only distract me from my goal, which is to (figuratively) dance around the question raised, gesticulate at it, and run away laughing insanely.

I wasn't going to do it, but then Saturday I saw the AP story about the 5 high school students in Galesburg, Illinois, who were denied keepsake diplomas at graduation because their friends and family cheered them too much. And I read that the 5 consisted of 4 Blacks and 1 Hispanic.

Now, there's no evidence that Galesburg is unusually racist. Within two years of being settled, the first Illinois anti-slavery society began there, and it became a stop on the underground railroad. Also, Carl Sandburg was born there, who never owned a slave, unlike George Washington, who had 364.

Still, it makes you pause. You've got a population that's roughly 84% White and yet it's 5 non-White students that get denied diplomas. The odds of that happening at random is around 1/100th of 1%. What up?

The first thing everybody did was ask themselves if the problem was that the White People of Galesburg weren't taking the cultures of Black People and Hispanics fully into account. Here's where I do my weird dance, where I fling my hips out, fly off the ground and land on my head (figuratively) and say, no, they aren't taking White People's culture fully into account. I say it's White People culture that says everybody should be quiet and respectful while the names of the graduates are read off.

Think about it. They say it's a matter of not being able to hear the names read out. But why should the ceremony be set up so you have to be able to hear? Why couldn't they have some clowns or mascots or whatever run around the stage holding up big cardboard signs letting people know who's who? Then they could play music through the whole thing, people could cheer and shout all they wanted and dance in their seats and in the aisles, and you'd have something to remember.

They can't do that because they're too White, that's why. So, yes, Virginia, wherever there are quiet boring ceremonies that drag on forever and put you to sleep, White People Culture lives, in our hearts, in our souls.

Now for the running away laughing insanely part. I can't resist pointing out that racism is a cultural artifact. So to the extent White People are overtly racist, that's culture. Conversely, take that overt racism away, as has genuinely happened in the 57 years of my lifetime, and you create a big void. So the fact that Whites are seen as cultureless can be a good thing.

Oppressed People's Cultures always seem richer. This is usually explained by saying that being oppressed makes your people more interesting somehow. So, Christians got interesting by being martyred. Blacks got made slaves, so now even I listen to Hip-Hop, it's so interesting.

I say, rubbish. The truth is, Christianity took hold because Rome had became mind-numbingly boring as soon as it was politically-incorrect to throw Christians to hungry lions.

If your culture is largely about social domination, then as that piece falls away, it leaves a vacuum. Anything looks better than a vacuum!

[Right: Me, looking better than a vacuum, a quarter-century ago.]