Yes, Geniuses Suck, Too

I want everyone to learn how to be a genius like me.

I was in the Real Change office yesterday afternoon admitting that I suck because I was already at that moment 6 hours past the deadline to write this, and hadn't started yet. (And at 18 hours later I hadn't started yet still! I suck more!) A trick I've learned in life is to always announce that you suck before anyone tells you. It's better if you say it first.

It's one of many techniques I have accumulated over the years, and may soon make available in a self-help audio-tape series for just $79.99 in one easy installment, to help you and you and you be a genius, too. In the same conversation the editorial staff and I discussed what is certainly the most important technique of all, which is Master the Obvious.

Actually, I don't know if being a Master of the Obvious makes you a genius, but I can pretend it does and encourage others to go along with it until they believe me! And 99% of being a genius is being declared one, because it isn't an objective condition!

See how it works? I just Mastered the Obvious!

Let's try it with the News of the day. I read this morning that Democratic Senator Birch Bayh, who voted to confirm Michael Mukasey for Attorney General, thought Mukasey to be "an improvement over Bush's previous attorneys general," being neither "excessively ideological" like Ashcroft nor "incompetent" like Gonzales.

Isn't that just all you can ask for in an attorney general? I mean, we can't ask for an exceptionally competent attorney general of surpassing wisdom. This is 2007. Those guys were all chewed up by the Peloponnesian War, right?

If only we had a president who was as well qualified as Mukasey. Neither bat-spit insane, nor brain-dead.

By the way, I just illustrated another technique of being a genius. Always let your mind free to wander off topic. Last night Anitra "OK on History But If She Gets Started On Worms Run For Your Lives" Freeman was recalling Machiavelli telling his Prince, "And he who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it has always the watchword of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget." What the hell was that all about? The Peloponnesian War! Machiavelli knew that Athens was trounced in the Peloponnesian war but they bounced back. They had tasted freedom!. I wouldn't have thought of that if I had the mental discipline to stay on topic! Mental discipline keeps you from being a genius!

[Above; You will all know that this is a picture of Machiavelli and not Adam Hyla, Real Change's editorial manager, by virtue of the hair being too long in the back.]

Of, course that has nothing to do with what I was saying, but I feel better having thought of it.

Another story, which may have been in the New York Times, but I read it on Military.com of all places, related the views of Malcolm Nance, a counter-terrorism and intelligence consultant for the special operations, homeland security and intelligence agencies. Nance called the debate over waterboarding "a crisis of honor," and said that accepting it as a tool of interrogation does the United States no honor.

It turns out Malcolm Nance could speak from experience because he has worked with SERE, the military's own Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school, as a master instructor and chief of training, instructing our own soldiers and sailors, and airmen in how to deal with torture. He has conducted hundreds of waterboardings for his students so they would know what torture is.

Nance says our own guys are teaching waterboarding as a form of torture that "evil totalitarian enemy" would use "at the slightest whim" so our soldiers have to be prepared for it and ready to give evasive and misleading answers when faced with it.

"Is waterboarding torture?" The not-incompetent says it needs more study. The genius says, "Hell yes."

You're Thinking Too much

Remember Ian Spiers? He was the Scots-African-American who last year chose to take photographs of the beautiful Hiram Chittenden Locks in his neighborhood just like he’d seen all the tourists do for the decade or so since he’d been living nearby. Only Mr. Spiers wasn’t made to feel welcome. Instead he was greeted by police who demanded to see ID, not once but repeatedly. In one case federal agents even showed up at his home to lecture Mr. Spiers about 9-11 and to make him feel like a criminal.

Well, just when we thought all that was behind us, the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued a new warning last week that "it is crucial that police, fire and emergency medical personnel take notice of their surroundings, and be aware of 'vagrants' who seem out of place or unfamiliar." This warning was in part prompted by the discovery in Somerville, Massachusetts, of a homeless man with an expired Yemen passport, who was doing nothing illegal and who was not a terrorist.

Let me explain that again. I’m sure most of you out there have working neurons taking up valuable space in your heads, so that what I’ve said here so far may not have sunk in for you the way it would have done if your brain was made of chocolate pudding.

Pay close attention now. A MAN was found in OUR country guilty of NOT being a terrorist and of being ACTUALLY homeless and from Yemen, another country. This led OUR government to conclude that there might be other non-terrorists who are homeless and from Yemen, RIGHT?

NO! From that they concluded that we have to be more afraid of terrorists POSING as terrorists. We’ve already seen one person NOT DO THAT, in Somerville, so we must be more vigilant than ever.

You know, by concentrating really hard, and by taking lots of illegal pills and funny mushrooms, and drinking a whole bottle of Jack Daniels, I bet I could work for Homeland Security, too. Let me crank up my natural paranoia and see how that would work.

Seriously, I think I speak for everyone in the homeless community when I say the U.S. Attorney’s Office hasn’t gone far enough. We need to really be on the safe side and think of how else terrorists might effectively disguise themselves. Gee, if I were a terrorist I would want to be able to go anywhere I want and rarely be suspected of any wrongdoing, or, if suspected, be able to easily brush the suspicions aside.

I could pose as police, fire, or emergency medical personnel, couldn’t I? Yes! Our police should be on the alert for our other police! Our firemen should be suspicious of each other! We should run away from ambulance drivers; they may have bombs!

I know, a lot of you are probably saying, “Wes, you’re being silly. No ambulance driver has ever been found with a bomb in this country.” Precisely! The terrorists knew that’s what you were going to think and they’re using that! THEY’RE USING YOUR NEURONS, MAN.

It’s because you have a brain that they can get you. The terrorists do the opposite of everything that makes sense, and they use the sense that you make against you! (I want Dennis Hopper to play me in the movie version of this column.)

All the homeless people in this country are under suspicion all the time! That’s precisely why the terrorists will pretend to be homeless, because you won’t suspect the people you already suspected! Our government is full of geniuses. I know it because they came up with this.

What you’ve got to do is stop thinking. If you stop thinking the terrorists can’t get you. Our government destroys reason to protect us. We are better off when we do what they say and be stupid, because that’s the last thing the terrorists will expect from us.

Remember, 2+2=5. Non-thinking is Safe-thinking. Take your pills.

Of Pennies and Prejudice

Today I want to talk about panhandling, panhandling related incidents, and panhandler focused factoids.

It really annoys me that I can't actually present reliably true panhandler focused factoids, on account of there being none. So far, the only way genius social scientists have been able to figure out who panhandles and who doesn't is to go around to places where they think potential panhandlers are to be found, like shelters and meal programs, and beg them to tell the truth about whether they panhandle or not. This approach results in statistics that are a little like the ones you get when you ask the neighbor teenagers how often they've done each other.

To make matters worse: I am not a statistics wonk, so I forget even where I've seen statistics based on the truth-begging approach. So, for example, I am certain that at one time a few years ago I saw a report about such surveys being done in Seattle, Denver and Washington, D.C., independently, among other places. I am almost certain what the results were. And I am absolutely without any shred of doubt certain I don't remember where I saw that report, so I'm just wasting space telling you about it.

Still I can't resist telling you that, in spite of the inadequacies of the research methods, there is one pair of conclusions that genius social scientists always come up with when they study the question. Those conclusions are that (2) most panhandlers aren't homeless (so looking for them in shelters might be a mistake, see above), and (1) most homeless people aren't panhandlers.

The reason they come to the first conclusion is that the reported frequency of panhandling among admittedly homeless people is incredibly low even assuming, as social scientists do, that roughly a quarter of all human beings will lie to social scientists whenever they get the chance. The reason they come to the second conclusion is the same way I have, namely by getting to know various panhandlers and following them home at the end of the day.

The kind of results we're talking about varies considerably from city to city, but, except for Washington, D.C., in every place you go the percentage of homeless people who report even intermittent panhandling is down below 15%. In some areas the figure is much lower. I just saw a recent report out of Charlottesville, Virginia, about a hundred miles from D.C., where they could only get 4 homeless adults in a hundred admit to having panhandled at all in 6 months. Or maybe it was 3 in a hundred. They weren't too clear about their denominator. I don't blame them --denominators are hard.

The result I remember for Seattle was closer to 6%. I'd really appreciate someone tracking that down for me.

Meanwhile, a survey done by the Gallup people found that over 30% of all Americans thought the average homeless person was a panhandler. So a sizable minority of Americans figures that you can't solve homelessness without first dissuading homeless people from relying on panhandling, something hardly any of them do. It's like thinking that in order to solve the continuing problem of poverty in rural West Virginia, we have to get the West Virginians to not speak Etruscan when applying for jobs.

Here's one of those panhandling related incidents I was talking about. One day I was homeless and had 3 pennies. Two days later I still had the same 3 pennies. It occurred to me then that if I asked somebody for a quarter and they gave me one, I would experience an 833% increase in liquid assets, and after buying a roll at Safeway I would still have 3 pennies. Instead, I starved. Ha, ha, pride is funny.

Let that be a lesson to you all. If you are ever homeless, and you only have 3 pennies, and you don't ask anybody for a quarter, well, join the club.

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!