“Guantanamo” Means Shame

I can have nothing new to say on this subject, but to add my voice to others embarrassed by our country's current bosses' capriciousness with the Constitution and what we thought were supposed to be American values: fairness, the rights of the individual, devotion to rule of law.

I am ashamed by it.

I try honestly to think whether anyone in power can believe the Guantanamo arrangement has any upside. They must believe so to stick with it, or simply be terrible cretins, because the moral ugliness of it, the damage to the nation's reputation, and most especially the ill-will engendered can not serve for any good. In its effort at balance NPR reports that "supporters say the camp is a valuable source of information and vital to the U.S. effort to combat terrorism." So give 'em a trial so that info gets out… Even if there are hardened terrorists among the crowd there (and I don’t deny that possibility), the claims and statistical probability of innocence among the majority of them are probably only fueling the fires of more hardened terrorists not stuck in the Pearl of the Antilles.

And, oh, the preposterousness of having a prison (and naval base) in the territory of a country we have no truck with? The absurdity is so large it gets lost from view. Why not have a POW camp in Iran then? North Korea?

The rationale for keeping people imprisoned, unvisitable, far from home, with no charges or hope for redress, is that they were "picked up in the field of battle." His Honor Justice Antonin Scalia (a class act), claims, “War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts.” Yeah, we're all about only doing what we “have to,” that's the American way. Nevermind that this war isn't a "war" in the traditional sense. We didn't give trials to POWs in previous wars because, first of all, most of them were in uniform and not denying they were enemy combatants, plus, there was some understanding that eventually, one way or another, the war would be declared at an end. There's no indication that anyone in power thinks the amorphous war with undefined enemies we're in will end anytime before the sun burns out. It definitely won't if we treat the people who already hate us in ways to make them hate us more. In Scalia's words: “Give me a break.”

Hey, Jill Carroll could be considered to have been picked up "in the field of battle," and they just released her today (for which, hurray).

I am not a Christian, but I see the nobility and virtue (as well as difficulty) of turning the other cheek, of loving thine enemy. How do fundamentalist Christian war-making types reconcile those tenets of the religion, I wonder?

Spamalot “Reviewed” and More Interstices

Here in the interstices again–workday is done, child picked up, and basketball starts in half an hour… (I'll no doubt be late.)

My sisters were visiting over the weekend and there was much toothless invective spouted. God, I wish I could remember a quarter of it; it was brilliant. Spluttering outrage and ironic hilarity at the world's foibles and arrogant evil. Some rhapsodic blather too, as we consumed red wines from around the world. Think we tackled every continent. World citizens, we. And wishing the best for everyone except the selfish creeps in power in some places.

Sunday night, though, spouse and I went with friends to see Spamalot. As mentioned in the previous post, Monty Python was a crucial influence in my young life. That whole British humor thing goes down like a milkshake for me. Thus I may have become a too critical audience for the American stage version. It was thoroughly enjoyable (except the 80+ temperature and a couple of hours of basketball earlier in the day that made me a little sleepy partway through) but, perhaps because I knew the price of the tickets, it didn't pack the full wallop of hysteria that I thought it might. And that the Globe review had suggested it would.

Part of the trouble is not being a regular attender of musicals. Or even theater in general, sad to say. (And jeez, even movies at this point in life.) But live theater has a slightly different aesthetic, a more generous suspension of disbelief required to start, or something. What is it, experts? Anyhow, getting sucked in takes more effort especially from the balcony and especially in the pastiche that is Spamalot.

Here's where I differ from the Globe reviewer, who said you didn't need to know the original (Monty Python's Holy Grail) to appreciate the stage version. But to me it seemed like a reprieve of scenes (the best scenes) from the movie but without the flow between them. It was more like a reminder of those scenes, with some self-referential and current events jokes thrown in. Quite funny some of them. On the whole, it made me want to see the movie again. Most impressive, besides the voice of the Lady of the Lake, Pia someone–I'll look it up, was the sets and staging and smoothness with which some of the gags were executed. The program too had a very comical page at the expense of the Finns (simply because Finland sounds like England).

So, I'd recommend it highly if you can get a cheap ticket, or if you have a special interest in set design, or if your curiosity makes you think your soul will not rest easy without having seen it. Otherwise I would recommend it to a normal degree. Could one be more wishywashy? Splunge.

Oh, another recommendation: Comfy restaurant/bar in Boston's Theater district: Intermission Tavern. High marks all round. (And free wi-fi, though I only know that from a review.)

On Wasting Time

One reason I need to increase efficiency and productivity is to make up for vast quantities of “wasted” time in my life. I’m quite sure that’s true. But still I question myself, what is wasted time? I mean, some time is inarguably, frustratingly wasted, like getting halfway to work and realizing I’ve left my laptop at home and having to backtrack 10 extra miles. That’s plain infuriating. Unless you happen to see a pileated woodpecker or something in that extra leg. And how often is that? (Once.)

But other things that tend to fall into the category of time wasting, I’m not so sure. Especially in the philosophic mood this week finds me in, having just had a long weekend’s whirlwind celebration of my mother’s 80 hale years, and then having heard news of two untimely deaths in my circle (a 40-something woman and a 16-year-old man). Makes ya kind of pause and think it really doesn’t matter, really, if I get that trim around the bathroom windows painted right now, or after the college basketball season… and that sort of thing.

So, noodling around websites that make you laugh or tickle your interest—even if they don’t really relate to anything productive in your life—is that a waste? I haven’t gotten to where I schedule time for it, like I do for exercise or socializing or dogwalking or things that I would declare important and inalienable in my pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. It gets fit into the interstices between these things, and sometimes, like the moss in sidewalk cracks, it takes root and expands the allotted space and if it gets really bad it cracks the cement block around it, which is usually (analogically speaking) domestic upkeep or timely arrival at appointed thingies.

(Like right now, after work and before meeting friends for dinner, I was supposed to go get a new headlamp for my car, but writing this, which I didn’t really intend to do, is cutting into the time available to get to AutoZone and back to Naked Fish in time…. But what’s important? The right-hand headlight still works.)

I blather on about this as my means of introducing a couple of sites that have delighted me (and sucked up time) lately. Best has been sent to my by colleague Todd, who got it from former colleague David, and it’s called The Institute of Official Cheer. Who can resist the “Gallery of Regrettable Food” or “Interior Desecrations”?

Rather lower brow is a collection of TV news bloopers on YouTube, which for some stupid reason crack me up. Laughing is therapeutic, no? So is it a waste of time?

When I’m really suffering low blood flow to the brain, I can pretty reliably get a chuckle out of Engrish.com, a photo compendium of Japanese and Korean signs and t-shirts in English. It’s the proofreader and kid-who-grew-up-watching-Monty-Python’s-Flying-Circus in me that makes me susceptible.

For more intelligent stimulus, I love 3 Quarks Daily. As we say around these parts, wicked smaht.

Ah-ha, that site just offered up justification for all this “time wasting”! With a link to a Fortune article entitled Be Smarter at Work, Slack Off.

On Being Over-Busy

Such a boring modern first-world plight. One takes on things and takes on things and never discards things. And by things I mean things, which is bad enough because for most of us storage space is finite, but also projects, activities, goals, habits, commitments. And it is so hard to part with those already in the queue. But really time is finite too. At least as far as we know within this mortal coil.

My roommate Gretchen back in Ann Arbor had a good way of looking at life—from the college students’ perspective. You take so many classes, say, four or five in a full load. But then you have a boyfriend maybe, that’s equivalent to another class (at least). And if you live in a shared household, that’s like another class. Say you belong to the rowing club—another class. Work a few hours in the library? Class. Volunteer at the food coop for discounts? Class. Have a social life? Class. Now you see your course schedule is rather overloaded. How do you keep up with the homework???

The trouble is, especially further on in adult life, where you have things you are somehow more obliged to do than when you were in college and where the view of the short horizon of life is clearer and fills you with the existential hum (Vonnegut’s phrase), the course schedule builds and builds and you never graduate from any of them….

You often hear people say, I have to simplify, I want to scale back on things. My problem is, I don’t really want to. I want to keep adding more. But I’m rather more dreamy than efficient, distracted by the trees when observing the forest, etc., so it pushes one (me) to the brink of idiocy trying to do it all.

So I’m interested in the life hacking concept.

After perusing Lifehack.org and Hackyourlife.com, I have to kind of conclude it’s just a modernized, expanded, searchable version of Heloise’s Hints. (There’s still a Heloise, though she can’t possibly be the original. (I’ll look into that, in all the spare corners of the day life hacking will give me….)) Whereas Heloise’s hints are mainly aimed at the home and personal care spheres, life hacking extends to work, maintenance of one’s electronic identity and presence, and Internet powerusage. You’ll still find tips on more efficient sleeping, eating, and bathing, but it sounds ever so much cooler as “hacking.”

I like the idea, whether it’s a 50s era Heloise or a 00s era hack. I started practicing a little hack unknowingly. I really like to work out at lunch, either running and weight lifting or playing pickup basketball. But I always am running late at work or know I’ve got to leave early…. Working out for 45-60 minutes is great, but the whole getting geared up and then cleaned up is maddeningly time consuming. So I’ve started wearing the “foundation wear” of the workout to work on the days I think I’m going to go play. That means I’ve switched to black athletic socks, and I do have to adapt my wardrobe choices to accommodate the T-back of a typical sports bra (no scoop necks on those days). But it saves minutes! Also, combined shower/shampoo gel helps…. Or just living with sweat-dried hair. It’s work, for heaven’s sake; I’m not a model nor do I meet with “the public.”

So, would putting enough of these neurotic hacks together actually amount to another hour in the day? Or just make me a compulsive oddball? Guess we’ll see.

The Cubicle: A Big Mistake

Robert Oppenheimer agonized over building the A-bomb. Alfred Nobel got queasy about creating dynamite. Robert Propst invented nothing so destructive. Yet before he died in 2000, he lamented his unwitting contribution to what he called “monolithic insanity.”

So begins a really well written article from Fortune magazine by Julie Schlosser. The office cubicle as we know it today is nothing like its prototype, the “action office,” designed by Robert Propst. The action office was supposed to be ergonomically and organizationally designed to suit an office worker’s physical and functional needs. Not just to be small and cheap. But the ability to shrink them was a modern seeming way for companies’ to save money on the real estate line item and consequently sent them back to being the same old open bullpen of a typing pool, but with ugly beige half walls.

Yeah, I work in one of these. Though it was designed during the late 90s, so it is supposed to be more hip. Ah, I long for plain beige. The rug looks like an olive drab giraffe and the walls are painted a textured insane asylum green (I think the color was thought to be “calming”) and the work surfaces are black faux granite and the pod sides, which are steel and therefore no use for pinning things to, are a riotous carnival pattern reminiscent of airline upholstery. Most workers’ backs are to the hallway, so though we have windows, which is nice, there’s an unconscious anxiety that no doubt could be articulated by someone familiar with the flying stars of Feng Shui. Hey, the company has not done so well since we moved into this hideous configuration. All signs point to….see?

Get Your Bearings on the Political Compass

Darn, wish I could find or remember the name of the blog where I got directed to The Political Compass site. I love that “next blog” feature on wordpress, for the random surprises, but you can’t be too hasty about leaving the page or turning off your computer before you notice where you are. (If I find it or remember it, I’ll add it back in here.)

Back to the political compass, though. Answer six screens of questions, maybe 40 issue or position type questions to which you can agree or disagree, straight up or strongly. It shows where you come up on a two-dimensional matrix (as opposed to the customary left-right spectrum). Basically it separates views on controlled versus free market economics from views on government’s role in other aspects of life (social issues). After an explanation, plunks you on a grid with famous leaders. Are you in the quadrant with Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama? Or with the lonely Milton Friedman? Or the terribly overpopulated upper right quadrant populated by Berlusconi, Bush, Hitler, Sharon, Thatcher, etc. Lots of interesting stuff here, including another very difficult quiz on who said what. Outrageous things.

Bush Impersonations

Here’s a funny topic. Rhapsodizing about satire that pounces on the things one usually expends one’s invective on. My sister recently sent me a few amusing links:

On wimp.com, a surreally accurate Bush rendition. Especially combined with the low res video, you have to really ask yourself if it’s an impersonator (with a false nose, has to be). It’s a roast for Jeff Foxworthy, probably from Comedy Central? Not riotously funny, but as I said, astoudingly accurate.

Onegoodmove.org has another. Don’t know the original source. Will Farrell doesn’t do the best W impersonation, but it’s good enough to suspend your disbelief and the funniness builds as he gets more outrageous, though within character.

So, OK, let me praise a country that allows people to go unmolested (I think) for making fun of their elected leader. That to me shows a high level of sophistication. To believe that critique alone won’t topple a sound system, just the individual doofuses when their time comes. I do hope we can hang on to that.

It also reminds me of a million years ago, when my boyfriend on a soul-searching trip around the country was taken in briefly by the Moonies. Remember them? He said they were very nice, happy people really and seemed sincere in wanting him to be happy too…. It was the realization that the full embrace of happiness in their style meant the exclusion of things like Neil Young and Howlin’ Wolf and Virginia Woolf and other expressions of the blues that put him off. There was something untrue to life in excluding all that.

Why am I reminded of that? I don’t know, I must tell you honestly. What was I talking about? Oh, it’s that, well, if we had Utopia, we wouldn’t have satire, would we? Always look on the bright side of life…..

What’s in a Name?

It’s almost as bad as naming a child, naming a blog. One can’t stay up all night about it (well, one does), but you hardly have nine months to contemplate the untoward repercussions of your capricious fancies. And so, perhaps it’s worse.

With no particular ax to grind, market to corner, or stand to make, a general name will have to do the job. I seem quite capable (if not to say, prone) to see the world’s faults from my position of pretty complete powerlessness, and express outrage and vituperation to the already converted choir mostly, and thus: the first part of this blog’s title.

I am as frequently filled with a feeling of suffused blessing, simple appreciation for my life which so far has been without a lot of shooting and explosions, prolonged or injurious dearth of food and water, or physical disability (knock wood). Thus the second bit.

I wonder which will make an appearance more frequently here.