A Fragile Melting Pot

Today’s New York Times has an article entitled “A Call To Jihad, Answered in America”–see it here.  I found it to be inexpressibly sad. 

In essence it details the recruitment of young Somali men (all students) from Minneapolis to join an Islamist organization in Somalia.  While none of them ever expressed a desire to harm America or Americans, the FBI is rightly concerned their training and indoctrination will lead them to that step, especially since Al-Queda allegedly actively recruits Muslims with American passports. 

I have a personal story to go along with this.  In January of 1997, I was sent to St. Louis by the company I worked for at the time to take over a large operation with around 100 employees, temporarily as it turned out.  Of those 100 employees, I’d say 20% were American, and of those, the majority were African-American.  The other 80% were about equally divided between Serbians and Somalis.  All the Serbians and Somalis were Muslim, and it was my first ever personal contact with Muslims in the real world.  All 100 of the employees were male.  (You can perhaps sense a looming problem here.) 

All the Serbians were white, and all the Somalis were black.  I therefore expected the Somalis to identify with the majority African-American employees.  Nothing could have been further from the truth.  There was a deep resentment, if not hatred, on the part of the Somalis toward the African-Americans, some of whom held supervisory positions.  In time, I was told that a perceived superiority on the part of the African-Americans was to blame.  It was like, “I was born here, you weren’t”.  Skin color was not enough to unite them.  What was left was religion, which united the white Serbians and the black Somalis more than skin color divided them, even though they did not speak the same language.  And in fact with the exception of one Serbian and one Somali, none of them spoke English either.  It’s hard to grasp that kind of isolation.

One day the the Somali  English-speaker came to me and said, more or less, Begging your pardon, but the men are not going to do anything you ask, because it is against our beliefs to take orders from women.  So I could have been stupid and railed about how they were in America now and had to play by America’s rules.  But I’m not that stupid.  I had a job to do.  So I sized up the situation and said, “If I ask you, will you ask them?”  He grinned and said, “Yes”.  He wasn’t stupid either.

As I previously mentioned, it was January in St. Louis.  The temperature was below freezing every day, all day long, and the wind was brutal.  Much our jobs took place outside in the weather.  That particular year, the month of January was also the month of Ramadan.  Ramadan is a month of fasting, followed by the feast of Eid-al-Fitr.  It’s the second holiest day in the Islamic religion.  So these men were working in bitter cold, performing fairly physical labor, without even the relief of something to eat or drink (you can’t even drink water during Ramadan except after sunset and before sunrise).  I developed a deep admiration for them as a result of this and one other thing. 

I’m not religious, and I think the rituals associated with religion are basically superstitious in nature.  However, having said that–I respect people who try to live their religion and live a good life, and if the rituals reinforce that, then they’re okay with me.  So the Muslims in our workforce brought their prayer rugs to work every day, or kept them in their lockers, and at the appointed time, they would pray.  The prayers are short, but in spite of that there were some grumblings among the non-Muslim employees when a task of some urgency needed to be carried out and the Muslims were unavailable to help. 

I was only there for 3 weeks, and it’s been 12 years, but I wonder what happened to them.  Did some of them become terrorists, in this age of terrorism?  I hope not.

By cellphone, instant messaging, and on Facebook, the young men who left kept in touch with their friends in the U.S.  An especially poignant quote from the article:  “They missed movies and basketball, deodorant and boxer shorts, they told friends back home. One of the men, who suffered from heartburn, asked if anyone could send him a box of Tums by DHL.”  In another quote:  

“Even among the world’s jihadists, the young men from Minneapolis are something of an exception: in their instant messages and cellphone calls, they seem caught between inner-city America and the badlands of Africa, pining for Starbucks one day, extolling the virtues of camel’s milk and Islamic fundamentalism the next.”

They were torn between the promise of America and the demands of family and clan on the other.  They were sending money to relatives in Somalia they had never even met, out of their meager wages in menial jobs.  They had the proverbial dilemma–one foot in one country, the other foot in a second country–and never quite felt they belonged in either. 

Even the Imam of their mosque could not dissuade them from going to Somalia.  Stay, he said.  Here you can help your people by becoming a doctor or an engineer.  Over there, you will be just another dead body in the street.  Who knows what psychological factors cause some of these young men to throw away their lives, when others stick it out in spite of the barriers and hardships?  Today at least two of the young men who answered the “call” to Somalia are dead.  One, at the age of 26, blew himself up in Somalia last October. 

This causes me to ask the question, How welcoming are we?  “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free”.  Right.  Whatever happened to that?

Sarah Palin and Three-Syllable Words

Sorry.  I’ve taken it long enough, and I just can’t stay quiet about Sarah any longer.  Here’s the thing I hate most about the Sarah Palin phenomenon:  you can’t criticize her.  If you’re male, you’re a sexist; if you’re female, you just hate her because she’s beautiful.  And there’s no argument to counter that.  It’s like the old joke about asking when you stopped beating your wife.  As soon as you start to say, “But I never…”, you realize you’ve been trapped.  If you’re a liberal critic, that goes double for you, and if you’re a liberal critic in the media, triple.  Said another way by Judith Warner of the NY Times:

“The idea that women with a “major education” think they’re better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of “normal” women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place. It’s precisely the kind of thinking that has fueled Sarah Palin’s unlikely — and continued — ability to pass herself off as the consummately “real” American woman. (And it is what has made it possible for her supporters to discredit other women’s criticism of her as elitist cat fighting.)”–July 9, 2009 

That’s why I have viewed the reactions of conservatives over the last week with great glee.  They aren’t so easy to dismiss.  First there is David Brooks, who technically isn’t a conservative, he’s a moderate, but he’s the most liberal of the people I’ll refer to here, not counting Warner.  His op-ed In Search of Dignity concludes that Sarah Palin and Mark Sanford have none; Obama does.    To quote him:  “Then there was Sarah Palin’s press conference. Here was a woman who aspires to a high public role but is unfamiliar with the traits of equipoise and constancy, which are the sources of authority and trust.”  He says worse, but you get the drift. 

Then there was Russ Douthat who wrote about Palin and Her Enemies.  He’s quite a bit more sympathetic to Palin than most, but he says she should have said no to John McCain.  Well of course.  But her ego would not have allowed that. 

Now today, there is Kathleen Parker, who I guess is pretty enough and conservative enough to get away with her criticisms.  Her column from yesterday begins:

“WHEN YOU’RE up to your waders in barracuda, blame the media.

And quit your job.

And say you did it for the people.

And hire an agent.

And try to keep a straight face.

On your way to the bank.”

Parker ends her column by saying that if this is altruism, “there’s a lakeside house in Wasilla with a fabulous view of Russia you’re just gonna love”.

By far, however, the comment that struck home with me was by, of all people, Jeb Bush.  (What is the world coming to?)  Here’s a summary from CNN Political Ticker, although the actual interview with Jeb is in Esquire magazine.  There’s a link to it in the CNN article if you’d prefer to go to the source.  The relevant quote: 

“Told that Joe the Plumber had briefed congressional Republicans on Gaza, Bush launched into a defense of intellectualism. “I think it’s okay to have a deeper understanding of things. I think it’s okay to talk in three-syllable words. The world we’re living in is incredibly complex,” he told the magazine. “And simplifying things to the point where you’re misunderstanding where we are as a nation isn’t going to help people overcome their fears or give them hope that they can achieve great things. I don’t get inspired by shameless populism.”  Shameless populism?  He may have been talking about Joe the Plumber, but who else does that remind you of?  Also when asked who he thought the leaders of the Republican Party are, Sarah wasn’t mentioned. 

So while listening to Sarah’s garbled speech and cutesy folkisms (Only dead fish go with the flow?  Huh?)  may make me grind my teeth together, I am comforted by this prediction:  she will never be either President or VP.  The Republican Party will not let that happen.  I’m not sure she’ll ever make it to Congress either.  Maybe she should try to run for mayor of Wasilla again, if there are enough people even there who still trust her.

Nothing To Lose

No, this is not a new nihilistic philosophy I’ve adopted, it’s the title of a book.  In honor of ptfan1 , I’m reading a book by his favorite suspense writer, Lee Child.

Child has a recurring character named Jack Reacher.  In this book, Reacher is hitchhiking/walking from Calais, Maine (I’ve been there!) to San Diego, making a diagonal across the country from the extreme northeast to the extreme southwest.  Why?  Just because.  This seems to be Reacher’s MO:  wander around aimlessly and get into trouble. 

As our book opens he’s made it into Colorado to a town called Hope.  Next town over is Despair.  While it’s out of the way of his diagonal path, who could resist taking a peek at Despair?  Not Reacher.  He is promply thrown out of town by the local law, for no apparent reason.  They deposit him on the outskirts of town, where he is picked up by a pretty female officer from Hope PD.  He announces to her that he’s going back.  “Why?”, she asks.  He answers, “Because I don’t like people telling me where I can go and what I can do.”  Ohhh, now I get it.  It’s that bad boy thing.  Then he asks her, “What would you do?”  She replies, “I’m an estrogen-based life form.  I would suck it up and move on.”  Ha ha!  I of course found that very funny.  It would probably be even funnier if there were a shred of truth in it.  I mean, not necessarily speaking for myself personally, but I haven’t found we estrogen-based life forms to be particularly good in the sucking it up and moving on department. 

The book has a sort of fantasy-like atmosphere to it.  It all seems a bit surreal.  Hope and Despair, indeed.  The town of Despair is very mysterious.  It has a huge metal recycling plant…at least that’s what it’s supposed to be.  For some strange reason there is an army combat unit posted just outside the rear wall of the plant.  While sneaking out of Despair after a late-night clandestine visit, he stumbles upon a dead body in the desert.  Back in Hope, a young woman appears who asks if he, Reacher, has seen her husband, whom she last saw in Despair.  And the dead body does not fit her husband’s description, so there are two missing persons.   But it’s obvious that Jack Reacher will eventually get to the bottom of this.  Because that’s who he is!  Nobody tells him what to do!  He’s a testosterone-based life form!

Caught Up In the Rapture

Station-surfing in the car again on the way home from work, and there was Anita Baker singing “Sweet Love”.  Damn!  I had forgotten all about her!  I think I like this one better…And also, I want that suit she’s wearing!

Weird News

First, a Fakename health update.  I was suddenly stricken on Wednesday evening with what, according to the doctor, is a stomach virus they are seeing a lot of.  I knew I was in trouble on Wednesday evening when I threw up, because that never happens to me.  Some people can get squeamish and nauseated at the sight of a raw oyster, or of a picture of certain delicacy from the Phillipines (duck embryos) which shall remain unpictured here.  Not me.  I have the classic iron stomach.  I don’t eat much at a time, but I can and will eat almost anything (exceptions:  duck embryos and mountain oysters).  The last time I even felt queasy was over three years ago, and then I turned out to have appendicitis. 

So as I said, I knew this was something out of the ordinary.  Therefore, I went to the doctor on Thursday morning, which I try to avoid unless gangrene seems to be setting in.  The doctor gave me a prescription to control the nausea and vomiting, and basically said, Good luck.  It will take 1-3 days for this to run its course.  It will get worse before it gets better.  Come back if you get a whole lot worse.

By 3:00 P.M. Thursday, I was asleep, and slept off and on until 8:00 A.M. this morning.  During the two short periods I was awake in between these times, I mostly did two things:  a) watched several episodes of the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel, b) became entranced by weird news on MSN.com. 

A lot of weird news seems to happen in Russia.  There’s this one:  “Feral Girl gets brought up by mongrels in Russia”.  http://www.mosnews.com/weird/2009/07/02/veronika/   She lived in the back yard with her grandmother’s dogs.  The same dogs who killed her brother in that same back yard two years ago.  And this is not the only time this has happened. 

And this one:  “Accident-free crossing crossing built for frogs in Belarus”.  http://www.mosnews.com/weird/2009/06/13/frogtunnel/  Here in Tallahassee, there is a hue and cry over a planned wildlife tunnel costing $3.4 million that is popularly known as the “Turtle Tunnel”.  Some senator from Oklahoma (Oklahoma!) made it his Number Four example of how the stimulus money is going to wasteful projects.  I hear there is a planned “Tea Party” to protest it tomorrow.  Senator Whoever needs to confine himself to Bleeping Oklahoma, and not concern himself with Florida, where it’s possible his only knowledge is confined to Disneyworld, if that. 

And more news from Russia:  a guy who was breaking up with his girlfriend made the mistake of drinking too much and falling asleep in their apartment, which he was moving out of.  Hint:  Never, ever do this unless you’re a very light sleeper.  She attached some firecrackers to his penis, and lit them.  This isn’t really even funny, since he may not live.  http://www.mosnews.com/weird/2009/05/25/1909/  And the question is whether he will even want to live. 

In our own Tallahassee version of weird news, a 14-year old girl was killed on Tuesday while riding north from here on the way to Georgia with her father.  While we’ve been hoping for rain, my limited knowledge of meteorology tells me that the end of a heat wave such as we’ve been having often results in violent storms, and such was the case.  So at the exact moment this young girl was traveling, an oak tree fell, crushing the car and killing her.  It’s almost too strange to comprehend.  If they had been going slower…or faster…or started on the trip a minute later or a minute earlier…I’ts like The Bridge Over The River Kwai. 

Besides being fascinated by things that don’t usually attract my attention, and feeling sick, and possibly being delerious (did I mention I have a fever?), I am disappointed.  I had important plans for this weekend.  Bridge collapses and falling oak trees and viruses just don’t operate on your schedule.

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing

Do you ever have those days when everything just seems perfect?  Of course you don’t.  I mean between global warming and the U.S. financial meltdown and the fact that you might come down with swine flu and the fact that you ran out of AA batteries and your TV remote control won’t work, life totally sucks. 

No wait.  Of course you do.  Some days you wake up and all those things are still happening, but you’re like, What the hell!  What pretty leaves that tree has!  Oh look–there’s a frog!  That cloud up in the sky looks like a fuzzy little lamb!  Is that cute or what? 

Okay, that might be exaggerating but I am pretty much having a fuzzy-lamb kind of day.  First of all—no, let’s start with second of all–I didn’t have to go to work today.  I took an officially approved day off.  Don’t get me wrong, I like my job, which some people find completely incomprehensible, but who cares?  I get to use my brain, I have a lot of freedom, I get to meet a lot of people, I get to learn things.  But sometimes you just need a break. 

So third of all, it rained.  Which considerably cooled off the spot on Earth I inhabit, and after two weeks of enduring a record heat wave with air conditioning in my office that is limping and on life support, that is nothing but net.  Not to mention that however hot it remains, I’m not there.  I’ve soldiered bravely, and given more breaks to the people who work for me than I’ve taken myself, but you know, sometimes you just have to take a break yourself.  You’re no good to them or yourself if you collapse.

So the combination of all the above has put me in a this-is-a-great-day-to-be-alive sort of mood.  And I came up with the perfect song to express it.  Try not to focus on the details!  This video is 33 years old.  I didn’t even know they had video in 1976.  Okay, just kidding.  Kind of.  ( I refer you back to my previous posts regarding being digitally challenged.) Let’s dance!

Old Dogs…Part 2

I haven’t figured out the knack of inserting photos into comments, ergo, Part 2.  Many thanks to my friend (and Troughton’s friend) Sue in Canada for this picture of Troughton when he was 4 1/2 and in his prime. 

Look at those muscles in his back legs!  Compared to that picture, he looks postively frail these days.  Also see how intently he is staring…probably has detected a mink in the rocks.  Here in Tallahassee he had to give up minks for squirrels, but he can still scare the whiskers off a squirrel! 

Goodbye Michael, The Pain is Over

I probably shouldn’t have been, but I confess I was shocked when I learned of Michael Jackson’s death.  What has shocked me more, however, is the massive amount of media attention it received and continues to receive.  Even today, the NY Times online had two, if not more, Michael Jackson stories on the front page.

One of those was an interactive one…choose your favorite MJ song out of the eight choices given, and tell us why.  Picking a favorite MJ song is like me trying to name the top ten books ever written.  The real answer is, “whichever one I’m hearing now”.  You can tell I’m right by the comments, which included a lot of “Why didn’t you include (pick a title)”?  But it just so happens I’d been thinking about that already, and my favorite was one of the eight. 

I’ve always thought of Michael Jackson as the perpetual Little Boy Lost.  As he got older, he just became sadder, more pathetic, and more bizarre.  He had no frame of reference about what it meant to be a kid, and therefore how to act as an adult.  He’s like a figure in a Greek tragedy, so what I’m not surprised about is that his life ended so soon.  Can you picture a Michael Jackson at 70 years old?  Being a mentor?  An elder statesman of music, so to speak?  Like his own mentors Berry Gordy or Quincy Jones? 

It seems to me that his escalating weirdness, and his inability to grasp reality made him the saddest person in the world.  He so wanted to be happy, and to make others happy, but he had absolutely no idea how to do either one.  It’s my theory that that’s the source of our continued sadness about his death.  We all so wanted him to be happy too, but we kind of had a clue that would never happen.  That chance is lost now.  But truthfully, that chance was probably lost about 45 years ago. 

So here’s my favorite.  It’s my favorite because I think it says who Michael Jackson wanted to be and couldn’t, because his head was full of snakes.   

Old Dogs

Troughton the dog will be 10 this year, and in the last few weeks I’ve noticed changes in his behavior.  He sleeps more, as you would expect, but he no longer is the first one up and out the door in the morning.  He has to be coaxed to go out.  But the big change is that when it’s time to come in (there’s always been a mad dash between all three of them to come in at the same time) he holds back.  And I believe he’s forgetting why he’s at the door. 

You know how you go into another room to find something you left there, and then when you get there, you can’t remember what you were looking for?  So then you go back to the first room to try to jumpstart your memory?  Okay, if this hasn’t happened to you, please keep it to yourself! 

But that’s exactly how Troughton acts.  He gets just to the step and stands there.  Then he turns around and goes back out in the yard.  Only moments later he will be back at the door.  Each time I tell him to come in, but it’s as if he either doesn’t recognize me, or he doesn’t understand what I’m saying.  Eventually, of course, he figures it out, and comes back in. 

Things scare him more than they used to.  He’s always been afraid of thunder and of gunshots (we have a lot of those in my neighborhood during duck hunting season, because I live near a lake).  But last Tuesday when it stormed, briefly, he went into the bathroom to escape.  It stopped storming at about 10:15 that night, but he never came out of the bathroom until 6:00 the next morning when I insisted. 

He’s often startled out of an apparently sound sleep by something happening only in his head.  Tonight I was watching TV, sitting on the couch, and he was lying by my side, when suddenly he had one of those startled moments where he started to leap up out of a sound sleep and run.  This time I caught him and touched him and spoke to him, and said, You’re okay, you’re safe, I’m right here.  And he looked at me as if he recognized me this time and understood, and he put his head in my lap. 

Dobermans have an average lifespan of 10 to 12 years, so he’s at the beginning of that curve.  But I know, as everyone does who lives with a dog, that he has changed.  Physically, he is in relatively good shape.  He’s thin, because he’s losing muscle, but he shows no signs of arthritis (the deadliest dog disease) and he does not appear to be in pain.  It’s just his brain that has become the issue. 

But this is what I signed on for.  ‘Til death do us part, Troughton my friend. 

The singer/songwriter Tom T. Hall has a ballad called “Old Dogs and Children and Watermelon Wine”.  Which are, he says, the onlythings “worth a solitary dime”.  The watermelon wine part is self-evident, but the lyrics say, Old dogs care about you even when you make mistakes; God bless little children while they’re still too young to hate.  I can say an amen to that. 

I’m in that horrible period where you’re missing them before they’re gone.  It’s like pre-grief grief.  But I’ve been there before with a dog, and I volunteered for this anyway.  Because with dogs, it’s truly No Pain No Gain.  You could spare yourself this–and I know many people do–but you also spare yourself the joy and companionship. 

I take the good with the bad for you, Troughton.  You’re okay.  I’m right here.  I will always keep you safe.

The End of Life as We Know It

First, let me say that I don’t read about celebrities (okay, I read their obits).  I don’t read gossip magazines or websites, even the relatively respectable ones like People.  I really don’t care who celebrities are dating or sleeping with, and I don’t care about their opinions either.  When I want titillation, I just try to hack into Mark Sanford’s email account. 

Second–and this may seem like an unrelated issue, but I’m going somewhere with this–I’ve recently been corrupted by eehard http://eehard.wordpress.com/ and am now watching the Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow shows on MSNBC.  So in a totally casual IM conversation with ee yesterday, I said, Do you think Rachel Maddow is gay?  I could practically see ee’s eyes rolling back in his head through the realignment of electrons on my computer screen–no webcam needed. After a capitalized “duh”, he said, “Rachel Maddow is as gay as Anderson Cooper!”

Oh Wait a minute.  What.  Did.  You.  Just Say.  Don’t tell me Anderson Cooper is gay.  Nooooooo! If I were in the habit of making lists like “Sexiest Men on TV”, AC would have been first on my list.

I first really paid attention to him when he was the host of a short-lived reality show on TV called The Mole.  I haven’t seen him that much on CNN, but who hasn’t seen his emotional coverage of Hurricane Katrina?  I’m more likely to see him during his occasional guest episodes on 60 Minutes.  In other words, it isn’t like I follow his every move.  Still.

A quick Google search does bring up speculation on some websites about who his boyfriend used to be and who it is now, which is no proof at all.  His bio on Wiki says that he does not discuss his personal life, and that that was a decision he made long ago.  Well that is a little more troublesome.  I’m not saying he is gay, but that’s what that usually means.  However, in his case, he’s the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, who was very, shall we say, active, and very vocal about it.  I can see where that would affect him, and cause him to make the decision that he would never be that way.  Plus, let’s face it…once you admit you’re gay, it’s like that becomes the adjective you can’t escape.  You’re no longer a news anchor, you’re a GAY news anchor.  You can’t be just an Olympic Gold Medalist, you’re a Gay Olympic Gold Medalist.  We don’t diminish the accomplishments or blame the failures of heterosexuals on their sexual orientation.  It’s just bizarre. 

So believe me, I really don’t care.  I’ve always admired Anderson Cooper and still do.  But I’m going to have to revise that Sexiest Men list.  Oh, in case you were wondering, I won’t be replacing him with Mark Sanford.