Some Important Questions for President Bush

There are several questions I'd love for some intrepid reporter to ask President Bush at one of his press conferences. They might seem like trivial questions, but I don't think they are. These questions are:

Why, after being president of the United States for over seven years, do you still mispronounce "nuclear" by saying "nucular"? After all this time, do you still not know the proper pronunciation of this extremely important word, or do you know it but choose to go on mispronouncing it on purpose? If you still don't know how to pronounce it, why is that? If you DO know how to pronounce it but deliberately mispronounce it anyway, why do you do THAT? What do you think it says about the president of the world's military and economic superpower that he still mispronounces "nuclear" after more than seven years in office?

If a reporter from a major media source were to ask President Bush such questions, I'm quite sure it would be the last questions he or she ever asked a president or anyone else as a prominent reporter, Helen Thomas possibly excepted. But what a great way to go out in style!

I'm surprised that somebody somewhere hasn't asked President Bush these things, or, at least, that the public hasn't made a bigger deal of his persistent mispronunciation than it has. When people do talk about it, they tend to treat is as some kind of amusing joke. But is it a joking matter?

If President Bush REALLY doesn't know how to pronounce "nuclear" after all these years as president and after all the comic impressions of him mispronouncing it, what DOES this say about him? Does it say that he's stupid? Some might say so. But one can have cognitive deficits in some areas without being globally stupid. Perhaps President Bush, despite his Yale MBA, is linguistically or verbally challenged in some respects but not intellectually deficient overall. Yet, how verbally challenged would one have to be to occupy President Bush's position on the world stage and not know how to pronounce "nuclear" after all this time? It seems to me that someone THAT verbally challenged has no business being president (or possessing a Yale MBA).

However, as much as I think that George Bush has no business being president, I don't think he's THAT verbally challenged. I think that he's almost certainly aware of his mispronunciation but chooses to keep doing it anyway. Now why would he do this? I'm not a psychologist and don't even play one on this blog, but I'm nevertheless going to take the liberty of offering a layman's hypothesis of my own.

President Bush believes that being a real man means never having to admit that you're wrong. That is, admitting or doing anything to acknowledge that you're wrong is a sign of weakness, and real men aren't weak and must avoid appearing so at all costs. They "stay the course" even when they're wrong, and even when they know they're wrong, whether they're wrong in their pronunciation of "nuclear" or about our invading and staying in Iraq.

Of course, I don't think President Bush believes that our involvement with Iraq is wrong. But because he seems to believe that real men stick with what they start no matter what, he won't even allow himself to entertain for one nanosecond the possibility that our involvement in Iraq was and is a terrible mistake. Real men don't do such things, even if it maims and kills thousands and costs trillions to keep on doing what we're doing.

All I can say is that if THIS is what it means to be a real man, God help us if we have any more real men occupying the White House in these perilous times! If nothing else, it looks as though we can at least be assured that our next president will pronounce "nuclear" properly and maybe, just maybe this is a sign of better things to come.

Robert Reich's Take on the Economy

I've never understood much about economics and personal finance. I guess that puts me in the same boat would-be president John McCain recently admitted to occupying. But if McCain ends up being president and if I want to improve my chances of getting by in these economically challenging times, he I will both need to boost our EQs. Not emotional IQ, but economics IQ.

Many people say that we're already in an economic recession and could be headed toward a depression. Others disagree. I'm not sure whom to trust for the truth. I could read and listen to all sides, but how do I then decide who's right and who's wrong or what size piece everyone, as Ken Wilber maintains, has of the pie of overall truth?

What size piece does this lengthy excerpt from a Robert Reich blog column have of the pie?

American consumers are coming to the end of their ropes and don't have the buying power they need to absorb the goods and services the U.S. economy is capable of producing. This is likely to mean fewer jobs, which will force Americans to pull in their belts even tighter, leading to still fewer jobs – the classic recipe for recession. That recession may turn into a full-fledged Depression if fiscal and monetary policies can't make up for consumers' lack of buying power. And there's reason to worry they cannot because consumers are in a permanent bind. They're deep in debt, their homes are losing value, and their paychecks are shrinking.

Under these circumstances, the usual remedies won't work. Wall Street bailouts have no effect because housing prices continue to fall, and the Street is sitting on a giant pile of bad debt. Tax breaks for business won't generate more investment in factories or equipment because demand for their products what emerges from the factories is dropping. Temporary fixes like a stimulus package that give households a one-time cash infusion won't get consumers back to the malls because they know the assistance is temporary and their problems are permanent. They're likely to pocket the extra money instead of spending it. Additional Fed rate cuts might give consumers access to somewhat cheaper loans, but there's no going back to the easy money of a few years ago. Lenders and borrowers have been badly burned. The values of houses and other major assets are dropping even faster than interest rates can be lowered. Growing numbers of homeowners owe more on their mortgages than their homes are now worth on the market.

We're reaping the whirlwind of many years during which Americans have spent beyond their means and most of the benefits of an expanding economy have gone to a relatively small group at the very top. Adjusted for inflation, the median wage is below where it was in 1999. The nation's median hourly wage is barely higher than it was 35 thirty-five years ago. The income of a man in his 30s is now 12 percent below that of a man his age three decades ago. The rich, meanwhile, can't keep the economy going on their own because they devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us: After all, they're rich, and they already have most of what they want. Instead of buying, they're more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return.

Some say well and good. They think our consumer society is unsustainable as it is. They argue Americans should learn to accept a lower standard of living and American business must adjust to a smaller domestic economy. This argument leaves out one salient fact: Considered as a whole, the nation has enough productive capacity to provide a higher standard of living for its citizens and also be sustainable. With the right incentives, we could dramatically reduce energy use and carbon emissions while continuing to grow at a rate that provided most people with good jobs at good wages. The problem isn't economic growth per se. It's unbalanced growth – too much consumption of goods and services that utilize too much energy and generate too much carbon into the atmosphere. Balanced growth is surely possible. But if the economy heads into a severe recession or Depression, there's almost no way to achieve more balance. Hard-pressed Americans will be unwilling to sacrifice anything.

The debate over widening economic inequality of income and wealth in America usually pits fairness against growth. Conservative supply-siders contend that the people at the top not only deserve to be richly rewarded because such rewards encourage them to invest and innovate, and thereby benefit everyone else. Liberals concede that some inequality may be necessary to encourage growth but that we have long passed the point where it is either necessary or fair. But the reality we're now facing poses a different question: Can we have any growth at all when income and wealth are so unequal that most Americans can no longer buy what they produce?

Glenn Greenwald on Spitzer Scandal

"People who work at an unpleasant job in order to support themselves, rather than because they enjoy it, are the functional equivalent of brutalized, exploited slaves and therefore should be barred by others from choosing that job -- when the job in question is prostitution, but not when it's factory work or fast food cashier or large corporate law firm associate or massage therapist or porn actor."

"Because Eliot Spitzer is a wretched hypocrite who mercilessly and cruelly prosecuted others for the very acts in which he himself engaged, and because he's so very sleazy, there's no reason to question the vast, extraordinary law enforcement resources expended -- under highly unusual circumstances -- by the Bush DOJ and FBI to investigate a crime that the Federal Government almost never prosecutes."

"Governors who hire adult prostitutes must resign immediately lest the public trust be forever sullied. Presidents who break the law by spying on Americans with no warrants, who torture people in violation of multiple treaties and statutes, who start hideously destructive wars based on false pretenses, who repeatedly proclaim the power to ignore laws, and who imprison people -- including Americans -- with no charges of any kind, should remain in office for as long as they want. Anyone who suggests otherwise is an irresponsible, shrill, partisan radical."

I obtained the three quotes above from today's Glenn Greenwald article in Salon. It's titled Misadventures in logical reasoning--and lessons learned from the Spitzer scandal. Greenwald says at the end that he has "no sympathy for Spitzer personally given how aggressively he prosecuted multiple prostitution cases and how guilty he is of rank hypocrisy and overzealous prosecutions," but he doesn't believe that this has any bearing on the points he raises in his article, including those above. I'm inclined to agree. And I would like to see the media conduct a thorough investigation of how and why the federal government became so involved in investigating Spitzer's financial transactions, for this is what apparently led to his being exposed for his involvement with prostitutes.

My Dilemma Over Spitzer Revelations

Governor Eliot Spitzer apparently paid money for sex with prostitutes. Why did he do that when he had to know how vulnerable this made him and his career, especially given his strong moralistic persona and all the enemies he made from his actions as former Attorney General of a big and important state?

Should Spitzer resign? Many say yes and some say no. I have a dilemma. On the one hand, I don't think there should be laws against people selling their sexual services or against people buying them, and I don't think law enforcement should be spending their time, money, and manpower investigating these "crimes" On the other hand, there are such laws, and the former Attorney General and now Governor of New York apparently broke them.

Not that my dilemmas probably make any difference to anyone but me. I guess I mention this one in the predominately philosophical context of wondering publicly how we properly assess a situation like this. What standards do we apply and what weight do conflicting standards have in determining our overall position on the matter? I also wonder about the psychology behind successful and prominent people like Spitzer (and Bernie Ward) self-destructing in this way.

Angry With Hillary

I feel disappointed that Hillary won in Texas and Ohio. In fact, I feel more than disappointed. I feel angry. Not so much that she won as how she won. Or how I think she won. Or how I think she may have won.

I think she may have won by throwing everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at Obama and hoping something would stick. It looks like a few things may have including that ridiculous 3 AM spot, the even more ridiculous assertion that she and John McCain are highly qualified to be president while Obama's only qualification is "that speech he gave in 2002." And, oh yes, Obama's only pretending to have any reservations about NAFTA.

I don't know if the last point is true, but Obama says it isn't, and I'm inclined to believe him. In fact, I'm more inclined to believe him about virtually everything than I am her. I have the feeling, justified or not, that Hillary Clinton or her people would say or do almost anything to take the office to which she seems to think she has a birthright. This reminds me of my strongest objection to many illegal immigrants. It's not so much that they're here illegally per se as that they appear to think that they're entitled to be here and to militantly thumb their noses at our immigration laws, and how dare anyone say anything against them or otherwise stand (or place a fence) in their way. Not that Hillary running for president is exactly the same. She has a legal right to run. But the fact that Bill and she seem to think that she's preordained for it turns me off.

But that's not the only thing. Aside from her attacktics, there's her voice. The more I hear that voice, with its histrionic modulations for oratorical effect, the more it grates on my nerves. I confess that I'm hard pressed to think of any female politician's voice and oratorical style that has impressed me with its gravitas. Barbara Jordan's, perhaps. But I'll use the same word that many others have to characterize Hillary's campaign voice--shrill.

What's more, I have the feeling that she's so plugged in to the political scene and so Machiavellian in her political approach that a Hillary Clinton administration would be pretty much a case of "meet the new boss, same as the old boss." No, I'm not saying that she'd be as bad as George Bush, and, at least, she can properly pronounce "nuclear." But I suspect that if she were president, Democrats and Republicans in Congress and in the public at large would remain just as contentiously divided as they were under Bush and that this would not be good.

Of course, I'm assuming that it would be different under Obama. I'm assuming that his inviting rhetoric about uniting across party and ideological lines and working together for the common good and the charisma he radiates when using it would be effective in a way that Hillary could never be. But perhaps I'm mistaken. The only thing I know for sure is that I would much rather hear a president Obama speech or press conference than a President Clinton one.

However, if Clinton attacks and otherwise manipulates her way into the nomination, I feel quite certain that crusty John McCain will be our next president, and we'll have at least four more years of the same old same old, including more Supreme Court justices ready to overturn Roe v Wade and continuing troop "surges" in Iraq on our way to maintaining our disastrous presence there for the next 100 years.

For as much as I dislike the Republican party and its platform, it would be all I could do to hold my nose and vote for Hillary Clinton, and if I feel that way, how many others who would have voted for Obama will end up either voting for McCain (or Nader) or just not bothering to vote at all?

Do YOU Want McCain Answering That Phone at 3 AM?

"I like McCain. I respect McCain. But I am a little worried by his knee-jerk response factor. I think it is a little scary. I think this guy's first reactions are not necessarily the best reactions. I believe that he acts on impulse."
--Major General Paul Eaton, a Clinton supporter

"I studied leadership for a long time during 32 years in the military. It is all about character. Who can motivate willing followers? Who has the vision? Who can inspire people? I have tremendous respect for John McCain, but I would not follow him."
--Major General Scott Gration, an Obama supporter

"One of the things the senior military would like to see when they go visit the president is a kind of consistency, a kind of reliability. [Obama is] not that up when he is up and not that down when he is down. He is kind of a steady Eddie. This is a very important feature. [On the other hand] McCain has got a reputation for being a little volatile."
--General Merrill McPeak, an Obama supporter

Copycat

Rising Above Political Cynicism

I heard a guy on talk radio recently discussing the political cynicism rampant in the media. A case in point, he said, was how George Stephanopoulos, Cokie Roberts, and George Will laughed uproariously last Sunday on This Week about a woman who said that every time she and her husband thought about going out to dinner, they contributed $80 to Barack Obama's campaign. The ABC panelists thought it was ridiculous for common folk like us to be so engaged in politics, and, argued the talk show host, this attitude poisons efforts to wrest political power away from corporations and individual fat cats and invest it in the people.

I believe that this talk radio host may have a point and that maybe, just maybe, what we should do about it is tune out the so-called "pundits" of mainstream media and refuse to let their cynicism dampen our resolve to get the candidate of our choice elected to carry out our political will.

The radio host brought up a related point in his discussion. He said that Republicans and other Obama detractors were citing the amazing degree of enthusiastic popular support going to Obama as reason to view him with suspicion and even to vote against him. Anyone THAT popular, or so the argument goes, must be some kind of dangerous demagogue (or even Anti-Christ) poised to lead us over a cliff. Hillary made a similar point last week when she mockingly spoke of perceiving Obama as a messianic figure preparing to part the clouds and invoke political miracles. In other words, even if it wasn't necessarily dangerous to get excited by Obama's candidacy, it was certainly naive to do so.

I agree that we shouldn't become so enamored with any politician's personality, oratory, or popularity that we abandon all critical perspective or reasoned analysis, but I nevertheless think that one can allow oneself to become energized by excitement and hopefulness about Obama without doing that, and I'd like to think that a good many Obama supporters, Gagdad Bob's psychodynamic and theological analysis nothwithstanding, fall into that category.

Letting Go of the Bernie Ward Story

The sad, sad story of Bernie Ward has been at the forefront of my mind for the past several days. If he were just anyone, I might not give the matter a second thought. But when you've listened to him on the radio as long and as much as I have, corresponded with him on occasion, and come to feel as though you know him so well that he could almost be a friend or even a member of the family, one can't help but feel virtually consumed with disappointment toward Bernie, sadness for him and his family, and anger toward those who seem to be reveling in his suffering and earnestly say the ugliest things about what they'd like to see happen to him.

There are those who believe that he deserves to go federal prison for a very long time (and to suffer the stereotypical indignities thereof) for briefly possessing and sharing three pornographic pictures involving minors with an online dominatrix while cyber-chatting with her. He claims that he was conducting research for a book. However, the police transcripts of the sordid chats cast this in doubt.

In any case, the law says motives don't matter, and supporters of this strict law, in tandem with Bernie's detractors, say that the government must be merciless with child predators and with those who aid and abet them in any manner.

Is Bernie a child predator? He wasn't charged with child molestation, and his children are still living with him. Did his actions support child predator-pornographers to any degree? I think it would be exceedingly difficult to argue that his reinforcement of child pornography was anything more than vanishingly small.

But that's just what I think. Many if not most of those who've discussed this in public forums disagree, and I guess there's no point in my fretting about Bernie's fate or arguing with others about what it should be. What will be will be. However, I hope it turns out better for him and his family than it now looks like it will.

A Cult of Racial Healing

Many dismiss the Obama phenomenon as a mere "cult of personality." It is in some ways a cult, but not one of personality -- it's a cult of racial healing, of racial transcendence. For many whites, voting for Obama is a kind of appeal to one's better self, and the better self of the country. It is, in a way, a promise. It could even be seen as a kind of prayer....Barack Obama is not a savior. But there's every reason to believe that if elected he will be a good president -- and maybe a great one. And every day that Obama is in office, even the bad ones, we'll be able to tell ourselves: We elected a black man president of this country. That thought, with all that it says about where we came from as a nation and where we hope to be going, will be a light that no one can put out.
--Gary Kamiya

A President's Most Important Role

I briefly tuned in to Meet the Press this afternoon. They were discussing Barack Obama. . Many have argued that he hasn't done that much in Congress and that when you examine closely the substance behind his rhetorical glitter, there's little there there. But one of the panelists in the discussion, a presidential historian, argued that what may be most important in a president is the ability to use his or her rhetorical gifts and charisma to inspire diverse peoples to unite and work together for the common good and that Obama may have the precious potential to do exactly that.

I think this is what I find most promising about Obama and why, unless and until I encounter good reason to do otherwise, I support him for president. He and Hillary may not be that far apart in their politics, but I think they may be world's apart in their ability to inspire "we the people" to make sound political vision reality.

The Merits of Melancholia

Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?
--John Keats

Chase away the demons and they take the angels with them.
--Joni Mitchell

A person can only become a fully formed human being, as opposed to a mere mind, through suffering and sorrow.
--Eric G. Wilson

English professor Eric G. Wilson argues that the American pursuit of happiness, fueled by Prozac and "positive psychology," has robbed many lives of the "fertility of pain" or "melancholia" that propelled Keats, Handel, Georgia O'Keefe, and countless others to their greatest works. Joni Mitchell calls her bouts with melancholia the "sand that makes the pearl," and Professor Wilson says:

"Melancholia, far from error or defect, is an almost miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life."

Wilson explains that he's not urging that we "wantonly cultivate depression" or "romanticize mental illnesses that can end in madness or suicide."

"On the contrary, following Keats and those like him, I'm valorizing a fundamental emotion too frequently avoided in the American scene. I'm offering hope to those millions who feel guilty for being downhearted. I'm saying that it's more than all right to descend into introspective gloom. In fact, it is crucial, a call to what might be the best portion of ourselves, those depths where the most lasting truths lie."

Twelve years ago, I became romantically involved with a woman I should never have gone near. When she inevitably left me in the dust a few months later, I went thorough the "best of times and the worst of times." For over a year, I could hardly eat or sleep, and I'd cry at the proverbial drop of a hat, especially at songs of love and loss and when I saw suffering, human or animal.

But I also experienced some of my greatest joys during that time--mudita over others' good fortune, a sense of sublime connectedness with all living things and with the ups and downs of life, and, finally and overarchingly, an almost constant sense of what I can only characterize as soulful depth that I've seldom even glimpsed before or since.

I don't mean to suggest that I would want to return to those mostly gloomy days and interminable nights, and I certainly don't claim to have accomplished any great things back then. But there was, nevertheless, something deep and magical about that time that I would like to regain something of without plunging forever into a depressive abyss.

In other words, I think Eric Wilson is on to something, and what I'm now trying to figure out is how to reconcile Wilson's "miracle of melancholia" with my essential philosophy that the ultimate goal and purpose of life is to be happy. At this point, I will only and vaguely say that it seems to me that the solution lies in the understanding that happiness is not merely the blind pursuit of hedonistic pleasure or of a life devoid of all unpleasantness, but is an ongoing and much more complex fulfillment of one's divinely human nature.

Revisiting the Bernie Ward Story

I recently posted an entry about local talk radio host Bernie Ward. I complained that the federal government appeared to be trying to railroad him into a lengthy prison term merely for downloading a few images of child pornography that weren't even on his computers when the authorities seized them. I said I was inclined to believe Bernie when he said that he was using the downloaded images for his research for a book about "hypocrisy in America." I believed him because I'd been listening to him for over 25 years on the radio, I liked him, and I had never heard even the faintest hint of a suggestion from or about him that he harbored any sexual interest in children. I admit that I had some dimly conscious doubts about his excuse, but I wanted so much to believe him that I was willing to overlook certain things in the news about his case that seemed suspicious.

Well, now that I've read more details about the case, I have to say that I now have an extremely difficult time buying Bernie's excuse. It definitely doesn't seem to fit the unpleasant facts that have come to light.

But while my opinion of the motives behind his acts has changed, I haven't changed my opinion that someone doesn't deserve to spend years if not decades in prison for merely possessing and distributing, for the briefest of time, a few images of child pornography that he didn't sell or buy or apparently play any role in creating. Yes, child pornography is a very bad thing, and those who make it or otherwise profit from it deserve to be treated severely. But what Bernie apparently did doesn't begin to rise to that level of egregiousness.

After recent revelations about his case, I can't see any way that he could ever return to talk radio. Not just KGO but also anywhere else. His reputation seems forever ruined. His media career seems forever ruined. And I can't imagine that his marriage and family life are ever going to be the same, and they may be ruined too. If the government wants to pile on with extended public service, probation, and, perhaps, even a heavy fine, well, I guess it has to do something because Bernie did break the law, as even he admits, and charges have already been brought. But a long (or even short) prison sentence and permanent status as a registered sex offender seems like an ostensive definition of "cruel and unusual punishment" not only of Bernie but also of his family.

And some of the hateful things I've heard people say about how Bernie deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison being raped, brutalized, and humiliated, or to at least have his life destroyed forever seem more disturbing to me than anything Bernie appears to have done.

I feel very sorry for Bernie Ward, for his family and friends, and for a community that has lost an intelligent, thought-provoking, and influential voice for the poor and middle class. What unfortunate pathology led such a smart and well-read man to bring such ruin to himself and such pain to his loved ones?

Why Men Stop Desiring Their Wives

I was listening to talk radio the other day. They were talking about why men lose sexual interest in their wives. Some say it's because they're too tired from work and other responsibilities. Some say it's because of unresolved anger toward the spouse. Others say other things.

One 49-year-old man called in and said that it could often be the result of men no longer being attracted to their aging and obese spouses. That is, men are biologically programmed to feel attracted to females whose youth and physical beauty imply fertility, because men are biologically programmed to spread and perpetuate their genes.

A female caller immediately after him angrily denounced this man as a "child" who needed to "grow up." She accused him of justifying men wanting young, pretty girls for sex and rejecting their wives. I think she was off-base. I think the man's comments were legitimate and not offered as justification but merely as valid explanation of why many men stop desiring their wives. They don't want to feel that way, but they do because that's how nature made them, and one does not simply flip a switch in one's mind and "get over" this programming.

If that woman caller had been a man, I think she would have understood. How easy it is to condemn those we don't understand. We need to stop condemning so much and start listening and opening our minds and hearts to what we hear.

Jimi Hendrix's Machine Gun

Evil man make me kill you,
Evil man make you kill me,
Evil man make me kill you
Even though we're only families apart.
--Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix was a genius. He revolutionized electric guitar playing. He may not have had the blinding speed and advanced compositional knowledge that many of today's guitar greats have, but you can bet your house that virtually every electric guitarist who came after him owes a huge debt to him.

Some people say that the legendary solo below is the greatest electric guitar solo ever captured, and I'm not sure I'd disagree. It's called Machine Gun and was recorded in a concert appearance at the Fillmore East in New York City with the group Band of Gypsys on New Year's Eve in 1969.

It's electrifying, in more ways than one--a performance for the ages.

Jimi Hendrix plays Machine Gun

A New Challenge on the Job

I can't say that I ever look forward to going to work, but I look forward to it a lot less than usual today. For the past several weeks, I was beginning to get a little more comfortable because I was doing familiar things and was becoming a little faster at doing them. But yesterday I was introduced to a procedure on the computer that I didn't understand. For most, it's easy. They pick it right up. For me, it's a different story. I didn't know what I was doing or why I was doing it. That is, I kept needing to be reminded of what I was supposed to do, I kept messing up on it even after being told, and when I asked for explanations of why I was supposed to do what I was doing, in order to help me learn the logic behind the procedure so that I could learn that procedure better and apply the procedure to the various contingencies I might be faced with, I didn't understand the explanations.

I think I'm going to be back at that task again today, and I'm going to be expected to make significant progress in learning it. I anticipate a rough time of it. No doubt my pessimistic expectations make matters worse. Yet, how can I, based on a lifetime's experience, not expect things to go badly? They almost always do in cases like this.

I will go there today and do my best. I will also try to take notes if time and other conditions allow. But I feel apprehensive that rougher than usual times lie ahead, and I'm not sure what to do about it if they do. With my wife having quit her job, it's vital that at least one of us is bringing in at least a little money. But how long will I be able to keep the job I have now?

I'm trying to take these things less seriously and not worry so much about what others think of me when I have difficulty learning and performing tasks that come easily to them. I think I'm getting a little better at doing this. I tell myself I'm doing the best I can, and if others look down on me for struggling, their perceptions of me or feelings toward me don't change who I am.

One thing I've told myself more recently is that if I can find a way to handle my struggles gracefully, it might serve as a valuable lesson to others that there are people like me in the world who have these kinds of difficulties, but who nevertheless keep working hard and trying hard to do what's expected of us, and we're good people. Perhaps this understanding will increase empathy and tolerance not only for me but also for people with all kinds of disabilities.

Still, I think the time may be fast approaching when I'll need to sit down with my supervisor and explain to him what's going on with me. It's often said that if one does have an underlying disability or difficulty that isn't obvious but that does impact one's job, one shouldn't say any more about it to his bosses and co-workers than he needs to. In other words, if he's having trouble learning aspects of his job, he shouldn't explain the reason why he's having it. He should simply say something like, "I seem to be having difficulty with this. Could you take a little more time training me on it and allow me to take notes and do everything I can to pick it up?"

However, I'm thinking that, in my case, it might be better to tell my supervisor about the underlying difficulty than, each and every time I'm asked to learn something new, his wondering why I'm struggling so much. Maybe that way I won't need to ask him and my co-workers to allow me more time to learn each and every time I'm given a new duty to learn. They'll already know I'm "slow" and make allowances. Or they won't keep assigning me new tasks and will just let me do the things I've been doing and get better at them so that I still shoulder a respectable share of the workload. Or they'll decide, while I'm still on new employee probation, that I'm not a good fit for them and let me go.

In any case, I will stay on the job and do the best I can with it until they either let me go, I find something better, or my body breaks down from the strain.

We Don't Want No Stinkin' Superdelegates

As I was driving to work yesterday, I heard progressive talk radio host Randi Rhodes discussing the possibility that superdelegates may very well decide who the next Democratic nominee (an oxymoronic expression if ever I've heard one) for president will be. And, right now, it looks like they could snatch the nomination away from Obama and hand it to Hillary.

Rhodes is not the only one talking about this. It seems that almost everyone in the media is, and I think they should be. I'm very concerned that backroom manipulation within the Democratic party is going to supersede the wishes of the people the party supposedly represents, and if this happens, I will leave the Democratic party and become an Independent. Why stay in a party that doesn't value and trust the will of its members?

I hope that the superdelegates align with the candidate who receives the most regular delegates through the primary process and that, afterward, the Democratic party ends the use of superdelegates. As it is now, we have Bill Clinton regularly calling one 21-year-old superdelagate I read about, and Chelsea just went to lunch with him. Gee, I wonder if that might have any influence on his vote at the convention!

The Curse of Inflexibility

Yesterday some of us attended a short class on multi-cultural awareness at work. One of the points the instructor made, which had little to do with the subject of the class but was nevertheless extremely important, was that the health system we work for is a great place for those who are very adaptable to the complex, ever-changing nature of the system. Such people can reasonably expect to be in demand and to be able to work there for as long as they desire. However, those who aren't so adaptable, who can't readily learn new skills and apply them don't have a rosy future there.

Well, I suppose this goes for just about any workplace. You've got to be adaptable, flexible, able to understand what's going on and learn the changes that are always occurring and use that understanding to meet the constantly shifting demands placed upon you. But what the instructor said yesterday and the way he said it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

How can someone whose disability prevents him from being adaptable to complex, ever-changing circumstances make it in the place where I work or in almost any job anywhere that pays enough to live on?

It's Official

My wife saw the GM yesterday. He told her she doesn't smile enough at her present job to fill the open room service position which, somehow, just closed due to the "poor economy." But, he said, if she practices to the point where she can smile all the time and not look like she's concentrating on her job (even when she has to concentrate), maybe she can work room service someday.

She served two week's notice of her resignation immediately afterward.

My wife is Thai. Thais are renowned, and rightfully so, for their smiles, and my wife smiles as much as anybody on and off the job. But it's difficult to impossible to smile constantly when carrying heavy trays or trying to get multiple orders straight. Nobody else does it either.

She was an outstanding employee. She would have been outstanding at room service. And if she had been Caucasian with her record of outstanding service, I don't think her smile or her look of concentration would have been the least bit of an issue. I believe that there is a consistent pattern of discrimination going on at that hotel, and I wonder if anything might be done about it.

Judgment Day

This week, I've had one of the more interesting experiences of my life, which I look forward to describing here as soon as I can find the time to do it justice.

Also, my wife hasn't resigned from her job yet, because she's been waiting for the opportunity to meet with the GM of the hotel where she works to persuade him to give her the chance to try out for the room service position. If he gives her that chance, she will probably stay. If he doesn't, she will resign.

Well, she was supposed to have her meeting this morning, and I'm presuming that she did. So, she has probably already either resigned or resolved to stay on. I'm eager to find out which, but also anxious about it. I fully support her if she decides to quit. She's been doing her present job for almost eighteen months, and it would be too much of a strain on her body and too much stress on her mentally to continue, and there would be no better position likely to ever open to her. On the other hand, if she quits, we'll be without affordable health insurance and possibly without a second income for awhile, and I darn sure don't make enough from my job to support us.

We shall see what happens.

Acoustic Magic

Here is a beautiful version of one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Carlos Vamos Plays Jimi Hendrix' "Little Wing"

Runaway Train

Today my wife is going to serve two weeks notice that she's resigning from her job. After being jerked around too long and too often by her employers, she's had enough, and I don't blame her. So for now, we'll have to make do with my meager income from my shaky job and with our ever-dwindling savings and pay out-of-pocket for COBRA health insurance coverage that, despite its exorbitant cost, we can't afford to be without.

I feel like my wife and I are locked into a runaway train that we know is bound for disaster, but we can't get off, and our only choice, if we can even exercise choice over such a thing, is whether to relax and calmly enjoy what's left of our ride before the inevitable cataclysm or go to our doom in terror.

Actually, my wife has another choice. She can jump off the train before it crashes. She'd be injured by the fall, but at least she'd survive. But there's no escape for me. My only choice seems to be whether to throw my wife from the train before it crashes or let her stay with me till the bitter end.

This is how I feel today. It's actually how I've felt for a long time. But now I feel it more acutely than ever. Maybe I'll feel different in time. Maybe I'll find reason for hope that I just don't see now.

Yes, I could do as Cousin Dupree suggested and see my doctor about getting a prescription for an anti-depressant. But I think all that would accomplish is to possibly make it easier for me to choose my first option and meet my (and my poor wife's) doom with a little less despair.

Hope/One Word 1973

The first Mahavishnu Orchestra. The greatest band that ever was, playing as well as it ever played.

A Fascinating Meeting With a Neuroscientist

I recently met with a prominent local neuroscientist to discuss with him whether I could be a research subject and perhaps receive help for my learning difficulties. The website of the institute where he works says this about him:

[He] is a pediatric cognitive neuroscientist. His research focuses on the neural basis of cognitive impairments seen in genetic disorders that produce mental retardation, developmental disability and psychopathology. Building on his influential theory of the foundations of numerical competence, [he] investigates how dysfunction in specific neurocognitive processing systems, such as attention and spatial cognition, can generate a range of cognitive and behavioral impairments. His goal is to develop remedial intervention programs that will minimize such disability. [His] current projects center on studies of visuospatial and numerical cognition in children with chromosome 22q11.2 deletion syndrome, also known as DiGeorge and VeloCardioFacial syndrome. He is also engaged in similar studies of children with Fragile X, Williams, and Turner syndromes. Besides cognitive processing analyses and psychometric testing, [he] uses cutting edge neuroimaging methods, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Voxel Based Morphometrics, and Diffusion Tensor Fiber Tracking in order to study the structure, function and connective patterns in the developing brain.

This sounds pertinent to my situation and impressive, and I found the man it describes to be extremely impressive in person. This is one brilliant and tremendously knowledgeable guy! We talked for over an hour. Actually, he did most of the talking and I listened with utter fascination. I don't claim to have understood most of what he said, but here is the essence of what I think I understood:

He works mostly with children but has been approached recently by several adults close to the same age from different parts of the country. We all report similar symptoms. That is, there seems to be an uncommonly large gap between our relatively high verbal facility and low nonverbal ability. He characterizes these symptoms as probably resulting from several factors.

First, we are like computers connected to much lower resolution digital cameras than most people are. In other words, our visual-spatial representations of the world are so much less detailed than most people's that when we try to focus on and thoroughly understand some part of our representation, we get a blurry image when most people get a much clearer one.

Second, if attention is likened to the narrow beam of a flashlight in a large, dark room, while most people's attention moves fairly smoothly and systematically from one portion of the "room" to another until they're able to piece together a coherent perspective of the entire room from all of the areas the "flashlight" illumined, the attention of people like me tends to flit haphazardly from one portion of the room to another, and we're subsequently unable to reconstruct a coherent image or representation of the entire room. This makes it much more difficult for us to understand with visual-spatial thinking the structures and functioning of various places and systems. In my case, it makes it exceptionally difficult for me to conceptualize the filing system where I work. I can't visualize or mentally represent to myself the flow of files into, through, and out of the file room to various units and departments., and I can't readily conceptualize how to perform various tasks involved in the operation of this system.

Third, not only do we take in less visual information than most people and in a more unsystematic manner, but we also process this information more slowly, making us markedly slower at tasks affected by our disabilities.

I've been told and have long suspected that my difficulties probably stem from perinatal brain damage. However, this neuroscientist believes that they may result from genetic anomalies. At least two of the other adults who've approached him have shown unusual duplications or deletions in the base pairs of certain genes in certain chromosomes, and he's curious to know whether I have this same anomaly.

So, he'd like me to submit a blood sample that will be screened for these and other genetic anomalies that could be related to my learning difficulties. He'd also like to subject me to a functional MRI scan and to much more specialized psychometric testing than I've received so far. Finally, he thinks that the human brain exhibits a high degree of what he calls "neuroplasticity."In other words, he thinks it has a remarkable ability to change itself as a result of experience and to compensate for injuries and malfunctions. He's currently working with other researchers to develop video games to train the brains of people with various nonverbal learning difficulties to increase their visual-spatial "bandwidth" and to improve their attentiveness and processing speeds, and I might be included in this research. In the meantime, he speculated that some kind of occupational therapy might help me to either accommodate better to my current job or to find and keep a more suitable one.

All in all, I was very pleased by our meeting, and I'm grateful that such a busy man, who is currently in the middle of seeking a grant from the NIH so that he can continue a promising line of this important research, would take over an hour of his precious time to meet with me and then propose that we go forward with the steps I just listed. I'm now waiting to proceed with my blood and other tests and to find out all that I can about what ails my brain and what I might be able to do about it.

Decisons, Decisions

My back is stiff and sore. My knees are stiff and sore. My hands are stiff and sore. My wrists are sore. I've woken up several nights recently with cramps in my hamstrings so severe that my wife has had to massage them; I never had these kinds of cramps before. I feel like I've aged years in just two months. Much of my job feels like torture with no prospect of relief. I'm not getting any faster at doing what I started doing two months ago, and, now that I'm being given more to do, I'm staying an hour to an hour-and-a-half later than everyone else to complete my tasks.

I want to find another steady job I can do better and that pays benefits and doesn't destroy my body, but I need to upgrade my typing and computer skills to improve my chances of getting and keeping it, yet, I have no time to develop these skills, if I even can develop them, as long as I spend so much time each day at this job. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before I'm let go from underproduction and inability to learn the new tasks that I'll certainly be asked to perform in time, but I'm wondering if I should quit before that happens and start full-time preparing and looking for another job, or if it would be better to hang on and endure the torment until I'm asked to leave. And if I quit first, how should I do it? What should I tell and not tell my boss about the reason for my decision?

Yet, even after I leave from resigning or being fired, what job do I seek? What decent job can I, at my age and with my sparse background and all my learning impediments and slowness, reasonably expect to be hired for and to be able to keep?

It would be easy to surrender to total despair, but I'm trying to keep hope alive and make the right decisions and follow through with them.

Wise Discrimination

The Buddha, the most practical of teachers, defined the wise man or woman in a thoroughly practical way: "One who will gladly give up a smaller pleasure to gain a greater joy." That is discrimination, the precious capacity to see life clearly and choose wisely. When it is understood, every choice becomes an opportunity for training the mind.
--Eknath Easwaran, Conquest of Mind, p. 66

Easwaran has written that he loves great symphonies, novels, and other works of art but that what he loves most is the "perfectly crafted life." That to him, and to me, is the supreme work of art, more beautiful and inspiring even than Michelangelo's David. Indeed, it seems to me, we can look at how we live our lives as a process of sculpting. Every choice we make chips away a piece of the precious stone we've been given. Every bad choice makes it that much harder to craft a great work of living art; every good choice fosters our effort. Sooner or later, we will run out of stone, and the potential we once had to sculpt a moving, breathing David will have crumbled into dust. Why waste time when we don't know how much we have left? Why make bad choices that undermine the most important project of a lifetime?

I have made countless bad choices, and I'll be fifty-five in March. I don't know how much stone I have left, and I have many, many mistakes to overcome to forge my modest masterpiece from what raw material remains.

Baring It All

Almost everyone who's read my blog has never met me, and I think I've always rather liked it that way. Just as the only people an exhibitionist wants to see him naked tend to be his lover and those who'll never know who he is, so I'm a little shy about people who aren't very close to me reading my blog and knowing me outside the blog.

However, I casually mentioned to my wife's friend's husband the other night that I have a blog, and he promptly asked for the URL so he could check it out. With some hesitation, I gave it to him, and I believe that he will get around to reading some of my entries, including some of my more intimate posts about my learning disabilities and struggles at work and home. I feel a little anxious about this.

I see this guy only two or three times a year, but I respect and like him and would like to think of him as a friend. Yet, do I want this particular friend to know as much about me as I reveal in this blog?

Yes and no. Or, rather, part of me does, and part of me doesn't. Part of me doesn't want him to know anything about me that would make him think less of me, to the extent that he thinks of me at all, than he does now. And another part of me wants to stop worrying about what others think of me and to stop hiding my flaws from them and just bare it all and let the proverbial chips fall where they may. If they know all about me and like me, fine. If they know all about me and don't like or respect me, I can live with that. In fact, I can live with it better, in the long run, than I can live with trying to maintain a false front and have people like or respect a persona I know is not really me. I've spent too much of my life trying to cover up, and what has it gotten me? A life of being uneasy and guarded around others. A life of not trying new things in public because I was afraid I'd fail and look stupid and make people think less of me.

So, letting my friend read my blog may be one of the best things I can do. Maybe it can help to set me free to be myself not just in a blog or with my closest friends but with everyone. And if I still find it difficult to do this, I can contemplate the fact--at least I believe it's a fact--that our bodies, minds, and personalities are only the tiniest, most insignificant portions of who and what we really are.

Today's "The Twilight Zone" Marathon

I grew up with the original The Twilight Zone. It was a wonderful series, one of the best to ever grace television. Every week, I would be transported to strange places and exposed to mind-bending ideas, chills, and terrors. I've seen most of its episodes countless times since they first aired between 1959 and 1964, and I'm tempted, so very tempted to tune in to The Twilight Zone marathon showing all day today and much of tomorrow on the Sci-Fi channel. But I'm trying to resist, because I know that if I start watching, I won't be able to tear myself away and do anything else, and I have so much else to do today and tomorrow and so little time to do it all. Watching episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone, which are virtually inscribed into my DNA after all these years, is like hearing a great old song. It doesn't matter how many times you've heard it. It doesn't matter that you know every note of the tune. You still want to hear it again and again and again.

There are so many unforgettable episodes. When I was a child, I was particularly impressed by an episode in which two parents awaken to hear their young daughter calling out to them from somewhere within the house, but she can't be seen anywhere. Finally, it's discovered that she has fallen from her bed through the adjoining wall into another dimension and universe caused by a rare and temporary intersection of universes. There was something about this idea that lit my imagination on fire and had me feeling the wall next to my bed on many a dark night to see if I could plunge my hand right through it into a Twilight Zone universe.

However, it was only a relatively few years ago that I saw the episode that has left the biggest impression on me, moving me to tears the first and subsequent times I saw it. It was called Miniature and featured Robert Duvall as a bright but extremely self-controlled and almost autistically alienated man who falls in love with a living doll in a dollhouse in a museum. Duvall's performance is so incredibly touching, and I guess I felt special empathy for his character who wanted so little part of the world around him but still deeply longed to connect with someone somewhere. The very end of this special one-hour episode made me weep with joy.

The old expression "They don't make 'em like they used to" has never been more true or regrettable than in the case of the original The Twilight Zone and episodes like Miniature.

The Trial of Bernie Ward

Bernie Ward grew up in San Francisco, was a Catholic priest for two years before leaving the priesthood to marry and start a family, taught theology in Bay Area high schools and in a private school in Washington DC, worked as chief legislative assistant for U.S. Representative Barbara Boxer, became an award-winning reporter and fill-in talk show host for Bay Area newstalk radio giant KGO Radio, and then became a popular full-time KGO host of two programs, the Bernie Ward program on weeknights and God Talk on Sunday mornings. For a time, he billed himself as "the lion of the left" and always championed a politically and religiously liberal perspective both on his radio programs and in his spirited appearances on national television programs. He also raised hundreds of thousands of dollars via his Thanksgiving charities fund drives every year that he was host of God Talk. He was one of my favorite talk show hosts, and I've listened to him regularly on KGO since the mid-to-late 1980's.

However, he was recently placed on paid leave from the station pending resolution of federal charges brought against him for owning and distributing child pornography. Ward admits that he did download several images of child pornography but says that he did it as part of his research for a book he was planning to write on "hypocrisy in America."He contends that when federal officials seized his computer in early 2005, they found no child pornography on it, and I'm not aware of any allegations ever being made against him of being involved in any kind of child sexual abuse. Apparently the federal government offered him a plea deal sometime back that would have meant his spending several years in prison, and he rejected it. Now he's been indicted and could conceivably serve decades in prison if he's convicted.

Everything I've read and heard about Bernie Ward tells me that he's been a wonderful husband to his pediatrician wife, father to his four children, and supporter of the community, especially in his fund raising for agencies serving the destitute. I have seen no indication whatsoever that he had any sexual interest in children or that he would deliberately do anything to harm children in any way. In fact, everything I know about Bernie Ward tells me quite the opposite. Unfortunately, federal law is very clear that if one receives or distributes through any means any child pornography, it doesn't matter why one does it. All that matters is that one has done it, and the penalties for it are incredibly severe.

Although I believe that child pornography is bad and should be illegal, I also believe that the penalties for simple possession of it are unreasonably draconian and that the apparent motives of the accused should be taken into account in deciding whether or not to bring charges. In Bernie's case, based on what I know, the spirit of the law aimed at rightfully protecting children from sexual exploitation seems to have been grossly perverted by slavish and perhaps malicious adherence to the letter of the law with what seems to me to be the likely result of ruining the life of a hard-working and talented man who has been a blessing to his community and family and of doing irreparable harm to his family and many friends. Yes, one could argue that if he's convicted and imprisoned, this will deter others from becoming involved in child pornography in any way, shape, or form. But even if this is true, and I wonder if it is, it seems that this good is vastly outweighed by the harm done in this particular instance.

I don't know that Bernie's longstanding, fierce opposition to conservative political leaders and especially to George Bush has played any role in the federal government's dogged pursuit of its case against him, but I do believe, based on what I've read and heard, that the federal government is morally, even if not legally, wrong to bring these charges against him, and I wish Bernie well in his defense against those charges. I would love to hear him back on KGO as soon as possible.

Bernie debating a conservative talk show host on MSNBC

Back Pain

I used to suffer frequent bouts of back pain. I also used to play a lot of basketball. When I stopped playing basketball, I pretty much stopped having back pain. Even when I worked as a baggage handler at SFO a few years ago and routinely handled heavy baggage for several hours a day, I seldom experienced any trouble with my back.

But I'm having some back pain now. I've had it for several days. I don't know if my job caused it, but I'm quite sure it's contributed to it. I spend hours every weekday handling heavy medical charts and stacks of charts in all kinds of ways that require bending, stooping, twisting, reaching, pushing, and pulling. I try to be careful about how I move, but I also try to be efficient and fast. It's difficult to be both careful and fast. I suspect that I often sacrifice the former for the latter. I don't want to lose my job, but I can't expect to keep it if I don't get a lot faster at it than I am now.

So, it would seem that I have a real dilemma. I just hope that I don't continue suffering the back pain and stiffness I do now. It's not terrible, but it's definitely unpleasant, and, as far as I know, it could get worse, much worse over time. I can try to be more careful about my movements at and away from work. I can do back exercises. I can try to take better care of myself overall. And time will tell if it helps my aching back.

Meeting With My Job Coach

I met with my vocational rehab counselor and a job coach the other day. It was my first time with the job coach. I tried to explain my situation to her as best I could, but I'm not sure how well I did or how well she ended up understanding where I'm coming from. And even if she understood extremely well, there is still the daunting challenge of figuring out how to help me succeed in the workplace.

What can anyone really do to help me succeed? The absolute ideal would be to simulate a medical records file room in a large health service institution and pair me with a medical records professional who could patiently walk me through all the duties of my job, painstakingly explain to me the hows, whats, and whys of each duty and of the entire medical records system, and then drill me rigorously on accomplishing virtually any task and solving virtually any problem likely to arise on the actual job. There's no chance of that or of getting even remotely close.

Still, I will try to benefit as much as I can from the extra help.

Political Oratory Par Excellence

If this guy could be as good a president as he is a speechwriter and speechmaker, what a wonderful president he would be, and what a critical time this is for us to have a wonderful president!

Reflections on Bhutto's Death

Benazir Bhutto, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, died yesterday after being shot by someone who then blew himself up, taking more people with him.

I feel both angry and sad. Angry at Bhutto for needlessly subjecting herself and innocent onlookers to totally predictable mayhem and death, and angry at the zealot who inflicted the carnage. Part of me would like to see him burn in screaming agony in hell for a thousand years or two before being consigned to everlasting oblivion.

Yet, I also feel sad that all those lives were lost for no good reason that I can see, and that Pakistan lost a leader who might have helped that country to reform. And I'm sad to see senseless violence motivated by pathological political and religious zealotry just go on and on and on with no end in sight.

Someone might argue that at least the assassin-terrorist died for a cause in which he believed. In what do I believe for which I would be willing to kill others including myself?

I believe that I might well kill an aggressor to prevent him from harming me or others without justification, and I would like to think that I would sacrifice my own life to save the life of a loved one or even just an innocent child or other person I don't even know.

Well, what if the man who killed Bhutto, himself, and the others believed that he was doing it to save more lives from misery and death than he took? How different is that from my killing others or sacrificing myself to save others? There intuitively seems to be a difference, but when one subjects that intuition to the spotlight of reason and tries to explain precisely what that difference is, it isn't so easy.

For instance, one could argue that killing is justified only when done to protect oneself or others against an imminent threat of severe harm or death, and that killing Bhutto didn't fulfill that requirement. But suppose one had the chance to kill Hitler or Stalin and had to endanger or kill innocent people to accomplish the task. Can one definitively say that this would be wrong? Of course, I'm not comparing Bhutto to Hitler or Stalin. I'm merely suggesting that the assassin may have perceived her as an evil person or as someone who could, if allowed to live, end up being responsible for tremendous evil befalling Pakistan, and so he acted to eliminate the threat.

What bearing should a person's motives have on our assessment of his actions?

Bhutto interview

Christmas Reflections on Faith

"The adolescent is the one who wants to experience everything. The adult comes to realize that you can't experience everything. Mother Teresa never lost her faith, because she kept praying and going for spiritual direction. But she had to live by sheer faith--faith without a lot of consolation. But faith itself is consolation."

I obtained the quote above from an article in the National Post. The man who spoke those words was Fr. Eric Jensen, a Jesuit priest and author and the director of Loyola House in Guelph, Ontario. He and the article as a whole appear to argue that we all must and do have faith in something, because it's impossible to know everything and to live without taking certain things on faith that we don't know; therefore, the theist's faith in, say, the Immaculate Conception and all that follows from it is fundamentally no less well-founded than is a physicist's faith in the existence of unseen quarks or your or my faith that there will be a tomorrow.

I spent years arguing about Christianity with Christians on the Internet, and examples of it can be found in this blog. But not long ago I came to the conclusion that I needed to learn a lot more about what I was arguing against if I was going to make the most cogent arguments possible, and, furthermore, I needed to be more circumspect about my motives for indulging in these arguments.

Having said that, I sorely doubt the soundness of the Christian argument that faith in the Immaculate Conception, unique divinity, and salvific crucifixion and resurrection of the historical Jesus is equivalent to faith in quarks or the dawning of tomorrow, even though I'm not yet and may never be fully prepared to explain why. At the moment, I will only say that it seems to me that quarks and the anticipation of a probable future are more consistent with an intermingling of broad experience and reason than is belief in Jesus Christ. The notion that the Supreme Being of the Universe would choose to reveal Itself to us and redeem us through the historical Jesus and expect us to assent, with the skeptical minds that he gave us, to this revelation upon pain of eternal torment if we don't continues to strike me as ludicrously inconsistent with my experience and with any reasonable understanding of Reality. Thus, my faith is not in religious claims per se, but in my capacity to evaluate the plausibility of those claims.

Thus, Christmas doesn't have the special meaning for me that it presumably does for most Christians. In fact, aside from being grateful to have the day off from work, it has no more special meaning for me than it does for my Buddhist wife and her relatives with whom we'll be spending this evening. Perhaps it would if I had kids or a big family with whom I could meet and partake of secular festivities. But I don't, partly by choice and partly by necessity. My wife's at work as I write this, and I'm home alone. Yet, I'm still happy to be alive and to be able to sit here writing this on my 55th Christmas day.

The Late, Great Oscar Peterson

The technical brilliance, unprecedented speed and hard-driving swing of Peterson's best work inspired generations of artists. But it also drove them to despair, for they knew Peterson's feats could not be matched, much less topped.
--The Austrailian

Oscar Peterson plays the best ivory box I've ever heard.
--Count Basie

I recently wrote about the incomparable Art Tatum, a jazz pianist of stupendous skill and improvisational ability. But, actually, there is one jazz pianist who may have been his equal or at least close to it. His name was Oscar Peterson. He died Sunday from kidney failure at his Canadian home at the age of 82.

When Peterson was growing up, Art Tatum was his idol, but Peterson soon became an idol for countless jazz pianists in his own right and played with such luminaries as Louis Armstrong, Dizzie Gillespe, Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, Billie Holliday, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Itzhak Perlman.

The jazz reviewer Leonard Feather wrote that Peterson could "extract the gentlest whimper, the profoundest roar or the deepest indigo wails from his keyboard." Duke Ellington called him "Maharajah of the keyboard." And, after witnessing a Peterson performance in 1987, reviewer Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times:

"Mr. Peterson's rock-solid sense of swing, grounded in Count Basie, is balanced by a delicacy of tone and fleetness of touch that make his extended runs seem to almost disappear into the sky...His amazing speed was matched by an equally amazing sense of thematic invention."

The world has lost a great, great musician.

Oscar Peterson--You Look Good to Me




Oscar Peterson Trio--Goodbye

Buddha's Politics

In this season of political debates and upcoming elections in the USA, I'm looking to understand it all in a broader and deeper way than we see presented in the media polls and commentaries and sound-bite interviews with leading presidential candidates. Below, Ken Wilber discusses the historical development and natures of political parties and perspectives and the importance of an integral politics that transcends and includes all of them.

John Danley Plays Acoustic Guitar

Here is a great fingerstyle acoustic guitarist named John Danley.

Career Choices and Concerns

After I posted my previous entry, someone wrote to me privately to say that it was difficult for him to fathom how a person who writes as well as I do could have the kinds of learning impediments I say I have. However, he went on to suggest that I may want to look for a different kind of job that is better at downplaying my non-verbal weaknesses and at tapping my verbal strengths. But I wonder what that job would be.

He recommended that I try writing for publication. I have to admit that my dream job would be to make a good living from writing. But that seems totally unrealistic. Look at Gagdad Bob. He's brilliant, erudite, and an amazing writer. Yet, to hear him tell it, he can scarcely give his remarkable book One Cosmos away even though it's been praised by reputable reviewers and discussed with him in What is Enlightenment? magazine. If he can't make a living off his writing, how can a far less intelligent, learned, and gifted writer such as myself hope to do so? How many people, no matter how talented they are, make a living writing philosophical or "spiritual" nonfiction or, for that matter, anything else?

No, I need to do something else for my livelihood, even if I can somehow find the time to write on the side. I've chosen medical coding as my career goal for three reasons. First, it's predominately verbal. It consists of analyzing the diagnoses and procedures that healthcare professionals perform with patients and the supplies and equipment they use in their rendering of services to those patients into their appropriate numerical or alphanumerical codes. For example, 43820 is the CPT code for a surgical procedure called a gastrojejunostomy. Coders need to know enough about medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, and the practice of medicine to find these codes quickly and to apply them accurately in the right order and form to any healthcare scenario.

My second reason for choosing medical coding is that I've had an interest in the medical field ever since I was a kid. Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, Marcus Welby, Medical Center, and much later, St. Elsewhere, ER, and Chicago Hope have numbered among my favorite TV shows. I couldn't be a doctor when I was a boy, but fictional doctors from the small screen were my role models of intelligent and selfless service to humankind during my formative years. Maybe I can't be a doctor now, or a PA or nurse, but I can possibly have some involvement in the medical field by working with doctors and other healthcare professionals in a supporting clerical capacity.

Finally, I chose medical coding because it's a pretty solid job. The pay isn't stellar, but it's not too bad. And if you can work for a big healthcare system like U.C. Davis or Kaiser, you probably have about as good a job security as you could hope for.

However, it undoubtedly comes as no surprise to my handful of regular readers that I have acute concerns over whether I can succeed as a coder. I have several not insignificant factors working against me. First, I'm accurate in my coding, but I'm also very slow. In order to be hired for almost any coding job, one must pass an exam that requires speed as well as accuracy. Moreover, in order to be hired for the better, higher-paying coding jobs, one must pass a national certification exam where, once again, speed is essential. I don't know if I can ever get fast enough, no matter how much or long I practice. And even if I do, I don't know if I'll be fast enough on the job to carry the workload expected of me.

Second, there's my age and startlingly unimpressive background. If I were hiring coders, I probably wouldn't choose me from a pool of qualified applicants. Why would anyone else?

Finally, I don't know if I'll be able to learn the job. If I'm struggling helplessly to learn the system and my relatively simple duties in the file room, what chance do I have of learning the more complex computer and other operations required of a medical coder? Realistically speaking, I may have a better chance of becoming a bestselling author than I have of succeeding at a medical coding career, and the odds in favor of the former seem infinitesimal in their own right. Unless I can grow a new brain that works the way it's supposed to, that is. Or, perhaps, one of my dear readers would like to do a brain exchange with me. No, I'm not malevolent enough to inflict that inequity on anyone.

So, I really don't know what to do other than keep doing what I'm doing and working in the file room as long as they'll let me while studying on the side unless and until I'm able to get into coding. I'll be talking about that with my vocational rehabilitation counselor and a job coach later this week and with a neuroscientist next week. If I learn anything new, I'll probably be writing about it here. In the meantime, I'd like to thank the person who wrote to me privately and Night Stranger for their words of encouragement. And I'd like to wish a blissfully happy holiday season to all.

Naked Reflections on my Naked Reflections

My notion when I began this blog was to 'nakedly reflect' my experiences and ideas. But I have such a poor opinion of my capabilities and I experience so many negative emotions as a result that many of my entries have been bleak and despairing and have probably turned away most of what few readers I ever had. This might not be so bad if I were writing this blog only for myself, but I'm not. While I'm not trying hard to entice people to read it, it would be nice if people liked this blog enough to stop by and read it anyway. But why would they want to if they encounter one depressing entry after another crying about my learning disabilities and their emotional fallout?

On the other hand, my learning disabilities or cognitive impairments along with their psychological repercussions have had and continue to have an enormous impact on my life, and to what extent does a blog that ignores this 'nakedly reflect' me? And if it does so only very little if at all, why not change the name of this blog to something else and write about other things?

Perhaps I could keep my entries impersonally philosophical or "spiritual," or I could write about myself only when I have something "positive" or uplifting to say. I have long thought that it's cathartic and, therefore, good to bare the pains of the soul. Yet, I'm coming to wonder if this isn't like, to borrow an Easwaran simile, wearing an unwanted groove in a vinyl record by tracing the same path innumerable times with the phonograph needle.

I'm reminded of "gangsta rap" or whatever they call it these days, of how its revolting, at least to my ears, concoction of monstrous misogyny, mindless hedonism, brutal machismo, and reptilian sociopathy is often defended as an "honest reflection" of life in the "hood" and of my questioning how people can rise above such an awful life by wallowing in it like a pig in slime. I don't have the answer to that question or to the question of how I can rise above my crippling impairments, self-doubts, and sense of helpless hopelessness by nakedly reflecting them here. Maybe I can't. Maybe I need to take another path with any blog that I continue to write. Or maybe I at least need to be a little more moderate or sparing in "reflecting" negativity about myself. I don't know, but I'm trying to work it out.

In the meantime, below is a very 'naked reflection' of how I felt at work the other night. I wrote it during one of my breaks. Since then, I've had times when I felt better and times when I've felt even worse. Over all, I think it speaks for how I essentially feel about myself and my (and my wife's) future when I allow or force myself to take an unsparing look at myself and at what I truly believe about my prospects.

I'm into my fourth week of my new job, and I wonder how many weeks they'll keep me on until they decide that I just can't meet the demands of the position. Am I being unduly pessimistic? Perhaps. But I struggle every day to understand the blooming, buzzing confusion around me and my supervisors' and co-workers' explanations of it, and I fail dismally.

As for executing certain tasks expected of me in a reasonable period of time, forget about it. One of my co-workers takes only 20 minutes to accomplish what it takes me two hours to do. This is no exaggeration. I can certainly understand how his five years on the job would make him more efficient and quicker at his tasks. But six times faster at such a relatively simple task as filing medical charts back into the wall in their proper places? No matter how long I stay on the job and no matter how much I gain in experience, I don't know how I'll ever be able to perform that particular task significantly faster than I do already.

And that pretty much speaks for all of the tasks I perform and for how much slower I am at most of them than everyone else, including those who haven't been on the job much longer than I have. And I'm referring now to those rare, simple tasks where I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel like dead weight in my workplace, and it seems to be only a matter of time until I'm treated as such. Still, I keep doing my best, watching what and how others do, asking questions, and taking notes so that, if it's at all possible, I can do better and stay around longer.

Because if and when I lose this job, how long will it take me to get another? And if I can even get another, how long will I be able to keep it until I'm let go again? I really feel quite hopeless right now. I feel as though I may well be incapable of doing any job that pays enough to help sustain my wife and me beyond a poverty level requiring us to count literally every penny we spend and be consumed with constant financial worries and stress.

I sometimes wish I had never married my wife. Not because I don't love her but precisely because I love her so much that I don't want to see her stuck with a loser for the rest of our lives.

I know I may sound extremely depressed right now, but I'm not. At least not in the stereotypical sense of choking back tears, feeling suicidal, or anything of that kind. It may sound as though I'm being unduly harsh with myself and pessimistic about my future. I don't believe that I am. I believe that I see my future with all too realistic clarity. Of course, Buddha said something to the effect that we are the result of what we have thought, and thinking that I'm going to fail in life could well contribute to my failing. But in my case I think it's likely to contribute about as much as a drop of gasoline to a raging forest fire.

Yet, even if the contribution is bigger than that, what do I do about my pessimism, especially if its based on reality? See a therapist? Been there, done that. It cost me a veritable fortune and did little if any good of which I'm aware. See a different therapist. I don't know how I can afford it. Get a doctor to prescribe me an anti-depressant drug? Will that make me any less incapable of meeting the demands of job and life than I am now? Any less likely to fail? If not, why fool around with my brain chemistry and perhaps mess myself up even more than I am already?

Well, I do plan to meet soon with a neuroscientist from the local university. His specialty is the neural basis and psychological consequences of learning disabilities in children. Even though I'm well past childhood, at least in a chronological sense, I wrote to him about myself, and he immediately wrote back expressing an interest in seeing me and exploring with me some possible research (and, perhaps, clinical) options. I don't want to get my hopes up and have them squashed. After all, what can anybody really do to help me or to help me help myself even if they can pinpoint precisely the nature and location of my brain malfunction and the type and extent of my impairment? Yet, I need to have hope in something, and I don't seem to be able to find it anywhere else at the moment.

Well, my break is over. Time to get back to my snail's pace of work and rock-like incomprehension of what's going on around me.

Can YOU Beat the Chimp?

To Use or Not to Use a Handkerchief?

Dr. Dean Edell says that he's "disgusted" by people using hankies to blow their noses. Apparently he's not alone. The Japanese have a term for nasal mucous that translates into English as "nose poop," and one can well imagine how they feel about people nasally defecating into a cloth that they carry around in their pocket. But what I want to know is, What's a person with a runny nose to do? I wish we humans were never plagued by runny noses, but we are, especially during allergy season and when we have colds.

Some people carry tissues with them, but that can be pretty inconvenient when your nose is very runny and you don't have room for a big box of tissue or there's no wastebasket around. So, I often use a hankie, especially when I'm out and about. Yes, it's not the most sanitary thing in the world, and it's not very pleasing to the eye. But what's a viable alternative?

There But For the Grace of God...

I can't blog much or often anymore. Not that I was doing it anyway. But now there's almost no time for any posting. However, I don't want to stop completely. So, I'll do what I can when I can. I suspect that it will be mostly on the weekends and that I'll keep it mostly short and simple.

I don't know the whole story. I know only what I've heard from snippets on CNN. But apparently he was thrown out of the house at eighteen. He dropped out of high school. He had few friends. He felt like he didn't belong anywhere. He had just lost his girlfriend and his job and believed he was a worthless "piece of sh*t." He wanted to be somebody, to have his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. So he got it and then some even though I doubt that he's now able to revel in it. He killed nine people including himself in an Omaha shopping mall earlier this week.

When I read about cases like this, I wonder what I would have done in his shoes. I felt pretty worthless and alienated too as a teenager and long after. In fact, I still do at times. But I had a few friends and a family that didn't throw me out of the house. Maybe my family should have been tougher on me that they were and pushed me to do and achieve more. But if they had pushed too hard, what might I have done? I don't think I would have gone into a shopping mall and killed myself and eight other people. But there were times when I felt not only awfully depressed but also very angry about the cold, cruel, fuc*ed up world.

How do I know, how do any of us know exactly what we would do if we were in someone else's shoes? I'm inclined to believe that we would do exactly what that young man did. That is, if we had the same body, brain, mind, and experience as that young man, we would have inevitably acted the same way he did in that mall on that dark day and achieved our own measure of infamy.

There but for the grace of "God" go any of us.