The Junior League of Hezbollah

Imagine the sanctimonious outrage we would have seen from Senate Republicans if the Democrats had filibustered a George W. (I'm a War President) Bush choice for Secretary of Defense while troops were still deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their patriotism wouldn't just have been questioned; it would have been flatly denied. Face it, they would have been called traitors.

Well I'm not happy about it but, if Bush was a war president, so is Obama. But the Senate Republicans really are shameless in their prevention of a confirmation vote. The last I heard, they were saying it wasn't a filibuster, but they're clearly invoking a procedural manipulation that requires 60 votes to overcome. If it walks like a duck, etc.

I don't know if I agree with Hendrik Hertzberg's assertion in a recent New Yorker that the filibuster is unconstitutional, because it seems to me like another instance where our glorious constitution, like the even more sanctified bible, provides conflicting guidelines. But Hertzberg shows that two of the founders who didn't agree on many things, both thought that a requirement for more than simple majorities in situations other than those specified in the constitution were bad ideas.

Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist paper 22, said of the idea of a super majority:

its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of the government, and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.

James Madison, in Federalist paper 58 concurred:

In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule: the power would be transferred to the minority.

The following is an old story now, and I don't know how much it has been covered:

On Februray 6th, Dan Friedman, a reporter for the New York Daily News called a Republican Senate aide to ask, with a humerous intent, if Hagel's critics had any interesting news about groups he might have addressed, like for instance, Friend of Hamas or the Junior League of Hezbollah?

A day or two later, Ben Shapiro at Breitbart.com wrote a story that began:

Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons...Hagel has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called 'Friends of Hamas.'

Despite the fact that the simplest attempt to verify the allegation would have raised questions about the accuracy of the charge, apparently Shapiro and Breitbart.com continue to deny they made a serious mistake and are even attacking anyone who suggests they did. After all, they just reported accurately what a senate source told them exclusively.

The New Yorker and the Daily Beast both have interesting stories about this debacle.

Solely For My Own Satisfaction

In an earlier post about the good ol´ days in Genoa, Nebraska I made an offhand reference to Teeny Burroughs, and mentioned that I would put off writing about her until another day. It was the sort of reference that anyone reading it probably forgot by the time they finished the paragraph, but I have been tormenting myself ever since about how best to describe this woman.

The first trouble I run up against is trying to estimate how old Teeny was when I knew her. Sixteen or seventeen year olds have no sense of how old adults are. At least I didn't. If you think about it, that makes sense; as adults we have acquired much more expertise at judging the lines in someone's face or recognizing the rather phony youthfulness that results from plastic surgery or excessive cosmetics. I never really thought about age. I was a teenager. Other people were adults. Subtler distinctions than that were apparently beyond my self-centered self.  Having made all of those disclaimers, I'm going to guess that Louise (Teeny) Little Burroughs was between 55 and 60 when I knew her.

Teeny owned and operated the only cafe in Genoa and I started working there when I was a Junior in high school. By the time I was a Senior I had graduated to the position of night fry cook. The title says it all. Perhaps there was real prepared food available at lunch, but at night the only options were fried this or fried that. You could have regular fried (hamburgers, hamburger steaks, pork chops, t-bones) or deep fried (chicken fried steaks, breaded frozen chicken), all accompanied by fried hash browns or deep fried french fries. Probably dinner came with a side of vegetables that had come out of a can and been boiled within an inch of their lives.

Teeny seemed exotic to me. First of all, as her nickname and maiden name both suggest, she was small of stature. She had flaming red hair whose color might have been natural many years earlier, but was now maintained at one of the local beauty shops, bright red lipstick, too much rouge and eyeliner, a permanent cigarette in her lips or close by, and a well-practiced sarcastic take on the small-town hypocrites and prigs. As we might say today, she had a mouth on her and could be a bit coarse.

Teeny didn't have to suffer the small-mindedness of small-town life alone. Her helpmate was Harry Burroughs. And now I'm back at the problem of guesstimating ages. I would guess that Harry was somewhere from ten to twenty years older than Teeny, and I have the idea that he once had an occupation apart from the cafe. It was, after all, always called Teeny's and not Teeny's and Harry's. But when I knew him he was pretty much a slug. The lunch counter in the cafe had an opening for wait staff to pass through. Harry owned one of the seats next to that opening and that is where he spent his day, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and coughing up phlegm, which he would walk to the bathroom to expectorate into the most disgusting sink that has ever existed in a food establishment. If the waitress was busy somewhere else, and he felt like it, he might get up and pour someone a cup of coffee or give them a refill as long as he was up getting one for himself.

Having just called him a slug, I want to stress that I liked Harry. He wasn't as sarcastic as Teeny, but he had a sense of humor and I have no memory of him ever being anything but pleasant to me. I have distinctive memories of him laughing. The one interest in Harry's life that outweighed all others was baseball. When I was in grade school Harry had been the manager of the Genoa men's baseball team. That was the end of an era when all the small towns had baseball teams, made up mostly of locals, but also with the occasional ringer brought in from Omaha or Lincoln, probably from the university. By the time I was working at the cafe, that period was already coming to an end, if it hadn't already reached it. At any rate, if the team still existed, I don't think Harry managed it any longer.

(A side note that interests...me, at least: I think the games were worked with only a home plate umpire, and it seems that all of the games had the same umpire. He was an old, chubby guy who was known only as Tucker, who I think was from Silver Creek. What is odd about that is that there were teams from Genoa, Fullerton, Silver Creek, St. Edward, Osceola, Polk and who knows what other nearby towns...but the umpire for Genoa home games was always Tucker.)

The town of Genoa had 1000 people and at least 5 churches. People were largely defined by their religion. Perhaps Teeny and Harry had a religion (I know their daughter and her family did), but I like to think they did not. They certainly weren't church goers. I liked that.

If either of them had been inclined to get religion, they were given a fine opportunity. When we were probably in what would now be called the Middle School years, my brothers and I had the local paper route delivering the Omaha Weird Harold (or World Herald). Late one winter night, the town was awakened by the sound of the local volunteer fire department siren, a particularly scary sound in the middle of a freezing night. When we got up a few hours later, still in the dark, to deliver the papers we learned what had happened. It was the first time I had ever seen a house virtually burned down to the ground. Either Teeny or Harry had fallen asleep with one of those ubiquitous cigarettes still burning. Somehow or other, they both made it out with minor injuries. Teeny was permanently scarred from burns on one or both of her arms, but I think that was the extent of the damage.

I can't think of any specific life lesson that I learned from Teeny, but I have no doubt that, if I am more than a little sarcastic today or a little more irreverent than is normal, Teeny is one of the responsible influences. If I take a particular delight when sanctimony is revealed as hypocrisy, to some extent I am channeling Teeny.

One last note. Many years after I left Genoa and long after I had any contact with Teeny or Harry, I discovered that Teeny had a younger brother who had gone into the circus world and become a famous clown with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. When he died in November 2010, he became surely the only Genoa native to have his obituary in the NY Times.

Priests In Panties

My initial reaction to the Pope's resignation was ho-hum, but a story at The Daily Beast yesterday could make me sit up and pay attention. The headline is: "Did a Cross-Dressing Priest Sex Ring Bring Down Benedict XVI?"

Of all the rumors floating around about just why Pope Benedict XVI is hanging up his camauro, one has taken on a life of its own. According to several well-placed vaticanisti—or Vatican experts—in Rome, Benedict is resigning after being handed a secret red-covered dossier that included details about a network of gay priests who work inside the Vatican, but who play in secular Rome. The priests, it seems, are allegedly being blackmailed by a network of male prostitutes who worked at a sauna in Rome’s Quarto Miglio district, a health spa in the city center, and a private residence once entrusted to a prominent archbishop. The evidence reportedly includes compromising photos and videos of the prelates—sometimes caught on film in drag, and, in some cases, caught “in the act.”

Revelations about the alleged network are the basis of a 300-page report supposedly delivered to Benedict on December 17 by Cardinals Julian Herranz, Joseph Tomko, and Salvatore De Giorgi. According to the press reports, it was on that day that Benedict XVI decided once and for all to retire, after toying with the idea for months. He reportedly closed the dossier and locked it away in the pontifical apartment safe to be handed to his successor to deal with. According to reports originally printed by La Repubblica newspaper and the newsweekly Panorama (and followed up across the gamut of the Italian media), the crimes the cardinals uncovered involved breaking the commandments “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the latter of which has been used in Vatican-speak to also refer to homosexual relations instead of the traditional reference to infidelity. 

The only story is the hypocrisy. It's the same reason I love when gay-baiting Republicans and Fundamentalist ministers get caught with their pants down.

While we're sorta on the subject, to paraphrase Bill Maher, if you're only going to see one documentary this year about pedophilia and its cover up in the Catholic Church, make it the HBO production, "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God." It's already been aired, but you can probably find it at Netflix...and I suppose HBO re-airs the same programs a few times before retiring them, don't they?

Some Government Programs are Truly Stupid

 
A family examined a fallout shelter in 1960 on display at the New York Civil Defense headquarters in Manhattan. 

 Steuart Pittman, a Washington lawyer who was appointed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to create enough fallout shelters to protect every American in the event of a nuclear attack, and who resigned in frustration three years later amid heated debates over the feasibility, the cost and even the ethics of such a program, died on Feb. 10 at his family farm in Davidsonville, Md. He was 93.

Really, How Can I Resist?

Guns and Suicide, Part 2

Lest there be any confusion, in the earlier post with this title, I had hoped it was obvious that I did not intend to suggest that the parents should have a sense of shame because their teenage son committed suicide. What I suggested they should have is a sense of both shame and culpability for not exercising appropriate precautions with the guns that were kept in their house.

Reading the Obits

Dolores Prida was a Cuban-born journalist and playwright from NYC who died about three weeks ago at the age of 69.  Twenty years ago she and Sonia Sotomayor were two of the founders of a womens´s group called LIP (Latinas in Power).

The group later accepted Prida´s suggestion that they rename the group LIPS. The additional letter stood for  "Sort of."

Once again I learn about an interesting person only after she died.

Guns and Suicide

There is a great article in the NY Times today about the link between guns in the home and the increased risk of suicide.

It's not news that studies, including one by the New England Journal of Medicine, have shown that a firearm in the home increases the risk of suicide. I didn't know, however, that the three states (Wyoming, Montana and Alaska) with the highest rates of suicide are also the three states with the highest rates of gun ownership. But those numbers are too broad to identify whether the suicides occurred in homes that also had guns...so let's not go there. One doesn't want to subscribe to "bad science."

The part of the story that caught my attention was about a Wyoming couple whose seventeen-year-old son committed suicide with one of the guns in the house. The father is quoted as saying that he "beats himself up quite a bit" about the fact that he didn't have a gun safe but that, if he had, there would have been two people with the combination, him and his son.

What is the point of conducting background checks on prospective gun purchasers if owners are not held responsible for how the weapon is used once it is in their possession? If a seventeen-year-old is too young to purchase a gun (and I hope to hell he is) then how can a father allow that same kid unrestricted access to his, the father's, guns without some legal liability? How about even the recognition of some moral liability?

There is something seriously wrong with our gun culture when a family like this proudly poses for pictures and allows themselves to be profiled in the NY Times with no apparent sense of shame or culpability. It is apparently, for them, just another tragic situation; whaddaya gonna do? Instead of a tragic situation for which the parents are in some  measure responsible.

Carnaval in São Paulo

Last year was our first Carnaval in our new neighborhood and Heitor and I didn´t stick around to see what it was like. We just knew from our experience of living in the center of the city that it was a good time to get out of town and escape the noisy revelers. So we went to Vitória for 4-5 days. Vitória, where everything was closed to the point we had difficulty finding a place to eat, but at least it was quiet.

It seems we were alarmist for no reason. This is our neighborhood today. It is quieter, with fewer cars and fewer people than on Christmas day.


My image of Carnaval was all based on pictures and video from Rio, which is the most famous, and I´ve only experienced it in São Paulo. But, in neither city is it a great big street  party. The parades of the samba schools, which is what you have probably seen, whether in Rio or São Paulo, take place in a designated area that you buy a ticket to enter. Or you stay home and watch on television.

Of course there are parties that spring up all over the city.  Virtually everyone is off work and there is much alcohol-related celebrating. That is why Heitor and I left town last year. But there are also a ton of people who leave São Paulo and head to the beach towns. It would seem that is what all of our neighbors have done. The last two nights have been quieter than normal, instead of what we expected.

Self Confidence

An interesting, isolated tidbit from David Brooks' column today:

I’ve always assumed that people who frequently use words like “I,” “me,” and “mine” are probably more egotistical than people who don’t. 

But as James Pennebaker of the University of Texas notes in his book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” when people are feeling confident, they are focused on the task at hand, not on themselves. High status, confident people use fewer “I” words, not more. 

Pennebaker analyzed the Nixon tapes. Nixon used few “I” words early in his presidency, but used many more after the Watergate scandal ravaged his self-confidence. Rudy Giuliani used few “I” words through his mayoralty, but used many more later, during the two weeks when his cancer was diagnosed and his marriage dissolved. Barack Obama, a self-confident person, uses fewer “I” words than any other modern president.