Forever Old

April 4, 2014

Monrovia, California

My keyboard has been finicky lately, making it difficult to write the blog.  Guess I shouldn't have spilled coffee on it.  At least I don't use sugar, but a little milk has enough sugar in it to gum up the works.  So it's been slow going, with the occasional freezeup.  Having now made that Facebook-worthy disclosure, I proceed, a bit tardily, with this posting.

A couple of weeks ago I awoke from a dream in which I was in the presence of a person I gradually came to understand was my great grandmother.  People were milling around, and she was talking to them and sometimes standing alone while I observed her and was given information about her by others or gradually came to understand things about her in that way that happens only in dreams.  In that weird fashion I was becoming aware of her existence for the first time, and was supposed to be--indeed was--rather impressed with her accomplishments.  She was a stout, matronly woman of indeterminate old age, rather tall as she stood there with her hair pulled back tightly from her face and gathered in a no-nonsense bun.  She wore a full dress, not quite formal but very dignified, and resembled older women in prewar movies and New Yorker cartoons.  Definitely a personage from another time.  She was supposed to have been the first president of something or other, and one of the few women to have.....whatever the hell it was.  That part was never quite clear, or the details were lost to me in the seconds after I woke up, but the overall sense I had was this was a forebear who did some remarkable things.  And in the dream she was alive and in front of me.

Of course this woman wasn't really my great grandmother, but after the shell of the dream had broken and floated away with most of its contents, I was left thinking about great grandparents in general.  Each of us has had precisely eight great grandparents, biologically speaking.  In my case all of them died before I was born.  All four of my grandparents were born in the 1880s, and their four sets of parents were all born before or during the Civil War.  As with most of my contemporaries in age, we are fortunate if even one of our parents is still living, and our grandparents are long gone, and great grandparents are out of the question.  Indeed comparatively few of us have any recollection of them.  Perhaps, if our parents or grandparents were story tellers, we have some sketchy information about those great grandparents, such as their names and where they were born and what they did, and maybe a personal anecdote or two about them.  Our great grandparents are for the most part the oldest relatives we might have had during our lifetimes, and probably the oldest our own parents had, given people's comparatively shorter lifespans half a century or more ago, and therefore the oldest people with which we have any degree of personal familiarity.  We might have a few old and yellowing photos or even some tintypes of them, from the early years of photography.

In my own case I know the first and last names and maiden names of all eight of my great grandparents and where they were born.  I have seen photos of seven or possibly eight of them, most taken the better part of a hundred years ago--rich yellow and ocher formal-sitting-type photographs such as were the norm in the those days.  Two were born and died in Holland; one was born in Germany and one in Canada of a German father and both came to Michigan; one was born in Illinois and one in Missouri; and two lived their whole lives in southern New Jersey, descended from early settlers in New England and New York.  That's pretty much the story of an average American of mixed northern European heritage.

The thing about great grandparents in general as opposed to great-great grandparents and earlier ancestors, is that they lived on after their deaths in story and pictures and maybe some family legends or anecdotes--either you knew them yourselves, or your parents could tell you about them, the way you might occasionally tell your children about your own grandparents.  They were close enough to be real and yet remote enough in time to be semi-historical--the last solid link with the past before becoming merely a name on a family tree, relevant only to the curious (unless you're a Mormon looking to baptize them).  We might know we had an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, but half the time what we think we know isn't really the case, because stories always get more interesting in the retelling, and there's no real link with people we actually knew. With great grandparents it's harder to fudge the reality of their existences, since they're too close to the present.  Even if we knew them a little when we were kids, they were hopelessly old--caught and held forever, in photographs or in our memories, as too remote to be the affectionate and indulgent grandparents who might have loved and nurtured us, but too recently passed out of time to be full-fledged ancestors.

The bridge of progress and technology our great grandparents crossed was enormous.  Chances are they were born before automobiles, electricity, indoor plumbing, telephones, and air travel, to name just a few innovations that came into being during their lifetimes.  Their livelihoods more than likely were of a different era, too, if not in their particularity then in the way they conducted them.  Half of my great grandparents were farmers, one was a baker and one a sawmill operator.  I don't think any of them made it to what we'd call secondary school, and that was entirely the norm for their era.  The fact that they survived into adulthood, much less old age, was in itself a defiance of the odds.  At the turn of the 19th to the 20th century the most common cause of death was infectious diseases, followed by heart disease and strokes.  Childbirth complications for mothers and babies were common.  The life expectancy for someone born in 1860 was about 42 years.  It was rare for someone of my great grandparents' era not to have had at least one sibling who died at birth or at a young age from things like influenza, measles, diphtheria, and typhoid fever.  Antibiotics and vaccinations were rudimentary, injectible insulin didn't exist. Workplace accidents were frequent, as were unfortunate childhood events like falling into wells and dying in fires.  Life was risky in the way it still is in the third world.  Or people might live to be 35 and catch or develop something that today would be treatable, and be gone in a flash.  The fact that cancer and high blood pressure and type II diabetes and Alzheimer's Disease are so common today speaks volumes.  These are for the most part conditions that take decades to develop to the point where they are fatal.  It is in all respects, in this country at least, a safer world, even with the real and imaginary dangers that blare out at us from all the news media outlets.  In fact, the reason we hear so much about such dangers--plane crashes, murders, traffic fatalities, and so on--is that they are news, which is to say that they don't happen often enough to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of life in the advanced western world.

So often we unrealistically imagine the peace and quiet and comparative safety of a bygone and more rural age.  But the days of our great grandparents were not safe. Dangerous in a less noisy way, perhaps, but dangerous nonetheless.  In terms of what government or employers had to offer, they were not much removed from medieval times.  No social security, no old-age health insurance, no minimum wage, no child labor laws, very little reliable medical treatment.  Life was a bitch and then you died.  Between your fortunate survival of birth and early childhood and your departure from this mortal coil you worked your ass off six or seven days a week, read the scriptures (if you could read), and were ruled by your religion.  Many of that time also were born into slavery or peonage, or lived with the fear of impressment into military service, local vendettas, the oppression of a merciless employer and an equally merciless and indifferent government.  As Thomas Hobbes put it in the 17th century, life for the majority of people without the protection of a benevolent sovereign (and how many of them have there been?) was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.  This was barely beginning to be less the norm than the exception in the western world during the last half of the 19th century.  And all of it was happening within the living memories of persons who were able to tell us, or our parents, about them.  But they didn't do so, for the most part.

Some wit once said that nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but of course it is what it always has been--a form of ignorance, in the true sense that it deliberately ignores facts.  For some this ignorance is probably therapeutic, for others it is merely self-delusion.  Despite all of human misery, what generally survives in the telling are the sweeter and more glossy recollections in life, which is where the nostalgia comes in.  I suppose that few who make it into comparative old age really enjoy dwelling on their own life's miseries, although the temptation, so often succumbed to, is to remind our descendants of how practically everything was done differently (and by implication better) when we were kids.  That of course is because what we're remembering is not life as a whole, but childhood.  Ironically, this gloss of nostalgia, which seeks the memories of the comforts of youth, is not how we see our great grandparents.  We tend to view them as old, because if we knew them at all, or have pictures of them, chances are they were old at the time.  No home movies survive of great grandparents frolicking down by the old fishing hole in some Huckleberry Finn-like way, or rolling hoops down the rutted dirt streets while avoiding horse turds, or spending shivering nighttime moments in the three-hole outhouse, or trudging out to the family graveyard with an infant's coffin.  But all that happened.  What we see is their mature old age, if they made it that far, and the serious looks on their faces--looks that said life is hard, by God, but we made it.

Most of us will someday be viewed that way by our own great grandchildren--as relics of another era, wearing out-of-date clothing and speaking in a hopelessly uncool way and sporting the comparatively grim looks that reflect a long life of comparative hardship: Having to get up to change one of the few channels on the TV; having to use only telephones that were attached to the wall by a cord; having to look things up in books; having to use typewriters; having only hot dogs and hamburgers to choose from at fast-food places, having to spend cash most of the time.  Having measles, mumps, and chicken pox; having had or known someone our age who had polio; having no seatbelts, airbags, or child car seats; having segregated public facilities; having to watch only white guys play major league sports.  The list, trivial and serious, goes on and on.  We will be the last living--or recently dead--links to a dinosaur world of semi-history.  We will, above all, be forever old.

Days And Years

March 8, 2014

Monrovia, California

Okay, I've already begun to backslide from my goal of posting more often.  But February was a short month, with two holidays.  How much work can you expect anyone to get done?  And speaking of the calendar, sort of, it was three years ago this week that I reported in this blog on the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, or at least on my trip to Hollywood to get as close as I could to the glitterati. (Check out "The Last Oscars" posted here on 2/28/11.  I just reread it and I must say it's not bad.)  At that time there were people in the streets talking about the impeding end of the world.  It was going to occur in somewhere between 84 and 90 days from Oscar night, if I recall.  This date had been calculated independently by several end-time Armageddon type groups, based generally on various interpretations of the biblical book known as The Revelation of St. John the Divine.  (St. John the Divine was so named to differentiate him from St. John the Nosepicker, St. John the Not-too-Punctual, and other Monty Pythonesque personages.)

Back then, as I waited in vain for a close look at the famous Hollywood actors who were about to go into the Kodak Theater, I had just finished my walk across the country and was examining some of the more specific areas of quirkiness in the Los Angeles area, on which I've attempted to continue to report to my readers ever since, having now made LA County my home.  On that particular day I didn't get near enough to where the A-listers were disembarking from their limousines to see any of them too well, but I got a flavor of the whole scene.  More importantly, however, I got to chat with some end-of-the-world types, including one I called Armageddon Dude, and to read his manifesto regarding the state of the world in its waning months. The guy told me he was Jesus Christ himself, and although I was skeptical of this claim initially, I gradually came to realize that he had, at any rate, a divine world view in some respects.  Apart from believing he was from somewhere between Jupiter and Saturn, he also held that the Republican Party was the apotheosis of evil in America.  No arguing with that, and indeed, even though the world didn't come to an end later in 2011, as he and others were predicting, the Republicans have continued to wage their satanic war of attrition against the few good things others have tried to do through and within the government of this country.  I had hoped to find Armageddon Dude again over in Hollywood, and though I've been there a few times since then, I haven't seen him.  Maybe he's back upstairs with The Old Man, recalculating the whole second coming thing.  As anyone knows who is familiar with western theology and mythology, sometimes even the gods make mistakes.

But back to calendars, because that was the rub in that end-of-the-world thing in early 2011 when I visited Hollywood.   Somehow the end-time Christians screwed up.  Not long after that, in fact the next year, the Mayans, or at least their modern adherents, also screwed up. They got their dates wrong, and damn it, the world didn't end.  That would have been news.  Bigger even than war or the movies or sports.  Somehow humans have a tendency to make things for their own convenience, then forget that they've made them in the first place, and begin to think of them as God-given.  Happens over and over, throughout the world.  It's a major failing of the human race.  The calendar is one such device among many--created by man and then imbued with divine authority to give it more authenticity.  Within the calendar are a number of instances of days, weeks, or months that have become special or sacrosanct merely by having been arbitrarily designated so on the calendar.  December 25 as the date of the birth of Jesus comes immediately to mind, as if anyone could have figured that out, and of course no one really did, especially since not even all Christians agree on that date.  There are the eastern Orthodox folks and the western Christians, and they have different dates.  But whenever it's celebrated, it's holy.  It kind of gets you to wondering about how a species as clever as homo sapiens is in many ways can at the same time be so profoundly silly.

As for calendars in general, whoever it was who decided there were going to be seven days in a week also had to decide which day was going to be Sunday, and go from there.  As for the number of days in a week, you might well suppose that seven days makes sense in terms of the lunar cycle--there being four seven-day periods within one such cycle.  Possibly six days of breaking your ass seemed to a lot of folks as reasonably calling for a seventh day of comparative leisure.  But there could as easily have been seven four-day weeks as four seven-day weeks.

So my question still is, Why is Sunday Sunday, and not Monday or Tuesday, or whatever?  Well, the answer is buried forever in the recesses of time, although updates to the calendar have happened over the centuries, by agreement or fiat, some not so long ago.  As recently as the mid-1700s in Protestant Europe and even as recently as 1917 in Russia, today would not have been Saturday March 8, but some other day and date, about eleven or thirteen days earlier.  Different day of the week, different day of the month, even a different year, because up to a certain time March 1 was New Year's day.  George Washington's date of birth, for instance, is recognized today as having been February 22, 1732, but when George was born, it was February 11, 1731, and until Washington was about 20 and England got on the Gregorian calendar (the one decreed by the Pope for all Catholics in 1582, and the one we use today), he thought his birthday was on February 11.  Of course there was lot more he didn't know back then, including the fact that we'd still be commemorating his birthday in 2014 and that it would be on a convenient Monday instead of the real day so we could have a three-day weekend, and that it would have morphed into President's Day and that Crazy Dave's Mattress Store and all your local Toyota dealers would be having fantastic sales to commemorate it, and so on.

The Great October Socialist Revolution, which started on October 25, 1917 in Russia (a country that was even slower getting on board with the Gregorian calendar than England was), actually started on what is today November 7.  They really should have named that submarine Red November. When the Soviets shifted calendars, 13 days just went pfffffft, and disappeared.  Anybody whose birthday was within that period of almost two weeks just sort of missed out, I guess.  Maybe birthdays weren't as important then as they are now, but still.... imagine if someone told you on the day before your birthday that the calendar was going to jump ahead almost two weeks and your birthday would be skipped that year?  You'd be plenty pissed off, I'll bet.  Maybe you'd still get a cake and some presents, and you'd have to consider yourself a year older, but imagine the havoc it would play with other aspects of the modern world, where specific times and dates are so important?  My car payment is due on March 5, but there is no March 5.  What the hell do I do?  And more importantly, what will the loan company do?

I suppose the point I'm getting to is that we're pretty strongly tied to calendars, much more so than when Washington or Lenin were kids.  In this context I was examining my own calendar this morning and noticed that on the calendar hanging on the kitchen door, picked up for free at a bank, it says March is Women's History Month.  I thought more or less the same thing I thought last month when it was Black History Month, namely, hmmmm, why do these groups--one comprising about 12.5 % of the country's population and the other an overlapping 51%--have one lousy month per year dedicated to their history?  And doesn't that mean that Black females get two months a year, while Black males get only one?  Does that mean that the other ten months of the year--from April through January--are by default white male history months?  Then upon closer examination of my calendar I observed that May has been designated Asian Pacific Heritage Month and November is National Native American and Alaskan Heritage Month, so I guess we white guys get eight months a year--but still, that's two-thirds of the time--not bad, in a disproportionate way.  And after all, in addition to all those months white males gets, even though we're 35% of the population, we get most of the wealth, property, and political power, not to mention fame and fortune in the entertainment industry and the majority of the Get Out of Jail Free cards.  It seems that on just about every corner these days you see a white man.  Turn on the TV and what do you see?  White men.  Go to court and who do you see sitting in black robes and carrying around briefcases?  White men.  Look at the heads of the large corporations, the inventors of technological advances, the members of rock bands--mostly white men.  What's the country coming to?  All but one president has been a white man, and all the vice presidents, too.  Maybe we're a bit underrepresented in professional sports--hockey and golf excepted--but that's not a bad trade-off for being the owners and head coaches and managers of most of the teams.  Even Armageddon Dude was white.

But take heart, women of America, and people of color, because you've got yourself a whole month dedicated to your history, and if you're a woman, two whole months.  And if you're part Native American or Asian and African American, maybe three months.  This, and the subject of the Oscars, helps me hop up into the saddle of another hobby horse.  The movie Twelve Years a Slave took some of the prime Academy Awards this year.  I saw the movie and liked it, in an uncomfortable sort of way.  Slavery, as we all know, was bad.  But why does it take the story of a guy who was illegally pressed into slavery to make us pay attention to the subject?  What about all his plantation companions who were born and died as slaves and didn't even get a chance to engage in a tearful reunion with their free families up north?  Twelve years is bad enough, but how about a lifetime?  I'm just saying.

Oh, by the way, here's a good trivia question involving knowledge not only of U.S. presidents but of the Gregorian calendar:  Other than George Washington, who was elected to his first term in 1789, name the only two presidents who were elected in years that weren't leap years.

The Death Scream Of The Carrot

Monrovia, California

February 19, 2014

This is about what we eat, as a species.  Somehow I have the feeling I've written about this before on the blog, but it might be that I've only alluded to aspects of the problem.  Problem? you ask.  What's the problem?  Let's have pizza!  Well, go right ahead.  Extra cheese and pepperoni for me.  And while you're eating a slice, I'll chat.

One of the things about humans that has made us so successful (in the short run at least as the history of the world goes) is our adaptability.  We can live almost anywhere on earth, from the frozen poles to the jungles of the equator to the lone and level sands of the desert, and everywhere in between.  Give us something to eat and wear and something with which to shelter ourselves and we're good.  Of course there are other species that can and do adapt to all sorts of climates--rats and dogs and certain insects come immediately to mind, and they don't even have to make clothing.  It's our ability to imitate other species and use them for our own purposes that allows us to be damned near everywhere.  We are predators of the highest possible order, in that we not only prey on other species but have developed ways, on a vast scale, of managing them, changing them, and molding them to our needs.  We hunt, we fish, we gather, but more importantly we develop and refine.  In some places and at some stages of social and economic development we do simply grab what's at hand.  But in most areas we do far more than that, and for most of us, historically, each phase of development has led to a more complex one, from subsistence to full-blown agriculture.

Where human habitation has been unsuccessful on a large scale that has been due to the fact that folks have been unable or unwilling to adapt--to get with the local program.  (The Vikings in Greenland come immediately to mind here--they knew there were Inuits who had adapted well to that environment by fishing and hunting aquatic mammals, but instead of copying them they chose to transplant the agricultural model of their native Scandinavia, which, when the going got rough climatically, just didn't work.  So they died or went back home.)  But almost everywhere we've not only gotten with the program, but have improved upon it and developed it.  Where there were once herds of wild bovines we have converted them into domestic cattle; where there have been schools of wild fish we have learned to net them or better yet have enclosed them into fish farms; where there were once fat wild edible birds we have converted them to tame chickens, ducks, and geese.  We use their meat, their hides, their feathers, their milk, or their eggs, as the case may be.  We not only prey on other animals, but we actually improve the quality and quantity of our prey, often on a mass scale, for our own consumption.  And of course we do the same with plants.

The human level of predatory behavior goes far beyond the cunning and opportunistic habits of those predators we most fear and admire--lions and tigers and bears, for instance.  It is not entirely unprecedented in the rest of nature for one species to, as it were, farm another.  Certain wasps are known to keep bees under their control in order to have a steady supply of honey.  But the average meat-eating king of the jungle appears to just lie in wait and take what it can from the weak and the slow of the herd rather than killing the fattest and strongest of them as we do.  Lions are kind of a garbage disposal for their prey.  In human terms, they're dumpster divers.  Lions do make it a point to kill competing predators when possible--no baby cheetah is safe from a lion, and a lion will eat a human when it can, with relish.  They're opportunistic, as I say, but not particularly forward-thinking, just highly adapted in a narrow way.  It's worked okay for them for quite some time, except where they've come into contact with us, because we're more efficient as predators than they are, however much stronger they may be than us, however much we like their sinuous ferocity.  We reduce their habitat for our personal use, and we kill not only them, as competitors and potential predators of us, but we also kill their prey.  So while we admire their pure bloodthirstiness, reflecting as it does our own, we also know how to get rid of them if necessary.

Because humans live all over the world, we've learned to get by with whatever food is at hand, for the most part, and to avoid what's not good for us.  Where meat or seafood is potentially tainted or harmful to us, we've developed rules against such foods, usually dressing them up in the elaborate proscriptions of religion.  Where plants are practically nonexistent, we eat meat only, deriving whatever necessary nutrients we can from body parts.  And where meat is scarce, we eat only plants, getting as much nutrition out of them as possible.  But mostly, when we can, we eat just about anything and everything, because our digestive systems have developed to allow us to be omnivorous.  It all seems to work pretty well.  Folks in some parts of the world eat things that people elsewhere would consider revolting or perhaps a bit wacky.  Raw blood, insects, guinea pigs, even dirt.  Nature seems to provide pretty well for us wherever we find ourselves.  And if not, we move on or die.

This brings me to people who are vegetarians by choice, rather than by necessity or under the insidious influence of some religious mumbo-jumbo.  This particular subset of our species is dedicated to the proposition that even though we live in the midst of plenty and are enjoying ever-longer lives (in part by having successfully exterminated or reined in the species, from large to microbial, that prey on or compete with us) we are doing something drastically wrong to ourselves by consuming animals.  And here I'm talking mostly about American and western European vegetarians who have the luxury of choice in this area.  These vegetarians seem to have, as their primary motivation, the promotion of human health, and maybe also some concerns about the cost and waste of eating high on the food pyramid.  But those opposed generally to the eating of meat usually observe a kind of natural, and telling, set of priorities.  They are, to put it bluntly, species-centric, and concerned with the welfare of their own kind--good old homo sapiens.  They are vegetarians because eating no meat appears to them to be the best thing for humans, above all.

Then there are vegans--those who don't eat anything that comes from an animal, even things that don't involve the killing of animals, such as milk, cheese, eggs, or honey.  They seem to be vegetarians who have moved to a different level, motivated by a more extended agenda.  This agenda has more political and social  overtones.  For the vegan mere dietary and health considerations are perhaps important, but human self-interest appears to have taken a back seat to altruism.  They profess to object to the killing or even the exploitation in any manner of other animals.  It's these folks I worry about, because, without seeming to realize it, they still practice self-centeredness, or at least what might be termed, biologically, kingdom-centrism.  Perhaps without meaning to, the species whose consumption both vegetarians and vegans most abhor are the ones that most closely resemble us, or our own conception of ourselves.  Thus the smarter an animal is, or the larger it is, or the cuter it is, or the more useful or attractive to us it is in some capacity other than as meat, the more likely they are to oppose the butchering and devouring of it, either on grounds of human health or in the interest of kindness to our fellow-creatures.  Whales, and especially dolphins, have big brains, so they're high on the list of the forbidden, since we believe we have big brains.  Cows and horses, fellow-mammals, are also a no-no.  And puppies, even the tenderest and most potentially succulent of them--well it would be just unthinkable to eat one of them.  Vegans of course don't stop at objecting to the consumption of mammalian flesh.  They oppose the eating of birds, fish, insects, reptiles--anything that is within the animal kingdom, and anything produced by members of that taxonomic group.  Their objections seem to arise from a general sense of solidarity with the rest of the beings within our kingdom--the swimmers, the quackers, the mooers, the growlers, the buzzers, the singers of the mournful songs of the sea.

I said I was worried about vegans, so let me clarify what I mean.  I think, in their zeal, they've drawn the line a bit too high, taxonomically speaking.  It's all well and good to be considerate to animals (and to make ourselves feel better, in a sort of self-sacrificing way, at the same time), but can we afford to ignore the feelings of plants?  Why should the sufferings of species that are rooted in the ground be absent from the consciences of these otherwise well-meaning folks, as if things that have flourished on earth for millennia longer than animals are less deserving of our thoughtfulness?   And why should we exploit them for our selfish uses, forcing them from wild to tame and planting them in uniform rows to serve our needs?  Have vegans never heard the death scream of the carrot as it is untimely ripped from the womb of Mother Earth?  What about the cry of agony of the broccoli plant as its flowers are amputated?  Or the grief of the fruit or nut tree as its offspring are plucked from its branches or gathered from the ground beneath its protective shade?  Have these vegans no hearts, no souls, no consciences?  Shouldn't we, as thoughtful humans, be more circumspect?  To spare our fellow biological species, we should, by rights, eat nothing but dirt and minerals.  And for that matter, who are we to presume that rocks have no feelings?  Where will it end?  We should, I think, in the apotheosis of the vegan mentality, simply go out of existence.

Of course I'm being deliberately hyperbolic here.  Almost all of us draw the line somewhere, in terms of what's okay to eat and what's not.  Most people don't consider plants to be sentient beings in the same sense that animals are, and most of us even imagine a hierarchy of sentience within the animal kingdom.  This is mostly to make ourselves feel better.  Hook a fish through the lip with a pointed piece of metal, throw it in the boat and let it suffocate, what's the harm?  The fish has a tiny brain, after all, not a large one like ours.  Toss a live lobster into a pot of boiling water and bring on the clarified butter.  It's just a giant insect anyway.  But cut the still-beating heart out of a cute little lamb or eat a house cat?  Well mister, you're going straight to hell.

Somehow it doesn't bother either vegetarians or their more unhappy cousins the vegans that other animals eat nothing but meat, often while it's still alive: the soaring  eagle, the crouching tiger, the graceful killer whale.  Or that others are omnivorous: the pig, the rat, the chimpanzee.  It only irks them that we humans have these same eating habits.  This discomfort with our nature, amounting to self-loathing, is what really worries me.  How full of hatred for all that we are and have been in our comparatively short run on this planet must someone be to hold himself to such drastically different standards of behavior than any of his fellow animals? Does a deer think more or less of itself because it eats only grass and other plants, and does it worry about ruining trees and bushes?  Does a mountain lion feel guilty about eating the deer until they are no more?  I think not.  Why, then should we care?   It suggests, simultaneously, that we are both inferior and superior to other species: inferior in that our carnivorousness is somehow more evil than that of other animals, and superior in that we are, or ought to be, the caretakers of the rest of creation.  And how self-consciously pro-animal and anti-vegetable these vegans are.

Shakespeare's Hamlet comes to mind here, as an example of mankind in its most befuddled state of indecision and misplaced priorities:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er, with the pale cast of thought.

For Hamlet and his story that quote cuts more than one way.  The poor guy just doesn't know what's right.  Should he kill his uncle and avenge his father's death--a fairly natural human response to murder and usurpation?  Should he send him straight to hell, or should he let him say his prayers first?  Should he punish his mother for marrying his father's killer and make her a widow, or, for want of being able to make any damned decision, should he just kill himself?  What to do, what to do?  By the end of the play pretty much everybody gets killed, deliberately or accidentally, in a real tragedy of errors.  Hamlet gets it from a guy with a poisoned sword blade who is avenging his own father's and sister's deaths caused by Hamlet's mistake; but oops, Hamlet's killer dies from the poisoned blade, too; Hamlet's mom accidentally drinks poison intended for Hamlet; and Hamlet finally does kill his uncle, which, had he done that in the first place, would have shortened the play considerably and saved a lot of lives. You students of great literature might disagree here, but I think Hamlet's tragic flaw is that he's a ditherer, unable to accept the reality of what's right in front of him.  He doesn't trust his natural impulses, or recognize what ought to have been pretty obvious to him from the beginning--(gee, dad died and Uncle Claudius immediately married mom, wonder what's going on?).  He remains supremely self-centered from beginning to end, even while imagining that he's being thoughtful and careful.  What passes for compassion on his part is only momentary indecision.  He keeps wondering where and when to draw the line.  

I'm convinced that if such a thing had been on anybody's radar screen back then, Hamlet would have been a vegan.

To put it more bluntly, shut up, eat, enjoy.

Shits And Giggles

Monrovia, California

January 26, 2014

I address this to the 39 official followers of my blog, which includes at least three people who are listed twice, at least one of whom is dead.  Dead once, but listed twice.  So I address this to the 35 or so official separate living followers of my blog, and especially to the five to ten who read it on a regular or semi-regular basis.  I address this also to the people who are not listed as official followers who nevertheless read it.  Among those, in particular, I address this to the hundreds of random readers from countries like China, the Ukraine, Brazil, and South Korea, most of whom take a peek in order to post spam comments like "Great blog, really well written.  If you get an opportunity, take a look at my blog, which I call women in tattered underwear working in the sex trade."

It is for all of you, my cherished readers the world over, that I toil to make this blog what it is, or at least what it once was when you started reading it.

I feel that I haven't been giving you your money's worth lately (which is a figure of speech of course, since it's free).  Don't worry (or get your hopes up as the case may be), this is not a valedictory posting.  I'm not going out of business.  I just think I've been a bit too narrow in my selection of topics, and therefore haven't been producing as much as I should.  So my New Year's resolution is to post more often.  Not every day, mind you, but more than once a month, which is what it's come down to lately.  Since it started as a travel blog and my traveling days consist mostly of trips into downtown Los Angeles, the journey will continue on a more cerebral plane.

I take my inspiration from that most esteemed and currently popular of the social media, Facebook.  I acknowledge that I am on Facebook, and do like to exchange banter with a few family members, friends, and acquaintances, sharing my personal feelings from time to time, announcing the sad passing of relatives, wishing people happy birthday, and so on.

It is also on Facebook that I learn such things as how happy people are that they're off work today, or will be off work tomorrow, or how pissed they are that it's only Wednesday, for Christ's sake.  I also learn what they think about the weather where they live, how much they love photos and videos featuring cute animals, and what an awesome God our God really is, with streams of sunlight emanating from his ethereal presence and illuminating the snow, or the mountains, or whatever he deigns to brighten with those streams of sunlight of his.  Our God is truly an awesome God, because he created Facebook and all the shit it contains.  I think that might have been on the eighth or ninth day, after he had rested a bit and seen that everything was good, but couldn't resist putting in his two cents about the minor details of creation.  Kvetching, mostly, in the tradition of his original chosen people.  In addition, of course, on Facebook I learn of personal triumphs, such as the successful plowing or shoveling of the driveway, the fact that the family pet can do tricks, the consumption of a great meal, etc.

Facebook is also where I learn what political reactionaries or utter nostalgic fools some of my old school acquaintances have become over the years, and occasionally, to my satisfaction, what compassionate and liberal souls some of them have.  I'm sure a few of my old classmates always were the way they are now, but not most of them.  For instance, I don't remember anyone campaigning for arch-conservative politicians or advocating the abridgment of the Bill of Rights (second amendment excepted, always) back when we in high school.  But then, they were busy doing what they had to do: eating 18 minute lunches, hurrying from class to class lugging heavy textbooks (sans backpacks), making out in the hallways in front of their lockers, popping their pimples, playing sports, cheering for sports, chewing gum, sneaking cigarettes, and occasionally studying.  Now they want the world to know, on a daily basis, how they're feeling about just about EVERYTHING.  Aches and pains, pet peeves, how much snow has fallen overnight, their pride in their children or grandchildren--you name it.  Well, sic transit gloria mundi, which is Latin for "by the way, whatever happened to Gloria Mundi, the girl most likely to succeed?  I wonder if she's on Facebook?"

As just about everyone knows, on Facebook you get to "like" or "comment" on others' observations, which is a way of affirming what they have posted or perhaps criticizing it a little.  I say "a little" with regard to the criticism, because I don't generally see anyone challenging anyone else's opinions on Facebook.  It's usually a sort of "right on" response, or a "like," or silence.  Rarely is there any debate.  I suppose that's not what Facebook is supposed to be about.  Let people spout off and if you don't like it, don't comment.  It's like what everyone claims their mother used to tell them (though few of our mothers ever did):  "If you can't say something nice about someone, don't say anything at all."  If I were to post on Facebook that Marco Rubio is an asshole, for instance, I would get a few "likes" from a few like-minded folks, but probably not many comments challenging what I said.  By the same token, when I see people blaming Barack Obama or the politically divided congress for the ills of the country I don't generally challenge them either.  I don't point out, for instance, that congress has been severely divided far more often throughout the course of the nation's history than it has been united.  (Does anyone remember reading about the Civil War?  Does anyone remember the impeachment of Bill Clinton?)  So I just shake my head and scroll on down the page, looking for something interesting or useful, which I occasionally find, though not too often.

Like this blog, the social media in general have elevated the pronouncement of trivial thoughts on trivial ideas to a new art form.  It's as if we're all chatting with one another over the back fence or over the telephone, but without the need to listen to an answer from anyone.  And after all, who expects an answer to an observation about the weather or politics or religion?  These are subjects that admit of no meaningful discussion, since no one can do anything about them.  The weather is what it is.  Political opinions are seldom if ever changed as a result of personal debate.  Only the self-appointed experts on television can change our beliefs there, and usually not to much effect, because we tend to choose the channels where the talking heads tell us what we already think.  And as for religion--who ever changed anyone's opinion about that through discussion?  Wars and natural catastrophes can scare people into changing religions, but not discussion.  It's always interesting to me that while we have an organization like the United Nations to nominally arbitrate socio-political issues, and which indeed does manage to come to some worldwide consensus on certain things such as the fact that genocide, disease, and despotism are not good (consensuses that are nevertheless ignored by many), we do not have an organization dedicated to discussing the worldwide merits of religion.  It's simply off limits.  Yet without confronting religion head on no real progress will ever be made on the social and political issues that organizations like the UN try to address.  We have no problem at the global level saying, for instance, that gender equality is a good thing, or that the arrogation of absolute power over an entire people or group of nations into the hands of a few individuals is a bad thing, yet billions of people belong to religions that preach and practice just the opposite, headed by dictators who claim to derive their power from God alone.  Does anyone else think this is more than a bit odd?

And here I'll say that some of these absolute religious dictators are not necessarily bad folks. But being a dictator can take a little of the niceness out of anyone.  The pope might smile beneficently and tousle the heads of young folks and preach worldwide love and tolerance in some areas, but he also can and does relegate women to a subordinate place in his realm and suggests that post mortem trouble lies ahead for people who use contraception or have abortions.  And he could, if he chose, reverse those positions with a stroke of the pen, more or less, because he speaks for God.  The Dalai Lama isn't such a bad guy, even though he purports to be the fourteenth reincarnation of blah blah blah and the chosen one and to be more in touch with the divine than the rest of us mortals.  His chief complaint in life, and the reason he's so well known to us all, is that he's not being allowed to be the spiritual and temporal ruler of his home country, Tibet.  The fact that he's now just a giggly member of the worldwide lecture circuit and the author of inspiring books that sell in new age stores and the darling of people who don't like the Chinese government seems to have made him a hero. But give him some real power in his own country and he'd pretty much have to behave like a pope does, telling everyone what to think, even if he tells them nice things.  That, after all, would be his job.

All this, as I say, along with the pronouncements of ayatollahs and chief rabbis and televangelists and the like, to whom many people listen far more attentively than they do to their elected or appointed secular leaders, is pretty much off limits for debate.  Everyone has the right to overthrow despotism, but no group seems to have the right, collectively, to tell people that their religion is reactionary and full of shit.  World religions are allowed to assert worldwide dominance in the name of God almighty, but world secular leaders are not, at least not any more.  The modicum of progress inherent in the tail end of the last sentence--"not any more"--might just provide a glimmer of hope.

How the hell did I get from Facebook to all this, you ask?  I don't know, it just happened.  Maybe God made me do it, or maybe the Devil did.  Or maybe I just got up on my figurative soapbox and it all sort of tumbled out.  Like a preacher, or like someone on Facebook.

The Golden Globes

Monrovia, California

January 13, 2014

Here's the latest gossip from this blog about the Golden Globe Awards, as if the Oscars weren't enough, along with the Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, and all the rest of the awards ceremonies for the other types of "performing arts."  (Arts my ass, by the way.  You want art?  Go to a museum or listen to a classical music station.  You might see or hear some.)   For those of you who weren't glued to your TV to see the Golden Globes, which includes me, I will give you my observations on the high points I have managed to glean from the AOL home page and a few other internet sources.

1.  Diane Keaton looks like an old English man.  She looks a little better than Keith Richards, mostly because of the necktie and because she wears less makeup than Keith does.  Also, she's had a less interesting life.

2.  People like to swear on TV, even though they know the words will be bleeped out.  This reminds me of the way we used to swear as little kids when no adults were around.  (Oh wait, it just hit me.  No adults ARE around at the Golden Globes.)  They realize they're going to be on prime time television, where they bleep things out, but they swear anyway and leave the mental work to the sound editors.  This results in long silent gaps in their speeches, while their lips move and you try to read them.  Maybe it's an homage to the silent movies, I don't know.  Partly they do it out of habit, and partly because they're stoned to the gills and whatever built-in filters they might have had are temporarily knocked out of commission.

3.  Almost all the women wore silly dresses or things that would have been silly dresses in any real-world context.

4.  Did I mention that Diane Keaton looks like an old British queen?  And I don't mean Elizabeth II.

5.  The men who wore tuxedos looked good compared to almost everyone else, because that's a good look for just about any man--fat, slim, intelligent, or stupid.  Women shouldn't have so many choices, but unfortunately they do.  It's like the choices we have in fast food restaurants.  You want fries with that dress?  Can I supersize that for you?

6.  Diane Keaton should have worn a tuxedo.

7.  Women's dress designers are the greatest practical jokers in the world.

8.  Women's hairdressers are the second greatest practical jokers in the world.

9.  At least Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were deliberately trying to be funny, which is more than you can say for the rest of the people who attended.

10.  Diane Keaton shouldn't be allowed to go out in public, except on Halloween.

I'm just sayin'.    

Pride and Prejudice

Central Lake, Michigan

December 29, 2013

Recently I noticed on Facebook one of those pseudo-Hallmark postings, put there by a very nice and thoughtful woman who is fond of sharing her observations on all aspects of life (children, work, favorite movies, songs, holiday customs--you name it).  If you go on Facebook you know the particular shared sayings I'm talking about--usually they're done as pen and ink drawings of Victorian-era women over pastel backgrounds, with sometimes nostalgic and sometimes mildly to moderately irreverent observations about the lives of women, intended to be evocative, funny, cynical, or critical--particularly of men.

The one that caught my eye in this instance had this to say:  "All women desire a Mr. Darcy.  Unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is."  I found this interesting because I was about to reread Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice for the first time since graduate school, and also because of the astounding degree of both pride and prejudice contained in the posting.  Many people are aware that several television and movie versions of the book have been made, starring the usual suspects in British film, known and revered by movie-goers everywhere.  In all likelihood the "all women" to whom the card referred have seen one or more of these cinematic versions, but fewer of them have read the book.

I was struck by the obvious anti-male sentiment this e-card conveyed, coming from a person I believe to be enlightened and circumspect.  I don't think "anti-male" is too strong a characterization of the message, since it doesn't require women to have read Pride and Prejudice, only to want a man like its male protagonist, Mr. Darcy.  The women are let off the hook when it comes to reading, or even movie watching.  But it also says, in effect, that men don't read 19th century English literature or watch movies based on such books, and implies further that men are clueless about romance and matters of the heart and that they have no such needs of their own.  Moreover, it suggests a certain overall boorishness on the part of our gender, and a concomitant desire on the part of the other gender to have us be more literate and sensitive and, given the man to whom we are unfavorably compared, more wealthy and generous.  All this I chalk up in part to the e-card genre I described above, which seems to specialize in self-pitying word bites.

It was in this light, then, that I undertook my previously-planned re-reading of the most famous and best of Jane Austen's novels.  Now here I should perhaps qualify the term "re-reading."  In fact, although I have read the novel twice in printed form, this time I listened to a recorded book version of it, read by an Englishwoman with a suitably Sloaney upper-class English accent, perfect for the astoundingly articulate text written by an essentially self-educated woman barely out of her twenties.  So far, so good.

Jane Austen, it turns out, is considerably more generous to the male sex than my Facebook friend is.  The story, for those who aren't familiar with it (and I don't think less of anyone for that, male or female--tastes in literature and the cinema are vastly variable) may be distilled to this description:

The time is the beginning of the 19th century and the social milieu is the English gentry.  Everybody who figures in the book, even the most relatively poor of them, has servants and leisure and, by 21st century standards, is damned well off.  A wealthy single man named Mr. Bingley has just moved into a mansion in a country neighborhood, and people in or near his social circle are thinking that he might marry a local woman and make her rich, or perhaps unite two existing fortunes.  The folks to whom I refer don't have much else to do but to contemplate the preservation of wealth.

A certain Mr. Bennett is an even-tempered man with five semi-adult daughters and no sons and a silly wife to whose beauty he was once attracted.  He has plenty of money to live on, but because of an "entail" of his estate in favor of male heirs only, when he dies all his property will devolve to his nearest male relative, a first cousin once removed.  Rather than being distressed about this state of affairs, however, Mr. Bennett is philosophical, and is, because of his learned and gently cynical and resigned disposition, quite amused and bemused by this young cousin of his.  The cousin, Mr. Collins, is a completely idiotic, socially sycophantic clergyman who is thinking maybe he would be doing the Bennett family a favor by marrying one of the five daughters.  This was in the days when being in the clergy was regarded as a necessary but rather frivolous occupation, to be opted for if you weren't already rich and if you didn't have the stomach to become a military officer or an adventurer. Rather than being a calling by God, the Anglican priesthood was (and probably still is) an elevated form of civil service.  But enough about Mr. Collins and his profession; suffice it to say he does not succeed in marrying one of the Bennett girls.

Meanwhile Mr. Bennett's eldest daughter, Jane, who is beautiful and intelligent and sensible (having taken after her father in the brains department and her mother in the beauty department), becomes romantically involved with Mr. Bingley, who subsequently goes to London and appears to drop her.  But during Jane's visits to Mr. Bingley's country place her next-in-line sister, twenty-year-old Elizabeth (the heroine of the story, also very intelligent and down-to-earth) meets a close friend of Mr. Bingley's, the immensely rich Mr. Darcy, also single and in his twenties.  There's chemistry between him and Elizabeth, but she thinks he's too proud and supercilious, and he looks down on Elizabeth's family, especially her silly mother and her three equally silly younger sisters, as well as her uncle who (God forbid) has made his money in business, rather than the old-fashioned way, by inheritance.  Mr. and Mrs. Bennett, though decently well-off with no need to work for a living, have chump change compared to Mr. Darcy, whose income is over 10,000 pounds a year, which in today's money is well over a million dollars, but at a time when a million dollars could buy a hell of a lot more than it does now.  And that's his income, mind you, which consists mostly of interest on a considerably larger fortune, along with whatever he makes as the feudal overlord of a huge country estate.

Here is where most of the pride and the prejudice come in.  Elizabeth becomes prejudiced against Mr. Darcy, perceiving him to be too proud, based in part on her own observations and in part on misinformation fed to her by others.  Mr. Darcy is prejudiced against Elizabeth's immediate family and collateral relatives, a fact that she discovers, causing her own pride in her family to kick in.  So it goes, back and forth, through the inevitable misunderstandings and chance meetings between the two as well as meetings arranged by Mr. Darcy, who, in spite of himself, is falling madly in love with Elizabeth and is becoming willing to do damned near anything to win her heart, including putting up with her zany family.  I'll spare you the rest of the details and sub-plots and jump to the end.  Mr. Bingley and Jane do get married, and of course Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy get married too.  Elizabeth has become ashamed of herself for having judged Mr. Darcy so severely at first, discovering that what she perceived as his pride consists in part of a natural shyness and in part of such a complete lack of pretense that he can't bring himself to make small talk at dinner parties and balls and all that.  But he does possess social pride as well, which he gradually dampens down in favor of a more relatively egalitarian viewpoint (meaning, in this context, that he's willing to reach down into the middle level of the landed gentry for a wife).

When all is said and done Mr. Darcy is just a fabulously wealthy guy with a good heart, if you can get to know him.  And Elizabeth is a kind and sensible and bright woman of the correct social class who seems to be able to bring out the best in Darcy without sacrificing anything of herself.  The promise at the end of the book is that she's going to get him to gradually lighten up, and he's going to let her into his world of untold wealth, and they'll both be happy doing what well-off people in England do, which is, well, basically nothing.

As much as I can I've avoided reading any literary criticism of Pride and Prejudice, or for that matter any literary criticism at all.  For me it tends to ruin the story, and I like to figure out things like "what does it mean" for myself.  Which is not to say that I don't enjoy engaging in amateur literary criticism of my own.  It seems to me that Pride and Prejudice is at one level just a modern (for its time) retelling of an oft-told story, a fairy tale really, in which a deserving woman of lesser means is discovered and rescued by a wealthy prince type.  It's Cinderella, or the movie "Pretty Woman."  It's different in that the heroine isn't an abused stepsister or a whore-with-a-heart, but the same in that it's a story of a girl who is surrounded by people a little beneath her, though none of them know it, and who gets saved by a rich and noble guy.

Now let's revisit the offensive quotation from that e-card and explore what it might mean:  "All women desire a Mr. Darcy.  Unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is."  Does this mean that all women desire a guy who is richer than God?  If so, it takes 99.99% of us out of the running right away and leaves those women desiring something virtually unattainable.  Does it mean that all women desire a guy who starts out being an aloof snob and gradually becomes a little more liberal in his attitudes?  That describes Mr. Darcy pretty well, too.  If that's the case, it also excludes most of us because we weren't that way to begin with, not having possessed the wherewithal or inclination to indulge in such peering down our noses at the rest of the world.  Does it mean that all women desire a guy who is both wealthy and tolerably decent?  Again, that keeps the field extremely narrow.  And no matter what anyone says, Mr. Darcy's most important and endearing trait, the one that keeps everyone interested in him, is his fabulous wealth.  Of course it might also mean that all women desire a man who is so madly in love with them that he is willing to change dramatically and risk incurring the wrath, or at least the scorn, of some of his family members and social set, which did happen to Mr. Darcy.  Or, at its most simplistic level, it means that all women desire a man who desires them even more than they desire him.  (Here we might be getting somewhere.)

And what of the second part of this sentiment, that "unfortunately, all men have no idea who that is"?  That's where the screw really turns, isn't it?  It's insulting and inaccurate no matter how you read it.  Read literally, it means that men don't read old novels or watch movies based on them, which isn't true.  Alternatively, it pretty much has to mean that even if a few men do know who Mr. Darcy is, there's not a damn thing they can do about being more like him than other regular Joes are, because (a) they're not wealthy and so in love they'd stoop to a slightly lower social level for the woman they love, (b) they're complete egomaniacs and/or knuckle-draggers who wouldn't change unless Bill O'Reilly told them to, or (c) they're hopelessly unromantic.  Of course it's the last of these three possibilities that makes the most sense in the context of the card.

Having read Pride and Prejudice again it's obvious to me that Elizabeth Bennett, the female protagonist, is the one to be sought after, and far far more valuable than Mr. Darcy could ever be.  She's the keeper, not him, and so unlike all the other women in Jane Austen's novel that she leaves them in the dust.  She's attractive in a variety of ways, and not just physically.  She has wit, a fine sense of humor, an understanding of irony, knowledge of human nature (including her own shortcomings), levelheadedness, and education.  And she possesses a variety of other good traits, not the least of which are the ability to change and a complete lack of the type of unrealistic sentimentalism and underlying resentment of the opposite sex that characterize those who would create or post such a twisted e-card sentiment as the one that is the subject at hand.  She captivates without guile, she perseveres without suffering, she adjusts and prevails without sacrificing anything of her self, she possesses humility without being humbled.    

Indeed, after reading Pride and Prejudice, I think it would be more accurate to say, "All men desire an Elizabeth Bennett.  Unfortunately, few women have any idea who that really is."

The County, Part 2

Monrovia, California

November 29, 2013

I continue to find things out, very slowly.  (That might be a fitting inscription for my tombstone, except that it might not fit.)  I've been writing about the Los Angeles area for the past couple of blog postings, and I'm going to continue down that path.

I mentioned last time that there are 88 incorporated municipalities in Los Angeles County, and that some of them because of their comparatively small size use the resources of the County for policing and fire protection and that sort of thing.  West Hollywood is a case in point.  It's a full-fledged city, but is also an enclave of the City of Los Angeles.  Its distinction is that it is basically an inclusionary, liberal, and identifiably gay city, with a gay male population of 41%.  Its city council members are mostly gay, and its city flag is the familiar rainbow flag associated with the LGBT movement.  In addition to its gay population is a somewhat inapposite community of Russian Jewish immigrants, most of whom arrived there shortly before and after the breakup of the Soviet Union.  West Hollywood's Russian-speaking population of around 6,000 people is the largest such concentrated group in the U.S. outside New York City.  Thus as you saunter down Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood you are likely to see same-sex couples walking pairs of poodles, cheek-by-jowl with old women in babushkas carrying home vegetables for the evening's meal, passing storefronts featuring young male manikins wearing purple sequined thongs.  The image of elderly old-world Russian couples and dashing young gays living side by side in tolerant harmony is one worth musing on.

I said that West Hollywood is an enclave of Los Angeles, but technically it is not completely surrounded by the City, since it shares a border on its western side with Beverly Hills, another separate city within the City.  Traveling from Hollywood (which is part of Los Angeles) on the Sunset Strip to Beverly Hills, you wouldn't really know you were on the edge of a separate city unless you paid careful attention.  But within West Hollywood are some rather famous spots, and some rather unusual municipal phenomena.  It is home to the Chateau Marmont, perhaps best known as the place where John Belushi crashed and burned. It also has the Viper Room, outside of which River Phoenix collapsed and died.  West Hollywood was known long before its incorporation as something of a "wide-open" community, offering legal gambling at a time when it was prohibited by the City, and having a reputation as liquor-friendly during Prohibition.  Thus many nightclubs and cabarets sprang up in West Hollywood.  Today the city has a law decreeing that pets are to be called "companions," and their owners "guardians."  It has also outlawed the de-clawing of cats.  I don't know whether or not the Bob Barker/Drew Carey admonition to "have your pet spayed or neutered" has been challenged in West Hollywood, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were, as the idea of a guardian removing a companion's testicles without his permission might be abhorrent to many citizens.

I had always thought West Hollywood seceded from Los Angeles, but that is not the case.  Before 1984 it was an unincorporated and rather erose chunk of County land partially within and partially adjacent to the City, a little like East Los Angeles is, except that East LA and West Hollywood, though only a few miles apart, might as well be in different worlds.  On the map West Hollywood has the odd gerrymandered look of an area that was simply left over.  Its shape sort of resembles a pistol pointed eastward toward the heart of Los Angeles.  (See the map, above.)

Anyway, West Hollywood was formed in 1984 out of some spare real estate that had once been known as the community of Sherman, being named for Moses Sherman, a railroad magnate.  (Sherman Oaks, a region of the City of Los Angeles up in the San Fernando Valley, also was named for Sherman.)  The area that eventually became West Hollywood was for some years a sort of railroad town, with rail yards for the local interurban electric street railways that Moses Sherman started, and some of which he sold for several million dollars in 1904 to Henry Huntington (nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington), another much more powerful railroad magnate about whom I have written before in this blog, who started the Huntington Library in San Marino after marrying his uncle's widow.  In about 1925 the region began to be known as West Hollywood.

Moses Sherman was born in Vermont in 1853, and in his early 20s moved out to Arizona, where he was a school teacher and administrator, and a capitalist.  He became Adjutant General of the Territory of Arizona, and thereafter referred to himself as General Sherman, a title that must have seemed both prestigious and pretentious in the last quarter of the 19th Century when Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman (no relation) was still a revered presence in American politics.  After building the Phoenix Street Railway in Arizona, Moses Sherman journeyed to Los Angeles and started building trolley lines here.  He continued to build street railways, the most prominent of which ran north-south up through North Hollywood into the San Fernando Valley, connecting Van Nuys and Canoga Park to the downtown area.  Sherman Way still bears his name, and Hazeltine Avenue was named after one of his daughters.

(The likes of Moses Sherman, William Mulholland, Collis Huntington, and other early capitalists who ran and shaped Los Angeles, carving it up, cutting into its hills, and diverting its waterways for their original purposes, were undoubtedly the inspiration for the fictional characters Hollis Mulwray and Noah Cross, the latter played by John Huston, in Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown.)

The fact that West Hollywood is now surrounded mostly by LA proper is not due so much to the omission of this piece of land from the incorporation into the City as it is to the rather disorganized way the City itself grew to gobble up many of the little communities that were adjacent to its core central district.  Hollywood, for instance, was once an outlying suburb to the northwest of Los Angeles proper, then elected to join Los Angeles itself.  Beverly Hills was sort of the same, except that it decided to become a separate city.  West Hollywood just stayed part of the County.  Besides growing northward into the San Fernando Valley, thanks in part to the Sherman rail line, the City grew westward to the ocean, incorporating Pacific Palisades, Venice, and several other communities, eastward toward Pasadena, gulping up Silver Lake, Echo Park, Highland Park, Eagle Rock, and several other little towns, and southward as well, cutting a thin corridor for itself down to San Pedro on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and incorporating that city in 1909 so as to have its own commercial seaport.

Along the way, the City left many little areas either unincorporated or separately incorporated.  The result, when you look at the map of the City, is a metropolis that is wildly irregular in shape, interspersed with a bunch of separate cities. Contrast this pattern of development to that of the nation's other great city, New York.  There you find five pretty much solid chunks of land, each of which is now (as of about the last decade of the 19th century) a borough of that city, whereas each had been a separate county before, and in fact still is.  Thus New York City uniquely consists of five boroughs, and five counties, two adjacent ones on eastern Long Island (Queens and Brooklyn), one on the southern tip of the mainland (The Bronx), and two on their own islands (Staten Island and Manhattan).  New York, for as far-flung as it is, is still one huge monolith, which you can traverse from one end to the other by means of bridges, roads, railways, and ferries, without venturing outside the city limits.  The same cannot be said for Los Angeles.  There is no freeway or easy street route that will take you through the City from one end to the other without passing at least briefly through a non-city area, either incorporated or unincorporated.  Observe this on the map above, in which the colored areas are those of the neighborhoods or districts that are part of the City and the grayish-white areas are not part of it.

Los Angeles County continues to fascinate, and throughout it I continue to discover its little oddities.  For instance, the City of Arcadia (between Monrovia and Pasadena), home to the Santa Anita Race Track, has the second-highest per capita income of any city of over 50,000 in the U.S., exceeded only by Greenwich, Connecticut in that category.  (Arcadia's per capita income, by the way, is more than $67,000.)  Most locals don't know this.  Over on the other side of Monrovia is a tiny incorporated city called Bradbury, which broke away from Monrovia in 1957 and is now served by the public-safety agencies of the County.  Bradbury has a population of a little over 1,000, and consists almost exclusively of gated communities, boasting the highest average home price for a single zip code in the nation, in excess of $4.2 million.  It's one of those places few know about, and the residents like it that way, I'm sure.  It was the home of the late beloved evangelist, the Reverend W. euGene Scott, the garrulous white-haired preacher wacko who plied the late-night airwaves during the latter decades of the 20th century from his broadcasting headquarters in Glendale.  His widow Melissa Scott still lives there.  Another resident of Bradbury is Lynsi Torres, the thirty-something heiress to the In-N-Out Burger fortune and the youngest female billionaire in the country, whose house is thought to be worth $17 million.  But the most expensive property in Bradbury seems to be one known as The Bradbury Estate, clocking in at over $78 million.  Even in the absurdly inflated LA County real estate market, where a house the size of a decent Michigan garage can go for several hundred thousand, that, my friends, is an expensive place.  Unlike the more accessible and ostentatious neighborhoods of the west side of LA where the glitterati dwell, this is a community where billionaires and millionaires, businessmen, athletes and Saudi princes, go to live in privacy.  For all that, though, its brown and barren hills on the south edge of the San Gabriel Mountains do not look particularly attractive or inviting.  But then maybe that's the idea.

The County

Monrovia, California

November 17, 2013

In my last posting I talked about someone I call Diabetes Woman, and I want to give you an update on her. Following my two less than amicable encounters with her I continued to pass her from time to time on my way down to the parking lot on Hill Street.  I'm not certain what her hours of operation are, but on my way into work at around 8:00 a.m. she's not yet at her post, and when I work all day at the downtown location she's not there at 4:30 in the afternoon when I go back to my car.  However, many times my day on the job is split between the downtown complex and a satellite County office.  The downtown complex includes the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration, named after a man named Kenneth Hahn, and the Los Angeles Central Superior Court, named after Stanley Mosk.

Kenneth Hahn was a mildly interesting man.  He was born in Los Angeles in 1920 to Canadian parents who had just moved there, and spent his entire life as a resident of the area, dying in 1997.  In addition to serving for forty years on the County Board of Supervisors, from 1952 to 1992, he also designed the current seal of the County of Los Angeles, which was modified slightly in 2004 to eliminate the Christian cross with which he had adorned it.  (Hahn was very a religious Protestant, often quoting scripture.)  Although Los Angeles was founded by Spanish priests and named for the Virgin Mary, it is now under the fortunate umbrella of the nominally nonsectarian American government, so removing the cross was a good move, albeit a tardy one, on the part of the County.

Stanley Mosk served as a California Supreme Court Justice for 37 years, from 1964 until his death at the age of 89 in 2001.  Prior to that he served as state Attorney General.  Of politically liberal Jewish heritage, he and his family moved to Los Angeles from Rockford, Illinois during the Depression after his father's business failed.  Mosk became the longest-serving state Supreme Court justice, and after his death the central downtown Superior Court building was named in his honor.

The two buildings named after these guys occupy most of a large block whose boundaries are Hill, Temple, First, and Grand Streets, with a narrow public area called Grand Park between the buildings.  They are connected by an underground parking lot where the Superior Court judges and other court officials as well as the higher-ups in the LA County administration park.  The satellite office I often go to is located in East Los Angeles, and is named for Gloria Molina, the County Supervisor for that area.  That office, a modest two-story building, is at the corner of Sunol Avenue and East First and we refer to it simply as "Sunol."  It is on my walks back to my car during the middle of the day to drive to Sunol--anywhere from about 11:00 a.m. to noon--that I see Diabetes Woman.  However, occasionally in the morning I would see her sitting high on the steps that go up the hill to the top of the Fort Moore Memorial.  I assume she slept somewhere up there then would come down to Hill Street to take her post in front of the entrance to the parking lot connected to the Cathedral.

Here let me digress again from Diabetes Woman to say a few words about the County of Los Angeles.  LA County is vast, both in area and in population.  At over 4,000 square miles it is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.  And its population of over 10 million (some estimate it to be closer to 11 million, since many of its inhabitants do not wish to make themselves known to the authorities lest they be subject to deportation) makes it the most populous county in the United States, with more people than 42 individual states have. The majority of the population lives in the southern half of the county, while its northern region is thinly inhabited mountains and high desert.  For you Michigan folks, think of it this way.  Pack three times the population of Wayne, Oakland, and Macomb Counties combined into the same area those counties occupy, then add another area the same size that is mostly empty.

LA County's population is diverse though heavily Mexican, as you might expect (appropriately so considering that this area was part of Spain and then Mexico from its "discovery" by Europeans in the 1500s until the middle of the 19th century).  The general demographic breakdown is about 48% Hispanics, 28% non-Hispanic whites, 14% Asians (mostly Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Japanese, in that order), and 9% African Americans.  Languages other than English and Spanish often heard include Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Armenian, Tagalog, and various Slavic tongues.  For those who no longer speak any language, the County contains the largest cemetery in the U.S., Rose Hills Memorial Park in Whittier, and of course two of the most famous--the Forest Lawns of Glendale and Los Angeles.

Human diversity aside, the County is rich in geological, botanical, and biological variety as well.  Its highest point of elevation is a little over 10,000 feet and its lowest is sea level.  Cacti of a number of species abound, as well as native evergreens, sycamores, cottonwoods, oaks, and wildflowers, and a plethora of non-native plant species, including several varieties of palm trees, eucalyptuses, ficuses, citrus trees, and more ornamental lawn trees than you can count.  Up in the mountains and deserts as well as at the edges of the cities there are coyotes, mountain lions, bears, deer, foxes, bobcats, vultures, bald eagles, feral parrots, black widow spiders, and rattlesnakes.  Little lizards are everywhere.

Los Angeles County encompasses the City of Los Angeles, but also no fewer than 87 other incorporated municipalities and over 140 recognized unincorporated regions that account for over 65% of the County's area.  Apart from the 3.3 million people of the City of Los Angeles, the County contains at least 14 other cities with populations of over 100,000.

It is in one of the unincorporated areas, East Los Angeles, just outside the city limits of LA, where Sunol, the satellite County office I referred to above, is located.  East Los Angeles, bounded on the west by the City and on its other sides by Monterey Park, Montebello, and several other municipalities, has a population of over 125,000, more than 97% of whom are Hispanic. It would rank as the tenth most populous city in the County, except that it isn't a city, just a piece of County land.  I am not sure why this area, essentially a Mexican ghetto, does not belong to the City proper, since it is geographically just an extension of the Boyle Heights area of LA, also known as East Los Angeles.  At any rate, because it isn't part of any city, it is directly governed by the County of Los Angeles and policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the largest sheriff's department in the United States.  The County itself is politically administered by a Board of Supervisors, consisting of five elected Supervisors, who hire an executive director, and each of whom presides over his or her own fiefdom, with primary jurisdiction over the unincorporated areas and sometimes concurrent and overlapping jurisdiction over the incorporated cities.  Many of the smaller incorporated cities contract with the County for police and fire services in lieu of having their own.  Supervisor Gloria Molina, as far as I can discern, is the de facto mayor of East Los Angeles, its alcalde.  The other four County Supervisors are Zev Yaroslavsky, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Michael Antonovich, and Don Knabe.  It is in the upper atmosphere of the vast Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration where these Supervisors wield their power.  My office, the Department of Consumer Affairs, is down in the basement, away from cell phone reception and natural light.  That is one of the reasons I enjoy going over to Sunol.  There I have a nice naturally lit desk by a window on the second floor, my own direct phone line, and out front a truck that sells tacos for a dollar apiece.

Well, that's a boatload of statistics and miscellaneous information, and really, what county doesn't have lots of stuff you could say about it?  I guess the point of it all is to emphasize that LA County is much more than the television and movie industries.  (To give it its due, however, Hollywood does a pretty good job of depicting the one and two story stucco sameness of the tightly-packed urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles, barred windows and all, usually when it does one of its many "tough corrupt cop" movies about the LAPD or the County Sheriff's Department.  Tough and corrupt are reputations both police forces have worked long and hard to earn.)  In fact, although media production is a big part of the economy, it's only the most famous part.  The rest of what makes the place run is what the average person does every day everywhere (other than driving snowplows, maybe).  In fact, holding up Hollywood and the wealthy neighborhoods of the west side hills and their glittering, privileged denizens as representing the essence of LA is little like trying to understand Detroit by examining Bloomfield Hills, or equating the south side of Chicago with Evanston, or driving around in Westchester County to see what the Bronx is all about.

It is, as I said, to East Los Angeles that I often journey about halfway through my day, and that is when I walk past Diabetes Woman on my way northward down the hill to the parking lot in Chinatown.  Not long after I wrote the last blog posting, I saw her at her usual post, still holding the sign whose efficacy I had had the temerity to question.  As I went by I expected her to stare yellow-eyed reptilian daggers at me or mutter something obscene.  Instead her eyes were bright and she smiled and held up a key that was attached to a blue lanyard around her neck.  "Look," she said proudly, "I got an apartment!"  She was beaming, and I was momentarily nonplussed by her unexpected display of joy.  I slowed down just enough to answer back, "I'm happy for you."  Our past animosity was forgotten by both of us in this moment of her joy.  It was obvious that she felt she had attained a new level of respectability, one that would elevate her status in the world in the eyes of suit-wearing types like me.  I wouldn't dream of disabusing her of that notion, though I can't say it makes much difference to me.  But it certainly was making a difference to her.

So Diabetes Woman no longer lives among the scrub in the abandoned ancient graveyard at the top of the Fort Moore steps, sleeping, as I imagine it, huddled in a blanket or two and surrounded by her small collection of worldly possessions, one of the more than 58,000 homeless people in the County, enough to fill Dodger stadium.  As I began crossing over the freeway I glanced back and saw her making the same happy boast to another well-dressed passerby, speaking to her warmly, like a friend.  But she still panhandles at her spot.  I suppose she now has at least a small amount of rent and/or household upkeep to pay for in addition to whatever she needs to do to obtain food and clothing.  A person, after all, has to make a living.

At the outskirts of Chinatown I passed a few more familiar denizens of my walk, including the funky always-smiling young Vietnamese guy who runs the parking lot, whom I once saw wearing bright red lipstick and eyeliner for no reason I could discern.  I also passed several of the same superannuated Chinese men and women I see shuffling slowly past me in shapeless pants and dresses, making whatever slow progress their long day requires, up the steep hillsides to the small apartments overlooking Hill Street, whose balconies are hung with drying laundry and red and gold talismans of luck and hoped-for prosperity.

This time I didn't think of the depiction of the perverse and treacherous diversion of the wealth of Los Angeles played out in Chinatown by John Huston and Jack Nicholson.  Nor did I dwell on the baldly hypocritical and insulting praise of the Mormon Brigade chiseled in the stone and glorified in bas relief on the Fort Moore Memorial, honoring the Pioneers who bravely "settled" Los Angeles for the country in the mid-1800s.  Instead I was reminded of the many souls who have journeyed to the County with no political or economic agendas other than to try to escape the terror and bigotry and degradation of their native lands, whether from south of the border, from across the vast Pacific, or out of the American deep south, most to a better life but some to something less than the promised land they expected.  Some were homeless and found homes, however modest; others left homes and became homeless, out here in the land of big dreams and often much smaller joys.

I thought of the final lines from "Lapis Lazuli" by William Butler Yeats, where he describes the images of three ancient Chinese men, climbing toward a little house:

There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes, mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.