Spam Inundation

I returned this week from a relaxing month on the Ligurian Sea coast in Italy. The weather was sunny, the air 70F-80F every day but one, and the cool water and sandy beach ideal for swimming.

When I got home, I opened my e-mail program and found 3,200 messages in the inbox. About 1 percent of these were from friends or related to business. The remaining 3,168 were spam. I've spent many hours the last couple of days clearing out this sewage from the mailbox and server.

Am I the only one receiving this much e-crap? I have a good antivirus program, but that clearly isn't enough to stem this tide. If there's effective antispam software available, please let me know. I'm getting too old for this shit.

The Peace Price

An item in the Nov. 16 Harper's Weekly Review reports that "Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to push his cabinet to freeze most construction on West Bank settlements for 90 days--in exchange for a $3 billion package from the United States in security incentives and fighter jets--so that peace talks could continue."

Under such conditions, the prospects for peace are as dim as ever.

Bullet Points

In an eye-opening article published in the August 2010 issue of Harper's magazine, titled "Happiness Is a Worn Gun," writer Dan Baum estimates that there are 250 million firearms owned by private citizens in the United States. And among those gun owners, 6 million have permits to carry a concealed pistol.

Baum, himself a handgun owner and holder of a concealed-carry license, traces what he calls "the gun-carrying revolution" to Florida, whose cocaine-driven murder rate in 1987 ran 40 percent higher than the national average. But instead of restricting access to guns in the face of such slaughter, he writes, the Florida legislature took the view that citizens should be able to defend themselves and ordered police chiefs to issue any adult a carry permit unless there was good reason to deny it. "In the history of gun politics, this was a big moment. The gun-rights movement had won just about every battle it had fought since coalescing in the late 1960s, but these had been defensive battles against new gun-control laws. Reversing the burden of proof on carry permits expanded gun rights. For the first time, the movement was on offense, and the public loved it."

To his credit, Baum is candid about the heightened sense of power carrying a handgun has given him: "There’s no denying that carrying a gun has made my days a lot more dramatic. Suddenly, I’m dangerous. I’m an action figure. I bear a lethal secret into every social encounter." And he has to "remind myself occasionally that my gun is not a prop, a political statement, or a rhetorical device, but an instrument designed to blow a ragged channel through a human being."

Currently in the United States, 37 states have "shall issue" laws, which require law enforcement authorities to issue a concealed-pistol license to an adult citizen unless he or she has a state-mandated reason for disqualification, such as a felony conviction. With 250 million firearms in private hands, guns are here to stay.

Gun ownership and control is a hot-button subject that invariably fans emotional flames no matter what position you take on the issue. Baum deserves credit for having written a balanced, well-researched, and personally revealing article. He has advanced--and elevated--the discussion.

On the Road

In March 2009, my friend and former chiropractor, Mike Lewis, left Seattle by motorcycle on a 5-year journey to the world’s continents. Leading up to his departure, he sold his house and his business, storing whatever possessions were left.

Now, a year later, Mike has made it to the southern tip of South America. He’s documenting his trip with photographs and movies, which you can see here. You can also follow Mike's journey on his blog.

It takes a lot of courage—and stones—to make a move like this. Buon viaggio, my friend, and buona fortuna.

Short Fiction

Titled "Almost Over: What's the Word?" this story was written by Lydia Davis, and it appears in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, published in 2009. Here it is:

He says, "When I first met you, I didn't think you would turn out to be so ... strange."

That's it, end of story.

Addition Problem

"... and as an added bonus ..." We see this come-on everywhere nowadays, but it makes no sense. After all, a bonus, the dictionary reminds us, is "something in addition [italics mine] to what is expected or strictly due" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed.). So, an added bonus is something added to something added. "Bonus" is a solid noun, perfectly capable of standing alone. It shouldn't be rendered meaningless by marketing drivel.

The Heart of the Matter

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," begins the resignation letter submitted last month by U.S. Foreign Service Political Officer Matthew Hoh, who served as Senior Civilian Representative for the U.S. government in Zabul Province. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy," he continues, "but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end." Hoh, by the way, is a former captain in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Why and to what end. Have you heard a single journalist put this question to President Obama at a news conference or during an interview? Neither have I. Yet it's the essential question that must be asked--and answered satisfactorily--before a single extra soldier or Marine is deployed to Afghanistan. In fact, if this question isn't addressed, we should insist that all our forces be withdrawn from the country immediately.

Don't Try This at Home

As everyone has now learned, the actor David Carradine did not lose his life by suicide, as early reports from Thailand, where he was working on a new film, seemed to suggest. No, it turned out that Carradine, 72 years old, was most likely engaged in an act of autoerotic asphyxiation at the time of his death, an activity that ought to be considered an unsafe sexual practice, according to The Stranger columnist Mistress Matisse, a professional dominatrix whose specialty is, of course, edgy sex play. In her latest column, aptly titled Control Tower, MM reminds us that "self-bondage can be risky in itself, but any time someone's oxygen is restricted, death becomes a possibility." She quotes Jay Wiseman, author of SM 101 and an authority on breath play, who clarifies the risk: "I know of no way whatsoever that suffocation or strangulation can be done that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest."

So there you have it: death by cardiac arrest resulting from an elaborate masturbatory practice involving ropes, suspension, and cut-off breath. What a way to go.

SEALing the Deal

In the wake of the daring rescue of Capt. Richard Phillips from the Somali pirates who hijacked his merchant ship, the Maersk Alabama, in the Indian Ocean, taking the captain hostage, I suggest a new promotional slogan for the US Navy SEALs, whose snipers' chilling accuracy--in 3-foot swells, no less--brought the episode (and the pirates' lives) to an end.

Here's the slogan: 3 bullets, 3 bodies. US Navy SEALs: We get the job done.

SEALs may be the best-trained Special Operations Forces in the world. Their completion of this mission reminds us to be grateful they're on our side.

Faint Praise

We often see the term fulsome praise used to indicate abundant approval or admiration. The problem is, fulsome doesn't mean that at all. Rather, the word means "flattering to an excessive degree," according to the Oxford American Dictionary. Thus, fulsome praise "isn't a lavish tribute," explains Bill Bryson in his excellent Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors, "it is unctuous and insincere toadying."

Good Deed, a Short Story

We were half-way through our third drink when the old guy at the end of the bar toppled off his stool onto the floor. He lay there for several minutes, his face turning gray, and no one tried to help him. So we called 9-1-1. The ambulance arrived quickly, and two EMTs loaded the guy on a stretcher and carted him off. An hour and a half later, he walked back in and said something to the bartender, who pointed at us. He nodded and headed our way. “Probably wants to buy us a drink,” I said to my friend. But I was wrong. “Next time,” the old guy told us, “mind your own fucking business.”

New Yorker Brouhaha

While the gathering media storm over The New Yorker's cover illustration of the Obamas might fog up Eustace Tilly's monocle, I'm betting Tina Brown, the magazine's gutsy former editor who published many controversial covers during her reign, is pleased. As Bill Maher put it in today's New York Times, "If you can't do irony on the cover of The New Yorker, where can you do it?"

"There's been this question about whether he's [Barack Obama] black enough," Maher continued in the same Times article. "I have this joke: What does he have to do? Dunk? He bowled a 37--to me, that's black enough." Case closed.

Bursting BS Balloons

Just when the effusive outpouring of claptrap over the death of TV news celebrity Tim Russert threatened to choke us in a cloud of sentimental exhaust, a breath of fresh air arrived on June 23 in a column by Chris Hedges at truthdig.com titled "The Hedonists of Power."

"We were instructed by the high priests on television over the past few days to mourn a Sunday morning talk show host, who made $5 million a year and who gave a platform to the powerful and the famous so they could spin, equivocate and lie to the nation," Hedges writes. "We were repeatedly told by these television courtiers, people like Tom Brokaw and Wolf Blitzer, that this talk show host was one of our nation’s greatest journalists, as if sitting in a studio, putting on makeup and chatting with Dick Cheney or George W. Bush have much to do with journalism."

Quoting the great muckraker I.F. Stone, Hedges reminds us that all governments lie, and it is "the job of the journalist to do the hard, tedious reporting to shine a light on these lies." It is the job of TV courtiers, by contrast, to "feed off the scraps tossed to them by the powerful and never question the system."

These courtiers, Hedges continues, "including the late Tim Russert, never gave a voice to credible critics in the buildup to the war against Iraq. They were too busy playing their roles as red-blooded American patriots. They never fought back in their public forums against the steady erosion of our civil liberties and the trashing of our Constitution."

Letting Go

Nick Gallo, one of the best friends I've ever had, died in October at the age of 57. He had fallen ill on a flight to Athens, Greece, where he was headed to write an article for a magazine. He died a few days later in an Athens public hospital. Pericarditis and pneumonia were given as the cause of death.

I'm having a hard time letting him go. It's only now that I can write this entry, which already seems hopelessly inadequate. In recent years, we talked several times a week and usually got together at least once a week. Before that, we had offices across the hall from each other for 10 years.

I keep coming across things that Nick would be interested in and I think, "Oh, I've got to tell Nick about ..." or "I'll get this book for Nick."

Time, they say, is the great healer. But I'm not so sure. My life's a little darker now.

Goodbye, Old Friend

Walt Crowley died Friday evening, September 21. He was 60 years old, three years younger than I am, and he was a friend of mine. The best article about his life appears on the website historylink.org, which he co-founded in 1997. The warmest personal remembrance of Walt was written by Seattle City Council member Jean Godden, a former newspaper reporter and columnist.

I met Walt when he and I worked at the Weekly (now called Seattle Weekly) in the mid-1980s. We had neighboring desks in the open newsroom and soon became friends. I enjoyed his keen intelligence, playful sense of humor, personal integrity, and compassion. He knew a lot of people, some of them movers and shakers, and had a lot of friends.

Walt believed in engagement. He was not one to withdraw into cynical detachment in the face of appalling official injustice and cruelty. He sought to do something about it.

"As we know from any reading of the morning papers, liberty is never at a loss for ambitious enemies," said Lewis Lapham, former and longtime editor of Harper's magazine, in a salute to Molly Ivins last year. "But the survival of the American democracy depends less on the magnificence of its Air Force or the wonder of its fleets than on the willingness of its citizens to stand on the ground of their own thought."

Walt Crowley was more than willing to stand on the ground of his own thought. I'll miss him as a friend, and I'll miss him as a model of what a citizen should be.

Unsafe and Insecure

With the 2008 presidential race already rolling along, we're hearing a lot of noise from the candidates, Democratic and Republican alike, about "keeping America safe" and "securing our borders." It's all nonsense, of course.

No one can keep you safe from anything. Here are the facts: You are not safe, you are not secure. Life is uncertain. But you do have a choice. You can accept the reality of uncertainty, or you can deny it and convince yourself that this or that presidential candidate will do a better job of making you "safe" and "secure."

In the wake of 9/11, Bush and Cheney established a cabinet-level mega-department, Homeland Security, to protect us from terrorists and evildoers. Now we all know that B & C are tough guys, eager to dispatch the Air Force bombers and Devil Dog Marines. Shock and awe, baby!

Endless and ill-defined "war on terrorism," colossally inept Homeland Security department, disastrous invasion of Iraq ... you tell me, do you feel safe and secure? Well, do you?

The Plane Truth

An item in the August 4 New York Times titled "Passengers Scowl as Airlines Smile" finally confirms what anyone who's flown in the past few years already knows; namely, that the airlines have been consistently downgrading service to passengers. You know the drill: We get nothing to eat, inadequate seating space, dirty cabins and lavatories, broken equipment (e.g., seat-tilting controls), and, of course, regularly delayed or canceled flights.

Here's the bad news:

"For the first five months of this year, the on-time arrival rate of the big airlines was 73.5 percent, the lowest in seven years. Complaints about service were up 49 percent from May 2006. This summer, flights are booked at average levels of about 90 percent, a historic high. That means that if a flight is delayed, it is much more difficult for a passenger to get a seat on a later flight.

"Airlines make a simple calculation, comparing the loss from flying with an empty seat against the risk of bumping passengers, to whom airlines have to pay $200 or $400, depending on how quickly they can be rebooked."

The Times quotes Serguei Netessine, a professor at Wharton School of Business: "Previously, airlines worried about dissatisfied customers. Now I don't think they worry about it, because the customer service at all airlines is so horrible." [italics mine]

Blowing Smoke

Despite the proven health risks associated with smoking--e.g., lung cancer, emphysema, congestive heart failure, colorectal cancer, hypertension--many Americans continue to smoke. Here are the latest figures, reported in Time magazine's July 16 issue:

• 71.5 million Americans use tobacco products.
• 23.4 percent of men are cigarette smokers.
• 18.5 percent of women are cigarette smokers.
• 44.3 percent of young adults 18 to 25 years old use tobacco, the highest of any group.
  

The article also mentioned that tobacco use is lowest in the West and highest in the Midwest.

Stuff Happens

Last night, we went to see a production of Stuff Happens, a play written by David Hare, at A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle. The play, whose title refers to a comment made by then-US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response to a reporter's question about looting and pillage in Baghdad, is concerned with the run-up to war in Iraq, and the actors portray the members of the Bush administration who were centrally involved in making the case for war: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and George W. Bush, along with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. It's a powerful play, and the ACT production was superb, with strong, convincing performances from the entire cast.

Late in Act II, Bush summons his war council to a critical meeting in the Oval Office regarding the Tony Blair problem. Powell, fed up with the vice president's frequent sarcastic asides about Blair, breaks in on Cheney:

Powell: Come on, this is ridiculous. This isn't worthy of you, Dick.
Cheney: Not worthy? You want me to be serious?
Powell: I do.
Cheney: You want me to tell you what I really think?
Powell: Yes.
Cheney: All right. I'll tell you. Tony Blair? I've read his stuff. I've heard him talk. This is a man on a mission. This is a man with a history.
Powell: Sure.
Cheney: He knows what he wants: He wants to build some new world order out of the ruins of the World Trade Center. He wants the right to go into any country anywhere and bring relief from suffering and pain wherever he finds it. And I don't. What I want is to follow this country's legitimate security concerns. And, for me, those come above everything.
Rumsfeld: Me, too.
Cheney: Now: If those interests happen to coincide with some Englishman's fantasy of how he's one day going to introduce some universal penalty system -- three strikes and the UN says you can overthrow any regime you like -- then that's fine. If not, not, and we won't miss him.
Powell: That isn't fair. Blair's loyal. He's been loyal from the start.
Cheney: OK, I admit it, if we want him, Blair's good at the high moral tone. If you want to go into battle with a preacher sitting on top of the tank, that's fine by me. But bear in mind, the preacher's one more to carry. Needs rations, needs a latrine, just like everyone else.
Powell: I like Blair.
Cheney: Maybe you do. But we don't need him. And as of this moment, he's bringing us nothing but trouble. It's a good rule: When the cat shit gets bigger than the cat, get rid of the cat.
Rumsfeld: Nice.
Cheney: This guy is putting himself halfway between American power and international diplomacy. And sorry -- but that's a place where people get mashed.

If you have a chance to see the play, by all means go. It's provocative, it's enraging, it's discouraging, but you won't soon forget it.

Inside Passage

For many years, I've thought that meditation, the practice of sitting quietly alone in a room with nothing but your breath and your thoughts for company, may be a key to understanding the fundamental mysteries of life. Who am I? Why am I here? What (if anything) is real? True, philosophers have grappled with such questions for centuries, publishing enough scholarly papers and books to fill entire libraries. But what about the rest of us? Is there a chance we might learn something important by going inside ourselves instead of opening a book?

Thinking about the value of meditation is one thing. Creating a practice is another. These things were going through my mind this morning as I was waiting at the chiropractor's office for my appointment. To pass the time, I started paging through the May-June Utne magazine and spotted an article by filmmaker David Lynch titled "Deep Thoughts." Admitting that he originally thought meditation was a waste of time, Lynch eventually decided to try it when anxiety and anger began to subvert his creative powers (and his marriage). As he writes, "Anger and depression and sorrow are beautiful things in a story, but they're like poison to the filmmaker or artist." After he'd been meditating for a couple of weeks, Lynch's wife asked him: "This anger, where did it go?" He hadn't even noticed it had lifted.

Now, Lynch tells us, he hasn't missed a meditation in 33 years. Reading about the lasting benefits of his practice, you can see why.

I meditate once in the morning and again in the afternoon, for about 20 minutes each time. Then I go about the business of my day. And I find that the joy of doing increases. Intuition increases.The pleasure of life grows. And negativity recedes.