Farewell to the season

Yesterday was the 12th day of Christmas, Epiphany, and the end of NFL Wild Card weekend. Today is, finally, a college football championship played by two teams I loath.

Your blogger is pooped from sheer seasonal excess. Here's one last tidbit of Xmas trivia:

Tomorrow we go on vacation to Hawaii and we need it.

More later, maybe.

Mourning in the 'hood

They weren't shot, but they are no less dead. And there was a gun and shooter ...

A San Francisco man charged with killing two people with his car while fleeing from police in the Mission District was on probation for participating in a criminal street gang, the district attorney's office said Friday.

David Morales, 19, was convicted in April 2012 in San Mateo County for gang activity, said San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón. Prosecutors say Morales is a member of the Norteños.

Police arrested Morales on New Year's Day after he allegedly ran a red light and slammed his black Chevrolet Impala into a Toyota sedan in the intersection of 21st Street and South Van Ness Avenue at about 8 a.m.

The impact of the collision sent the Toyota spinning into a pedestrian, Francisco Gutierrez, 26, of San Francisco. He was killed.

Also killed in the crash was Silvia Tuncun, 29, of San Francisco, who was a passenger in the Toyota. The driver, an 18-year-old man, is still in the hospital in serious condition.

Investigators said Morales had just driven through the Valencia Gardens housing complex at 14th and Guerrero streets and fired a gun at three young men. None of them was injured.

… In addition to two counts of murder, Morales is charged with three counts of attempted murder for the shooting at Valencia Gardens. He is also accused of evading police, participating in a criminal street gang and being a felon in possession of a handgun.

San Francisco Chronicle

I walked by the crash site today.


The neighborhood grieves.


At the taqueria tonight, there's a collection box by the cash register:

Francisco's friends are raising funds to send his body home to his native Honduras. Collection boxes like this show up several times a year at Mission stores. This can be a dangerous place to come for work.

De-cluttering: Girls beat Boys

A few friends have asked what I'm doing now that a year's intensive campaigning is finished ... I'm not worried, I'll have things to do. I think of these interim times between more focused gigs as "taking my retirement on the installment plan." (H/t to writer John D. MacDonald. I wonder, does anyone still know what the installment plan was?)

But I do have an immediate project. A newcomer to our house remarked the other day: "Oh, I get it. You have huge quantities of 'dead parent stuff.'" She was right. Having been through the deaths of our parents over the past 20 years, we've ended up with all sorts of stuff. The furniture is useful, or at least we've put it to use. The memorabilia -- photos, clippings, old letters -- is of more dubious value. It's not as if anyone really wants it, but I have not, in the past, been able bring myself to throw these items out. However the accumulation takes up more space than I'm willing to give it.

Technology to the rescue: these days I am plowing through drawers and boxes full of paper, scanning the pictures, and howling at some of my finds. Here's one, a newspaper clipping from 1964:


The three of us had represented our all-girls high school on a TV quiz show that pitted us against the equivalent boys' school. We were apparently more able to regurgitate faithfully what the Courier Express had written about such topics as "the railroad crisis" and "the recent light weight boxing championship" than the guys.

I just realized I still possess the Desk Encyclopedia that was the prize. That can go as part of the de-cluttering. Google has trumped it.

Just for fun: a Klezmer band

Last night, coming home late-ish, I ran across these nice folks. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, as did the passersby. I hope they collected a few contributions.

Maybe we'll get to Dick Cheney yet …

Dictators, torturers (and the intellectual authors of torture), and fascist thugs can never be completely secure that society won't seek retribution for their crimes until they die.

A Chilean friend tipped me off to the important news that the Chilean government is trying to extradite a thug involved in the killing of the popular leftist singer Victor Jara almost 40 years ago during the U.S.-supported fascist coup against a democratically elected Chilean government.

Guess what? The shooter, named as Pedro Barrientos Nunez, has been hiding in plain sight in Miami. He is a retired U.S Army officer. The other seven charged with the crime are being taken into custody within Chile.

The Australian explains:

Jara, the singer whose lyrics spoke of love and social protest, became an icon of Latin American popular music with songs such as The Right to Live in Peace, The Cigarette and I remember you, Amanda. …

Jara was arrested the day after the September 11, 1973, coup that installed Pinochet as dictator. The singer's body was found days later, riddled with 44 machine-gun bullet wounds.

Jara, 40, had been held with 5000 other political prisoners in Santiago's biggest stadium, where he was interrogated, tortured and then killed. The case was revived in 2009 and Jara's body was exhumed after a soldier who had been in the stadium after the coup admitted to the shooting -- though he later retracted his confession.

What I learned while working to pass Prop. 34

This new year, much as it did last year, the New York Times has published an editorial decrying the death penalty.

A distinguished committee of scholars convened by the National Research Council found that there is no useful evidence to determine if the death penalty deters serious crimes. Many first-rate scholars have tried to prove the theory of deterrence, but that research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” the committee said.

A host of other respected experts have also concluded that life imprisonment is a far more practical form of retribution, because the death penalty process is too expensive, too time-consuming and unfairly applied.

The punishment is supposed to be reserved for the very worst criminals, but dozens of studies in state after state have shown that the process for deciding who should be sent to death row is arbitrary and discriminatory.

Thanks to the Innocence Project and the overturning of 18 wrongful convictions of death-row inmates with DNA evidence and the exonerations of 16 others charged with capital crimes, the American public is increasingly aware that the system makes terrible mistakes. Since 1973, a total of 142 people have been freed from death row after being exonerated with DNA or other kinds of evidence.

Having spent all last year working to replace California's death penalty with sentences of life in prison without parole, I've learned a great deal about the issue itself, the California electorate, and contemporary state initiative campaigns (this was my first major involvement in a decade.) Yes, we lost -- fairly narrowly -- by 52-48 percent. But I am certain we've changed the conversation and the death penalty is on its way out. A pretended death penalty, seldom or never carried out, serves no one, is a luxury we can't afford, and always risks killing an innocent person. It will go.

Here are some observations in no particular order from my last year's work.

• For some people, the mere existence of a death penalty amounts to a promise from the government that justice will be done in response to hideous crimes. Many people feel this instinctively; some find their instincts ratified by Biblical proof texts (see for example: Numbers 35: 30-35). They truly feel that justice would be impaired if the state's option to kill killers was ended.

• Many people, including many of those who cling to the death penalty as an expression of the state's commitment to justice, barely know anything about it. They don't know California has over 720 people on death row, that since 1976 far more condemned prisoners have died of old age than have been executed, that the state hasn't executed anyone since 2006 (and still won't for at at least three more years.) The death penalty is not really on most Californians' minds and many were quite willing to become more informed. That's the 48 percent we won.

• In order to do my job responsibly, I read through the cases of quite a few condemned California prisoners. Assuming the stories are true, it's fine with me if these guys are locked up for the rest of their lives. Some people are a danger to society.

• Working with the California Catholic Conference on the signature gathering phase of the campaign, I'm pretty sure I know what institution is doing great work to bring new-citizen Spanish speakers into the electorate. We processed sheet upon sheet of signatures from the Central Valley dioceses from people with Spanish surnames.

• On the other hand, it is hard in looking at the results to believe that the Catholic Church had much influence on how people voted on the issue. Being a registered Democrat was probably a stronger predictor of a "yes" vote. The Catholic Church seems not to be regarded by many of its members as authoritative on public issues. (In addition to striking out on ending California's death penalty, the institution doesn't seem to have done very well in this cycle at holding back gay marriage or electing Mitt Romney either. Oops.)

• There are two tiny segments of the population who are literally driven mad by the existence of the death penalty. Most obviously, one set are people who were the loved ones of victims and want the perpetrator dead in the hope that somehow another death will reduce their pain. Since executions hardly ever happen, hanging on to that hope means prolonged suffering. (Some victim family members manage to move on from unbearable grief and a few even bear witness against the impulse to demand "an eye for an eye.") The other people driven mad are those who love people who end up on death row; even condemned killers are sons, brothers, nephews and husbands, strange as it may seem to realize this. Some of these folks with close connections to condemned prisoners were deranged enough to feel they must campaign against replacing death sentences with life without parole because the change would end all hope for them. The death penalty heaps pain on all who come close to it.

• The California electorate approaches all initiatives with great skepticism. We're sick of voting on long lists of measures we don't understand and we don't trust the people who put them on the ballot. Focus groups with white working class voters showed them to be particularly resistant to making new law by way of the ballot (the only path to ending California's death penalty); they think all campaigns try to jerk their emotions around and put something over on them. Since there is a lot of truth in that, the finding is not surprising, but the impediment this suspicion creates to introducing new ideas is significant.

• I don't like writing this, but the imperative that progressive campaigns print all their paper propaganda at union printers has become an out-dated form of extortion. Once upon a time, union printers did the only reliable work. We were glad to give jobs to shops where workers were treated right. But the technology of print publication has changed. High-end color copy machines that are standard in well equipped small organizations do just as good work as printers for most purposes -- faster and cheaper. Union printers have become as obsolete as digital design made typesetters a decade ago. Campaigns need to be freed from any obligation to try to salvage a dead technology.

• We are a state very much divided not only by geography, race, age and ideology, but also by our degree of involvement with and comfort in using digital media. There are voters who can only be reached through Twitter and many others who don't use email. Some people only text, while others can only be reached at their doors. And all their votes are exactly equally valuable in an election. The digital divide(s) are complications even within a campaign. Different people expect different sorts of approaches and none of the silos seem very aware that there are other equally legitimate ways of spreading the message. It's a wonderful, empowering but often frustrating, in-between time in how we construct and maintain our communities and networks.

Working the campaign was a great privilege. We put the case against California's dysfunctional death penalty into the public conversation and I have no doubt that when our message sinks in, it will prevail. It was a lot to ask to get people to change relatively unconsidered instinctive reactions in the short span of one election. But we put Californians well onto the path of believing that we can have safety and justice without the state being in the killing business. We'll get there.

One more quick thought about the "fiscal cliff" deal ...

When all this stuff comes back to the top in a month or so, let's remember there's another source of ready cash that doesn't involve hurting anyone except a few military profiteers:
Those wasted billions of dollars could be turned to useful work if we'd make the decision to go there. The (numerically small) work forces involved in military contracting could do something useful such as engineering for climate change mitigation, medical technology, and alternative energy.

The sense that there are no more socially useful possibilities than cutting the safety net for young and old and giving more money to Wall Street to gamble with is entirely false. We believe lies when we allow ourselves to feel trapped in these choices. This is a rich country with a weak democracy and stupid imperial pretensions; it can be made better if we chose to struggle to make it better.

Warming Wednesdays: we need to grow into temporal empathy

If our species is to avert climate change catastrophe, our moral compass needs to incorporate a temporal dimension that is not second nature to most human societies. David Roberts at Grist reflected on this in an essay inspired by the Newtown shootings and President Obama's reflections speaking there.

… We begin with a concern for our own children that is instinctual, biological. And through an act of intellect (“come to realize”) we extend that concern to the larger social ecology in which our children are enmeshed. In that way, our love for our children is “a love that takes us out of ourselves and binds us to something larger.” They are all our children.

… To draw the distant and universal into our guts, to feel them as we feel our own children’s presence, requires a mix of intellect and will that is not familiar, or easy. For all our love and concern toward those like us, we have an equally strong propensity toward moral disregard, even callousness, toward those outside our circle of empathy. Especially in situations of stress or uncertainty, we tend to pull our circle inward, husbanding our love, concern, and sacrifice for those closest by.

… But now we face an even more difficult moral challenge. We now know — we have “come to realize” — that our actions do not just affect our tribe, our country, and our world. Our interdependence is temporal as well. We are feeling the effects of decisions our grandparents made, and our actions will affect the well-being of our descendants, the children of a world 40, 50, 100 years hence.

We know that the decisions we are making today are on track to create irreversible and inexorable changes in the global climate that our children and their children will inherit. We know that those changes threaten to slow or reverse our hard-fought gains in peace and health, leaving our descendants a world in violent, unceasing transition, with rising seas, greater droughts, more intense storms, shifting zones of fertility and disease, and waves of climate refugees. We discovered this not through shock or confrontation but through the slow accumulation and careful interpretation of evidence. It is still, to most people, almost entirely an intellectual phenomenon, something they know but do not feel.

… the evidence of the climate threat to children is, by and large, abstract and ethereal. Even those who “know” the extent of climate change find it difficult to feel authentic moral outrage about it. Yet for every ton of carbon we emit, we are firing a bullet into the air. We may not live to see it, but those bullets will rain down on the children of the future, and they will suffer for it. …

Do read it all.

I should probably add that an expanding universe of empathetic concern -- from family, to locality, to tribe, to nation, to the planet, and looking forward to the future -- is not confined to those who have offspring. Not everyone reproduces and in humans that often socially a good thing. In fact, one of the ways we, as human societies, are beginning to care for the planet is that we are almost universally concluding that enough people are enough. Birth rates fall everywhere that the standard of living rises beyond subsistence and current generations become confident that life will go on in their tribe even if they don't reproduce to their biological limits.

The planet needs humans to understand other sorts of limits that require more intellectual abstraction. The human animal has survived and taken over the planet because we can manipulate abstractions, so what we must do is within the range of what we can do. Expanded empathy makes adapting to necessity more desirable and is probably necessary to spur us to the actions we must take to keep the future livable.

Graphic from An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces by Joe Romm. Read that too.

Happy New Year!

This bit of neighborhood graffiti seems appropriate to the morning after a defeated political party representing whining oligarchs extorted yet more breaks from a conciliatory President. Dude doesn't ever seem to realize that offering reasonable compromise to bullies only whets their appetites.

Here's Paul Krugman's take:

Conceder In Chief?
...Anyone looking at these negotiations, especially given Obama’s previous behavior, can’t help but reach one main conclusion: whenever the president says that there’s an issue on which he absolutely, positively won’t give ground, you can count on him, you know, giving way — and soon, too. The idea that you should only make promises and threats you intend to make good on doesn’t seem to be one that this particular president can grasp.

And that means that Republicans will go right from this negotiation into the debt ceiling in the firm belief that Obama can be rolled.

At that point he can redeem himself by holding firm — but because the Republicans don’t think he will, they will play tough, almost surely forcing him to actually hit the ceiling with all the costs that entails. And look, if I were a Republican I would also be betting that he’ll cave.

There are hardier Democrats than the Prez, but not enough of them. Rich people's class war on the poor and middle class will continue until the majority builds enough power to stop them. To be continued in 2013 ... Happy New Year.

In case you wondered, Eric Schmidt is the Executive CEO of Google and worth some $7.5 billion.

A nice fantasy for the New Year

As I write, the "fiscal cliff" talks seem to have collapsed. Maybe those guys in Washington will put them together again, maybe not. I can't bring myself to care.

The realities of the situation remain the same: government has certain necessary tasks that it must perform for the common good. We argue about what those tasks are, but in the last election the majority of the people rendered some clear direction:

• The government should support job creation in every way possible;

• The economy should be made to work for ordinary people, not just for vulture capitalists;

• Elders should retain access to affordable health care through Medicare and there should be no cuts Social Security;

• Education should be accessible to young people who want it.

• We expect government to provide a safety net for people who have been crushed by an under-regulated economic system that privileges greed.

• No more dumb wars.

All these items except the last cost money. Roughly speaking, the policy of President Obama and the Democrats is to get the money for the government to do its job from the people who have the money -- that is, from rich people. It is the policy of the Republicans to put the government out of business. We rejected the latter option.

For the moment, the Prez and his fractious Democratic partners seem to be hanging tough, sticking up for the people who put them in office. The fantasy is that Dems will stay the course. The degree to which they do so will depend on how much heat they feel from constituents. We can't let up on them -- that's my fantasy for the New Year.

Books in the past year

That's not a book case. Note the reflectors at the bottom right and left. That's the painted rear of a truck parked on 24th Street in San Francisco yesterday.
The side panel proclaimed the vehicle an Archive … I do not claim to understand.***Nearly everyone I know has shifted over the last few years from reading books in their weighty, musty paper versions to using one of the various available electronic tablets. Josh Marshall who edits TPM describes how the transition happened for him.

I never had this desire to stop reading physical books. I was always into the physicality of books. This I just stumbled into. When I first got an iPhone I tried out the Kindle app for iPhone and discovered that even on that tiny non-ideal screen, it worked for me. Then I bought an actual Kindle, which pretty much worked. And then when the iPad came out, I downloaded that Kindle app and I was done with physical books. I haven’t bought one in at least a couple years now and I’m not sure I ever will again unless I find something I really, really need to read that isn’t out in a digital edition (and yes, it does constrict the numbers of books I can read.)

So far, I haven't been willing to move to a tablet. Why? It's not that I enjoy lugging heavy objects around -- nor giving up whole walls of our small living space to bookcases.

The stumbling block is that I'm not yet convinced that I'm willing to lose the miracle that is the public library. We live within a half a block of a branch. I can order any book in their collection; it will be delivered around the corner and I can keep it at least 3 weeks -- all for FREE. (Yes, I know my city taxes pay librarians and library bonds; that's a good thing!) The collection is wide ranging, though maybe a couple of months behind publication dates. But nearly everything anyone ever wrote can wait. And not everything I want to read has been published in the last ten years and hence electronically available, not by a long shot.

Yes, the library does have some kind of system for making e-book loans. I've looked at it and I don't quite get how it works. Maybe that's my future; at the moment it seems to be at an awkward stage: workable but anti-intuitive.

So for now I won't join the tablet readers, however much I envy them those light-weight, sleek appliances. Maybe soon, but not quite yet. I'll stick with the library -- and what book purchases I make will be audiobooks, volumes I can *read* while walking or exercising. After all, I can always get the print versions from the library … ***

Most years I record here which of the many volumes I've read stuck with me, made me think. This year there's no contest: I know which new book haunted my life and imagination throughout the year, but, oddly, I never directly wrote about it here, though I alluded to it often enough. Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is one of those rare "big books" that tries, hubristically, to explain all human history -- and at least makes a case for itself. Pinker thinks the species has become less violent, less destructive , kinder, even gentler, over time and sets out to prove his thesis. Professional historians hate this sort of thing because the effort always falls victim to anachronistic thinking that erases the particularity of past eras; scientists shout "confirmation bias" (seeing what you expect and want in the evidence) on contact. And it doesn't help that Pinker himself comes across in the book as an intellectually arrogant twit who has always enjoyed being the smartest guy in the room.

But he's on to something and I recommend it to anyone up for a romp through human history in 800 mind-expanding pages. The sheer length commends this book for tablet reading ...

Saturday scenes and scenery: behind the fence

Sometimes it's (sort of) obvious that the fence is there you keep you out ...


But it can be interesting to look through a fence.


Not much to see through this fence ... unless you step back 10 feet from your screen. Go ahead ... try it.


Sure I can photographed the garden, but isn't the previous image more interesting?

Friday cat blogging

On these cold dark winter mornings, I awake to the discovery that something has come between the humans in the bed. If I could see, which I can't in the dark, I'd find a face like this one installed inches away on the pillow. Morty has decided he likes the spot where the pillows and bedcovers meet and appropriates it once we've dozed off. I don't even know he is there, unless I reach across, expecting skin and encountering fur.

When I think about it, it makes me a little anxious to find a creature who doesn't seem to appreciate the damage teeth and claws can do ensconced just inches from my face. What if he stretches? The claws come out then ...

But so far we coexist peacefully, Mr. Furry Brain and his human servants.

For this "most charitable time of the year ..."

Exuberant art deco mural in City Hall, Buffalo, NY

If you've ever had to raise money from rich people for a cause you cared about, you will love Reuters financial columnist Felix Salmon's article: Philanthropy: You’re doing it wrong. He's obviously not currently having to work the begging circuit, so he tells it like it is.

… since I’m personally feeling very charitable right now, I’ve decided to do you all the favor of telling you that when it comes to philanthropy, you’re doing it wrong.

Interestingly, philanthropy is one of those areas where the richer you are, the more likely you are to be doing it spectacularly wrong. So to make you feel better still, this is aimed mainly at the mega-philanthropists: the people who give away millions of dollars and feel fantastic for doing so. …

… Let’s run down the list of things you’re likely to be doing wrong, if you’re a rich philanthropist:

• You meddle in the internal workings of the charities you donate to, even though you’re not on the board. …

• You set up your own foundation. …

• You fund architecture. …

• You encourage mission creep. …

• You kid yourself that your mere presence on the board, or your “celebrity endorsement”, is valuable. …

• You’re a tease.

• You think that going to to charity balls constitutes charitable activity. …

• ...have some humility. Here’s one idea: for every dollar you spend on overhead and payroll at your foundation, make sure that you donate a dollar earmarked for overhead and payroll somewhere else. Those are the funds which are always the hardest to raise, after all. …

• …Finally, there’s something that all of us can do, whether we’re dynastically rich or really rather poor: volunteering. But weirdly, volunteering is harder for the rich, who can more easily afford the time commitment: they often think that time spent volunteering is wasted.…The problem with this logic is that it ignores the enormous value to the volunteer of volunteering

When I work on political campaigns, I often find myself telling the unfortunate folks trying to raise the money that political donors are different people than charitable donors. (I'm usually fortunate mostly to be tasked with the spending, not the begging, though I try to do my part.) They are not entirely different, but the political giving impetus works slightly differently. Political donors are more straightforward about their ambition to change how the world works. There's more ostensible emphasis on efficacy; a little less about massaging their self-esteem. But most of Salmon's items have campaign analogues:

• Donors are tempted to think they are strategic political geniuses -- but in fact they are less likely than the average person to have a finger on the pulse of what matters to ordinary voters. The lives of the rich are different.

• Setting up a campaign committee and planning a campaign requires some legal and experiential professionalism; the donors need to trust the people who do this work, not think they can replace them. Yes, democracy is a participatory enterprise, even for the rich, but there are rules to know and skills to acquire that no one is born with.

• Don't judge a campaign by whether it has a fancy office. Some of the more effective campaigns I've seen have been run out of dingy holes in the wall; the campaign needs computers and printing facilities, it doesn't need nice furniture.

• Endorsements are necessary to campaigns to signal who is lining up behind them; however even genuinely respected political figures can rarely directly shift votes. And celebrities add almost nothing to campaign's success. Sorry -- politics just doesn't work that way.

• If you decide to contribute, don't dole out the funds over time. Throw down. Early money makes for winners. Money in the last month is much less useful to the campaign and much less likely to make a difference.

• Political fundraising events are the analogue of charity balls: necessary evils that by themselves do nothing to win votes. Give the money and ask your friends to chip in; skip the expensive party.

• Do volunteer on the campaign. Active participation in the democratic process offers an opportunity to meet your fellow citizens without filters. It's educational.

As Salmon says, in politics as in philanthropy,

… there’s no good reason why you should be part of the problem.

Jury duty

Would you believe, I've been summoned for jury duty the morning after Christmas? Neither do I believe it, but I am required to report.

Don't get me wrong -- I think juries are a generally good thing, sometimes even surprisingly wise. And I love the air of civic earnestness that most people bring to the jury pool. Sure, hardly anyone is happy to have their life disrupted. But once resigned to their fate, people take the task seriously.

But I know I'll never be on a jury. I've worked in so many venues and know so many people that there is always something to disqualify me. No responsible lawyer on any side would take a chance on me, for good or ill. My only function is to pump up the numbers. Reporting for duty feels futile.

Regular blogging will resume when they let me go.

UPDATE: Well that was quick ... I've been excused for "hardship." The trial was expected to continue into the week next month during which I've got tickets to Kauai. That's cause for dismissal of a potential juror.

About 90 of us were in the first batch brought into a courtroom for a criminal trial. The defendant was an older black man, well dressed. Among the panel of jury candidates, only two were obviously African-American. One of those was one of the 30 or so of us released for various hardships.

Joyeux Noël

May all your holidays be bright.

New life is born again, again and again

A Song of Julian of Norwich

God chose to be our mother in all things •
and so made the foundation of his work,
most humble and most pure,
in the Virgin’s womb.

God, the perfect wisdom of all, •
arrayed himself in this humble place.

Christ came in our poor flesh •
to share a mother’s care.

Our mothers bear us for pain and for death; •
our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.

Christ carried us within him in love and travail, •
until the full time of his passion.

And when all was completed and he had carried us so for joy, •
still all this could not satisfy the power of his wonderful love.

All that we owe is redeemed in truly loving God, •
for the love of Christ works in us; Christ is the one whom we love.

We sang this throughout the Advent season. Sometimes I cried.

An unexpected voice of the season ...

Since I'm taking my retirement on the installment plan this year -- that's what I do for awhile after working political campaigns -- I'm trying to check in on all the East Armpit Bowls this year. "East Armpit" is the label we use around this house for obscure football games that the TV powers-that-be put on to sate the hunger of fans like us who will watch just about any gladiators bang away at each other. Bowls before Christmas are as Armpit-ish as they come, plus they are sponsored by a bizarre array of minor business enterprises like body shops and moving companies we never hear of any other time of year. For this fan, they are an intriguing, if outlandish, window on the national culture.

Naturally many of these contests between "bowl eligible" teams (they need six regular season victories to get an invite) are snooze fests. I've proved that. In my quest to get at least a look at all of them, I often record them for viewing later in the evening. So far this year I've fallen asleep watching both the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl and the Beef O'Brady Bowl.

But I try to catch at least a bit of all of them. Sometimes you see a dazzlingly accomplished player. The current ascendancy of San Francisco 49er phenom quarterback Colin Kaepernick is no surprise if you watched his college -- Nevada (Reno) -- in Armpit games over the years. And sometimes the teams bring a passion to these obscure games that makes them more interesting than overhyped "championships" between arrogant behemoths (that's Notre Dame v. Alabama if you've been hiding in a hole.) The very first of this year's offerings, the Gildan New Mexico Bowl, was a riveting gem of a game.

I had no hopes at all for one of the most Armpit-ish of these bowls played yesterday, the R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl between East Carolina and Louisiana-Lafayette. That what??? But when I tuned in, I was surprised to hear a woman's voice doing the play-by-play. And not any female voice. This woman may not be a lesbian -- her life is her business -- but she's got the kind of deep voice that people associate with dykeyness in a woman. A little internet research told me she was Beth Mowins, a student athlete turned professional ESPN commentator.

Women doing football play-by-play work are rarer than blue moons, so I stuck around to see how she did. She did okay, nothing great. The play-by-play job consists of telling the viewers what they just saw quickly, coherently and accurately. I suspect it is hard -- and you know that thousands of people are ready to scream at the screen if you blow the down or distance call -- as you undoubtedly sometimes will. Mowins did fine. Mediocre is really successful when you aren't supposed to be there are all.

And she certainly is not. She is one of only two women who've ever called a broadcast football game. She inspires the venom of legions of angry football fans, mostly male. Here's a relatively polite specimen:

… ESPN2 puts Beth Mowings in as an announcer OMG IS SHE ANNOYING!!!!!!!! I can’t stand her voice!! [Who] would marry her, I keep thinking who is Beth Mowins husband and how miserable must they be!

You get the gist …

Evidently this career is something she wants very much. Good for Beth Mowins.

The game turned out to be moderately interesting as well, for an Armpit Bowl. Happy football season to all.

Ready for Christmas ...

The great American consumption binge that is Christmas in is full flower on Mission Street in San Francisco. This segment of the street is the city's equivalent of Delancey Street in New York, a jumble of discount bazaars offering cheap Chinese imprts.


I thought of this display when I read this:

IMAGINE walking into the toy department and noticing several distinct aisles. In one, you find toys packaged in dark brown and black, which include the “Inner-City Street Corner” building set and a “Little Rapper” dress-up kit. In the next aisle, the toys are all in shades of brown and include farm-worker-themed play sets and a “Hotel Housekeeper” dress.

If toys were marketed solely according to racial and ethnic stereotypes, customers would be outraged, and rightfully so. Yet every day, people encounter toy departments that are rigidly segregated — not by race, but by gender. There are pink aisles, where toys revolve around beauty and domesticity, and blue aisles filled with toys related to building, action and aggression. ...

Elizabeth Sweet, NY Times.

The whole is worth reading. Apparently gender-based toy marketing has made a big comeback.

This trend makes me ache for the child who doesn't fit the gender stereotypes. By enforcing this division, we say to many children that they are no good at being part of their own society.

I know. I was a cap-gun waving, sword-fighting, riotous bundle of little girl energy as a child in the 1950s. Curiously it may have been easier to violate gender norms then: those of us who were misfits were just "experimenting"; the adults trusted we'd grow out of it. Nowadays, girls actually can grow up to attend West Point and end up in combat. The society approves. But we still demand they conform to gender stereotypes and even reinforce those with "science."

Is it possible that some contemporary children comfortably outfox the social rules, learn early to play gender as a game of possibilities rather than restrictions, sail through childhood's obstacle course, and emerge comfortably themselves. I've seen a few of these who seem to have little trouble navigating the gender minefield. But I weep at this season for the ones whose way of appearing in the world seems to violate their inner being. This is a tough way to come up.

Irish-American working class woman adrift ...

I strongly looked forward to the public library acquiring Joan Walsh's What's the Matter with White People?: Why We Long for a Golden Age That Never Was. Walsh spent six years as Salon's editor in chief. I've read her for years and learned to trust her consistent injection of a woman's perspective into the all-too-male enterprise of progressive liberal punditry. Besides, as a white woman myself, I wanted an answer to the question posed by her title. Finally I got a crack at it. Here are some reactions.

Walsh's book is a personal story, not an analytic exercise. It's the tale of how her Irish immigrant working class relatives drifted away from supporting racial and economic justice and away from liberal Democrats. Like too many older whites, they somehow ended up in the party of the plutocrats, of G.W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. It is also the tale of how Walsh managed to remain a liberal Democrat despite feeling out of place among progressives. And so, necessarily, it is a story of feeling whiplashed, without a place.

Like such authors as Rick Perlstein, Jefferson Cowie, and even the too little noted Judith Stein, Walsh points to the late 60s and the 70s as a hinge time, the time when the white working class became alienated from Democrats.

Because Democrats were in charge when the country came undone in the 1960s, Democrats got blamed. …

… prosperity undermined the New Deal coalition, giving white workers the freedom to believe their enemy was black protesters and white hippies, while providing the New Left with the dream it could create a progressive majority coalition without big labor. The two groups suddenly had the luxury of hating each other, of focusing on their cultural differences, because their economic battles seemed to have been won.

She mourns the disdain and ignorance with which liberals treated the terrible history of Irish suffering -- somehow other people's travails counted more than those of her people. None of us respond well to feeling our culture has been dismissed.

And Walsh experienced a particular wrenching that many white progressives felt in the Reagan era:

… I had given up on my working-class family; I tuned out their problems and anything they had to say that was legitimate. I was out of touch with the number of people who shared their concerns and blissfully ignorant of what the new Reagan Republicans would impose on the national scene in the coming decades -- a full-scaled Republican revolution that used social issues to inflame the people I grew up with, while betraying their economic interests.

She identifies with the experience Obama recounts in his autobiography of checking out the squabbling sectarian left groups of that era while seeking a political home and, like him, recoiling at their lack of realism and of an inspiring vision.

A savvy post movement do-gooder stayed away from that leftover left. … Obama went into community organizing, I went into community journalism. Trying to be effective in the Reagan years, we mostly had small dreams.

I lived some of the same sense of losing my place (though my mostly WASP family had always been Republicans of the now-extinct northeastern sort), but for me, insurgent feminism filled the hole where New Deal populism might have once lived. Though Walsh is the epitome in some ways of what the women's movement has won us -- a Hillary-admirer, a writer, a TV commentator who brings a woman's experience to politics -- the women's movement doesn't seem to have served her as a political home in that difficult time. She reports with resentment her feeling of having no place in social struggles in which race seemed to trump concerns for economic justice.

In at least two different Oakland meetings, heavily attended by welfare-rights groups, the very same African American woman stood up, as if on cue, pointed to me sitting with the decision-makers, and said angrily, "There's only one reason you're sitting there, and I'm standing here." No one needed to spell out the reason: that I was white. I understood her anger, but it felt like theater, not practical politics intended to bring about change. (I also noticed that "minorities" always singled out other "minorities" at such times. Why didn't she suggest an older white male colleague had taken the place that should have been hers?)

I'm a little older than Walsh with a different political history, but I've been in some of those meetings -- in Oakland in fact. Come on Joan -- you shine that stuff on. It will either pass away or it won't; you'll either be accepted for your work by people whose work you respect or you won't; there's nothing to do but let it go and do the work. I'm sure she knows that, but the book is a testament to how hard it has been for her to hang on to what she knows.

Anyone who has read this far will have gathered that I'm ambivalent about What's the Matter with White People? It didn't help as much as I hoped in answering its own question. I can't stop with recognizing the humanity of people whose bitterness (yes -- bitterness and disappointment, I will just say it) keeps them acting politically against their own self-interest. I want to know what we can do -- truthfully, respectfully -- to help them change that. I'm an activist, I guess.

On the other hand, if you don't know much about the history of Irish assimilation in the U.S. melting pot, this is a good and valuable book. There are more histories in this country than we realize and we become more ourselves as we assimilate more of them.