Body Parts

Rain

I am typing at my desk by an opened window. It is almost eleven in the evening. The thunder storm has broken the humidity of the past several days. It is raining. I am listening to the rain patter on the leaves of the small tree growing a few feet away. The air smells of chocolate. Nothing is ironic.

California's Cognitive Dissonance: Smoking Pot Okay, Smoking Cigarettes Not Okay

California's headlong rush to legalize another means of getting inebriated, by smoking marijuana, would seemingly conflict with its nanny drive to outlaw smoking cigarettes. I've talked with potheads, and dialogued with them in this blog, and they seem in a state of denial, unaware that smoking marijuana is just as deadly as smoking tobacco cigarettes. Perhaps it is the legalization of "medical" pot that has created the false notion that pot is healthy; of course, smoke from burning marijuana leaves is just as deadly as smoke from tobacco leaves. (And why aren't cigarettes a "healthy good," as they relax and calm the nervous system, which many persons need? If the argument is good for "medical" marijuana, it's good for cigarettes. Perhaps we need a movement to legalize "medical tobacco smoking"!) So in Old Citrus Town, the wise elders of the City Council have outlawed "smoking" in the city's public parks. Does the prohibition include smoking marijuana? Can medical marijuana smokers be arrested for smoking their medicine while picnicking on the flowing green grass of the parks?

California is a farce.

The Silence of July

School is out for summer break. No morning rush hour from 8 to 9 as mothers and buses would otherwise hurriedly transport children to school before first bell. Many families have taken advantage of the Fourth of July holiday for an extended vacation. Houses sit back on their suburban haunches, staring blankly out at the street. Curtains drawn. Grass growing long. A few newspapers accumulated on the lawn. Several bath room lights left on in vain expectation of fooling would-be burglars. No children riding bicycles in the quiet streets. Independence Day fireworks expended. No teens racing cars in the streets, speeding through stop signs. No lawn crews with leaf blowers. The Spring marine layer perpetuates itself, spreading its blanket of moist gray fog and mist close to the ground, muffling distant trains, planes, and the police helicopter. Southern California slows down. I run through the neighborhoods in exaltation. Silence enough to feel joy for the world.

Yes, Robert Byrd Brought Pork To West Virginia, But, California, Look In The Mirror

All political commentators are appropriately noting that deceased Senator Robert Byrd had used his political clout to push "disproportionate" federal funds into projects in West Virginia. And Fred Barnes correctly notes that all representatives did that. But for a real pork hog, let's look to California. It was California that for two generations, from the late 1930s to the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, hogged national defense expenditures. Aerospace research and development, military training and deployment bases, military effectiveness research centers, munitions and weapons systems research, development, and manufacture. It was no mistake that Los Angeles was/is home to the Air Force research center, that inland Southern California was/is home to the naval (!) weapons research center, was home the Air Force's Pacific command center and the state's largest Air Force strategic bomber base, and that the California deserts were/are home to Marine and Army training bases. San Francisco, Los Angeles/Long Beach, San Diego had/have huge naval bases. California sucked defense tax dollars like no other state. West Virginia sure didn't get much of them. Nor did Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Montana, Colorado, Utah, and a lot of other states. It was as if the rest of America dumped its taxes in trains which daily hauled them into California where they were soaked up by private companies, unionized laborers, who made a hell of lot more money than coal miners, millions of soldiers and officers, and the economy that fed off them. World War II and the Cold War made California rich, more than did gold, oranges, oil, silicon, and movies. Once the military tax spigot turned off in the 1990s, California government started to have its budgetary crises. The crises were created when the state was spending other people's money as if it were, in fact, other people's money. Now that California has to re-invent itself as a private economy, it's having a hard time economically and its Cold War politial paradim (live off others) is not useful. Not all Californians are as poor as West Virginians, but if you drive up the Central Valley, off the 5, through the farm towns, some clearly are. California benefitted disproportionately from World War II and the Cold War. Now that the state has to live on its own earnings, things are not so easy. It ought to be enough to engender some sympathy for other states that never had so good. And for Robert Byrd.

Revised. June 30, 2010.

El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake Moved Calexico 31 Inches South

Why did it require radar observation from a NASA plane to discover that Calexico moved 31 inches South and lower into the ground in the April earthquake? A movement over that distance should have been observed in shifting of roads and streets along the fault lines. In the 1907 San Francisco earthquake, the fault line in the Central Valley of California moved 20 feet, as observed by shifting of roads and fence lines on opposites of the fault line. Why not in Calexico?

Purple Blossoms

Purple Flowers in the Huntington Gardens

Valets at the Langham Huntington Hotel

Earth Day Plus Forty: Reclaiming America's Natural Heritage

I have lived in three of our nation's most environmentally damaged, simply filthiest, places--rural New England, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the Los Angeles Basin. And I have lived to see each of them dramatically cleaned up, returned to startling beauty to become inspiring, often breath-taking, environments in which to live.

Earth Day symbolizes the environmental movement which, during President Nixon's presidency, put in place landmark legislation to clean up America. Air, water, and land had been polluted by the unrestrained industrialization of the previous century. Even remote, rural areas of the nation, like the small village in northern New England, where I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, had been damaged by that industrialization. Paper mills dumped their untreated wastes from making paper into the streams and rivers, making the water deadly for fish, poisonous for people, stinky, and ugly to view. The river that flowed through my home village, Plymouth, New Hampshire, was so polluted that our high school mocked it in our school song. We sang, "Far above the polluted waters, where our banner flies ... here's to you, our alma mater, dear old stinky high". I can recall that I would hold my breath when crossing bridges over the river, fearful that the foul odor would aggrevate my severe asthma. Over the next several decades, the village of fewer than 2,000 persons, required with other villages and towns along it's river to do so, put in waste treatment plants to treat the sewage they had previously been dumping into its water. The paper mills and textile mills were required to treat their waste. By the end of the century, Atlantic salmon were returning to the river's headwaters to spawn.

My first teaching job was a one-year stint as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh. After the war--that is, the second world war--, led by its business and industrial giants, such as the Mellon family, the steel mills of the city were slowly cleaned up. The city that had been so cloudy with air pollution at noon as to obscure the sun had, by the time I lived there, emerged through the murk. But it remained polluted. During the night, tiny particles and fibers of steel, nearly invisible filings, would settle out of the air onto the ground, the buildings, streets, and cars. In the morning, you could turn on your automobile's windshield wiper blades for one swipe. They would leave a long line of steel filings where they ended their sweep of the glass. Over the next few decades, the last steel mill inside the city closed. And steel mills up and down the rivers were, at least partially, cleaned up. The fount of the Ohio River was, if not exactly purified, certainly greatly cleaner and beautiful. I loved Pittsburgh, its industrial muscularity, its historic architecture, and its urban renewal. It was a great place to live, skyscrapers and hilly urban neighborhoods often stunning in their natural setting at the confluence of two rivers along side high hills.

Finally, Riverside, California, at the eastern edge of the "South Coast Air Basin"--to give the officialized designation its capitalization. When I arrived to teach at the University of California, the city had a reputation as a historic and architectural gem set among thousands of acres of navel orange groves. State governmental hearings, a few years later, that preceded smog laws unhappily smeared the city's reputation as effectively as the smog that cooked in Los Angeles and drifted east to it. Nonetheless, the clean air laws, the requirement of vehicle emission controls, cleaned up the air over the next several decades so effectively that, by the mid-1990s, the air was clear and the surrounding ring of mountains visible year-round. The dramatically beautiful setting, that had been depicted on fruit crate labels for two generations, returned.

Though I am politically conservative, I happily acknowledge the effectiveness of the environmental laws that have cleaned up much, though certainly not all, of the mess created by industrialization and, as in the case of untreated sewage, urbanization in the century from the 1850s to the 1950s. It was a chore that mostly had to be done by the federal government, because pollution crossed state borders.That accomplishment does not mean that debate today over the founding environmental laws is illegitimate or unreasonable. Conservative thinkers in the past generation have proposed market solutions to environmental problems that have changed the regulatory and enforcement paradigms on which the 1970s environmental laws were based. New market solutions will be implemented in piecemeal, of not replacement, mode. What the new thinking about implementation has not replaced is the environmental consensus to clean up and reclaim our environment forged in the 1960s.

Scenes of the Squall: Supplication