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Rod Amis - Unbound

a soft touch
for a hard planet

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G21 EDITORIAL: The Second Term Curse

Most of the usual pundits won't bring this up right away. Expect them to get around to it next March or April or whenever it is that the shoe finally drops. Being inclined toward historical thinking, This Editorialist will share some thoughts with you on the subject right away, before the second term for Mr. Bush begins.

If the history of American presidencies over the last forty years is any indicator, we're on the road to another national disgrace. Here's the evidence: every second term presidency this country has experienced since the 1960s has led to some scandal, trauma or debacle for the sitting administration.

• Nixon: Watergate and resignation;
• Reagan: Iran-Contra and;
• Clinton: Monicagate and impeachment.

Should we expect less of the new Bush administration? I doubt it.

The fact seems to be that the very mechanisms by which we Americans choose our Presidents in the Television Age sets them up for these kinds of falls. Here's at least a couple of reasons why:

1. the focus on money instead of policy, which makes our elections little more than corporate-financed side-shows where the eventual candidates of any party are chosen by boardrooms instead of voters and;
2. the necessary commodification of candidates pushed by those board rooms and the political consultants hired to "package" the candidates, by way of focus group results, the same way their brothers and sisters on Madison Avenue would package soap or corn flakes.

That's why the "feel good" quotient garnered by a political candidate is as important to his or her success in an election, as viewed by these paid political hacks and their corporate puppet-masters, as the Q rating of a Hollywood actor or actress when number-crunching how much a film will gross at the box office.

Richard Nixon's disgrace at the hands of young candidate John Kennedy -- and that is what it was for someone with Nixon's resume at the time, a track-record far more impre ssive than Kennedy's -- was completely forgotten when the handlers produced the confident and all-smiles "New Nixon." That this moniker, the "new" Nixon, could even be used so openly in that election had a lot to say about the thinking behind the packaging of the candidate. Mr. Nixon's vast experience in public life became less important than his upbeat presentation to the consumers -- ehm, electorate.

My point here is that this cheapening, the sales-pitch-as-process means of choosing our leaders, means that the product/candidate is a hollow shell who -- absolutely convinced of their own "commercials" about themselves running on now-stop for four years -- become reckless from their own success after the heat of an election. They are conditioned to go beyond-the-pale in one area or another and we, the people, pay the price in the form of some "unbelievable" scandal of over-reaching or hubris.

If you're paying attention at all, you can already see four or five areas from which the potential Bush scandal might emerge.

From this perch, the price of these recurring national paroxysms is too high. In each case cited above, the cost to the republic, not only in actual money -- either for legal wrangling, investigations in Congress or actual money paid out (see Iran-Contra) -- but also in emotional costs and the effect on our view of ourselves and our government, was immeasurable. Each of these episodes could rightly be called catastrophic. And, when looked at from that historical perspective, bringing any administration back into power must be seen as a colossal blunder by anyone interested in efficient and effective government.

When we look at the periods during which each of these second-term incidents occurred, they all have three commonalities:

1. the efficient operation of the United States government ground to a screeching halt;
2. the press and the legislature were obsessed with the scandal in question to the detriment of other items of pressing national business and;
3. the administrations themselves became bunkered, combative and ineffective.

Why would any nation in its right mind choose to go through incidents like those again? Which invariably leads back to the question of why we'd grant a Chief Executive and his team a second term of office. The cards are stacked against us.

In each of these eras, and we call it an era once we decide to give an administration nearly a decade of national leadership, much of the good accomplished was mitigated by the bad taste of the inevitable scandal. The world looks on at our paralysis in either horror or relief (that our usual meddling is attenuated) and wonders when sanity will be regained, if ever.

The first step toward a period of sustained sanity would be to extend the presidential term by two years to six while limiting each President to a single term, our history would suggest.

As stated in this space before, we are advocates for a new Constitutional Convention. This country needs a document more reflective of the realities of our times. Either that or the republican experiment will wither on the vine and empire will irrevocably take hold. In some quarters, that latter result in more than desirable but not in this one.

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PHOENIX, AZ, USA - 22 November, 2004: I am of those people, of a certain age, who always, always, remember this as the anniversary of the death of President Kennedy. It was a life-altering experience for many of the people of the "television generation."

Whether we were in school, at work or driving down the street, there was a television, a radio or a wave of panic-stricken and tearful people to let us know that the poles had shifted and time had come to a sudden, gut-wrenching halt. It was a moment unlike any other experience we would have in our lives.

November 22, 1963, was the day we lost our innocence. That day was so shattering that the other gut-wrenching days that would follow -- the day we heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot; the day we heard that Bobby Kennedy was shot; the day Richard Nixon resigned; the day the planes crashed into the World Trade Center -- all those gut-wrenching days were easier for us to accept. Those successive days were easier because we already knew that the world was filled with horror and injustice. We had already experienced November 22nd.

Normally, Monday -- the day the "early birds" among you look at the newest edition of this magazine -- is my day for post-partem depression. I field the latest missives and new submissions for the up-coming edition from the writers, fret as to whether we are being read at all and attempt to remind myself that I worry too much.

Today, I have the added pall of knowing this is that day, the day President Kennedy, the first President I acknowledged or cared about in my childish life, was shot and died.

I sit here, too, racking my brain about the telephone/DSL bill, the electric bill and my first class (my new Day Job) tomorrow.

My supervisor telephoned today and offered me an additional class for this afternoon. Doug needed to use Victoria, this computer. (His computer needs repair right now, so he has been using mine to do his work for the Arizona Republic, where he now freelances.) Poor Vickie gets pushed enough meeting my needs and now she has to deal with both of us ...

My supervisor told me that there was no need for my apologies since he was giving me less than an hour's notice. He said that I should feel free to telephone him next Monday morning and check to see if there are any open class-slots that need to be filled. I was glad of the offer. My Plan for this week is to try to fill all the open tutoring slots I have available before December begins.

So this is one of those Mondays when I feel the weight of the world.

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Our local weekly, the New Times, reports in its most recent edition that it believes there is sufficient evidence to suggest that the new President of Arizona State University (ASU) has the school on the fast track to become Brigham Young University (BYU) south. BYU is the flagship school of the Mormon denomination in Utah. Mormons (members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints) were mentioned in this space last week.

As mentioned in that journal entry, I seldom think about Mormons. I certainly can't remember thinking about them much before moving here to Arizona. The New Times, the local television newscasts and the people encountered since coming to Arizona have put the Mormons on this radar screen.

According to the New Times article I'm referencing ["Quid Pro Crow" by Joe Watson, November 18-24, 2004,] ASU President Michael Crow has been doing serious fundraising in the local (Phoenix) Mormon community. He scored $50 million (USD) from a local builder, Ira Fulton, to invest in the (renamed) Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at the ASU campus in Tempe back in June, 2003. Since then, the Times asserts, Mr. Fulton and his church's doctrines have had increasing influence on ASU policy and operations.

Interestingly, ASU -- which in the recent past was considered one of the nation's top "party" schools -- this semester opened Mariposa Hall, a dormitory touted as a "Healthy Living" environment. Mariposa Hall requires students who choose to live there to sign a written vow to refrain from smoking, doing drugs or imbibing alcoholic beverages.

If, as the Times story asserts, Mr. Crow intend to make ASU a magnet school for Mormon students, the change would be a significant development worth reporting. On the other hand, the New Times seems from this seat to have a hard-on for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the same obsessive manner that my former patron, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, has an obsessive hard-on for Pacific Gas & Electric (PG & E) Company and the insistence , on the part of the Bay Guardian that the City of San Francisco should convert to a public power system.

When a news organization gets an obsession with another organization and goes on a crusade, as the Bay Guardian is notorious for and the New Times appears to be doing, its ability to report objectively tends to get clouded. Because of its advocacy position, its credibility on other issues suffers. That was certainly true of the Bay Guardian as regards the whole public power issue; its own constituency began to joke about the "war" against PG&E as Bruce Bruggman's (the publisher's) cracked record. There is evidence of this same clay foot in some of the New Times reporting.

One example: In Watson's story referenced here (and which you can read by online by following this link,) he asserts:

How many LDS students live at Mariposa is unknown, but the LDS Institute, on its Web site, www.lds.org/institutes, advertises the dorm as being "basicly [sic] like BYU standards though it is open to all denominations."

That assertion is simply not true. If you go to the LDS Tempe, Arizona, Institute Web site he mentions and look under "Student Information" the way Mariposa Hall is described (as opposed to "advertised") reads this way:

Housing, ASU Healthy Living Dorm
ASU has a "Healthy Living" dorm for students that want to live in a healthy invironment, no smoking or drinking, keep reasonable hours etc. it is open to all denominations. For more information, look on ASU's website www.asu.edu/reslife, healthy living or Mariposa. Or you can call us here at the Institute at 480-967-4498.

Yes, environment is spelled incorrectly. But there is no "basicly" to be misspelled and no mention whatsoever of Brigham Young University.

This is not reported to imply that the New Times might not be onto something in its perspective on Mormon influence here in Arizona or the transformation of ASU but rather to say that any journal, when attempting to advocate for the public good, needs to make sure its "facts" are just that. Ask Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair or Judith Miller.

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23 November, 2004: MORE ON THE IMMIGRATION furor in Arizona: Following up on last week's entry on the Proposition 200 debate that took place in the last election, I offer this next for your consideration. Longtime Readers are aware of how frightening (if not also repulsive) Yours Unruly finds so-called "passionate" people when they are advocating for their particular worldview(s). Thus, it should come as no surprise that I cringed and shuddered when I read this passage in on the "Letters"(to the Editor) page of the New Times regarding their reporting on the issue:

... Another subject not covered was the Mexico "makeover" of our inner city. Main thoroughfares increasingly resembles Nogales, with more taco shops than Starbuckses. If I wanted to see this crap I would move to Mexico ...

A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 2332 W. Glenrosa Avenue, #249 Phoenix, AZ 85015-7039 To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks.

When an invaded neighborhood becomes riddled with graffiti, stolen cars, gunfire, burglaries, home invasions, Mex tunes blasting from every lowrider, discarded diapers, urine stains and steaming piles of immigrant dung, it's pretty unlivable.

Of course, all of this is part of the master plan perpetrated by the treasonous John McCain and his butt buddies at the Arizona Chamber of Commerce. Arizona's congressional delegation and Jack Napolitano should all be hung in Patriots Square. We could serve tortas.

This letter was written by one of my fellow Phoenix residents. For the record, the governor of Arizona's name is Janet Napolitano.

ROD ON CHILDREN, OF ALL AGES

One of the facets of this Season is that you are naturally made to think of children. From the beginning of the traditional harvest time until we enter the first of winter, all the holidays are family-centered and the stories, rituals and events have a lot to do with and are directed toward children. We do not doff that focus until the celebration of the New Year, in the Western tradition.

All of this must, in the case of a childless man, bring up the issue of the experience of parenthood. Every person has some opinion or other about being or failing to be a parent, in both senses of the latter clause.

We have been trained to think of childhood as a time of wonder and to forget that it is also a time of insecurity, pain and disappointment.

Because I have never been a parent, I tend to think of the children of other people I have known or of the children I have taught in various settings over the years. I seldom talk or write about my teaching often but it has been my portion to teach other people's children a number of times in this life -- including my current position as a distance-learning tutor.

For all of the children I have known, this Season has been a time of heightened expectations. I am made to think of this Season as experienced by my own siblings and myself. Between the special events and legends we attended and were given, the burden of the Season also coinciding with the first part of the school year was made lighter.

A constant of my neighborhood here in Phoenix is the sound of children running -- along the second floor landing, across the mud and garden in the courtyard -- singing, yelling, chanting, laughing or crying. I used to know a couple of brothers who would joke, "All you gottah do is blink at a Latin girl and she gets pregnant, Blood." You might believe it here. Almost every woman in the courtyard my apartment overlooks seems to have a minimum of two very young children.

Some of these children are still babes in arms. Others are running, laughing, singing, chanting before or after school. Others wobble about or cry, still too young for school. And then there are the teenagers, locking into their insecure states of perpetual cool or nearly flirtatious sidelong glances, downcast eyes or looking quickly away from each other. Fidgetty. Gangly. Par-formed.

Twenty-somethings,, like twenty-somethings everywhere, strut newly confident in their achievement of adulthood and satisfied in the knowledge that they know more about more than any people who have ever lived in the history of the world.

I cannot look at the faces and into the eyes of these children I walk past, greet at the door, see and hear every day, without a sense of envy and admiration. They are so fresh. They have not tested the limits of their capacities nor been dealt those wounds that they must carry with them to their graves.

I was once applauded by a young man for having written the line, "You have not lived until you have been emotionally damaged." He took the line as an evidence of my depth rather than my experience. He shared that line with friends to demonstrate what an insightful writer he believed me to be. He had not actually been emotionally damaged yet. He was still very fresh, too, and imagined the idea in the most romantic of terms rather than as an acceptance of, a resignation to, the fate that must eventually scar us all.

I opened the "Glass House" for the 400th edition with a quote from Bertrand Russell about the immense and intense pain of all the suffering in this world. I could not but think of the children of Darfur and Iraq, the kidnapped child soldiers of the Tamil Tigers and those of the Ugandan rebels, reading those words of Russell's again. I speak of my own suffering here but it pales beside the suffering of those children, spread around the globe. My suffering makes me feel their suffering all the more intimately and empathetically. They are our world's orphans, a subject all too familiar in this quarter.

Most adults, in my experience, don't take this subject of emotional or spiritual orphanage seriously enough. Perhaps that is why so many of them make such atrocious parents ...

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24 November, 2004: THIS DAY before Thanksgiving (USA) shall be burned in my memory for quite some time. It is the day when donations from a couple of you arrived -- one with a cablegram announcing "Happy Thankgiving, Rod!" -- to change my fate. I am overwhelmed.

There was enough money for me to make up any shortfall caused by the smart-card I got from the apartment complex around the corner that is the free Turkey coupon I got, buy food for tonight's dinner (I ate the last of the unspoiled potatoes last night), get salt, bread, garbage bags, cigarettes and FINALLY do my laundry. I shall have food and clean clothes. Hoorah!

The kind-hearted benefactors know who they are. The remainder of the proceeds I shall apply to the telephone/DSL bill to keep this magazine and my Day Job up and running.

At the insistence of another friend, I shall use the bus fare left to apply for Food Stamps next week. Considering how little money I make, I should have done so years ago. That way, I can invest my meagre earnings in other needful things than food.

So tomorrow, at least part of my time shall be devoted to cooking. The turkey should supply left-overs for a good while ...


FEED THE HUNGRY. You can help someone else in this world and IT WON'T COST YOU A DIME. If you simply remember to drop by The Hunger Site every day that you surf and click a simple button ONE LESS PERSON WILL GO HUNGRY. The food is distributed by the United Nations World Food Programme and paid for through the sponsorship of companies that care. Do your part.

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27 November, 2004: ON DOUG'S LUCK: I certainly wish I had my roomie's luck. No matter how many dishes he leaves piled in the sink before dashing out to one of his adventures, they miraculously pick themselves up, rinse themselves off and then place themselves in the dishwasher. They add the soap and turn the machine on, and then, most astonishing of all, they open the dishwasher, take themselves out and place themselves tidily back in the drawers and cabinets.

Though I rinse my dishes off and place them in the dishwasher until it's time for another load, they never do all that for me ...

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I DID SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER ATTEMPTED BEFORE this evening. I read a series of successive "Glass Houses." One after another. And I was appalled.

Reading them, as a reader rather than as myself, I saw a man who was unremittingly disengaged from himself. I saw a man who honestly did not care whether he lived or died; the writer I was reading simply recorded each event, each interaction, as though he were not present.

He looked at the events of his own life as though reporting an accident he had observed and then he moved on. His next move would be to report on something else, completely unrelated to himself, from the same distance.

What appalled me was that this person I was reading was me.

I read my own description of how I nearly died this year and realized that, by my tone, I was saying that I didn't give a damn that that might have happened; I was saying that other people there in New Orleans and in other places, cared whether I lived or died more than I did myself.

Reading it that way was revelation for me, my love.

Now here's the rub: I learned long ago that all that will matter for "my posterity" -- should I actually have one -- is the editor of the magazine and all the people he brings you and, in the end, my estimable skills as a writer.

However, what bothered me in what I read -- admittedly from a very bad period of my sojourn in New Orleans -- was that it obscured the fact that I was once considered a pretty fun and funny guy. I do have a sense of humor. In fact, readers of the G21 Newsletter know that I'm an inveterate collector of jokes. I've been collecting jokes for a decade now. We used to run a regular all-jokes page on this Web site, when it first started, so that I could share the thousands of jokes I collect with the readers.

"And your point is, Rodja?"

My point is that, yes, my life is HARD. Poverty definitely takes its toll on me, HOWEVER I enjoy a good laugh as much as you do, Luv. I'd like to laugh a lot more, while also being self-conscious about my missing teeth, of course. (I'll laugh behind my hand.)

I'D LOVE A GOOD, FULL-BELLIED LAUGH.

I'd love to laugh like that child in the picture I've posted for you in the corner of this entry above. I'd love to laugh until tears streamed down my cheeks ...

That said, I also must say that its the kindness of those people over on our "sponsors" list (the Roll of Honor) flowing down the right side of this page who have given me a full belly or made me laugh at all this week. When I hold the tin-cup out and beg you to help with the continued existence of this magazine, I'm being as serious as cancer. Do put us on your giving list, do take a moment to keep this hope alive.

One of the most heartening things about doing this every week over all these years has been the e-mails that come in from both students and teachers from around the world, the USA, the UK, Brazil, Argentina, China, Mexico -- pick a country -- asking us for permission to reprint articles we've publish ed over the years. Sometimes the requests are to use our articles for a class report, part of a Lesson Plan, or to contact one of the writers to complete some research. As the Internet could be considered our modern-day library of Alexandria, this cathedral of words has produced articles on almost any topic you might want to research.

We were one of the first journals on- or off-line to talk about the kidnap-and-ransom practice among narco-terrorists. Tom Hargrove's article on the topic here was presented as Congressional testimony on the topic years before it was on most people's radar screens. We've produced top-flight pieces on elections in Cambodia, the UK and here in the United States. We've covered everything from factory-farming, before that was a national issue, to BSD, MTBE and the spirulina craze.

Week after week, for the past nearly nine years online, we've brought you real voices from everyday people around the planet on these important topics and more. There's something to be said for that, I believe, and we can only continue this effort with your help.

Yes, my little loves, the life of penury and worry I write about in this column, week in and week out, has worn me thin. But this edifice, your World's Magazine, has been a source of constant joy and, yes, laughter for me, too. I love the writers we've brought you here. I hope to keep bringing them to you until I do shuffle off this mortal coil and I plan on loving every minute of doing so.

I also need to acknowledge the fact that I need more laughter in my life, yes. I'll try to laugh more. You should encourage me to do so. Thanks in advance!

THINGS I PRAY FOR THIS WEEK

1. Some more positive results in my Job Search.

2. Respite from constant worry.

3. Resuming my spiritual journey.

4. More things in my life to LAUGH about.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was also a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was also principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. Our Resident Philosopher is now looking for creative ways of re-inventing himself in the Valley of the Sun. He currently teaches a distance-learning courses in Reading and Math to at-risk students online. In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

Rod plans publication of the first Glass House book before the end of the year and is already working on the second, sequel, manuscript.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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Our Editor does listen!

© 2004, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.