My grandnephew's first birthday party yesterday. He's learning to tear the wrapping paper off presents. Then he likes to wave it in the air, put it on top of his head and stick it in his mouth. The adults stare at him and smile, grateful for this visitor from another planet.

An article by Cecil Adams in Wink, a local magazine, says it takes more energy to produce ethanol, alcohol made from corn, than it produces when burned in a car. Also that the reduced air pollution benefits of using gasohol, ethanol mixed with gas, are doubtful. The government subsidy for ethanol is bad for the taxpayer but good for corporate corn farmers.

Lindbergh

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within and Without 1939-1944, published 1980

I was born in 1940, and it is interesting to read what was happening then, especially written in the present tense.

Lindbergh was a writer (Gift from the Sea) and the wife of Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. entry into WWII and got smeared for it. Anne Lindbergh writes, in this volume of her journals, of her frustration at president Roosevelt's power to drag the country into a war most of its citizens, at least in 1940, did not want.

In her forward, Lindbergh writes that Roosevelt was the first to set the precedent, later followed by Truman in Korea and Johnson in Vietnam, that the president has the power to take the U.S. into war without a declaration of war from Congress. Roosevelt did get a declaration of war after Pearl Harbor, but he was shipping war material to England, across the German sub-infested North Atlantic, long before that.

From what I’ve read, there has been significant popular opposition to all of our major wars.

Every US president finds some excuse to kill his share of foreigners. I've wondered if they're competing. There's some kind of very exclusive men's club where they compare scores, the stuffed head of a third world dictator mounted on the wall.

History allows us to escape from the meanness of today to the meanness of yesterday.

... it is this prostitution quality of the modern world [1940], this cheapening of real things, this taking the heart out of what is true, this insistence on the form, the appearance, the show and the fashion, that so sickens us both.

The people's will does not count. The President does what he wants, regardless. There could not be a more compelling majority to stay out of this war. All the polls show an overwhelming mass of the people want to stay out. No movement could be more popular than our movement. No meetings more successful. And yet the President says he doesn't believe in polls. The interventionists pooh-pooh any talk of a referendum. The deceive the people and draw them along closer and closer into the war, against their will.

Monday, December 8, 1941 – Listening to the radio in the early afternoon I heard the news – that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, Manila, Guam Island, Wake Island. It is the knell of the old world. All army officers all over the U.S. ordered into uniform. Espionage Act invoked. (If C. [Charles Lindbergh] speaks again they’ll put him in prison, I think immediately.)

I feel as if all I believed was America, all memories of it, all history, all dreams of the future were marching gaily toward a precipice – and unaware, unaware.

Art

At an art gallery I picked up this quote from George Braque, quoted by Kenneth Paul: "I should be utterly lost if I knew where I was going."

Paul says that art is like dreaming.

I guess subtle art has always depended on creating associations. More economical. You can depend on the associations to carry your point across. And the resonance effect makes it deeper.

Maybe creative people really need all that frustration.

It's always better to go after simple things and complex ideas.

Aging

I begin to appreciate why my father was so irritable. So hard to get any control.

With every year that goes by my body requires more mindful maintenance. I can't just take it for granted and live in my head, like I used to. (My doctor would ask me about symptoms and I couldn't tell him. I wasn't paying any attention.)

Now I have to focus on drinking enough fluids to keep stuff moving through my intestines. Last month I spent over a week feeling like I had a rock in my gut. I'm constantly working on diet control to keep my digestive system working right and get the cholesterol numbers down, hopefully without drugs, which my doctor thinks the Oregon Health Plan (Medicaid) won't pay for.

I think these are mostly "normal" changes rather than a sign of illness. I tell you all this so, if you're younger, you'll have some idea what to expect.

The main change is that I'm often tired. I often get up groaning until my body learns how to move again.

I'm 64 next month. Makes me wonder: what will I be like in 20 years, assuming I'm still here?

I can live with all this, and be mentally productive, but mainly because I’m retired, and not a lot is required of me physically.

There is something unpleasant about going for medical help, so I put it off as long as possible, hoping the problem will go away, as it usually does. I’m not sure what it is, maybe the intrusion on my personal space. Or the institutionalization of medicine, the impersonality, which makes the intrusion worse. Some corporation hands me a form to fill out which asks about my “genital health.”

Medicine needs to work on its “bedside manner.”

After a certain amount of past is accumulated, it begins to seem like a dream. Did I really do all that? All that's real, sort of, is sitting in this apartment in 2004, writing.

I thought after I retired I would have all this time, and I would dive in and get a lot done. What I'm discovering is that I don't want to get a lot done.

In old age, "really good shit" has a different meaning. 

Oregon

Since I moved to Eugene I've been soaking up local color. It's gray.

Oregon needs a new slogan: "We're poor here."

Measure 30 will be decided by Feb. 3 and I'll find out whether I'll have medical insurance (OHP) after August. There has been a strong grassroots campaign to pass it, and I did some work on it. I think it has a chance. Local Channel 9 news has been outrageously biased against the measure. The local newspapers, daily and weekly, are supporting it. [Didn’t pass.]

Last Saturday night I went down to Cafe Paradiso in downtown Eugene, about a 20 minute walk from my apartment, to hear some music. I like the compactness of Eugene. I'm much more likely to do something like this when I don't have to wait for a bus and spend half an hour on it, one way, like I did in Portland.

Eugene is a politics and therapy town – one driving you to the other.

I’m still working through the aftereffects of moving. Imagine living in a room that keeps changing. You reach for something in its familiar place but it’s somewhere else.

I’ve had a moving experience. Now I want it to stop.

Eugene Weekly, “A Town By Any Other Name”

 Eugene is well known for its political chasms. Ralph Nader chided EW during an interview last year, "Aren't you the town that calls itself progressive but has one of the most conservative city councils in the country?"

Why do hippies move to Eugene? Because there aren't any jobs.

Robots

Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio,  Robo sapiens, 2000

They interviewed robot scientists and took pictures of their robots. Most of the scientists seemed to be interested in trying to pattern a robot after humans or other biological beings. Biology, they say, is very instructive. Insects are popular, because they can do amazing things without thinking about it too much. As the scientists say, insectoid robots are "robust." They move better than humanoid robots.

So far, though, I haven't seen any robot plants in this book. Perhaps because they're so focused on mobility. In his science fiction novel Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling wrote about weaving artificial intelligence into nature. So you could have intelligent plants.

I'm wondering why they haven't just used a computer to control an animal. Why build a robot lobster to clear underwater mines when you could use a real one? Probably no workable computer/animal interface.

Something fascinating about a machine acting as if it were alive. One of those gut science fiction ideas that we pursue because they're there.

Joseph Ayers says the purpose of building a robot lobster is, "Because it isn't there."

One of the scientists says they're "reverse-engineering" animals.

To make a human being, even an artificial one, is to assume the role of the supreme deity, an action that in the Judeo-Christian tradition inevitably precedes a fall.

“I think the goal is to build robots that are autonomous. That's the Holy  Grail as far as I'm concerned – autonomy.” – Joseph Ayers

Love

A Register-Guard article says we can expect to spend about half our lives unmarried . The new cold war. Based on a University of Chicago study led by Edward Laumann. He'll have a book out on this in the spring, The Sexual Organization of the City.

According to “Boyd’s Factoids” in Wink, about half of married couples remain faithful. Perhaps that has something to do with about half of marriages ending in divorce. I wonder if this is typical of human societies in general or just our consumer culture? In America we are determined to have our cake and eat it too.

That may be why romantic trust is in such short supply that many of us go for years without dating. That and the fact that dating is such work and we are so lazy. I do enjoy talking to new women, but if it’s “dating” it makes me tense. I wonder: What is going on here? Are we getting anywhere? When does the love start? Is she really interested in me? Am I really interested in her? It’s like being an adolescent again, only without the enormous sex drive.

That’s America for you: Since nothing is ever settled, we are doomed to eternal adolescence.

My observation is that all husbands go deaf around the 12th year. – Kathleen Parker

Books

At 29, “we exchange a great dim possibility for a small hard reality.” – Gertrude Stein, Fernhurst

I give up. I can’t read this. The language is too highfalutin, abstract. I glanced through some of her later writing at the library and found the style weird. One of those writers who got carried away trying to be experimental. I’m willing, sometimes, to deal with difficult content, but I want the writing to be clear and easy. No sentences I have to read twice.

Black Sunshine is a satirical Florida crime novel. A lot of sailing talk which I don't understand, but I get a feeling of what it might be like, to be at home on the water.

Always a pleasure, to be in a different place.

The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Working class

Paul Le Blanc,  A Short History of the U.S. Working Class

By 1937, according to Le Blanc, “close to one-third of the workforce was unionized.”

Contrary to president Roosevelt’s image as a great liberal, Le Blanc writes that “FDR’s primary commitment was not to his working-class supporters – he was no less committed to the interests of big business, which sometimes meant giving labor the short end of the stick.”  Likewise Democratic administrations ever since.

After WWII, federal legislation was passed to reduce the power of unions. Still, 1945-46 saw “American labor’s greatest upsurge … and the consequence was the beginning of a steady rise in living standards – and buying power – of U.S. workers for the next 25 years… Adjusted for inflation, average wages increased by 250 percent from 1945 to 1975.”

The unions blew it  by not starting their own political party, concentrating only on the welfare of their own members, and not organizing the unorganized. They also tried to increase their membership by raiding other unions. So “labor came to be viewed more and more as a ‘special interest group’ seeking benefits for a limited sector of the working class.” Union membership declined from 36 percent in 1955 to 14 percent in 1995. Besides union incompetence, the loss was also due to antiunion laws, corporate pressure, and the deindustrialization of America, which wiped out a great many unionized, family wage factory jobs.

By the 1970s and 80s, Le Blanc says, U.S. business was feeling competition from the rebuilt economies of Europe and Asia. One of the ways they dealt with that was by reducing wages.

Meanwhile taxes have been downshifted to the middle and lower classes: “… the average tax bill for millionaires fell 27 percent from 1986 to 1989…. The top corporate rate in the 1950s was 52 percent. In the 1990s [it was] 36 percent.”

I’m generally pro-union, but it’s hard to care when I don’t see them doing me any good, and I have to compete with their higher incomes when I go to the supermarket. Also when they don’t support what I want politically. Unions have become embedded in the Democratic party, so they fight anything to the left which they perceive as a threat to the Democrats.

Still, Oregon unions have gotten us, through the initiative, two increases in the state minimum wage, which is a big deal.

What I would propose is to organize those whose yearly income is below the U.S. median, the people who are feeling the pain, and are being ignored by the major parties.

A great many people in this country are now dependent on government safety net programs for survival. We are entitled to these programs, both on the basis of morality and because we have been vastly underpaid for our labor. If the middle and upper classes are going to exploit us for cheap goods and services, then they should pay the bill.

“The accumulation of property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is, that the working hand perishes in old age, and that the employer abounds in affluence.” – Tom Paine

Some in the U.S. labor movement of 1940 believed … that [World War II] in some ways … was also a power struggle – including a struggle for markets, raw materials and economic conquest, similar to what World War I had turned out to be….

… [corporate] economic power translated into political power, and the big corporations became profoundly influential at all levels of government and in both major political parties.

Throughout the 1980s, corporate profits rose 205 percent, while the wages of production workers rose slower than the price rise in consumer goods…. In the 1979-1994 period the bottom 60 percent of all families saw their inflation-adjusted incomes decline….

“The coalition of an energized section of labor, Negroes, unemployed and welfare recipients may be the source of power that reshapes economic relationships and ushers in a breakthrough to a new level of social reform.” – Martin Luther King Jr., 1966

Dream

C and I go back to look at a place we lived as teenagers, in Los Angeles, by a high school. We find the school but everything seems to be changed around it. I say I don’t care about seeing the inside of the school but C wants to go in, and I lose track of her.

I find the local city library I used to go to, but it’s just a shell. They’re turning it into something else.

Can’t find the house where we lived, everything changed, don’t recognize anything. Get lost on road and then underground (?) tunnels/hallways, shops.

I’m carrying a small black puppy in my hands. Afraid if I put it down it will get lost or hurt.

A familiar theme: you can’t go back. It’s not there anymore. Without a past we can contact, we are lost.

Nineties

Joseph E. Stiglitz,  The Roaring Nineties, 2003

Another useful inside account of the Clinton administration. He says they erred on the side of getting rid of the deficit, while not doing enough for people.

During the [1990s] bubble, of course, all kinds of resources get wasted – in amounts that are often hard to fathom, and make government waste look small by comparison.

Mutual funds spend millions on research, but, as study after study has demonstrated, most of them do no better at stock picking than they might by throwing darts at a dartboard.

… businesspeople generally oppose subsidies, for everyone but themselves. For their own sector, there were always a host of arguments for why some government help was needed. From unfair competition abroad to an unexpected downturn at home, the stories were endless.

Genetics

According to an OPB program, “DNA”, about eugenics and James Watson, one in four families are affected by mental illness. Including mine.

Kay Jamison, who has written books on manic-depression, is interviewed. She says there is a high correlation between manic-depression (now called “bipolar”) and creativity. And is it worth it, considering the unhappiness and high risk of suicide? She seems to think so, and she has the illness. She says we need to preserve “diversity,” not produce a lot of “vanilla” people.

Having seen the disease in action – someone I used to know – I have my doubts. My friend had lists of famous depressive and bipolar people on her refrigerator door, made her feel better. But she couldn’t work. Even the slightest on-the-job stress would make her freak out. Intelligent, creative, energetic, charming, mostly nonfunctional. She took medication for it, which helped but not enough.

Jamison is apparently functioning well, in spite of her disease. She said it made her angry when a doctor told her she shouldn’t have children, for fear of passing on the bipolar gene or genes. But the disease, and suicide attempts, run all through her family.

Watson, one of the discoverers of DNA, wants to eliminate mental illness genes. Parents can now have genetic testing done before a baby is born, and abort if they wish. But the genes for most mental illnesses have not yet been located. Probably there are multiple genes, working together, which cause each illness. They can test for genes causing Down’s syndrome, cystic fibrosis, and I don’t know what else.

Watson hopes we can eventually go beyond detecting defective genes to changing them, not only preventing disease but enhancing people. Which some see as threatening. Watson, an old man, says people have been telling him all his life that he can’t do things he wants to do. He just keeps on trucking.

What I would like to see is more people with the genes for both intelligence and creativity. I just think it would be a more interesting world, at least for people like me.

If only I had the gene that allows people to sleep at will.