Sunday, May 27, 2012

Shibboleth


The volunteer coordinator Jessica  and I got into an interesting discussion about rhetoric the other night at Sharon's party. She felt, like I often feel,  the difficulty in dealing with the right's rhetoric and how it has captured the discussion. And dominates the public discourse. We agreed that you can't really argue point by point, because of an inherent asymmetry in the loaded language that they use. So you can't argue logic, even though it is important and very useful to break down the fallacy and syllogistic inconsistencies, just so you see where the faults are and what they are.
So how can we on the progressive side use a more powerful rhetoric, and how can that be useful?

Really, the first task is to identify the target audience whom you wish to address.
You will never convince the right wing to change their thinking, because it is not based on evidence or logic to begin with but on an emotional self-aggrandizing sham logic or gut feeling involving some unspoken assumptions that will not stand the light of reason so are shrouded in layers of self-referent sentiment. And combine that with the loaded language of specialized meanings you get an assymetry that defies actual discussion the whole effect being to stifle persuasion. You can stand toe to toe and trade assertions, but it might not do any good. Still, you will be serving notice that you aren't buying their BS.
So who are you talking for? Folks that have good feelings but who are uninstructed, folks who are just now getting involved, and folks who are discouraged about never hearing exactly why our side is in fact morally and politically excellent.

Back in the day, through the 20s and 30s there was so much left wing rhetoric that the american public burnt out on it. That social-equity rhetoric is now felt to be shameful, communist, degrading, wrong.
To the point that we of the left are vaguely ashamed of our own point of view.
In the 30s and then again in the 70s this culture was presented with the idea of a "revolution" a radical restructuring of the social and economic relation and Americn culture pretty roundly rejected that restructuring, even though, for the dialectician, it wasn’t that simple, we got the Great society and John birch at the same time. And the left, which has a conscience, feels bad that it failed  and feels bad that people whio didn’t understand in the first place, felt threatened.
Now the left is embarrassed to hold these views.

So I have to say to the progressive in public life, don't be embarrassed, be proud to want to help the poor, to want health care for all, and proud to strive for a fair system. Paid for by all, especially by those who benefit the most.
Progressive rhetoric has an important place that needs to be recognized and utilized more readily in the public discourse.
There is a strong current of reason that needs to be articulated, like it once was. The left used to be the masters of the podium.

First progressive principle that is understated in public discourse is that old stand-by, social responsibility. It was said often that history will judge a civilization on how it treats its weakest citizens. TQM, the management philosophy and the reason Lexus builds great cars, says the same. "Your suppliers will treat you exactly like you treat your smallest customer" I don't know how that happens but it seems to be true. I used to hear this but I don't anymore.
There used to be an old Mainline christian church rhetoric, based more or less on the "sermon on the mount" advocating social responsibility as a matter of simple christian (with a small c) virtue. Feeding the poor, clothe the naked, heal the sick.

My second underused concept is that good shit costs money. You cant drive a Maybach and expect to pay for a Kia. Same for communities. Financial responsibility.
You wouldn't enjoy a nice meal in a nice restaurant and then refuse to pay the bill. Neither should you live in a nice community with streetlights and a fire department and refuse to pay taxes, even though much of what the taxes pay for is intangible. Intangible but necessary.
Wealth is not created in a vacuum.
People need to pay for the benefits they accrue.
The level playing field is an expensive facility.

A third point being that it is NOT A GAME. I heard Mr Romney saying to Jimmy Kimmel in the most patronizing tone that folks who don't buy health insurance aren't playing by the rules, and that because of that they should be excluded coverage for preexisting conditions. As if it were a simple choice and that they didn’t have health insurance because they were cheating the system. Mr Romney repeated and extended the metaphor until I realized that he really does think it is a game and that the game is more important than the players. The guy just doesn’t understand how it is to live in the working class strata of near-poverty, where you never have enough money to pay all the bills in any given month, which is the ordinary reality of too many Americans.
The minute this "game" metaphor comes up we need to jump on it hard, get all judgmental and not let it pass as a rhetorical device. Put them on the defensive right off the bat. Maybe for the rich it is a game, to see how much they can get away with, but for the rest it is a life and death struggle.
The middle class pays too much, the wealthiest don't pay enough, and the poorest simply self-destruct  in the most painful and expensive way possible.

A new rhetorical opportunity, which seems to me to be  worth thinking about, is a legitimate question about who or what actually creates jobs. The 1% all act like they do it, and that we shouldn’t tap their wealth to finance the community,that it is either/or,  and they always use the fear of job loss to justify their tax exemptions. But one thing about capitalists that is an eternal truth is that they cut jobs anyway. Whenever possible.
http://www.businessinsider.com/this-billionaire-venture-capitalist-gave-a-ted-talk-saying-rich-people-dont-create-jobs--and-ted-is-refusing-to-post-it-2012-5#ixzz1v4NvmZV2
It turns out the TED folks really didn’t shut this down for the reasons stated, but it is an interesting point and it captures a rhetorical opportunity.
TL;DR  Demand creates all economic activity. Consumers create demand. Rich consumers consume more but only to a point, no matter how much money you have you can only consume so much, 24 hrs in a day etc. One stomach. You can consume a ridiculous amount, but not an infinite amount. Beyond that point, hoarded wealth seems to lose its influence on the vigor of the economy... Unless it is spent, like governments spend money, to buy things, big things. Wealthy people never buy big things. Nobody buys a new interstate highway, or a highway bridge, or a state park, or a reservoir, or a subway system. Or a guided missile frigate.
Companies build production facilities, to be sure, but not out of altruism or excess of capital. They build in response to demand for products, and if you have that you can get the money whether you have it in pocket or not. Privately accumulated wealth in individual hands beyond a certain point  does not, in fact, create jobs. Neither do the owners of capital. Consumers create jobs.
Capital never hires a worker unless and until it is forced to

Finally, I have a candidate for fallacious rhetorical device of the year. A shibboleth for the left. The word Oligarchy, a wonderful scary word that just sounds badass. And this might be a very effective point to make. The right has the word “Government” which they use with scorn and loathing, when they wish to cloud an issue or frighten the uninstructed.
In case you are wondering, a shibboleth used to be, back in the old testament days, a bone, a shoulder blade from a sheep, which are kind of creepy looking to start with, that the head priest would invest through ritual and prayer with all the troubles of the tribe, which were then thought to actually go live in that bone, like for instance the Philistines, or the plague or whatnot. Then when the priest wanted to intimidate everybody, to make them toe the line he would give the stink-eye and yell and then brandish the shibboleth and everybody would cower terrified in awe.

The 1% is an Oligarchy.
A) people wont know what the fuck an oligarchy is but it sounds bad.
B) they might know from the news about the rich gangsters in Russia and everybody knows that Russians are shady.

Cheap trick? maybe, and then you have to ask why not use a device or two just to create some breathing room? Folks who use dishonest rhetorical devices and fallacious reasoning as a matter of course are in no position to begin enforcing rhetorical purity.


Thursday, May 24, 2012

Poopy Day

Rain rain rain...
Ross came and got me this morning in his beat up little ford pickup and took me out to the marina. The place was a pigsty.
Good news though was that the hatchcover seems to be shedding water. Nice.
With no boom tent the whole cabin top is exposed to the rain. The starboard house top leaks a bit around one of the port lights, those silly oval looking things they put in modern sailboats. So the little shelf behind the settee had some water in there, but nothing really got wet.
So the first thing was to mop it up, which led to a general mopping up of the cabin and the galley, which has been so jammed with shit the whole time that the shelves never really got clean. Now its all empty so I ragged it up and boiled some water and ragged it up some more.
Rain rain rain...so I got on my oilers and I went out and hung the boom tent and then pulled all the blue tape I left last week when I varnished. The varnish looks good!
There was a ton of stuff in the cabin to go to the dumpster. And to put away.
Now if I get a prospective buyer I wont have to cringe..
Then about 2:30 Ross came back with his little 97 horsepower battered blue Ford pickup and guess what ? He picked me up!
Home for meds.
Not bad for a poopy day

Friday, May 18, 2012

Shining Up

My pals are making me look really good.
Nomad David called the other day to see if I wanted to ride out to the marina which we did and we even went to the Devil Store to score cheap tools on the way.
I managed to get a complete lap of varnish done and left things looking very yachtlike.
Dave T showed up just as I finished to take me to lunch. I showed him the material I had put together to market Felicity Jane, and we finalized the plan.
I spent some time yesterday setting up a new blog with the boat details and lots of photos.
You've seen it all, but the blog is called felicity jane for sale.
The last act in this little drama was the ad I put up on Craigslist.
Oh yeah, I got the pals.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

High-Qual

Qualitative analysis doesn't tell you how much, it tells you what, specifically whether.
So yesterday when other Jan called from the clinic she had some mixed news. The good part is that the 8-week qualitative analysis did not find ANY hep-c viruses in my blood.
Yay!
The less bitchin news is that the little white blood cells and the platelets are still lower than is really good for you, although I looked it up and vegans sometimes have WBC as low as mine. The RBC is back to low-normal.
I think it's fun to obsess a little over this minutiae, for a time. I think I would eventually lose interest.

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Party Line

Casa Colima on SW Capitol Highway in Hillsdale was the scene tonight of a gala socio-political event tonight for supporters of  Sharon Meieran. The professional politicos and the friends and colleagues of this remarkable woman got together for Margueritas and Tapas and conversation mostly about the paucity of information about the election results.
I wasn't going to go but I got a second wind when the sun went down so I bused on over there. I'm glad I did. I got to meet and to chat for a few minutes with Sharon's Mom, a wonderful woman and another smart cookie as well. It was good to see Sharon again, and to pay my respects to the campaign staff. And the I bailed out and just by the skin of my teeth caught the last bus rolling and I had good bus-luck all the way home.
I don't know that her campaign did anything wrong, but it is hard to compete with the machine that her opponent represents, the old-time Oregon labor/lefty party organization. I think Ms Williamson paid a lot of dues over the years, and cultivated the right associations, and I would be willing to believe she fielded more volunteers and better paid staff.  I think she will make a fine representative and If she indeed wins this primary I shall support her enthusiastically in any way I can.
It looks like we didn't win, but I am glad Sharon ran a positive campaign, and it was a treat to make her acquaintance. I hope the future rewards her with more responsibility, Oregon as a community and Oregon as an idea need people like her, even better Oregon needs her specifically.

Friday, May 11, 2012

The Natural

Tuesday was a very nice day. I got a bit of sunburn, especially on the tops of my ears and especially especially the little stripe of naked white scalp where my hair is parted. Ouch. Not naked white any more.
We were working on the boat all day, and Bob my brother worked way harder than me to get some of the teak ready for varnish. And then he swept and dusted and it just looks great now. I'm planning a trip to Sextons tomorrow to get the material.
That's the chandlery out on the very end of Hayden island, actually Tomahawk island to the east of Jantzen Beach. Irony being that I can catch a #6 bus in Goose Hollow that takes me all the way there and back.
And, a side note, I had a lovely and informative lunch with the candidate today, unplanned. She is even cooler than I thought. And smart, but she has that natural gift of making you feel that she is very interested in what you are saying and not appearing to be aware that she is doing it, to the point where I believe she was actually very interested in what I had to say, and you can't buy that with PAC money, and they don't teach it in school. She's a natural.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Middle School Legislature

I basically have no credibility in the larger world because I do stuff like the "Hygiene" post.
Now when I need to say something halfway serious, I am in no danger of actually being taken seriously.
I'm new to this politics game, though my friends have been doing it for many years, with a great deal of success I might add.
This H36 contest is my test case, about how this stuff is done.
The defining concept for me is that the people I know personally who have done well in the legislature have one thing in common. They are very, extremely, embarrassingly, intimidatingly smart. I'm not slow, but Billy Bradbury and Jules Bailey are scary smart guys, and I consider it a privilege to claim acquaintance.
The pace in Salem during the session is brutal, one thing after another, with little time for reflection or doubt. None for confusion.
An average Joe can participate and not look too bad, and there are plenty of people to tell him what to do, how to vote, what things mean what, but in order to drive a specific agenda and create legislation and guide public policy from the front you have to be very quick on your feet indeed and the average Joe so beloved of those on the one side of the aisle will be lost, a pawn  in somebody else's game.
You have to work, to read and read some more and grasp what you have read and  synthesize it immediately and project the implications and move on to the next thing before the ink is dry, so to speak. You have to shift gears instantaneously and carry your whole attention with you at all times. Not everybody can do it.
Which is why I support Sharon Meieran so fully. I know she can get out ahead of this process and actually think it and lead it and know what she is about, the whole time.
Jen Williamson is no doubt a wonderful person, and I don't care who her clients were or are. She strikes me as an honest and sincere character. That is not at issue, in my mind. I know she will do her very best and that will be pretty good, actually, better than most. She no doubt cares about the right NPR type things. I just don't think she has that polymath all-consuming genius that marks the real leadership. I'm excited about Sharon Meieran because I think I see that she does have what it takes to be a real guiding hand in public policy.
John Kitzhaber, the aging mad genius of health care reform, needs her in the house to help get this new policy grounded, to do some of the heavy lifting he has done so well for so long. And I don't even like John Kitzhaber, but I recognize that he knows far more about this public health business than anybody I have read about or heard of on the national scene let alone in our fair tiny lovable broke-ass state.
There's a lot of middle school nonsense going on in this H36 race that is beneath the dignity of either of these fine and admirable women. You may say what you like about either, but  a gentleman, or a lady, does not stoop to dispute distasteful rumour, which is what this slinging of accusation amounts to. We have a whole political party dedicated to the skewing of falsehood into the form of truthiness. Let's leave this hallway-by-the-locker nonsense to them.Vote the issues, vote the candidates, and leave the accusations to the fools.

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Stumptown Attitude

 From: "Heidi Dillenbach" <info@spiceandtea.com>
To: "The Spice & Tea Exchange" <info@spiceandtea.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 2, 2012 4:50:02 PM
Subject: Message from The Spice & Tea Exchange

From:        Heidi Dillenbach
Email:       

------------------------------------------------------

I am deeply disappointed in my dealings with your store staff today, May2.
Last Christmas I bought a mortar/pestle from your store. It is the kind with
a full pestle that fits in a rounded bowl. I don't like it for grinding
spices, the effort is spread out too much and it wont shred things like
fenugreek or rosemary or cumin or even sage. I went in the store today to
see what can be done and the fellow pretty much told me tough luck, to pick
up the little rosemary leaves and pre-cut them with scissors,that he would
not sell me another pestle and that he would not take this one back. I
suspected when I bought it that this might happen but the store guy said it
would work great and I would like it. It doesn't, and I don't, and it is
humiliating to be treated like this. This fellow today acted like I was
stupid and that I was trying to get away with something.Please help me get
some satisfaction. Remember the TQM rule, that your suppliers will treat you
like you treat your smallest customers.

_________________________________________________________
The next day I get this from corporate HQ

Hello Heidi-
I apologize for the experience you had at one of our stores.  As the mortar & pestle you purchased did not meet with your expectations, we will absolutely exchange it for another or refund your purchase.  I realize how frustrated you must feel and would like to get your situation rectified as soon as possible. 
Your email has reached us here at our Distribution Center in FL, can you tell me in which store you made your purchase? 
I appreciate you giving us the opportunity to make this situation right and look forward to hearing from you soon. 
Sincerely,
Jen Hand
The Spice & Tea Exchange Distribution Center
St. Augustine, FL




Hygeine (fixed)

Pardon me, sir. You seem to have a fragment of... turd? ...On your mustache...






(Edit): This is why I consider myself borderline sociopathic, because writing this, actually, thinking it up, over the course of many months, crafting every pause and nuance, gave me hours of real fun and still, to this very minute cracks me up to a disturbing degree

Friday, May 4, 2012

Rhymes with Siren


I got out of my comfort zone last night and guess what, I had a wonderful time.
The Sharon Meieran campaign held what they call a phone bank out in Multnomah Village at campaign headquarters, a little barely furnished office suite in the basement of a dental building. It’s a nice part of town, on the road to Lake Oswego, if you know what I mean.
There weren’t that many people there, six of us, and I had the unenviable task of writing personal notes from Sharon on the campaign brochures that will be left with those who aren't home or won't come to the door during the handshake knockalongs this coming Saturday.Tomorrow.
A big key with these grass-roots type campaigns seems to be personal contact, so the staff tries to get ahold of everybody they can in the run-up to May 15.
The others got on the phone with their little laptops open in front of them on the tables and tried to get a simple and respectful script delivered to the surprising number of folks who actually picked up in response to the dinner-time jingle from”unknown number” on their caller ID screens. And a number of folks weren’t even annoyed about it. I was kind of tickled about the response we got, so very wholesome and neighborly.
I wrote little notes until my wrist was on fire, and my atrocious handwriting was judged to be perfect for the task, after all, Sharon is an MD.
Then they fed us, delightful honey baked chicken and a nice mixed salad and some enormous very red very ripe strawberries. I even scored a ride home from the coordinator.
Nice folks.

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

I like it like that!

My life is really really boring. This blog suffers for it, even though I am quite content.
If you are as tired as I am of endless medical updates then you're gonna have a bad time. If you hate sailboats, you will be disappoint. And if you are in recovery like I am you will be glad I'm not on here complaining about or making fun of the program or of people in the program, by far the more entertaining of those two options, because anonymity, that's why.
Even though they said Monday my hematocrit and red blood count were fine, Tue I get a call that the RBC is below the line and I have to drop my Ribavirin dosage.
This is why it is a drag to catch your healthcare providers in a lie.  I dont believe a fucking word that fat dunderhead says, and I hate the idea of dropping that dosage because that is what fucked me up last time. They say it wont hurt the outcomes with the triple Tx so I'm gonna do it for right now but I want to know why not procrit?
And another week is gone by and no work on the boat. All I need is a couple of decent days to some prep, and the one really nice day to put on some Cetol, which is a varnish substitute. And the same snotty yachties that never leave the dock are all, when I say "Nice varnish" they're all "That's not varnish its cetol and I'm like, no, that's your asshole."
So I went to a party at Danny's on Saturday after MxM, Trina's birthday, 23 I believe. Great food, all the serious people in the program, good conversations, lots of love. I did notice there were not too many black people, though, no Jackie or Harrison or even that lovable nutbag Pamela, or Tyrone the world's most thoughtful African American Man. Oh, well.
I did have a sit down with Trina, who is one of those people that intimidate me to the point of incoherence, and I came away with an improved sense of who she is and also feeling I finally might have made a positive impression on her and her friends. I hope so.