Month: August 2020

Have I lived the life I wanted?

Canaan’s descendants settled in the land of Canaan!

canaanIn the Boston Globe recently, there was an interesting title. “If I die now, have I lived the life I wanted to?” The subtitle: “The pandemic has people examining their lives. Some don’t like what they’re seeing.”

“Spouses are being left, retirements pushed up, friends dropped. People are moving to rural spots and strengthening their faith, and those fortunate enough to have a choice are saying ‘no’ to commuting.”

But I don’t think it’s just the pandemic. As the article noted, “A married couple have taken stock of their lives… They have been hanging out with the wrong people — friends who were nice to their faces, but, they now realize, are selfish. The friends refuse to wear masks or support Black Lives Matter, stances that rule out any further relationship.”

So it’s all of it: IMPOTUS, COVID-19, George Floyd and all of the ramifications of each. It’s certainly true for me.

Let me let you in on a little secret. I hate writing about race and racism in America. The only thing that I hate more is NOT writing about it. There is a hole in my stomach, probably from acid reflux, when I don’t write what I am feeling.

So I have come to a conclusion. There’s a woman in my life who is really upset with me. It is because I told her, in an email discussion in late June, that IMPOTUS was a bigoted person. Therefore, her support of him appeared racist to me. She says she’s “devastated.”

Old Testament

My realization, my culpability in this, is that I held back in the past. For instance, when she laid out to me that black people became slaves in America because of the curse of Canaan. I wrote about this theory five years ago.

From here: “Canaan’s descendants, however, did not settle in Africa, but in the land to which they gave their father’s name—the land of Canaan!… Later, Joshua conquered this land and placed the Canaanites under forced slave labor (Josh. 9:23)…. Thus, the prophetic curse of slavery was literally fulfilled on the Canaanites. The curse, therefore, applies to no ethnic group in existence today. The mistaken idea that Ham’s African descendants are cursed is a myth too often repeated even to this day!” And it’s out there a lot.

When I finally did figure out the absurdity that she was talking about – even assuming that the Bible is literally true, which she does – I might have called her out about it. But I didn’t, in the name of peace. But, as it states in Jeremiah 6:14-15:

They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.
Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct?
No, they have no shame at all;
they do not even know how to blush.

My disservice to her, then, was not saying something sooner. It’s not her support for IMPOTUS that is the reason I believe her views are racist; that just codifies it. It’s because of her views on the curse of Ham, and the seeming glee she had sharing this with me five or six years earlier. And some other things too.

Favorites: Talking Heads (1984-1987)

1983, SPAC

talking-heads
Frantz, Weymouth, Harrison, Byrne
More of my J. Eric Smith-inspired Favorite Songs by Favorite Bands, an impossible task I’m doing anyway.

I saw Talking Heads on their stop at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, north of Albany, NY in 1983. It was of the two or three best concerts I’ve seen in my lifetime. Oddly, I have never seen, in its entirety, the well-regarded Stop Making Sense movie made from that tour.

The then-current album in 1983 was Speaking in Tongues. It’s the only album of theirs I have on both vinyl and compact disc. Interestingly, the tracks have different running times, with the cuts on the CD going longer. It was one of those gimmicks that record companies were using at the time to get people to buy into the new CD technology. It remains my favorite album by the group.

Eventually, I acquired all of the studio albums on vinyl. My only CD, besides SiT, is the 1992 compilation Sand in the Vaseline. Here’s a quiz I did some years ago, based on their songs.

Tunes

Mu: Wild Wild Life.
Lambda: Slippery People. “How do you do?”
Kappa: City of Dreams.
Iota: Blind.
Theta: This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody). “I guess I must be having fun.” This is a song that takes me back to a specific time and place in upstate New York.
Eta: Psycho Killer Qu’est-ce que c’est

Zeta: Take Me to the River . If I were ever to sing Karaoke, it might be this version of the Al Green classic.
Epsilon: Crosseyed and Painless. The album Remain in Light is an aural canvas, and picking a “favorite song” is difficult.
Delta: Making Flippy Floppy. “Nothing is complete.” I love saying the repeated FL sound.
Gamma: Burning Down the House . “I’m…an…or..din.ar..y..guy.” Yeah, right. The first single from SiT.
Beta: Road to Nowhere. ‘Give us time to work it out.” “I wanted to write a song that presented a resigned, even joyful look at doom,” recalls David Byrne.
Alpha: Once in a Lifetime. “My God, what have I done?!” The lead single from Talking Heads’ fourth studio album, Remain in Light. The inspiration from Afrobeat is apparent.

Use of public office for private gain

An employee shall not use or permit the use of Government position to endorse any product, service, or enterprise

public office for private gainWay back in early 2018, the Washington Monthly noted A Year in Trump Corruption, indicating every time the man profited off the presidency.

The piece cited the U.S. Constitution twice. One was Article I, Section 9. “No person holding any office of profit or trust under [the United States], shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.”

There is also the Code of Federal Regulations. 5 CFR § 2635.702 covers Use of public office for private gain. To wit:

B. Appearance of governmental sanction. Except as otherwise provided in this part, an employee shall not use or permit the use of his Government position or title or any authority associated with his public office in a manner that could reasonably be construed to imply that his agency or the Government sanctions or endorses his personal activities or those of another.  

C. Endorsements. An employee shall not use or permit the use of his Government position or title or any authority associated with his public office to endorse any product, service, or enterprise except:

(1) In furtherance of statutory authority to promote products, services or enterprises; or
(2) As a result of documentation of compliance with agency requirements or standards or as the result of recognition for achievement given under an agency program of recognition for accomplishment in support of the agency’s mission.

Sleazy

Remember back in 2017? Kellyanne Conway Promotes Ivanka Trump Brand, Raising Ethics Concerns. Yet he looked the other way, which the specific law technically allowed.

Or 2019? Trump plugs son’s book while accusing Bidens of self-dealing. “For the children of the politically powerful, personal business and public dealings can often be indistinguishable, especially when private projects depend on foreign governments that are looking to bolster ties with Washington.”

Or last month: Ivanka Trump defends Goya post that watchdogs call unethical.

I point these things out, not because they’re new phenomena, but because they are not. Regularly before the election, I want to note why IMPOTUS is unfit for office. It’s certainly not because he’s a Republican. Nor is it because I disagree with him, though Allah knows I do. It’s because he and his family are grifters.

Earlier this year, in a piece about impeachment, I wrote: “Frankly, I wish the House had gone after the emoluments issue. He may have been guilty of that on January 20, 2017, when he failed to put his businesses in a blind trust and maintained controlling interests.”

To paraphrase Wayne and Garth, “He’s not worthy.”

Lest We Forget again

“Early in [his] term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of his cruelties, collusions, and crimes…

“It felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them. This list will be updated between now and the November 2020 Presidential election.”

El Gato and the other new hire

blindsided

el gatoHere’s a work story from 2000, give or take a year, that I wish had gone better, about a new hire.

First, I have to explain that, for a brief time around the turn of the century, my department, the New York Small Business Development Center, was taken over by something called the Institute for Entrepreneurship. It happened because IE had political clout.

There was a kickoff in which New York State Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno rambled on. It was the evening of November 10, in 1999, I believe. We were all required to show up and stand around looking enthused, about what, je ne sais pas, the night before a holiday.

Felix Strevell, a former barber who inexplicably had became NYS Deputy Secretary of State headed the IE. Ostensibly, the entity was supposed to be a conduit “through which SUNY has sought public grants and private donations to expand academic research and development that could help small businesses.” But there were about 24 employees, and most of them had not much to do.

The contempt for which IE held SBDC showed up in an organizational chart I saw and wish I had copied. Every one of the IE folks was on the chart, but the entirety of the SBDC, which had been operating for a decade and a half, was in a box on the bottom.

For the most part, we at SBDC kept our heads down and did our valuable work. Occasionally, though, El Gato, as I referred to him, wanted our then-state SBDC director, Jim King to do things that weren’t allowable. Even through closed doors, one could hear the arguments. Jim King, BTW, was not related to Robert King, who was then Chancellor of all of SUNY. Robert King’s wife, not incidentally, worked part-time for the IE, doing who knows what.

The crux of the matter

The local SBDC center in Albany needed to hire an advisor to counsel potential entrepreneurs. I was the chair of the committee, which was fine; I’d done it before. This involved calling the meetings, designing the procedure, and doing the paperwork that SUNY required in terms of our process. We came up with a suitable candidate, who I’ll call CC.

Then, another member of the committee, who I’ll call Holly, said we had to hire someone else as well. What? It wasn’t anyone who was already on the list of candidates. Holly had the resume, and she expected that I, as chair, would sign off on them. I wasn’t about to do that. So SHE signed off on the mystery candidate. I told one of my superiors about it, but they felt there wasn’t much to do about it.

What I WISH I had done was to take down the name of the bogus employee and report it. But to whom? There were a few mid-level, long-term SUNY Central employees I could have, should have consulted. By the time it occurred to me this strategy, I didn’t have the bogus candidate’s name. Though, as I look back on it, they probably could have figured it out from the date of service. I was blindsided and didn’t figure out a better way to respond.

Comeuppance

By the way, El Gato was canned in 2001, and soon thereafter, the SBDC was released from the yoke of the IE. In 2007, El Gato admitted to having committed fraud, “including using his corporate credit card to pay for a trip to Disney World, bringing his father along on two business trips to China, and arranging for a $95,000 pay raise to which he was not entitled.”

He continues to have legal trouble. El Gato was convicted in 2017 of perjury, in giving false testimony about his personal and family expenditures.

Eh. Twenty years later, this still bugs me.

Utility: external gas meter

a six-inch gap

utility conesIn a real, fundamental way, I’ve actually been, dare I say, excited of late. That’s because, for the past two months or so, people from utility entities have been doing work on my street.

It started on June 9 with a tag on our door that National Grid was going to install a new gas line on our property, and to install an external meter. We let Matt into the side door of our house. It was a way to let him do his job while being socially distant from us. In fact, he may have been the first person I allowed into our house in nearly three months. It felt… foreign.

Within the week, workers were digging a large hole across our sidewalk and onto a bit of the lawn, with a smaller hole by the house. Then other folks filled the holes, initially with small rocks, pressed down by a machine sounding like a jackhammer. The strips in the sidewalk were tarred over.

What’s that smell?

A few days later, I vaguely smelled what I thought was gas. But it wasn’t coming from the area of our oven in the kitchen. Instead, I sensed it as I walked down the stairs from the second to the first floor. We called National Grid.

The guy who came over was Will. As it turned out, he had heard of me because of a convoluted story. The bottom line is that his wife’s middle name is Green. Blame this on Will’s father-in-law, Broome.

In any case, Will discovered that the vent that sends the hot water heater’s contaminants out of the house through the chimney was detached by six inches. That’s huge. So we were experiencing a mild case of carbon monoxide poisoning. I suspect the jackhammer-like tool outdoors a couple of weeks earlier disconnected the vent. Note to self: install a CO monitor in the basement!

In other works

Subsequently, different workers have planted grass seed on our lawn, which has been growing back better than it was before. Two sidewalk panels were replaced entirely.

Workers trimmed excess branches from our power lines. We wish they had taken more of the lower branches, but I gather they weren’t National Grid’s responsibility.

Workers repaved part of our street. Not just patching holes but digging up and replacing. I had a nice, brief chat with one of the guys who helps control the traffic when one lane is closed off. I noted that everyone would notice if he and his partner at the end of the construction barrier were to screw up.

This talk happened right after I’d seen a story on the news about the value of conversation, even with a stranger, in releasing oxytocin. That connection with others may be the thing I miss the most in COVID world.

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