Outrage, Indeed

In which credit card holders are being asked to pay for the sins of the irresponsible.

To cite a personal example, my father's Bank of America credit card rate was abruptly raised from 8% to 29% back in November. He has good credit, has never missed a payment, and has never gone into default with that bank or any other credit lender. Each of the major players have now accepted billions of dollars in government TARP funds but continues to charge exorbitant fees anyway. More that just a Congressional inquiry is needed to right this wrong. We need the Obama Administration to address this problem head on and propose legislation to stop these usurious tactics.

Articles like this one understate the problem. The AYP rate for many cards has done more than just double--it has tripled or quadrupled in many cases. This is not a recent phenomenon, either. Many cardholders have noticed inflated interest rates for the past six months or so.

Congratulations Are In Order

My mother's first book will be published and ready for purchase on 1 May. Entitled Creating the Best Literacy Block Ever: A Framework for Successfully Managing, Teaching, and Assessing in an Extended Literacy Block, it is available for pre-order purchase here.



For those of you who care about Early Childhood Education and teaching reading to grades K-3, this book will be right up your alley.

Quote of the Week

Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them; then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone; whereby in them you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you.- George Fox.

My New Favorite Obsession

The Fail Blog

10 Most Influential Men

Liberality tagged me for this. Due to time constraints, I'm only going to select ten instead of the twenty she suggested. Since the word "influential" is a highly subjective term just by its very existence, I'm going to pick the men who were most highly influential in my life.


1. Peter Cook



Comedic genius and wit extraordinary.

2. Charlie Chaplin



An autodidact Vaudevillian who through his own hard work and creativity rose from utter poverty to become phenomenally popular and influential to the current day.

3. C. Vann Woodward



A brilliant historian, scholar, and writer whose prescient insights still amaze me.

4. James Thurber



Member of the Algonquin Round Table, Thurber's darkly comedic worldview, cartoons, and self-designed genres of creative fiction greatly popularized The New Yorker magazine.

5. Lou Reed



A rock musician whose inventive guitar tunings, sonic effects, and literate, often sordid lyrics completely revolutionized the genre.

6. Franklin Delano Roosevelt



A hero to my grandparents and a hero to me.

7. Hieronymus Bosch




A Dutch painter of the fifteen and early sixteenth centuries whose bizarre, demented imagery had no equal in its time or since.

8. Thomas Eakins



A multi-talented painter, photographer, sculptor, and educator.

9. Che Guevara



A physician, revolutionary, guerrilla leader, and writer. He espoused a socialistic philosophy that called for the unity of Hispanic America and an end to the crippling poverty of the region. A deeply flawed, but still admirable man.

10. Eugene Debs



Labor leader, unapologetic socialist, and frequent Presidential candidate.

Here, There, and Everywhere

At The American Street

Saturday Video

Neko Case is the latest female singer/songwriter to skillfully mine the alt country genre. She is also quite the fashionable artist these days, so once you see this you can name drop to your heart's content.

What Is a Martyr?

On this day where Christians pause to reflect upon the grim death by crucifixion of Jesus, I thought it might be worthwhile to commemorate a few notable figures who have given their lives to advance a noble cause. The question of what constitutes a martyr is itself a controversial one. I think this is because the cause or causes these men and women advanced were often quite polarizing, and many times their frequently imperfect behavior in their personal lives distracts and detracts from the good works they did during their time on earth. Character flaws are true for all of us, but when too many of them are present in the court of popular opinion, even a history of good works cannot redeem them.

To Islamic extremists, the 11 September 2001 hijackers were considered martyrs, though most people around the world do not believe that this. Martyrdom has been extended to people who were intrinsically secular and not particularly religious, also. In truth, I think there are few martyrs who would make almost everyone's list just like there are few people who have ever lived who are universally praised. Who would be on your list?

Here are a few martyrs I thought notable.

1. Joan of Arc



2. Mohandas K. Gandhi



3. Harvey Milk. This is a controversial selection.

Old Verses to an Even Older Song: The Budget Battle

When President Obama's budget comes up for a vote in the next few days, expect the same predictable attacks from the right. GOP politicians will try their damndest to saturate the cable news airwaves with an rabid outrage bordering on overkill. I would guess that many of these attacks will, no doubt, be some variation of the same arguments used against The New Deal back in the early 1930's. Allow me to include a few applicable quotes to better underscore my point. Each of these comes from Adam Cohen's book Nothing To Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America.

The Wagner Bill immediately drew Republican attacks. "It is socialism," Representative Robert Luce of Massachusetts protested. "Whether it is Communism or not I do not know."

How many times have we heard THAT complaint in the last nine months? While it is true that the reform measures pushed by the Obama Administration represent a growth in government oversight, federal spending, and government intervention in the private sector, it'd be pushing it to say that these program represent anything close to true Socialism. Americans, by in large, have a healthy suspicion and distaste of complete government control of anything. Furthermore, it would really be an exaggeration to state that the budget bill is a manifestation of Communism, irregardless of what Glenn Beck says.

Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio, whose unswerving loyalty to the Republican Party earned him the nicknamed "Faithful Fess" complained that "Uncle Sam is looked upon as a Santa Claus to give alms."

Until The New Deal, it was widely believed that poverty was little more than a moral failure. Those who were unemployed and living in squalid conditions, as the argument went, deserved exactly what they got because their gaping character flaws and deliberately slothful behavior was what created their state of being. These days, I'm not sure we're quite so callous and cold-hearted towards the poor, but there is still a strain of thought in the American condition whereby we assume the poor have no desire to work, no compulsion to increase their station, and are instead content to live off of the public welfare. FDR himself was hesitant to institute a large-scale system of relief because he held many of these same reservations. Quite simply put, he believed that a European-style welfare system gave an incentive for people to live off the system and not put in their fair share. The reforms he favored along these lines advanced work over monetary payments, though through the crusading efforts of progressive Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, he did establish a system of public relief that involved unemployment payments. The arguments for and against them is a debate that has been raging for a good while.

Southerners, led by Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, insisted that states be given full control over how their funds were spent, to ensure that federal administrators could not require that blacks and whites be treated equally. Conservatives demanded that no new federal bureaucracy be created to manage the problem.

Even if you remove the racial component, attitudes like this still characterize the political mentality of the southern states. Southern natives, I being one of them, recognize the reasons why politicians frequently invoke the tenth amendment and state's rights to serve their own interests; to wit, the region wishes to run its own affairs alone without anyone's oversight. The problems in this circle-the-wagons mentality arise when a kind of entrenched, stubborn provincialism creates an unwillingness to work together for anyone's common good. Arguably, the south has never known true democracy for this reason and its leadership has never wished to work together with Washington, DC, or surrounding states, even for a noble purpose.

___________

I imagine what it must be like to be part of Obama's Brain Trust at the moment in time. If I were in that vaulted inner circle, I'd be excited to shape public policy to a degree that hasn't been done since The New Deal. Rather than sit on the outside and throw rocks, an attitude that has given rise to the careers of so many armchair politicians and cable television pundits, I'd rather seek to understand the game plan of the Obama Administration. Perhaps I've never sold into a gloom and doom way of thinking or wanted the role of the mad prophet forecasting the end times. As Frances Perkins herself said, "You've no idea how much more human beings can endure, particularly if they see a ray of hope."

Short-Term Planning

Eventually I intend to point-by-point describe the similarities I've observed between FDR's New Deal and the reform measures proposed by the Obama Administration. I'm sure that you wouldn't be surprised to hear that the same criticisms being used now by the Republicans are identical to the ones used by the party eighty years ago.

This is my goal. Give me another day to prepare.

Performance Video

Movie Review: Visages d'enfants

What gets forgotten in a discussion of the late silent era are the surprising variety of quality French directors producing work during the period. Any worthy list would have to include Abel Gance, best known his series of art films packed full of experimental techniques, high production values, and substantial running times. Gance was perhaps even better known for his sweeping epic, Napoléon, which was, in typical fashion, six hours long upon first release. One shouldn't forget Andre Antoine, an actor by trade, who dabbled in film making before retiring from the screen altogether to become a film and theater critic. And, the list would be wise to pause to mention the director of Visages d'enfants, Jacques Feyder. Though technically a Belgian, Feyder worked as both an actor and director in his adopted home country of France.

Upon viewing, a contemporary audience might make the connection to a more recent foreign film. To wit, Ingmar Bergman used Visages d'enfants as a major plot influence in his 1982 goodbye to feature film making, Fanny and Alexander. The differences between the two films are that in Feyder's work, the father of the sensitive young boy (Jean) who serves as the film's protagonist remarries a widowed female, primarily to provide his two children with a second parent. While in Visages d'enfants, the stepmother is callous, firm, and primarily unemotional in nature, in Fanny and Alexander, by contrast, the sensitive young boy's (Alexander) father dies instead. Though his new stepfather, a Bishop, metes out discipline with a similarly firm hand, the clergyman also possesses a deep sadism, the likes of which is not present in the former film. Additionally, Feyder's film differs from Bergman's because includes a bratty step-sister suspicious of Jean and fiercely loyal to her birth mother.

A major similarity between the two films, of course, is that Jean is devoted to his younger sister, Pierrette, in the same way that Alexander is devoted to Fanny. Both sets of siblings band together against changes in their environment and face adversity with defiance. The film's conclusion, however, is decidedly more optimistic and affirming than in the Swedish director's work. In Visages d'enfants, having nearly caused the death of his cursed stepsister through deliberate perfidy, Jean, plagued with guilt, throws himself into a river. He is saved by his stepmother, who has had a change of heart. As he regains consciousness in her arms, he refers to her at long last as his own mother, not a stranger in the place of his birth mother. By contrast, in Fanny and Alexander, Alexander's mother comes to realize the evil that lurks within her new husband. The clergyman has no redeeming qualities, much less any desire to change his cold heart. Alexander will never see him as a Father and the Bishop will never make anything more than the feeblest of overtures to be liked and trusted by his stepson.

Quote of the Week

"Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people"- Eleanor Roosevelt

Have We Become Numb to Tragedy?

MSNBC seems to think so.

I think it's a simple matter of perception. Lost in all the news regularly reported and discussed is the simple fact that there are more people roaming the earth these days. With population increase come a statistically larger likelihood that there will be more people born with paranoid schizophrenia, more serial killers, more mentally unstable people who refuse to seek treatment, and more of everything else, really. When it comes down to a matter of proportion, we'll continue to see these maladies increase ever-so-slightly with time.

Once I talked to a firefighter about the nature and demands of his job. I asked him the question that many of us wonder: "How you deal with the tragedy you face on a daily basis?" His reply was, "If I internalized everything with which I deal regularly and took it home with me, I'd go totally nuts. You simply can't do it if you want to work this job." It was nothing personal, he added.

Factor in a hyperactive cable news network cycle and we get further inundated with similar stories. To an extent we are somewhat "numb" to tragedy, but under that criteria, my Depression-era Grandparents were, too. For example, my grandfather's Christmas presents every year were an apple and an orange. My Grandmother remembered even fifty years later how she spent all of D-Day weeping, having heard over the radio that the invasion was underway. She knew from frequent correspondence over the mails that two of her brothers were going to be among the first waves of soldiers to storm the beaches when the long-promised invasion would take place. Neither of them bothered to wring their hands about routine tragedy, instead they learned coping strategies as a survival skill. The implication in this story is that we are collectively growing hard, callous, robotic, inhuman, and insensitive to random acts of violence and I honestly think otherwise.

The adversity my grandparents faced made them more human, not less so. They learned the value of sacrifice, perseverance, courage, and unselfishness. With the problems they faced, they became more empathetic and more compassionate to their fellow person. It is a tempting belief that the tragedies and senseless crimes we experience will drown us and collectively drag us down into the mire, but this was an idea advanced by the Lost Generation and the early modernists. While it is true that World War I was a completely futile slaughter, it's a stretch to believe that the only things gleamed from the conflict were purely negative and soul-destroying. Nothing is that cut-and-dried or purely negative. I encourage us to take the time to find the good among the bad and not sell purely into a mentality that the final outcome of tragedy must always be awful and destructive.

An Open Letter from Me

Dear People Who Get Tattoos on the Back of their Neck,

I really don't understand the appeal. It's not the ink I object to, it's the placement. Is tattooing a Greek or Latin word meaning something inspiring or vaguely uplifting, written in the same blue-green cursive a fashion trend of which I am not familiar? Does it mean "I have been to jail before"? Does it mean "I think I'm hardcore?" Or perhaps it means, "I am likely a recreational drug user?"

Or does it mean, "I hate myself, look at me!"

Saturday Video

which asks the age old musical question: What kind of fuckery is this?

While On the Job Search, I Encountered This...

Yoga Studio Seeks Mary/Marty Poppins

Are you a punctual, morning person who wears a smile on your face and would enjoy greeting and hosting Flow’s morning yoga students? Are you a neat-nik who feels more comfortable actively battling dust bunnies than watching them multiply? Are you comfortable assisting in an office environment – moving gracefully between computer work and small errands?

And do you have a brimming love for children (esp. newborns) and experience caring for them, inspired by the likes of Mary Poppins – including the sweet lullabies and the spoonful-of-sugar-accompanied life lessons.

_____________

No. I don't.

Still Busy, But Thought You Might Need a Laugh

God knows I do. Do you know how many cover letters I have written in the past fourteen days? It's shocking.

Blarf on the Page: Catharsis up to a Point

In case anyone needed confirmation, here it is: relationship blogging is a stress relief, to some extent. It can also be more trouble than it's worth. Those of you out there who seek an audience of sympathetic readers and validation of your own situation/point of view have probably also learned that there can be unforeseen consequences which which to deal, as well. This is where the matter gets supremely complicated. Feelings and desires are complex organisms and if one doesn't impose strict boundaries and controls upon what is said in an online forum, one can easily end up playing with fire.

In my younger years, I misinterpreted the typical relationship frustration that goes hand-in-hand with every long term pairing as something else entirely. Instead of seeing it as purely a stress-reliever from whomever was writing, I interpreted the gesture to mean that breakup was imminent, and contented myself with the belief that all I had to do was bide my time until it did. Sometimes I was right. Most often I was wrong. Sometimes I learned that it was indicative of a woman who was in an unhappy relationship or marriage and quite willing to engage in an affair. More often than not, however, I was reading the words of someone deeply conflicted on all sides whose intentions, in the final analysis, were not nearly so cut-and-dried and were tremendously convoluted.

Lots of people take to the internet to voice issues and feelings they'd never feel comfortable expressing in public or face-to-face. The relative anonymity of cyberspace makes it a tempting medium but I honestly believe that a session with a trusted counselor is a much better option. As the article addresses, when blogging becomes a passive-aggressive medium for voicing concerns with a partner that one would never say to them in person, this quickly becomes problematic. We all have thoughts and desires that we withhold from whomever it is we're with at the time because they would do nothing but bruise feelings and create resentment but I often wonder if instead of to committing these feelings to an electronic medium, a private e-mail with a close friend might be a much better option. My two cents, of course.

Something Silly

I didn't get much sleep last night, so today I'm taking a mental health day.

Enjoy the silliness!