Personal Reflections « The Ramblings of An Eternal Student of Life

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

I guess that I’m not the most optimistic of people. I’ve explained here why human civilization may be heading for a 200 or 300 year setback, starting sometime before the end of this century. This setback certainly won’t be the end of humankind, nor of civilization; but as with the Dark Ages, it certainly will increase the Hobbsian character of life for the average Joe and Jane, everywhere in the world. I.e., life for everyone on the planet will be nasty, brutish and short.

After a while, maybe around 2300 or so, there may well be a Renaissance; hope will return, based not so much on technology or wealth as on wisdom. People will finally learn that greed and tribalism and aggression have got to go. Laissez-faire capitalism, as we know it today, will finally be seen for the abomination that it is; society will finally see through the lure of individual riches that it offers. World consciousness will finally take root, overcoming the tribal barriers and prejudices that have built up around differences in languages, customs, skin colors, body structures and religious metaphysics. People will share each other’s resources and be concerned about each other’s needs; Houston will be concerned with Cairo, Buenos Airians will think about Vladivostok, Brazzaville will offer help to Los Angeles. Too bad I won’t live to see it (neither will anyone alive today).

But for now, it’s just one more sign of social decay after another along the road spiraling downward. If you’ve read my Urban Thoughts section, you know that I’ve been watching trends in America’s inner cities and have concluded that despite all the signs of gentrification and rebirth, many neighborhoods are stuck in a downward spiral of lawlessness and disengagement from the mainstream system of social norms, education and economics. An alternate social and economic reality is being built there by the street gangs, around guns, narcotics and other forms of illicit entrepreneurship. I started writing Urban Thoughts in 1998. Now it’s eight years later, and too many of my predictions are coming true. The gangsta rappers are making lots of cash selling songs about it to kids in the bored suburbs, who ironically don’t seem to realize that this is real. I’m not sure where it’s going to wind up for this “alternate America”, but I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.

I don’t stay up with the latest mega hiphop songs by 50 Cent or The Game, but I can offer you a local news story that is similarly quite frightening. It’s about the life of Raynard Brown of Orange, NJ. Orange isn’t quite what I would call a ghetto. It is located just to the west of East Orange, Newark and Irvington, all of which do have areas with a lot of poverty, crime, and gang activity. But Orange seemed to be hanging on as a working class town. However, about a week ago, Mr. Brown was reported to the police for shooting a sawed off shotgun at someone in the street. The police arrived and chased him toward an abandoned house used by drug dealers. Brown went up some steps to a second floor, then turned with his gun just as Orange Police Detective Kiernan Shields arrived below him. Brown pulled the trigger and Shields died from the gunshot blast.

In one of the background stories published in the local newspapers to explain this tragedy, it was pointed out that Brown is a ranking member of the Bloods street gang. But what really got me is that Raynard Brown grew up in a stable, working class family, the kind of household that still dominates the town of Orange. He had both his father and his mother at home with him, and they both cared about his education. They wanted him to succeed. They got him involved in after-school activities, and steered him away from the “trouble” crowd. They followed the parental handbook; they did everything right. And yet they couldn’t keep their son from the grips of a social infection that hadn’t seemed to have reached their town yet, not in a big way at least. The dysfunctional world of single parent homes and welfare and junkies and “hoeing” that spawned the local Bloods and Crips sets seemed to stop a mile or two away from the Brown family residence. And yet, that mile or two, along with a caring family, wasn’t enough protection. Obviously, the infection is still spreading.

What to do? As my Urban Thoughts page says, I think that the forces behind this “infection” are extremely strong and will overcome the meager resources that our society is willing to devote to it (e.g., federal and state grants for anti-gang youth programs, job training, housing redevelopment, inner-city economic development, convict re-entry support, etc.). In the end, about the best we can do is to help those who want to get out of the bad neighborhoods to get out, by expanding things like the HUD “Move to Opportunity” program. This “infection” may just have to end like the plagues of the Middle Ages did, by killing off those who are most vulnerable. In the mean time, it will also take down some collateral victims, like Officer Shields. I wish that I was wrong about that. But at the moment, America seems too busy … too “Bushy” … to care.

It may well take 2 or 3 centuries for a revolution of wisdom to overcome all of this and bring about a Renaissance of Hope.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 5:44 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Thursday, July 20, 2006

◊ Would Nietzsche Do It All Over Again?

Current Affairs ... Personal Reflections ... Philosophy ...

I’m sitting at my computer after having dinner, sipping a little glass of B&B.; I listened to a CD lecture on Nietzsche while preparing my stir-fry, and two points got stuck in my mind. First off was Nietzsche’s disdain for the desire shared by so many people to have a predictable and comfortable life, to avoid tumult and surprise. Well, two nights ago here in my over-rated little town of Montclair, New Jersey, a macho thunderstorm came roaring thru. Nothing that you southerners couldn’t ride out on the porch, but a bit much for our precious little community. It knocked down a lot of trees, blew out the power, and caused some property damage.

I went without power for 24 hours, and had to put up with some traffic jams on the way to and from work; the town had to temporarily close various roads to clean up the damage. It wasn’t really much, but the locals seemed shell-shocked. You can read about their angst on the Barristanet blog. If that sort of thing interests you. The power goes out fairly frequently here (well, not quite like in Baghdad or Khartoum; maybe every two months or so). And they favor tall old trees in Monty Clair, so the city won’t cut them down before they fall down. Thus, seeing tree trunks and limbs blown on to the road is not exactly a new thing.

My point is, if a few wind gusts and lightning bolts could cause such consternation, what would we Montclairians do if we had to face what the people of southern Lebanon and northern Israel are now going thru, i.e. war? Or suppose we were in New Orleans at about this time last year (reminder, we’re coming up on the 1 year anniversary of Katrina)? Going back to Nietzsche, the boring and routine way of life starts looking pretty good pretty quickly, once it’s taken away.

But I know what the great madman was getting at. He was urging us to find a cause in our lives, find a passion to follow. Find something that makes living on the edge fulfilling, makes taking a few bruises and losses all worth while. This makes me think of the Phil Collins / Genesis song “Land of Confusion” aka “This Is The World We Live In”. It’s a good song which tries to be an inspirational song. An interesting cover was recently released by Disturbed.

One line in the song goes “I won’t be coming home tonight; my generation is going to put things right.” At the age of 20, I would have been elated by that sentiment. Nietzsche would have applauded. Who cares if you’re going to sleep in a smelly cellar instead of your own comfortable bed, so long as you’re out there with your peers changing the world?

At age 53, however, I’m less than impressed. The world we live in is a rather tough nut to crack. Not to say that you can’t do any good; not to say that it’s not worthwhile to try. But don’t expect to find any one theory or political doctrine or manifesto or religion (or special concert produced by Bob Geldoff) that is going to make us all act as responsible, cooperative world citizens. The human brain is hard-wired to be tribal. That ain’t gonna go away any time soon, unfortunately. The Israelis and Hezbollah are now vigorously adding another chapter to the thousands and thousands of chapters in that litany of proof.

One other interesting thing about Neitzsche; he more or less came up with the idea for the movie “Groundhog Day” (which I still need to see). His doctrine of eternal recurrence asks whether it would be worthwhile if all you had to look forward to was an afterlife EXACTLY the same as your current life. I won’t go thru all the philosophical ramifications of that question, but it certainly is very good food for thought.

As to check up on how old and behind the times my observation linking Neitzsche with Groundhog Day is, I did a search on Google and some other search engines. And yea, “eternal recurrence” is hooked up with Groundhog Day all over the web. My blog is maybe the 10,000th site to make the point. Oh well. Eternal recurrence, indeed. Trees are toppling in Montclair, and Israel is at war again. It’s just another Groundhog Day, unfortunately. And yet, if I had to do it all over again, Friedrich, . . . .

◊ posted by Jim G @ 7:51 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Tuesday, July 4, 2006

◊ D.A.R.’s I’ve Known

Personal Reflections ...

Well, actually, I only knew one. As a Polish-American guy who grew up in a working class town in New Jersey, and who never really got out of “kielbasa world” (even though I’m now a vegetarian, thank goodness), you wouldn’t expect that I’d have met too many Daughters of the American Revolution. But I actually did have an acquaintance with one. This being Independence Day here in the USA, it seems the patriotic thing to do to reminisce a bit about her.

Her name was Celeste Underhill, of Shelter Island, New York (a ritzy little island off the far northern tip of Long Island). To me, she was “Aunt Celeste”, even though she obviously wasn’t in any way related to me. She was the great aunt of a guy who I worked with back in the mid-1980s, and with whom I struck up a friendship (we’re still friends today, pleasantly enough). Anyway, Ed and his wife Jane were quite close with Aunt Celeste, and used to visit her little estate out on Shelter Island (in the “heights” section) quite regularly. And I had the honor and pleasure of accompanying them on two or three of those weekend trips (my memory isn’t that good anymore; I know I was there at least twice).

I don’t think that Aunt Celeste was spectacularly rich, but she was well enough off, » continue reading …

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:45 am No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, June 17, 2006

◊ Contemplation and Flirty Chats at Whole Foods

Personal Reflections ...

About 12 years ago, I had a thing for monasteries. And so did a lot of other people. Monks and monasteries had recently attained the status of “groovy stuff” amidst the spiritual seekers of the post-war generation. Thinking Christians of the 1950s and 1960s turned to Thomas Merton, a famous Trappist writer and apologist for the “quiet way” of monasticism. Now the beautiful people of the 1980s and 1990s, the maturing baby boomers, had re-discovered the monastic institution. Various writers decided to ride the wave for fame and book sales, most notably Kathleen Norris.

I bought and read Norris’ magnus opus on monasticism (“The Cloister Walk”) soon after it came out. This book was and is a good source of information about monastery life. Norris received a lot of good reviews for it. But as for me, “The Walk” was a rather annoying exercise in self-indulgence and self-celebration by Ms. Norris. In the end, it wasn’t about the monks and nuns and their ancient traditions; it was all about thoroughly-modern Kathleen, a totally with-it author who had the vision to rediscover what these (usually) old men and women were doing in their old churches and farms, despite their seeming irrelevance to the flower-power generation. The stories in Cloister Walk of Ms. Norris’ interactions with various monks and nuns and their communities were quite interesting; but she also just has to let you know about her reaction to an LSD trip, about how a local farm-hand brought a bucket of newly-removed bull’s testicles over to her house one morning (something of a local delicacy out in South Dakota, I think she was trying to say), and various other experiences far from the cloister. I wasn’t quite sure what her point was, other than “oh, my life is so interesting, including how I dug up these places where people still do what they did in the Middle Ages; so aren’t you so glad you paid the $15 or whatever to allow fascinating little me to tell you all about it?”

Last night, while in the supermarket, I was reminded of another disedifying line from Cloister Walk. In describing her life as a famous author, Norris talks about a late evening in Oklahoma City or some such place when she was coming back to a hotel to meet up with her husband after doing a local media interview. Even though it was late and her hubby had turned in, she was all charged up; she wanted something modestly stimulating and satisfying, like fresh strawberries and cream, or a swim in the pool. But it just wasn’t gonna happen that night. So poor, groovy Kathleen wasn’t going to get her berries on. What a tragedy.

I don’t know why, but I felt like that while walking up the cereal aisle. I had just concluded another blah week at work, but strangely enough I still had some restless energy left over. Nonetheless, there wasn’t anything worthwhile to burn it on. So I tried to do what Ms. Norris forgot about out there on the celebrity circuit. I tried to relate to what lies at the heart of monasticism, the raison de etre for every monk and contemplative nun: i.e., contemplation. I.e., the turning inward, the embracing of the darkness and emptiness inside ourselves in the search for the ultimate brightness without. I tried to “calm the monkey mind”, as the Buddhists say (with much admiration from the Cistercians [Trappists] and other highly contemplative Christian orders). I heard the Buddha’s call to extinguish desire.

That pretty much explains why I felt let down by Ms. Norris. She got close to the monks and got deep inside their monasteries. They actually talked to her, and that made me jealous. They never seemed very talkative with me when I visited their retreat centers. Actually, there was one guy, Father Albert at the local Benedictine High School [technically still a monastery, albeit in the middle of urban Newark, NJ] who exchanged correspondence with Ms. Norris and wrote a few books himself, but was still willing to give me a few minutes of his time. But back to the main problem: the monastic way just didn’t seem to rub off on Ms. Norris, despite her may words about the wisdom behind the Rule of Benedict. I.e. the inner pathway to sanctity and personal “imitation of Christ”. She just didn’t seem to take it personally; or if she did, she just wasn’t willing to share what it meant to her (other than her surface fascination with the details of an ancient way of life, e.g. the chanting of the “O Canticles” during Advent). She didn’t seem able to hue to the “quiet path” of inner peace when the urge for earthly gratification blossomed and (as usual) quickly shriveled into frustration and disappointment. She didn’t seem to even know that it was available. Just what were those monks teaching her?

So, did I get back on the Zen level despite my existential urge for adventure at the supermarket last night? Yes, for a while. As the daylight faded in the west, I felt at peace with my loneliness and failures and disappointments as I left the Shop Rite and drove over to Whole Foods to pick up some soy yogart. But then something unexpected happened, something that actually did gratify the earlier urge for a “memorable experience”. The checkout woman at Whole Foods was rather young and pretty, and she was very nice to me (rare here in northern New Jersey, rarer still for schmucks like me). We got into a pleasant little conversation about the bottle of blackstrap molasses that I was buying with my yogart. I guess she was also interested in “whole foods”.

Well no, it didn’t lead to anything. Sorry, but this is New Jersey, not a fairy tale or a romantic comedy. I don’t go to Whole Foods very often and the staff there turns over very quickly. I’ll probably never see her again, and even if I did, she was too young for me (and is probably hooked up anyway). But that little tete a tete and the little smiles we exchanged as I carried my bags away were just enough to satisfy my earlier restlessness. It was an interesting day after all. I had found both inner peace and a bit of ego gratification.

(If you read my entry from earlier this week, you might ask why I liked this little bit of attention so much better than the occasional condescending and teasing smiles from the married chicks at work? Well . . . . maybe I’m just in a better mood when I’m away from work.)

(As to the local Whole Foods, business was booming last night, despite their announcement that they will no longer sell live lobsters. Actually I don’t remember even seeing a lobster tank there.)

◊ posted by Jim G @ 11:12 am No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, June 4, 2006

◊ Eternal Students, Some Definitions

Personal Reflections ... Web Site/Blog ...

BY DEFINITION: There seems to be some confusion on the Web about who is an “eternal student” and what it means to be one. As to relieve some of that confusion, or at least acknowledge it, I propose the following dictionary definition:

E • ter • nal Stu • dent • dom 1.) The state that young grad students often find themselves in when it seems to take forever to get their classes finished and get a grip on their thesis. This state relates to the state of despair, especially when the graduate student is married and has a child and sees his or her friends with regular jobs buying houses and taking vacation trips while the “eternal” graduate student suffers relative deprivation because of the high cost of postgraduate education these days. However, this form of eternal studentdom eventually comes to an end when the grad student finally gets the doctorate and finds a job, or gives up and becomes a stockbroker or something. 2.) The state that certain older people, who are long out of college, find themselves in when they look back and realize that their college and/or graduate school days were probably the best days of their lives, and then realize that the spirit of those times can be continued despite the lack of teachers and classrooms and registrars offices about them. I.e., the older “eternal student” dedicates him or herself to continuing study, mostly self-guided but sometimes in conjunction with others, occasionally utilizing formal curricula but mostly improvised, by continuing their readings in selected topics of interest; by writing and thinking and discussing what they’ve learned, challenging the accepted paradigms of the chosen field of learning, and by maintaining their curiosity and thirst for greater understanding and wisdom. Some observers relate this condition to pre-operational delay theory, contending that “eternal student” types had, as children, stalled neurologically at Piaget’s pre-operational stage of cognitive development, where much of information processing is at a holistic-visual level and is largely musical and non-verbal, and there is not yet a decentralization from egocentrism. In other words, because of some glitch in childhood mental development, some people arguably want to stay in school and learn, and forget about the joys of wheeling and dealing as adults in society. Either because such people are egocentric, or because learning has a musical quality to it.

Obviously, this blog and the person behind it — sweet, wonderful me — have everything to do with the second definition and nothing to do with the first. As to Piaget and pre-operational developmental delays, I don’t necessarily agree. But even if so, then so what? It takes all kinds to run this world. We need wheelers and dealers and we also need eternal students. If we can all work together and share our strengths to fill in for our weaknesses, then the world could be a better place.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 2:19 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Thursday, March 30, 2006

◊ A Bigger Man Than Al or Me

Music ... Personal Reflections ...

I recently met up with a guy from college who I hadn’t seen since the late 70s. His name is Al Lacki (hi Al!) and he reached out to me after accidentally coming across this web site! We had a good chat over a few beers, with lots of reminiscing, catching up, and pondering the world in a way that only engineering school graduates can ponder it. He’s got a great web site dedicated to Corvairs and other rear engine cars. If you’re into Corvairs it’s definitely a must-see site. And even if you’re not, it’s worth a visit.

In other recent doings, I got hooked on a band that started out over 20 years ago, not long after Al and I had last seen each other. They’re called Sawyer Brown, and they’re known as a modern country and western act. I was never big on country and western; it just gets too twangy and weepy and harmonic for me (although it does bring back memories of younger days when I used to cruise the hinterlands of Pennsylvania and Ohio and Maryland and Virginia on photo expeditions). Sawyer Brown is still pretty twangy and weepy and harmonic. But they mix a lot of rock and roll into their music, so it isn’t so hard for an old time rocker like me to relate to it.

I recently picked up their album “The Hits – Live”, and I have to say that it’s an easy album to listen to, with elements of evocative story-telling, good-time foot stompin, honest sentimentality, and sly humor (something that rock and roll doesn’t even try to do). The song that best combines humor and country-style narrative is called “800 Pound Jesus”. It’s hard to say if the song is a parody of the typical country faith song, or whether it still has a theological agenda (or maybe both). But it does have a catchy refrain, one that you can sing while walking in from the parking lot in the morning. The basic premise of the song is that a guy stops at a yard sale and buys an eight-foot high concrete statue of Jesus. The refrain obviously claims that this statue weighed 800 pounds.

Having been trained as an engineer (in the same class with Al), I decided to investigate the weight claim; would an eight-foot tall human statue in concrete really weigh that much? OK, first question: what is the cubic volume of a human body? A science web site suggested that the volume of our bodies depends mostly upon our weight, and suggested using a conversion factor of 1 cubic centimeter per gram. Let’s assume that Jesus was relatively tall and thin; I’ll guess that he weighed around 140 pounds, since he did a lot of walking and ate mostly fish and figs and wheat berries. Remember, there were no Big Macs or three-meat pizzas back then. There are 453 grams per pound, so we shall re-state Jesus’ weight in metric, as 63,420 grams. Then using the cubic centimeter-to-grams conversion factor of 1, we can say that Jesus’ body filled about 63,420 cubic centimeters of space.

Next, I’ll guess that Jesus was about 5 feet, 11 inches tall; an average height today, but back in the old days of malnutrition, relatively tall. No one in the New Testament bothered to describe what Jesus looked like; he could have been a shrimp. But the Gospels do indicate that Jesus had a very charismatic personality, and guys like that are usually pretty tall. So, I’ll go with 5 feet, 11 inches, which can also be stated as 5.9 feet.

Sawyer Brown points out that the statue in question was 8 feet tall. We will assume that the statue is correctly proportioned for a tall, thin human (as most Jesus statues are); so, in order to estimate its volume from the 63,420 cubic centimeters for the actual Jesus, we need to scale up each dimension (depth, height and width) by a factor of 8 / 5.9. The volume increase factor is thus (8/5.9) x (8/5.9) x (8/5.9), which is about 2.493. So we multiply 63,420 by 2.493, and get 158,106 cubic centimeters for the concrete Jesus. That’s a lot of concrete. Another web site estimates that dry concrete weighs at least 2.3 grams per cubic centimeter. So, the concrete Jesus must weigh around 363,643 grams, which is 363.6 kilograms. Each kilogram equals about 2.2 pounds. Multiply 363.6 by 2.2, and we get . . . 800 pounds !!!!! (Actually, it could be a bit more, since I didn’t account for the added volume from the statue’s robes.)

(The question remains, however, how the guy in the song got this statue home; even if he had a heavy duty pickup truck, as a lot of country-western fans do, he would still need an industrial hoist to load and unload the statue.)

I hope that Al Lacki is proud of me for quantitatively investigating the weight issue! But despite our marvelous mathematical intellects, Al and I must bow down before the greater power involved here. As the refrain to “800 Pound Jesus” goes, “he’s a bigger man than you or me.” :^)

◊ posted by Jim G @ 8:41 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, October 9, 2005

◊ Another Rocky Story

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

There are several “Rocky” legends out there in popular culture today. There’s Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stalone’s underdog prizefighter from Philadelphia; there’s Rocky and Bullwinkle of cartoon fame; and then there’s the Rocky Horror Show (less said the better). But I have another Rocky story, and this one is true. It’s about a guy named Rocky Locarro who was the janitor in the public elementary school that I went to.

My own “Rocky story” isn’t much of a story at all, actually. Rocky didn’t do anything that captured the attention of the local newspaper, much less the national media. He didn’t commit any horrendous crimes against the children who were around him all day; he wasn’t a brilliant scholar or musician making a living mopping up classroom floors; and he wasn’t the chieftain of some crime syndicate working undercover. He didn’t even drink or fall asleep while on the job. Rocky was just another working class guy of Italian ethnic heritage who lived in town, had a home, raised a family, did his job, and died rather quietly a few years after retiring.

What made Rocky special wasn’t something that you could see back when you knew him. He was definitely the kind of guy that you took for granted. He was always there, emptying the class trash baskets, moping up puke, cleaning the boy’s urinals, keeping an eye on the boiler so that the classrooms were always warm in January and February (and they always were). He didn’t take many days off. If you needed something from your desk during Christmas or Spring break, all you had to do was to go down to the school and bang on the door around 10 am. Rocky would let you in and you would soon have what you needed.

What really made Rocky special was that he was a consistently nice guy. He sometimes had to yell at kids when they “got stupid”; i.e., when they started manifesting that charming combination of poor judgment and petty malevolence that’s inherent to youth (especially youth from ethnic working-class towns back in the unenlightened early 1960s). He didn’t push his niceness on anyone; he wasn’t trying to prove his virtue at every little opportunity. He didn’t have a big bright smile or an outgoing personality. He had a small, almost odd looking little body, not exactly the kind of person you’d want to hug. But he had a certain combination of empathy and sympathy for every kid, along with a lot of patience. You knew that Rocky would not hassle you any more that he had to. If he could give you a break, he would. By fourth or fifth grade, when you started to “turn cool”, he’d go along with your desire to assert your status (however undeserved) by calling an adult by his first name. If he was coming down the hall and you and your 10 year old friends said “hi, Rocky”, it was no problem; he’d give you a nod or a quick “hi” in return. Try that with a teacher or principal and you were in for some major blah-blah; it was MISTER, MISSUS, or MISS (no “MS” back in those days).

Back in my elementary school years, they didn’t have Ritalin or mandatory special education programs. Nonetheless, we did have a troubled, hyperactive student who bounced back and forth between grades and was occasionally referred to some special school in a distant town. There were a couple of other tough-guy troublemakers who didn’t get along well with the teachers. Rocky seemed to be the one guy who could talk to these unsettled kids (even though he had to chide them about smoking in the boy’s room). I can’t say if Rocky changed their lives. Some of them settled down and had productive adulthoods, and some didn’t. But Rocky was the only adult that they could talk to. He was also nice to the weaker, nerdy kids (like me). And to the average kids. Rocky was basically nice to everyone.

In addressing the economic problems and segregation awareness of American blacks in the 1960s, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that even if a man is just a street sweeper, he should push himself to be the best street sweeper possible. As with so much of what Dr. King said, this injunction can now be interpreted more broadly across all of humankind. Rocky Locarro was just an elementary school janitor, and yet he was also the best school janitor possible. To a large degree, he would be commended for what he was not: he wasn’t a child molester, a drunk, a slacker, or a tyrant. But he is also forgotten for what he wasn’t: he wasn’t a man of ideas, he wasn’t an entrepreneur, he wasn’t a politician, he wasn’t rich, he wasn’t a world-class athlete, he wasn’t a major artist, he wasn’t a “mover and a shaker”. And that’s a shame, because Rocky was one of those rare people who made life easier for most everyone around him. If there were more like him, there would surely be fewer wars, less crime, fewer lawsuits, better government, and a whole lot more trust and cooperation between people.

They say that capitalism, with all of its wondrous by-products (high tech gadgets, entertaining athletics and culture, sexy fashions, etc.), requires egocentric greed to function. If everyone were like Rocky Locarro in terms of ego, then maybe we wouldn’t have miniature cell phones and wide screen TVs and the Super Bowl and negative political ads and JenLo or Beyonce whomever the pop queen is at present. We’d have a plainer, more dowdy world where everyone was a whole lot more decent and respectful to one another. I, for one, would be willing to trade some consumer electronics and some entertainment culture for a few million more people like Rocky. “It’s nice to be important, but it’s more important to be nice.” That seems like a trite statement, but if you knew a guy like Rocky Locarro, you’d realize that it’s a radical formula for a better world.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:59 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, May 29, 2005

◊ Calling All Civilized Angels

Personal Reflections ... Society ...

Sometimes I think that the world around me has pretty much given up on the idea of civilization. Maybe we go thru the motions so as to avoid getting sued, but in our hearts, we’re all just animals right now; hunting and hurting (and sometimes even killing) as needed to meet our immediate needs. That’s sure what it seems like on my worse days. (And I’m not sure if I’m any better).

My place of employment deals with criminals, people who steal and rape and kill as needed to meet their immediate needs. Unfortunately, when you deal a lot with criminals, you pick up something of their nature. I can see that happening in the investigators and the assistant prosecutors, the “front line” people. I can understand when a police investigator goes into the tough guy routine, but it upsets me when I see the lawyers picking up those nasty habits. Lawyers, in theory, are supposed to devote their lives to the ideals of law, which are key components of civilization. You’d think they would go out of their way to be civilized – you know, the bow-tie kind of lawyer, the old-fashioned guy or lady who believed in the ultimate redemptive quality of practicing law and practicing it well. But no, many of our assistant prosecutors go around swearing and cursing and taking on threatening postures, just like their police investigator friends. It’s especially nauseating to me when the women do it – partly because of my old fashioned notion of women being the kinder and gentler side of the human race, but also because when women put on the tough-guy facade, they tend to overdo it (at least in my office).

I had to help a couple of assistant prosecutors with a press release after a big drug bust the other day. One of them was Terri, who is a head honcho over the “tough crime” units (homicide, narcotics, etc.). Terri is actually a rather nice and decent woman at heart. But when she starts dealing with a case, she starts using the F-word over and over. While talking with some cops as we were trying to get the facts straight for the press release, I heard her talking about a “cluster f—“. I didn’t even want to know what that was about.

Well, it took a bit of back and forth until we got the facts straight about how much cocaine and heroin were seized. Everyone seemed to have a different number, and the numbers didn’t always refer to the same measurements; sometimes we were told that there were so many grams of something, sometimes it was in “decks”, sometimes in “bricks”. And then there was confusion about what was taken in the immediate seizure, and how much came during the “rip” (removed from the person of those who were taken into custody).

Right at the point when the confusion was reaching its peak, Terri stopped her cursing and said, to everyone and no one in particular, “oh yea, figuring out how many decks are in a brick, this is why I went to law school nights”. Actually, that comment made me feel better. I found her frustration to be a hopeful thing. Deep down inside, Terri still held within her the ideal of civilization. THAT is why she went to law school nights. She still had some soul left.

We got the press release out OK. And I went home thinking about the refrain verse from Train’s Calling All Angels: “I won’t give up if you don’t give up”.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 12:21 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Sunday, February 6, 2005

◊ Auto Inflation

Current Affairs ... Personal Reflections ...

If you read my entry from Jan. 27, you know that I’m in the market for a car, since my previous car was recently totaled. I’m considering buying a new one, even though I’m only getting about $5,000 from the insurance company. I like to get a car new and hold on to it for ten or twelve years. At least you know where the problems are. You build a relationship with your machinery.

So, I’ve been researching the 2005 compact cars, and I’ve not been very impressed with what’s out there. I’ve still got my notes from 1999 when I bought the last one, so I was able to do some comparisons. You’d think that cars would get better gas mileage and have more standard safety features after six years. But what’s actually happened is that they’ve gotten bigger, heavier and come with more frills. And if you go back to the Sentras, Civics and Corollas of the late 80s, the size contrast is stunning.

Some compact models (e.g. from Saturn, Mazda, Ford, and Mitshubishi) now get worse gas mileage than six years ago. Honda and Toyota pretty much held even, balancing off greater weight with better engine technology (e.g., variable valve timing). As to safety features, a lot more good stuff is now available (e.g., anti-skid control, head protection airbags), but they’re usually optional for compact cars (and expensive). However, as to frills such as CD players, motorized mirrors and other stuff, a lot more of that is now standard equipment on small cars . . . even the base models (which is what I always buy, being a base kind of guy).

In sum, both car manufacturers and car buyers (yes, that means you!) continue to push for bigger, fancier and less efficient vehicles. That’s the magic of unregulated, laissez-faire Republican capitalism at work. Duhhh, can I ask a silly question . . . . . did it occur to anyone that America’s dependence on oil imported from the Persian Gulf area is a key factor in our vulnerability to terrorism? Is it going to take another nine-eleven to make us think seriously about this?

But hey, other than griping here on my blog, I’m not going to do anything about it. If I had a lot of cash sitting around, I could buy a Civic hybrid or a Prius and get 50 to 60 miles per gallon, and order up all the safety features. If I was a “poor green”, I could go tiny and get an Echo or an Accent, which have higher MPG ratings (35 for the Echo, 29 for the Accent); but they get questionable ratings on stability, workmanship and acceleration. And after the accident, the thought of cruising the highways in a tiny car gives me a queasy feeling in the stomach. There are just too many Expeditions and Yukons and Hummers out there on the road; even an out-of-control Ford Escape or Subaru Forester could take you down.

I’m probably gonna get a base model Corolla or Civic off the lot, with the adequate gas mileage (around 30 or 31 mpg) and the frills and without the safety enhancements that I’d really like. And hope for the best. For both myself, and for our nation.

I’ll be sure to post a pic of the new cruiser. And I’ll feel a twinge of pain and hypocrisy thinking about you intrepid people who get around on bicycles and mass transit. Vanguards of a brave new world, indeed!

Enjoy the big football game tonight, sports fans, and get ready to shift into college basketball mode. Ah, when Dick Vitale (who coached at my high school during my youth) hits the airwaves, can Spring be far behind?

◊ posted by Jim G @ 5:00 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

Saturday, October 16, 2004

◊ My Cousin, The Entrepreneur

Personal Reflections ...

I only have four cousins, all from my mother’s side (my brother claims to have five, but one is a “pretend cousin”). We’re all pretty close in age, and we all grew up within a few miles of each other here in northern New Jersey. We all watched “The Beverly Hillbillies” on TV as kids, but only one of us took the show’s intro song seriously. Right after college, Cousin Connie decided that “California’s the place you ought to be”, so she loaded up the truck, and she moved to Beverly …. Well, she didn’t actually move to Beverly Hills, but she definitely did make her way to the West Coast.

Cousin Connie has been in California about thirty years now. Every now and then we’d hear something about her; less often we’d hear directly from her; and lesser still, actually see her on a visit. The last time I saw her was in 1993 at her mother’s funeral (Aunt Sophie, r.i.p.). Since then, my only contact with Connie was in trying to convince her to accept a check for her share of my late Uncle Bruno’s estate (he died in 1999). She was a bit upset about being a part of a legal proceeding back in the “old country”, and told me that she wanted nothing to do with the whole thing. With the help of an Irish lawyer having the charm of a leprechaun (hey, remember Lucky Charms?), I finally convinced Connie that she wasn’t going to have her car and her family home confiscated by the IRS if she accepted a lousy $700 check from me. But I got the underlying message – she wasn’t exactly tickled pink at hearing from the folk back home.

My other 3 cousins haven’t had much contact with her either. I guess you don’t stay in California for three decades so as to remain close to an ethnic family in New Jersey.

The other day, my cousin Mike was talking about an old picture that he had of Connie. That made me think about her, so I punched her two names (married and maiden) into the Google thing, and bingo, there she is – the CEO of a computer tech company. For now, the company appears to have two employees – Connie and her husband. They’re small, but I wouldn’t write them off; they appear to have a digital tiger by the tail. They’re marketing some kind of software tailored for hand-held digital devices (tablet PCs and PDAs and stuff like that, which I know almost nothing about; I’m a troglodyte chained to my old desktop tower), and their customer list is small but quite real.

Wow, Connie as a tech company executive. She was always smart, and she did have a streak of entrepreneurial spirit in her that she got from her father, my Uncle Matt. Uncle Matt was a quality control rep for a defense company that made a whole lot of money in the 60s and 70s supplying Uncle Sam with helicopters that the Vietcong (the resistance movement in Vietnam, for you young’ns) kept shooting down. He was a Willie Loman-like character, driving miles and miles between supply plants throughout the eastern US so as to ensure that his company was supplied with good helicopter gizmos. In his spare time, Uncle Matt invested his money in stocks (and did quite well), fixed his home up into a little suburban palace (the kind of place that you didn’t like visiting as a kid because they wouldn’t let you run or play for fear of mussing something up), and urged his daughters to be successful in the world.

(But let me be fair here. Even though I was never driven by the notion of “success”, Uncle Matt and I always got along quite well. He’s actually still alive, but we’ve lost touch with him too since he retired and moved to South Jersey).

I thought at first that Connie went to California to get away from her parents. Connie was never really a hippie, and I really don’ t think she smoked too much hooch or took great advantage of the “Summer of Love” back in ’67. However, she did appear to be an individualist, someone who wanted neither to be defined by her mother’s ethnic Catholicism nor by her father’s dreams of “making-it-big”. I thought she was more like me, trying (successfully or not) to live an enlightened but non-materialistic life, an environmentally conscious life where you get involved and try to do some good without resorting to radical tactics. Now it looks like she’s been co-opted by her father’s ghosts, resorting to radical capitalist tactics in order to get rich.

Well, what the heck. I hope that Connie gets rich, and has fun doing it. For now, the only interesting observation that I can make about my cousin is that she’s gone back to using her maiden name on the company web site. That surprised me at first, given her “Escape from the Dark Ages of New Jersey” philosophy. But then again, her married name is the same as Oscar Wilde’s wife. And in my Google search, I saw reference to a play about the latter character entitled The Fall of Constance Wilde. Whoops, perhaps Mom and Dad weren’t so bad after all!

P.S., eleven years later — Connie passed away in June, 2015 after battling melanoma for several years. We on the east coast only found out about that after she was gone. She left behind her husband Chuck and two grown sons. Even in her distance — or maybe because of that distance — she was still very much a presence in our lives. She will always be a part of our stories. She is missed.

◊ posted by Jim G @ 3:47 pm No Comments Yet / Leave a Comment

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