May 26, 2011
One of the questions most frequently asked of urban beekeepers is: Where do you get your bees? Do they just fly into your yard?
Sometimes they do. A surprising number of people I meet tell stories of coming home from work one fine spring afternoon to find an undulating ball of honeybees nestled on a nearby tree-branch or fence. Seeing this phenomenon, some go into a panic and call 911; others go into a reverie and call their children out to marvel. In either case, by the time a beekeeper or — horrors! — an exterminator arrives, or by the time the family looks the next morning, the bees may have already flown away.
It’s the passing of a swarm.
Swarming is the honeybees’ way of propagating their species. When a colony becomes large, the bees — tens of thousands of sterile female workers, a few hundred male drones, and a single fertile female, the queen — raise another queen. The colony then divides into two groups, one staying put with their new queen and the other flying off with the old one to find another home. The swarm will settle temporarily on branch or fence or pole or wall while several hundred of the most experienced worker bees scout the vicinity for a suitable and safe cavity to inhabit, most often a hollow tree.
Despite centuries of study, entomologists still don’t understand exactly how each bee determines whether to stay home or to swarm, but they are coming to know how a swarm finds its new digs. Cornell professor Thomas B. Seeley recently summarized the research in his book, Honeybee Democracy. Contrary to the common belief that the queen bee is the autocrat of the colony, Seeley’s experiments show that the swarm makes a collective decision about where to live. The scout bees, having examined many possible dwellings for location and size, return to the swarm and, through the same kind of dance-like movements used to direct their sisters to sources of nectar and pollen, communicate their conclusions about the desirability of each prospect. Other bees then go to look at the options, and gradually the swarm forms a consensus on which one to take, flies off, and moves in. (Seeley discussed this process with NPR’s annoyingly flippant science correspondent Robert Krulwich on Tuesday’s Morning Edition; you can find the interview at www.npr.org.)
Beekeepers can influence the swarm’s decision by taking it to an empty hive — a comfy, ready-made home which the bees are usually (but not always) most happy to accept.
But back to our FAQ. Failing the good fortune of capturing a swarm, where do beekeepers get their bees?
More often than not, they buy them in what are called “packages” — several thousand worker bees culled from strong colonies, weighed out in two-pound lots, and placed in a shoe-box-sized cage with a mated queen in a separate little cage. You spray the bees with sugar-water to keep them temporarily flightless and busy licking the sweet stuff off each other, open the package, dump the sticky clump into an empty hive, release the queen from her cage, close up the box, and walk away. Within a week the package of disparate bees has become a functioning colony, the queen laying a thousand eggs a day, the workers foraging for nectar and pollen to feed themselves and the babies.
Usually these packages are made up by large-scale honeybee farmers, predominantly in the South, and are either sent directly through the mail or shipped by truck to a central location for pickup.
Having lost two of my three colonies to this year’s long and brutal winter, I ordered two packages from a beekeeping cooperative which supplies equipment, bees, and instruction to both aspiring and experienced beekeepers in New York City.
The co-op’s truckload of packages from Georgia was delivered to their warehouse on Flatbush Avenue in downtown Brooklyn one morning last week. How was I to get my bees to their new neighborhood in the Bronx? Fight weekday traffic and risk a ticket for double-parking while I dashed into the warehouse? Nah. These Southern transplants would get around just like most New Yorkers do — by subway.
At the warehouse, conveniently located just steps away from a station with direct service to the Bronx, I sprayed the bees with water for hydration, zipped them up in duffel bags, and took them underground for their first New York adventure.
At nine in the morning, the subway car was packed with commuters heading to work in Manhattan. Several people looked up from their seats at this guy with two big bags slung across his shoulders, jostling for standing room. A recorded voice came through the loudspeaker with the routine message: “Remember, if you see something, say something. Report suspicious packages immediately.”
Yikes! Visions of the transit police swooping down and finding ten thousand stinging insects in my possession (a type of terrorist attack not unheard of in history; the Roman army threw bags of bees into enemy lines) made me shudder. But the gods were with me, the trip was smooth, and in an hour and a half two new colonies were ensconced in their homes in my Bronx apiary.
And that’s how this urban beekeeper got his bees.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
OSAMA ON THE BUS
May 6, 2011
The bus making its way through the South Bronx on Monday was unusually alive with chatter.
"Obama got Osama!" a gray-bearded man in a Yankees jacket gloated loudly to his seat-mate. "That's poetry!"
"Beautiful," the other replied. "I heard they threw his body into the sea. Now he sleeps with the fishes."
"Ha! He smells so bad even the fishes won't eat him."
A middle-aged lady in the seat ahead piped up in Spanish. "He killed so many people. Now he's tasting his own medicine."
"No me gusta, the way they just took him out," said a young woman across the aisle. "It's just more killing. They shoulda captured him. I wanted to see what he had to say. Maybe he was sorry."
"Too late, baby," a man in a wheelchair said from the front. "He gone for good now. He gave all those people at Ground Zero hell on earth for a few hours, but he's gonna burn forever."
A well-dressed woman sitting next to me handed me a pamphlet. On the cover, yellow and red flames licked around the title: "Hellfire: Is It Part of Divine Justice?"
"Read this," she said to me softly. "Go to your bible and see for yourself."
I glanced at the tract, from the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Have you ever seen someone tortured?" it began. "We hope not. Deliberate torture is sickening and abhorrent. ... Many religions teach that God tortures sinners in an eternal hellfire. ... Would a God of love inflict torture that even humans with any measure of decency find revolting? ... Even if someone perpetrated extreme wickedness for his whole lifetime, would everlastingtorment be a just punishment? No."
"God is love," she whispered. "How can there be a hell?"
A man leaned forward from the seat behind us. "The truth is, nobody really knows what happens in the next world. All we know for sure is about this world, and I'm glad Osama's out of the way here. He can't do anything more to us now."
The graybeard overheard. "Oh yeah? We have a saying in Puerto Rico: ‘You cut off the head of a snake and two heads grow back.' He's got people all over the world ready to take his place."
"I heard he has a hundred children," the middle-aged lady said in Spanish.
An African woman in a headscarf, cradling a baby on her lap, stared blankly out the window.
"They shoulda just forgot about him," the man in the wheelchair said. "Let the sleeping dog lie. Things was just settling down. The people in Egypt got their revolution without blowing anything up, and they was saying Osama's ideas are stupid and he's a has-been. Now we're on red alert again, that's what I heard. We're back to where we was after 9/11. Before, they just had a man, now they got a saint. Who knows what they'll do now?"
"I don't care," the man behind me said. "We'll get them too. I'm proud to be an American, and I'm glad Obama got him."
"Jerome Avenue," the driver called, pulling up to the stop. Passengers got off and on; the spontaneous social network traveling through the South Bronx changed friends.
"I found a nice apartment in Queens," a woman told her companion. "I'm moving next week. It's closer to my job, and it's more quiet there. Quiet and peaceful."
The bus making its way through the South Bronx on Monday was unusually alive with chatter.
"Obama got Osama!" a gray-bearded man in a Yankees jacket gloated loudly to his seat-mate. "That's poetry!"
"Beautiful," the other replied. "I heard they threw his body into the sea. Now he sleeps with the fishes."
"Ha! He smells so bad even the fishes won't eat him."
A middle-aged lady in the seat ahead piped up in Spanish. "He killed so many people. Now he's tasting his own medicine."
"No me gusta, the way they just took him out," said a young woman across the aisle. "It's just more killing. They shoulda captured him. I wanted to see what he had to say. Maybe he was sorry."
"Too late, baby," a man in a wheelchair said from the front. "He gone for good now. He gave all those people at Ground Zero hell on earth for a few hours, but he's gonna burn forever."
A well-dressed woman sitting next to me handed me a pamphlet. On the cover, yellow and red flames licked around the title: "Hellfire: Is It Part of Divine Justice?"
"Read this," she said to me softly. "Go to your bible and see for yourself."
I glanced at the tract, from the Jehovah's Witnesses. "Have you ever seen someone tortured?" it began. "We hope not. Deliberate torture is sickening and abhorrent. ... Many religions teach that God tortures sinners in an eternal hellfire. ... Would a God of love inflict torture that even humans with any measure of decency find revolting? ... Even if someone perpetrated extreme wickedness for his whole lifetime, would everlastingtorment be a just punishment? No."
"God is love," she whispered. "How can there be a hell?"
A man leaned forward from the seat behind us. "The truth is, nobody really knows what happens in the next world. All we know for sure is about this world, and I'm glad Osama's out of the way here. He can't do anything more to us now."
The graybeard overheard. "Oh yeah? We have a saying in Puerto Rico: ‘You cut off the head of a snake and two heads grow back.' He's got people all over the world ready to take his place."
"I heard he has a hundred children," the middle-aged lady said in Spanish.
An African woman in a headscarf, cradling a baby on her lap, stared blankly out the window.
"They shoulda just forgot about him," the man in the wheelchair said. "Let the sleeping dog lie. Things was just settling down. The people in Egypt got their revolution without blowing anything up, and they was saying Osama's ideas are stupid and he's a has-been. Now we're on red alert again, that's what I heard. We're back to where we was after 9/11. Before, they just had a man, now they got a saint. Who knows what they'll do now?"
"I don't care," the man behind me said. "We'll get them too. I'm proud to be an American, and I'm glad Obama got him."
"Jerome Avenue," the driver called, pulling up to the stop. Passengers got off and on; the spontaneous social network traveling through the South Bronx changed friends.
"I found a nice apartment in Queens," a woman told her companion. "I'm moving next week. It's closer to my job, and it's more quiet there. Quiet and peaceful."
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
LIBYA: WOULD HAVE? COULD HAVE?
March 31, 2011
On the cover of The New Yorker magazine for March 14, a drawing by Barry Blitt depicts Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, as a scarecrow, dressed in military finery, stuffed with straw, and mounted on a stick, with a desert landscape below. Flying around the scarecrow is a flock of white doves, several of them pulling tufts of straw protruding from its arms and head, another unraveling the braids on the uniform, gathering nesting material for spring.
The drawing is entitled, "Hope is the thing with feathers."
How quickly hawks snatch doves in flight, scattering their feathers in the wind.
Barely a month ago, as Blitt was pitching his idea to The New Yorker's editors, it seemed to much of the watching world that the near-miracle of peaceful revolution wrought in Tunisia and Egypt would replicate itself in Libya. Mass protests calling for Qaddafi's resignation were met with a waffling similar to that of those aged dictators to his east and west: a show of force followed by the promise of concessions. Qaddafi's brutal crackdown against the demonstrators in mid-February shocked even his own government, with two of his air force pilots flying their French-built Mirage jets to asylum in Malta and several of his ambassadors and diplomatic staff resigning their posts.
A few more days of demonstration might have toppled the regime. But for reasons as yet unclear, the center of nonviolent opposition did not hold. Disaffected military personnel seized arms and munitions in outlying regions and persuaded some of the citizens to join them in battle. Quick as that, protesters had become rebels; civil resistance had become civil war.
Thus allowed to play the game the way he liked it, Qaddafi set about smashing the revolt with attacks from air and ground — and almost immediately drew much of Europe into the vortex of violence. This crazy-as-a-fox colonel had been pushing the buttons of the West for 40 years, now threatening, now cozying up, back and forth — first a Communist and then an anti- Communist, first a terrorist and then an anti-terrorist. Having blown up the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and then having initiated a chemical and nuclear weapons program, he turned right around and apologized, proffering reparations to the Lockerbie survivors and dismantling his WMD's, hoodwinking none other than George W. Bush in 2004 to rescind Libya's terrorist status, thus clearing the path for multi-billion-dollar arms deals with France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, among others. It is those very weapons, so readily supplied to a country lacking a single external threat, that he's now using against the rebels, and that the U.S. and NATO are now firing their missiles at to take out.
So here we go again.
Another megalomaniac Little Caesar twirling the great powers around his finger. Another internal conflict inflated into an international one. Another military intervention in the name of protecting civilians with so-called "pinpoint bombing" that inevitably results in the death of civilians they are bombing to protect. Another commitment to topple — or not to topple, can't get quite clear on that one yet — the dictator with only the vaguest knowledge of who will take his place. Another rejection of Colin Powell's doctrine that every entrance strategy must have an exit strategy.
And thus far, despite it all, the latest Little Caesar remains, laughing at the world while his country goes up in smoke.
How can this be, and so soon, too, with Iraq so fresh in the mind?
President Obama's defense of military action in Libya, outlined in his address to the nation on Monday, is based on would-have's and could-have's: "We knew if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. ... A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders .... The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship .... A failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America."
Preemptive war is a war of would-have's.
But since we're speculating, there is another set of would- have's to consider: What would have happened had the Libyan resistance remained nonviolent? What would have happened had the militants been left without external assistance? Would those democratic impulses dawning across the region have been strengthened or diminished had the "international community" opted against force?
Oh yes, and one could-it-be: Could it yet be that in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and even Palestine, those things with feathers will continue to pick at their respective scarecrows?
On the cover of The New Yorker magazine for March 14, a drawing by Barry Blitt depicts Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator, as a scarecrow, dressed in military finery, stuffed with straw, and mounted on a stick, with a desert landscape below. Flying around the scarecrow is a flock of white doves, several of them pulling tufts of straw protruding from its arms and head, another unraveling the braids on the uniform, gathering nesting material for spring.
The drawing is entitled, "Hope is the thing with feathers."
How quickly hawks snatch doves in flight, scattering their feathers in the wind.
Barely a month ago, as Blitt was pitching his idea to The New Yorker's editors, it seemed to much of the watching world that the near-miracle of peaceful revolution wrought in Tunisia and Egypt would replicate itself in Libya. Mass protests calling for Qaddafi's resignation were met with a waffling similar to that of those aged dictators to his east and west: a show of force followed by the promise of concessions. Qaddafi's brutal crackdown against the demonstrators in mid-February shocked even his own government, with two of his air force pilots flying their French-built Mirage jets to asylum in Malta and several of his ambassadors and diplomatic staff resigning their posts.
A few more days of demonstration might have toppled the regime. But for reasons as yet unclear, the center of nonviolent opposition did not hold. Disaffected military personnel seized arms and munitions in outlying regions and persuaded some of the citizens to join them in battle. Quick as that, protesters had become rebels; civil resistance had become civil war.
Thus allowed to play the game the way he liked it, Qaddafi set about smashing the revolt with attacks from air and ground — and almost immediately drew much of Europe into the vortex of violence. This crazy-as-a-fox colonel had been pushing the buttons of the West for 40 years, now threatening, now cozying up, back and forth — first a Communist and then an anti- Communist, first a terrorist and then an anti-terrorist. Having blown up the Pan Am plane over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 and then having initiated a chemical and nuclear weapons program, he turned right around and apologized, proffering reparations to the Lockerbie survivors and dismantling his WMD's, hoodwinking none other than George W. Bush in 2004 to rescind Libya's terrorist status, thus clearing the path for multi-billion-dollar arms deals with France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, among others. It is those very weapons, so readily supplied to a country lacking a single external threat, that he's now using against the rebels, and that the U.S. and NATO are now firing their missiles at to take out.
So here we go again.
Another megalomaniac Little Caesar twirling the great powers around his finger. Another internal conflict inflated into an international one. Another military intervention in the name of protecting civilians with so-called "pinpoint bombing" that inevitably results in the death of civilians they are bombing to protect. Another commitment to topple — or not to topple, can't get quite clear on that one yet — the dictator with only the vaguest knowledge of who will take his place. Another rejection of Colin Powell's doctrine that every entrance strategy must have an exit strategy.
And thus far, despite it all, the latest Little Caesar remains, laughing at the world while his country goes up in smoke.
How can this be, and so soon, too, with Iraq so fresh in the mind?
President Obama's defense of military action in Libya, outlined in his address to the nation on Monday, is based on would-have's and could-have's: "We knew if we waited one more day, Benghazi — a city nearly the size of Charlotte — could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. ... A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya's borders .... The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship .... A failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America."
Preemptive war is a war of would-have's.
But since we're speculating, there is another set of would- have's to consider: What would have happened had the Libyan resistance remained nonviolent? What would have happened had the militants been left without external assistance? Would those democratic impulses dawning across the region have been strengthened or diminished had the "international community" opted against force?
Oh yes, and one could-it-be: Could it yet be that in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and even Palestine, those things with feathers will continue to pick at their respective scarecrows?
IN PRAISE OF PRINT
March 17, 2011
Easy Reader publisher Kevin Cody's puzzled prognostication on the death of newspapers (EasyReaderNews.com, February 24) set me a-shivering. It was what the passage of Prohibition did to drinkers and what the smoking bans did to tobacco lovers: When the papers are no more, how can I live?
There's something about a newspaper, and it isn't just the news. It's the paper.
You can spread it or fold it. You can linger over it or glance at it. Turning its pages yields constant surprises. Reading a paper is a non-linear activity; looking across its broad pages, you see many things at once — headlines, photos, ads — some you follow, others you don't.
The comment of Will Rogers, the homespun pundit of the 1930's, that "All I know is just what I read in the papers," certainly applies to me. Much of what I've learned or been prompted to learn has come not from courses, journals, books, or on-line sources but from the newspapers, just as it did for generations before me.
Newspapers were their window to the world.
Uncle Frank, my mother's brother, a book-binder with a knack for picking stocks, retired at age 55 and for the next 30 years spent every afternoon reading the Los Angeles Times. He read it the way people commonly did it on buses and trains in pre- iPod/iPad days, folding it in half lengthwise, reading the left side of the front page, turning it over to the right side, then folding that side back to reveal page 2, and so on to the end. When I was a boy, I was fascinated by this method and begged him to teach me how to do it, but after several attempts when I turned his Times into a pile of random pages, he gave up. I eventually mastered the technique, but now seldom use it, preferring the compact New Yorker on the subway instead. (As proof that you can find absolutely everything on the internet, go to RealSimple.com and search for "How to Fold a Broadsheet Newspaper" for illustrated instructions. Real simple, they say.)
Uncle Frank's method was an early version of multi-tasking, in which he held several unfinished articles in his head at once, resuming them wherever they were continued inside. My father, a machinist with a post-Depression suspicion of stocks, had a different approach with the evening Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the people's paper, which he bought daily after work. Dad was an interactive reader, spreading the paper on the kitchen table and noisily turning the pages to find the continuation of a font-page story. He processed the essential facts, offering running commentary on international politics, labor relations, government boondoggles, or movieland scandals to anyone nearby, and failing that, to himself.
Neither of these men had a formal education, but both of them displayed an astounding command of ideas and issues, due almost exclusively to their lifelong love of the newspaper.
It's no wonder I got hooked on newspapers at an early age. First I cut out cartoons, then later amassed huge files of clippings ranging from hard news to human and natural oddities. In high school I helped to found and went on to edit a mimeographed alternative weekly to counter the glossy and vapid establishment organ produced by the journalism class. I wrote a column for the Bellflower Herald Enterprise, as local as local news got. When I went off to college on the East Coast, I had the Sunday L.A. Times mailed to me, my medication for homesickness. There hasn't been a day in the decades since when I've begun my morning without the paper, any paper, wherever I was, even in Poland or Italy, where all I could do was look at the photos and guess at the words.
Reading the newspaper is part of my life's ritual. On days when the New York Times doesn't come — delivery to the Bronx is spotty, and when it snows they don't even bother — I feel the ache of absence, the symptoms of withdrawal.
My approach to internet news is different. I use the Web in much the same way as I did the public library's reference room in bygone days — another identity problem, by the way — to search for information on specific topics. When I enter a news site, I rarely browse the home page; sitting at a computer screen is work, not leisure, and there's something about the screen itself that makes me vaguely anxious. I cannot linger; when I find what I want I print it out and read the hard copy.
This purpose-driven activity leaves me usually oblivious to the ads flashing and framing the screen, most of which I treat as so much annoying spam, as worthless as e-mails from the Nigerian lottery.
Cody's mystification about why the Easy Reader, like all papers, is losing advertising to the electronic media mystifies me too. I'm much more likely to be attracted to and act on an ad when I come upon it as I turn a page rather than having it in my face on a computer screen. Plus, you see so many more of them in hard copy.
But as surveys continue to show more and more people getting their news from the internet, the more I dread the death of my old friend, the newspaper. Only a retrieval of appreciation for its unique contribution to daily life will save it.
Last month I got three handwritten letters from people under 30. Maybe some revival is at hand.
Easy Reader publisher Kevin Cody's puzzled prognostication on the death of newspapers (EasyReaderNews.com, February 24) set me a-shivering. It was what the passage of Prohibition did to drinkers and what the smoking bans did to tobacco lovers: When the papers are no more, how can I live?
There's something about a newspaper, and it isn't just the news. It's the paper.
You can spread it or fold it. You can linger over it or glance at it. Turning its pages yields constant surprises. Reading a paper is a non-linear activity; looking across its broad pages, you see many things at once — headlines, photos, ads — some you follow, others you don't.
The comment of Will Rogers, the homespun pundit of the 1930's, that "All I know is just what I read in the papers," certainly applies to me. Much of what I've learned or been prompted to learn has come not from courses, journals, books, or on-line sources but from the newspapers, just as it did for generations before me.
Newspapers were their window to the world.
Uncle Frank, my mother's brother, a book-binder with a knack for picking stocks, retired at age 55 and for the next 30 years spent every afternoon reading the Los Angeles Times. He read it the way people commonly did it on buses and trains in pre- iPod/iPad days, folding it in half lengthwise, reading the left side of the front page, turning it over to the right side, then folding that side back to reveal page 2, and so on to the end. When I was a boy, I was fascinated by this method and begged him to teach me how to do it, but after several attempts when I turned his Times into a pile of random pages, he gave up. I eventually mastered the technique, but now seldom use it, preferring the compact New Yorker on the subway instead. (As proof that you can find absolutely everything on the internet, go to RealSimple.com and search for "How to Fold a Broadsheet Newspaper" for illustrated instructions. Real simple, they say.)
Uncle Frank's method was an early version of multi-tasking, in which he held several unfinished articles in his head at once, resuming them wherever they were continued inside. My father, a machinist with a post-Depression suspicion of stocks, had a different approach with the evening Los Angeles Herald Examiner, the people's paper, which he bought daily after work. Dad was an interactive reader, spreading the paper on the kitchen table and noisily turning the pages to find the continuation of a font-page story. He processed the essential facts, offering running commentary on international politics, labor relations, government boondoggles, or movieland scandals to anyone nearby, and failing that, to himself.
Neither of these men had a formal education, but both of them displayed an astounding command of ideas and issues, due almost exclusively to their lifelong love of the newspaper.
It's no wonder I got hooked on newspapers at an early age. First I cut out cartoons, then later amassed huge files of clippings ranging from hard news to human and natural oddities. In high school I helped to found and went on to edit a mimeographed alternative weekly to counter the glossy and vapid establishment organ produced by the journalism class. I wrote a column for the Bellflower Herald Enterprise, as local as local news got. When I went off to college on the East Coast, I had the Sunday L.A. Times mailed to me, my medication for homesickness. There hasn't been a day in the decades since when I've begun my morning without the paper, any paper, wherever I was, even in Poland or Italy, where all I could do was look at the photos and guess at the words.
Reading the newspaper is part of my life's ritual. On days when the New York Times doesn't come — delivery to the Bronx is spotty, and when it snows they don't even bother — I feel the ache of absence, the symptoms of withdrawal.
My approach to internet news is different. I use the Web in much the same way as I did the public library's reference room in bygone days — another identity problem, by the way — to search for information on specific topics. When I enter a news site, I rarely browse the home page; sitting at a computer screen is work, not leisure, and there's something about the screen itself that makes me vaguely anxious. I cannot linger; when I find what I want I print it out and read the hard copy.
This purpose-driven activity leaves me usually oblivious to the ads flashing and framing the screen, most of which I treat as so much annoying spam, as worthless as e-mails from the Nigerian lottery.
Cody's mystification about why the Easy Reader, like all papers, is losing advertising to the electronic media mystifies me too. I'm much more likely to be attracted to and act on an ad when I come upon it as I turn a page rather than having it in my face on a computer screen. Plus, you see so many more of them in hard copy.
But as surveys continue to show more and more people getting their news from the internet, the more I dread the death of my old friend, the newspaper. Only a retrieval of appreciation for its unique contribution to daily life will save it.
Last month I got three handwritten letters from people under 30. Maybe some revival is at hand.
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
DRAMA REVIEW: "IN BETWEEN"
February 3, 2011
If there's any place on Earth for a modern Romeo-and-Juliet story, Israel must top the list: Jews and Arabs, living together yet apart, locked in mutual distrust and in many cases, mutual hatred. Yet here and there, eyes meet, smiles are exchanged, and something happens that makes all the barriers fall.
"All you need is love, love: Love is all you need." So sings Ibrahim Miari at the beginning of his one-man autobiographical play, "In Between," presented last Sunday at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Greenwich Village and sponsored by the Pax Christi organization. He's recounting how his Arab father won his Jewish mother in 1969, in Galilee, with a fire-red VW Beetle and its radio blasting out the Beatles. "I don't really know how they met," he admits, with a smile at the audience. "Neither of them ever talk about it. But I'd like to think it was this way."
He pulls a silver ring from his shirt pocket and examines it. "This isn't their ring either," he says. "It's ours."
Now he unfolds the story of his own graced encounter of eye catching eye in a Jerusalem coffee shop: Ibrahim, Israeli citizen, struggling playwright, an "in-between"; Sarah, an American student visiting Israel, a Jew. In short order, they decide to marry, and Sarah invites him to Boston to meet her parents and arrange the wedding.
Whirling slowly in a Sufi dance, Miari shifts the scene to the Tel Aviv airport. He retrieves a suitcase from a corner of the barren stage and snaps a latex glove on his right hand. His gestures split his body from top to bottom, right hand motioning to bewildered left to step aside: the pat-down. Left hand drops pants, right hand investigates body. Next scene: the supervisor's office. Right hand opens the suitcase, rummaging through the contents and tossing some items on the floor: a necktie, a silk scarf — a gas mask? The supervisor examines his passport. "You are an Arab and a Jew? You have been to Gaza? And what's all this?" "I am a playwright," he explains. "These are props for a play I'm trying out."
Another whirl. Now we're in Boston. Miari takes on the soft voice and anxious pose of his fiancee's mother. "Sarah, Ibrahim, I would love to give you my blessing — as long as you'll be married by our rabbi."
Out of the open suitcase comes a towering puppet, an empty black gown topped with a grotesque foam-rubber head wearing a broad-brimmed hat over ringlets of hair. Another interrogation: "Will you raise your children as Jews?" the puppet asks. "We want to let them decide." Request for marriage refused.
Whirl again, flashback to childhood, early 1980's. The actor becomes his father, telling the boy gruffly that though he was raised as a Jew in his mother's line, he is now an Arab. His name will be changed from Abraham to Ibrahim, and he will be transferred from Hebrew school to Islamic school. The scene shifts to a school-yard: His lifelong Jewish friends call to him through the fence to join them in play. He cannot come.
Another whirl, to present time. His father, enraged at the news of his son's engagement, curses his own interracial marriage as "a mistake." "Remember our proverb," he admonishes: "If you don't marry from your tribe, you'll suffer until you die."
The puppet appears twice more, first as an imam and then as a Buddhist priest ("We're ‘Jew-Bu's!'" Ibrahim tells him). Sorry; all impossible.
The play ends abruptly there, with Ibrahim telling the audience they went ahead with the wedding without religious officialdom, calling on a friend to witness their vows.
The last third of this work is dissatisfying. The dramatic tension built up through the airport scene falls flat. The puppet takes on a major role, a satire of formal religion, while — with the exception of the tirade of Ibrahim's father — the characters of Sarah and the parents are left undeveloped. (Indeed, Sarah's father and Ibrahim's mother are barely mentioned.) The resolution, such as it is, is achieved with little of the anticipated conflict. In the end, it's less Romeo and Juliet and more Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Nevertheless, the overall mood is evocative. By masterfully dividing the gestures of his body, Miari illustrates the sad division between Jews and Arabs, both the Biblical descendants of Abraham/Ibrahim, a division that lives in his very self and in his very name, extending back to his parents and forward to his children. (A far better ending, in fact, would have been a reflection on those children-to-be.)
"In Between" leaves you thinking that those who marry in spite of ethnic prohibitions are living symbols of hope, unmasking the absurdity of racial and religious intolerance and pointing the way to a world as yet untried.
All you need is love.
If there's any place on Earth for a modern Romeo-and-Juliet story, Israel must top the list: Jews and Arabs, living together yet apart, locked in mutual distrust and in many cases, mutual hatred. Yet here and there, eyes meet, smiles are exchanged, and something happens that makes all the barriers fall.
"All you need is love, love: Love is all you need." So sings Ibrahim Miari at the beginning of his one-man autobiographical play, "In Between," presented last Sunday at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Greenwich Village and sponsored by the Pax Christi organization. He's recounting how his Arab father won his Jewish mother in 1969, in Galilee, with a fire-red VW Beetle and its radio blasting out the Beatles. "I don't really know how they met," he admits, with a smile at the audience. "Neither of them ever talk about it. But I'd like to think it was this way."
He pulls a silver ring from his shirt pocket and examines it. "This isn't their ring either," he says. "It's ours."
Now he unfolds the story of his own graced encounter of eye catching eye in a Jerusalem coffee shop: Ibrahim, Israeli citizen, struggling playwright, an "in-between"; Sarah, an American student visiting Israel, a Jew. In short order, they decide to marry, and Sarah invites him to Boston to meet her parents and arrange the wedding.
Whirling slowly in a Sufi dance, Miari shifts the scene to the Tel Aviv airport. He retrieves a suitcase from a corner of the barren stage and snaps a latex glove on his right hand. His gestures split his body from top to bottom, right hand motioning to bewildered left to step aside: the pat-down. Left hand drops pants, right hand investigates body. Next scene: the supervisor's office. Right hand opens the suitcase, rummaging through the contents and tossing some items on the floor: a necktie, a silk scarf — a gas mask? The supervisor examines his passport. "You are an Arab and a Jew? You have been to Gaza? And what's all this?" "I am a playwright," he explains. "These are props for a play I'm trying out."
Another whirl. Now we're in Boston. Miari takes on the soft voice and anxious pose of his fiancee's mother. "Sarah, Ibrahim, I would love to give you my blessing — as long as you'll be married by our rabbi."
Out of the open suitcase comes a towering puppet, an empty black gown topped with a grotesque foam-rubber head wearing a broad-brimmed hat over ringlets of hair. Another interrogation: "Will you raise your children as Jews?" the puppet asks. "We want to let them decide." Request for marriage refused.
Whirl again, flashback to childhood, early 1980's. The actor becomes his father, telling the boy gruffly that though he was raised as a Jew in his mother's line, he is now an Arab. His name will be changed from Abraham to Ibrahim, and he will be transferred from Hebrew school to Islamic school. The scene shifts to a school-yard: His lifelong Jewish friends call to him through the fence to join them in play. He cannot come.
Another whirl, to present time. His father, enraged at the news of his son's engagement, curses his own interracial marriage as "a mistake." "Remember our proverb," he admonishes: "If you don't marry from your tribe, you'll suffer until you die."
The puppet appears twice more, first as an imam and then as a Buddhist priest ("We're ‘Jew-Bu's!'" Ibrahim tells him). Sorry; all impossible.
The play ends abruptly there, with Ibrahim telling the audience they went ahead with the wedding without religious officialdom, calling on a friend to witness their vows.
The last third of this work is dissatisfying. The dramatic tension built up through the airport scene falls flat. The puppet takes on a major role, a satire of formal religion, while — with the exception of the tirade of Ibrahim's father — the characters of Sarah and the parents are left undeveloped. (Indeed, Sarah's father and Ibrahim's mother are barely mentioned.) The resolution, such as it is, is achieved with little of the anticipated conflict. In the end, it's less Romeo and Juliet and more Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.
Nevertheless, the overall mood is evocative. By masterfully dividing the gestures of his body, Miari illustrates the sad division between Jews and Arabs, both the Biblical descendants of Abraham/Ibrahim, a division that lives in his very self and in his very name, extending back to his parents and forward to his children. (A far better ending, in fact, would have been a reflection on those children-to-be.)
"In Between" leaves you thinking that those who marry in spite of ethnic prohibitions are living symbols of hope, unmasking the absurdity of racial and religious intolerance and pointing the way to a world as yet untried.
All you need is love.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
WHERE'S THE CARE IN HEALTH CARE?
January 27, 2011
Having delayed it a week in deference towards Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot through the head in Tucson, the Republicans of the House brought up and voted en bloc to repeal the health-care bill signed into law just ten months ago. The measure is entitled "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." Job-killing? Killing, period? Now that's a lovely choice of words, considering the topic and the circumstances. But even something kinder and gentler — "job-eliminating" or "employment- effacing," for instance — wouldn't soften the Republican message that health-care legislation is about jobs, or about the deficit, or about taxation, or about states' rights — about anything but health.
As usual, the anything-but arguments are hardly compelling. Republicans contend that the law will "kill" jobs because businesses will let employees go rather than be burdened by either insuring them or paying an additional tax; Democrats say the effect will be minimal.
The ambiguity in the deficit argument is even greater. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that repealing the law will add $230 billion to the federal deficit over ten years, while the Republicans insist that keeping the existing law will add $701 billion. The fact made obvious by this divergence is that nobody really knows for sure. This isn't policy, it's politics.
But consider the case of Rep. Giffords. What will be the total cost of repairing her wounded brain and leading her to recovery — the hospitalization, the teams of medical specialists, the surgeries, the medications, and all the rehabilitation therapies — speech, occupational, physical - that will last for months or quite possibly years? The figure will be astronomical, and it will be paid for almost entirely by her federal insurance plan.
What of the 12 others wounded in the shooting? Five of them are over 65 and covered by Medicare. As for the rest, are there maybe some who have little or no health insurance? What will they and their families do?
Last month, Virginia federal judge Henry Hudson ruled that federally-mandated insurance coverage for almost all Americans, a key provision in the law intended to distribute the costs more equitably, violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. "Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," he wrote. Virginia state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who brought the suit, remarked that "if the government can order you to buy health insurance, they can order you to buy a car, to buy asparagus, even cauliflower ... or join a gym. The power is expandable almost without limit if this is allowable and constitutional."
Two other federal judges have also weighed in on the question thus far, affirming the opposite, that the mandate is constitutional; so the issue is hardly settled. But while Cuccinelli's comment is just typically embarrassing Republican rhetoric (see "job-killing," above) the judge's sober analysis makes sense. Health insurance is no different from life insurance or homeowner's insurance; it's a product. How can the government compel people to buy it?
Health insurance is a commodity, "in the stream of commerce" — but the essential medical services it pays for are not. They are not a matter of choice, like cauliflower; they are a necessity.
Return to Rep. Giffords. When she was shot, the entire nation, and I daresay that includes the most libertarian opponents of health-care reform, focused single-mindedly on her condition and on the measures being taken by the heroic medical staff to save her life and restore her wholeness. In this tragic moment, health care suddenly was not about jobs or deficits or comparison shopping. It was about health.
And it's about us all. Rep. Giffords is exactly like the tens of thousands of people who will be hit with something just as unexpected and devastating this very day — a gunshot wound, a workplace accident, a heart attack, a diagnosis of cancer. Injury and disease are the absolute leveler, the one thing that eventually will afflict every single human being, from the billionaire to the indigent to the immigrant.
Despite its "laudable intentions," as Judge Hudson readily admitted, I believe the present law is flawed in preserving almost intact the role of insurance companies, reinforcing the notion that health care is product involving, in the judge's words, "an individual's right to choose to participate." It is not. Because it is a universal need, medical care should be considered a public responsibility whose burden must be shared by all. Like education, health care should be treated not as a commodity but as a civil right.
Having delayed it a week in deference towards Representative Gabrielle Giffords, shot through the head in Tucson, the Republicans of the House brought up and voted en bloc to repeal the health-care bill signed into law just ten months ago. The measure is entitled "Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act." Job-killing? Killing, period? Now that's a lovely choice of words, considering the topic and the circumstances. But even something kinder and gentler — "job-eliminating" or "employment- effacing," for instance — wouldn't soften the Republican message that health-care legislation is about jobs, or about the deficit, or about taxation, or about states' rights — about anything but health.
As usual, the anything-but arguments are hardly compelling. Republicans contend that the law will "kill" jobs because businesses will let employees go rather than be burdened by either insuring them or paying an additional tax; Democrats say the effect will be minimal.
The ambiguity in the deficit argument is even greater. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that repealing the law will add $230 billion to the federal deficit over ten years, while the Republicans insist that keeping the existing law will add $701 billion. The fact made obvious by this divergence is that nobody really knows for sure. This isn't policy, it's politics.
But consider the case of Rep. Giffords. What will be the total cost of repairing her wounded brain and leading her to recovery — the hospitalization, the teams of medical specialists, the surgeries, the medications, and all the rehabilitation therapies — speech, occupational, physical - that will last for months or quite possibly years? The figure will be astronomical, and it will be paid for almost entirely by her federal insurance plan.
What of the 12 others wounded in the shooting? Five of them are over 65 and covered by Medicare. As for the rest, are there maybe some who have little or no health insurance? What will they and their families do?
Last month, Virginia federal judge Henry Hudson ruled that federally-mandated insurance coverage for almost all Americans, a key provision in the law intended to distribute the costs more equitably, violates the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. "Neither the Supreme Court nor any federal circuit court of appeals has extended Commerce Clause powers to compel an individual to involuntarily enter the stream of commerce by purchasing a commodity in the private market," he wrote. Virginia state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, who brought the suit, remarked that "if the government can order you to buy health insurance, they can order you to buy a car, to buy asparagus, even cauliflower ... or join a gym. The power is expandable almost without limit if this is allowable and constitutional."
Two other federal judges have also weighed in on the question thus far, affirming the opposite, that the mandate is constitutional; so the issue is hardly settled. But while Cuccinelli's comment is just typically embarrassing Republican rhetoric (see "job-killing," above) the judge's sober analysis makes sense. Health insurance is no different from life insurance or homeowner's insurance; it's a product. How can the government compel people to buy it?
Health insurance is a commodity, "in the stream of commerce" — but the essential medical services it pays for are not. They are not a matter of choice, like cauliflower; they are a necessity.
Return to Rep. Giffords. When she was shot, the entire nation, and I daresay that includes the most libertarian opponents of health-care reform, focused single-mindedly on her condition and on the measures being taken by the heroic medical staff to save her life and restore her wholeness. In this tragic moment, health care suddenly was not about jobs or deficits or comparison shopping. It was about health.
And it's about us all. Rep. Giffords is exactly like the tens of thousands of people who will be hit with something just as unexpected and devastating this very day — a gunshot wound, a workplace accident, a heart attack, a diagnosis of cancer. Injury and disease are the absolute leveler, the one thing that eventually will afflict every single human being, from the billionaire to the indigent to the immigrant.
Despite its "laudable intentions," as Judge Hudson readily admitted, I believe the present law is flawed in preserving almost intact the role of insurance companies, reinforcing the notion that health care is product involving, in the judge's words, "an individual's right to choose to participate." It is not. Because it is a universal need, medical care should be considered a public responsibility whose burden must be shared by all. Like education, health care should be treated not as a commodity but as a civil right.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
TOMBSTONE
January 13, 2011
"I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America," said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik after the Saturday massacre in Tucson.
Tombstone, the silver-mining boomtown-turned-tourist town 70 miles south of Tucson, holds a signal place in American mythology, with its macabre name, its historic reputation for lawlessness, and its told-and-retold story of the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral — the epitome of all that was wild about the Wild West. Sheriff Dupnik, 30 years on the job and long noted for his blunt and sometimes contrarian views on hot- button social issues not necessarily connected to law enforcement, tapped into the well of mythology as few others could; after all, Wyatt Earp himself was once the sheriff of Pima County.
Sheriff Dupnik had his home state in mind, of course, and there's certainly some reason for it; Arizona has lost its fun- in-the-sun image of late. The passage of SB 1070, the strictest illegal-immigration state law in the nation, last April, ignited protests and boycotts throughout the country. (Dupnik said the law "is unwise, it's stupid, and it's racist" — "a national embarrassment".)
Also recently enacted were laws allowing Arizonans to purchase guns without a license and to pack concealed weapons without a permit, and prohibiting counties and municipalities from setting tougher regulations themselves. (Dupnik: "I have never been a proponent of letting everyone in this state carry guns under almost any situation, and that's almost where we are." An ironic sidelight on the issue came from Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen, writing in Politico: By 1880, she notes, the town of Tombstone itself had outlawed the possession of all firearms.)
On January 1, a law went into effect withdrawing state funding from schools offering courses that are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and that "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals" — a law which the state superintendent of schools said was specifically directed against the Chicano studies program in the school district of ... Tucson.
Perhaps even more than elsewhere, an atmosphere of rancor seems to have infused Arizona state politics over the last several years, beginning with those shouting-matches called "town hall meetings" over health-care legislation and continuing through the bitter midterm Congressional campaigns. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," Dupnik said after the shootings. "And unfortunately, I think Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Dupnik may be right about Arizona — it's certainly developing a reputation — but the myth of the West, of which Tombstone and the O.K. Corral are examples, is embedded in the American consciousness, containing themes of individualism, scorn for governmental control, hatred for outsiders, and the supremacy of the gun, all of which underlie much of the rhetoric of the Right.
Whether or not the Tucson shooter was acting out those Tombstone themes may never be known. Yet, as Dupnik remarked: "To try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with."
For those of normal disposition, the rhetoric of anger is taken metaphorically and sublimated. For those who are "unbalanced," it can become an atmosphere of pure oxygen waiting for a match.
Wouldn't you think that the deaths of those six innocents would change a nation's mind about the common sense of gun control? Wouldn't you think that the wounding of those 13 others would demonstrate how vulnerable to fate we all are, and that medical care is not a commodity but a necessity and a right? Wouldn't you think that this horrifying event would at the very least sober people up about the dangers of incendiary words?
The answer is probably no. The myth of Tombstone will not die.
"I think we're the Tombstone of the United States of America," said Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik after the Saturday massacre in Tucson.
Tombstone, the silver-mining boomtown-turned-tourist town 70 miles south of Tucson, holds a signal place in American mythology, with its macabre name, its historic reputation for lawlessness, and its told-and-retold story of the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral — the epitome of all that was wild about the Wild West. Sheriff Dupnik, 30 years on the job and long noted for his blunt and sometimes contrarian views on hot- button social issues not necessarily connected to law enforcement, tapped into the well of mythology as few others could; after all, Wyatt Earp himself was once the sheriff of Pima County.
Sheriff Dupnik had his home state in mind, of course, and there's certainly some reason for it; Arizona has lost its fun- in-the-sun image of late. The passage of SB 1070, the strictest illegal-immigration state law in the nation, last April, ignited protests and boycotts throughout the country. (Dupnik said the law "is unwise, it's stupid, and it's racist" — "a national embarrassment".)
Also recently enacted were laws allowing Arizonans to purchase guns without a license and to pack concealed weapons without a permit, and prohibiting counties and municipalities from setting tougher regulations themselves. (Dupnik: "I have never been a proponent of letting everyone in this state carry guns under almost any situation, and that's almost where we are." An ironic sidelight on the issue came from Georgetown history professor Katherine Benton-Cohen, writing in Politico: By 1880, she notes, the town of Tombstone itself had outlawed the possession of all firearms.)
On January 1, a law went into effect withdrawing state funding from schools offering courses that are "designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group" and that "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals" — a law which the state superintendent of schools said was specifically directed against the Chicano studies program in the school district of ... Tucson.
Perhaps even more than elsewhere, an atmosphere of rancor seems to have infused Arizona state politics over the last several years, beginning with those shouting-matches called "town hall meetings" over health-care legislation and continuing through the bitter midterm Congressional campaigns. "The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous," Dupnik said after the shootings. "And unfortunately, I think Arizona has become sort of the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."
Dupnik may be right about Arizona — it's certainly developing a reputation — but the myth of the West, of which Tombstone and the O.K. Corral are examples, is embedded in the American consciousness, containing themes of individualism, scorn for governmental control, hatred for outsiders, and the supremacy of the gun, all of which underlie much of the rhetoric of the Right.
Whether or not the Tucson shooter was acting out those Tombstone themes may never be known. Yet, as Dupnik remarked: "To try to inflame the public on a daily basis 24 hours a day, seven days a week has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with."
For those of normal disposition, the rhetoric of anger is taken metaphorically and sublimated. For those who are "unbalanced," it can become an atmosphere of pure oxygen waiting for a match.
Wouldn't you think that the deaths of those six innocents would change a nation's mind about the common sense of gun control? Wouldn't you think that the wounding of those 13 others would demonstrate how vulnerable to fate we all are, and that medical care is not a commodity but a necessity and a right? Wouldn't you think that this horrifying event would at the very least sober people up about the dangers of incendiary words?
The answer is probably no. The myth of Tombstone will not die.
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