Mao Poster Art (Your Face Here)

I have to get one of these posters made. Perfect for decorating the cubicle! Everybody has the Gurkha knives, and the war carpets, and the travel mementos in their work space, but I don't know anyone with one of these.










This one says: "I may be just a peasant but I'm armed, so back off!"










This one appeals to me for the bookish aspects of Mao's regime; all those proletarians reading Mao's sayings as they go about their workday.










And one like this would make a great family portrait. I can see it now over my fireplace.

UK Guardian to America: Elect Obama, or Else

A columnist at the UK Guardian, writing on behalf of the whole world, has warned America not to break his heart by electing anyone other than Barack Obama. Here it is: the world's verdict will be harsh if the US rejects the man it yearns for. Yes, the headline actually used the words "the man it yearns for."

It seems that consequences will follow if we fail to elect the world's heart throb. According to the article's sub-head, "an America that disdains Obama for his global support risks turning current anti-Bush feeling into something far worse." You might wonder what could possibly be far worse than the current anti-Bush feeling? What could the world do to us, anyway? Well, in the P.G. Woodhouse novel The Swoop!, England was occupied by foreign invaders and the Brits retaliated by giving their enemies the Supercilious Stare.

The Supercilious Stare unnerved them. There is nothing so terrible to the highly-strung foreigner as the cold, contemptuous, patronising gaze of the Englishman. It gave the invaders a perpetual feeling of doing the wrong thing.

Maybe the Brits will unleash something like the Stare on us if we toy with their feelings and then elect McCain.

Two quotes from the article:

If Americans choose McCain, they will be turning their back on the rest of the world, choosing to show us four more years of the Bush-Cheney finger. And I predict a deeply unpleasant shift.

And the manner of that decision will matter, too. If it is deemed to have been about race - that Obama was rejected because of his colour - the world's verdict will be harsh.

That last bit of finger-wagging is especially choice. The British love non-white politicians so much that they have two (two!) of their own in the House of Commons, and the rest of the EU nations seem to be likewise enamored of non-white office holders. So of course they claim the moral high ground.

America, you have been warned. Elect the man the world yearns for, or risk a deeply unpleasant shift and a harsh verdict in the court of world opinion. Maybe even the Supercilious Stare.

Community Organizers Strike Back

The jibes at community organizers at last week's Republican convention really struck a nerve. Already two groups have stood up to fight for the dignity of those put-upon souls.

The National Association of Social Workers was outraged to hear Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, one of the nation’s vice-presidential candidates, malign in a live international broadcast the work of community organizers.

Outraged is right, and they want you to read all about it: Social Workers Respond to Gov. Sarah Palin’s Attack on Community Organizers. According to the NASW, we owe our very democracy, our economic growth, and even our health and family services to community organizers. God bless them all, and I'm sure they could use some of your spare change.

And if the social workers are outraged, then the organized community organizers [I can find no other way to describe them] at Community Organizers Fight Back are angry and demanding an apology.

Community organizers across America, taken aback by a series of attacks from Republican leaders at the GOP convention in St. Paul, came together today to defend their work organizing Americans who have been left behind by unemployment, lack of health insurance and the national housing crisis. The organizers demanded an apology from Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for her statement that community organizers have no “actual responsibilities” and launched a web site, http://organizersfightback.wordpress.com, to defend themselves against Republican attacks.

Once again, I'm left perplexed when community organizers explain what they do, exactly:

Though many people are unfamiliar with community organizing, the job is both straightforward and vital: community organizers work with families who are struggling–because of low wages, poor health coverage, unaffordable housing, and other community problems–so that collectively, they can fix those problems and make government respond to their day-to-day concerns.

So, 'working with' these Dickensian families apparently consists of telling them to collectively fix their own problems by demanding that the government do something about them. Is that it? Everything I know about life tells me that if you expect the government to fix your problems for you, it will result in nothing but steady employment for more community organizers, generation after generation.

FBI = Forbidding Brutalist Irritant (to Washington's Federal Triangle)

The Washington Post ran a good opinion piece yesterday by a local community organizer - well, the executive director of the Downtown Cluster of Congregations - calling for the demolition of the ugly and dysfunctional FBI Headquarters building, which he rightly calls a "dead zone in what should be the thriving heart of the city" (Let's Hoover Up a Dead Space on Pennsylvania Avenue).

One quote will give the flavor of the article:

The FBI building, a "brutalist" design constructed in the late 1960s and early '70s, probably suffers from the same conditions that many other buildings of that era do: poor construction and an abysmal layout; highly inefficient use of interior space; and nightmarish heating and cooling systems. The building surely is on the opposite end of today's goals for a "green" space.

By the way, that term "brutalist" isn't just a diss against one building. It refers to a style of modern architecture that was in vogue for a mercifully brief time in the 1960s. Brutalist Architecture originates from the French béton brut, or "raw concrete", a term used by Le Corbusier to describe his choice of material. That style might have had its fans once upon a time, but it has no place amid the neo-classical architecture of the Federal Triangle, the greatest part of the Holy City of Washington. The Hoover Building looks like a pesticide factory compared to the next-door Justice Department headquarters, which outclasses the Hoover Building in every way. There is more architectural merit in one of the Justice Department's art deco doors then there is in the entire Hoover Building.

The Hoover Building is already falling down all by itself, as the author notes ("if you have taken a closer look at the place, then you've seen that the upper part of the building is wrapped in netting. Chunks of concrete facade seem to have fallen off randomly around the exterior"). I say, put it out of its misery and build the FBI a new, secure, headquarters elsewhere.

On the topic of security, allow me to point out the obvious and note that the Hoover Building, which was completed and occupied in 1974, 21 years before the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building bombing and the creation of anti-terrorism physical security requirements for domestic government office buildings, is completely vulnerable to a truck-bomb. It has essentially no setback distance from the surrounding streets, therefore no ability to resist blast effects. Part of the structure even overhangs the street (see the above photo). No anti-ram vehicle barrier can mitigate that vulnerability.

This is one situation where both the troglodytes of government security and the sensitive artistes of public architecture should be in complete agreement. The Hoover building must go!

Do They Still Make Hush Puppies?

After re-reading Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers for the first time in at least 20 years, I was bowled over by how well Tom Wolfe captured bureaucrats, like this #2 official of the San Francisco Office of Economic Opportunity:

But he doesn't have to open his mouth. All you have to do is look at him and you get the picture. The man's a lifer. He's stone civil service. He has it all down from the wheatcolor Hush Puppies to the wash'n'dry semi-tab-collar shortsleeves white shirt. Those wheatcolor Hush Puppies must be like some kind of fraternal garb among the civil-service employees, because they all wear them. They cost about $4.99, and the second time you move your toes, the seams split and the tops come away from the soles. But they all wear them. The man's shirt looks like he bought it at the August end-of-summer sale at the White Front. It is one of those shirts with pockets on both sides. Sticking out of the pockets and running across his chest he has a lineup of ball-point pens, felt nibs, lead pencils, wax markers, such as you wouldn't believe, Paper-mates, Pentels, Scriptos, Eberhard Faber Mongol 482's, Dri-Marks, Bic PM-29's, everything. They are lined up across his chest like campaign ribbons.

And then it dawns on you, and you wonder why it took so long for you to realize it. This man is the flak catcher. His job is to catch the flak for the No. 1 man. He's like the professional mourners you can hire in Chinatown. They have certified wailers, professional mourners, in Chinatown, and when your loved one dies, you can hire the professional mourners to wail at the funeral and show what a great loss to the community the departed is. In the same way this lifer is ready to catch whatever flak you're sending up. It doesn't matter what bureau they put him in. It's all the same. Poverty, Japanese imports, valley fever, tomato-crop parity, partial disability, home loans, second-probate accounting, the Interstate 90 detour change order, lockouts, secondary boycotts, G.I. alimony, the Pakistani quota, cinch mites, the Tularemic Loa loa, veterans' dental benefits, workmen's compensation, suspended excise rebates -- whatever you're angry about, it doesn't matter, he's there to catch the flak. He's a lifer.

And this nugget about the skill of office malingering:

The jobs themselves were nothing. They were supposed to be for teenagers from poor families. It was an O.E.O. program, and you got $1.35 an hour and ended up as a file clerk or stock-room boy in some federal office or some foundation -- hell, they didn't even need one half the people they already had working for them, and so all you learned was how to make work, fake work, and malinger out by the Xerox machine. It is true that you learned those skills from experts in the field, but it was a depressing field to be in.

Truly, Tom Wolfe is the Marcel Proust of modern American life. The next chance I get, I'm going to go shopping for semi-tab collar shirts and Hush Puppies.

Community Organizing Explained

"Over the past five years, I've often had a difficult time explaining my profession to folks."

So said Barack Obama, about his former profession of community organizing (in After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois, 1990).

Actually, it's easy to explain the profession of community organizing, and it was never done better than by Tom Wolfe in his 1970 essay about Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (you can read it here).

[Community organizers] were the kind of people the social-welfare professionals in the Kennedy Administration had in mind when they planned the poverty program in the first place. It was a truly adventurous and experimental approach they had. Instead of handing out alms, which never seemed to change anything, they would encourage the people in the ghettos to organize. They would help them become powerful enough to force the Establishment to give them what they needed. From the beginning the poverty program was aimed at helping ghetto people rise up against their oppressors. It was a scene in which the federal government came into the ghetto and said, "Here is some money and some field advisors. Now you organize your own pressure groups."

To sell the poverty program, its backers had to give it the protective coloration of "jobs" and "education," the Job Corps and Operation Head Start, things like that, things the country as a whole could accept. "Jobs" and "education" were things everybody could agree on. They were part of the free-enterprise ethic. They weren't uncomfortable subjects like racism and the class structure--and giving the poor the money and the tools to fight City Hall. But from the first that was what the lion's share of the poverty budget went into. It went into "community organizing," which was the bureaucratic term for "power to the people," the term for finding the real leaders of the ghetto and helping them organize the poor.

When you get down to the basics, community organizations and community development corporations are simply vessels for receiving and disbursing federal funds in the form of Community Development Block Grants. If you want the CDBG money, you first have to create an organization, which means you need a organizer or two to do the necessary paperwork and jump through the bureaucratic hoops. From the above link:

Citizen Participation - A [CDBG] grantee must develop and follow a detailed plan that provides for and encourages citizen participation. This integral process emphasizes participation by persons of low or moderate income, particularly residents of predominantly low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, slum or blighted areas, and areas in which the grantee proposes to use CDBG funds. The plan must provide citizens with the following: reasonable and timely access to local meetings; an opportunity to review proposed activities and program performance; provide for timely written answers to written complaints and grievances; and identify how the needs of non-English speaking residents will be met in the case of public hearings where a significant number of non-English speaking residents can be reasonably expected to participate.

I've encountered many such organizers and organizations in the 15 or so years I've done various types of volunteer work in Northern Virginia, and they were all primarily funding pass-through mechanisms, although a few of them were also safehavens for out-of-office politicians bidding their time between elections. It is clear what those community organizers do, but many of them surround themselves with an impenetrable word cloud of high-sounding justifications for the same reason an octopus emits ink when threatened by predators. The plain fact is that many community organizers don't really develop anything tangible with that development money except for their own offices, cars, debit cards, cell phones, expense accounts, travel vouchers and salaries.

Hence the difficulty Obama had explaining exactly what it was he did for a living for a few years in Chicago. According to the most detailed news media accounts I've seen, Obama's community development organization received about $400,000 in block grants over three years but could claim only the usual nebulous accomplishments, such as 'supporting' this group and 'standing by' that one and 'empowering' the other one.

I got a kick out of the way Obama's campaign manager responded to the laughter at the Republican Convention about community organizing:

Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack's experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed. Let's clarify something for them right now.

Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies.

Enough is enough. Make your voice heard loud and clear by making a donation right now. Thank you for joining more than 2 million ordinary Americans who refuse to be silenced.

That's perfect. I don't know what 'working with' unemployed steel workers entailed exactly, although I doubt it meant something actually useful like finding them other jobs. I do know what 'responding to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies' means, it means Mau-Mauing some hapless Chicago city agency employees exactly as Tom Wolfe described happening in San Francisco back in 1970.

And the icing on the cake is that Obama invites you to fight these outrageous slurs against community organizers by sending him some cash. Please dig deep, ordinary people across America are depending on you to keep the money flowing to their community organizers.

A Buncha Them Paki Bastard'adors

The August issue of Government Computer News had a piece on the digitization of the Johnson Presidential Library's many audio records, including LBJ's recorded telephone calls. Since the National Archives and Records Administration does not allow its personnel to make transcriptions of presidential recordings, the only transcripts released were the contemporary ones made by Johnson's staff, and they are far from perfect [see Lost in Transcription].

Among the many entertaining telephone conversations LBJ recorded was one to House Speaker McCormack on November 29, 1963, which was cut short when a foreign dignitary arrived. According to the transcript, LBJ told McCormack he had to hang up because:

"I've got a pack of them bastards waiting on me."

But the oral record has him saying:

"I've got the Pakistani Ambassador waiting on me."

I don't know. On this one, I might have to trust LBJ's staff to have the more accurate take.