Obviously my house-hunting wishlist is to find a sufficiently wonderful house for a sufficiently wonderful price I don't feel the need to move in six months.
Ideally what I'd want would be a two to three bedroom house, colonial by preference, on a postage stamp lot, in the middle of protected forest - and with no neighbors not more than 10 miles from a Wegmans.
For some silly reason I don't think I'll be finding that.
More seriously, my list of things that I feel are non-negotiable are a lot simpler:
Right Angles. I spent a year in a row building in the NYC/NJ area that had not a single right angle because of settling of the structure over the past century. Never again. (Even though we're talking about 89.45 degrees, or so - you'd be surprised just how accurate the human eye can be for noting such angles as being off.)
Off Street Parking. I don't really give a shit if there's a garage or not. I simply don't care to be stuck on snow days trying to find a place to put my car so it won't get towed or ticketed. There are advantages to a garage, if it is sound and not in need of huge repairs, no question there, but. . . that's an 'it's nice' feature - not a necessity.
No obvious six-legged roommates.
Move-in ready. All major appliances in place, and working. Including furnace/boiler; hot water heater; stove; oven; and fridge. If I can get them: washer/dryer. Also by preference, none of any of these more than 20 years old. Working bathrooms. No plumbing issues. No heating issues. No open walls.
Oh, yeah. No dyslexic plumbing. No burners that can't stay flat. Some kind of ventilation from the kitchen - if only a stupid window.
Things get a bit more complicated when we start looking at my wants:
No galley kitchens!
A dishwasher!
Washer/Dryer
More than one electric outlet per room. Preferably several, and update electrical post 1960.
No enclosed porch
If a garage a garage that is sound.
Fenced in yard.
Relatively easy road access. Either room in the back to turn the car around or not backing out onto a road as busy as Clifford St.
Preferably zero abandoned properties still standing on the immediate block; as a practical limit no more than, say, two. Likewise, no more than two lots where former structures were bulldozed by the city.
Other decisions I've made: No condos. Add in a set of HOA fees and something doable becomes a nightmare very quickly. (Besides I want more space between me and neighbor. No more upstairs mosh pits. Similarly - while I understand the reasoning, and see the potential benefits, no duplexes. Probably the best argument against it is that I have no fucking clue how the VA would react to such an income source. But really the biggest hurdle for me is that I don't trust myself to pick good tenants.
Besides, all the duplexes I've seen in my price range have galley kitchens. Inevitably.
I think that's the main stuff that I want to bring to the meeting with the Realtor tomorrow, but we'll see.
I remember the confusion. I remember the questions. I remember, too, the rush to judgment. The blind accusations that it must have been some kind of foreign strike. (If I recall there were suggestions of PLO asssociation.)
I don't want to do anything like that with this strike.
So, I do not make accusations.
However, I am thinking of the reasons why I don't think this is the work of Al-Qaeda. Nor any other foreign group.
Patriot's Day, in Massachusetts is a big thing linked inextricably to the Minutemen and the Revolution. And all the things that have been being fetishized in certain circles who claim to want to save America for Americans.
Add to that that the Boston Marathon is a hugely international event these days...
I can't think of anywhere a bombing would be more likely to be considered to be both a hearkening to the Minutemen and a condemnation of globilization.
Which has me wondering just who might be behind this bombing.
I make no accusations. Logic isn't proof.
But I won't be surprised if this logic turns out to be related to the facts, either.
This is the review of Sarah's Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay I just put up over at Goodreads.
How can I explain my reactions to this book?
First off, looking at the work, itself, without placing it into any larger context, it's well-written, and the characterizations range from excellent to cardboard. The saddest part, for me, was that in general the most compelling characterizations were for generally minor characters.
This book can be considered to be split into two stories - the story of the modern day narrator - an ex-pat American journalist Julia, married to a Frenchman, and still somewhat apart from her in-law's family dynamic; the other story is that of a ten-year old girl, Sarah, living in Paris under the German occupation. The action for both stories starts with the Vel d'Hiv round up. For Sarah it's when the French police come for her whole family; for Julia it's when her editor tells her to write up a piece about the round-up for the ex-pat centered magazine she works at.
Working from these two starts, de Rosnay paints a picture of the Vel d'Hiv roundup, using Julia's narration to expose the larger picture - discussing statistics, numbers, the extent of the planning, and other abstracts; from Sarah's narrative, we get a personal view of what those numbers might hide.
When I speak of the characterizations, we get some compellingly sympathetic depictions of modern French characters, some people in the English-speaking ex-pat community that Julia orbits, and Julia's daughter Zoe. Sarah's characterization is also excellent, though kept at more of a distance. The biggest problem I had with the modern narrative is that one of the key characters within that portion of the story is Julia's husband - and he's a cipher. Now, some of that, I believe, reflects a deliberate narrative choice by the author - one of the themes for Julia is how examining the story of the Vel d'Hiv is forcing her to reexamine so much else in her life, too.
While we get told that there was a great deal of physical chemistry between Julia and her husband, we never get any real sense of that in the narrative. It's not that I wanted to be taken into the bedroom with Julia and her husband - but I would like to be able to believe that the two characters being shown to me were people I could believe would go to their bedroom together. And I couldn't. The whole dynamic of that relationship was so unconvincing to me that I really could only connect with Julia's narrative when she dealt with other people.
In the end the novel does tie the two narratives together in a manner that is plausible, and, if not precisely satisfying, at least having the benefit of verisimilitude. Along the way there are several well done climaxes provided to the reader - and perhaps the most satisfying, for me, came not in Sarah's story, but in Julia's. (I'll discuss that in a moment, when I start connecting the novel to other books, to history, and to certain philosophical points.) In the end I found this to be a very good book - not great, but certainly one I have no trouble recommending to any reader.
From here on, I will make no further effort to avoid spoilers, and I am going to be bouncing around a lot with connecting this book to other books, fictional and non-fiction, about the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. And especially about the duty to witness and remember.
First off, some personal background: when I was a teen my interest in military history, the macabre, and especially survival stories brought me into that subset of WWII themed books dealing with the Holocaust, and especially Holocaust survivor's accounts. I read a lot of these, both age-appropriate ones, and those that were written for the adult audience, too. As such, I have a list of cliches that I expect to see in such stories.
While it has been many years since I was a teen, I found those cliches still fresh in my mind. And with one notable exception de Rosnay seems to have put all of them into her account of Sarah's experiences. Perhaps especially annoying was when they would be present in a manner that seemed to contradict other cliches. Some I can accept as being more-or-less representative of real experiences of survivors, since so much of what happened was contradictory. Other cliches, such as having two girls escaping together from the transit camp at Drancy, but only one of the two surviving, even after they found sympathetic shelter, seemed a bit egregious. While it served a narrative purpose, once more emphasizing how some people were cooperating with the occupiers in their efforts, it remains the incident that most threw me out of the narrative for either story - Sarah's, or Julia's.
(Especially since, if de Rosnay felt, for narrative purposes, she has to make Sarah feel a completely isolated lone survivor, it would have been even more emotionally effective had the gendarme who found the two girls attempting to sneak through the fence stayed with his original impulse - and let only Sarah escape, while taking her friend back to the camp. Granted, that would have tarnished, badly, one of the acts of grace that de Rosnay did make sure to include her narrative, but it wouldn't have felt quite so predictable. Of course, predictable fiction doesn't mean unbelievable fiction. Just often dissatisfying fiction.)
Which brings me to one of the things that I feel was very, very well done in the novel as a whole. While there is no attempt to whitewash anything about the complicity of the government, nor how there was popular support from some people for what happened, there was also no attempt to present that as the sole representation of the French reaction to the occupation or the treatment of the Jews. There are acts of grace all through Sarah's story, culminating not simply with the Dufaure couple, who take in Sarah - but with Julia's father-in-law, and his own father. (Since, of course, Sarah's story and Julia's do connect. See what I said about cliches earlier.)
None of which changes that Sarah went through a shattering experience. Nor is any attempt made to say that the one makes up for the other. Just a recognition that for all the complicity there were numerous individual rebellions, too.
One of the themes throughout Julia's narrative is that of looking away from unpleasant history. Especially history that touches on one's own family, or nation. Julia goes on, time and time again, asking her friends - usually other ex-pats, then even her sister living on Long Island - whether they'd ever been taught anything in school about the Vel d'Hive round up. The clear implication, and I believe it was mentioned at least once, was that Julia felt (and here I can't help but think she was speaking for the author, too) that it was a major failure for those person's education to have left such a horrible event unremarked.
Now, here we start to get into questions of 'who can criticize what.' Or to put it in a more crude fashion, how close need a person be to be able to validly criticize another nation or culture's reaction? Because Julia is an American ex-pat, I think it's quite reasonable for de Rosnay to refuse to have Julia make specific criticisms of the French people and government for how they've been willing to buy into the idea of the Holocaust having been something imposed upon Europe entirely by the Nazis. (More on that in a few paragraphs)
There are several places where the narration invites such criticism from the reader, but wisely de Rosnay keeps Julia from making such criticisms herself.
However, the criticism that Julia seems to focus on is that American schools should be teaching the Vel d'Hiv round up. And I can't agree with that. American curriculum, I think, would be satisfied with making a small stab at the idea that the Holocaust were something uniquely German, or unique to the Nazi party. The truth is a bit murkier, and the Vel d'Hiv round up illustrates that - there was a lot of anti-Semitism in Europe, and even in the US, at that time. The Dreyfus Affair was only completed in 1906, after over a decade of back-and-forth about the role of Jews in French society. The cooperation provided not simply within occupied France, but from Vichy France, towards the racial goals of the Nazis is something that should be part of US curriculum.
But even more, the US curriculum needs to focus on the questions of our own domestic issues of the time: Why was the MS St. Louis refused permission to debark her passengers in the US? What made that acceptable? What justification was there for gathering up the Nisei into concentration camps of our own? What conditions and attitudes created the mutiny of the African American sailors after the Port Chicago disaster, or any of the other mutinies involving African American troops during WWII?
Rather than focusing on the mote in our neighbor's eye, let's shed some light on things that people like to keep hidden here. That, in my opinion, is a better focus for US curricula than an exhaustive discussion of the Vel d'Hiv round up.
One of the things that becomes increasingly clear to me as I get older is just how convenient scapegoats are. If the scapegoat can be tarred with the whole guilt for some terrible event, it has the effect of taking away the stigma of sins from anyone else who might be at fault as well. To use an example from American history, the Cherokee's Trail of Tears is often presented and remembered as something that Andrew Jackson did to the Cherokee. The reality is rather more disturbing: The Trail of Tears didn't even happen while Jackson was President, but during the term of his successor, Martin Van Buren. The Supreme Court explicitly said that the relocation was legal. The popular support for the relocation was hard to overstate.
But for most Americans, now, it is something done solely by Andrew Jackson. (It certainly helps that while Jackson had his own virtues, it is also accurate to say the man was a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch.)
Similarly, every nation occupied by the Germans during WWII finds it convenient to buy into the narrative that the Holocaust was something imposed upon them by the Germans, or more often, by the Nazis and the Gestapo. This puts the blood guilt onto a foreign group, and even better if it can be a currently marginalized foreign group. And ignores how, with exceptions like Denmark, the governments of occupied territories often complied with the racial agenda of the occupiers.
If we forget such failures of governments, if we allow a veil of silence to be drawn over such incidents - we prevent the sort of questioning attitude that is our best defense against a repeat of similar atrocities in the future. Which, I think, is a position that Julia (and Tatiana de Rosnay, herself) would agree with me about, even if we continue to disagree about the validity of including the Vel d'Hiv round up, as part of a US curriculum.
For reasons that, quite honestly, escape me one of the books I remember most from my very youngest days is Barbara and Ed Emberley's Caldecott Medal winning Drummer Hoff. For those of you who may not be intimately familiar with this tragic volume, I shall provide a link - but in summary it is a description of the process whereby an early gunpowder era cannon was fired. Wikipedia says of the art style that it evokes "both 1960s psycheldelica and Colonial American engravings." I can't think of a better way to put it, myself.
The work is clearly a product of the sixties, both in its artwork, but particularly for the tone and anti-war message most people see in it. I see something else, that doesn't seem to strike as many people, when they read the book. Before going any further, here's the video:
The video also has a teacher's guide associated with it. In the guide it highlights three things that they think the children should learn from the book: recognition of the horrors of war; recognition of the idea of division of labor; and following a sequence of events.
The horrors of war, to me, seems rather iffy. There is no sense of desperation or contested achievement in firing off the cannon in the book. If anything it looks far more like a celebratory event (until the final denoument, at least.) than anything I'd call war. However, I'll concede the point, and admit that my own view is probably a bit skewed. Further, for that time period in the American consciousness, an anti-war message is a likely intent of the authors.
The division of labor, and the sequencing of events are unobjectionable, and clearly a part of the work.
Where I feel that the teacher's guide fails is that it ignores the lesson that I seem to remember being most vivid about the whole work: That blame, if not accountability, is going to flow downhill to the lowest member of any hierarchical organization in the wake of a disaster. With every step of the sequence of events the reader is being reminded that the ultimate step taken was Drummer Hoff's. Not only does this emphasize the sequence of events, but also places in the minds of the audience the sense that the person who must have been at fault was Drummer Hoff.
In short, this work is a masterful frame job for poor Drummer Hoff, providing us a concrete example in children's literature of the truism that Rudyard Kipling wrote in his poem The Hyenas:
"Nor do they defile the dead man's name - That is reserved for his kind."
In this book poor, dead, defenseless Drummer Hoff is clearly, and relentlessly, saddled with the guilt for firing off the cannon and killing the squad that set up the weapon. And no one cares to admit it.
As an adult, I find that message and warning even more explicit than I found it as a child - knowing that the sort of cannon ruptures shown in this work are usually the result of poorly cast weapons means that if there is any fault involved the most likely culprits are never named, let alone investigated nor called to account for their actions. After all, why investigate further when we all know that it was hapless Drummer Hoff who fired it off?
I will close with some lines from another source, which may be familiar:
"This story has no moral; this story has no end; this story only goes to show that there ain't no good in men."
Goodnight
Part of what's likely to be an ongoing series, asking the perennial question: Just how drunk must one be for this to seem a good idea?
Today's example comes to me via Dr. Grumpy's Twitter feed, and describes a pair of Russian men who decided that they wanted to have sex with pocupines.
Like most everyone else in the US, I have strong opinions about the upcoming election.
While I see plenty of room, usually, for honest disagreement on most policy issues, this election cycle has been particularly depressing for me. The various clear-cut policy issues matter to me, and I feel, strongly that one of the general proposed plans of actions between the two parties is better than the other. But I'm not about to touch anything substantive about that today.
Rather, I'd like to take a moment to discuss the moment I really began to see Mitt Romney not merely as a politician whose policies I disagree with, but a person whom I find terrifying to consider being in a position of power.
During the Republican primary process Mitt Romney began to battle his personality handicaps - whatever else one may say for or against him, he doesn't come off as a very warm, personal person in public. Which isn't a fatal flaw to my mind, I don't particular care to choose my President based on whether I'd care to spend an evening with him at the bar. But it is a factor with the public at large, and so he began rerunning an ad from a previous campaign that described one of the more human moments in his personal history - where he used his influence and resources to help an acquaintance find and be re-united with his missing teen aged daughter.
Here's a video of the ad, describing the situation and Mitt Romney's solution:
Based on what I've seen at various fact-check sites, this story has been presented in a fairly accurate manner. Before I go any further I feel I should make it clear, I do not criticize Mitt for wanting to help, nor for the goal of saving a 14 yo girl from a potentially horrible situation. I am glad the girl was found, and re-united with her family. For that matter, I'm not going to discuss the questions about the effectiveness or need for such help - that's all irrelevant to my gut reaction.
But the means of the help is horrifying to me.
First off, to be completely callous, 14 yo girls disappear every day in this nation. What made this case different was that Mitt Romney had a personal connection to the family. So, he felt the need to help out. I'd be the first to say that it's normal, human and admirable to want to help people one has a personal connection to. However, if you're running for the Presidency - I don't want to hear that your idea of helping people is to arrange a tiger team to look for one girl whom you happen to know personally.
Public policy shouldn't run on the same lines as private actions. When talking public policy the problem wouldn't be "how can I help this individual girl?" The question, or challenge, is: "What is the root cause of this phenomenon, and can public policy be enacted to effect a change for the better?" Actions focused upon an individual recipient are always going to be limited in their effect by the degree that that individual touches upon public life.
Secondly, the manner of the help that Mitt chose to offer is horrifying. For a man who argues strenuously against public assistance programs for individuals, he had a shocking readiness to treat his employees at Bain as his minions without any autonomy of their own. Read the transcript of the ad, again: Bain was shut down, to free up the workforce for this quixotic campaign. Even at the most benign, I have to assume that this became an unpaid vacation for the employees. If there were the slightest pressure to make the effort to help this girl seem a mandatory requirement for the job things get even worse.
Hell, let's extend the fantasy even further: assume that the employees were still receiving their salaries while they were schlepped off to NYC. Travel, especially travel on short notice with no set return date, is a hardship for most people. You have to arrange for people to watch your home, to take care of pets, or plants, mail has to be redirected - all those little details. If you have a family it's even more disruptive. Then there's the question of who was paying for the cost of living expenses while in NYC: If it was being done on Bain's dime, well and good. If it wasn't, if it didn't include a per diem for those little things that most of us buy every day without noticing, again - he imposed a financial hardship on his workers willi-nilli.
And all of this was in service of someone who, to be completely classist about things, had advantages that most of the workers at Bain never would and never will have. In short, Mitt Romney treated his employees as if they were his minions, in the grand old pulp fiction evil mastermind model, existing to simply be automatons for his will - in the service of helping a personal friend.
If that's how he was willing to run his business, where to be honest, he has more incentive to keep his minions happy and feeling that their interests align with his - just how is he going to treat the great masses of people in the US as President? Are we going to simply be more minions in the service of helping his friends?
Before you dismiss my concerns as class warfare, or hysterical scare-mongering, consider this: We've already got one serious allegation of a company that was perfectly willing to tell its workers to take unpaid time off to go to a Mitt Romney political event. Granted, this was at a Murray Energy subsidiary, and I start from the premise that Murray Energy is a blight upon the face of the Earth. It wasn't something that Mitt set up, nor do I believe the candidate had any knowledge of what happened. For that matter, I doubt that Murray, himself, knew either. But the corporate attitudes are often simply a reflection of the attitudes of the higher ups, repeated and emulated by boot lickers going down the chain of command.
For that matter, the defense offered by the company spokesperson at the time is hilarious - if you're into Orwellian humor: "Murray Energy Chief Financial Officer Rob Moore told Blomquist that the charges were untrue.
“There were no workers that were forced to attend the event,” Moore said. “We had managers that communicated to our work force that the attendance at the Romney event was mandatory, but no one was forced to attend the event."
Newspeak at its finest. And individuals being treated as automatons in the service of their boss' whims. Not even on the clock - but off the clock.
Still think I'm simply being hysterical?
ETA: I"m aware of the letter sent to the Obama campaign claiming that the complaints about the rally are false. I'm also sufficiently skeptical to think that a company that can say that something is "mandatory" without recognizing that this means "forced attendance" would see nothing wrong with pressuring its workers to lie to try to cover up their misdeeds.
