Paul Soglin: Waxing America

I Will Serve Steven Slater's Prison Sentence. Righteous Dude.

Steven Slater, the angry Jet Blue flight attendant knows that it is often the circumstances that make the hero.

As President Calvin Coolidge said, "Heroism is not only the man, but in the occasion," or perhaps better put by Gerald W. Johnson, "Heroes are created by popular demand, sometimes out of the scantiest materials."

In any case, I volunteer to serve a one tenth share of any prison sentence he receives for doing the right thing. I am sure there are enough of us to fill all of the prisons in this nation for the next decade.

Slater spoke volumes when he said he did it for all of us poor, abused travelers who follow the rules.

In these trying times we should heed the words of Mahatma Gandhi, though he probably did not have obnoxious airline passengers, or the people who run the airlines in mind, "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good."

Rest In Peace, Peter Orlovsky

Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg's longtime companion and a strong poet in his own right ("Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs"), died yesterday. A stalwart of the Beat generation and of modern American Buddhist culture, Orlovsky was a fixture whenever Ginsberg performed his wonderful reading/singing act in the 1970's and 1980's, playing the harmonium and chanting in harmony to Allen's nasal voice.

Here's Ginsberg singing "Do The Meditation Rock" with Orlovsky meditating in the background.

Worth reading: Steve Silberman's "Impossible Happiness: An Elegy for Peter Orlovsky:"

Together Peter and Allen traveled all over, sowing seeds of poetry, tenderness, public candor, and American Buddhism worldwide. They hung out with Burroughs in Tangier, smoked ganja and contemplated burning corpses in ghats along the Ganges, wrote Charlie Chaplin a fan letter from Benares, and visited the young Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. They also meditated side-by-side on railroad tracks in Denver to block a delivery of radioactive material to the leak-prone Rocky Flats nuclear power plant. Often, a reading by Allen at some illustrious academic institution would feature Peter unselfconsciously yodeling away with a banjo about the joys of shoveling shit on their farm.

- Barry Orton

Ben Masel Settles With UW & State of Wisconsin; Gets Some Money But No Apology

Only $7,500? And Ben's attorney probably gets half. This is a bargain for us taxpayers, considering the facts of the case and the costs of another trial.

Over a year ago, Waxing America concluded:

• The UW and the Wisconsin Attorney General's office should offer a sincere apology and a reasonable settlement to Masel before the jury awards him everything they legally can.
• The UW-Madison police need upgraded training in alternatives to using force and in community policing techniques.

I hope the training's been done or is ongoing. The settlement is more than reasonable. Masel probably got no apology though.

So, as a UW employee of long standing with free speech rights and no official standing whatsoever, I'll say it, since apparently no one else will: "Sorry, Ben." 

- Barry Orton

Big Savings, Twice the Performance of a Palin and Half the Cost

If you need a speaker for your next graduation ceremony, a motivational or inspirational address for your bar mitzvah, or officiating at your cousin's wedding, I am available.

Show me the speaker fees charged by any Palin and I will provide a speech without any references to abstinence, but witty and poignant stories about Bill Clinton, Mayors Dinkins, Maynard Jackson, Michael Blandic, and George Moscone at half their price.

In addition I make no demands for outrageous catering services. A few bagels and Crystal Light will do.  Fresh fruit would be a nice touch.

Highland Park High School - Not Quite as Rich, White, and now Fighting for Justice.

I was raised in Hyde Park and the summer of my fifteenth year we moved to Highland Park, Illinois. How we ended up there was most curious.

I loved Hyde Park. We moved to the Woodlawn-Hyde Park neighborhoods when I was four in 1949. We had everything a kid could want. Parks to play baseball and tennis. The Museum of Science of Industry and the awesome University of Chicago (UC). The hotels that housed the White Sox and the visiting American League teams. My friends and I went to the beaches in the summer, hung out at The Point, and peered into the coffee houses on 57th Street looking at real beatniks.

At Hyde Park High School about 85% of my classmates were black.

In 1960 my mother was pregnant and it was time to buy a house. My parents decided on Evanston. It was on Lake Michigan, and while Northwestern University was not the UC, it did provide an intellectual atmosphere and it was the most integrated of the suburbs.  

In June an offer was accepted on a small house three or four blocks from Lake Michigan. Two weeks later the sellers found a reason not to sell to us, though the realtor explained that it was because we were Jewish.

My parents were desperate. Debbie and I had to be in a school, the baby (Ari) was due in less than three months.

On the Fourth of July Dad opened up the paper and found a listing in Highland Park two blocks from the beach and three blocks from the downtown. That was important since my mother did not drive.

He and I hopped into the car, made the 25 mile trip, inspected the house, returned to Hyde Park to pick up my mother and Debbie, toured the house again and had an accepted offer in a matter of days.

I knew a little about Highland Park and what differentiated it from the other North Shore suburbs. In terms of religion, it was more diverse than the others. (In celebration of the 1960 Olympics we had our own Jewish-Italian Olympics - golf, swimming, poker, and bowling,) It was more liberal, though you could not tell from the faces of my high school classmates - there was one black student in Highland Park High School (HPHS).

Our companion suburb, Deerfield was somewhat notorious for halting a subdivision where the developer intended to sell to both blacks and whites. But Not Next Door

In 1965 the North Shore changed forever. From Rich Samuels, who produced  Civil Rights on the Northshore: Bringing the Movement Home:

Along the way, North Shore residents answered Dr. King's call, demonstrating and volunteering in the South and then bringing the struggle to their own neighborhoods where they sought open housing in previously all-white communities.

What motivated residents of one of the nation's most affluent communities to reach out to the disadvantaged? Why, after roughly four decades, has their drive for racial diversity on the North Shore achieved such limited results?

Those are the questions I raise in the documentary. But I don't answer them -- because I want to renew the debate sparked years ago by the North Shore activists.

A lot has changed over the years. While still not reflective of the demographics of this nation, these suburbs are more  economically, racially and culturally integrated.

Now Highland Park High School decided that its outstanding girls basketball team should not travel to Arizona. The point being, that it would not be responsible to take these teenagers to a state where some could be detained and unable to return home.

Go Giants.

 

Cymbalta: Brilliant and Manipulative TV Commercial Hurts

There are a lot of offensive television commercials that make one push the 'off' button on the remote control, but Cymbalta may be the best.

These people are brilliant. Spend a few minutes a day watching their commercial and you cannot help but become depressed. The woman's droning voice accompanied by the images infects the happiest person with misery.

If people do not need your product, manipulate them and make sure they do.

Sandra Bullock: Acceptance speech better than Blind Side performance

Every once is a while there is a rare gem at the Academy Awards such as Sandra Bullock's acceptance fo the Oscar for best actress in The Blind Side  Sandra Bullock acceptance speech highlights Oscar winners 2010 list

Those painful speeches are usually a rambling discourse on some politically correct subject and/or an over-wrought tribute to the actor's family.

Bullock spoke form the heart with grace and style and sincerely thanked her mother while sending a genuine message about caring.

When you combine her Academy Award acceptance with her personal appearance the previous day for her Razzie, Bullock shot to the top of the list among actresses to be admired. Bullock vows to display Oscar, Razzie side by side.

 

"Free Holden Caulfield" - Learning To Question Authority

In his New Yorker blog, Hendrik Hertzberg wrote last week of his high school encounter with J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye."  Hertzberg remembers the "cool" English teacher, Mr. Perkins, who assigned the book to his Suffern, NY, eleventh-grade class. A few days later, school authorities confiscated the books and the next year Mr. Perkins was gone. But the spark was lit.

As for me and my friends, we were shocked. We were hurt. But we were also wildly excited—energized to the point of exhilaration. By the end of the day the whole school knew what had happened. For weeks afterwards no one talked of anything else. It was never clear exactly why the book had been banned. The word was that there had been pressure from the school board. Too many dirty words was one reason, that was certain—all those hells and goddams that Holden sprinkles throughout his story, plus (if I’m recalling this right) one solitary “fuck.” It’s not Holden’s word. He sees it scrawled on a bathroom wall (if I’m remembering this right), and he doesn’t like it any better than our school board did. I suppose that the dirty words were sufficient to stampede the school board, but we were sure that Holden’s real offense was what the school board presumably saw as his disrespect for authority and we saw as his insistence on deciding for himself which authorities were worthy of respect and which were not.

Anyhow, our clique made as much of a fuss as we could. Pooling our pocket money, we bought a whole bunch of copies of the Signet paperback (fifty cents each). Then we set up a table just outside the school grounds and hawked them. They went quickly. Instead of just one class reading “Catcher in the Rye,” half the school read it—not as a sullenly accepted duty but as an act of curiosity and rebellion, a rite of passage, an unexpected gift. For more than a few, it was the first time in their lives they had ever read a book on their own initiative. How could they resist, once their natural enemies had deemed it unfit for their eyes (and deemed them unfit to read it)?

Calling the 1959 experience " excellent preparation for what was about to arrive: the nineteen-sixties," Hertzberg was able to pinpoint a moment when his young development took an important turn, a "question authority" event.

Mine wasn't a book (although I read "Catcher" in my teens and thought it was pretty cool), or a school board's overreaction (although the Bayonne, NJ, school board was reactionary and anti-intellectual),  or even November 22, 1963 (although I cannot ever forget that day and weekend). It was a steady diet of listening to Jean Shepherd on the radio late at night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Known now mostly as the voice and writer of "A Christmas Story," Shep was the guy who corrupted the minds of hundreds of thousands of pimply know-it-all kids, and entertained many late night workers from firehouses to restaurant kitchens throughout the east coast via powerhouse New York radio station WOR. We've written about Shep before here on Waxing America. There's a great book dedicated to the genius who never quite found the success he sought. But Shep's rants did provide excellent preparation for the nineteen-sixties.

- Barry Orton

Super Bowl Ads for Ten Year Olds

Charles Barkley needs a brand new bag and Danica Patrick should not quit her day job.

I saw about three quarters of the Super Bowl which means I probably saw about three quarters of the ads. I believe it was the third Super Bowl I watched in the past fifteen years.

Come on, what gives? These ads were written by thirteen year olds for ten year olds. The humor was non-existent, the originality sucked and the weak and boring special effects were overshadowed by the horrible scripts.

If she wanted to, Betty White could single-handed put Doritos, Coke, Kia, Go Daddy and the rest of them out of business in less than one football season.

I hope the estate of Dr. Suess sues both Taco Bell and Barkley.

Free Speech, Madison and UW Style: The Good and the Bad.

Today the University of Wisconsin Union Theater will host Ayaan Hirsi Ali as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.

Originally she was rejected as a speaker -too controversial.

UW to host controversial author who rejects Islam

Students first voted against bringing Hirsi Ali because they didn't want to be seen as supporting her agenda, said Reid Tice, chair of the Distinguished Lecture Series committee. But when a scheduled speaker, sportswriter Rick Reilly, fell through, the committee reconsidered Hirsi Ali...

Hirsi Ali wrote the screenplay for "Submission," a short movie by Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh that criticized the treatment of women in Islamic society. In 2004, an extremist killed van Gogh in Amsterdam and left a death threat against Hirsi Ali pinned to his chest with a knife.

Hirsi Ali said she will focus her speech on the plight of women in Islam and the importance of talking about it, even though it can be risky.

It is sad and even frightening that students, or any one for that matter, would succumb to the notion that the right to speak is measured by the messenger being  timid, meek, and boring.

Fortunately there was an opportunity to revisit the issue and the right thing was done.

As a student I had the privilege to hear Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace, Joan Baez and Strom Thurmond, Eldridge Cleaver and Averell Harriman. The campus and the university community was served well by every one of them speaking and sharing their beliefs and thoughts, no matter how controversial, outdated, narrow-minded, or enlightening their speech.

On a sadder note, Isthmus reports that the city of Madison Parks Division instituted rules banning the staff speaking to journalists, council members or just about any one, A 'gag rule' at city parks

As Isthmus has reported (Watchdog, 1/22/09), Parks Superintendent Kevin Briski, upon taking over in June 2008, began requiring that all media inquiries be routed through Whitmore. He thinks this policy has worked out well: "It's helped facilitate efficient communication."

But clearly the new policy has struck fear in the hearts of some Parks employees. One person even asked not to be quoted saying s/he could not be quoted.

A few words of advice. No one is served well by limiting the speech of city staff. In fourteen years as mayor, our office had a very simple policy - make sure you know what you are talking about, and if you are unsure refer the matter to someone who does.

That was it. No gag rule. No lengthy talking points. I do not recall any disasters. There were a few embarrassing moments when a staff member said something and did not have all the information but nothing that would remotely justify a gag order.

As the President of the Madison Parks Commission, Bill Barker noted:

"The tradition of the city has always been transparency and open government. Anything that runs counter to that is not a good idea."

City council members are a different story but, not to worry,  no one will ever keep them quiet.