Writing to be Read

Hello to my loyal readers: all dozen of you! If you are enjoying this blog, how about forwarding it to your friends? I'm human and just as egoncentric as everyone else. I'd love to be read. You can reach me at dianamdeluca@aol.com if you want to comment or argue. But there is also a place at the end of each entry for you to comment more publicly. Thanks for reading this! Diana

Running on the Coololdtech Party Ticket

Since my self-nomination for US Vice President, I’ve received an outpouring of support from people in all walks of life. Mechanics, hair stylists, secretaries, public relations folk, retirees, relatives—all have pledged their support and each day more come in. I’m proud to announce that as of tonight—including my own vote for myself, I have a grand total of 10 votes. This is certainly enough for me to accept my own nomination and declare my official candidacy for vice president, especially since I fully expect that over the next 40 days until the election, I will at least double that number.

Why me? Well, for one thing I’m real. I’ve seen plenty of posturing and people promoting one candidate or another, often with high passion, without giving much real thought to the candidates beyond what they represent. I shake my head at all this unexamined passion: it’s not a case of finding the best candidate for the economic and global messes we are in, it’s promoting whoever best represents whatever prejudice we happen to have. Unfortunately, this kind of zeal is making us the laughing stock of the world.

So Sarah Palin presumably represents a certain type of issue (the Canadian press aroused great annoyance when a columnist there called her the red-neck candidate), similarly Obama supposedly highlights the minority experience that is rapidly becoming the majority—John McCain represents all the old white dudes who feel they are being pushed aside—and Joe Biden represents—well, I’m not sure what Joe Biden represents. I don’t hear much about him these days.

I, on the other hand, think politics is a crock and I listen to the candidates with my bull-geieger at my side. My meter goes off when I hear Sarah gush about McCain policies she can’t answer questions about, when McCain flies in like Mighty Mouse to save to day, when Obama says he is not playing politics, and Biden---well, I don’t know about him, but there’s a reason he dropped out of the presidential race.

So here I am. I am not a Harriet Myers sub who has not been out of the country until this year. Oh ye heavens—I guess she imbues internationalism by breathing the air that blows over from Russia. I am not a member of the armed forces and never have been, so I do not offer my military background as evidence of my fitness to guide intricate economic debates and provide hurricane relief. I am not a Harvard-trained lawyer, although I will offer up my own earned arrogance as a trained researcher. I am not—well—a former hopeful for the presidency. That would be hubris. Vice president is fine for me.

I represent common sense, relative sincerity, and some much-needed levity. For heaven’s sake, families and friendships are being torn apart by all this hyperbole. In another fifty years, only historians will give a damn. Even though I am running for vice president, I do keep in mind that one of the previous incumbents described the office as “not worth a bucket of warm piss.”

Currrently, I invite your votes and also suggestions as to who might run for president with me on the Coololdtech party ticket. I can bring him or her ten promised votes.

Me for Vice President

The wisest political commentary I’ve received lately comes from my hair stylist. She’s a single woman, earning her living the hard way, paying her taxes and not seeing that she’s getting much in return. “Calm down,” she told me as she cut my hair. “Now that the Wall Street thing has happened, people are reminded of what’s important. They’ll see through the cute stuff with Palin. We’re smarter than they think.”

Her calm confidence made me wonder why I am so personally offended by the selection of John McCain’s Mini-Me, the trophy Vice President, Sarah Palin. I think part of it may be because many other women—including me—appear better qualified to be a heartbeat away other than just being women, handy, and agreeing with John McCain.

Wow--you may be thinking. She thinks she's qualified to run for such high office? Well--if Ms. Palin is the yardstick, I think I am. And why not? I've been in public life for a lot longer than she has and I'll stack my university experience against her state experience. The budget and infrastructure of most big public universities are larger than Alaska's and I'm willing to bet that our students and faculty are just as independent and unruly as her citizens. So please bear with me and allow me to provide you with the following checklist of our qualifcations.

People Skills: In my younger days, I went out on the picket line for women’s issues. We didn’t get it all (the Equal Rights Amendment) and women still earn less than men but we got some of it. In fact, it was quite exciting to think that the FBI might have files on us all—alas, when I applied to see my file, the FBI claimed not have one. I bet Ms. Palin doesn’t even think about what we went through to make sure she could have a career. Score: one point for me for social activism.

Overcoming Adversity: My doctorate got earned the hard way—even though I was a good student the scholarships went to the men (they had families to support, don’t you know?) so the burden of graduate school fell on me and my family. Score: one point for me for proven determination.

Administrative Experience: My most salient experience, of course, is that I have been a cabinet member on the staff of the president of the University of Hawaii. I was, in fact, listed as one of three most powerfully placed women on the president’s staff. We worked with a budget about $1 billion (fifteen years ago), so it probably compares well with Alaska’s state budget today which is around $8 billion. Administering a university system has to be equivalent of being the mayor of a small town. Score: Let’s be generous: one point for each of us.

Dealing with Difficult People: The president sent me out as a trouble shooter to wherever trouble appeared. This included dealing with fraternities (who liked to send their pledges on a nude run round the campus after dark--the Honolulu Police Department loved that), the Athletics Department and the NCAA, which I am sure Ms. Palin has never been faced with. Score: One point for me although anyone who has dealt the NCAA might say this was worth two.

Federal Policy: Then there were the legal problems. I worked with the state attorney general to manage the university’s unending law suits (usually with the university as a defendant)—everything from people cutting their feet on sprinklers to equal opportunity and sexual harassment complaints. Ms. Palin probably knows about the employment policies given the brouhaha with her ex-brother-in-law, but I doubt she has dealt with a student complaining about being stalked by a professor. Score: One point for me.

State Legislature: When I left the university, I had two commendations from the State of Hawaii Legislature and a personal commendation from the governor. Now, I admit that I did not run for office but my office supervised the university’s lobbyists and I was named by the governor to commissions and task forces. I was part of the hands-on, direct process for establishing international agreements with Viet Nam (prior to normalization of relations), Russia, and Thailand. I figure my international experience (got her there) makes up for at least some of her public experience. Score: I’ll give myself a point here, but I’ll concede her three points.

The grand total then is six points for me and four for Ms. Palin. The only real advantage I see that she has over me (besides getting herself elected) is her hobby of shooting wolves from aircraft. But since I feel that even a wolf deserves a fair chance, I will concede that one to her. Forgive me if I don’t award any points.

Wal-Mart Mom: I’ve been told that Palin’s strength is with Wal-Mart Moms—apparently these are votes that McCain can’t get by himself. Now, I don’t know who they mean by Wal-Mart Moms— Cindy McCain may not shop at Wal-Mart, but I do. My step-granddaughter works there and if the economy keeps sliding, I might be glad of a job there myself. I therefore believe I can counter Ms. Palin’s advantage by arguing that I too am a mother and that I do indeed shop at Wal-Mart.

Therefore, given my obvious advantage, may I ask for your support of my nomination for Vice President of the United States? As I hope I have demonstrated, I have the requisite experience and will stand by my pledges to you (as long as they are useful). But I do make one promise that I intend to keep. I promise faithfully that I will not go out and buy new eyeglasses no matter how cute they look on my opponent.

Baa-Baa Black Sheep

Mum used to repeat a saying whenever she was about to buy something more expensive than she had planned to—like a pair of glamour shoes that she couldn’t resist. “Oh well,” she’d sigh. “I might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”

I thought about her the other day when I received an e-mail apparently from someone who does not support Barrack Obama. Normally I read the first sentence of these political missiles, whether Republican or Democrat, and send them to the trash bin. This one, however, managed to get my attention. It stated outright that Obama was looking at a tax on property owners whose houses were larger than 2400 square feet. I have to admit that my common sense went out of the window for a few moments. I froze. My house is 2700 square feet and I already pay multiple thousand dollars in property tax. Could this be true and I hadn’t heard? There was even a list of articles from reputable magazines where this was apparently reported.

It took me several moments to regain my bearings. Huh? Property taxes are local and state. How could the federal government possibly impose this tax? Didn’t make sense. Nor did the other alarmist claims in the e-mail. I went down and actually read the articles listed at the bottom of the e-mail and found that not only was Obama NOT proposing that kind of tax, but the articles cited actually said the exact opposite of what the e-mail was claiming. Whoever wrote the e-mail was hoping/expecting that the recipient (me) would surrender to panic and not read the so-called supporting material.

The e-mail, in other words, was a lie and a big one. That’s what made me think of Mum and her sheep. It seems that if you are going to lie these days, you might as well make it a whopper. This experience probably had the complete opposite effect of what the sender intended. I checked out the claims and now am highly suspicious of what the Republicans have to say—not that I can hold John McCain personally responsible for this e-mail, but I’m human—I have to wonder if this is typical of the ethics and honesty of his supporters.

I can report now that my new skepticism appears somewhat justified. I find myself wondering how the Republicans can be fielding a platform of change when they are the ones who have been in power for the past eight years. What, in other words, are they changing from? Is it, we’ll do the same thing only this time we’ll do it better? We are now watching the meltdown in the financial markets resulting, I believe, from lifting of regulations and the belief that if the economy is driven solely by the profit motive then competition will provide whatever regulation is necessary rather than government doing it. I happen to believe that some regulation IS necessary because the world cannot long endure on the basis of a greed that encourages the strong to devour the not quite so strong (those who can only afford a million dollar house rather than a ten million) let alone the weak who tend to live in flood plains.

The current news of the collapse of the investment banks makes my point. Even I can see that corporations and investment banks are not a substitute for government even if their lobbyists would like to believe so. Corporations exist for one purpose: to make money. They do not have to worry about unemployment rates in the US—they are multinational and are free to move jobs to wherever the work can be done more cheaply. There’s nothing wrong with this self-interest. This is what corporations do. But it is not what governments are meant to do. They are meant to balance all the competing interests in the national interest. When was it decided that enriching corporations was to be the national economic policy? How naive can one get? We learned from the Reagan administration that trickle-downs don’t trickle down. They trickle out to investors and corporate leadership. We’re all greedy in some way—but corporations are greedy with about five zeroes after my net worth and what they do matters. They represent too much of our net worth as a nation to be allowed to flounder around just pursuing the buck and rewarding their executives obscenely on the basis of increased earnings regardless of how they are achieved.

If I sound my usual churlish self about this, well I don't apologize. I don't have investments and pots of money tied up in this market. But I am still concerned about my house value, how far my pension will stretch, whether my commercial bank made stupid investments, and whether I will be able to afford whatever medical nonsense my body inflicts on me. I don't believe John McCain and his trophy vice president (sorry) feel the angst of people like me who are likely to feel the fall out from the Republican's great economic experiment in believing that what is good for corporations is good for America. In the end, though, politicians can make whatever claims they want--it's up to us to think for ourselves and sort the lambs from the sheep.

Baa

Not All Peas Are Alike in the Pod

I don't usually write about politics, but when I thought about the rather obvious connection between being senior and being interested in what happens to the national programs such as Social Security, into which I have paid all my working life, I decided that perhaps it was time.

The catalyst for me to do this is the recent nomination of Sarah Palin to run as vice president on the Republican ticket with John McCain Ordinarily I would just shrug and say if the Republicans really want to send a lady to Washington who opposes sex education and abortion in all cases (including rape and incest) and who said in an interview that God intended us to be in Iraq, well that's their thing. Most of our leaders can afford to send their wives and daughters to Europe for abortions anyway. But what gets me—certainly enough to write this blog—is the assumption in the highest circles (Republican) that because I was (and still am) a Hillary Clinton supporter that I would immediately transfer my vote to someone just because she is a woman and never mind that she stands against everything I value, including freedom of religious thought.

I was born British and the values still flow through my veins. Britain has a well-founded suspicion of religious conflict. We fought a civil war over religion (Catholics versus Protestant) and we weren't afraid to create a new religion because one of our kings wanted to divorce his queen. We think discussing religion in public forums, let alone letting it guide national policy, is not good manners and is rather a bore. The closest we've come to religious activism is when the countrykicked out the Puritans and sent them to America—they were too enthusiastic for British comfort and made themselves a nuisance.

Given that moderation, I am particularly annoyed by having Sarah Palin offered up as a substitute for Hillary. I grew up alongside Hillary. Like her I was a Goldwater fan at first. Like her I faced all manner of professional discouragement. Like her I put up with the comments—like the time when I, a very junior untenurable instructor, stepped onto the elevator in my university's English department and heard one of the male senior profs say to his colleague, "There's getting to be a lot of women in the department." He was a polite man who was just stating what he saw as a fact. He just didn't get it. I put in the same category the graduate school dean who, at the peak of the Viet Nam war, said that if the draft continued taking students and faculty, universities would be filled with "the lame, the halt, the blind, and the women." Hillary would have understood what I felt.

When Hillary had to deal with her husband's very public embarrassment, she did so both with class and sad resolution. People said she was too cold and reserved—they wanted to see her mete out public punishment reflecting their own disappointment in her husband. Instead she thought it through carefully. I could imagine her making a column withpro on one side and con on the other. In the end, she decided that though he was an idiot, she valued who he was and his companionship. She decided in other words that they were better off together. The religionistas pillored her for it. They said she was calculating and self-absorbed. They either wanted her to judge him and throw him out or play a public roleof anguished, long-suffering wife. She didn't do either. She showed herself to be an independent lady not given—as she once let slip—to making cookies.

Expecting me to immediately transfer my vote to Ms. Palin just because she is a woman begs the whole question of qualifications. That assumption insults my intelligence. I agree with the Founding Fathers of this country about wanting good sense in government. I haven't seen enough of Ms. Palin's decisions to know if she has it.

When I vote for Hillary, it will be for her and not for some substitute whose opinions are scary in their absolute judgment on people. Hillary will get a very nice post in an Obama administration if she wants it. If she doesn't, she will be one of the major movers in Congress. She will still be eligible to run for president next time—and she will be even better prepared. I trust her to be pragmatic about the human condition and compassionate to those of us who stumble along the way. I trust her to weigh up a situation as she did with her husband and decide in all of our best interests rather than impose herreligious views on me. And above all, I trust her to continue to be the class act she is. My vote for Obama is as much a vote for her.

Los Alamos Mon Amour

When I was an undergrad at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus back in the early sixties, there was a tavern called The Blue Goose in Mo’ili’ili, the small town below the campus. I had a husband and child at home so I didn’t get to spend much time there, but I did have lunch now and then. I remember it mostly as dark and somewhat noisy, but one thing remains vivid. On one wall, there was a large poster about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack on the Hawaiian Islands. There was a list of what sounded like fairly prudent precautions (stay away from windows, don’t look at the blast etc.) but it ended with the advice to get under a table, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.

The question of surviving a nuclear attack was intensely interesting to us in Hawaii because of the many military targets in the chain. We knew that if the main island of Oahu came under attack, very few would be left to kiss anything goodbye. This realization was underlined by the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki had happened less that twenty years before, there was a mad scramble among nations to amass as many weapons as possible, and even our own government was occupied blowing up empty land somewhere in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico. I know every generation loses its innocence at some point, but I also have to believe the new power to blow up the world made our angst uniquely poignant.

All during the time I was in college, we lived under threat. It was the 1960s version of today’s terrorism and just as real. We watched the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold and held our breaths. Even when that passed, the threat didn’t. With time, we developed a cynical ability to laugh at what we feared—a point of view brilliantly reflected in the movie “Dr. Strangelove” in 1964. Some of us became activists against all wars, others tried not to think too much about it, yet others—like me—became morbidly curious. I found myself wondering why this monster had been developed, how it came about, and where it had all happened. This is what took me recently to Los Alamos—a city on a plateau high above Santa Fe, the site of the Manhattan Project that developed the bomb and still home to the Los Alamos National Lab.

I think I went to Los Alamos looking for a piece of the youthful joy that we of my generation lost. But as Sid and I drove down the main street of modern research facilities—still secure but not surrounded as they once were by barbed wire designed to both enclose and exclude—I realized I was seeking the wrong thing. All of a sudden it was 1942. The war could still be lost. The Axis allies were said to be working on a new weapon of catastrophic power and if this nation were to survive, the Axis had to be beaten to it. The most brilliant scientific brains were gathered on this muddy mesa with no less a mission than to develop a weapon that would end the war. Among those who literally “disappeared” from civilian life, there was a real sense of mission and excitement. The Los Alamos historical museum housed in one of the few surviving buildings used by the original project shows just how uncomfortable the setting was and what little reward there was except for contributing to the national effort. And yet that was enough. The scientists and the graduate students stayed and did the job.

I am quite sure the scientists didn’t think at first about the consequences of what they were achieving. Their focus was on solving the various technical issues associated with fission and implosion—a chain reaction that they weren’t even sure would work. They certainly weren’t thinking about students at The Blue Goose twenty years in the future. The awareness of the bomb’s potential came after the Trinity test and as the implications of nuclear weapons became more obvious and the post World War II world began to take shape. There were to be protests around the world. There were to be recriminations. There were to be the true horror stories of what happened at Ground Zero. There were to be accusations of disloyalty made against some of the scientists who wanted to harness the power of the atom for peaceful purposes and discourage its use as a military weapon. There was, in other words, to be the luxury of hindsight.

Los Alamos reminds me of the controversy surrounding WWII Bomber Command. At a time when Britain stood alone and at one point had only two-weeks’ worth of food for the island, the niceties of bombing only military targets seemed beside the point. No one wanted deliberately to bomb civilians, but in the struggle for survival they died on both sides. When the RAF and then the RCAF and the USAF took the war to Germany, the point was to win. Looking back on the bombing and the incredible loss of life both among the aircrews and those on the ground, some revisionist historians have tried to rewrite history to the intense annoyance of the surviving aircrews who risked their lives and watched their comrades—my father among them—drop to a fiery death. But nothing is clear-cut during wartime. I remember bomb craters in the roads in my hometown of Brighton on England’s south coast. I heard how adults still talked about the Blitz in London and how they said bombing Germany was getting a bit of our own back. It’s only natural that perspectives change with time and victory.

Much the same has happened at Los Alamos. When it comes to how we view the Manhattan Project and the scientists working on it, it seems to me that we have a choice. We can look only at the devastation caused by the splitting of the atom and decry the waste of the arms race that ensued. Many have done that and I can recall protesters in London waving placards saying ‘Ban the Bomb.’ Or we can marvel at the fact that the work was achieved at all, let alone under conditions of extreme security and haste, and understand that it was part and parcel of the time that spawned it. Perhaps we need to do a bit of both. But however we choose to view the work conducted at Los Alamos, we need to acknowledge that it changed our world forever.