tbentley.com

It was a long weekend.  We piled into the remtal car, and drove north out of Manhattan.

But not to go to Woodstock.  Already we knew that was going to be mass confusion (by the time we were on the road, it was already impossible to get to the site).  No, we six young gay men were going to Vermont.  East Burke, specifically.

So we had our own Woodstock, right there in East Burke.  We thought about going to Woodstock, NY; but it seemed to us to be so totally, well, straight.

August 1969–this was just after the Stonewall riots.  Nothing loomed larger in importance, that gay lib; which is what we talked about, what we did, in Vermont, and could not have done in Woodstock.  It was simply so important to establish our identity as gay men, we were in the vanguard of that movement, and identifying with the great mass of young people, who were still floundering around, establishing their own identity–no, ours was a different cohort.

A year later, we were at the front of the first Gay Pride Day parade.

While driving to the gym this morning, I passed by an intersection where there were quite a few young people holding up signs reading, “Jesus loves you” and “God Is Good” and such like.  They were what? Witnessing?  I guess.

At the time, I was listening to a recorded lecture on American history, specifically  about The Great Awakening; the lecturer pointed out that both the Great Awakining, the movement for Abolition, the 60’s Civil Rights movement, all were begun, or at least were promulgated by, youth.  Like the Salem witch triaols, where a few teenage girls led a community into mass hysteria.

Excuse me, Mr. NY Times, but a message like this is completely unacceptable:

Http/1.1 Service Unavailable

At least edit your error message to be somewhat meaningul to your readers!

(the above message was the result from several requests to nytimes.com on  7/11/09 at 7:50 pm.

On March 26, the Times printed an article on economics in Europe:

Aided by Safety Nets, Europe Resists Stimulus Push

…The program — known as “Kurzarbeit,” which translates as “short time” — and others like it lie at the heart of a heated debate…

I just had to send this correction, as a comment:

I hate to inform you, but the phrase “Kurzarbeit” means “short work”, not “short time”.

To my amazement, I got a responsive email the next day:

Thank you for your comment on Economix. We’ve corrected the mistranslation of “Kurzarbeit.” Apologies for the error, and thanks for keeping us on our toes.
Best…

Ach so!  Two painful years of college German, finally vindicated!  Thank you, Herr Doctor Professor Direktor Karl-Heinz Planitz!

Today’s headline in the New York Times: “PALIN RESIGNING GOVERNOR’S JOB; FUTURE UNCLEAR”.

Whereas at the New York Times, the future is usually bright, clear and easily explicated on Page One.

This almost ranks right up there with the Times’s 1865 headline: “Lincold Reported Shot; Significant If True”.

Here’s the top-selling hardcover books from New York Times list:

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. ”Catastrophe” by Dick Morris, Eileen McGann (Harper)

2. ”Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto” by Mark R. Levin (Threshold Editions)

Two authors insisting Obama’s ‘Socialist program” is destroying America. Who is buying this shit? I suspect these ‘best-selling’ figures are taken from Sam’s Club bulk ordering lists.

We have faith-based initiatives; but why not faith-based terrorism? Surely al-Queda qualifies? How about “pro-life” (that is, anti-abortion) terrorisim?

Dear President Obama,

I guess you must have missed my blog about the war in Afghanistan: how when you sent 17,000 new troops, you should have 5,000 of them skilled in speaking the Pashto language. How much more warmly they would be welcomed! What a message that would have sent to the entire Islamic community!

But I guess you missed that blog; or maybe it was because my server crashed, and that blog went off line for a while.

At any rate, let me offer the suggestion again: Send Pashto-speaking soldiers to Afghanistan– and to Pakistan, too, in those Pashtun areas.

But from where, you may ask, will come all these Pashto speaking volunteers?

Sir, President Obama — may I call you Barak? No? Okay — Mr. President, here’s the thing: make Pashto-learning software freely available over the Internet. Sure, there are already some programs available; I say, make them ubiquitous. If the programs aren’t up to snuff, get your intelligence guys busy creating really easy to use programs — I believe the term in “user-friendly” — that will be fun to use — like a video game!

Sir, there are millions of young people out there eager to join the world community, looking for a way to contribute. Just think of a mass of young people able to speak the language of the country you want to turn into a model of democracy (is that it?) who are now, because of a down-turned economy, available for the nation-building effort.

Mr. President, please don’t take this suggestion lightly. We need speakers of foreign languages: not French and German and Italian, which are old school (although these are valuable still), but Pashto, Arabic, Hindi and Mandarin, and we need to encourage young people, in fact all people, open their minds to the new ways of thinking that new languages open up.

Your emphasis, Mr. President, on education, can have such a significance, if anyone can get involved, even if they’re not enrolled in a traditional school, college, or university. Through the Internet, everyone can be a student. It needs some work in the server end, some interactivity. But surely the US Government can commit a few resources to making language-learning software fun, enticing, and available.

So that’s my suggestion, Mr. President. What do you think?

For the last few weeks I’ve cringed when I came across Glenn Greenwald’s column in Salon. I really didn’t want to read about any of Obama’s failures, and GG does go on about his failure to call for a thorough investigation of the torture practices of the Bush administration. I knew he was right, but I just didn’t want to hear about it, good liberal that I am.

But the latest release of memos really got to me.

The one about the close-confinement of the arachnophobic prisoner with spiders — up to the number of insects with which he might be confined — was especially sickening beyond sickening to me, a phobic.

Ever read Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four? The prisoner is taken to the infamous Room 101, where he is pesented with the thing which he fears most. For Winton Smith, the protagonist of 1984, the object of terror is rats. He is to be confined to face a cage full of rats in his face.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has long been presented as the epitome of totalitarianism, and the depths to which it might sink.

The government of the United States of America has now been shown to have sunk to a similar depth. No, even greater depths; Winton’s toturers didn’t pretend the were followintglegal orders.

Nice to have literature validate my own repulsion at these tactics. I’d rather not, rather this had been a bad dream, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. We need to wake up and see the scum,

We need to see it all.

And it may be that a special prosecutor, and legal presentation to a grand jury, is not the best way to reveal the full extent of these evils, because evidence presented to a grand jury is kept secret at least until, and often beyond, indictment. Maybe the Truth Commission of Barney Frank is the best way to go?

I don’t know. But something’s got to release the poison from within the body politic.