Muscle Cars

I had a muscle car once, a 1965 Pontiac GTO – 389 cubes, 360HP, 4-barrel carburetor, a three-on the floor Hurst transmission.  I was hot shit. My buddy Joe DeLoreto from work racing tuned it and showed me how to power shift – you never take your foot off the accelerator when shifting.  “Pay attention”, warned Joe, “If you fuck up you will throw the rods through the hood”. 

We rocketed through the gears with all the acceleration that the monster engine could generate, the dual exhausts blasting power – plain, unmuzzled, raw, male power.  I loved it.  It was the fulfillment of a dream begun in high school when my friend Billy Harding played records of the sound of engines of hot cars.  “The Porsches”, the narrator intoned, and the baritone rumble and throbbing base of the Carrera boomed out.  “The Maseratis”, the narrator continued, and the pitch went up, no longer a deep, throaty roar, but a restrained singing in an upper register.  “And….” Here the narrator paused for dramatic effect, creating a moment of indescribably delicious anticipation, “…the Ferraris”.  There was no music, no trebles or bass, no singing or registers, just the high, ferocious whine of a 500HP Testarossa 250.  I was ecstatic.

A month later the GTO was stolen from the parking lot of my Newark apartment.  I went out to get the car one morning and couldn’t find it, and only after I had structured my search to check every single space in the lot did I conclude that it was just too sexy for the kids from the nearby projects to resist.  Gone.  The only great ride of my life.

My previous car had been a 1963 Volkswagen.  It had a 34HP lawnmower engine, funky push-out wing vents and a heater that pumped out only a few degrees on cold days.  The company had made some improvements to the car – it now had flashing turn signals, a fuel gauge, and a fully synchronized transmission; but it was no muscle car.  It was bought because it was cheap and took very little gas.  I was so delicate driving the car to see how little gas I could use, I fouled the points, plugs, and every other part of the little engine that relied on high RPM and high engine heat.  Valve job.  Then valve job #2, and I traded it in for the GTO.  I would never have been so extravagant or so ghetto for that matter, given my conservative WASP-like upbringing, if hadn’t been for my glitzy, showy, theatrical girlfriend – the only glitzy, showy, and theatrical girlfriend I have every had, and I returned to conservative form in sexual as well as automotive matters after she and the GTO were gone.

 

“Ronnie”, she said, “You want it, buy it”, referring to the GTO.  I had never heard this kind of logic before – a logic that was illogical, not concerned with ability to pay (I had a low-paying job at the Newark Housing Authority), practicality, or the rip-off factor.  Her inverted logic eventually went the way of the car, and I eventually returned to my frugal New England ways, but at the time the persuasive logic of impracticality was irresistable and irrefutable.

The theft of the GTO was a blessing in disguise.  I could get rid of the unsustainable debt I was carrying, leave the girlfriend, and return to normal.  I bought a used 1965 Plymouth Valiant.  I returned to my roots.  I had so little money that I never replaced the bald tires, and got so handy with the jack that I could change them in minutes.  The car was junky enough so that I could park it down by the Hudson River in an old industrial district of New York without fear that it would be gone when I went to get it.  It turned out to be one of the most indestructible cars ever, along with its brother the 1965 Dodge Dart.  Chrysler Corporation soon changed that, of course, and went the way of the planned obsolescence and built-in mechanical and structural issues which got you to buy new cars more often.  The Valiant was indeed a warrior – never a sketchy sound in the motor or rattle in the transmission.  The shocks and springs were made of some super-planet, alien material because despite the banging through deep New York potholes they never complained.  Even the clock worked.

In 1968 I went to India where there were no muscle cars, nor any Volkswagens or Valiants, just Hindustan Ambassadors, basically unchanged from the Morris Oxford on which it was based.

The Ambassador was indestructible.  The simplicity of its engine which had few moving parts made it easy to break down - which it always did.  Not only could it be fixed in minutes, it could be fixed using household products – gum, shoelaces, electrical tape, and piano wire.  The Amby had a number of features which endeared it to some, especially when they got rid of it and looked back on it nostalgically, but maddened all foreigners whose companies were too cheap to import foreign cars.  The Ambassador had three gears.  The ratio of first gear was so low, that you could only go 5MPH before you had to shift.  Most Indians didn’t even bother with first, and pinged along in second, riding the clutch until it eventually and quickly wore out which was never a problem given the simplicity of its mechanics and the cheapness of labor.  “Oh, there’s a first gear?”, said an Indian friend of mine.  “I never knew”.

The steering wheel of the Ambassador is canted towards the driver’s window so that there is more room to jam in extra passengers on the front seat.  Given the extreme cant of the wheel, most times you drove with an elbow out the window, 50s greaser style. 

The Ambassador had a firewall, but it too gave way within a thousand miles.  Great heat blasted from the engine into the cabin of the car, and on summer days when the outside temperature easily reached 110F, the temperature inside was unbearable.  The horn worked for about two weeks, then gave out.  This was a problem, for in those days in India the horn replaced regulated driving.  Drivers used their rearview mirrors to comb their hair, not to check what was gaining on them, so horns signaled presence and intention.  Horns also warned pedestrians who felt they always had the right of way.  Indian drivers used their horns so incessantly that it became a habit – kind of like a nervous cough.  There was no reason to cough or use your horn, you just did it.

The Indian-built Fiat which was available in only some ‘markets’, especially Bombay, was not much better.  It was smaller, far more comfortable, and much more zippy than the elephantine Ambassador.  It, however, broke down as much.  A hippy friend who stayed with us in Delhi had a theory about disease and infirmity which said that the stars, by their alignment at the time of your birth, determined what would be your body’s weakness.  Some people would always have a weak heart or would get frequent colds.  The Fiat was no different, and its weakness was the fuel pump.  No sooner had we labored 25 miles up  the steep and winding road from Bombay to Poona, did the fuel pump give out.  It was so predictable and so precise that there were at least four repair shops at the 25-mile point, stocked with fuel pumps and little else.

I gave up Third World driving after the nightmare of India – a miasma of cows, cyclists, rickshaws, pedestrians, chickens, overloaded Tata trucks, and swaying busses with flaccid springs.  Travelling at night, especially at railroad grade crossings where all lanes in both directions were jammed,with every vehicle possible from bullock cart to heavy truck, and when the gates finally went up, all converged on the tracks in a cloud of billowing, dark, diesel smoke.  I lived in Ecuador and Bolivia for a number of years after India, and never got behind the wheel.  As much of an inconvenience as it was, I wanted no more to do with cars.

When we returned to the US after ten years abroad, it was car-buying time again, and since my father-in-law was a fan of big V8s (safer in crashes, by which he meant, you will survive but probably not the passengers in the smaller car you crush), we bought one used station wagon after another.  The jewel in the crown was the 1986 Buick Electra station wagon.

This car was the biggest dinosaur on the road at the time.  Nineteen-eighty-six was at least a decade before the monster SUVs, and big station wagons gave you the safety and security of a tank, and the space for groceries and nine passengers.  The problem was that it swerved and swayed like a boat – the tight steering, ABS, and other safety features designed to improve safety and control were a long way off.  This particular car got more than its share of recalls for brakes (its hippy body weak point).  I was not happy that my son ran the car without oil for ten miles until the engine froze; but I was happy to have an excuse to ditch that behemoth.

I had one more old wagon – a 1976 Plymouth Volare.

This car was great, and Chrysler must have slipped back into its quality ways between long stretches of inferiority and planned obsolescence because this car was indestructible.  We bought it with 100k miles and drove it another 75k at least until it gave up the ghost.  It had only one problem – rust – and the car leaked like a sieve.  It got so moldy inside that little mushrooms began growing on the passenger-side carpet.  One summer I took my young children on a vacation to the beach in North Carolina.  We loaded up the back with chairs, umbrellas, shovels and pails, suitcases, and coolers.  I knew that there was a chance of rain so I was sure to pack a plastic tarp.  Not only did it rain, but it poured.  I gave my six-year old son the job of constructing a makeshift drainage system so that the water coming in from the roof would flow easily down the valleys, culverts, and sluiceways that he would fashion in the plastic covering.  I could see him in the rearview mirror, clambering in the back, molding, readjusting, and modeling so that the water would go down and out.

“Fuck it”, I finally concluded. “Time to get a decent car”, and the long years of Corollas and Camrys began.  I don’t need to post a photo of these cars, because for years they have been among the most popular on the road.  In fact the Camry was so popular for a while that theft rates were extremely high – not because it was such a cool car, but because it could be cannibalized for parts.

So, the odyssey that began with the muscle car is all over but the shouting.  I still have to confess one automotive wet dream – driving a new Ferrari Testarossa.  The animal whine of that engine, played for me in 1958, is still in my dreams.

One day, on a trip through Sonoma County, we visited a vineyard which just happened to be the venue for the Ferrari Club of California’s annual luncheon.  Outside in the parking lot were 50 of the most gorgeous machines ever.  I lovingly looked at every one.  In Hinduism, all gods have vehicles, usually animals that take them around the universe.  My vehicle on the way to another world will be a Ferrari.

Ethnic Stereotypes

I grew up in an era when there were no stereotypes for ethnic, racial, or religious groupings and no pejorative terms for them.  Not because people did not pigeonhole on the basis of background; on the contrary it was because no one had ever once given a thought to the subject.  Everyone knew that yids, wops, hunkies, micks, and Polacks behaved in certain prescribed, innate, and immutable ways.  Jews were acquisitive, aggressive, and pushy.  Micks were drunkards given to bar fights.  Polacks and hunkies were stupid; and Italians yelled a lot and beat their wives.  It was what we were. It was part of our nature.  We were born that way. Nobody stereotyped anybody.

The problem with this simplified ethnic classification system was that the Polacks or micks couldn’t make any sense out of the exceptions. How could a guinea go to Yale? Maybe my father let up a bit on the wife-beating; or fewer goomba relatives patrolled the parlor, yelling, screaming, and throwing things; or fewer wailing, hysterical women in black dresses attended family funerals.  In any case my family didn’t stink of garlic, have hairy ears, or work construction.  The Polacks had to transform my family into some weird, cancerous, ethnic growth with some Italian, some WASP, some Swedish bits, so that the moral order of their universe could be maintained; so that we – like everyone else  without exception, could be as Fifties as pink shirts, black tight pants, throaty mufflers, and backseat pussy.  Basically, the Polacks thought, we must have a lot white blood.

Nor could the Polacks make any sense out of the Mafia.  How could these guineas possibly have so much power, they wondered?  From the looks of them, they sure looked the Italian part – swarthy, greasy, curly hair, lots of noise – but instead of working construction, they owned it.  In fact they owned and ran everything.

“Ya have to admit”, said one of the Polacks hanging out on Broad Street in front of the kielbasa market, “those guineas are tough sons-o’-bitches”. He was referring to the Cosa Nostra, the Black Hand, the Mafia who ran the numbers, maintained a protection racket that covered the whole city, controlled the unions and prostitution, and who were the de facto governors of the city.

“Fuckin’ micks never had a chance”, said Stash “like they did in Boston.” And Polacks who were 60 percent of the city got nothing but ‘guinea leavings’.   The Poles worked in the factories as laborers or as cleaning ladies for the WASPs in the West End. They were never able to elect anyone because the Italians worked over the neighborhoods and muscled a 100 percent vote their way.

So the Polacks made adjustments in their assessments of Italians – either they had white blood, or were descendants of the Roman Empire or whose faith linked them in an unholy alliance with the Vatican – and with these illogical conclusions, were able to see to it that the moral and social order was left intact.

The Micks had their own racket going – the Catholic Church.  The buggering Father O’Reillys, Father Murphys, and Father Quinlans, were assigned parishes by the Archdiocese of Hartford, which took its lead from the Archdiocese of Boston which was as Irish as half the counties of Ireland put together, and which was led by the most Irish of Cardinals in the Holy see.  No mick Excellency, or Monsignor, or priest laboring in the vineyard ever gave a glancing thought to ‘ethnic community’ – Italian priests for Italian neighborhoods.  The Irish Church was the Catholic Church in New England, so even the goomba tough guys had to sit through sermons on self-abuse, bad thoughts, and the shameful, if not pitiful nature of women, except, of course, for the Holy Virgin Mary, conceived without sin, Mother of God, and loving intercessor for her Son, Our God, Jesus Christ.

So the micks had their revenge on the guineas who ran things by sending their trembling sons home from confession, having been told that they were inevitably and irretrievably doomed to perdition, and if they continued to have these deranged thoughts and impure desires, the hell fires would only burn more hotly.

The goombas could do nothing, for they respected the sanctity of the Sacrament of Confession and, although begrudgingly, accepted the links between God, St. Peter, the Pope down to the parish priest.  In fact they admired the Church.  It wasn’t much different from the Mafia with its own secular rules and sacraments, social order, and administration as efficient as the Roman Curia; and like the Cosa Nostra, the farther down you got in the pecking order, the more jerks you found, and as often as you could get rid of them, the more there were to take their place.  So the goombas put up with the Church just like the Church put up with the goombas.  A convenient standoff, no turf battles.

The Jews were all smart and successful, so unlike the Italians, Irish, and Polish all of whom gave you good reason to dislike them because they seemed stupid.  No one in his right mind would ever say such a thing about the Jews.  If you wanted a smart lawyer, you went to a Jew.  You wanted clothes, jewelry, furs, a loan, you went to a Jew.  So, if they were smarter than everyone else, you had to find some other reason to dislike them.  For example, they were pushy, didn’t know their place, didn’t wait in line to serve themselves canapés and tea sandwiches, didn’t politely accept being blacklisted at the country club but said fuck you and formed their own, elbowed their way to ticket counters, shoved and pushed to get on the train, and fought for every nickel.

The Polacks couldn’t understand this either.  The Jews’ pushing and shoving, nickel-and-diming, chutzpah or whatever the Polish word was for outrageously self-serving behavior was, seemed to work.  Everywhere they were allowed to work, Jews ruled and made money, and kept moving up.  A tailor whose grandfather had been a rag-picker became a clothier who then opened a chain of apparel stores.  A lawyer who chased ambulances opened offices in Newington, Bristol, and Plainville, and his sons became famous personal injury attorneys. 

Was it because the Jews didn’t have the manners of the WASPs, those arbiters of taste and fashion in the city, who, descended from generations of shipbuilders, rum runners, slave traders, and ice shippers made the city what it was? The Polacks had no clue as to what the manners of the Manor-born were, wouldn’t know them if they saw them, and of course had no chance to see them, living as they did either below ground in the basement sweatshops of the factories, or above ground in the top, most cramped and creaky apartments of a fourth-floor walk-up.

Jews simply must have some kind of inbuilt and innate human inferiority somewhere, regardless of their material success and brains.  Once again the moral and social universe was maintained by an easy logic.  Things in the Fifties just were.  Too much thinking about them never did anyone any good. 

The City had one or two Puerto Ricans and a stray black man here and there.  The Puerto Ricans worked in the boiler room of the hospital and the blacks shined shoes for the lawyers and bankers on Main Street.  No one knew where they lived and no one cared; and just as Hindu outcastes were invisible, so were they - marginalia, not worth the stereotyping which would come later as the waves of immigrations from the Caribbean or the South hit the East Coast.  “Why, they’re just as American as you or I”, I overheard a young, idealistic, lawyer saying to his companion as they passed the Puerto Ricans coming up from the boiler room.  

“Are you kidding me?”, replied the friend.  “They’re spics, and we don’t have spics in America”.  So the logic of the moral and social universe was applied once again with little debate.

I have never been a fan of revisionist history.  The Fifties was an era of certitude.  America was the greatest country in the world.  We had just won the War, defeated the Nazis and the Japs, and were a resurgent economic power,the envy of everyone.  The Church was solidly in place, Republicans and Democrats were exemplary models of democracy and capitalism, the business of General Motors was the business of the United States Government.   If all this was true, certain, and unchallenged, then the certainty of the ethnic moral and social universe was also fixed and unchallenged.

The thing of it was, the stereotypes were not that far off.  Ethnic communities in the Fifties were still very isolated from each other.  The Poles lived in one end of the city, the Italians in other.  The Poles – I later learned from a sophisticated, cosmopolitan Polish co-worker when I travelled to Warsaw just after the fall of the Soviet Union – had come from Silesia, one of the poorest areas of Poland.  I had proudly told him, wishing to establish my bona fides that I came from a well-known city in Connecticut which was over 60 percent Polish. I knew about kielbasa, pierogi, rouladen, and kotlets, and the ways of the babushka-wrapped women I saw in the park.  I could say, nozdrowie (to your health) and bez pracy nie ma pieniędzy (no work, no money).

I got no reaction from my colleague, who was a Polish-Prussian prince whose family had been well under cover during Soviet times but who had reemerged, reclaimed much of their lost land, and were on there way to restoring the family name and fortune.  I repeated my litany of Polish references a number of times.  “I wouldn’t be so proud of your Poles”, he said and went on to relate their boorish, thickwitted, Silesian peasant ways.  So we were right after all, I thought.  Because of their poor, rural, peasant roots, they were not unlike our own Appalachian clodhoppers.  We had put them in the right category.

My trips to Poland in the early 90s were memorable for many reasons, perhaps the most important of which was the revelation that all Poles were not like the Silesian Poles of my youth.  Women were beautiful, unlike the steel-toothed, fat, babushka-ed cleaning ladies that came and banged furniture around my house once a week.  There were plenty more aristocrats, Euro-professionals, and artists where my colleague came from.  Poland was Europe.  Even though our stereotyping had been correct, it had – like most stereotypes – been woefully limited.  Accurate to a point, but in the end, ridiculously exaggerated and silly.

Religion was another one of those archetypically stereotyped fixtures of my community in the Fifties.  In addition to being a yid, wop, mick, or polack, you were either a Catholic, Protestant, or Jew.   Those two characteristics were enough for anyone.  What your father did for a living usually followed logically from them – not exactly, of course.  Not all Italians were barbers or crushed rocks for a living.

I grew up a Catholic, hated Mass and all the trappings of the religion, was forced to suffer through an hour of a Latin service in a hot, airless church, smelling of Saturday night’s liquored bad breath and lilac perfume, and to listen to the whack and thud of browbeating about sin, Purgatory, and particularly damnation.   It was not until I was eleven or twelve did I realize that Protestants did not go on like this.  They talked of social justice, equality, and world peace. They were Episcopalians and not holy roller Baptists, but to me they were streamlined, airy, and sensible.  Just going into a Protestant church, free from the baroque statues and bleeding Christ on the cross, holy water fonts, and celestial angels, was liberating.

From what I could tell from the bar mitzvahs I attended, the Jews were not much different from Catholics, except a lot more foreign language.  Their altar, rituals, comings and goings of the rabbis, were familiar – a lot of rigmarole and secret doings – so I had little interest in the temple.

My two closest friends were a Jew and a Protestant, and we called ourselves The Three Musketeers.  We were too young to talk about religion except to comment on how many presents Bruce got for his bar mitzvah or the piles of toys we got for Christmas.  Bruce’s family kept a kosher house and had a fat Irishwoman as their housekeeper who kept the dairy plates away from the meat dishes.   I was the only one who was interested in religion, or better, churches and rituals, because of my incarceration every Sunday, bullied by sadistic priests.  Bruce seemed happy enough as a Jew.  I got the impression that for him being a Jew was like our seeing him as a Jew – just part of the moral and social order of things.  Herbie, the Protestant, maybe went to church on Sundays, maybe not, depending.  His father wanted a decent show, because these were the days of Rotary and belonging and churchgoing was a must, at least occasionally; but golf beckoned and the 19th hole poker games afterwards.

It is strange but satisfying to think back on those days.  We all, except the WASPs of the West End, struggled through our stereotypes; but enjoyed the freewheeling ethnic free-for-all of the times.  Political correctness was as remote from my New England city as Bujumbura.  Ethnic identity – and the Borscht Belt comedy of our streets based on it – was far from offensive or debilitating.  My daughter had absolutely no idea what I was talking about when I asked how many Italians there were in her class.  Hispanics, blacks she knew; but Italians….?  Color and ethnic background don’t  matter any more, or at least aren’t supposed to.  We are all equal.  We all come equipped with Twenty-First Century glasses which see only the unique individuals before us.  I suppose this is a good thing, but it is way, way less fun.

Don’t Be Evil–Time for Google to Rethink Its Motto

There are two articles in the Washington Post today on Google and its new policy to unify its information collection activity, linking Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube among other platforms.  I will excerpt from the articles, for I have gone on record here to voice my strong opposition to what the company is doing and how important it is to have a web-based counter attack.  The first is on the business deal between Google and Verizon, but goes into detail about the invasion of privacy issue (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/maybe-its-time-for-google-to-rethink-its-dont-be-evil-motto/2012/01/25/gIQAAS0XRQ_story.html):

“Don’t be evil.” That’s Google’s unofficial motto, in case you didn’t know. In 2004, when the company went public, its founders even based the company code of conduct on the phrase, which has since become known as the “Don’t Be Evil’” manifesto.

For a long time, it was easy to believe that Google was walking the walk. The company regularly spoke out in defense of openness and against censorship on the Internet, choosing its values over potential profit by leaving China and becoming a force in Washington by acting to oppose the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act.

But was all that just an act?

It’s clear that Google has had to evolve as its position has slipped. It has had to become more than agile — it has had to become wildly aggressive. Slowly but surely, we’ve watched Google try to find a way into spaces where its search is increasingly less relevant.

That’s where Google+ comes in. Google+, unveiled in June, is the company’s first real answer to Twitter and Facebook.

A few weeks ago, Google made one of the biggest changes to its search product. If you happened to be signed in to your Gmail account, Google search began including — no, not just including, but promoting — Google+ links inside of your search results. Sure, you can turn off this personalized search feature, but many users might not know how. So if you had searched for Ryan Gosling, it might have also displayed information about other people named Ryan that you’re friends with or showed you images that your friends have shared at the top of image results.

In short, it started seriously messing with “true” search, the search that had been largely untainted; the search based on algorithms, not allegiances; the search we expect from Google.

I think most users would argue that this makes finding what you want harder, less diverse and more insulated. The experience feels suffocating to me, like I have to fight through Google+ results to see the “real” stuff.

Google search has, until now, represented the Internet giant’s biggest gift and most valuable contribution to the Web — a place to find things untouched (or at least mostly untouched) by greedy hands.

This week, Google announced another radical change to Google search — but this time on the back end. It said that beginning March 1, Google would begin integrating information about searches you run while signed into a Google account, including your Android phone, with data from 59 other Google products such as Gmail and YouTube. Google says there’s a way to turn off your search history — but you have to do it in at least three places. The only absolute way to prevent giving Google enough information to build a digital dossier of your life is to close your account.

The real problem is that Google’s search policy shift and the change in its privacy policies suggest a shift in core values at the company — values you didn’t need a road map to figure out a few years ago. Those were values that placed the user first and stood in stark contrast to monopolistic practices of companies like Microsoft in the 1990s.

They were Google Values, and they felt right. They felt good.

If Google can’t see how perverse some of its decisions look today by comparison, maybe it’s time to rethink the company motto.

The second article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/faq-googles-new-privacy-policy/2012/01/24/gIQArw8GOQ_story.html) is a FAQ sheet about Google’s new policy:

What is Google doing?: In a nutshell, Google is taking information from almost all of your Google services — including Gmail, Picasa, YouTube and search — and integrating the data so that they can learn more about you. Google Books, Google Wallet and Google Chrome will retain their own additional policies, partly for legal reasons, but Google could still integrate data from these services.

What kind of information are they collecting and integrating?:

Google collects and can integrate almost anything that’s already in the Google ecosystem: calendar appointments, location data, search preferences, contacts, personal habits based on Gmail chatter, device information and search queries, to name a few.

Can they do that?: Well, under the company’s current privacy policies for some of its properties, Google says it can “combine the information you submit under your account with information from other Google services or third parties in order to provide you with a better experience and to improve the quality of our services.” The privacy policies for YouTube and search history, however, did not have such language. Now they do and the company has now made its ability to combine information across these and its other services more explicit.

Why is Google doing this?: Google says it will be able to do a lot more “cool things” when it combines information across products. There’s “so much more that Google can do to help you” if you share your information with them.

When do the changes take effect?: March 1.

Can I opt-out?: No.

So what do I do if I don’t like the policy?: You can close your account. Google has provided information on how to take all of your personal information off of Google by closing your Google Account, which would erase your Gmail, Google+ and other accounts.

But I have a lot of data saved on Gmail/Picasa/etc...: Google says it is committed to “data liberation” and that it will allow you to take your information elsewhere if you want to. The company said it would provide directions on how to do this in the help sections for its various services.

I don’t have a Google Account, but use Google search. Am I affected?: No. The new policy only applies to people who have a Google Account linked to services such as Gmail, Picasa or YouTube and are signed in.

As I have written previously, there are many players active in the invasion of Internet privacy: 1) Internet companies like Google and Yahoo who have the power to collect vast amounts of personal information about each user, bundle it, and sell it to private companies who will then buy targeted advertising; 2) Sales companies like Amazon who are big enough to collect information on their own and who then use it to precision-target advertisements; 3) Service companies like insurance companies in whose interest it is to collect health-related information on individual consumers; 4) consumers who like receiving personalized advertising and who therefore see no reason to object to tracking cookies; and 4) the US Government, local and other police who have a vested interest in surveillance and tracking either in the name of stopping terrorism or criminals or both.

A concerted effort must be made:

1. Locate the many non-profit agencies organized to protect free speech and the free flow of information.  They often have links directly to those members of Congress responsible for pending legislation.

2. Write directly to Google.  This type of grassroots campaign was successful in getting Netflix to rollback its streaming-DVD policy.

3. Boycott Google.  Bing as a search engine and Yahoo as an email server are just fine.

4. Read more about the pernicious links between and among the four players’ programs, above; i.e. how traffic cameras, store monitors, GPS device tracking, cell phone monitoring, Internet tracking can and have been themselves unified to build invasive profiles of American citizens.

5. Be alert to how your keystrokes are being tracked and used.

More Invasions of Privacy

Today’s (1.25.12) Washington Post carries an article http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/faq-googles-new-privacy-policy/2012/01/24/gIQArw8GOQ_story.html  about Google’s dangerous but not entirely unexpected expanded invasion of privacy policies.  Google has long tracked user use on its search engine – that is, every inquiry we make is recorded by Google.  The reason given, to which I have referred before on this blog, is to make advertising more tailor-made to the consumer.  If Google sees that you have visited a number of sites on Turkey, for example, it will show you advertisements for hotels in Istanbul, low-cost fares, and restaurants.  If it sees that you have shown an interest in Turkish rugs, it will offer you a selection of appropriate carpet salesrooms in your area (of course Google knows where you are, even if your platform does not have GPS).

Google, through its Gmail service, has also long-tracked every word you write; so that if you have an email exchange with a friend about a possible trip to Turkey, you will see ads, like those I suggested above, on your Gmail home page.

Since Google bought YouTube last November, it has employed its software there as well.  Google tracks the videos you watch, then offers you products and services related.  To extend the current example, if you have been watching clips of Whirling Dervishes in Konya, Turkey, Google will guess that you want to go there, but will also suggest to you some books on dervishes and Sufism.

So far so good – at least for those who value tailor-made advertising to the invasion of privacy and the collection of vast personal information on your habits, likes, preferences, and choices.   However, for those of us who care more about personal privacy, these intrusions are unwelcome.

Suppose, for example, that a person has been diagnosed with a particular type of cancer, and immediately goes online to find out all she can about it – its severity, recurrence rates, cure rates, therapy, etc.  Google will then, through its advertisers posted on your Google website, direct you to hospitals which specialize in your types of cancer, books related to your treatment, and doctors in your area with particular credentials of interest to you.

Again, all well and good for those people who value this kind of relevant, targeted advertising, but worrisome for those of us on the other side.  As we all know, the Internet is porous – anyone who wants information from you can get it.  It does not take a sophisticated hacker to find out your health viewing habits, and insurance companies can certainly do so.  Suppose you have had a mammogram and and MRI in close succession, suggesting to the insurance company, but not proving, that you might have breast cancer.  A quick hack into your Google search files can easily turn up valuable information about your likely condition, and you would be put on a red flag alert monitoring system. 

And if the insurance companies can and will use your private and personal information, the United States Government will not be far behind.  They will not even need to develop their own unified platforms – they will simply strike a deal with Google, beginning with an application of the Patriot Act to ‘stop terrorism’, and then extending to other areas they consider subversive or prejudicial to national security.

I have written before how the Centers of Disease Control (CDC) of the US Government has negotiated a deal with Google to have access to information from users on their ‘flu’ searches.  CDC has found this to be a very reliable predictor of the evolution of an epidemic.  If CDC sees that there are a disproportionate number of hits on ‘flu’ or ‘influenza’ in a particular locality, it knows that the virus has begun to infect people there…far before its more traditional monitoring systems provide that information.

At first glance, many people will like this.  Why not provide our premier epidemiological research institution with as much data as it needs?  Many people do not, because once again it is Government invading personal privacy.

Now, if all this is not bad enough, Google is now unifying all information from all its platforms – Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube among others.  That is, your search behavior on YouTube is immediately shared with your search engine and your email – and vice-versa.  Google now has the means to collect even more information about you and to put it together. 

The worst news of all is that Google has refused an ‘opt-out’ provision for its users.  That is, you will not be able to opt out of the unified system.  You will be tracked, monitored, and used regardless of your preferences.  That, or you move to Bing and Yahoo.

In closing, anyone reading this post should take all steps to stop Google from implementing their new policy.  Remember the rollback of SOPA or the rescinding of the streaming-DVD account policy of Netflix.  Public outcry can and has worked.

An Alternative to High-Cost College Education

In an excellent article in Monday’s (1.23.12) Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/online-course-startups-offer-virtually-free-college/2012/01/09/gIQAEJ6VGQ_story.html  Jon Marcus relates the rise of online free college courses. 

An emerging group of entrepreneurs with influential backing is seeking to lower the cost of higher education from as much as tens of thousands of dollars a year to nearly nothing.

These new arrivals are harnessing the Internet to offer online courses, which isn’t new. But their classes are free, or almost free. Most traditional universities have refused to award academic credit for such online studies.

Now the start-ups are discovering a way around that monopoly, by inventing credentials that “graduates” can take directly to employers instead of university degrees [italics mine].

I have argued on this blog for significant reform in higher public education to provide students with a practical, employment-based curriculum, one complemented by courses necessary for an enlightened citizenry – e.g. history, economics, international finance,  and political philosophy.  I have suggested that this reform be effected by: a) increasing vocational education often with the participation and support of industry; b) realigning the curriculum to match the marketplace, eliminating certain more esoteric liberal arts courses which private universities can offer, and focusing on IT and computer science, engineering, business, and technology; c) instituting rigorous entrance requirements for all levels of the educational system – that is, not all students have to attend the premier state four-year colleges, and those who do should be of the highest caliber.

This free online innovation is another way to reform education – to reduce the unrealistically high costs and student debt burdens, and to directly link students to employers with no unnecessary intermediary – the university.  An employer in silicon valley may not need learning in the wide array of academic disciplines available at public universities today, but only certain specialized ones.  A student, through an online course which has been accredited, can send his/her application directly to an employer as the first step in an interview and hiring process. 

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is running a $2 million competition to design digital “badges” that can be used instead of university degrees to prove a job candidate’s experience and knowledge to employers. P2PU and Saylor [online education firms] are experimenting with such badges for students to show they have completed courses.

As importantly, the subject matter for these online courses are of top quality:

The content these providers supply comes from top universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, Tufts University and the University of Michigan. Those are among about 250 institutions worldwide that have put a collective 15,000 courses online in what has become known as the open-courseware movement.

This spring, MIT will begin offering certificates of completion to anyone who successfully finishes courses the university makes available free online. There will be a small fee for certificates in this project, known as MITx.

The online students are by no means being shortchanged.  They are receiving the same content and level of education as their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

Perhaps most tellingly, private companies have shown a significant interest in these online courses:

Meanwhile, some businesses that offer tuition reimbursement to employees are becoming interested in the free- and low-cost education providers. CompuCom, a Dallas information technology company with 5,000 employees, has begun to work with StraighterLine [one of the online companies cited in the article].

The Web environment makes complementing these courses easy:

“Libraries are free, too,” says Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. “You can roam around, read books and study. But hardly anyone would say that spending time in the library is a good preparation to work in any economy, much less this one.”

In other words, why spend four slow-paced, often inefficient, and expensive years when you can tailor-make your education with free online study complemented by the vast storehouse of knowledge on the Internet.

“The Pollyanna version of college is that you’re learning and discussing things with your professors,” Arthur [student at an online course offeror] said. “The reality is that you have 450 kids in an auditorium listening to a teaching assistant.”

Obviously this online route is not for everyone.  Students who can afford a traditional post-secondary education, and who prefer a more social and diverse learning environment, should be able to attend one.  These students can choose among a wide array of opportunities – premier private schools, top public universities, and the many two-year, community, and vocational institutions in every state.

Online education is, however, the wave of the future.  Social networking is in its infancy. Within fifty years or less the interface between users will become indistinguishable from reality, and a true, believable, virtual environment will be the norm.  In the farther but still not too distant future there will be a complete computer-brain interface, and we all will be able to access all information in milliseconds, create our own virtual social world, and travel through history and across continents effortlessly.

In other words, the worlds of education, social networking, IT science, and competitive business will produce completely new educational paradigms. 

The Famous Nude Posture Pictures at Yale

Everyone in my class at Yale remembers – or better, cannot forget – the compulsory full Monte photographs we had taken upon entering Freshman Year.  We were told that they were to help assess our posture and to determine what remedial physical therapy was required.  The most common distortion was scoliosis or curvature of the spine.  It of course was highly likely for any incoming 18 year-old in good health and from the best families to have curvature of anything, let alone this congenital or idiopathic anomaly.  Most of us had some tilt or irregularity based on the photographs, and we had to make the long trip to the Payne Whitney three times a week or until we stood up straight.

“I’ve told you a hundred times that you don’t stand up straight”, said my mother when she heard the news, “and you don’t sit up straight either.  No wonder you have curvature of the spine, and if you didn’t hunch over your food and shovel it in, you wouldn’t always have a cricked neck and bad digestion”

The rumors were – subsequently confirmed – that the nude photographs were a cover-up for a cockamamie theory by William Herbert Sheldon, an American psychologist who said you could correlate body and personality types.  Mesomorphs were well-muscled, strong, and well-proportioned and who were outgoing, popular, and hardworking.  Ectomorphs were thin and withdrawn, intelligent and fearful.  Endomorphs were heavy, slow, sloppy, and lazy.  Sheldon collected the photos of thousands of male and female freshmen; and under the guise of posture remediation, and with the full complicity of the Ivy League, tracked our performance and measured it against his standards.  These standards were not new, but the pseudo-intellectual and pompous basis for his ideas, made them all the more irretrievably bad:

In general outline, [Sheldon’s theory] resembles ideas found in the tridosha system of Ayurveda; The Republic by Plato; and propounded in the twentieth century by George Gurdjieff. In addition, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that "nature ... distinguishes" three different physiological body types, which correspond to a Republic-esque hierarchy. Sheldon's ideas also owe something to Aristotle's conception of the soul. Roughly the three corresponding personality types proposed by Sheldon are somewhat akin to Jung's categorization of thinking, feeling and sensing types (Wikipedia).

We knew of the rumors, believed them, and therefore were pissed that we had to traipse through the snow the mile to the Payne Whitney gym and back for some professor’s wacko ideas.  I never followed up on the results nor tried to determine whether Yale ever destroyed the pictures.  I did hear recently from a Vassar alumna who bridled at the thought that some creep was ogling not only her particular private parts but the parts of thousands of well-to-do young things; but with all the really great porno out there now, fifty years later, I could not imagine anyone getting off on what amounted to body mug shots. 

The real story, however, concerns the game that I and my friends concocted.  We did our own body- and personality-typing, and kept a record of our impressions.   The mesomorphs were easy.  They were the privileged WASPs from the North Shore, Greenwich, or Grosse Pointe – tall, blond and blue-eyed, sculpted by summers swimming off Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard; crewing at Groton, or tennis at Piping Rock.  Mesomorphism ran in their families.   Father Robert helped Yale win the Henley Regatta in ‘28.  Grandfather Robert was the captain of Yale’s championship squash team in ‘94, and prior great and great-great grandfathers and beyond sat their chops on the Yale Fence for generations before that. 

The problem was that few of them were hardworking.  Yale in the early Sixties still gave out Gentlemen’s ‘C’s’ – i.e., “We know that you are intelligent and from a good family and would do well if you worked hard, but why should you work as hard as Jews?” – so while the Locust Valley produced young men that might have been intelligent, how did we know? Still they were outgoing and popular, two out of the three criteria, so we put them in the ‘M’ category. 

The harder part were the few jocks that Yale recruited.  Rico Carpatti was one of the few Italian-Americans at Yale, a local product from New Haven, and recruited as part of a deal that Yale made with the Aldermen of the city. 

“OK, maybe he’s not exactly your typical Yale Man”, said the aldermen, “but he can play football, and while we’re at it, we’re not so happy with the current state of Town-Gown relations with no New Haven graduates for five years.”

Yale let him in, established a “Pass this ape” policy, and watched as Rico ate up the Harvard and Princeton lines.

Rico was not just a mesomorph, he was the mesomorph.  In fact he was a proto-mesomorph because of his underslung jaw, heavy brow, and thick, thatched hair all over his body, massive shoulders, thin waist, bulging thighs, and cannonball biceps.  Rico, however, was stupid; and far from being outgoing and popular, he was reclusive and weird.  Maybe it was because he was so different-looking from the Oyster Bay rowers or from even the most obsessive ectomorphs he felt that the only comfortable space other than the football field was his room; and he made no attempt to make friends.  He wasn’t even invited to join DKE, the jock fraternity.  The crowd there didn’t want their girlfriends to see this bandy-legged throwback who stabbed at his meat like pinning some live thing with a pitchfork.  He went back to his Wooster Square family walk- up for meals, dated some mustachioed, wiry-haired girl from New Haven High, and spent as little time as possible on campus. 

We had to put him in the ‘M’ category as well, but realized what strange bedfellows these body types were making.

The endomorphs were the easiest and the most fun.  ‘What exactly is fat?’, we asked before starting the game, and decided on ‘You’ll know it when you see it’.  We picked the grossest examples – the real fatties with quivering stomachs, fat-assed big-time booties, doughy chins, and ham-hock legs.  We preferred the ones who were so fat that their thighs chafed.  Given Yale’s selection process at the time, ages before self-esteem and Political Correctness were ever heard of, the university stuck pretty close to the norm – the WASP norm or, better, the Goldilocks norm…Not too skinny, not too fat, just right. But a few exceptions did sneak in.  Maybe they wore corsets to the interview or were particularly brilliant at something, or had a fat legacy in the family tree; but they were there.

Sheldon’s theory was really fucked up.  Most of these guys didn’t even come close to his criteria.  Take Drew Potter, one of the fattest guys on campus and who must have been a homo.  How he got in, I’ll never know.  He minced, he was meticulous in his dress, exaggerated in his speech and gestures, and prim and proper to a ‘T’.  He was the very stereotype of the gay guy of today.  There was nothing sloppy about him.  He ate European style, never picking up his chicken bones like the rest of us, sucking the skin and fat bits, but cutting the meat off into delicate little pieces.  He went to the barber (many of those to choose from in goomba New Haven) every ten days to get a razor trim.  He wasn’t lazy by any means.  He had the lead roles in both Spring and Fall musicals at the Yale Repertory Theatre. 

The rest of the fatties were true to form – ambling, unhurried, disheveled and – what became a stereotypical characteristic of fat people after Sheldon – laughing and happy.  This, we concluded, was the best part of the Professor’s work – obvious to any but the most squirrel-focused grind.

Which leads me to the ectomorphs.  They, too, were easy to spot.  No shadings, dissections of type, debatable categorizations as there were with the mesomorphs.  We went to the libraries to find them.  Skinny, acned, bespectacled dorks; sallow-complexioned because of limited exposure to sunlight; and yes, intelligent….or perhaps hardworking, although this assumption would confuse the mesomorph conclusion….but in any case a quick check of the public records showed honors, high achievement, and academic recognition. 

Not all ectomorphs were this way, since Sheldon’s ideas were so idiotic.  Darryl Holmes was a Bursary Boy who waited tables at Trumbull College to pay the university back in kind for his scholarship.  He had gotten into Yale because his father had been mangled in a horrific accident on a farm in Eastern Tennessee owned by the Gore family; and the Senator got him in (Harvard, his own alma mater wouldn’t take him).  Darryl gave the lie to Sheldon’s theories like no other.  He was an endomorph not because of genetic disposition but because of a steady Southern diet of fatback, ribs, and cornmeal.  He lost the pounds quickly, never gained muscle tone like a mesomorph, but became more like a flabby and flaccid ectomorph.  He was as dumb as a stone but as gregarious as they come, a regular life of the party.  His classmates loved his stories about noodling, moonshine, Junior Johnson clones, and his sheep-buggering uncles.  Yalies, like the rest of America, loved to deal in stereotypes.

This whole episode would have never happened today.  Today we would have Googled Sheldon, read reviews of his work, checked and counter-checked the reliability of his theories, exposed the University with protests at the invasion of personal privacy.  We never would have even considered categorizing our classmates so harshly and insensitively; which is why it now all feels so…..good! 

The Vassar girl who worried about being devoilee if the nude pictures of her and her classmates were ever to come to light has long forgotten her concern.  I haven’t had the time or interest to go digging to find out what happened to Sheldon and his theories, but there he will be on the Web if ever I feel like it.  For now, the episode will remain part of my undergraduate lore, sophomoric, puerile even, but fun.

An Endomorph at Yale

Everyone in my class at Yale remembers – or better, cannot forget – the compulsory full Monte photographs we had taken upon entering Freshman Year.  We were told that they were to help assess our posture and to determine what remedial physical therapy was required.  The most common distortion was scoliosis or curvature of the spine.  It of course was highly likely for any incoming 18 year-old in good health and from the best families to have curvature of anything, let alone this congenital or idiopathic anomaly.  Most of us had some tilt or irregularity based on the photographs, and we had to make the long trip to the Payne Whitney three times a week or until we stood up straight.

“I’ve told you a hundred times that you don’t stand up straight”, said my mother when she heard the news, “and you don’t sit up straight either.  No wonder you have curvature of the spine, and if you didn’t hunch over your food and shovel it in, you wouldn’t always have a cricked neck and bad digestion”

The rumors were – subsequently confirmed – that the nude photographs were a cover-up for a cockamamie theory by William Herbert Sheldon, an American psychologist who said you could correlate body and personality types.  Mesomorphs were well-muscled, strong, and well-proportioned and who were outgoing, popular, and hardworking.  Ectomorphs were thin and withdrawn, intelligent and fearful.  Endomorphs were heavy, slow, sloppy, and lazy.  Sheldon collected the photos of thousands of male and female freshmen; and under the guise of posture remediation, and with the full complicity of the Ivy League, tracked our performance and measured it against his standards.  These standards were not new, but the pseudo-intellectual and pompous basis for his ideas, made them all the more irretrievably bad:

In general outline, [Sheldon’s theory] resembles ideas found in the tridosha system of Ayurveda; The Republic by Plato; and propounded in the twentieth century by George Gurdjieff. In addition, Friedrich Nietzsche writes that "nature ... distinguishes" three different physiological body types, which correspond to a Republic-esque hierarchy. Sheldon's ideas also owe something to Aristotle's conception of the soul. Roughly the three corresponding personality types proposed by Sheldon are somewhat akin to Jung's categorization of thinking, feeling and sensing types (Wikipedia).

We knew of the rumors, believed them, and therefore were pissed that we had to traipse through the snow the mile to the Payne Whitney gym and back for some professor’s wacko ideas.  I never followed up on the results nor tried to determine whether Yale ever destroyed the pictures.  I did hear recently from a Vassar alumna who bridled at the thought that some creep was ogling not only her particular private parts but the parts of thousands of well-to-do young things; but with all the really great porno out there now, fifty years later, I could not imagine anyone getting off on what amounted to body mug shots. 

The real story, however, concerns the game that I and my friends concocted.  We did our own body- and personality-typing, and kept a record of our impressions.   The mesomorphs were easy.  They were the privileged WASPs from the North Shore, Greenwich, or Grosse Pointe – tall, blond and blue-eyed, sculpted by summers swimming off Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard; crewing at Groton, or tennis at Piping Rock.  Mesomorphism ran in their families.   Father Robert helped Yale win the Henley Regatta in ‘28.  Grandfather Robert was the captain of Yale’s championship squash team in ‘94, and prior great and great-great grandfathers and beyond sat their chops on the Yale Fence for generations before that. 

The problem was that few of them were hardworking.  Yale in the early Sixties still gave out Gentlemen’s ‘C’s’ – i.e., “We know that you are intelligent and from a good family and would do well if you worked hard, but why should you work as hard as Jews?” – so while the Locust Valley produced young men that might have been intelligent, how did we know? Still they were outgoing and popular, two out of the three criteria, so we put them in the ‘M’ category. 

The harder part were the few jocks that Yale recruited.  Rico Carpatti was one of the few Italian-Americans at Yale, a local product from New Haven, and recruited as part of a deal that Yale made with the Aldermen of the city. 

“OK, maybe he’s not exactly your typical Yale Man”, said the aldermen, “but he can play football, and while we’re at it, we’re not so happy with the current state of Town-Gown relations with no New Haven graduates for five years.”

Yale let him in, established a “Pass this ape” policy, and watched as Rico ate up the Harvard and Princeton lines.

Rico was not just a mesomorph, he was the mesomorph.  In fact he was a proto-mesomorph because of his underslung jaw, heavy brow, and thick, thatched hair all over his body, massive shoulders, thin waist, bulging thighs, and cannonball biceps.  Rico, however, was stupid; and far from being outgoing and popular, he was reclusive and weird.  Maybe it was because he was so different-looking from the Oyster Bay rowers or from even the most obsessive ectomorphs he felt that the only comfortable space other than the football field was his room; and he made no attempt to make friends.  He wasn’t even invited to join DKE, the jock fraternity.  The crowd there didn’t want their girlfriends to see this bandy-legged throwback who stabbed at his meat like pinning some live thing with a pitchfork.  He went back to his Wooster Square family walk- up for meals, dated some mustachioed, wiry-haired girl from New Haven High, and spent as little time as possible on campus. 

We had to put him in the ‘M’ category as well, but realized what strange bedfellows these body types were making.

The endomorphs were the easiest and the most fun.  ‘What exactly is fat?’, we asked before starting the game, and decided on ‘You’ll know it when you see it’.  We picked the grossest examples – the real fatties with quivering stomachs, fat-assed big-time booties, doughy chins, and ham-hock legs.  We preferred the ones who were so fat that their thighs chafed.  Given Yale’s selection process at the time, ages before self-esteem and Political Correctness were ever heard of, the university stuck pretty close to the norm – the WASP norm or, better, the Goldilocks norm…Not too skinny, not too fat, just right. But a few exceptions did sneak in.  Maybe they wore corsets to the interview or were particularly brilliant at something, or had a fat legacy in the family tree; but they were there.

Sheldon’s theory was really fucked up.  Most of these guys didn’t even come close to his criteria.  Take Drew Potter, one of the fattest guys on campus and who must have been a homo.  How he got in, I’ll never know.  He minced, he was meticulous in his dress, exaggerated in his speech and gestures, and prim and proper to a ‘T’.  He was the very stereotype of the gay guy of today.  There was nothing sloppy about him.  He ate European style, never picking up his chicken bones like the rest of us, sucking the skin and fat bits, but cutting the meat off into delicate little pieces.  He went to the barber (many of those to choose from in goomba New Haven) every ten days to get a razor trim.  He wasn’t lazy by any means.  He had the lead roles in both Spring and Fall musicals at the Yale Repertory Theatre. 

The rest of the fatties were true to form – ambling, unhurried, disheveled and – what became a stereotypical characteristic of fat people after Sheldon – laughing and happy.  This, we concluded, was the best part of the Professor’s work – obvious to any but the most squirrel-focused grind.

Which leads me to the ectomorphs.  They, too, were easy to spot.  No shadings, dissections of type, debatable categorizations as there were with the mesomorphs.  We went to the libraries to find them.  Skinny, acned, bespectacled dorks; sallow-complexioned because of limited exposure to sunlight; and yes, intelligent….or perhaps hardworking, although this assumption would confuse the mesomorph conclusion….but in any case a quick check of the public records showed honors, high achievement, and academic recognition. 

Not all ectomorphs were this way, since Sheldon’s ideas were so idiotic.  Darryl Holmes was a Bursary Boy who waited tables at Trumbull College to pay the university back in kind for his scholarship.  He had gotten into Yale because his father had been mangled in a horrific accident on a farm in Eastern Tennessee owned by the Gore family; and the Senator got him in (Harvard, his own alma mater wouldn’t take him).  Darryl gave the lie to Sheldon’s theories like no other.  He was an endomorph not because of genetic disposition but because of a steady Southern diet of fatback, ribs, and cornmeal.  He lost the pounds quickly, never gained muscle tone like a mesomorph, but became more like a flabby and flaccid ectomorph.  He was as dumb as a stone but as gregarious as they come, a regular life of the party.  His classmates loved his stories about noodling, moonshine, Junior Johnson clones, and his sheep-buggering uncles.  Yalies, like the rest of America, loved to deal in stereotypes.

This whole episode would have never happened today.  Today we would have Googled Sheldon, read reviews of his work, checked and counter-checked the reliability of his theories, exposed the University with protests at the invasion of personal privacy.  We never would have even considered categorizing our classmates so harshly and insensitively; which is why it now all feels so…..good! 

The Vassar girl who worried about being devoilee if the nude pictures of her and her classmates were ever to come to light has long forgotten her concern.  I haven’t had the time or interest to go digging to find out what happened to Sheldon and his theories, but there he will be on the Web if ever I feel like it.  For now, the episode will remain part of my undergraduate lore, sophomoric, puerile even, but fun.

Love and Jasmine

The last place on earth that Chris Whately ever thought he would visit was India.  Back in 1965 when I met him at our university rooming house in Pittsburgh, India was women with morose dark circles under their eyes, the Black Hole of Calcutta, and in general a sinkhole of pestilence.  He was not far from the truth – the slums of Calcutta and Bombay were indeed vast and pestilential.  Foreign residents were routinely innoculated against plague, typhus, cholera, yellow fever.  “Unless it’s boiled, don’t drink it, bathe in it or swim in it” was the prophetic warning.  Of course life for non-Indians, despite the risks of disease, was luxurious.  Most had spacious houses, a full complement of servants and retainers, more money than could be spent in what was a very poor country, access to private or embassy pools and golf courses.  There was heat and dust, to be sure, but there were always the cool retreats of the Tolleygunge Club – an elegant brass and teak throwback to the Raj – or the Breach Candy Club, a foreigners-only redoubt on the Arabian Sea in Bombay with pool and tennis courts.

It was the women of India whom Chris had badly misjudged.  There is often a sallowness and high-boned shadowed darkness under the eyes of many women, but they were women who sat under the tree in dusty, pitiless villages, heads wrapped with the top folds of their saris, only one dark eye peeping out, not the tall and elegant ones one met at the Oberoi or the Taj who were as lustrous as polished mahogany, a dark, burnished caramel color, set off by magenta, green, or blue gold embroidered saris.  Their skin was smooth and unlined, lips full and sensuous, noses straight and balanced. 

Chris’ image of Indian women was formed by Dr. Romila Chatterjee, a student of graduate medicine at the university and who lived in our rooming house.  She was mousy, inelegant, and with those dark circles under her eyes which always seemed mourning, unhappy, or sick.  She was a lovely woman Chris had said, kept to herself, and smelled vaguely of the laboratory where she worked.  In the morning, she trailed jasmine perfume, and in the Spring put lilacs or honeysuckle in her hair, and filled the halls with a flowery and exotic scent.

Chris joined an international agency which had offices in over 50 countries in the world.  He spoke fluent French and was slated to go to Algeria.  He had never been to the Mediterranean, but had always wanted to go since seeing L’Etranger, the film adaptation of the Camus existentialist classic.  Much of the film was set on the beaches of Oran and Constantine and had long scenes of bored foreigners eating sumptuous meals under lightly flapping umbrellas in the bright southern sun.  He had no service motive whatsoever, and had joined the organization because of the chance to lead an exciting, good life. 

Chris was disconsolate when the directors told him that all organization staff in Algeria had been declared persona non grata and given 24 hours to leave the country, and he would go to India instead. 

The ride in from Bombay Airport was infamous.  It wound through the worst slums of the city, the Potters’ Colony, and went miles past hutment dwellings – rags sewn to rags held up by sticks – and whole communities who lived in the dank, wet, and immeasurable rank and unhealthy culverts along the highway.  The view was unremitting, hostile, and depressing.  “What have I done”, Chris said to himself, as the misery continued mile after mile.  The miasma lifted eventually and the apartment towers of the modern city could be seen in the distance.

It didn’t take Chris long to get acclimated to Bombay and India.  His office was next to the Breach Candy Club, and his windows opened on to the waters of the Arabian Sea.  He had a car and driver, and generous living expenses.  He found a terrace apartment at the top of the highest hill in Bombay and had a complete view of the city, the sea, Nariman Point, and the Parsi Towers of Silence.  He had arrived in December, so the mornings were fresh, and he was able to sleep without air conditioning.  The breezes from the sea blew all night and softened in the morning. 

He admired the Indian women eating at Bombelli’s, a culturally mixed restaurant near his office.  Along with the foreign contractors and representatives of international banks and insurance companies were wealthy, young Indian women all wearing hip-hugger saris.  In the late 60s jeans and halters had not yet replaced traditional dress, and the fashion was low-slung saris exposing an expanse of smooth, burnished mahogany skin. These women were beautiful.  Their faces were as fine as any Chris had seen in Indian miniatures, their hair raven black, silky, and full.  Their eyes were dark and almond-shaped, lustrous and brilliant.  Each woman chose her sari to coordinate with her skin color which had a stunning array of variations ranging from wheat to a dark, polished umber. 

His first girlfriend was a Sindhi from Malabar Hill.  She was young, not more than 20, more tentative than the socialites of Bombelli’s.  She had a demureness and a quiet reserve that Chris liked.  He met her at one of the many parties given by young people from the more modern and outgoing Bombay communities – Christians, Parsis and Sindhis.  As they got to know each other the did more things alone – although given Indian mores, that meant walks along Juhu or Chowpatthi Beaches or the Gateway of India.  He was excited by the chasteness of it, sneaking kisses in dark corners behind the Taj, holding hands in the movies, or feeding each other bits of puri or idli on the beach.  

Chris knew, however, that the girl wanted more.  Just as he had never had an Indian lover, to her even the thought of intimacy with a foreigner was as remote as intermarrying into a lower caste.  Her family, whom he had never met, and whom she kept completely in the dark, would have been shocked, appalled, and opposed to the relationship.  All this – the subterfuge, his whiteness and foreignness, her virginity, and her natural passion – made her eagerness all the more insistent.

He invited her to his apartment, and they sat on the terrace drinking whiskey and watching the aerial maneuvers of the kites who circled in the high drafts coming from the sea until the dived perfectly into the apartment canyons for small street animals.  When they made love for the first time, it was as if it was his first time.  She took her clothes off delicately, unwinding her sari, then removing the silk garments underneath.  Then, with a gesture which was womanly and feminine far beyond her years, undid her hair which was still long but pulled on top of her head.  She stood naked in front of him without shame or reluctance, quiet and still. As her hair tumbled over her shoulders, Chris could smell the sweet perfume of coconut oil.  Their lovemaking was slow, increasingly passionate, and lasted through the night.  There was no any urgency in the act itself, only a sense that it was too good to end, too good to be lost.

Other adventures in India were by no means as sublime.  Some of Chris’ friends went to the Cages, the neon and flourescent red light district where girls called to men from behind wooden bars, like a crib or a drunk dream hot pink and airless prison cell.  Their eyes were painted black, like those of infants whom mothers blacken to ward off evil spirits.  They wore half-Christian, half-ancient erotic temple dress.  They wore cheap jasmine and rosewater scents which hung in the humid air and filled the streets.  The men dreamt of a painted tigress, raping them, sucking everything out of them, a dark Kali, the Destroyer sitting on top of them in the squalor, heat, tinny music, and incense of room half-open to the street.

India was never a destination for sexual tourists as Bangkok always was officially with the Patpong Road massage parlors, or that West Africa was unofficially.  Men assigned to India after years in Liberia or Sierra Leone suffered because of the lack of easy sex.  Paul Theroux wrote about his happy life in Africa, the daily liaisons, and the sexual fabric of rural life, and all foreign emigres from that Promised Land were profoundly unhappy in India.

Other than the doped up resident foreigners, with no family looking on, who understood the complete social freedom that being not just an outcaste but a no-caste afforded, few outsiders sought out the Cages.  There was plenty of sexual opportunity other than the Cages, of course, but most foreigners were put off by the overt conservatism and the byzantine paths of Indian family, religion, and community.  Those, like Chris, who knew where to look, where to find the small chinks in the Hindu armor and insinuate themselves into the privileged and open sexuality beneath, lived their years in India happily and without regret.

Most foreigners, therefore, relied on their own kind for sexual diversion.  Sexual infidelity was so common that no one even bothered to gossip.  Who cared if Fred was sleeping with Rita?  In a small town the size of the American community in Delhi, tongues would have wagged, but here were agreed-upon but temporary community mores which suspended moral judgment. Of course husbands and wives fought over each new indiscretion, but quickly forgave and forgot as they went on to new pastures.  There was something about the permissiveness of India, the insignificance of foreigners as minor interlopers, hardly a whisper in the national psyche, that made chinks in the Protestant armor.

Each of the state offices of Chris’ organization had its own lewd and fascinating story.  People didn’t so much gossip about the people involved, as told the tales with admiration and envy.  There was Lloyd Peters, the Administrator of the Calcutta office, who charmed his Bengali counterparts with a Jersey Shore confidence and a shiny, sharkskinned appeal. Bedding the Deputy Secretary of Health might not have had the same cachet as a Bollywood starlet, but it was a triumph in international development circles. 

Bruce Gunther, the Administrator in Madras was famous for his wife-swapping, group-sex events.  The affairs were never the sordid affairs of the Lower East Side hippy enclaves in New York – sweaty banging on cheap beds, sex-smell and incense, nasty hair and Chinese cooking.  These were elegant Park Avenue happenings.  Bruce had tall vases of flowers in the entrance hall, imported hors d’oeuvres and French champagne.  Hookahs were prepared in advance with he finest Bombay Black – a sweet and potent hashish and opium mix – hash brownies on all the coffee tables.  Couples paired off and went discreetly to the bedrooms, each decorated differently.  In fact, Bruce’s house was like an elegant B&B out of Southern Living.  Bruce held court over the cotillion, lying back on floor cushions, drinking Scotch, watching the scene evolve.  He rarely participated and enjoyed more the booze and his role as impresario and animateur.  Chris took a business trip to Madras as often as he possibly could.

Rob Wilkens had a concubine in Kerala – not the sumptuous courtesan of Velasquez, all rustling silk finery, practiced in the arts of love, but a rural woman as beautiful as a Bollywood diva.  Despite 18 years of rural poverty, she had grown to be exquisite – as fine as any of Bombelli’s sophisticated Bombay-ites, as stunning as any woman he had ever seen.  He had met her on a field trip, was completely mesmerized, and shortly thereafter concluded an arrangement with her father.  Wilkens would pay a Rajah’s treasure for his time with the girl, and would provide for her after he left India.  She would never come to his home in Trivandrum – a modern, cantilevered building extending out over the crashing surf of the Arabian Sea – but would always be visited at her home in the village, a simple hut with an indoor stove and outdoor plumbing.  This Wilkens did out of fantasy.  The dung fires, the cowbells, the chirp of the water pumps, all featured in his dream of India, and he had the money and resourcefulness to realize it.

Chris’s affair with his young Sindhi lasted only until her parents found out four months later.  Over this time she became more and more preoccupied, and her initial joy and abandon were gone.  If her transgression were discovered, not only would she be castigated and thrown out of her house, she would be a pariah in the Sindhi community.  Forgiveness and reconciliation were not guaranteed and months if not years of penance would be required. Chris, too, although new to India, had heard about grisly threats and shotgun weddings.  Foreigners might be casteless, insignificant non-beings most of the time, but they were very much part of the system once they had penetrated and polluted it.  Chris had heard of the wild dacoits and goondas, hired thugs, hired to torture befouling foreigners in very particular Indian ways – with snakes, rats, sewage, and worse.

He never found out what happened, other that she called to tell him that her parents had found out, but that she did not tell them about him.  After that call, she disappeared completely.  He never saw her at the speakeasy parties in Colaba or at the Kwality Restaurant at Kemps Corner, but in any case went less frequently.  The perimeter had closed around the sweet young things.  He was the sapper, the intruder, the violator, and  the gates of the city had been drawn shut, locked, and bolted. 

Chris could never square the erotic temples of 10th Century Khajuraho with Puritan modern India.  Western history started out with restrictive family covenants and highly regulated sexual behavior, and became progressively less so.  India had Tantric Buddhism in the 6th Century A.D., and sexual union was one principal form of the expression of universal energy.  Sexual congress had always been a part of the Hindu god/couples such as Siva and Parvati.  In any case, he knew when to get out of town.

There were examples of the rule, perversions of it, love-marriages discouraged by parents (throw out the astrologer, the financial statements, considerations of caste, family, and origins) but increasing, and all variations of paid-for mistresses and concubines.  Seth Desai was from a wealthy Bombay family – one of the Gujarati families which, along the Parsis built the textile mills, created banks and insurance, and were clones of the Medicis of Florence who eventually created a city-state with their vision and desire.  Seth never had to work, and spent his time overseeing the various social institutions created by the Desai Foundation – temples, ashrams, orphanages, and schools.  He never actually managed them, just paid regular visits, had tea and chutney sandwiches with the local priest or headmaster and went on to his next appointment.

Seth had one of the most complete and extraordinary collections of Moghul erotic miniatures in India, passed on through successive generations of the family.  Each of the many hundreds was a museum piece, meticulously drawn and painted, tableaux not only of the court life of centuries ago, but of the wild swings of sexuality that made even the explicit sculptures of Khajuraho.seem prudish and tame.

Seth was the only one of his family who had actually looked at the paintings.  For years they had lain in a family vault until he took them out.  Everyone knew that they were there, but only Seth had the temerity – and the prurient interest – to disinter them.  Seth did not simply look at the pictures, admire their line, color, and precision; or study the complexities of court manners depicted; he ogled them, jacked off over them, eagerly showed them to foreign friends.  He was overawed at the acrobatics, the gymnastic positions, the very Victorian (although these paintings predated that conservative period by centuries) primness about showing a breast.  But there was nothing prim about the copulation, entering and filling every orifice, satisfying every sexual desire in every possible combination.  Looking at these ancient portraits was a complete experience for Seth – he was awestruck by the artistic beauty and excited by the acts depicted.  None of his family knew about his solitary delights, and before he died he replaced the now well-work, leather-bound book into the vault until some later Seth would discover it.

There must be thousands of Seths in India, Chris concluded, albeit without the treasure trove of irreplaceable paintings of inestimable value.  As he travelled and listened and explored, he found ‘places of despicable acts’, stories of desperate shadowy and illicit stalking of women, slave markets for wealthy Muslims in Hyderabad, and of concubinage in the opulent palaces of Jaipur.

When seen across the broad palette of human sexuality, none of this should have been a surprise.  The ‘Eve Teasing’ in the Muslim north – the horny, frustrated pinching and rubbing against women, especially white women by young men whose ideas of sex and sexual expectations had been twisted by Hollywood in the cinemas, and Victorian grandmothers at home.   Yet, to see this full expression of sex in all its forms in what appeared to be a tightly-wound society, was a surprising, but satisfying vision.  People are more alike than they are different, Chris concluded.

The more he understood the hot underbelly of India, the more he took advantage of it.  He had few inhibitions, was very approachable and social, and was very non-threatening to Indians because of his charm and ingenuousness.   He got invited to a sumptuous feast at the palace of a minor Rajput prince – the ‘privy purses’ of the princes were being eliminated, a necessary action to consolidate the post-empire democracy of India, but Government had left enough in the coffers to let the princes continue to live the good life.  The palace was made of translucent marble, carved with the images of Hindu gods and Rajput warriors.  It had interior courtyards, flowers and fountains, attentive servants and minions, and ghazals sung by the most illustrious musicians of the Jaipur gharana. The palace was open and airy, the monsoon far off, and the scent of jasmine and jacaranda filled the halls.  After dinner the theatre began, an operatic dance which became more and more provocative and sensual.  The women were all dressed as if they had stepped out of Scheherazade or the Arabian Nights with flowing silks, jewelled wrists and ankles.  After a while, they stepped off the stage, and while they continued their dance, went over to the men who were reclining on pillows before them, caressed them, and took them away.

Chris’ adventures ranged from the Cages to the palaces of Jaipur with more routine interludes than Eastern magic.  After the Sindhi girl there was a Gujarati student whom he met in Delhi.  He spent many nights with her in her house in Ahmedabad on the barsati, floating in the perfume of the late Spring, making love by the moonlight that came in through the open windows from rooms which gave out onto the temples and houses on the hills behind.  And many women after her.

India had been a second thought on the part of his organization, and an initial disappointment to Chris.  He thought he would get miasmal poverty, sallow, raccoon-eyed women, and a brutal climate.  He got all that and then some, but his real talent was for openness.  Few people have so few inhibitions or so much enthusiasm, or are willing to take such cultural risks.  He was a remarkable man, one of a kind, and continued on his journey to Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.  As he got older, his curiosity waned  a bit as did his desire; but like many older, aware men, he shifted his expectations and had a series of loving but still passionate affairs. 

He married a Malian woman when he was in his late forties – a wealthy woman from a regal family (her father had told him about majesterial Traores who ruled the Kingdom of Mali for centuries).  In Mali as in other former African kingdoms, there were few visible signs of greatness – no palaces, cathedrals, or hunting grounds – but it was her pride, tall, sure bearing, and unintimidated honesty that won him over.  He lived in Bamako in the family compound for years, had four children, and only occasionally returned to the United States.  He was a man whose life was as complete as any I know or have even heard of; and it all started by chance.

Crackerland–Travels to the Deep South (Updated)

I originally wrote this post in March 2011, almost a year ago, and when I first started writing on my blog.  Happily, people are still reading it and others from that era, and when I reread it today, I knew that I should update it – complete my Southern odyssey at least up till now as I am preparing to live in Mississippi for the Spring.  Here, then is the revised, updated version:

“I remember the first time I went to Florida with my parents and sister when I was growing up in Connecticut.  We went in the winter by train, and after an overnight journey we stopped about half-way down the Florida coast and got off the train to get some air and exercise.  The smell of orange blossoms was overwhelming – sweet, fragrant, strange, and foreign.  I knew I was in a very different place.  How could I have left the cold snow one day and feel the warm breezes and smell exotic and enticing scents the next?  I loved the palm trees – still my favorite tree – the sawgrass, and just being warm.

“About ten years ago I began my trips to the South. We drove to Latta, SC; then on to Lancaster, down to Aiken, over to Washington, GA, then back through SC to Monck’s Corner, Marion, and back home.  Our plan then was to stay in old antebellum mansions in small towns; and we did so on subsequent trips to the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, and Alabama.  Many if not most of these houses were elegantly restored and were furnished with either furniture of the period (a criterion for getting Historic Landmark status) or from the house itself.  The owners/proprietors were either descendants of the original owners or more likely people who had an interest in the house, the period, or the region.  In all cases, the owners had history to recount or stories to tell; and in some cases there were journals kept by the original owners.  One I remember in particular had accounts kept by a slave owner and recorded precisely what was spent on which slave – food, lodging, clothing, medical care, etc.  This direct history gave some grounding to the studies I was beginning on the economics of slavery.

“The trips were wonderful – meticulously restored antebellum houses set on spacious lawns shaded by live oaks; visits to local and Confederate cemeteries; endless discussion with older residents of towns about what life was like when they were young, what they remembered from their parents and grandparents.  Someone in their 80s now heard stories of Reconstruction and the Civil War from their grandparents born in the 1870s.  One owner in South Carolina showed us bullet holes in the side of his house.  “Sherman’s army did that”, he said, on their march through South Carolina (which was even more vengeful and destructive than that through Georgia). Another in a house in Vicksburg told of the Yankee bombardment of the town from the River, a siege that lasted days, showed us holes in the walls from cannonballs, and told of how his family was saved through connections with Northern officers.

“We went street by street through the small towns, wealthy white areas, poor white, and poor black; and learned which were the black rib places and which were the white. And through these trips began to appreciate the continuing legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.  Unless you visit the Deep South, you will never get a real feel for current de facto segregation in the North today; or the persistent problems of race.
And then there were the museums in each town with remarkable photographs of cotton fields, levees, river trade, rural life.

“I read book after book on the South and continue today with a new history of Lincoln and his evolving positions on slavery.  Eric Foner is an influential author, having written this book on Lincoln and a comprehensive book on Reconstruction.  Another book that greatly influenced my thinking was Time on the Cross, an economic history of slavery.  But I have read journals, personal histories; looked through museum archives, and my interest continues.

“I love eating in family restaurants – steam trays of pulled pork, ribs, collards, and peach cobbler; and made it a point to eat both lunch and dinner at these places.  Some were new to me – often the best place to eat was at the gas station – good food prepared on site, fried chicken and catfish right out of the cooker, biscuits, and tea.
We always travelled in high summer, August and September.  I somehow had to have heat, real heat and humidity to enjoy the South.  I love the rich, heavy air, scented with red dirt, flowers, and the River.

 
“In August and September of last year I spent almost a month in Columbus, MS to attend and participate in the 100th Anniversary celebration of Tennessee Williams birth; and I am preparing to go back for two months to teach a course on the plays of Williams, Shakespeare, and Edward Albee at the Mississippi University for Women.

Staying in one place gives a different dimension to travel, a chance to get a feel for the town, the community, and how it lives and works. I stayed in a renovated 1830s house, in a Victorian bedroom with access to a sunny parlor, front porch with a swing, and a back garden. I had bed tea, read theatre, went to the 'Y' every morning at 5am, walked for miles along the Riverwalk along the Tombigbee River, became a local at the Station 7 bar, and had ribs at Hanks more times than I thought was good for me. I made friends, met theatre people from New York who had come down for the Festival, engaged with scholars who made presentations during the Festival.

I am looking forward to going back to Columbus. It is now my second home and my 'other life' as Paul Theroux called his life of travel and adventure. He always had his wife and family in Massachusetts, his home, friends, and routines in New England, but when he travelled he had a second life, a life only that was defined by his new choices.  He had voluntarily loosed his moorings, cast himself on uncharted seas.

 
It is always hard to leave the familiar, but as I make my bed every morning, make tea, clean and rinse the teapot, settle in to read the newspaper on the couch, make dinner and walk the same route in Georgetown, I know it is time for a change. My travels to Columbus are not like those of Theroux to Africa and to unmapped regions. I did that when I was younger. In fact my life mimicked his - adventure, excitement, romance, reflection, and danger. Now, much older, I have the same desire for travel and adventure, but look for it in different places differently. Just as I have the patience to savor every line in the dense prose of Absalom, Absalom , James Joyce, or the complex histories of Shakespeare, I have the patience to savor little changes, new smells, personal adventures which are more about learning about lives with which I would never have come into contact to in my previous life than great romantic loves in steamy hotel rooms overlooking the Arabian Sea

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So my travels to the Deep South continue. I listen, I watch, and I learn how to navigate the waters of a small Southern town, its politics, its shoals and hidden rocks; to find its sunny, palm-fringed beaches.  I gain perspective.  I move to different rhythms.  I sit on the rocker on the front porch and chat with my neighbor about the town and the South.  I am enrolled in a course at the University on the history of Columbus and hope to learn more about the area, a real history now even more fascinating after reading about the fictional Thomas Sutpen and how he carved his 100 square miles out of scrub and forest to create Sutpen’s One Hundred – the history of black slaves and white settlers, Indian tribes, trading with the French and the Spanish, and forming community.  The course will complement the personal histories of my neighbor and his neighbor whose families have lived in Columbus for 200 years. 

It is my adventure, my exploration, my new and other life.