Random Notes from a Crank

The other day when I was in a grocery store, I sneezed while having a mask on. That was unpleasant. That had never happened to me before. 

The 43rd President of the US, Dubya, actually published a reasonable opinion piece about immigration in the The Washington Post: "How to Restore Confidence in the American Immigration System." 

I'm quoting a ¶ from it that is notable. 

"Increased legal immigration, focused on employment and skills, is also a choice that both parties should be able to get behind. The United States is better off when talented people bring their ideas and aspirations here. We could also improve our temporary entry program, so that seasonal and other short-term job can be more readily filled by guest workers who help our economy, support their families and then return home."

In the ¶ that follows that one, he talks about eventually bringing illegal immigrants into the fold as long as they meet a set of conditions such as "proof of work history," knowledge of US civics, and background checks, which are sensible requirements. However, he does note a need for "English proficiency." I don't know what the heck that means, but I suspect it belies a "English only" mindset that the United States has never followed. 

If Derek Chauvin gets off for the murder of George Floyd, it will be a gross miscarriage of justice. Again. It'll create another situation like we saw when the cops who beat the hell of Rodney King were wrongly acquitted by a jury in Simi Valley.

Random Notes from a Crank

I finally got around to reading David Frum's fine article in The Atlantic. In the magazine, it's title is "How Much Immigration Is Too Much?" On the Interwebs it's titled "If Liberals Won't Enforce Borders, Fascists Will."

To me, Frum is on the mark about the US immigration policy being supported more by nostalgia and not asking hard questions. As he states, "But immigration needs to be thought of as a system, not a symbol [like a stupid wall]. And the system is not working. No intentional policy has led the U.S. to accept more low-wage, low-skill laborers and fewer cancer researchers. Yet that is what the United States is doing." 

And as he gets to the close of the article, he offers this point: "More than any other area of government, U.S. immigration policy is driven by nostalgia--by ancestral memories of a world long gone. Give me your tired, your poor...

This is no way to think about the problems of today. These are new times, calling for new thinking." 

In another article in The Atlantic, this time in the May issue, a Professor of Linguistics describes how the language is changing in a way that is a bit odd. Check out "Why Grown-Ups Keep Talking Like Little Kids." His analysis brought up some syntactical changes people have been making all the time.  

The last three times I've walked the dog the song below has played with my iPod on shuffle. It is one of my favorite Lucero tunes. However, I'm trying to understand what the universe is trying to tell me.




As I watched the White Sox-Cubs game tonight, I thought about the cities that have two baseball teams, and I asked my son which of the sets of teams he'd root for: 

• New York: Yankees or Mets
• Bay Area: As or Giants

My son went with the Yankees and Giants, and I went the Mets and As. 

Random Notes from a Crank

The current issue of Utne has three articles I want to share. 

The first is "Picture Day" written by a Bosnian-Canadian. It puts the refugee crisis into a more personal perspective. As she says, "Today, more than twenty years after my parents and I left Bosnia, there are still refugees in the world--hundreds of thousands of them, in fact. The current refugee crisis, fueled by wars in Syria and across the Middle East, has been immortalized by photos of families just like mine: men, women, and children sitting in bus stations waiting for food, trapped behind border fences, and holing up in dilapidated refugee camps."

Here's a good example of Girl Power: "Women Mayors Lead the Charge on Climate Change." 

A long and interesting interview with ecologist Carl Safina titled "Signs of Intelligent Life"  makes me want to buy his book, Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel. There are many nuggets of fact-based wisdom in the interview, but here is one of my favorites: "I think humans are the animal who embodies the most extremes. We can give ourselves credit for being the most technologically talented, the most compassionate, and the most creative, but we also must own that we're the most destructive, the cruelest, and the most violent." I have similar feelings as he does about religion.

Music Friday: "Migration Blues" and "Prayin' for Shore"

At a time when MoscowDon bombs Syria instead of taking in Syrian women and children as immigrants, Eric Bibb's new album, Migration Blues, is timely. 

First is an interview with Bibb. After that video are a couple of other videos with songs from the new album. 





"Really, we're all in the same boat." 

Music Friday: "Big Rock Candy Mountain"

I featured a Springsteen song in a Music Friday post a while back that my daughter really likes. "American Land" is one of the bonus tracks on the Wrecking Ball album, which I have in my car right now. My daughter wants me to play the song all the time, which is fine because I like the song, and it's a political statement about immigration. 

Two stanzas from the lyrics stand out to me, especially since I recently looked at the idealistic rhetoric happening in state mottoes. Here are the lines I've latched onto:

Over there all the women wear silk and satin to their knees.

And children, dear, the sweets, I head, are growing on the trees. 

Gold comes rushing out the rivers straight into your hands

When you make your home in the American land.

There's diamonds in the sidewalk, the gutters lined in song.

Dear, I hear that beer flows through the faucets all night long. 

There's treasure for the taking, for any hard working man

Who'll make his home in the American land.

It's poetic hyperbole for a purpose, but it strikes me as reminiscent of the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" made popular by the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack. 

See the lyrics of that song below: 

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
By Harry McClintock

One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fires were burning,
Down the track came a hobo hiking,
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning,
I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains.
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There's a land that's fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.
There ain't no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I'm bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains

So what am I getting at here, you might thinkin'. The song by Springsteen presents how the US was and, to a degree, still is presented as a land to opportunity, a place of unbounded wealth, a state of beneficent grace. 

As Springsteen tersely relates in two of the latter stanzas of his song, here's the upshot:

The McNicholas, the Posalskis, the Smiths, Zerillis too
The Blacks, the Irish, Italians, the Germans and the Jews
They come across the water a thousand miles from home
With nothing in their bellies but the fire down below.

They died building the railroads, they worked to bones and skin.
They died in the fields and factories, names scattered in the wind.
They died to get here a hundred years ago, they're still dying now
Their hands that built the country we're always trying to keep out. (italics mine)

Though not about America as a whole, McClintock's song, as far as I can tell, is depicting the  idealization of the West (see California's "Eureka") via a hobo's dream. 

In fact, Wallace Stegner reportedly got the title of his novel from the song. It's the same novel Wendell Berry uses as a launching point to discuss the "Boomer" and "Sticker" mindsets of American culture in one of his fine essays I read years ago, and it's one that has stuck with me. 

Berry also presented these competing mindsets in his Jefferson Lecture, which is one of the nation's highest prizes for "distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities" awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

The essay/lecture is titled "It All Turns on Affection." 

It is recommended reading. 

But getting back to the song for today, a song that hit #1 on the country music charts in 1939, I think it's my favorite on the O Brother soundtrack, and I suspect it was a big if not a singular influence on Springsteen's song even though the Boss wraps his composition in Irish-Gaelic musical stylings. 

As for me, I'm dreaming of lemonade springs, bluebirds singing, lakes full of Maker's Mark, and sleeping all day. 

I want to find that place. 

Oh, and here's the song.

Random Notes from a Crank

At a meeting yesterday, I learned that the profile I had when I entered college -- a first-generation college student and an Undeclared major -- would make the higher ups, the muckity mucks, consider me an "at-risk student." I found being undeclared making one "at-risk" a little odd, but local and national statistics provide evidence that those folks don't stick around for their sophomore years as often as the others. I find that metric kind of sad because the whole point of college, for me at least, was exploring different subjects and trying to figure out what I liked and wanted to do.  Because I was interested in psychology, history, sociology/anthropology, philosophy, English, classics, and education, it would have been silly for me to declare a major. Now that I think about it some more, some people -- like Admissions counselors and high school teachers -- sometimes would act a little funny when I would tell them I was an undecided major. While I understand many people see higher education as an avenue toward a job and, sure, they deserve a return on their investment, it's also important to explore other subjects other than just what's in one's major, especially since people are likely to change jobs more than ever nowadays. Or maybe that's just my liberal arts mindset talking...

As I've probably written before, I love small college towns in the summer. When a substantial portion of the nine-month population heads back to their original territories, the town I live in becomes quiet. Sure, we have summer classes, but the character of the town is different. The weather is helping too. It's been gorgeous here in east central Illinois.

Mrs. Nasty was surprised yesterday when I told I'd watch The Hunger Games movie with her. I haven't read the novel, but she loved it. I'm no avid moviegoer, but it sounds like interesting dystopian fiction, which I don't mind. But as for dystopian reality, I don't like that. Now we just need to figure out a date night and arrange a kid sitter.

Speaking of Mrs. Nasty, she has an idea for our back patio area that once had cheap lattice adorning it. I had to tear it down because of wind damage. Since we took off the old shutters and replaced them with new black ones (see Stay Positive below), she wants to try using the old shutters where the lattice used to be. She's going to paint four of the old shutters, and then she wants to rig them up to hang in that area using a eye and hook system and cabling. I don't know if it will work (I think it will), so we'll see what happens. We already have a bottle tree in the front flower bed that I'm sure some people find weird, so a decorative shutter system will be a nice compliment in the back yard. Because of this nascent project, on Monday I got to do some demolition work on the framing that held up the lattice. Tearing up stuff is fun.

As much as I dislike it when people put down Southern states based on Yankee attitudes, I think the article in Mother Jones -- "'It's Just Not Right': The Failure of Alabama's Self-Deportation Experiment" -- is a case study of, as some Southerners say, "the dog catching the car." Be careful about what laws and policies your legislators pass. Hear that, nitwits in Springfield?

With my dog not freely running around and patrolling the backyard because she's rehabbing from surgery to repair a cranial cruciate ligament, the squirrels and birds are no longer vigilant because she would chase after anything that was in the yard. When she's back on her game, she's going to be beating some squirrel ass back there. Or more likely, the neighbors will return to hearing her bark a lot.

Norwegian Wood

Above is a picture of my grandmother's steamer chest. When she took the ship from Norway to America way back when, this trunk held all of her possessions.

The chest is now my sister's. In the process of dividing our parents' stuff that hasn't gone to where they live now, she got the trunk, and I got an antique kid's rocking chair from my parents, a chair I fondly remember sitting in as I read books and watched TV.

But there's a story behind the chest and my grandmother coming to America when she was very young. She came over when she was somewhere between eight and ten years old if I remember right. When she was sent to America, her parents stayed behind in Norway.

From what my mom has told me, my great-grandparents got a divorce in Norway at that time (sometime in the early 1900s), which had to be a badge of dishonor within a socially conservative Norwegian culture (think about Isben's A Doll House, for example). Apparently, they got a divorce, and my great-grandfather then married a Swedish woman as his second wife. For reasons unknown or possibly out of spite, my great-grandmother sent her daughter to the US at a young age.

From what my mom says, my grandmother landed in New York City like other immigrants, and then she traveled by train to Montana to live with her aunt and uncle, who raised sheep therre. Eventually, her new family, which also included her aunt and uncle's children, moved from Montana to Montevideo, Minnesota.

But what gets me is that my grandmother was put on a steamship not knowing any English at all. All she had was this trunk and a tag around her wrist directing the higher-ups on the ship where she needed to go. What a precarious situation, but maybe it wasn't all that uncommon. I don't know. My mom tells me that my grandma told her that she remembered people talking to her, but she had no idea what they were saying.

As my mom says, her mom wouldn't talk much about the trip or her parents because, as you can imagine, the whole deal had to be traumatic and the cause of much bitterness. Grandma, I'm told, did talk fondly about living in Norway though--the beauty of the towns and surrounding countryside, the fjords, etc.

In contrast the troubling history associated the trunk, I have good memories of this steamer chest made of Norwegian pine.

The first thing I can remember from when I was very young was hiding in this chest when playing hide-n-seek with my nephews who would often visit during the weekends.

This chest is connected to my very first memory, the first thing I remember. I hid in it and thought myself very clever. It was not only a great spot to hide, but the red synthetic fur that lines the inside was fun to feel.

I did get in trouble for hiding in the chest though. I don't remember why exactly, but it probably was because it's an antique. I didn't get put in a time-out back then (did they even have such a thing in the early 70s?), but I remember my mom scolding me.

And in another positive note, Deloras also stored her Xmas ornaments and holiday brick-a-brack in this chest at our house on 1051 Wisconsin Street, the home where they lived since the late 50s. And I associate holidays at my house with Norwegian Christmas cookies--cringla and fudamumbuckles--and gatherings where the whole family opened presents on Christmas Eve.

If you were puzzled why I was playing hide-and-seek with my nephews, that's because I'm the last of my siblings. I was one of those happy accidents, or as Virg told me one time as we drank a few beers in the 19th Hole after playing golf, "The damn rubber broke."

Because of the years separating my three siblings and me, my oldest brother has two sons who are actually older than their uncle (me).

But the strangeness of being the final kid is that I didn't get to know my grandparents just like my mom didn't know hers. Three of my four grandparents were gone before I popped out in 1971. I only met my grandmother, my dad's mom, once, and that meeting was at an old folks home (the old terminology) made of cinder block painted institutional white in rural northeastern Missouri. The only remark I remember her making to me, if I remember right, was "You're Judi's brother, right?" Then my dad shuffled me off to some waiting room-like area where I watched TV and he talked to his mom.

I didn't write the digression about my experience with grandparents (mainly lack thereof) in some attempt to milk sympathy from readers.

Rather, I'm just happy that my kids know their grandparents.

The mementos from the past--the rocking chair, the 4/10 shotgun I have of my grandfather's, etc.--are nice, but they don't beat the lived experience.

Immigration

As the linked article from E Magazine relates, 700K people become US citizens and half a mil get work visas each year.

While the MSM, especially the cantankerous Lou Dobbs, focuses exclusively on illegal immigration, I've tended to think that the US needs to become significantly more stringent on how many legal immigrants are admitted each year. While it's somewhat "taboo" to state this, at least according to the article, I feel there needs to be a strong cap on how many people can be admitted as US citizens each year.

A cap coupled by laws such as Arizona's recent one that is holding business owners responsible for hiring illegal immigrants will make us focus more squarely on the people we have in this country now. My motivation behind this is not out of fear that some folks have that the US is changing into a totally different country than it used to be, one where Euro-Americans dominated the population numbers. That time is gone.

People tend to argue from nostalgia and idealism about immigration--that the US has always be open to everyone and the typical anecdotes of "my grandparents" or "my great grandparents came over from" fill-in-the-blank country "back then," so why would we limit immigration now?

Well, the US is a different country than the late 19th century or the early 20th century. And our immigration policies--both legal and illegal--need to reflect that fact that we need to take care of the citizens we have in this country now. 

I've heard people (liberals and conservatives) say that Canada has a sensible and more stringent immigration policy than ours. Anyone know much about theirs?

Anyway, here's a link to an article in E Magazine that berates environmentalists for ducking the immigration issue, especially since more people living American-style "throw-away" and overly consumptive lifestyles doesn't benefit the environment.

"Destination America" Link