Colonial Williamsburg
This is an old image (taken in 2007), but I still like looking at it.
okee
From: pat matsueda <pmatsued>
Date: November 12, 2009 1:23:18 PM HST
Subject: Re: okeeMore brilliance; thank you
I’ll have to read the TIME issue my sister brought home; the cover article is titled something like “The State of Hillary.”
On Nov 10, 2009, at 7:14 AM, GARY MAWYER wrote:
I agree with both of you. I have no feelings of outrage per se, but the points are well taken. The patriot act and the Volksamt Sicherheit are not only unconstitutional and somewhat dangerous, but also ridiculous, and also a literally crazy waste of resources and a budget drain that can only be described as jaw-dropping. As for detainees, Ted Rall is absolutely right: anybody can be tried for anything, ergo there is no such animal as a detainee who can’t be tried. The justice dept’s “truth & reconciliation” process about executive law violations went from a feeble start to apparent extinction and never had Obama’s support. Obama was posed as a candidate of great change, and I would still say we have had a great amount of positive change for a mere 12 month period, but as far as being radical, Obama is nowhere near as radical as the 99-year-old Sen. Robert Byrd, who really is a radical populist and constitutionalist. Obama is a centrist moderate and so far he has not used his executive authority to jawbone anyone.
Since the proof is in the pudding it is easy to see what Obama’s real priorities were. Iraq was his first priority. However, he left it to the army to design its own withdrawal at its own speed. This was the safest way and it led to the prompt end of the US combat role with no political splash of any kind.
A health care bill was his largest priority — and he handed the task to Congress, which as I argued months ago doomed the reform to incremental failure, at least in this phase. I think this is a terrible outcome even if it does put principle first, and the exact opposite of what Hillary would have done. (She would have handed congress the bill, assigned them to pass it and shattered anyone who squeaked about it. People would have then quite rightly complained about the Imperial Clinton strong-arming eveybody).
The Afghanistan priority was to sit tight and reckon up the best thing to say. It still is. The US can neither do nothing nor do anything. From today’s Daily Beast, yet another fresh insight into this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-08/mcchrystals-fuzzy-math/
Every point in this link is spot on. The US strategic need in the region is eerily Victorian — Obama has to craft a script, call it a fantasy if you like, to go with the Pakistan war, where US ground forces will not be sent. For Americans the script has to read that the military occupation of parts of the Afghan plateau is a moral obligation that derives from the 2001 punitive raid (or liberation from Taliban tyranny — or Al Qaeda uprooting, or an important part of Afghan Health Care Reform or whatever). But that’s the hand Obama was dealt. It was vital to beat it out of Afghanistan before a Pakistan insurgency broke out, but the Neocons were in charge. Now the whole deployment is about “don’t jiggle anything and for God’s sake don’t strike a match.” A Paki nuclear exchange might easily kill a billion people. Think of the greenhouse gases that would release.
Fixing Patriot Act and security excesses and the DHS has not yet made it onto the agenda. In the face of the Great Depression II, arguably it really isn’t important enough. Two-thirds of New Orleans is still uninhabitable — it’s like the Detroit of the South — the United States is starting to generate ruins. Maybe FDR inherited this much mess — maybe not. It might be unprecedented. And yet I swear to God, I read an article a few days ago complaining that Obama had not come through on some implied gay-marriage promises. As vital matters of national importance go, on a scale of 1 to 10…
But I will join you in a heartfelt Obama complaint. It’s about linkage. Oftentimes, problem A can actually be used as part of the solution to problem B. It’s a good way to proceed. Clinton’s universal coverage plan would have liberated a tremendous amount of money into general circulation and would also have generated literally hundreds of thousands of jobs and an operating profit (as well as merely improving healthcare). It would have had the most immediate impact on the Depression of anything the government could have done. This could even have been “three birds with one stone” if the Volksamt Sicherheit had been dissolved on grounds of cost and mined for job transfers to the health coverage, FTC, FEC, JD and other severely underpowered agencies whose role in economic recovery is actually vital. This would have been a shakeout to remember and it’s an interesting example of how “moderate centrist” leanings aren’t necessarily always more pragmatic than radical ones.Original Message
From: “pat matsueda” <pmatsued>
To: “TalZhan” <talzhan>
Sent: Monday, November 9, 2009 4:07:25 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: okeeWell, I’m afraid I have to agree with Mike, maybe not on every point but on most.
(BTW, Mike, riding side-saddle isn’t only for sissies, my friend. I know what you meant, though.)
The other day, I was going to respond to Gary and say something to the effect that the presidency has its limits, but we were looking for–hungry and desperate for–someone to expand the office’s powers, not stay within those limits. Coincidentally, on the day of or day after we started this discussion, an article on voter dissatisfaction appeared in the STAR-BULLETIN. In this case, the dissatisfied were Republican or Independent Iowans who had voted for O. in the hopes of finally ending business-as-usual politics. The accompanying picture really conveyed their sense of discouragement.
These feelings shouldn’t be dismissed or glossed over or argued away. There is a real moral malaise that is causing people to either compromise or withdraw; neither is good for a democracy. A true one anyway.
On Nov 9, 2009, at 10:49 AM, TalZhan wrote:
Is Obama the “Man of the Hour”, or someone posed to look like the man of the hour? I’m pretty sure it is the latter, meant to mollify the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. Actually, by his inaction in several key areas, Obama is effectively working to further the agenda of the sick far right, just recently retired from the center ring of American Politics. Where did the US Attorneys outrage go? Why is there no effective regulation of the Federal Electoral Commission? Why is there no reasoned repeal of the Patriot Act? Why are we still subject to the most intrusive surveillance, specifically counter to the fundamental Founding Documents? The hope appears to be superficial,and the change cosmetic. At least,this is how it looks to me, domestically. Internationally, it may still be wise to claim Canadian citizenship, but America is apparently regaining her cachet, somewhat…this too, may be appearance more than substance.
All of the above is not meant to be dismissive of BO’s work, just wondering why, when America was poised for BIG CHANGE, BO charges onto the scene, looking bold, and innovative, and commanding. And then, when he’s holding the bridles, he wants to ride side saddle? I don’t get it, and can only conclude that he was meant to be in the White House, wanted there by his masters. But he was not meant to act boldly, and innovatively, but supposed to act as a braking mechanism against the onslaught of radical change demanded by an Earth so far out of balance, it stuns when you finally realize the extent of imbalance.
Patricia T Matsueda wrote:
True. Why did we have to learn it so quickly in his case, though? Couldn’t he have at least waited till after Christmas?This is said tongue-in-cheek, of course. As I recall, Mike raised the red flag within weeks of the inauguration.
Original Message
From: alan <alanm112
Date: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 1:29 am
Subject: Re: okee
To: Patricia T Matsueda <pmatsued, mike reilly <talzhan
> No one ever is. > Original Message
> From: Patricia T Matsueda
> To: mike reilly
> Cc: alan mawyer ; alex mawyer ; gary mawyer ; george
> Sent: Tuesday, November 03, 2009 12:24 AM
> Subject: okee>
> I’m finally ready to concede that President Obama may not be the person I thought we elected.
Birth of a novel
For the last three years, I’ve been trying to help Gary Mawyer get his epic novel Rockfish published. Here is a synopsis of the book, first called Shad River, that we sent a few years ago to a prospective publisher:
Shad River is a multigenerational story exploring the evolution of racial and family identity in the Appalachian South. The intertwined histories of three families, one white, one of Native American descent, and one African-American, are followed episodically from settlement times through November 2001. The best recent work of comparable scope may be Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The setting and action of the middle part of the book would be most easily compared to Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain. We believe that Shad River would complement the books on your list while distinguishing itself by its American perspective on racial issues and civil rights.
Says Canadian writer, critic, and scholar John Moss, who read the book and prepared a reader’s report:
Like all great books, Shad River is both a stunning surprise and inevitable. Once it has been read, one cannot imagine a world in which it did not exist. In a lifetime as a writer, literary critic, editor and academic, I have experienced the thrill of discovering great books many times over, but I have read only a few, and never a manuscript, to match Gary Dale Mawyer’s unpublished chronicle about the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
Here is an unlikely thought: imagine a conspiracy among Faulkner, James Mitchener, Tolstoy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they come together, the living and the dead, joined by Samuel Clemens, Alex Haley and Stephen Crane, maybe Eric Idle and Erich Maria Remarque, and they invent Gary Dale Mawyer. Mawyer in his mature years writes a book of life that is also a book of the dead. He calls his book Shad River and puts it in a drawer. But it won’t stay there. The world is too much invested to let it lie.
Possibly the best descriptions of the Civil War ever written lie in these pages. Conflicts from before the Revolution that force people into the hill country of Virginia and conflicts that draw them out again, generation by generation, are opened to the reader as real people turn to memory and memory turns into myth, all in a context shaped by the intricacies of genealogy along the Shad and by History as it whirls each succeeding layer of consciousness to the surface, from then to now. What has passed is prologue, yes, but is perpetually revised; presence is antecedent to the past. The sweep and scope of Mawyer’s narrative is breathtaking. It thrums with details of authenticity. The sustained brilliance as a narrative of times and a place is comparable only to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Yet this book is as much a history of the western world from a wondrously conceived finite perspective as it is a fiction; it is as much a meditation among quarreling philosophies as it is a novel; as much the dream-vision of an astonishingly wise and irrepressibly witty raconteur as it is a chronicle. It is a confession of remembering blood articulated through infinite research, an exorcism and celebration of racial awareness, a guide among bullets and carnage through local gossip, regional politics and global imperatives. It is a novel about a small place in the world and about the world itself. It is a war novel, a pamimpsest of military memoirs, a documentary of race and religion, and it is American history. It is about living in the twenty-first century, and about the generations of men and women who gave us a place to stand on even as they fade to quirks of custom and genetic lore.
Gary Mawyer in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, at the Mule Shoe—or Bloody Angle, as it was known by the Northern troops—on the Spotsylvania Court House battlefield.
Shad River is not always an easy book to read. The writing is superb; brilliantly articulate and often hauntingly evocative. Exhaustively researched materials of the past are given flesh-and bone-intensity, yet never recede into anecdote or exemplary vignette; more recent recollections, for instance of Washington under siege in the 1970’s, achieve a gut-churning immediacy, tempered with wry cynicism. The characters, from Abraham Marr, a Pennsylvania Quaker whose progeny mix native, white, and black in an infinitely fascinating quilt of cousinage, to Lynn Marr, the divorced Episcopal minister from the west coast, home in the hills for Thanksgiving, 2002, all have brief and glowing narrative lives which, together cast Shad Crossing and the Shad River region into dazzling illumination. The pacing, the narrative tempo, is right on the mark; leisurely at times among the old men around the stove in Marr’s General Store, frenetic in the battle scenes (which are many and varied, as finely detailed as escutcheons on a prize musket, dents on a cop’s billie-club), solemn in the intellectually charged debates on eugenics and Jim Crow, while irreverent, even raucous, in enumerating the strange intricacies of color, race, and genealogy from a layered perspective. The writing is superb. What might have been a sprawling inchoate welter spun around a chronological axis holds together as the whirling visionary gift of a narrative voice that shows absolute confidence in its own judgment to make sense of it all, its own ability to make it all accessible. The reader, however, is not meant to be passive. There are no genealogical charts, no potted historical summaries. These would be a betrayal of its vision. Shad River is implicitly postmodern. It interrogates and subverts and exploits the distinctions among history and fiction, myth and genetics, memory and imagination. It declares, not sole was I born but entire genesis. As with Marquez, it does not give itself as a gift to be consumed but as a parallel world within which to better see our own.
Letter to the editor
The following was sent last night to Frank Bridgewater, editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
Dear Mr. Bridgewater,
Someone has no doubt already proposed this, but I thought I’d write anyway.
The STAR-BULLETIN is now billing itself, as I saw from the newspaper stand this morning, as Hawaii’s first compact newspaper. It seems to me that the worth of this trendy phrase is lost on people who haven’t been following developments in the industry. Perhaps instead of focusing on this conversion, SB could create nodes of interest around which new readers would form.
Could, say, SB select two or three people in the community who would function as editors for a month? For argument’s sake, let’s say that I nominated my boss as an SB editor-for-a-month and he was selected. His site would be www.mystarbulletin.com/stewart. He would select the content that SB (1) gets from news sources and (2) generates itself, and then he would give it his particular slant. For example, his editorial page would consist of opinions he’d selected from those possible—or of opinions he wrote or solicited. His front page would consist of news that was of interest to him and his friends and associates.
His stint as editor would have to be preceded, of course, by some kind of course in SB’s editorial/publishing policy.
I like this idea because it would repackage SB content and resell it based on the strength of the reputation, or cachet let’s say, of the people selected to be editors every month. The banner, look, images, and so forth of SB would be consistent across these editions.
This idea formed as a result of (1) a HUFFINGTON POST article on newspapers that I just read and (2) a casual visit to a store in the heart of Chinatown. My sister, a friend, and I had had lunch at Mei Sum and then, because my friend needed to get a birthday gift for another friend, we went into the store called Into. Into, as you know, is a wonderful interior decorating store that imports stuff from all over the world. The man at the counter, who is one of the owners, told me that his store would be moving to Aina Haina because, as much as he loved the location, Into was losing money. I was very disappointed and said so, and he looked anguished and said he preferred to be in Chinatown and was even the president of the Downtown Merchants’ Association.
If someone such as he were able to create his own edition of SB, I think it would be intriguing, and, I predict, the edition would gain new readers for the paper. This would have to be a money-making proposition, of course. Perhaps SB could charge $10 for a month-long subscription to these special editions or have a special advertising section targeting each month’s set of readers.
In addition to considering individuals as editors, SB could consider groups, e.g., the Iolani (or Punahou) School newspaper staff, the Association of University Women, and so forth.
Thank you for reading this, and best of luck to SB, which I remain loyal to.
Aloha,
Pat
