The Joys of Serendipity - Indiana History; Evaluating Indiana's General Assembly

 The heat dome remains. It is wearing me out, but not quite as bad as yesterday. I came home, turned on the air conditioner and crashed for an hour. This did let me finally remove my seat-soaked shirt.

I have been working on the blog tonight. No calls. One trip to the convenience store.

Now, enough is enough. The front room has been stultifying.

Reading Indianapolis Monthly's The Feed,, I learned some Indiana history.

Garfield Park riot of 1919 (Wikipedia)

Amidst racial tensions during the summer of 1919, a group of white youths in Indianapolis thought that they were being followed by groups of African-Americans. On July 14, 1919, hundreds of white boys 16 to 19 years old converged on Garfield Park. There they used bricks and clubs to beat any black people they came across. When a group of African-Americans took shelter in the house of Nathan Weather, a local black man, the white mob followed them and surrounded the house. Weather fired into the crowd in hopes of dispersing the mob. A seven-year-old onlooker, Charlotte Pieper, received a flesh wound from stray buckshot. Another youth, Paul Karbwitz, 18, was also hit. Police were eventually able to disperse the mob and quell the riot.

That led me to Category:Riots and civil disorder in Indiana (Wikipedia)

When Indiana Banned the German Language in 1919 (The Indiana History Blog). Before Americans feared Spanish, they feared German-speakers. I believe Kurt Vonnegut wrote about this in his Palm Sunday collection of non-fiction. Vonnegut being of German descent.

We never get away from our history; we just ignore it to our detriment.

Issue 15 - The Drift is out.

The time to talk to your Indiana state legislators is now (ACLU of Indiana)

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The Presidency Is America's Constitutional Crisis

 I read a book while in prison criticizing our presidential system as inherently unstable. Therefore, I was prepared for the critique in Alasdair Roberts' The Crisis That Made Trump Possible Didn’t Start with Trump (The Walrus). Trump has only shown us how the United States President is a problem after the fall of Communism. When we had an active external danger (discounting how much the danger of the Soviet Union was a fever dream for political opportunists) facing the country, we could paper over the problems of increasing executive power. No external danger, means we have to face the monster created. The Constitution needs to change. Before that, the American public have to understand the dangers of authoritarianism; that their desire for a strong leader will not actually benefit them.

The article also makes a point on a subject that has been in my mind - our state political organizations:

Mid-century liberals wanted to change party politics as well as government. Political parties, they complained, were flimsy assemblages of state and local organizations. In a world where Washington played the leading role, parties lacked a national outlook and a coherent platform. Reformers argued that parties should be more Washington focused and ideologically disciplined.

Political parties are extra-constitutional entities. Treating American political parties as coalitions orbiting around a hazy ideological center seemed to be our modus operandi. A two-party system that becomes ideological is ripe for civil war; especially when politics fuses with a religious mindset. Instead of sorting out local ideology to reach a national consensus, our parties begin to impose a national ideology on the states. Trump is also the avatar of this movement.

Two solutions come to mind, which I do not see as mutually exclusive.

 First, let the state parties be state parties, not a merely a subset of the national parties. In Indiana, the old division between Democrats and Republicans was unions; an even older division was between nativist Republicans and immigrant Democrats; and before that it was between the centralizing Republicans and the decentralizing Democrats. 

Second, reform our voting practices to allow for representation of minority voices. There are plenty enough of these proposals floating about: proportional representation to weighted voting to open primaries.

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Writers: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

 I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 2)

 [Continued from Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 1). I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/13/2025] 

I notice The Week for September 26, 2014, carries a piece headlined "Marijuana's impact on teens". It notes teenagers smoking pot daily are seven times more likely to commit suicide. I suggest anyone smoking pot daily is like someone drinking daily: they have other problems hidden by their drug use. Bah. Silliness - confounding causation with correlation. Why is it so hard to admit we live in a world brutalizing our minds, that we all need psychiatric help sometime? What makes medical treatment so less palatable than the brutish mechanisms of prisons and punitive measures?

Thursday. Finished my Adult Continuing Education creative writing class. The first time we've met in 3 weeks. The B.O.P. had no one to staff the Educational Building these past few weeks - the person scheduled for Education was put to non-Education tasks. I feel queasy signing the sign-up sheets for the classes that BOP cancelled - it feels a bit of a fraud - but I do. It may show up that I have been programming. This is why the others scribble their names. They can show they have been doing their programming. That nothing was done, nothing learned, matters not in the least.

Kafka ought to have a bust or statue put up by our federal government. Or maybe one for Potemkin. Attorney General Eric Holder stated how prisons should not be warehouse, but that is what we have here at Fort Dix FCI. Maybe that explains why I face a lifetime of a court supervising my life. If I truly pose a threat to the general public, my incarceration may not affect the underlying source of that danger.

I again have death on my mind. Sherry Weesner dying reminds me how little I did with my life, and inadequate was what I did accomplish. I do not see why I could not close the deal with death before I got arrested. Unless the purpose was to teach me just how poorly I lived my life. I imagine now all the sensations I shall miss for being dead: the sun rising, or a crisp, snow-filled morning; blueberry pancakes; the smile of a beautiful woman; laughter in the night; a medium rare rib eye steak; Jerry Lee Lewis singing "Put No Headstone on My Grave"; the smell of trees; a cat chasing a mouse pursued by a young boy and an old man trying to keep the mouse alive; a mourning dove in the morning; The Beatles; a fish at the end of a line; Sophie Marceau and Michelle Pfeiffer; The Westerner; The Clash; the stacks of huge pumpkins at Ashby's Farm; the soft glowing blue of the sky in early September; Laughery Creek at the bottom of Cavehill Road; driving U.S. 52 between Rushville and the faces of what remains of friends and family. I have awakened to what all I let go by.

No work today. Rain would've knocked out landscaping, but there was also a recall. Recall means the compound is shut down. I have a meeting - my monthly one - with psychologist Dr. Gomez. I call it my do-you-still-want-to-kill-yourself monthly check up. I really don't. Although I really do wonder why the government does not gas us. After all, the people through their representatives at Washington, D.C. have made clear their disgust and repugnance. Why not return to the Nineties? That is the Seventeen Nineties. It makes sense to me. It keeps me from procrastinating - I got things to do before "they" come to a mass agreement on getting permanently rid of "us."

I also have been reading my way through A Sense of History (American Heritage 1985). I need to clear this brick out of my locker, but it also gave me a break from fiction. There is good writing here. Good writers are to be found, too: Perry Miller, Bruce Catton, B.H. Liddell Hart, David McCullough, Alfred Kazin, Robert L. Heilbroner, Henry Steele Commager, Louis Auchinloss, Barbara Tuchman, Wallace Stegner, Walter Karp, and William Manchester. It has left me wishing I had read Prescott and Henry Adams and George Bancroft. I should never have gone to law school.

I have not ignored fiction entirely. I read Cesar Aira's "Picasso" in The New Yorker for August 11 & 18, 2014, which showed me the short story as an essay with a punchline, and in interior monologue:

... And how could I leave the Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?

I like the dagger through of wit at its end. 

[Continued in Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 3) sch 6/13/2025.]

The Heat Got To Me

 Home a little after two, ate a little, then got dizzy. I slept the next 7 hours. Nothing accomplished, and I will need to get my Zoloft prescription refilled because I did not make it to CVS today.

It seems there is an Iranian-Israeli ceasefire. Call me surprised. If there is peace, it will be a shock. I suppose Trump will take credit for it all.

It is 12:48. Still nothing written, but email has been dealt with.

Onto other things now.

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Writers: Dorothy Parker

I find that knowing something of the writer's background is helpful for me in understanding their work. I should have been a historian, I tend towards categorizing writers not by personality but historical epoch. One thing wholly lacking in prison is information. The federal Bureau of Prisons is quite terrified of the internet, so no Google. This lack of information aids in infantilizing prisoners. This is part of a series of writers that I did look up when I got internet access. Some will be about the writer, and others may feature the writer. I went to YouTube for my main source, but others will also include some other material relating to the book or author discussed. One thing I did not have when younger was access to information about how writers wrote. I think that kept me from understanding the actual work, which, in turn, led me away from writing.

Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014 - 9/24/2014 (Part 1)

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written. Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 6/13/2025] 

What else am I to do here in this prison? Take classes and rehabilitate myself? There are no such classes, and the federal government cares nothing about rehabilitation. The federal government care about punishment. That punishment consists of warehousing me for so many years I will be incapable of any tender embraces. This leaves me with time for reading, thinking, writing.

Yesterday, I finished a pile of New Yorkers and Harpers. I almost find myself swamped mentally by a certain sort of Eastern sensibility.

The August 11 & 18, 2014 New Yorker has Claudia Roth Pierpont's "A Raised Voice: The many battles of Nina Simone." I feel a bit embarrassed to say how little I have heard of Nina Simone, against her part in civil rights and the place of dark women. Harper's Magazine for June 2014 has "The Civil Rights Act's Unsung Victory: And How It Changed the South" by Randall Kennedy. Back to The New Yorker for Malcolm Gladwell's "The Crooked Ladder: When crimes pay and when it doesn't." Gladwell writes how Italian (and Irish and Jewish) mobsters wanted to move up the economic ladder to respectability. The result? Black criminals given no means of reaching respectability. The Supreme Court further waters down minority, racial minority, participation in their government. But the icing on the cake comes with The New Republic's "The Rich-Get-Richer Dynamic" from Robert M. Solow, which reviews Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (May 12, 2014), which leaves me thinking those without capital - white or black - are headed towards lives very like the working class of a Dickens novel, or the unskilled workers of a William Gibson novel.

The black drug dealers here apparently think their way of life will go on forever. I know of only one drug dealer - a white man about my age who was a grower of marijuana - who even thinks about the effects of legalizing marijuana. He thinks he will get a job in the field. Hated to tell him how the legal marijuana field will probably be like legalized gambling: no felons need apply. I saw a recent Nation at the prison library exposing pain medicine companies backing the anti-legal marijuana groups. These people may be the only recognizing the danger legal marijuana poses to our opioid epidemic, as well as the network of illicit drug sales created by our war on drugs. I see these dealers going back to their neighborhoods, their projects, to find the money has gone out of illegal drugs. What will these people do when they have no means of advancing economically?

Doesn't help that Thomas Frank's "Donkey Business" (Harper's Magazine, vol. 328, no. 1964, pg. 5) paints a picture of the Democrats as feckless. The cover of the May 12, 2014 edition has "The Democrats" above a picture of buffaloes pitching over a cliff.

Reading The Atlantic's "Secrets of the Creative Brain" by Nancy C. Andreasen and Joshua Wolf Shenk's "The Power of Two"  got me thinking of my own creativity. Question: how did T.E. Lawrence appear out of a family of comparative dullards? He was a little crazy, after all. Am I even talented? Or was I talented and have mutilated that talent beyond repair?

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[Continued in Reading & Thinking - 9/23/2014–9/24/2014 (Part 2) sch 6/13/2025.]