The first week of this year 2008 I gnashed my teeth at trying to take care of a child with pneumonia at the same time as write no less than 20 college letters of recommendation. What an ugly blur of a week that was! I felt I had to choose between taking care of my sick daughter struggling to breathe clearly and taking care of my students and their college needs (taking care of myself was not on the agenda). It was dark and rainy; I didn’t sleep much; all I felt was pressure and stress. It was much more “crisis control” than considered action.

It seemed dark all the time, and that particular week passed in an anguished blur. The rest of the winter passed much the same.

But spring is upon us and last Sunday we all set our clocks one hour ahead. The bad? Waking up bleary in the dark at 6:00 a.m. and stumbling to the shower? The good? Leaving work, reading the newspaper, and still getting home in time for a bike ride before the sun goes down. I did just that yesterday, and it felt wonderful – as if the claustrophobic, horrible winter is waning with the summer lying carefree and happy in front of me. The sun is shining again and we can exit the “cabin fever” of winter.

We can go outdoors again.

As a teacher I enjoy/suffer the “all or nothing” academic lifestyle where I hardly have one moment to spare for a few months, and then I have the entire summer off. I am overwhelmed and stressed to the point of dysfunction, and then I have nothing to do for longer than I need. This winter was a blur of sickness, stress, and nonstop work. This Farch snapshot captures it succinctly:

Click to enlarge picture

Overwhelmed by work and family obligations, I got on my bike a total of two times in the past three months. I did not take care of my health; in fact, I hardly thought about my health or a healthy lifestyle at all. The results were predictable.

Nevertheless, last Saturday I rode a 50 mile bike race in a tad over three hours – not bad, considering my lack of training and that I still suffered a touch of a sinus infection and blew my nose constantly during the race. I did not feel strong in the least, but I consoled myself with the following: “You have to get back in the saddle, and now is as good a time as any.” Next week and the week after that the bike rides will come easier, as my legs and heart adapt to new demands and I get back in shape. I begin to see the outlines of the upcoming summer.

With my students I refer to the February and March of the academic year as “Farch”: it is the time of the year when everyone is exhausted and tempers grow short. If anything unfortunate were to take place, it will take place in Farch. Year after year I get no better at being less exhausted during Farch, but I know better how to adapt and endure. (Not that it is easy…). But the world looks like a different place the other side of Spring Break, and then the stress does not really build again until October. As I prepare to enjoy my spring and summer and to recover physically and emotionally from twelve hard months.

I even bought a new road bike for my wife, helping her to emerge from intense, almost constant motherhood back into the realm of looking out for one’s own health, as well as that of baby. In a perhaps tiny but important adjustment, we can get a bit of our own lives back. As all the veteran nurses in the delivery room claimed: “Healthy and happy mother equals healthy, happy baby.”

Julia at one year of age

One final note: this Friday marks one year that we have been parents! And in my four long weeks of recent sickness – in rolling in bed with feverish dreams, among other flu and cold symptoms – I came to the conclusion that I need to relax and take it easier as a parent. A person can operate on adrenaline for three months with no problems, but after eight or nine months the body will break down: and such was my case, I am convinced. My conclusion: being a parent of an infant is hard enough, so why add to the hard work by stressing over that which cannot be controlled? Roll with the punches; don’t lean into and fight them. Live in harmony with the rhythm of events, and don’t gnash your teeth and wring your hands. Have faith.

This in no way means I will be less attentive as a parent. The responsibility for a baby is on myself and my wife, and that responsibility does not go away. Nonetheless, I will take it easier from now on and trust in the process – having faith. As a parent, my feet are firmly on the ground now. I move forward confidently, not fretfully. I can exit “crisis mode” and become again the person I have always been. I can “come up for air” and reconnect with friends I have not seen since baby arrived. It is time.

Is this why they so often say “the first child is the hardest”? Is this what it means to be a “veteran parent”? Do I have my “sea legs” underneath me?

I almost think it not hyperbole to say that surviving the pregnancy and “break-in” period as a new parent one of the larger challenges in life. The enormous responsibility, the lack of sleep, the disruption in family life – it has taken, and will continue to take, a good chunk of my life’s energy, and I will never be the same (nor will my wife).

But still parenthood is not the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. That honor belongs to being an inner-city schoolteacher – the most depressing, difficult, and dispiriting thing I have ever done. It is one thing to pour one's soul into a project where success and growth take place. It is another to put your all into something where failure and frustration are the overwhelming result -- where it seems as if you are part of a train wreck in progress, and there is nothing you can do to stop the disaster taking place right in front of you in slow motion.

At any rate, the sun is shining here in California and the good times they lie just ahead. I intend to heal myself physically and emotionally over the next few months.

Let it begin!

Maria and her new road bike.

I read with interest and curiosity this morning that the federal government intends to cut my wife, myself, and daughter a $1,500 check as a means to boost consumer spending, stimulate the economy, and ward off a looming recession. While any unexpected monies are welcome, I think I need the money less than the government.

Maria and I live within our means and don’t live mired in debt; this has been a bedrock principle of our marriage and family, and it results in better sleep at night. We live without the burden of heavy credit card debt weighing us down, as do so many Americans. The federal government, in contrast, is horribly indebted. According to the National Debt Clock, the government owes $9,193,596,347,664.82 as of today. As the estimated population of the United States is 304,169,225, so each citizen's share of this debt is $30,225.27. I would like to put my check towards balancing the government’s books. The government needs it more than my family does.

We all get a bit of cash back from our taxes while the government is a financial basket-case. This seems to me like the very epitome of democratic short-sightedness and collective long-term folly.

Our national debt has continued to increase an average of $1.43 billion per day since September 29, 2006. A huge chunk of this money, to be paid for by our children most likely, has been sunk into the Iraqi desert sands to, at the very best, extremely mixed political outcome.

George W. Bush, thy name is misrule!

Whoever is president next shall have a huge mess to clean up…

RUNNING THE GOVERNMENT, SUPPOSEDLY

President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson

There I was, the living stereotype: the worried parent hovering over his sick child and looking down with concern and fear.

All day long Julia had not been her usual self. Her cheeks were flushed. She did not giggle or play with her parents: she laid there with a blank expression on my face. She had once become so lethargic that she could not sit up, or even hold her head up: she was like a rag doll. For the first time in her life, Julia was really sick. She had bacterial pneumonia.

Julia had particular trouble sleeping New Year's Eve. If she lay on her back (which was her habit) to sleep, the phlegm would send her into fits of coughing. She would fling her shoulders back in an attempt to breathe more freely through the fluid in her lungs and evade the pain in her chest. I held Julia to my chest and urged her to sleep on her stomach, and she would do so for a few minutes before waking up in pain and thrashing around. Julia slept fitfully. Her breathing was shallow and labored; she made a small noise every time she exhaled, as if she were in pain, and her breathing was quicker than usual, as if she were running a race. Julia’s immune system doing what it was supposed to do, as her body was fighting all-out an infection; she woke up constantly, crying bitterly.

I sat there in the dark and worried. I watched my daughter nervously.

When Julia woke up crying I would sit up with her hugged to my chest. This would open up her lungs and allow the phlegm to move out of the nose and throat to give her temporary relief. Then I would caress and kiss Julia back to sleep as I lay back down with her flat on my chest; and this continued late into the night. I would feel her forehead that seemed to be on fire and listen to her labored breathing. Julia's rapid breathing was punctuated by the occasional small moan. She drooled copiously on my shirt.

I worried.

I did not sleep.

I did lay there in the darkness with sick baby in my arms, waxing meditatively about how babies in the past died so often, and about how unthinkable and devastating it would be to have one's infant child fall sick and die. I thought of how the average woman in the 19th century would give birth to five children only three whom survived childhood, and how Benjamin Franklin had suffered the pain of his son "Franky's" early death the rest of his life -- a grim and depressive New Year's Eve it was for me, surrounded by melancholy reflections, lying there in the darkness, comforting feverish baby Julia on my chest. I felt kinship with the untold millions of fathers before me sick with worry over their ill children. How many a father had fret his brow all night just like me? Felt this horrible, dull pain in your heart as you worry?

Would she get better? Or not?

Does Julia feel my heart beat under her ear? Does my love for her help her to fight off infection? Through her delirium does she feel my loving kisses? Do they help? Does she feel the up/down swaying of my chest as I breathe? Does she even know I am here? Might she be reassured?

Is she improving? Getting worse?

We both finally fell into a deep sleep sometime after two in the morning. Julia was exhausted and I was exhausted: a typical symbol for this year. Julia never was an "easy baby."

But there always was tenderness, attention, love, and forward progress -- the next morning, the first day of that next year, Julia’s fever was almost gone.

It was an auspicious start for 2008.

It would take another week, and a strong regimen of Azithromycin, to rid Julia totally of pneumonia. But that night was the turning point.

FLUSHED CHEEKS, AN EXHAUSTED FAMILY

Resting on mommy's chest.

My Internet service provider, Time Warner, has always probably held that I was a strange customer.

When I first called them up to order service, they were incredulous that I wanted only Internet service and no cable access for television. They had all sort of special deals, the customer representative explained to me, to bundle high-speed cable modem access to the Internet with all the cable TV stations. “No,” I was patient but firm. “I just want a contract for Internet access but NO cable TV.” I got what I wanted.

For almost two decades I have turned my back on what has been called “the great unacknowledged educator of our time” – television. In my early twenties I took my TV out to the desert and blew it up with a shotgun blast at short range and have lived without it ever since. At the time TV seemed to me like an insidious plot to make my country stupid, and I would have none of it; the act of destroying my TV was a ritual cleansing of sorts, and I continued sans television until I got married at 36 years of age. After long negotiations, my wife and I agreed to own a TV hooked up to a DVD player but with no cable TV access – I could live with that. For a wedding present my good buddies Jim and Marty bought Maria and I a TV, something that brought them much mirth. “Let’s buy Richard a TV!” they laughed together. These past five or so years we have watched movies on DVD with Jim and Marty’s TV in our living room.

But this holiday season we acquired a new HDTV, and this has changed things. Time Warner regularly sends me “special offers” trying to entice me into buying more of their communications services. “You already have the Internet coming through our pipes into your home,” they say, “so why don’t you simply add on TV and phone services, too. We could hardly make it more easy than this.” To be more specific, their latest offer is cable TV, high-speed Internet access, and digital phone for a hundred bucks per month. Their whole approach is to get customers to have all the services bundled together. The Time Warner logo emphasizes this, and they have special offers to get customers to commit to Time Warner for all their communications services.

If I canceled my analogue phone service with ATT and committed to Time Warner digital phone, I could almost get TV in the bargain for what I pay now. It would essentially be cable TV for free! And now that I have an HDTV, I could have all the new HD cable stations without spending any more money per month. It would take just one phone call.

I am tempted.

It all comes back to the same dilemma as always: time and priorities. That precious spare time, after all one’s obligations to the rest of the world are settled – how does one use it? On my deathbed, will I regret having missed television? Or will I regret not having delved further through the stack of books next to my bed (often wait in vain) that await my limited time and attention? So what if the HD signal is wonderful and rich and vibrant? Is there really much on TV that is worth it? Anything really worth my time will eventually come out on Netflix sooner or later. And my wife is trying to get into painting and a sense of space and quiet – no new electronic distractions – would help.

I tend towards wanting to control the pace of dynamic media entering the household. I tend towards voting “no” on TV in our household. When I watch TV in hotels, it seems like such a circus. It seems they would do anything to keep you from changing the channel and losing advertisers – they are in the “boredom killing business.”

“TELEVISION IS A GODDAMNED AMUSEMENT PARK"
From Network (1976)
(25.7 mb)

There are flying graphics and flashing lights and everyone-is-so-excited – seemingly designed for an audience with the attention span of a gnat. I think I would want more quiet and introspection and less circuses and noise in my life (and the life of my family). I know there is good programming on TV, but if it really is that good I can wait and get it on Netflix. If the movie is any good, I can wait six months. I could care less about sports and sports coverage. I read two newspapers a day and am informed about the world there and on the Internet.

What is left?

On the other hand, there is so much I want to write – so much I want to read. In this sense, I harken back to the days of Lincoln, Jefferson, Bacon, Montaigne, Boethius, and Seneca where distractions were fewer. I don’t see how TV brings me closer to discovering myself – to living as deeply as did people in the past. I see TV as taking me away this. TV seems to me all about entertainment, and I don’t really want “entertainment.” I want something more. In the past people were thrust back more on themselves. It got dark out and you lit a candle and wrote, read, or talked with family or friends. They didn’t use TV as a form of electronic anesthesia.

What can TV offer me? I don’t want sitcoms. I don’t want a laugh track. I don't want celebrity gossip. I don't want "lifestyles of the rich and famous." I don’t want wit and style. I don't want to watch others play sports – I want to play sports myself. I don’t want simulated life – I want real life. I want fulfillment. I want truth.

And I have that pretty good right now without TV.

On this first day of 2008, what is the best use of my precious time? Just because HDTV nowadays has more vibrant color and a wider 16x9 format, is the content of any higher quality than previously? I don’t think its any better than before. So I am inclined to say “no” to Time Warner and their tempting offer.

What do you think? Am I missing something?

I am open at this moment to the opinions of others, especially those different from my own.

TWO THUMBS UP!

Wife on her way to Stage 6 and downloading 1080p DIVX clips to play on new Sony Bravia HDTV via her laptop.

My New Year’s Resolution’s have traditionally seen spectacular successes that made the whole exercise worth it – and a few utter failures which are recidivist in nature.

In focusing on the failure, I wonder at why I just don’t get it done. Much of it, I think, has to do with work. The new semester begins and I am so traumatized in terms of trying to get a handle on my classes that three months pass before I can even contemplate my own life. I am in “survival” mode.

But that does not entirely let me off the hook. For example, I could do something about my lunch situation at work that would not take huge amount of time and effort – and yet I don’t. I could get incorporated into the tennis scene here in Ventura – but I don’t. Why?

Is it the ruts of habit and convention that can run so deep in our lives? Is that the problem? We just continue to do what we have always done? Perhaps. But I also think fear plays a role. "Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most," claimed Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Combine this fear of the new with the ingrained routine of habit and one encounters a difficult obstacle to changing behavior.

At any rate, I have my new list of New Year’s Resolutions for 2008 posted. We shall see how it goes.

Happy New Year everyone!

BLAST FROM THE PAST: 1996 GOALS

"Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

DECEMBER 27, 2007 at 6:47 a.m.

An unquiet mind drove me from my bed this morning.

An acute personal disappointment of the previous day, and then brooding and anger over the War in Iraq and disappointment with George W. Bush and the Republican Party (and the direction of my country in general), turned over and over in my mind in the darkness after I woke up around 4 a.m. For two hours in the pre-dawn darkness I “knitted the old knot of contrariety” and tossed and turned uneasily in bed, unable to fall back asleep.

Finally, I gave up. I got out of bed, put on my clothes, and exited my hotel. It was cold and quiet outside.

If I could not sleep, I might as well get up and read the newspaper and eat a light breakfast, I told myself. Anything was better than this tossing and turning in bed.

So a little after six in the morning I got in my car, turned on the radio, and heard the news of the assassination of opposition politician Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan. Already taut in mood and anxious in spirit, my reaction to the news was immediate. I felt sheer disgust, mixed with weariness and contempt; the former I felt in my heart, the latter in my mind.

Someone shot Bhutto in the neck and chest, initial news reports claimed, and then the assassin blew himself up. The attack sounds like the usual Islamist handiwork, I thought to myself. But knowledgeable commentators explained that, due to the opaque nature of Pakistani politics, we may never know who was responsible for her murder. Pakistani intelligence agencies might have been responsible, I was told. It could be any of a long list of murky villains in that nation. Jesus.

What an incredibly fucked up country in an incredibly fucked up part of the world! I fume.

I sit here watching a flat screen TV at the local McDonald’s with CNN reports of the unraveling crisis in front of me. I observe graphic live video of Pakistani cities erupting in riots. For all the world it seems to me like more senseless violence. To whom are these Pakistanis directing their ire? Does anyone yet know who is to blame? What is the point of this? How does this rioting improve an already horrible situation? My heart sinks; my head recoils.

I am struck by the desire to sit in silence and listen softly to J.S. Bach’s English Suites. In Bach one always finds renewed clarity and self-possession. Quiet and introspection are called for now, not noise and violence.

The world is very far from well.

Oh, we human beings, what scoundrels we are!

By the time I write these lines the sun had come up. I sit here watching Pakistanis set fire to cars in Karachi and rush hither and thither beating their chests and crying in rage and frustration: the fires from this political murder will burn for weeks, if not months and years. Then I look outside and the new day’s light cheers me. There seems hope. With the dawn the insupportable becomes supportable. Hope struggles on, despite the evidence. What else can we do?

We humans, so compromised and so wicked, shall muddle through another day, I say to myself.

I exit the McDonald’s and “must endure the timid sun” as I head back to my hotel and another day.

We do the best we can with what we have.

RAGE AND FRUSTRATION

"The world is very far from well."

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/12/an_uneasy_morning_of_violence.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/12/an_uneasy_morning_of_violence.html Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:07:06 -0800 NEONATAL FACEBOOK PAGE: A FULLY DIGITAL LITTLE GIRL

"Born in March of 2007, my daughter Julia will lead a 21st century life."

CHANGE VS. CONTINUITY: A FATHER AND HIS DAUGHTER

The other day I read yet another cover article about the “threat to privacy” we Americans supposedly suffer. In 2007 we enjoy over a decade of popular use of the Internet access, but it is the proliferation of “social networking” sites such as Myspace and Facebook in recent years that have launched this new alarm, it seems. Perhaps it is only when you cannot swing a cat without hitting someone with a Myspace page that you have “mass use.”

Or perhaps we can take “social networking” seriously when Myspace has a reported market value of 6.5 billion dollars and Facebook’s recent market capitalization was no less than 15 billions dollars. Perhaps stock price is how America values – or doesn’t value – a social phenomenon.

Then there is the cold calculus of numbers: as of September 7, 2007 Myspace currently has 200 million accounts; Facebook reportedly sports an active membership of 54 million. Those sites have more registered accounts than most countries have people in them. The users of these sites tend to be the young and digitally savvy. The rise of social networking has not gone unnoticed, especially by those out to make a buck.

Schools and parents have also taken notice, and alarm and something approaching panic has been the predominant emotions on their part. The teachers in my high school repeatedly warn freshmen about privacy: student emails use aliases instead of real names to the point that often I have no idea who the student is emailing me. Students are warned college recruiters troll social networking sites to see “the other face” of a student. “Take down that alluring picture of yourself in a bikini!” “The law school you apply to might see that spring break picture of you dancing on the table in Fort Lauderdale!”

Most ominously and revealingly, the school has absolutely blocked Internet access to all social networking and personal blog websites. They are verboten. When I try and access a Blogsite a warning that comes up is: “Web Logs/Personal Pages…” Yes, along with communist China, the school district I work for uses web-filtering software that blocks anything off wordpress or blogspot. The reasoning they both use, as far as I can tell, is much the same. (Similarly, my webpage is also blocked by Chinese and school district web filters. Frankly, I am proud of this.)

The schools, as well as entire societies, struggle to adapt to a new technology. The "powers that be" seek to fit old rules onto new technologies, and the fit is imperfect. New rules are arrived at only after painful discussion and much disagreement. This is not a new story.

I‘m not sure what my students think about the school’s efforts to scare them about Internet pedophiles and threats to their privacy. I suspect they see their activities online as not really the school’s business: if anyone should be having this conversation with them, it should be their parents. As there are streets and people in the real world that are dangerous and should be avoided, so are sections of the online world: anyone who has reached the mid-point of adolescence should know as much. But how widespread is this problem in real life? Is there cause for panic?

I suspect the adults who don’t understand the technology are those most alarmed. Or maybe there is just a larger disconnect between generations in terms of social mores and acceptable/normal behavior. For example, I have heard adults decry the fact that a young person would choose to publish their innermost thoughts on the Internet. They read the most candid writing on some kid’s blogsite and are aghast at the lack of discretion. "But anyone can read it! Those are private feelings put inappropriately in a public place!" they object. Most kids, In contrast, just shrug their shoulders in indifference. Another “angsty” livejournal entry in a sea of such Internet posting, they exclaim. “Who cares?”

I take the point of view of the kids, even though I am not a kid. But I have had an Internet presence for over a decade and have thought long and hard about these issues.

And let me put it bluntly: the ability to communicate with anyone and publish my thoughts and ideas over a worldwide computer network is the most astonishing development of my life. The end of the Cold War was big, the rise of China as a world power was important, and the threat to the global environment by pollution is huge – but the introduction of the Internet to mass use in the mid-1990s beats them all, in my opinion. (In many ways it also links all those other developments.)

Since October of 1996 I have hosted my domain, rjgeib.com, and every now and again I encounter someone who looks at me sideways because of it. “Why would anyone spend so much time and effort thus? Why reveal so much private reflection in a public forum?” If such a personal website is not exactly “bad” or “wrong,” it is something very much less than “right” or “good.” As the Internet has become more mainstream and webpages more routine, this feeling has lessened to the point that instead of being problematic, unusual, or queer, my website has become mostly invisible: I next to never talk about it with friends or family. I suspect most of my family think my webpage another slightly odd aspect to this slightly odd relative, Rich Geib – “…and have you seen any good movies lately, Rich?” It is ironic that something so important to me remains so seldom mentioned out loud.

But the reality for me is this: most of what is most important to me as a human being can be found on my personal domain. This is as true in 2007 as it was in 1996. In those rare and precious spare evenings when I can do something solely for myself, I write to add to my personal domain. This is an indulgence, a treat. I am as idealistic today about the possibility of the Internet for sharing and communicating as I was in 1996. Just because most use the Internet for vapid chat or to try and sell something has not dampened my enthusiasm for what it could be used for. My goals and intentions have changed at all. And this will not change for my site, which I will keep up until I die.

But it seems I was an “early adopter,” as the argot puts it, of putting one’s words, photos, and videos online. Early webpages required some “Web 1.0” knowledge of HTML, graphics software, and FTP webserver technology. Now the onslaught of “Web 2.0” technologies has opened the floodgates to true mass participation to online posting. In a few short minutes anyone can have a Myspace page or a blog for free – and increasingly, everyone does. Last month I watched two aging rock and rollers exit their old beater car, walk into a Ralph’s supermarket, recognize an acquaintance, and talk up the latest doings of his band. “We even got a Myspace page!” bragged one of the rock star wannabes. Living most likely more in his bong than in the real world, this aging rocker sported a pot belly, receding hairline, graying ponytail, and he probably had fifty dollars to his name. But he and his band had a Myspace page.

This is an example of a “mass acceptance of a maturing technology,” if ever there was one!

The Internet maturing as a mass technology has raised a host of new concerns: pedophile predators targeting teens and preteens through their online presences, online bullying and the posting of “in appropriate” images and comments that could come back to haunt one later in life, and businesses and government accessing private information. For example, high school students are warned about college application officers scouring social networking sites to see how kids really are among themselves when supposedly no adults are watching, as opposed to the airbrushed version presented on their college applications. “They might see those pictures with a beer in hand – or the alluring photo and ‘come hither’ look in your bedroom!” Exasperated adults warn young people that anyone can read their livejournal entries, and how horrible that would be! I have noticed most young people inclined to post online at hearing this don’t much care: it seems there is a clear generation gap at play. As the September 16, 2007 Parade Magazine article “Is Anything Private Anymore?” put it:

"Privacy may not feel like much of an issue for those in their teens and 20s. They’ve grown up chronicling their lives on popular social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook for easy retrieval by friends and strangers alike. But some young people don’t realize that what was funny to college buddies might not amuse a law-firm recruiter. Employers regularly research job applicants on the Internet. Some colleges are helping students prepare: Duke University hosts seminars on how to clean up a Facebook account. 'You learn why posting pictures of you riding the mechanical bull at Shooters is a bad idea,' says Sarah Ball, a senior whose own page is secure and clean."

What is the result? As a person Ms. Sarah Ball may not be sanitized and boring, but her Facebook page is. All the complexity, ambiguity, and richness of real life are airbrushed out. She might as well just post her resumé instead.

One would think a law-firm would have better things to do than troll through Myspace or Facebook pages. In a job interview I can imagine hearing a recent law school graduate saying this:

"I headed the law review and graduated at the top of my class while volunteering during summers for death penalty review teams, and you are asking me about a picture you found of me on the Internet drinking tequila with my friends in Cancún? Are you kidding…?

"…which is the next law firm I am meeting with!?!"

In the same vein, just yesterday while driving I heard on the radio that increasing numbers of employees were “pounding the bricks online” for new job opportunities online through such sites as monsterboard.com But, the reporter warned, the trend worked both ways: employers were researching possible employees on the Internet, so “make sure your Internet presence as professional as possible.” Is this what we need? Is this an example of prudence? Or an example of cowardice?

This is what I always hoped the World Wide Web would NOT be.

From my very earliest experiences with the Internet, I hoped the World Wide Web would be a place of sharing, creativity, honesty, candor – the beating heart of humanity illuminated onto a new electronic medium accessible to everyone everywhere. As Justin Hall exhorted in Forging Culture, “Don't wait for anyone to recognize your talent - do what you love, and do it online.” He wrote that back in the dawn of the Internet era, in 1995. It has the scent of freshness, of possibility.

But as it matured, the Web seemed to become more a place for commerce, ass-kissing, posturing – the kind of slick hype designed to further one’s career. A young man hosts a domain and posts a webpage to explain his new book or hedge funds or ecommerce, but he doesn’t post his thoughts on loss and pain from his recent divorce, his opinion on the Iraq War, or his reflections on childhood and adolescence. It almost seems, as it matures, that the Internet starts to resemble the two-dimensional, politically-correct world of print. Writers are more concerned with winning arguments and in protecting their ideological flanks than in exploring their own ambiguities and acknowledging self-doubt. It is the conventional and hypocritical. It is so much less self-reflection, so much more self-promotion.

But what about the threat posed by the authorities to intrude into our online through technology? Much has been written about the United States government and the privacy we have from government intrusions in the “War of Terrorism.” While fully in favor of giving government the right to intrude on our privacy with a court order in cases where reasonable cause exists, I am not worried about the clumsy government controlling something so complex and unwieldy as the Internet. When I cannot get a lawyer to uphold my airtight case for free speech as determined by 230 years of Constitutional law, I might be more concerned. I am more worried about the commercial effects of the marketplace and the pressures of political correctness that lead individuals to self-censor and to fail to be honest with themselves and others. I am not so worried about online bullies and cybersnoops. I am worried that the full potential of this dynamic new medium will fail to blossom because of the same concessions to conventionality, public opinion - fear of the opinion others might have of us and a consequent self-silencing. The Internet gives an individual the power to broadcast his or her ideas and art to the entire world for free, and that is an amazing power never before conferred on a person.

But do we use this power well or wisely? Do we share and explore deeply? Or do we "chat" and "browse"? Does the Internet help us to live better and to be happier? Does Myspace enrich our culture?

Confusion and a mass media in flux is the result. Even as Parade Magazine had a cover article on the perils of losing privacy (“Is Anything Private Anymore?”), the weekly magazine took an exact opposite take on technology two months later with its November 18, 2007 headline screaming: “How technology can help you… GET CONNECTED!” Inside there even appeared an article titled “You Have the Power” by Michael Sherer, whose theme was personal empowerment and democracy in politics and culture by use of the Internet which quoted Democratic Party strategist Simon Rosenberg:

"We’re leaving the era of broadcast communication, where basically your job was to be a couch potato. Now you have much more control. You have many more information choices. You can interact when you want to."

Parade Magazine, which on its website boasts a circulation of 32 million and 71 million readers, first tells us the Internet is dangerous and threatens our privacy; then it tells us it is good and empowers us as citizens. Can both be true? Clearly it seems we live in the best of times and the worst of times, as technological change has fostered confusion with old rules needing to be redefined to encompass new realities. The present is cloudy and confused. One strains to separate the wheat from the chaff.

What are the risks? There will be many. But what are the benefits? How beneficial are they? How have things changed? How are they the same?

In politics Right and Left bloggers en masse cheer one another in their echo chambers, as they fulminate against the other side and produce much heat but little light, in my opinion. Is our political life the more healthy because of this? Or is our discourse more polarized? The divisions and passions stoked to new intensity? Both? The only clear result is we live in a different world because of the Internet.

But more, in my opinion, is the same. How would the past have worked with the tools of the present, for example? If St. Augustine had had access to the World Wide Web, for instance, I have no doubt he would have proselytized online and sent word of the miracle of his conversion experience out to the world through his personal blog. He would have been typing at length on his keyboard about how he “wanted chastity, but not yet” before posting it online to be read. If Jean Jacques Rousseau had access to a web log, he would have railed against the artifices of “civilization” and accented the pathos of his own upbringing online. Broke and cantankerous after falling out with yet another powerful sponsor, Rousseau would have been posting through a free blogging service. Augustine and Rousseau very much wanted to be read and would have used the tools available to them towards that end. It is no different today. In my own small way I am doing the same with my website as did Augustine and Rousseau, and greater men and women will come along after me who will do the same. Yet the medium is so new that it still strikes many as strange and unusual.

But even if the medium is still novel for many, its effects on the real world are undeniable. For example, it is increasingly difficult to be anonymous in our shrinking world. Anyone with even a semi-important job has an online “digital presence” through their work site, and if you have made the local newspaper your name appears in their online edition. It is a normal practice nowadays to “Google” a romantic interest before the first date. As mentioned already, employers research prospective employees on the World Wide Web. Short of dropping out of social life and living as a hermit, a good offense is the best defense when it comes to your image online. A person has to define and control their digital presence, lest it be done for them.

A personal example: Once in a job interview I was confronted by a principal with information she found on my personal website, and as a consequence I did not get the job. But I am glad I did not get the job, as the principal of that school and I would not have gotten along; the conflict over my website (my vision of education and myself, really) laid to rest what would have been a bigger fight if I had actually been hired. I did not belong there, and my website made that clear. And in my very next interview I was offered another job across town, and I went on to help found a high school where I did fit in and where I subsequently employed cutting-edge education technologies, won teaching awards, became an adjunct professor, and enjoyed much professional success. I sometimes feel like emailing that principal and thanking her for not hiring me, but she can read about it on the Web. It was her loss. Her district’s high school used to be the highest scoring in Ventura County; now we are. I take a grim satisfaction in that fact, and in my role in it, every time they release annual test scores: success is indeed the best revenge.

Hence, in my experience, the Web is more of an asset and tool than a threat or liability. I use the Web in the way Michel de Montaigne did in his essays where each prose piece was an attempt ("j’essai") to define the person he was becoming. One writes one's thoughts down to try and understand the self – the age-old goal of knowing oneself, living up to the Oracle of Delphi, the living the examined, conscious life – and not the oblivious, unexamined one. For me this is no different in my career or in my personal life. My web presence is all about my role as teacher, husband, citizen, father, son, and friend: I am all of these roles, of course, and my personal website is nothing less than all of me. Montaigne declared himself and the slant of his mind to be the topic of his Essays, and he hoped to show himself “fully naked"; and so I try to do in my website in the age-old tradition of Montaigne, as well as the philosophers of antiquity that he loved so much and quoted on almost every page.

In the Age of the Internet, it is old wine in new bottles.

At heart I see the matter very simply: you continue the ancient art of communication via the written word. No matter if the new digital means of communication are so various and dynamic, it is directed towards an unchanging goal: I do not feel in the least vertiginous. I feel firmly grounded in thousands of years of human history. Nothing I do would be essentially alien or incomprehensible to St. Augustine in his 5th century or Rousseau in the 18th century.

Born in March of 2007, my daughter Julia will lead a 21st century life. She will have known no world without the Internet and these ubiquitous digital technologies. Julia had her first email address one week before her due date, and she had a Facebook page by the end of the second day of her life. Although hidden from the general public, there are already 4.42 gigabytes of data posted to the World Wide Web. The creation of these more than 1,900 files has cost many dozens of hours of intense labor by her father. A friend swore I would be so busy taking care of Baby Julia I couldn’t keep it up, but I have kept it up. In late 2006 I went out to the very bleeding-edge of technological innovation and bought a newfanglin’ Sony HDR-HC3 high-definition video camera to record it all and now we have several precious hours of vivid 1440x1080 HDV. I have full-color high-definition video of little Julia, ten minutes into her life, being weighed and washed in the hospital nursery. This is video beyond valuation! In text I have chronicled closely our family’s experience in childbirth and beyond in dozens of essays and diary entries; I have poured my heart out. There are several hundred digital photos posted. Taken as a whole, it seeks to be as Time Magazine trumpeted itself, “The weight of words, the shock of photos.” The posting of these images and videos to the Web allows distant but doting grandparents to “stay in the loop.” It is a source of much joy for many, myself not the least.

For me this online work has been a way of processing experience and making sense of it, and of showing my love for my daughter. Through text, video, and photos I try as hard as I can to capture the experience of becoming a father for the first time. When Julia learns to navigate a web browser and to read, she will be able read herself just how excited, scared, and exhausted was her father. Julia will know where she comes from, and she will appreciate how special she was that her father took the time and effort to put this all together. I will not have to say this; she will see it. She might have been too young to remember anything about 2007, but she will know in some detail what her parents were thinking and feeling in her earliest days and months of life.

Besides my unconditional love, can I give daughter Julia any greater gift?

And as she matures I will walk my daughter through her “digital growth” in the context of her growth as a human being, like any good father does. I will explain that there are people and places online to avoid as dangerous, just as in the real world. She will grow up using computers on a daily basis, as do her parents; she will always have her own computer. Julia will watch me and learn from what I do; I will teach her whatever she wants to learn. I will supervise her communications with the outside world and grant her more trust as she grows deserving of it. Julia will see the computer as a tool with potential for productive and harmful use. If there will be painful setbacks, there will be forward progress. This progress might be slow at times, but it will be progress. I will be patient but firm. The iron hand will wear a velvet glove.

And one day I will give her full control of her online persona and everything I have collected so far. It will be all hers. Julia will be able to define who she is and how she will present herself to herself and to the rest of the world, online and off. It will be the beginning of maturity. This online definition of self, the trying on of new experience and change, will never end. It is a metaphor for life. It is to live like Socrates in the 21st century. It is to make oneself worthy of happiness, and hopefully, to become happy.

It is a legacy, as well as a benediction, from loving father to precious daughter.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/11/the_best_of_times_the_worst_of.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/11/the_best_of_times_the_worst_of.html Sun, 18 Nov 2007 18:26:34 -0800

Of Bees and Men: A Tragic Collision

OUCH!

If a person bicycles enough, they accumulate stories.

Most of the time I bike through the desert canyons and citrus fields of Ventura County without incident. It is just me and the occasional car passing by on a rural highway. My legs work, my lungs burn, and my heart pumps: I reflect on my life and finish refreshed, most of the time, and that is the point. I enjoy the solitude, and I enjoy an unremarkable trip on the back roads and farmer’s fields of western Ventura County.

But there are exceptions. For example, while biking Southern California streets over the past ten years four or five times cars have driven by and the occupants have thrown objects at me. They almost always miscalculate the lead they need to give in order to hit me and the object – almost always a can of soda – whizzes by in front of my head, missing me by just a bit. As they throw the object at me, they speed away and sometimes look back at me. Almost always I can see it is a young male and his friend, and sometimes I can hear them laugh. Once I was hit flat in the back by a one liter, half-full plastic bottle of Pepsi Cola, and I was so stunned by the impact that it took a few seconds for me to realize what had happened. The most recent time someone threw something at me from their car, they were stopped ahead at a stoplight. As I sprinted to try and catch up with him the driver he pulled a panicky quick right turn at the stoplight and peeled out rather than wait for me to catch up with him. In the passenger seat his girlfriend ducked down either in embarrassment -- or in an effort to evade my seeing her face. Just another random act of aggression on a total stranger!

Sometimes the foibles are more natural, less manmade. For example, once a bumblebee flew right into my mouth. Out of the periphery of my vision I saw the speck flying right into my path and then into my mouth as it and I collided by chance. I immediately spit it out, but not before it stung me on the inside of my lip. My lip grew swollen and I stopped to examine what had happened. “I reckon if a person bikes long enough, things like this happen,” I consoled myself at the time.

This afternoon it happened again. I was speeding along during a beautiful Sunday afternoon and from the left a bee flew into my path and then into my left ear where it buzzed in panic and confusion. I quickly used my finger to scoop it out and continued on my ride, but the increasing pain in my ear informed that indeed I had been stung. Some twenty minutes later I arrived home and my wife could still see the stinger hanging from the inside of my ear; she used tweezers to remove and show it to me.

Ouch!

If a person bikes enough miles, things like this happen…..

The offending stinger, after my wife removed it from my ear with tweezers.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/what_a_pain_in_the_ear.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/what_a_pain_in_the_ear.html Sun, 28 Oct 2007 20:51:56 -0800

Mother with child on vacation in Pacific Grove, California.

"CHILD-CENTERED"?

The social changes stemming from women entering the workforce in large numbers towards the end of the 20th century and the rise in the cost of living find more American families nowadays juggling the world of family and the needs of family. American women, in particular, find themselves struggling to juggle the demands of career and the those of family. Not surprisingly, contemporary couples have fewer children than in the past. Families don't need more kids to help on the farm as in the past, and Americans barely replace themselves -- a bare 2.1 children per couple.

It is in this context that I read the following in the newspaper today:

Children have become investments who need to be read to, Einsteined and schlepped to tuba lessons and Mandarin classes. They need their own rooms, the latest toys and college funds. And it all has to be done while both parents pursue increasingly challenging careers.

"We changed from a child-oriented society to a work-oriented society - people are on call 24 hours a day." Professor Steven Mintz said. "And that changes your attitude towards who you may love and care for, but they can't take up too much of your time because that will conflict with your work obligations."

Is it true we Americans have replaced as the main priority in our lives "children" and "family" with "work" and "career"? Could such a sweeping generalization really hold water? In what ways might it be true? In what ways might it be false?

If so, when did this become true? Did we vote on it? Did it just happen?

Was society really so "child-oriented" in 1907? Is it really all about work in 2007?

To what final effect?

Mother at work with children other than her own.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/from_children_and_family_to_wo.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/from_children_and_family_to_wo.html Sat, 27 Oct 2007 17:42:13 -0800

"It was as if the light falling to earth was put through an orange-colored filter, and the sun was a raging red orb."

AN UNUSUAL SUNDAY AFTERNOON

Upon awakening this morning we felt and heard the vicious winds whipped up against the side of our house, as well as the trees bending and straining against the winds -- news reports clocked the winds at around 50 mph throughout Southern California.

This was of interest to, but we were not alarmed. I went to a restaurant, ate breakfast, read the newspaper, and sat down to write. The usual early Sunday afternoon routine.

By noon there was a very distinct smell of fire in the air. This is not unusual for this type of weather with the Santa Ana winds and hot, dry conditions. There is a fire somewhere. Okay.

By one in the afternoon the sky had turned orange and I had become alarmed. It was as if the light falling to earth was put through an orange-colored filter, and the sun was a raging red orb. This was all a result of fires raging throughout Southern California. There was a major fire threatening Malibu to the south, and fires closer to home: to the east in the wide Castaic/Piru region, and one to the south between Moorpark and Camarillo in the Santa Rosa Valley area. Smoke from those fires grew denser by the hour.

PHOTOS: fire1, fire2, and fire3.

By two in the afternoon the smoke was much thicker still. The smoke had resulted in skies so darkened that everyone had turned their lights on as if it were evening. When walking outside and facing the fierce wind, my eyes stung and watered. I would turn my head away from the wind to protect them from the smoke.

PHOTOS: fire1, fire2, fire3, fire4, fire5, fire6, fire7, fire8, fire9, and fire10.

The forecast was that the wind would not die down for another two days. The winds blew this smoke straight towards us, and this was going to continue for awhile. Did I want my baby daughter breathing this air?

No. I was to be up in the Bay Area Tuesday evening, and I decided to get there a bit earlier than planned. We packed up the car and left.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/post_1.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/post_1.html Sun, 21 Oct 2007 14:05:11 -0800

VLADIMIR PUTIN
"Russia needs a strong state power and must have it. But I am not calling for totalitarianism.”
What exactly is he calling for then?

“A GOVERNMENT OF LAWS, AND NOT OF MEN”

The past few years have seen the rise of a handful of authoritarian leaders around the world who have taken great strides to eliminate any checks to their power inside their nations. They have outlawed alternative political parties and muffled the press towards portraying almost exclusively government-sponsored messages. These leaders have sought to make themselves almost synonymous with governmental power, and they have largely succeeded. There are no significant opposition political parties in Russia or Venezuela. Newspapers and TV networks critical of the government have been banned or brought to heel – no longer is there any independent media to speak of.

Democracy has much suffered in these countries, and perhaps one could sum it up thusly: we have seen a resurgence of demagogues.

Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Putin -- they have this in common: they hate the United States, they whip up their support from the lower ranks and the uneducated, and they speak to the fears and insecurities of their peoples.

They also have this in common: their reigns are almost entirely funded by rising oil prices. They are regimes perilously dependent on oil and unstable oil prices for any prosperity they might experience. And the past few years, which have seen sky-high oil prices, have been very good to them. They have funded their regimes on lavish oil profits, to the tune of billions of dollars.

But nothing lasts forever, and oil prices will come down. What then?

The worst part of corrupting a political culture with the worship of one supreme leader is what to do once he is gone. A temporary illusion of unity brought about by coercive governmental power can weaken institutions and civil society to the point that one suffers the succession crises that plagued the Roman Empire that eventually turned it into a brittle dictatorship – and Rome into a scene of unending civil chaos. When power devolves so heavily onto one person, the institutions that anchor a society in good times and bad diminish. Civil society under authoritarian regimes does not rest on the many pillars of many differing and independent interests – it relies on this one support of the Man in Power and his cohorts, and when this comes to an end – what next? Who says? Is there any way to change the regime of a once powerful strongmen whose star has faded among his people. When the bloom is off the rose -- when it is time to go and to go now -- what then? As Jan Masaryk claimed, "Dictators are rulers who always look good until the last ten minutes." Are there mechanisms for the transfer of power? Or does it come down to violence and who has more power? Does an independent judiciary hold any sway? Does the law mean anything anymore? Or is the law what the Maximum Leader says it is? Is there any real government independent of the Man at the Helm at any one time? Or does that Leader become the government? To whom is the army loyal, for example? The secret police?

It is not necessarily that Putin or Chavez themselves are horrible despots who will fill the jails with dissidents or kill off their adversaries. It is that in enlarging themselves so much they will subvert the democratic process in a way that will take decades to rebuild, in my opinion. Their corruption of the democratic process will be profound and long-lasting. Policemen and soldiers and other civil servants will come to serve more the Man in Power than the institutions they serve. Political loyalty to one Supreme Leader will become more important than doing one’s duty according to how it should be done. The law, and the government, will become whatever the Man in Power says it is.

Mark my words: not next year, nor in five years – but in ten years Venezuela and Russia will reap the rewards in sporting political cultures where one man was able to eliminate meaningful political opposition and destroy pluralism -- the daily practice of a multilateral political culture where power is shared through many fonts. It is a return to histrionic Peronism and caudillos in Latin America, to tight-lipped Czardom and Red Square authoritarianism in Russia.

Rule by commissar didn’t work out well the first time, and I see no reason why it will be any better now. Think of civil unrest and huge street fights between the government and outlawed opposition groups -- ten years from now: mark my words. John Adams hoped to create a stable government under a written constitution in a “government of laws, and not of men.” Putin and Chavez are helping to create nations graven in their image, and the law suffers in their long shadow. Their societies will suffer in the long-term. What about when the first real crisis hits their country? How will disagreements be brokered?

“Big leaders make for a small people.” The Russians and Venezuelans are playing with fire in allowing one person to define their political culture so much.

Ten years: mark my words.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/rise_of_the_demagogues.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/rise_of_the_demagogues.html Sat, 20 Oct 2007 10:21:37 -0800

ARTISTIC MASTERY
"Hewitt is one of these world-class musicians whose live performances of even the most technically difficult music do not contain any mistakes of note, yet still I was a bit dislocated at hearing such a different interpretation of this music."

So I saw Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt at the Orange County Performing Arts Center last night play all 24 of the preludes and fugures from Book I of J.S. Bach’s “Well Tempered Clavier.”

She played them all, one after the other, as in a trance. No sheet music, either. She had them memorized.

I am not kidding.

I was lucky enough to have fourth row seats just behind her, so I could watch perfectly her hands move up and down the keyboard.

She played a little over two hours straight from memory very difficult keyboard music; I was much fatigued by the end at having to concentrate so closely. At times there were four and five “voices” in the contrapuntal music, but Hewitt has only two hands -- and only one brain. For her, it seemed more like an endurance contest. She had three full glasses of water next to her $165, 000 Fazioli piano, and she would pause every twenty five minutes of so and drink one down. And if this were not enough, Hewitt was going to play the Well Tempered Clavier, Book II straight through that next Sunday evening. I am sure she would do that from memory, also.

Knowing I was in the presence of greatness and an artistry of absolutely the highest level, I as much watched Hewitt play as concentrated on the music. It reminded me of once or twice when I have seen master actors playing Shakespeare: the person seems totally “in the zone,” absolutely absorbed. One had the sense that their brains were operating at a level most will never know. A person knew they were in the presence of great art.

Angela Hewitt’s interpretation of Book I I found to be… interesting. There were moments she was clearly in synch with the music, and then there were moments when she slowed waaaaaay down and threw me. She is a very sensual yet exact player, and I am more used to a more muscular (masculine?) way of burning through these preludes and fugues. For nearly twenty years I have András Schiff and Keith Jarrett playing much more according to Wanda Landowska’s famous dictum: "You play Bach your way, and I'll play it Bach's way." I frankly like how Glenn Gould “goes off the reservation” and plays an idiosyncratic Bach that is as singular as its performer. The music almost seems as much Gould as Bach, but I like that. Hewitt, another Canadian, has been compared to Gould. But Hewitt did not capture me like Gould does.

Perhaps it is the fault of the technology – how we listen to music nowadays. Back in Bach’s day, one listened to all music live, with mistakes and a different interpretation each time. I have listened to two or three recorded versions over and over again on CD, and any mistakes or flaws were ironed out in the recording studio in those versions, never to be heard. It is a polished and “finished” version. Consequently, the expectations for a live performance are sky-high. I listened to a brief lecture by a music professor before the main concert, and I instantly heard and cringed at every little mistake he made in playing these fabulously difficult preludes and fugues; I am used to hearing studio recorded versions. I am used to hearing it polished to a high gloss and without obvious flaws. Hewitt is one of these world-class musicians whose live performances of even the most technically difficult music do not contain any mistakes of note, yet still I was a bit dislocated at hearing such a different interpretation of this music.

I am not passing judgment on Hewitt’s artistry. I am nothing but a rank music amateur. I am just trying to process the evening.

I will have to think more on it.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/angela_hewitt_plays_bach.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/10/angela_hewitt_plays_bach.html Sat, 06 Oct 2007 18:13:55 -0800

3:45 IN THE MORNING
"...something tells me I shall miss these late evenings with daughter Julia."

Maybe it was the psychological trauma of baby Julia’s second day in a new day-care center. New faces, new noises, new smells - a new place surrounded by other babies and toddlers -- it was a lot to take in for a baby in a world which already is so large and overwhelming. Maybe after a whole day of this Julia’s brain was overloaded with stimuli. Maybe this resulted in nightmares and uneven, restless sleep.

Or maybe Julia was just teething.

Whatever the reason, Julia woke up around midnight crying. It was not the whiny, soft cry that signals discomfort (“wa--wa--wa”) but the immediate, insistent sort of sharp, loud cry that suggests physical pain (“Ahhhhhh!”). At first cry both parents woke up and rushed to her crib, but no obvious ailment could be found. Julia was changed. She was fed. She was warm.

But she was crying bitterly in her mother’s arms. This was the evening of Friday September 21, 2007.

After this first incident Maria and I stumbled back to the crib two more times -- around midnight, and then again at 1:30 a.m. Maria held and kissed Julia in the darkness of the baby room, only putting her back down in her crib after Julia had fallen asleep in her arms.

Another piercing baby cry woke us up from a dead sleep at 3:30 a.m. Maria was “done,” and she snapped at me that I would take care of this one; she needed to eat something and drink a glass of water. She was nursing and was absolutely exhausted by the earlier crying bouts. Fair enough.

At first I was so tired I actually felt physical pain. But after about fifteen minutes of holding baby Julia, I was fully awake.

I held Julia in the darkness and swayed back and forth, as I always did in such cases. This swaying motion had comforted baby Julia ever since she was a newborn, and it still did. I turned off all the lights except for the nightlight, and then I turned on the video iPod to Bach’s First Cello Suite by Yo Yo Ma. The iPod itself and speakers were located on top of Julia’s armoire, and so while I held her Julia looked almost straight into the video iPod screen from a distance of two to three feet. The strains of the cello played out from the Inspired by Bach video segment “Music Garden,” laden with bird noises and verdant garden imagery. Julia watched the tiny screen intently over my shoulder and soon stopped crying. As I danced slowly back and forth in the darkness, Julia in silence watched Yo Yo Ma on the screen; her eyes did not leave the screen, as her ears absorbed the moaning strains of the cello that filled the dark room. Slowly Julia began to relax and after some fifteen minutes she finally fell back asleep. Her head slumped on my shoulder, her body went completely limp. I continued swaying gently to the music, daughter Julia asleep in my arms.

It was the most beautiful moment in the world.

At an earlier age Julia hardly allowed herself to be held, or she would not even know what was going on around her. When resting on my shoulder Julia sometimes used to turn her head and try to breastfeed from my ear: to a newborn, the whole world is a nipple. By six months, in contrast, Julia had grown to fit almost perfectly on my chest while in my arms; now Julia would grab my shirt and hold on. When she wanted to be picked up, she looked you in the eyes and put her arms out straight. And when she grew sleepy in my arms Julia would turn her cheek, rest it against my chest or shoulder, and then relax and give in to sleep.

How I loved it!

Thus Julia fell asleep on her daddy’s chest on September 21st, 2007, her father rocking her back and forth to Bach’s Cello Suite #1 at 4:30 a.m. in the pre-dawn darkness.

When I finally put Julia down into her crib, she was so deeply asleep that she did not stir. She slept the rest of the night peacefully and without incident.

Yes, parenting an infant is hard work. But something tells me I shall miss these late evenings with daughter Julia.

]]> http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/09/a_night_to_remember_1.html http://www.rjgeib.com/blog/2007/09/a_night_to_remember_1.html Wed, 26 Sep 2007 22:26:34 -0800

GUANTANAMO BAY DETENTION CENTER

Reasonable measure to secure our country? Or overreaction and judicial "black hole"?

ON TERRORISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS:

Today is the sixth anniversary of the terror attacks on September 11th, 2001. It is time to opine on a topic increasingly on my mind these past several months: civil rights in the context of the age of spectacular terrorist attacks.

For several years I have struggled to make up my mind about the detention centers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the US Government has held thousands of suspected terrorists swept off the battlefields of Afghanistan and elsewhere. This has been a keystone policy of President Bush’s “War on Terror,” whereupon America is supposedly a safer and more secure place than it was pre-September 11th, 2001.

In the aftermath of those attacks, President Bush and his lieutenants have vigorously – some say imperiously – moved to attack terrorist targets whenever and wherever they could be found. Bush invaded Afghanistan, and then later Iraq. Bush has had the CIA kidnap terrorist suspects (an “extraordinary rendition”) from Europe and have them taken to secret CIA facilities – and many others corralled into Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and declared “enemy combatants” with little legal recourse. The government under Bush’s stewardship has secretly monitored domestic phone conversations by use of the NSA without court warrant. Congress easily passed various versions of a “Patriot Act” to give government more power to investigate possible terrorism.

Much of this, I have to admit, is appropriate under the circumstances. It is the President’s job as chief executive of the government to ensure that the people are safe from mass attack. That office worker on the northern side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the 95th floor on September 11th, who watched with horror and a jet airliner headed for his window at 500 mph, could rightly blame the President, the FBI, and the CIA for not foiling the al-Qaeda operation that was to take her life, and well as the lives of several thousand others. The President of the United States has truly awesome power at his or her command, and we really want him or her to have those powers. Too little power in government is as bad, in my opinion, as too much power. There are many countries around the world today that suffer from chaos and disorder without any real authority in the country being able to guarantee the safety of its citizens.

There has always been a sliding scale where freedom in the United States is restricted in the name of collective security, and historians have long argued if what the president did in this era or that was “reasonable” and “appropriate,” under the circumstances. Historians seem to conclude that the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s were a clumsy Federalist overreaction to supposed French radicalism that did not significantly improve United States security and damaged a still nascent American democracy. On the other hand, historians have concluded that the massive civil rights clampdowns orchestrated by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War were appropriate in the context of that crisis. Lincoln imprisoned hundreds without trial and ignored Supreme Court decisions ordering him to produce suspects for trial, declaring to critics the following:

Are all the laws but one [the right to habeas corpus] to go unexecuted, and the government itself...go to pieces, lest that one be violated?

The Constitution, and the protections of our civil rights therein, is not inviolate; the rights we enjoy are to be tempered by reasonable needs of the government to protect American citizens. As the legal dictum claims: “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” I sometimes hear civil libertarians warn of “creeping fascism” by the Bush Administration and have to shake my head. In six years since the September 11th attacks, how many American citizens have been arrested without trial? How many of us have endured an FBI interrogation about our links to terrorism? How many of us have been imprisoned for penning an antagonistic letter on President Bush to the local newspaper? Groups like Human Rights Watch make civil rights seem the most important (or almost the only important!) consideration in society. The American Civil Liberties Union and its ilk speak about civil liberties the way fundamentalist Christians talk about virginity: a precious “all or nothing” proposition of enormous value, once desecrated never again pristine.

Laws are to serve society and citizens, and they can change with the needs and times. Most reasonable persons recognize it is the job of the government to keep its citizens safe in their homes and work places, and when the government claims its needs certain abilities to do this I listen to them. “Freedom for the wolves means death for the sheep,” Isaiah Berlin famously asserted. During the six years since the epochal attacks in New York and Washington D.C., there have been no terror attacks in the United States – and it is not for lack of trying by Islamist terrorists. Nobody in America has had to sit in their office again and watch in terror as the appearance of a jetliner (or other instrument of death) outside their window signaled their fiery, impending demise.

But here is the rub: what is reasonable for the government to be able to do in our name, and what is unreasonable and unproductive? What is the result of overreach and heavy-handedness, so common in so clumsy a tool as government? The internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, for example, is almost universally thought of a giant error born out of hysteria which did not help the war effort or make America more secure. If Lincoln suspending habeas corpus seems appropriate in the context of the Civil War, there are many or more examples of inappropriate government action in wartime. Why in the world, for example, did the Nixon Administration need to tap Coretta King’s or John Lennon’s phones and read their mail?

But let’s move to the point: What about George Bush and his “War Against Terror” in the early 21st century?

The more I think about it, the more I conclude that the Guantanamo camps should be closed down. I am unwilling to give to the President the power to hold suspects indefinitely without any kind of legal hearing for detainees. I am also made very nervous by the NSA listening in on domestic phone calls without a court warrant. It seems President Bush, in the crisis of 9/11, has come to the conclusion that there is a permanent state of extreme emergency that demands that we just trust him to make all these decisions without consulting courts or working within a legal framework outside of the Executive Branch.

For example, there already exists a FISA court where the government can get warrants in complete secrecy. Why does the President not operate in the framework of this court? Congress must have oversight powers with the FBI and warrantless searches, and a judge should be involved – or at the very least notified afterwards, if it be an emergency – when the NSA monitors internal communications. And can the President reasonably assume that he can stick terrorist suspects in detention centers indefinitely without any legal redress whatsoever? Do we have to rely completely on the Executive Branch as to whether a suspected terrorist belongs in Guantanamo? Are we to believe that no innocents were scooped up with the guilty and brought to Cuba by mistake? Is there any system that forces the government to explains its case, and gives suspects an opportunity to give their side of the story?

President Bush paints a picture of himself as a forceful and strong leader who does what he has to in the name of keeping America safe. He claims to be untroubled by his many critics. Bush says he is “the decider” and will do whatever he feels he need to, despite Congress or the Supreme Court. And in crisis times the government has always acceded, if temporarily, to the president. But in reality the people of the United States are the “deciders,” and any policy that the President of the United States enacts in the name of the people will undergo a referendum in the next election. As such, President Bush was, in effect, fired in the 2006 mid-term elections. In 2008, even if he could run, Bush would not be elected dogcatcher. The vast majority of the country disapproves of his administration, especially his disastrous War in Iraq. After 2008, federal policy with regards to civil rights will change, no matter what Bush thinks.

But it will most likely not change much, in the context of the post-9/11 world. Many now think George Bush a bull in a china shop who is to reckless in his use of power at home and overseas. Personally, I believe George Bush does more damage than good to American democracy with his policies. On the other hand, President Clinton in the 1990s was clearly too lax in his use of power to combat al Qaeda, and any American politician who lets terrorists coalesce in peace and plan spectacular attacks against the United States will be even more unpopular than President Bush is now. The Scylla of being too soft and the Charbydis of too harsh on terrorism.

Even as a bitter critic of him, I sometimes cringe at the cheap shots many take at George Bush. You think it is easy being President of the United States? But even under so much pressure with problems so big and complex, Bush has shown little of that most precious and important political commodities: wisdom, good judgment, a sense of the bigger picture, the good of the country. In the 2000 election during peace and prosperity I voted for a president who had managed well a major league baseball team and seemed a good lightweight leader to run the ship of state which needed little guiding. But after the crisis of 9/11 I got an obdurate and shortsighted simpleton who was in over his head in trying to navigate the nation through a crisis. The irony!

President Bush lost me with his war in Iraq. And I am increasingly against his civil rights policies with regards to terrorism. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t worry about “Bush police state” we supposedly now live in or make a fetish over the civil rights of terrorists, as do some. If the man has links to al-Qaeda or Islamism, investigate and/or arrest him. Monitor their communications, and bring the full weight of the police or military against terrorist threats. For the terrorist wolf hunting for civilian sheep in America, bring the full weight and hard edge of government power against him. But bring the courts into it, and let Congress know exactly what is happening. Explain your action to the voters. If the laws are too lax with regards to terrorists, change them or politic for their change. The vast majority of Americans will support this. But do it within the American system of checks and balances. George Bush is President, not King.

Again, do not mistake me for one of those weepy-eyed professional civil rights activists. Take someone like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for example, who currently resides at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He is a deadly threat, a religious fanatic, and a man with many political murders to his name. I don’t much care about his “human rights.” Take him outside and put a .45 slug in his brain, for all I care. But that is an extreme example. And this water-boarding, sleep-deprivation, and “stress positioning” is so weasely. Convict him, execute him, but don’t just hold and play and pester with him. For the majority of those held at Guantanamo of less renown than Khalid Sheikh Mohammad the situation is less clear cut. “We think he is guilty as sin but we don’t have any real proof, and so let’s just keep him here where he can do no harm.” Warehousing Islamist terror suspects at Guantanamo indefinitely without charging, trying, or executing them is no long-term solution.

But then there is this example: Taliban veteran Abdullah Mehsud was captured by U.S.-allied Afghan forces in northern Afghanistan in December 2001, but then was released from the Guantanamo detention camps in March 2004. Mehsud immediately returned to fetid Southwest Asia and took up arms again, leading local and foreign Islamist militants in Pakistan's lawless South Wazir region. He killed as many as he could and did as much damage as possible until Pakistani police finally corned him on July 24, 2007 whereupon Mehsud blew himself up with a grenade rather than be apprehended. Good riddance! But did the U.S. Government err in letting him out of Guantanamo in the first place?

The question, as I see it, comes down to this: does a terrorist suspect like Abdullah Mehsud or Sheikh Mohammad deserve a “fair trial.” It is custom in the United States to be considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and that five guilty persons might go free so that one innocent person not be found guilty unjustly. That puts a heavy burden on the state. The question is this: Can America afford to give full legal protections to all terror suspects and let several Abdullah Mehsuds go free after trial in the name of protecting one innocent who is unjustly found guilty? With as deadly and opportunistic an enemy as al Quaeda, do we give its members full Constitutional protections?

I find myself deeply conflicted on that question.

This discussion on civil rights has all too often popularly been a “we need the power to protect American citizens” on the one side, and “we need to protect civil rights” on the other. A better question might be: To what extent can we afford to give Islamist terror suspects their full civil rights while still pursuing an effective anti-terrorist policy. To what extent can we follow legal channels in places like Pakistan or Yemen where there is no law? How much can you fight vicious and implacable fanatics without becoming one yourself? And if you don’t become one yourself, can you expect to win?

There are plenty of examples of overeducated peaceniks who are kidnapped and/or victims of rape, and who fail to overwhelm or escape from their attackers when offered that opportunity because of a lack of that “dog eat dog” sense of survival; after having missed their opportunity, these victims often were killed. "Turn-the-other-cheek pacifism," George Orwell observed in 1941, "only flourishes among the more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. . . . To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it." I would not have us be too “civilized” to survive in a violent, chaotic world. (Leave that danger to the Europeans.)

But where is the line between fighting fire with fire and being strong enough to survive, and descending to a level little different than one’s foes. As Nietzsche claimed, “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.” It was always the danger in the Cold War that in rightfully standing up to Joe Stalin and his successors the United States might become little different than an authoritarian regime. But you don’t get down in the mud to fight with a rabid dog who likes it down there without getting muddy yourself. Neither can you afford to ignore the dangerous dog. What to do?

Why is it that so often the difficult questions are those nobody wants to ask? Or answer? I never hear ACLU lawyers wanting to talk about the powers the government should have to keep its citizens safe – the powers we all want the government to have. And we rarely hear law enforcement officials talking about the civil rights the law demands they respect. Fair enough – the system makes these two interest enemies.

But why do so few thoughtful commentators lock in on that immensely complicated gray area of exactly what powers should the NSA, FBI, CIA, and US military have in fighting Islamist terror worldwide, and how much oversight should courts and Congress have in those efforts? How much, really, does the government need? Why? Where? How much is a clumsy overreaction and abuse of power and civil rights?

On these questions I would be most attentive to a complex, candid discussion. I am just an average citizen and possess no special expertise in legal or terrorist affairs; I would welcome expert testimony. So far there is much posturing and speechifying to defend entrenched positions on terrorism and civil rights, it seems to me, and too little honest discussion on a vitally important subject.

Too little of that most rare and blessed virtue, wisdom.

TO READ OR NOT TO READ?

I read two newspapers everyday.

It is the one ritual I promised to keep after the upheaval of becoming a father, the daily activity I would keep to bridge the gap the life between the “before” and “after” metamorphosis of becoming responsible for a baby. “I am the same person as before; I am still me,” I tell myself, as my day retains a semblance of its earlier pattern. The ritual anchors my life in the vertiginous upheaval which is new parenthood. Some people stop at Starbuck’s on the way to work or do a crossword puzzle over breakfast. I read the newspaper. So much else has changed in my life but this hasn’t.

Years ago in training to become a gang/grief/addiction facilitator at a former school, I was urged to give up something important in my life for a week to gain empathy for what an addict felt in being deprived of their drug of choice. Supposedly we would see what it felt life to go “cold turkey.” I chose to give up the daily newspaper, and I felt unpleasantly and nervously isolated from the wider world. (A gay man in my training cohort swore off sex with men.) I missed my newspaper badly. The world seemed out of balance. Perhaps I missed the daily ritual as much as the actual newspaper.

Nowadays my ritual is to leave work in the early evening and to stop somewhere on the way home and read my newspapers. This is how I decompress from my work day and do something purely for myself. It is an indulgence, and I can hear finally myself think. My wife is home waiting for me and I know she is watching the clock. She wants me home; there is much to do there; and so I read quickly. Only on the rare occasion that a newspaper article is of the highest quality and worthy of it do I read slowly, carefully, and with my full attention. That is relatively rare.

I also subscribe, in the order of my interest, to the following publications: The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Montlhy, The New Yorker, and The Week. Sadly, I only manage to read some of "New York Review of Books" and totally ignore the others when they arrive in the mail. Yet I cannot bring myself to cancel my subscriptions. Perhaps it is an homage to an earlier time when Richard Geib did indeed read all those publications cover to cover almost all the time.

Yet increasingly over the past five years or so I have called into question the wisdom of devoting so much time to reading the newspaper. Rather more often than not, I look up after forty minutes of reading the newspaper and ask myself if I learned anything of real value. Was I not again just skimming the frothy surface of mankind? Wasting my precious leisure time and attention? Would I be much better off instead read the Bible – or the poetry of Milton, the rants of Thoreau, or the insights of Montaigne? As William Penn advised,

"Have but few Books, but let them be well chosen and well read, whether of Religious or Civil Subjects... reading many Books is but a taking off the Mind too much from Meditation. Reading your selves and Nature, in the Dealings and Conduct of Men, is the truest human wisdom. The Spirit of a Man knows the Things of Man, and more true Knowledge comes by Meditation and just Reflection than by Reading; for much Reading is an Oppression of the Mind, and extinguishes the natural Candle; which is the Reason of so many senseless Scholars in the World."

That seems to me a sage judgment. Do I waste my time on newspapers? Should I instead pick up and read the Autobiography of Benuvenuto Cellini that has sat next to my bed for three months? There are so many books I want to read but for which I lack the time.

But do I really lack the time? I could make time… but instead I have read the newspaper!

As Henry David Thoreau claimed:

"If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. Yet not a few are greedy after this gossip."

Is not dwelling on "the latest news" not a form of seeking for excitement and meaning in the external world where it could be more properly found in one's internal emotional life in relation to it? It is, of course, much easier just to read a newspaper and see what is "new." It is much harder, in contrast, to seek renewal and meaning in oneself. Clearly, it is easier to read a newspaper than to write your own book -- it is the "path more taken."

In settling for the newspaper, am I settling for mediocrity? Is this not mundanity? To read thousands of words daily in the newspaper without anything sparking one’s interest? Conventional. Boring. Mediocre. The articles in the newspaper become aged and of zero value even before the paper it was printed on turns yellow. Poet Ben Johnson warned, "What a deale of cold busines doth a man mis-spend the better part of life in! In scattering compliments, tendring visits, gathering and venting newes, following Feastes and Playes, making a little winter-love in a darke corner.” The newspaper seems to be part of the ordinariness of life, and perhaps I should reach for the extraordinary.

In my fifteenth year of teaching, it is this boring conventionality that increasingly irks me about schools and the education system. (I have noticed it irks students far more than teachers!) The system wants everyone to become proficient in certain skills and to conform to certain rules. And certainly for those are far from proficient in reading and writing understanding the rules, the system can serve to knock some sort of that into student’s think skulls. But for students who can read and write understand the reasoning behind the rule, the cookie cutter approach does not serve: it results in sheer mediocrity - that cursed, yellow-bellied mediocrity so often arrived at by strong students in their schoolwork without breaking a sweat. “Teacher! Tell me what you want -- what is on the rubric and on the test, and then I will learn it! But don’t ask me really to think or to invest myself in my work. Tell me what you want so I can do it quickly and painlessly -- and so I can get back to my video gaming! To do what I really want to do, and that ain't homework!!”

Oh, how I hate this sentiment! This is how young people gradually conclude that school is NOT a place where one comes to learn. Rather, it is a place where one learns to OBEY.There is more truth in the below cartoon about the role of the school in American society than I would like to admit:

Just be quiet and listen to those who know more than you do! Sit down. Be quiet. Obey. Conform.

I tell my students, “Shock me! Surprise me! Make me angry! Be sarcastic, witty, elegant, profound! Take risks! Do anything but turn in that musty cheese you think I want – that perfectly mediocre piece of writing done for the grade! Write more for yourself than for your teacher. And by all means do not bore me! I much prefer failed brilliance to perfect mediocrity.” A colleague once decried students breaking the academic rules thusly: “Who do they think they are? F. Scott Fitzgerald?” I thought to myself, With that attitude your student never will have a chance at becoming the next F. Scott Fitzgerald! It is not unconventionality but apathy that is the main enemy of learning – rank apathy. Apathy and boredom.

*sigh*

So it goes in school, so it goes in the “real world.” Look at all the academic essays that nobody will ever read with pleasure – those you have to pay people to read (ie. pay an instructor). Think of all the trees cut down to print out highly specialized PhD dissertations that are boring as warm spit. The “peer-reviewed scholarship” that are read never for pleasure but as a professional duty – and read by about four persons total. All the think tank publications that are predictable, conventional, and perfectly mediocre: I see the writer of an article is associated with The Carnegie Endowment for Peace, and I already know what he or she is going to say from the political Left – the Hoover Institution hack will similarly spout the standard party line of the orthodox Right.

zzzzzzzzz.

But….but…. once a blue moon I read something in the newspaper that almost makes it all worth it. Something fresh! Something unexpected! Something outside of those well-worn ruts so much of the world drowsily slumbers in. You read it and have to marvel at the writer’s insights – the putting into plain, clear prose the thoughts that have been in our heads but have not been able to be put into clear form – and then someone else does it for you! Oh, mirabile dictum!

This morning I read the following essay by Andrew Klavan about self-righteousness in the wake of Republican Idaho Senator Larry Craig’s arrest for allegedly making a sexual pass in a Minnesota men’s bathroom:

How rare that article! How special! For me like water in the desert to a man dying of thirst!

Congratuatiuons, Mr. Klavan!

"Believe me, if I could be hanged for my dreams, I'd be a dead man."