Archive for November, 2006

Final endorsements

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 5, 2006
in Politics
. Closed

With the election now just two days away, let me repeat all of my 2006 general election endorsements.  I note that I have switched on one key statewide race.  All endorsements are for Democrats save where noted.

State Offices

Governor: Peter Camejo, Green

Lieutenant Governor: John Garamendi

Treasurer:  Bill Lockyer

Insurance Commissioner: Steve Poizner, Republican

Attorney General: Jerry Brown

Controller: John Chiang

Secretary of State:  Debra Bowen (I have switched on this race, reasons to follow)

US Senate: Dianne Feinstein

29th Congressional District: Bill Paparian, Green

44th Assembly District:  Ricardo Costa, Green

State Propositions:

1A: No
1B,1C, 1D, 1E: Yes
83: No
84: Yes
85: No
86: Yes
87: Yes
88: Yes
89: Yes
90: No

I’m voting for one Republican, the moderate Steve Poizner.  Though I am a registered Democrat, I am not now nor have I ever been a  "straight ticket" voter.  In my heart, largely for environmental and animal rights reasons, I’m a Green.  When the choice is between a moderate Democrat and a Green, I vote Green when I am certain that the Democrat is either certain to win  — or  to lose (as with Angelides.)  When the race is close, I vote Democratic.  Rarely, as with Poizner, the Republican is clearly the best candidate.  With Feinstein, I go back and forth — she’s a moderate Democrat at best, but I’m gaining affection for her in our old age.  She won’t be on the ballot again.

I had planned to vote Bruce McPherson for Secretary of State.  A moderate, pro-choice Republican with a fine record on the environment, I hadn’t realized he has a very welcoming and uncritical approach to electronic voting machines.  His Democratic opponent, Debra Bowen, is far more suspicious of these new devices, and will demand greater accountability.  With reluctance, I am voting against a man I deeply admire.

Time permitting, I will explain my endorsements when asked.  Use the comments section.

Nothing till Monday

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 3, 2006
in Blogging and Chinchillas
. 3 Comments

No posting until Monday, and little time to moderate the comments section.  Folks, make sure that if you are using italics, you really know HOW to use them! 

I’ve got tons of grading to do.  My wife is having wisdom teeth pulled, and I will be caring for her in recovery.  And our sixth and newest chinchilla, Racheli (named for Rachel the Matriarch, on whose death anniversary she was adopted) needs a vet run.  She’s underweight and scruffy — and possibly pregnant — and we need to get her checked out pronto.

UPDATE:  Racheli apparently not pregnant, and is as healthy as can be expected.  We are very relieved.  Wife home resting comfortably.  Hugo swamped with grading. 

Fat Suits at the Saturday Celebration

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 2, 2006
in All Saints Pasadena and Body
. 28 Comments

I ought to have blogged this earlier in the week, but got distracted.

On October 28, I was one of the leaders at the All Saints "Saturday Celebration", which offers a folky, relaxed, distinctly casual alternative to the more formal Sunday liturgies.  It’s the sort of service in which children are invited to run around and shake tambourines; this past Saturday, many of the little ones came in costumes.  We had princesses and witches and football players — and one boy of about eight dressed in the most extraordinary fat suit.

The suit, made of some synthetic material, covered him from throat to wrist to ankle.  It had a little remote control motor; when the boy pressed a button, the motor would cause the suit to inflate, simulating mounds and mounds of fat.  The exterior of the costume was painted to resemble the physique of an obese man, complete with a "butt crack" on the backside.   Of all the costumes worn by the kids, his got the most attention, particularly during that key part of the Anglican Liturgy known as the "parading of the costumes."  (This is, for the record, just after the prayers of the people and before the offertory.)  When it came time to receive the Eucharist, the boy inflated his fat suit to maximum size, and carefully guided by his parents, went up to receive the bread and the wine made holy.  Lots of indulgent smiles and chuckles all around.

I’ll admit it: one of the indulgent chuckles was mine.  I just wasn’t in the mood on Saturday afternoon to pull the parents of the boy aside for a quick chat.  In my head, I had the whole lecture ready: the cruelty of the stereotypes about fat people, the importance of sending a message of tolerance and inclusion rather than one of ridicule.  At All Saints, we preach the radical message that we are all children of God, equally precious, equally deserving of protection from derision.  Would a white child in black face have been okay?  If the little boy had dressed up as, say, a "dyke on a bike", would that have been okay?  I suspect not. But as a morbidly obese person, this rail-thin eight-year old delighted his parents and his peers.  And it made me very uncomfortable.

As the boy paraded around, I noticed one of the younger mothers staring the other way, out the window.  She’s a fairly regular parishioner, and she is very, very heavy.   I think her very little son was dressed as a badger or a wolf — something far less offensive.  I wondered if I ought to try and "check in" with this woman as well, and discover if she had been offended or hurt by the tyke in the fat suit.  But I second-guessed myself, got distracted with supervising the offertory, and before  I knew it, the service was over and the heavy-set mother had taken her son and left.

Bottom line: fat suits aren’t funny.  They aren’t appropriate Halloween costumes.  I may be on the slender side, but I am acutely weight-conscious; perhaps that’s why I found this outfit to be so hurtful and in such poor taste.   Is putting a skinny kid in a fat suit the moral equivalent of putting a white child in blackface?  Perhaps not, but it’s not far off.  And I missed a big opportunity on Saturday, and so I offer a tardy mea culpa this morning

Another note on RMP

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 2, 2006
in Body, Pasadena City College, Ratemyprofessors and Teaching
. 4 Comments

Scott Jaschik, the editor of the splendid Inside Higher Ed, called me up yesterday to chat about the latest Ratemyprofessors wrinkle: photos.  His article appears this morning, and begins:

There’s a new reason to worry about students with cell phones in your classes. RateMyProfessors.com, the Web site whose popularity with students is matched by the grief it gives professors, has launched a new feature, encouraging students to shoot photographs of their faculty members and to post them along with the anonymous ratings of professors.

Think RateMyProfessors is going to ask your permission to post a photograph that you may not even know was taken (camera phones are being recommended to students)? Of course not, although RateMyProfessor asserts that it has other quality control mechanisms in place.

In the 48 hours since RateMyProfessors posted information about this new service on its site, it has received more than 1,200 photographs of professors and it is in the process of reviewing and uploading them.

Well, my students know that using their cell phone in class to take pictures, text-message, or talk to friends will result in their names being stricken from the Lamb’s Book of Life. I have connections, you know!  Still, I am sure someone could snap my pic surreptitiously.  I do note that someone has already uploaded a picture for me on RMP — they simply took the photo from this blog, which I don’t mind.  But some of my pictures need to be seen in a certain context! 

Jaschik kindly quotes me at length:

Hugo Schwyzer might seem like just the kind of professor who would like RateMyProfessors. A historian at Pasadena City College, he’s on the hottest list, has great ratings on RateMyProfessors, and has no hesitation about sharing life details or photographs — along with his philosophy and ruminations — online, at his blog.

Indeed Schwyzer said that he had high hopes for RateMyProfessors and thought it might provide a good source of anonymous feedback for him so he could improve his teaching. But he said that by asking students to send in photographs of professors, without a system to check first on whether the photos were taken with permission, it was clear that “the primary function is to humiliate.”

Schwyzer said he’s seen “the speciousness of the whole system” in recent weeks. He offended some men’s rights activists on his blog, and they responded by posting numerous critical comments on RateMyProfessors to bring down his scores. While some of those comments have been removed, Schwyzer said he witnessed “a remarkably detailed discussion of my appearance.”

To the extent RateMyProfessors could have served a valuable purpose, he said, it would have been about teaching and classroom performance. The non-scientific approach to those subjects and the increasing emphasis on physical appearance take away that potential, he added. By going with the photo feature, Schwyzer said, RateMyProfessors “loses whatever shreds of legitimacy it had.”

Thursday Short Poem: Wieder’s “Mosaic”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 2, 2006
in Poetry
. 3 Comments

It’s the last Thursday Short Poem before next Tuesday’s election — another skirmish in the ongoing culture wars that seem interminable and,ultimately, utterly unimportant.  This Laurence Wieder poem, riffing on Psalm 144 (easily one of my least favorites, of course), is about enemies, guests, us and them. It appeared in First Things many years ago — and First Things is one of the indispensable combatants on the conservative side in the culture war.  With considerable ambivalence, I’ve aligned myself with the forces of the left in that same struggle.  But sometimes, it seems the right has the better writing.  Anyhow, it’s a goodie.

Mosaic (Psalm 144)

My fingers twang the bowstring.
Arrows flying from the tower
Land whole armies at my feet.
What is one human,
That God should know or care about him or his children?
Steam clouds, shadows in the air.
Lightning makes the mountains smoke;
Broken sunlight, rainbows.
Nock your shafts, Lord, fix
Those strangers speaking languages
With no word for truth,
Who hold one hand out fingers crossed behind their back.
Teach me to pluck the heartstring, sing
Like David did before
Those strangers speaking languages
With no word for truth.
Set our sons in glazed
Enamelled tile patterns, inlaid
Daughters, walls and pillars.
Keep our pantries stocked with meat, fruit, grain, and drink.
Let no guest uninvited, come,
Nor welcomed, go.
When miseries shout in the street,
Take them in hand.

Are there any two lines more perfectly, fundamentally antithetical to the Gospel than these?

Let no guest uninvited, come,
Nor welcomed, go.

Makes my hair stand on end with awful recognition.

Chinchilla update

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 1, 2006
in Chinchillas
. 2 Comments

Our five new chins are doing splendidly at home.  It’s a lot of work caring for them, but it is "joy work" indeed.  We may well have still more coming.  We’ve been contacted by a fellow who has a pregnant female he can’t care for, who lives in a house with a cat who apparently stares hungrily at the poor chin all day long.  The chin isn’t given any "out time" for fear of being attacked by the cat. It’s a horrible story, and we don’t know how far along the little mama is in her pregnancy (chins have a 110-day gestation), but we do know we need to rescue her and give her and her future kits a safe place to be for the time being.  We may end up trying to place them as a family eventually, but all of that is up in the air. 

More time, more expense.  But we’ll make the room.  For whatever reason, one of the many things God is calling us to do is to love these little and vulnerable creatures.  We won’t allow service to them to trump service to our fellow humans, but we won’t allow our other commitments to hold us back from caring for these remarkable, loving animals.

Race, class, Halloween, and the old Hyundais on Prospect Avenue

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 1, 2006
in Ethnicity, Feminism, Race and Youth
. 14 Comments

I’m gonna push a button or two with this one:

Tuesday afternoons, I meet with Stephanie,  my Pilates trainer, at 5:30PM.  After she and I finish up, I usually do a short run around the Rose Bowl and through some of the streets that constitute the "rim of the bowl" in the Arroyo Seco.  Last night, of course, was Halloween, and so I found myself running through the streets negotiating my way through hordes of little trick-or-treaters.

The area immediately south and east of the bowl is a wealthy one; some of the most beautiful and historic Craftsman houses lie on Prospect and Grand Avenues.  Normally at 7:45 on a Tuesday night, the streets are quiet.  But last night, there were cars honking and children squealing and flashlights flashing.   Many of the houses on these most expensive of streets were decked out in the most complex and spectacular Halloween finery — ghosts hung from trees, stereos blasted spooky organ music, huge carved pumpkins dotted the manicured lawns and walkways.

The cars gave it all away.  The trick-or-treaters on Prospect Avenue were driven in by their parents.   Though ethnicity was difficult to discern in the dark while doing an up-tempo workout, the predominant voices I heard were all in Spanish. A street normally known for its Benzes and its Land Rovers was now dotted with aging Hyundais and Toyota pickup trucks.  The disparity between the homeowners who were opening their houses to little devils and princesses and the trick-or-treaters themselves was obvious and remarkable.

It’s an oft-discussed phenomenon in Los Angeles, and perhaps elsewhere: poorer folks in "rougher" neighborhoods would rather drive their kids several miles in order to take them trick-or-treating in more affluent, presumably safer residential areas.  Fear of crime is obviously one factor; prosperity another.  Buying loads of candy isn’t cheap; decorating a house really well takes more time, money, and energy than many working-class families may have.  The promise of safer streets and fuller bags stuffed with bite-sized Snickers bars is evidently irresistible. It certainly was last night as I ran along streets where the average recent sales price tops the $2 million mark.

Perhaps some strange, unspoken part of the social contract is at work here.  Pasadena is a race and class-stratified city, with great prosperity and genuine poverty within a stone’s throw of each other.  To put it bluntly, if on any other night huge numbers of people of color descended on the whitest and wealthiest of neighborhoods, banging on doors and making demands, the police department would be out in full riot gear before you could say "boo!" But on October 31, it’s understood that those who have much have a special obligation, an obligation not only to hand out candy but to go to great lengths to create remarkably elaborate spooky spectacles to entice and awe the little ones.  And they have one other obligation: the obligation to feign fear from the little monsters who come knocking, while suspending their very real fear of the dark-skinned, flashlight-toting parents who lurk at the gate.

On this one night, at least, no one asks the hulking teen from West Altadena, clad in his long white t-shirt, tattered blue hoodie, and baggy shorts that hang to the knees, what he’s doing on Prospect Avenue after dark.  It’s obvious what he’s there for: he’s got his little sister (Tinkerbell?) and even littler brother (an enchanting pirate?) by the hand as they toddle down millionaire’s row, each in full expectation of sugary welcome rather than bitter suspicion.

It was a short run last night through streets I know well.  But the memory of what I saw and heard will linger with me.