The Election and Me
by Steve, December 21st, 2007
I never quite know what to say when people ask me about the upcoming presidential election. People are generally well-meaning, but if you know me, you know I haven’t been registered Democrat since the 1984 election (I caucused for Alan Cranston who won me over with his support of the nuclear freeze movement).
So when asked about the current election cycle, I have to assume people want to know what I think of the Democrats. The truth is, I tend to see all of the mainstream candidates, Democrat and Republican, bunched up way to the right of my belief system. Oh sure, there’s Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, but who really believes they have a prayer?
Anyway, I found this site today that asks you some overly-simplistic questions and matches you up with a candidate.
The questions cover Iraq, immigration, taxes, stem-cell research, health care, abortion, social security, line-item veto, energy, gay marriage, and the death penalty.
My top dog, not surprisingly, was Kucinich, with Gravel as a close second. What did surprise me was that this quiz scored John Edwards the lowest of all Democratic candidates as a match for me, tied with right-libertarian Ron Paul. Which goes to show you how little you can glean from such a simplistic quiz.
For a better view of where I stand in relation to the candidates, I took the slightly more nuanced test at politicalcompass.org. This test will place you on a grid that has the traditional left-right continuum for economics, coupled with a north-south axis for social values, with the top being “authoritarian” and the bottom being “libertarian.” (This may be confusing to some people. The bottom point should be called “civil-libertarian” to make clear the distinction between this and what is known as libertarianism in the US. Ron Paul’s position on the grid is about where most US Libertarian Party acolytes would fall. That is, they are economic libertarians but hold generally moderate social views.)
They provide some context, including placing the 2008 US candidates on the grid. Here’s where I stand:
So you can see the source of my consternation when people want me to discern between Clinton and Obama. They’re both so far away from me, they appear indistinguishable from one another, and barely distinguishable from the mainstream Republicans.
Politicalcompass.org also publishes this chart for reference, with some more meaningful labels on the endpoints:
I’m glad to share the southwest corner with Gandhi. The food’s better over here, for one thing.
When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it, always. — Mahatma Gandhi
Oregonian: a Day Late and a Dollar Short
by Steve, December 13th, 2007Isn’t it ironic that the Oregonian, whose Web site is the crappiest of all local news outlets, has suddenly discovered (thanks to the folks at Nielsen) that blogging is kind of a big thing in Portland. The front page of today’s living section features a story — yet to be published on the Web, evidently — about how Portland is the #2 bloggingest metro area in the US.
With a cutesy blog style article, complete with comments from Real! Live! Portland Bloggers!, the big O barely scratches the surface. In typical lazy Oregonian style, Steve Woodward did a cursory browse of ORBlogs and didn’t quite mention this blog.
He quotes the blurb on my ORBlogs page (”This may well be he only anti-war hockey blog… in the universe”) without mentioning the title or URL, and lumps me in with sports blogs.
Lordy, I’ve tried to be a sports blogger, but I just don’t have what it takes. All my hockey fan readers have left in droves since I’ve become more about politics than pucks. So it’s obvious that Woodward has no clue that this is one of a small handful of sites where Portland Public Schools policy and politics are discussed with any depth and regularity. The Tribune has pegged me and this blog as “the leading voice for equity issues” at PPS (I don’t think I’m worthy of that, but at least they’ve got the general drift). To the Oregonian I’m a sports blogger.
Most glaringly, there was no mention of Wacky Mommy, the internationally adored blogger I share a bed with.
Naturally, there’s no mention of the Portland Mercury’s very popular, pop culture-saturated Blogtown, or the less popular, more newsy Willamette Week WWire.
The fact that the Oregonian is trying to get current, with their generally irrelevant blogs and Oregon Reddit on oregonlive.com, doesn’t make up for the fact that they have the most outdated, least usable Web site of any local media source. The fact that I can’t even link to the story I’m writing about says it all. Even if it were published on the Web, the link would go dead after a couple weeks, since the O refuses to keep archives online.
Poli Chavez R.I.P.
by Steve, December 7th, 2007
Before I had kids and became obsessive about school politics and hockey, I used to play music. The last group I played with before laying down my saxophone was Poli Chavez y Sus Coronados. The Coronados were an innovator of the “Tex Mex” sound in San Diego, and Poli brought the band’s cumbia, ranchera and conjunto rhythms with him to Portland in 1978.
I met Poli through his son in 1996 or 1997, and played a few Quinceañeras, weddings and anniversary parties with the band. Poli’s book was thick; there were probably a hundred or more well-worn charts in the alto sax book he handed me at my first rehearsal. Most of the songs were standards, but I’d never played any of them. After one rehearsal and one gig basically sight reading, I begged him to let me take the alto book out of his sight and photocopy some of the songs I really needed to practice, like the classic Rico Mambo. He grudgingly let me take it, and I still have my copies.
The Portland version of the Coronados was a family band. I replaced his son on alto sax. Another son played tenor sax, and his son-in-law played trumpet.
Though Poli was something of a legend in the world of Tex Mex music, few in the Portland Anglo community knew about him. Their best chance to have heard him was the annual Cinco de Mayo festival at Waterfront Park, where he was a mainstay. The last time I worked with him was on the main stage there in 1997.
Napoleon “Poli” Chavez passed away in 2003. I missed it at the time, and only found out when searching for some of his recordings online the other day. My sincerest condolences go out to his large extended family, especially the guys I worked with. Poli was a larger-than-life figure, and touched the lives of many people, myself included.
After the break, there’s a photo montage tribute, featuring songs from his 1976 LP “Mi Nueva Ilucion.”
Read the rest of this entry »
A New Platform For Moi
by Steve, November 9th, 2007
Somebody foolishly decided it would be a good idea to give me another platform (besides this, my own sometimes-creaky printing press) to spout my insane communist rhetoric. I just wrote a post about the proposed Homer Williams/Mark Edling land grab involving Lincoln High School over at Metroblogging Portland.
I encourage you all to pop over there and join the conversation.
White Line Fever
by Steve, August 19th, 2007
I grew up road tripping family style. Starting with a coast-to-coast odyssey in a playpen in the back of a VW Microbus, and working my way through car, train, bus, truck and plane trips of all sorts through most of the United States and Mexico and parts of Canada and Europe.
San Rafael Reef, Utah
My traveling days, along with my ability to live out out of a backpack for months at a time, ended when I had two children. Or so it seemed. This summer, with the little ones getting bigger and with the aid of such niceties I never knew — like air conditioning and DVD players — we embarked on our first epic family road trip across the iconic landscapes of the American West. Twenty-six hundred miles of desert, forest, rock, canyon, mountain and gorge.
Shoshone Falls, Idaho
The joy of going overland is that the journey becomes a major part of the trip, rather than an annoyance to put up with on the way somewhere else. I love seeing the landscape change as I go. Read the rest of this entry »
Summer Break (a.k.a. the Off Season)
by Steve, August 12th, 2007You may have noticed I’ve been slacking about this blogging thing. I’ve been distracted by a nice little thing called “summer”, which is the fairest month in Oregon. I also haven’t been skating at all, which has got me a little grumpy.
I’ve taken a little time away from reading and engaging about Portland Public Schools, and despite the fact that the Winter Hawks have a new coach, I haven’t found the time to read, comment or blog about that, either. I should be back in full force with the blogging and skating soon. Until then, enjoy your summer, and I’ll see you at the rink and the school board meetings soon.
TTFN
Portland Through the Eyes of a Tourist
by Steve, July 22nd, 2007I don’t know why, but it’s been a Portland tourist weekend. Today we took the MAX down to PGE Park to catch a Beavers game. In the second inning, here comes a foul ball right toward me. I had just told my kids how funny it is to see grown men fighting over foul balls. Now here comes one right at me. I put my beer down. I stand up. Sweet Jesus, it’s coming right at me. Kinda low. But right at me. The wife, she’s down talking to somebody, which is good, I think, because she’s always concerned about errant pucks and balls at sporting events. So I’m thinking all this and here comes this ball. I should mention that when I’ve played ball, it’s always been infield. I have a real hard time judging fly balls and getting under them. Yeah. So here it comes, kinda low, and whack! Right in the groin, mere millimeters from the family jewels. The crowd goes “Oooh!” I say “I’m all right!” ButI didn’t come up with the ball (a kid in the row ahead of us got it, which is cool).
Then the guy two rows ahead points out that my beer spilled. D’oh! There goes $6.50 worth of cheap American beer spilling down the bleachers. I’d only had a couple sips.
Yesterday. I took the kids on a tour of Portland’s quasi-transportation toys, the Aerial Tram via the Portland Streetcar. The Aerial Tram connects two disparate parts of the Oregon Health & Science University. It’s got a vertical rise of 500 feet and takes about five minutes to ride. It’s kind of a joke, really. It was built with a big chunk of Portland tax money, came in grossly over-budget, and its promises of privacy to neighbors in the Lair Hill Neighborhood were shamelessly broken. The view is best from the top anyway, so save your four bucks and drive to the top and have a look. The streetcar, which operates at an average speed just slower than an 80-year-old granny out for a constitutional, is also a joke. It’s not a transportation system, it’s a tool to spur condo development (like those bastards need any more subsidies from Joe Sixpack). I’ll change my tune it they ever run it to the East side like they keep talking about, but honestly. Not so good. Thanks to Vera Katz and her erstwhile protege and would-be Mayor Sam “the Tram” Adams for all the shiny toys.
But the kids had fun, and that’s all that matters. Isn’t that what it’s all about?
Hockey? Oh Yeah, That!
by Steve, July 11th, 2007
My beer league team skated to a 6-2 defeat in the semi-final round of the playoffs last night, ending our “spring” season. I’m nursing nothing worse than a bruised arm from a nasty cross check in the first period. The season had to be extended by a week, because of some rescheduled games due to unforeseen scheduling conflicts—like Easter and an annual figure skating event.
The league is run by the rink (not my usual rink), and while the facility is real nice, modern and clean, I don’t care for their attitude, not to mention their scheduling ineptitude. I shan’t return.
So my 7-week off season has begun. See you in September, hockey fans!
Election ’08 Round Table Pt. 1
by Steve, July 6th, 2007
I’d like to introduce my good friends Antonio Valle del Rio and Benson Williams, both from the hockey heartland of Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. But they’re not here to talk about hockey. Oh no. Election ’08 is in full swing out on the prairie, and Benson just returned from a trip to Iowa City where he “happened to casually run into a Joe Biden rally in the Ped Mall on the way back from dinner one night, and then caught the Bill and Hillary show down at the river the next day. The campaigns are really gathering steam there.”
So my first question to these two astute political observers (I answered this one in my intro):
What criteria do you have for endorsing/supporting a Democratic candidate?
Williams: That question would seem to require a clarification up front as to what I might mean when I say “endorse/support” a candidate for president in this country. For me - and I would imagine all of those participating in this forum - this is more complex than it sounds. It reminds me of the polls taken in the lead-up to the Iraq war that purported to show an overwhelming percentage of Americans “supporting” the invasion. At the time I thought: these people aren’t processing this issue anywhere close to the extent necessary to “support” it. All they are doing is going along with it, and in so doing excepting themselves from the responsibility that would naturally be entailed by full-blown support.
Having said that, I’ll most likely end up supporting whichever Democrat that wins the nomination by voting for him/her. In the meantime I ask myself: How can my insistence upon rigorous benchmarks for endorsing a presidential candidate actually have an impact in this Miss America contest? With everyone else judging the candidates on their beauty, poise and evening apparel, what does it matter that I demand from them the admission that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting an energy war (Kucinich) or the recognition that the entire global economy is hanging by the thread of the dollar as it gradually loses it’s position as the World Reserve Currency (Biden) or the intention to grant all vets diagnosed with PTSD 100 percent VA disability benefits (Gravel). Unfortunately, these kinds of benchmarks go against the forward social motion required to engender large-scale change, and so I will have to be satisfied with the more abstract: in order to garner my endorsement (for now), a Dem candidate must go beyond the analgesic assuaging of our depression, and affirm for us what we all know on some level of consciousness — that we live in a sick, unbalanced society that is poisoning our country and the whole world, and the only way out is to do the one thing that Americans fear doing most – taking responsibility for it.
Valle del Rio: Can I say the most charismatic liar with the most stuffed war chest?
Himself: Hey, you can say whatever you want…. That’s why I invited you, you old sarcastard.
Okay, next question. The Democratic front-runners can generally be described as centrists. We’ve got this sort of illusory diversity, with Clinton representing women (despite her lack of feminist bona fides), Obama representing black America (though he is neither a product of the civil rights movement nor descended from the African slaves who built this country), and Edwards representing working people (though he made his fortune as a trial lawyer). It’s a picture of Republican-style tokenism.
None of them endorses single-payer health care, and of course none of them advocate a departure from neoliberal economic policy. And they’re all about as anti-Bush, anti-war as your average Republican presidential candidate (John McCain notwithstanding). Is there a role for progressive social democrats in the Democratic party? If so, what is it? If not, where do we go from here?
Stay tuned for part 2, and feel free to join the discussion.
