So I went to Socal’s tonight.

I did not do my twenties drinking in this town.  Thus, most of our local nightspots are basically terra incognita as far as I am concerned.

I do not think that if I had done my twenties drinking in this town, I would have done it at Socal’s.  There were a lot of wedding rings at this joint.  And a lot of flannel on the gents and skinny jeans on the ladies — which is pretty much par for the course in that particular neighborhood, it is true. 

It’s a good bar.  Relatively cheap beer, shuffleboard, $0.75 pool tables.   Dark paneling.  Really, what more could one want?

That said, I was moved to make two observations after tonight’s visit.  One, that the group I was with provided every single last drop of ethnic heterogeneity in the place.  Which is not really a criticism so much as it is an observation.  The bar _is_, after all, deep in East Sac. 

That said, I am still not at a point where I am not totally creeped out by a roomful of white people.  I hope I never lose that instinct, quite honestly. 

In any event, the second thing is this: the ethnic heterogeneity provided by the group I happened to be with lacked one of the four major food groups.  Which prodded me to realize further that the same could be said of (a) my immediate colleagues at work, (b) my closest friends from graduate school, and (c) the friends from high school with whom I remain in touch.  Da Partner, it should be said, noted as well that the situation at his work is similar.

Is this simply random chance?  Does it not seem a little odd that in California, in this day and age, one could go to a bar and not have at least one Hispanic person?

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How on earth did this happen?

I turned in what is/was to be my second dissertation — because as Weber pointed out, becoming an established member of the intellectual aristocracy requires the publication of not one book but two — only to find that I had mis-specified an equation.  And so my boss/advisor, wiser in these ways than I, asked me to revisit the numbers.

He was, of course, right.

This required that I learn a new statistical technique, in a programming language with which I am at best only hesitatingly fluent, and in regards to which I could receive absolutely no help from either my current or my former colleagues.

Dude, I called a woman whose paycheck comes alternately from the US Goverment and the Emir of Qatar, and I still had to figure this sh*t out basically on my own.

So, the end result?  I taught myself how to do what is definitely one of the more conceptually obtuse statistical techniques, using a programming language not precisely designed for said technique.   Because arbeiten fur den Mann does not guarantee that you will be provided with the best tools for the job.

All so that I could say, without absolute confidence, something that we already knew: namely that the outcome of a test is as much a product of who does the grading as it is a product of who is being graded, and that the grade depends almost not at all upon the circumstances under which the test is administered.

Or, in simpler language: you take a test, and sometimes the prof is an mean motherf*cker, and sometimes you’re just not up to it.  But either way it doesn’t really matter whether you take the exam in the classroom, in the hallway, in the Commons, or under the watchful eye of the principal. 

With absolute statistical precision, down to the 4th significant digit, I can say these things.

I do not understand — no, really, I don’t — how I became this person. 

Let me tell you a story.  My senior year of college, I took a statistics course.  From the worst professor ever to grace the cool sandstone cloisters of my alma mater, a man so astonishingly poor in his teaching skill that I was moved to write a letter of complaint to the ombudsman.

For which I received a pro-forma letter telling me to suck up my grade and stop complaining.

For the record, I got an A-.  I was most certainly not complaining about the grade.

No.  I was complaining about the unremitting hostility this professor had inculcated in me for a subject, the practice of which now ironically pays for my bread and butter.

I was so bilious after my final exam for that course that I took my calculator out into the Quad and smashed it.  With a ball-peen hammer which I had secreted into my backpack especially for such purpose.

I have rarely tasted such delicious joy as the day on which I sat smashing that calculator, over and over like some demented child in a D.H. Lawrence short story.

This joy, needless to say, turned to dust and ashes in my mouth when I showed up for graduate school and enrolled in yet another statistics course.  Thankfully that course was not taught by a complete jackass.  Thought it was taught in a room with a high-pitched whine from the AV that required the application of two tylenol, a 20-ouncer of diet coke, and a large chocolate-chip cookie to silence.

Someday, somehow, I will learn to appreciate this lesson.  But not today, nohow.  I can still too easily taste the sour joy that comes with watching silicone solar cells shatter against sandstone bricks on a hot June day.

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Twice.

Because even though I’m not a professor, I can still pull the absent-minded professor trick.

Yes, that’s right.  I mis-read the program for a conference and made my ticket for the wrong weekend.  And since making a new ticket was only an at-this-point trifling amount different from changing the original ticket, I will now the have the pleasure of seeing my old haunts two weekends in a row.

The arms of my father’s house are open Hilton-wide, etc.

Though as to that, I think I’ll be staying at a Kimpton.  I hear they have a fierce happy hour.  At which I will only indulge in white wine and/or tequila.

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I’m a weight loss regimen at the moment.  So far I’ve managed to get rid of the Texas 15 simply by becoming a semi-vegetarian.  The next goal is to get rid of the dissertation 15.

As it happens, the primary method by which I can cut down my caloric intake is to reduce the booze.

Who would’ve guessed that wine was fattening?

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Part of the fraughtness of this instinct for activism is the obvious flaws in the models with which I’ve been provided over the years. From that passing parade of boarders, friends, cousins, colleagues and homeless people I learned a few simple lessons of what it means to take up a political life.

Lesson #1: Accomplishing great things for others comes with a toll to oneself.

About ten years ago now – wow, can it really have been so long? – my parents and I took a trip to Cambodia. We were there to see the sights, of course, but also to visit with a longtime friend of my mother’s, someone she knew from her women’s group. The trip was fun and interesting for many reasons, not the least of which was seeing Angkor Wat.

Which is, for the record, really quite as amazing as it looks in the pages of National Geographic.

However, the sights are not what I wanted to talk about.  See, the friend whom we went to visit had undertaken a kind of mid-life career shift driven by a total dedication to moral seriousness.  In the early 90s, after Pol Pot’s genocidal tantrums had finally been put to an end, (thanks largely to the bayonets of the Vietnamese, and with very little help or even attention from us Yanks), just after the Paris peace accords had opened up the possibility of a government in Cambodia that might not attempt to kill every last person in the whole place, our family friend applied for a USAID grant, bought a plane ticket, and made herself a new life as a non-profit entrepreneur.  She has since spent the better part of the past two decades teaching those damaged by land mines how to raise chickens, repair small engines, and dig wells, helped not a little by a healthy dose of the kind of “up with people” ingenuousness that has largely disappeared from the American post-70’s cultural complex.  As an example, I would cite that not only does she attempt (and, largely, succeed) at getting former enemies to dig wells together, she teaches them to sing to a tune that I swear is straight out of the Methodist Sunday School hymnal.  She has managed to convince ex-Khmer Rouge to come out of the jungle and become part of an army led by Hun Sen, and perhaps more to the point she is getting the wives and sons of those same Potistas to commit to raising export-quality pepper in a region where anything other than subsistence agriculture was last seen under colonial auspices, and before then under the Khmer empire.

And for these efforts what is her reward?  To have her house occupied and stolen from her.  To have former aid workers attempt to appropriate her organization for their own personal enrichment.  To spend her free time socializing with such Le Carre extras as Canadian dwarves, Italian foreign agents, French backpackers, and blind masseurs.

I could tell other versions of this same story – the UFW organizers whose marriages didn’t last, the Democratic activists who got lupus instead of jobs at the White House, the red-diaper babies who spend their retirement running the ACLU in states better known for Aryan Nation activity but whose own kids go on to get MBAs and work for Disney – but the point remains the same: not only does one not receive a reward in this life for charitable activity (that would rather defeat the purpose, after all), but one is more usually punished in ways one could never expect. 

This is not a gospel lesson that Mr. Joel Osteen or Mr. Rick Warren typically teach, but there it is.

Lesson #2: You can get your reward, but it does not come from your principal political efforts.

We have another friend, someone my parents know from many years of work in the building.  Indeed, she was one of the principal geniuses behind the “Grits-Off,” a fundraiser for Loaves and Fishes that, I am sure, never ceased to surprise the good nuns who ran that place.  Any event that helped the homeless through the bizarre medium of a competitive grits-cooking contest to which such local luminaries as Josh Pane and Cal Worthington were known to put in an appearance and which one year featured my mother in a sunflower yellow hoop dress complete with parasol (that year’s theme was equal parts “let them eat cake” and “I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ no babies!”) has got to have raised at least one eyebrow among the Catholic Worker crowd. 

And yet, such efforts did not lead to this-worldly rewards for my parents and their friends.  To the extent that they were able to cash in their chips and buy the house on Orange Grove Boulevard, it came through political consultancy, a career choice that I learned early on to regard with only slightly less moral horror than pandering.  In some cases a this-worldly reward came through inheritance – but that is a dicey proposition, at best.  Our friend who runs the NGO in Cambodia, for instance, is currently in chancery with her sister over the division of her father’s estate.  Phrases like “horse farms” and “coal mine royalties” tend to crop up when this subject is raised.  Or they may come through slumlordery, a family habit usually acknowledged only privately (the rewards for which are, in any case and all other things being equal, not that great).  In fact, the only acquaintance I can think of at the moment who has remained “pure” from the profit motive has gone from local office to a national appointment to semi-retirement in the arms of a white lady in Land Park.  This does not precisely constitute a house on Orange Grove Boulevard (he lives, if you are curious, on Sutterville Road) but it is not, it must be admitted, all that different in principal from dating a union-busting dragon lady and living in Curtis Park.

Lesson #3: There are worse things that selling your soul for the house on Orange Grove Boulevard. 

I know one person from high school who went into political consulting.  I know another who works in the building.  Both have run to fat and wear ill-fitting suits.  In one case they were absolutely befuddled when I started dropping names of current legislators and consultants (“Wow.  It’s like you know more people in the building than I do!”); in the second they were befuddled when I declined their friend request on Facebook.  In neither case did I conclude that the smart money these days is in political consulting. Or working in the building. 

The problem with selling your soul is that you don’t actually know its price.  And as anyone with any sense at all will tell you: the first rule of bargaining is to know the value of that over which you are haggling.  Said differently, if you have to ask…well, you know the rest of that phrase.  Or, as the WASPs have always held, and with good reason: you never, ever, touch the principle. 

Capitalism is an ugly business, of course. It is exploitative at its very core, fundamentally amoral, and deeply deeply implicated by evil. And yet it is the system that we know, it is the nexus in which we move and breath and have our very being.  And because it is the game in which we find ourselves rolling the dice (etc.), we are but fools if we do anything other than endeavor to know the rules and understand the stakes. To deal other than openly and knowingly with forces beyond our personal control is not simply stupid, it is to invite predation, to enable and abet the temptor. See the Dream of Scipio if you need a fictional version of this lesson. 

Wow.  Well that got real serious, didn’t it?

Where was I? Oh, yes: don’t ever sell your soul. But at the same time, don’t ever expect a reward for behaving right.

Lesson #4: Sometimes it’s best not to take things too seriously.

One final anecdote: Some months ago, there was coup in Honduras.  Now, let the record reflect that Honduras does not (at the moment) appear to be descending into the kind of chaos that engulfed El Salvador in the late 70s and early 80s.  That said, anytime there is a coup in Central America, the script is so well-known, the house receipts so predictable, that all one really needs to do is call in a casting director, identify some new leads, bring in the character actors, and sit back and (ahem) enjoy the show. 

This particular coup had more than the normal interest, however, as by pure happenstance my dear father got cast in a bit part in the melodrama.  He was there when the shit went down, as they say, pursuing his latest interest in building woodworking schools with the help of the carpenters union, delivering surplus medical equipment donated by the nurses union, conveying out-of-date Spanish textbooks donated by a retired librarian, and holding the flashlight while a dental assistant from Pumpkin Center, Alabama pulled abscessed teeth.  All this as part of a larger effort to help establish a network of clinics staffed by doctors trained at the Medical School of the Americas, the seminary of Castro’s efforts to evangelize all of Latin America with a gospel of free medical care.

As I indicated, the script never changes: Castro would be one of those character actors aforementioned; he always, always makes a guest appearance.

Having learned that long-ago lesson of the 80s, my family has not been content to let this latest imbroglio slip us by.  There has been no need to shelter refugees in the basement this time around (thank goodness), but there has been occasion to shepard mid-level Zelayistas to AFL-CIO conferences, to see that the call was in fact put through to Hilda Solis’s office, to fulminate with rage at Hilary’s vacillating perfidy, to introduce certain individual to our local Congressperson with the proviso “Just so you know, Doris, our friend here will be among the first to be assassinated should we let the coup succeed.”

And, of course, there has been an uptick in the number of short-term boarders moving through the place.  Including one fellow who, over a dinner on the front porch of baked salmon, braised organic greens, and a nice pinot noir, told us the following tale:

In the final day or two leading up to coup, then-president Zelaya received an invitation to dinner at the American Ambassador’s residence.  It was to be a “private affair,” he was assured – nothing formal, just a friendly chat over dinner.  Our narrator was at that time working as an advisor to someone in the president’s cabinet; both he and the cabinet minister sensed something wrong – they had read this script before – and hatched a plan. 

Our narrator drove the car, along with the president and the cabinet minister.  Once arrived, the president got out and entered the ambassador’s residence alone.  It is an imposing structure, and the formal dining hall is on the second floor.  The president took the stairs at a leisurely place.  Once he arrived in the hall, he found not just the Ambassador, but also the kitchen cabinet of the opposition, the primary half-a-dozen guys responsible for plotting his ouster.  “Well, well, Mr. Ambassador!  I thought this was going to be an informal chat among friends.  I didn’t realize you were asking me to sit down at table in the presence of my enemies.” 

Before the Ambassador could reply, the cabinet minister noisily clambered up the stairs, breezily sashayed past the guards at the entrance to the dining room, and plopped herself down at an empty spot at the table.  Brushing her hair back over her ears, she looked around and said, “Well, my goodness Mr. Ambassador, this reminds me of a joke I once heard.  Why has there never been a coup in your country?”

The punchline to that particular gag was, needless to say, in the next morning’s Times.

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