Category: Personal

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[why my grandparents are the coolest]

So I got a package today at work — a battered-looking manila bundle, excessively taped — from my grandfather, Stan Winston. It contained precisely the following, in precisely the following order:

  • A copy of Áegis Living, the newsletter from his retirement home (slightly creepy motto: “People live here”), with the “Recent Activities” article highlighted, reading as follows: “We had a well-attended Halloween Party with the Spiral Mystics band playing oldies but goodies. Many of the staff and residents were in costumes. New resident [and the Palaverist’s grandmother] Shirley Winston and her husband Stanley accompanied the band with percussion instruments. Stanley has also started a percussion class on Saturday afternoons, which has become very popular.”

  • Four photos from the abovementioned Halloween event, including one of my grandmother looking ancient and one of my grandfather and an attractive young black woman in standing side by side and drumming intently on a pair of mounted bongos.

  • The Zenith of Desire: Contemporary Lesbian Poems About Sex, edited by Gerry Gomez Pearlberg, including such poems as “Shave,” “Changing the Oil” and “Why Is There No Dyke Bathhouse?”

  • The first issue of GNAOUA, which according to Wikipedia was “a magazine devoted to exorcism introducing the work of Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Harold Norse and other members of the Interzone,” published by Ira Cohen in Tangier, Morocco. The inaugural issue includes several works by William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsburg.

  • An issue of Cyril Connolly’s magazine Horizon from February 1949, consisting entirely of The Oasis by Mary McCarthy, described on Amazon.com as “a wickedly satiric roman a clef about a group of urban American intellectuals who try unsuccessfully to establish a rural utopian colony just as the Cold War is setting in and fear of the atomic bomb is reaching panic proportions.”

  • Elizabeth McNeill’s Nine and A Half Weeks, apparently a first-edition hardcover from 1978.

  • Male/Female Language, by Mary Ritchie Key, a cross-cultural exploration of differences between male and female uses of language; also apparently a first edition, this one put out by Scarecrow Press in 1975.

  • Paul Auster’s 2006 novel The Brooklyn Follies.

At least I come by it honestly.

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[orthodoxy]

Okay, this involves full frontal nudity, which is not something I usually post here, but it was just way too funny not to post. Here you go.

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[how black is obama?]

I’m still not sure, but in his answer to that question in Selma, Alabama, he demonstrates just how impressive he can be in winning people over by showing how fates and destinies and political ideals that seem separate or even opposed are actually intertwined.

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[taxing]

Look at the picture to the left. This image appears at the top of the Internal Revenue Service’s page for individual taxpayers, and I find it completely baffling. It’s apparently some kind of fiendishly happy interracial picnic, but what’s especially creepy is that these people appear to have been ripped from reality and forced to hover over fake grass and a fake sky that look like they were designed to be Windows 98 backgrounds.

What this has to do with individual tax-paying is unclear, except perhaps to imply that all happiness is, in the eyes of the IRS, artificial, inscrutable and untrustworthy.

I bring this up because it looks like I’m about to have a much more intimate relationship with the IRS — as if I were their token black friend, feeling uncomfortable at the creepy space picnic.

It turns out that a lot of citizens and green-card holders who work for foreign governments in the US haven’t been filing their taxes, or have been filing them incorrectly, and suddenly the IRS has decided to fuck with all of us. For some of my colleagues who have simply never filed, this will be a major financial disaster; for those who filed but did it incorrectly, it will merely hurt a lot. (I will not go into detail about myself; I am seeing a lawyer this afternoon.)

What really pisses me off about all of this is that the IRS clearly has the ability to communicate with all the foreign missions in the US — everyone seems to have gotten the news about this extension of the settlement initiative deadline — but chose to wait until this point to bother. They could’ve made some effort to inform mission staff, as we were hired and registered with the State Department, of what our rather unusual tax obligations are (according to these materials, we’re supposed to list our pay as wages but also pay the self-employment tax). They could’ve made some effort to publicize the settlement initiative when they came up with it. They could’ve designed the settlement initiative such that it would only impose the change moving forward. But no, the IRS stalks like a mugger, and I feel like I’ve been mugged by my own government.

I’m conflicted about that. I believe in taxes for services, and I think Jenny and I make enough that we should be taxed pretty substantially. On the other hand, I loathe the complexity of our tax system and the arbitrary neglect and nastiness with which it’s enforced, I hate the big tax cuts for the wealthy in recent years, and I don’t at all like what the government is spending the money on these days. (When our guys kidnap Iranian diplomats in Erbil and hold them hostage without any legal process, it’s my taxes that help pay the salaries of the kidnappers. Does that make me guilty of financing terrorism? I wonder if there’s any criminal liability there.) Still, this is helping me to understand how terrifying, financially damaging run-ins with regulatory agencies managed to turn many Americans against liberal big-government programs.

Once this is all settled, I will almost certainly have less money. Will the Korean government help us out? I sincerely doubt it, given their own budget troubles. Do I make a lot less money than I thought I did? Yeah, pretty much. Does it suck? Some, but we’ll get by. (To put it in perspective, a friend of ours recently got walloped by a $140,000 medical bill, with no one but himself to pay it. Which leads me to our desperate need for health care reform, but that’s another rant.)

There’s also a certain martyr’s masochistic pleasure in knowing that I too have been personally screwed by the Bush adminitration — not just obliquely, by having my nation’s reputation destroyed, its treasure wasted, its morals compromised, its infrastructure neglected, and so forth, but directly, like Katrina victims and National Guardsmen (only less so). It’s like Bush wants to make sure he’s crapped on absolutely everybody’s lawn before he leaves office. Lucky for him, he can check mine off the list.

And I don’t even have a lawn. Thanks to Team Dubya, it’ll be a few more years until I can afford one.

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[dearth]

It has been pointed out by my reader that I haven’t posted much lately. For this I apologize. I just haven’t been feeling it lately. I’ll post more again, I’m sure, but over the last couple of weeks, my mind has been elsewhere.

Perhaps the biggest brain-suck, outside of a concerted binge of Korean language study, was the preparation for our Funky President Potluck, a joint party with our upstairs neighbors, which went over like an assassinated Garfield last Saturday night.

The theme of the party was naughty depictions of presidents, and we took this to an extreme of nerdy craftiness. Jenny got the idea of cutting out the heads of presidents and pasting them on dirty pictures, and this grew into an extended effort of finding appropriate matches and cutting and pasting, then putting each naughty pic behind a legit portrait of said president. Some were fairly obscene — Clinton got a bukkake, Reagan got turned into a Mapplethorpe self-portrait (warning: very graphic!) — but for the most part they were a lesser order of naughty, like Pierce as a member of KISS or Nixon as Mao or Bush Sr. as the soldier pulling Saddam out of the hole in the ground. But there were 43 of these bastards (Cleveland counted as two different presidents because of his non-contiguous terms), and it took a while.

We also put up red-white-and-blue bunting and showed video of Nixon looking sweaty and grim, with the sound off, and played lots of James Brown and lots of president-themed songs I found on the Internet. And then there was the preparation of president-themed foods, which included beef (McKinley), chili (Bush Jr.), ketchup and cottage cheese (Nixon), peanut soup (Carter) and Kenyan beef casserole (the McKleinfelds’ optimistic homage to Barack Obama). There was also 잡채 (japchae), a Korean concoction of bean-thread noodles, vegetables and ample sesame oil, soy sauce and sugar. (A caricature of Korean President Roh Moo-hyun was quickly printed and affixed.) Lem showed up with a bottle of Pernod, which is not related to any president, and Paul the Muppeteer arrived without any food or drink at all, but having just spent the last week memorizing the names and dates of all the presidents, just for the heck of it. (He works for Sesame Street and has actually been to Mr. Hooper’s store, which I find just astonishingly cool.) Tom from the Steve Harrison campaign came by and told me a story I hadn’t heard, which was that when Bill Clinton recorded my phone script, he was doing so from Caesars Palace in Las Vegas at two in the morning.

The party was a great success, with the upstairs apartment (designated Camp David) serving as a quiet space for people to retreat to when they wanted more intimate conversation, while our own apartment provided the main space where the food and drinks were served. It was nice to have a party big enough to fragment into sections, because that way you can drift in and out of conversations and groups over the course of the night. Our apartment isn’t well set up for that, with its long living/dining room, but our two apartments work nicely.

This will not be the last joint party at the Court Street Castle. If nothing else, we’re thinking of a reprise of this weekend’s party with a dictator party next year.

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[lost in translation]

Now and again, various diplomats ask me about English idioms or snippets of text that they don’t understand.

Today I got a doozy: the following quotation from the Reverend Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius:

If you sincerely desire a truly, well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and “nutty”. You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day… no matter what… Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket…even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the telepathic pressure alone, of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well-grounded in consensus reality.

What particularly through my diplomatic colleague was the sentence “You need the balance,” because balance with what?

I did my best to explain that the Reverend Ivan Stang is not in fact one of those inspirational Christian pastors with whom Koreans are so often enamored, but I’m not sure I managed to convey the extent to which Stang is a figure of counterculture and satire — elements of our culture that most Koreans have difficulty grasping anyway.

I followed that up by suggesting that the balance was between the mainstream point of view, which we will learn automatically, and the views of the extremists, which it takes effort to study. I think I got this idea across.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to ask where the diplomat had stumbled across an inspirational quotation from Stang, of all people. But know that the Spirit of J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, Jr., has entered the United Nations!

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[who is a korean?]

In an interesting and laudable development, South Korea has decided to start teaching units in its elementary schools about mixed-race Koreans and overseas adoptees.

“Children in multi-cultural families get disadvantages and unfair treatment due to their accent, physical appearance and culture upbringing. We need to teach children that discrimination against or contempt of biracial people or overseas adoptees is wrong and that we can get along with children from an international marriage,” said Kwon Ki-won, head supervisor of the ministry’s curriculum policy division.

As the article points out, the number of biracial students in Korea is still incredibly small — well under 10,000 — but this will be a growing issue as Koreans continue to move abroad while maintaining links with home, and as interracial marriages continue to increase. I don’t think Korea will ever be an immigrant society like America, nor should it be, but the Koreans will have to come to an understanding of what it means to be Korean that is not wholly centered on race and native understanding of the language. This is a step in the right direction.

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[whaddaya know?]

So the early report is that a deal has been reached with North Korea: energy aid in exchange for steps toward disarmament.

It’s very preliminary still, and this whole thing could collapse over a North Korean demand for more energy than the other five powers are willing to give, or, more likely, over shifting North Korean positions on what disarmament steps they will take and when.

It will be interesting to see, as the details emerge, where exactly this leaves the Bush administration in terms of its North Korea policy. Did the hard line work? Were the Bushies right all along to toss the Agreed Framework over North Korea’s dabbling with uranium? Were they right to insist on talking only through the six-party framework rather than one on one?

The last question is the easiest to answer: No. The North Koreans have proved far more willing to compromise since Chris Hill, our lead negotiator, started talking one-on-one with the North Koreans (albeit in a format that the Bush administration, never sticklers for reality, continue to insist doesn’t qualify as one on one). As for the rest of it, let’s keep in mind that we’re now asking North Korea to roll back its plutonium-bomb developments, which wouldn’t exist if not for the collapse of the Agreed Framework.

There is no indication that the central problem of a poor, hostile, dictatorial, aggressively criminal North Korea has been solved. Still, if we’re all stepping back from the brink of nuclear war, that’s good.

For more on North Korea, check out Richard Bernstein in the New York Review, who notes that back in the early Clinton years, conventional wisdom had it that the communist regime in North Korea would wither and collapse like so many others had in Central and Eastern Europe. At this point, I think a more realistic model is that of China and Vietnam, where the Communist Party has maintained control while transforming into something new and pro-capitalist. And the road to such a transformation is through engagement, not isolation.

The Kim dynasty seems unlikely to collapse through internal decay, though one never knows. And even if it did, that would hardly be the end of our troubles: a headless state full of fanatical militants with no food is not a pretty prospect for any of its neighbors. Only engagement has any chance of creating a North Korea that can join with South Korea to become a prosperous, peaceful Korea.

Update: It turns out that South Korea’s lead negotiator is Chun Yung-woo, with whom I had the pleasure of working closely on a number of occasions when he was Deputy Permanent Representative at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations. In my experience, he was extremely intelligent, incisive, charismatic and tough-minded — ideal for his current role, really. Should an accord be signed, I will have to send him a note of congratulations.