The return of walkies!

All of those perky "how to make the best of your blog!" articles say that you should pick a topic and stick to it.  They also say you should post regularly.  People, they say, like consistency.  It might surprise you to know that I read articles like that, and that I love self-help, self-improvement, and how-to articles generally.  I suspect on the other hand that it will surprise no one that I never actually take their advice.  So, having meandered whimsically through politics, sarcasm,  random observations, and glee over my own publications, I have arrived back at one of my other interests, pretending to exercise.

You may recall that no sooner had I decided to embark upon an amusing and edifying blog-tour of all the walking trails in Athens, I moved because I got a new job.  So you could think of this as me jiggling the door handle of fate once again...

Big Trees Forest Preserve

One of the area's many delightful parks, located next to the North Fulton Government Service Center on Roswell Road.  It is within a reasonable walk of my house, so I can add mileage and time to my outdoor exertions...it always feels a bit weird to me to drive somewhere so I can walk, which is why I get my sweetie to drop me off. (Joking. Mostly.)

Best features:  Sun-dappled shade, babbling brooks, leafy glades.  Trails are well-maintained for the most part.

Down sides:  Parts of trails are within hearing of Roswell Road, which tends to spoil the illusion of woodsy solitude maintained elsewhere in the park.

Difficulty:  Easy for the most part, the Back Country trail and some of the connectors have some hilly and more moderate stretches.

Frequency of humans:  Depends on the time of day, but I have never seen it unpleasantly crowded.

Other wildlife:  The usual squirrels, chipmunks, and talkative birds.  Bird houses and feeders placed to encourage their presence.

Maps and mileage:  Map available on the website is accurate but not very printable.  Trails are about 1.5 miles but you can expand and vary this because there's more than one loop.

Access:  Enter from the NFGS parking lot on the right side of the building.  Part of the trail is wheelchair accessible. Pets on a leash, no bicycles.

New/old publication in the Dead Mule

Somehow I missed it when this came out:  God of the Marching Teddy Bears    A nearly true story.

Poverty, folk songs, culture, and the Just World Fallacy

All discussed in my article which came out in Flagpole Magazine today, Hard Times Everywhere.

Gone with the wind

Just watched a biography of Margaret Mitchell. I have a perverse fondness for her despite the fact that I can no longer read GWTW without wincing and the only benefit from the housing crash I can see is that it stunted the proliferation of middle-Georgia mid-range housing developments with names like "Tara Estates."  I'd known that she donated money to Morehouse medical students; I hadn't known she did it in secret for fear that someone would take violent exception to her donating money to African American students. Those were the times, as they say.

My father used to talk about his uncle who was a doctor and his aunts who were "country nurses," (ie midwives and whatever else was needed) and was emphatic that they would treat "anybody, white or black." This sailed over my head as a child. Why wouldn't they? But his uncle and aunts practiced in the 1910s, '20s and '30s when that just wasn't done. And by "not done" I mean "some people would turn black people away from emergency rooms and let them die rather than treat them." It occurs to me now that not only were they unusual, my great-uncle and aunts may have actually put themselves in danger. Though knowing my family I doubt they worried about it too much.

People are funny, contradictory creatures. Margaret Mitchell had some racist attitudes and so did my parents; I'm sure their elder relatives were no different. And yet, they defied other people's racism at some risk to themselves. If there is a lesson there, I think it's this: The world isn't made by saints. They are too thin on the ground. The world is pushed forward by flawed human beings choosing to do the better thing.

Don't Bring Your Hoodie to Town

Geraldo Rivera made an ass of himself on TV today.  This is, alas, not news, which would explain why it was on Fox. He misquoted Johnny Cash.  That wasn't even it, but I had to put that out there.  Sometimes the enormity of a thing is so vast and incomprehensible, you have to pick at something small to try to wrap your head around it.

I mean, yes, Rivera.  On what day is he not a fool? Fox "News," yep.  And yet...just when you think there is no possible way people can be more venal, more callous, more epically and outstandingly vile, they outdo themselves. It was an epiphany of sorts.  Rivera has had a long and storied career as a mystifyingly famous idiot. Today he reached an apotheosis, at least I devoutly hope that's what it was.  That he might have worse in him is too terrifying to contemplate.  It's enough to make a person believe in R'lyeh.

"I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trevon Martin's death as George Zimmerman was...I'll bet you money, if he didn't have that hoodie on, that nutty neighborhood watch guy wouldn't have responded in that violent way."

Yes, my friends and fellow citizens of Earth, he thinks that an adult man chasing a seventeen year old boy down the street after having been told by a 911 dispatcher not to do so and shooting said child is only partially that man's fault.   The wisdom of neighborhood watch carrying a gun in the first place, or the bizarre application of  "stand your ground" to include a public street and an unarmed opponent doesn't even enter into it.  The hoodie made him do it.

He went on to say that when people see a dark-skinned kid in a hoodie, they think that child is a menace and that we should all be aware of that.  You can't rehabilitate the hoodie, he says.

Oh, Lord.  You know what I think is a menace?  White guys with guns.

I mean, really.  Look at history.  The Chinese invented gunpowder and made fireworks.  Europeans invented gunpowder and made muskets, pistols, cannon, rifles, mortars, derringers, Thompson machine guns, howitzers, and 75 mm anti-aircraft guns.  For five hundred years and counting, the spectacle of some white people coming over the hill or sailing into the harbor or showing up on the doorstep in suits has made people the world over think, "Aw, shit.  Here they come. Are they armed?"

And nine times out of ten, when you hear on the news that someone has killed someone else in a completely bizarre whacknut vigilante way, with or without lengthy manifesto, it's a white guy.  With a gun and a lethal sense of entitlement.  I'll bet you money, if George Zimmerman hadn't gone out wearing a gun, he wouldn't have been able to react in that violent way.

So I'm urging all of you...don't let your white guys go out wearing guns.  Tell them people will look at them as a menace.  After five hundred years of history, you can't rehabilitate the white guy with gun look.  I'm just trying to save lives here.

What Occupy Atlanta is up to...

Feline Philosophy, Anarchy, and Art

"Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat." - Mark Twain

A side-effect of hanging around Occupy is that one winds up having to explain patiently to people that having a penchant for breaking things and wearing clothes you found on the bargain rack at Hot Topic does not make you an anarchist.  Sometimes you have to explain that to people who call themselves anarchists.  I don't look like I know anything about it, apparently.  I am middle-aged, chose to accord punk a decent burial rather than take up necrophilia,  and have a job, more or less, as an educator.   I vote, among my other peculiar habits, and my clothing comes in other colors than black.  That's all right; I reject the notion that political and philosophical ideas require membership in a subculture.  I also reject the idea that it requires a certain set of lifestyle choices, ideological catechisms, or a reading list.  Although I do habitually think about the systemic consequences of my personal decisions and I love a reading list, those are voluntary choices on my part.  (See what I did there?)  In other words....don't tell me what to do.

Let's start with a fundamental attitude.  Deep down in my bones, I believe that all power must justify itself to those it would exert influence over, rather than the other way around.  The power to pass laws or enforce them, to allocate resources or use them up, is always conditional and open to question; no other state of affairs is acceptable, or even possible except through manipulation, coercion and failure of the imagination.  When you put it that way, it sounds strangely like the Declaration of Independence ("....Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed")  and therefore ought to have the stamp of the hoariest true-blue American sentiment about it.  And yet in practice that fundamental world-view tends to bother people.  I have been told more than once in indignant tones that I have no respect for authority; I can only agree cheerfully, which seems to upset people even more.  I do not have respect for authority.  I barely recognize authority as a concept, except in the specific narrow academic sense of an authoritative source (and I'm well aware of how subject to debate that is). My compliance is never to be assumed, and my respect beyond that which I accord to all living beings as a matter of fundamental ethics has to be earned.  I do respect integrity, knowledge and logical sense, and will amiably ask that they be demonstrated before I put my full trust in a person or institution; I will less amiably point out when they have been breached.  This makes me a rebel, apparently, and very upsetting. 

Really, I'm no different from a cat, except that I talk more.  Cats are inherently anti-authoritarian.

So are artists, a species of which I am a member, cultivar writer.   While it's true you will occasionally find an artist espousing some authoritarian philosophy or another, they always mean it for other people.  (Nobody said an artist can't be a hypocrite.  We are like other mortals that way).  I never met a creative person though who took authority seriously as applied to herself.  That is because real art requires freedom and is governed by constraints the artist understands to be arbitrary even when she believes in them passionately, with the same total conviction that a six year old will lend to the rules of a game she and her friends just made up on the spot.  Even reality is bendable in spots.

Don't get the idea that just because I think rules are the product of fallible human minds it means I also think there shouldn't be any.  That kind of person always believes that there's such a thing as ultimate truth in human affairs, and that he or she knows what it is.  What I do think is that, acknowledging that rules are often arbitrary (a word with roots in the concept of rendering judgment), they are also functional in that they provide a container, a vessel for human interactions.  They can be useful, but they must also be subject to criticism and revision on the basis of how functional they really are, and that extends to all levels, the philosophical, the social, and the practical; local, national, and global.  This is also the business of the philosophical or theoretical arms of social justice movements:  feminism, anti-racism, queer activism, disabilities activism, etc.  That is not a coincidence.  As tiresome as that can sometimes be....like a four year old asking constantly "why? why? why do we do things this way?  why don't we do them another way?" it is essential.  All true and valuable change begins with a question.

Question authority.