Currently listening 2 the Jersey Guys on teh radio. Peter Gabiani (sp?), a Joisey politician, fwd an email w/ racist jokes. He says he's sorry.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Happy May Day!
Ebay has quite a collection of KGB memorabilia for sale. Get this stuff while you can.
Here is a repost of my "A Jaywalking Primer, or, Dividing the Spoils of the Cold War", from April 7th, 2004. Enjoy.
I went to shopping in the Park Slope neighborhood today. Park Slope and the surrounding neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Fort Greene, and East New York is a fascinating case of shifting demographics. Just a decade ago, the area was under the control of the Brooklyn chapter of the Drug Dealers' Union, along with their affiliates, the Hookers Union local 452, The International Brotherhood of Thieves, Carjackers, Muggers, and Pickpockets (IBTCMP) and the gang banger's franchise of Murder, Inc. In other words, the neighborhood was fun and interesting. Then the white people moved in.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against white people. Heck, I'm white myself, or Jewish, which is close enough. "White People" is what we call the people who call themselves "hipsters". You know, Midwestern-born the latte drinking, health food eating, goateed jerks who wear Buddy Holly type glasses and listen to jazz. They are ignorant of the most basic aspects of life in the city.
Say, for example, something as simple as crossing the street. These morons will stride to the nearest crosswalk, wait for the light to change, carefully look both ways, and proceed across the street at a leisurely pace, all the while blathering about the cultural diversity of the urban experience. This in the city that invented jaywalking and has since elevated it to an art form. I or any other Brooklynite worth his rat poison will cross between two parked cars I will wait for a break in the traffic and walk briskly to the double yellow line. I will watch the car coming the other way. Provided the driver is not in a homicidal mood (by no means a given), he or she will speed up, traffic conditions permitting, causing a gap in the flow of traffic. Noting this, I will shift my weight to my left leg a raise my right. When the car's mirror passes me, I will step with my right leg and begin walking. Timed correctly, I will reach a gap between two parked cars on the other side before the next car can turn me into a greasy spot on the pavement and a forty five second spot on the five o'clock news. See? Like I said, it's an art form. That is, if a native is driving. If a white person is driving, there really is no telling what they'll do. Sometimes, they'll slow to a crawl, causing cars behind them to drive into oncoming traffic in an attempt to pass (and narrowly missing me standing on the double yellow line, if I'm lucky). Sometimes they will panic stop, causing horrific traffic pileups. Sometimes they will gesture violently to the effect of "I'm from out of town! Take my wallet and my car keys, just let me live"! Or so I assume.
Anyway, Park Slope. There is a weekly flea market in the yard of the local public school. One can purchase hilarious neckties from the fifties, ridiculous buttons from the sixties (Make love, not war!), horrible clothing from the seventies, and horrible and ridiculous Danish furniture from the nineties. There is enough gaudy costume jewelry to bebauble every prostitute to ever work in this city going back to Tammany Hall. There are always elderly Russians Soviet era gewgaws- campaign ribbons and medals from the Great Patriotic War, tie clasps and cufflinks bearing Lenin's ugly mug, and various coins and bills.
It was at one such stall that I got into a bidding war with a soft spoken Asian guy over a Soviet tanker unit patch. "But why?" his girlfriend wanted to know. "I guess I just have a Soviet militaria fetish (the magazines and websites of which I shall leave to your imagination). I ended up paying six dollars for the patch and six dollars for a set of cool looking shoulder boards. The dealer alleged that the shoulder boards were that of a police senior sergeant, which I am still attempting to verify. The guy event threw in an officer's belt, which has a cool looking buckle. The belt itself, however, is made of the awful thin plastic-looking leather we failed to make wallets out of in summer camp. The Asian guy bought a less elaborate set of shoulder boards and an awful- looking Sam Browne belt, also police, in white patent leather. It would have been rejected out of hand by any self respecting crossing guard (oxymoron alert) in America on account of its comical appearance. The fellow, clearly delighted at the sale, promised to have better stuff next week. "You like officer coat, yes? Maybe hat?" He solemnly shook hands with the Asian dude and me, and we walked away with our purchases.
It occurred to me that what we had here was nothing less than the spoils of our victory in the fight against International Communism (European Division). The guy walked away with twenty six dollars between us and was clearly thrilled to be dumping the useless garbage on us. The powerful, terrifying Soviet military was nothing but junk. That's right, comrade. The revolution is over, and the bourgeoisie won. I was surrounded with elderly men desperate enough for my greenbacks to supplement their Social Security checks to part with their hard earned "Proletariat of the Week" medals and old, yellowing Ché posters (although the people selling the Ché posters were all aging American leftists). Taste the ash-heap of history, tavoritch.
It is always prudent, while doing a sack dance in the end zone, to make sure the other members of your team aren't setting fire to the stadium, defenestrating the announcers, and raping the cheerleaders. In the next stall over, there was an Author Andersen travel coffee mug. The woman selling it said I was the first person all day to recognize Enron's old accounting firm. It was labeled five dollars, but she let me have it for four. Then, with the mug of capitalism at its most rapacious sharing a shopping bag with the uniforms of the police state so total in it's totalitarianism that it simply collapsed under its own weight, I went home. I had a coffee while looking up my new purchases on EBay. The belt was selling for six dollars, but there were no buyers. The tanker patch was selling for four. I couldn't find the shoulder patch at all. The bastard had ripped me off. Maybe he was getting the hang of this capitalism thing after all. So there's hope for the Russians. At least I have the mug.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Lights Out in the Middle East
On the eve of the First World War, Lord Edward Grey observed that “[t]he lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” To Lord Grey, World War I was the result of decades of indirect competition between rival nations. The tensions and feuds resulting from the natural clashing of the European powers from the mid 19th century on eventually culminated in the most apocalyptic war the world had ever seen. As British Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey was savvy enough to do all that was in his power to protect his nation’s interests in the coming holocaust—but even he realized that all that was left was to make the best out of a catastrophic situation.
Lord Grey realized, unlike so many of his generation, that the new war would not be a quick and pleasant affair. Grey saw that the conflict could not be concluded until the underlying disputes between the great nations of Europe were resolved—even if it meant four years of literal apocalypse across the fields and forests of Europe. The fundamental conflict between blocs of nations had reached such a point that one side would necessarily destroy the other before it was all over.
Today in the Middle East, if we are not quite facing an analogous situation, we are fast approaching a similar point of no return. The fundamental conflict pervading the Middle East is the clash between liberalism and Islamic Fascism, just as there was a fundamental conflict between Western liberalism and Prussian militarism during the First World War. However, wars are seldom fought over purely ideological matters. The imminent threat in the Middle East is not the long term clash of values but the immediate clash of religions and the nations which finance them.
Traditionally in the Middle East, power has always lain with Sunni Islam. The Sunnis won favorable terms from the British and the French after the colonial period and the Sunnis now control the ostensible U.S. “allies” in the region: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt. These traditional Sunni powers are threatened by the growing power of a newly strengthened Iran. In many ways, the story of the past decade in the Middle East has been the spread of Iranian influence throughout the region, just as the specter of German unity created many of the geo-political fault lines in the decades proceeding World War I.
With Iraq’s large Shiite population freed from an oppressive Sunni minority, Iraq is now up for grabs ethnically and religiously. This power vacuum has created a battleground for the competing strands of Islam to fight it out for supremacy. Because of Iraq’s central location, a victory for either Iranian-backed Shiite death squads or Saudi-financed jihadists might permanently tip the balance of power in the region. A widespread regional war between Sunnis and Shiites—amounting to a proxy war between the conservative Gulf States and Iran—would not only have catastrophic effects on the global economy and regional stability (the gas lines of the 1970’s would for example, would look trivial in comparison) but would exponentially increase the threat of terrorism. Both branches of Islam would be trying to show that they are chosen heirs of Mohammed and would consequently wish to destroy as many American and Israeli targets as possible in order to gain bragging rights within the Middle Eastern community. It would amount to a very deadly PR war in which Al Qaeda (a Sunni organization) has already won the first round with its famous attacks on 9/11.
The only way possible to avoid such a bleak future is to regain stability in Iraq. In order to do that, we need more troops on the ground to get the job done. If the administration has the courage to request roughly 45,000 more troops and Congress is able to put partisan politics aside in order to avert the single greatest foreign policy calamity in American history, we may yet avoid wholesale slaughter in the region. However, the point is fast approaching where we will no longer have any control over events in the most strategic region on earth. Europe paid the price of global war on an unintelligible level twice during the 20th century. If we do not get our act together very quickly, future generations to come will be paying the price for our abdication of responsibility, principle, and ultimately humanity in the Middle East.
Dancing Hasidic Jews
Dancing Na Nachs in Times Square. Interesting.
I've had a long day, I need to be entertained.
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Announcing Chainik 2.0
The Chainik Hocker Corporation (Chainik and Mrs. Chainik) wish to announce the beta release of Chainik 2.0, with a projected global release date of November 2007.
I am terrified and exhilarated.
Friday morning, Mrs Chainik and I visited our local OBGYN. Using a device that looked like a Playskool Sing With Me Karaoke machine, we listened to the baby's heartbeat for the first time.
First we heard a slow, steady whoosh... whoosh.... whoosh sound. "That's you, Mom" said the Doctor, who looked and sounded way too much like Sarah Silverman for my comfort. It took quite a while for her to find the baby's heartbeat, which concerned the Mrs and myself. "Takes a while to find the baby" said Dr. Silverman (not her name but that's what I'm going to call her and if she doesn't like it she can start her own blog). "The baby keeps moving." Just like its father, I told Mrs Chainik later.
Then we heard it. WishWishWishWishWishWishWish!
I choked up, I really did. I found it a little hard to catch my breath. That's my baby! I looked at Mrs Chainik and she squeezed my hand, and I tried to say something but no words came out of my mouth. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you that I am not often speechless.
It was a combination of awe and fear. It really hit me. We've known for two months that Mrs Chainik is expecting, and we got a sonogram picture last month, but it was never really real until that second.
Wow. Wow.
Wow.
Even now, I don't quite know what to say.
Wow!
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