When Denial Ends

Phil at Alaska Progressive salutes Rich Mauer's ADN article on the Young-Abramoff connections today. Phil also talks about Dennis Greenia at Daily Kos whose been working on the Abromovff Scandal for a while now under the name Dengre and whose research has helped Phil in the past and Mauer in this new article.

Phil also links to an October 6, 2006 post he did on this topic covering much of the same ground.

All this relates to an important theme for me (see the name of this blog) - how people 'know' what they know. One wonders about the Alaskan voters who have elected and reelected Don Young all these years despite all the evidence that his response was to shout like a bully at anyone - including constituents - who asked questions about things like Abramoff and the Marianas.

Thomas Kuhn, the physicist who put the word 'paradigm' (see links to Kuhn in an earlier post) into the American mainstream, said that scientitists don't discard their old paradigms - even when they know they are faulty - until they have a better one to replace them with. I think that makes sense here.

I remember the evidence piling up that - despite his denial - Richard Nixon was a crook. Yet he was reelected for a second term. People didn't want to believe that there president was a crook. They didn't want to believe that Viet Nam was a mistake and that the great USA was on the wrong side and was losing. (Some people still think we could have won, whatever that means, but we were politically hampered. But looking back from today, we can see that the whole rationale of our being there - to keep the dominoes of Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, etc. from falling to Communism - was a model of things that did not accurately reflect what was happening.) While there were questions about Nixon, their beliefs overall were being challenged and they didn't have another belief system to switch to.

So, it has taken a while for the American public to lose faith in George W. Bush.

And it seems like forever for Alaskans to lose faith in Don Young.

Radical Catholic Mom raises a point that I didn't think of this morning: the poisonous role on American politics of one issue voting blocks. In this case she cites the Right to Life over everything else crowd for helping to keep Young in power.

It goes to the heart of the whole "vote pro-life only" camp. I received an email ripping me one for even hinting that I could POSSIBLY argue for voting for a "pro-abort" candidate. I responded that it ain't black and white, honey. Don Young and other Republican corrupt, disgusting, anti-life politicians who shamefully used the pro-life vote to continue in office and push through this Mariana Islands deal where women were raped, again and again and again, forced to abort their babies, and then forced to make clothes for the US consumer reflect why the traditional pro-life vote needs to become CRITICAL. WHO are we electing?

If a group is so obsessed with one issue that they are willing to close their eyes to everything else a candidate might do if only he takes a strong stand on their issue, then we get politicians who use those voters to carry out their immoral actions.

The point for me is NOT Don Young, but how we help US citizens to

• understand how to critically evaluate candidates,
  
• critically evaluate interest groups that urge them to vote based on certain issues,
  
• see beyond the very short term simplistic promises to understand who they are really putting into power.

I think Alaskans have gotten the point on Don Young. They got the point on Frank Murkowski (who, by the way, gets points on his outraged reaction to the Marianas situation

Murkowski said, he "talked with some Bangladesh workers who had not been paid and who were living in appalling conditions." He also described a young woman taken to Saipan as a minor and forced to work as a prostitute. (from Mauer piece)

though he continued to publicly support Young and according to the Mauer article

Since leaving office, Murkowski has declined to talk about the Marianas issue.

Again, my point is NOT Young or Murkowski, my point is about how voters

• gather the information they use,
  
• how they analyze that information, and
  
• how they decide to vote.

Second Night Seder at Home

M had suggested a week or so ago that we do a second night seder and invite the AJWS staff members Grib and A and other friends. It seemed like having a seder in a restaurant would be difficult, so I asked at our place whether we could use the dining area and kitchen. They said sure.

Grib wasn't feeling well, but A was able to come as well as the Thais who'd taken M to their village last week. And W the new volunteer who just got here as well as two of the young men who were at last night's seder. I've never cooked in an industrial kitchen before and it was fun. We shopped yesterday at a couple of the University Vegetable markets and had lots of very fresh ingredients. The fuzziness of the wine bottle is due to high alcohol content of the bottle.


And T and J brought wine made from sticky rice and grapes. A taste, like asparagus, that you have to develop a taste for. It was a very enjoyable evening with people doing interesting things. It's too bad we're just about to leave. But we have an invitation from J2 to visit his elephants when we come back. And it was nice to know that we didn't have to wash all the dishes, though everyone helped get them into the kitchen and we got most of the gunk off of them.

Scarlet Backed Flowerpecker

I've had some video on this little, almost hummingbird like bird, that frequents our tree and has a little red splash. But couldn't figure out what it was. Friday I thought I'd figured it out. I got a great view of a little bird that made the same hummingbird like sounds and it matched the scarlet backed flowerpecker in the book perfectly. Can't see it? It's in the lower left. And this picture was already enlarged. It's a tiny bird that rarely stops moving.

The photographer me is battling the birder me about whether to even post this picture. But you can find incredible bird pictures all over the web. This one helps show how difficult those great pictures are. And you can tell that this is a scarlet backed flowerpecker (if you have other pictures and descriptions to compare it with.) But the descriptions I can find are not very detailed.


So, is the bird in the video also a scarlet backed flowerpecker? There doesn't seem to be red on the head and back, just the rump.Watch quickly, then again in slow motion.


I think it's the same bird, but I'm not sure.

Chiang Mai in Yellow and Orange

Two different kinds of trees are bringing spectacular color to Chiang Mai right now. In unexpected places there is a sudden burst of orange or yellow.






Someone told me the names in Thai but wasn't sure. M said someone told her the yellow ones were 'dry wind' trees, which is the English translation of what I was told was the name of the yellow trees. So I still have to double check on that.
















This tree looks small next to the building, but if you look, you can see it reaches to the fourth floor.





This one was in a yard on my way to work.













This orange tree is at Wat (temple) Ramphoeng.




This yellow tree is right near the last orange one at Wat Ramphoeng.























And, of course, orange flowers are dropping down on everything below too.

Chiang Mai Seder

Tonight was the Passover Seder and we met M and the newly arrived volunteer W at the Centara Duang Tawan Hotel. We sat at the English Speaker's section. Mostly it was Israelis. And it was run by Chabad. As it turned out the English speakers were all put together because we had a Chabad member from New York translating into English for the English speakers - maybe about 20 of us in a room of 200 or more





W, who was in on the original AJWS orientation conference call back in November, finally arrived in Chiang Mai yesterday. He was born in Berlin and his family escaped to Central America and he eventually was able to get to the US and become a US citizen. He now lives in Vienna. He's an international consultant and just finished a job in Ukraine before coming here. Here he is with M.





We were sitting with really interesting people. Next to J was J2 who has relatives in Wasilla and is working on his PhD in Thailand - his subject is elephants. He said that most of the elephants that beg on the streets are owned by rich Thais who lease them out to people to go begging. The sugar cane doesn't help and the people with them are generally doing fine financially. So, their basically using the elephant's ability to connect with people for their own gain, not the elephant's at all.




On my side was F, who was born in Algeria and became a French citizen and worked for 30 years as an Air France pursar, mostly on the Paris - Anchorage - Tokyo run. So he knew and loved Anchorage. It is a small world. He also had very interesting stories about Algeria, France, and many other things. He lives in Thailand now.

We are planning a second seder with M here tomorrow evening. We've rented out the dining area and kitchen downstairs. We got food today. This will be interesting, but after tonight, I have much more confidence in the food we'll eat.

Bug Report

This bug was on the outside of the screen yesterday morning. When I went out on the balcony to shoot it from the other side, it flew off.

We're surprisingly bug free for a tropical country. I don't think it's because they use a lot of pesticides because we have some bugs and downstairs there are lots of frogs that wouldn't survive. I credit it to screens, not leaving food out, and being on the fourth floor.

Mosquitoes are surprisingly absent. Except for early evening if you are sitting with your bare or sandaled feet under a dark table, we really have hardly noticed mosquitoes.

Busy day at work today as time gets short. J leaves next Thursday morning for LA, Seattle, then Anchorage eventually. I'll leave Saturday for Singapore then Anchorage.

Racket Tailed Drongo on a Stick

After hiding for most of two months, the drongos are now starting to model. Or maybe I'm getting smarter about when they are around. Or it's luck. In this video we finally combine a view of the drongo along with the drongo call - the loud, distinctive two beat almost electric tone. There's also a rapid chatter which we think, but aren't positive, is also drongo speak. Watch for the second drongo in the tree. For previous drongo shots link to the drongo label.

Last Songkran Post

Here's a bit of video left over from Songkran. First from going downtown on Monday. Then yesterday afternoon on one of the side streets in our neighborhood, a small parade.

Anchorage is Starting to Sound Really Good

Did Anyone Else Read Chapter 1 of Palin's Bio?

When there was all the buzz about the Palin biography, most of the websites (for instance here, here, and here) that mentioned it, also had a link to the first chapter. I linked, read, and said, "Oh dear."

But do I need to blog about it? I'd like to think I subscribe to the "if it isn't doing anyone any harm, and if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything" school of blogging. I've even been accused of being too compassionate to Vic Kohring. (See first comment.) My response was that I'm not here to judge or to condemn, but to understand, to learn, to figure out how to do better next time. But, does writing a review on the book do any of that?

First, book reviews are an honorable tradition. They steer us to good books and away from bad ones. And this book is newsworthy. The most popular governor in the US, talked about as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate. The first ever biography of her. But I could only find one other review online. It was from a Sarah fan (actually, I, personally, think she's been exactly the governor we needed) who seems to be similarly unimpressed with the book, which he apparently got an advanced copy of.

Second, I also think that writing a good book is really hard. So another potential value of reviewing the book is to figure out why this doesn't work for me and perhaps offer something for other authors to consider. This fits the "how to do better next time" criterion.

(As I think about this, the process of writing itself is a way to think through something and understand it better. For me it's like solving a puzzle - why do I think this book is boring? Another problem is that I know Kaylene Johnson, the author. While we hadn't seen each other in years, we did have an enjoyable conversation not too long ago. The book didn't come up.)

So why did I find it boring? The sentences are all complete and the grammar works.

It's taken awhile to figure this out. There are several problems for me:

1. An impersonal, omniscient narrator who isn't (omniscient)
   
2. Facts that don't really add up to anything significant
3. A general sense of inauthenticity

It is hard to write a biography. You have to get in all the relevant facts that will help the reader understand who the person is and why she does what she does. You have to deal with chronology - do you do it in order, or skip around and confuse the reader? You have to document what you write. You have to give the context. This is just the mechanical stuff. Then you have to breathe life into the prose.

1. An impersonal, omniscient narrator who isn't. Some anonymous, all-knowing voice is telling us what happened and summing up the important things we should know.

These mountains would become, like other wild places in Alaska, a place of sustenance and renewal for her boisterous and busy family.

In 1969, the Heaths moved to southcentral Alaska, living for a short time with friends in Anchorage, then for two years in Eagle River before finally settling in Wasilla.

They had a white cat named Fifi and a German shepherd named Rufus, a canine sidekick to the kids who shows up in many family photos. The children often hiked the “Bunny Trail” to the home of a distant neighbor who had kids the same age.

Once a year, the family accompanied Chuck Sr. on a week- long class field trip to Denali National Park, where camping in view of majestic Mount McKinley left indelible memories with the Heath children.

This omniscient narrator doesn't know everything. She doesn't know that much at all. She is dependent on scraps of facts she got from the Heath family.

“Dad never stopped lining up new adventures for us,” Chuck Jr. said. The kids caught Dolly Varden off a nearby dock. Chuck Jr. loved to catch the Irish Lord, an ugly, creepy-looking fish, for the pleasure of holding it up to his little sisters’ faces and making them scream.

When the family wasn’t running or hiking, it was hunting or fishing. “We could literally go hunting out our back door,” Chuck Jr. said.

The Heath kids and their friends spent many hours playing ball.

There's lot that we don't know. The kids like each other and no one is telling us what really happened. Just the things that will make their sister look good.

If this were fiction, the narrator could be omniscient. But it isn't. (Well, maybe that's debatable too.) So Johnson needed to talk to us readers now and then. To explain her project, the obstacles, what she tried to do and how. "Hey, I have to write this biography of the governor. I talked to all the family members, but they didn't give me much to work with. And this is an authorized biography, that means I agreed to . . . " We don't know what she agreed to and Johnson doesn't tell us the rules. Did Sarah or someone in her family get the right to cut out stuff they didn't like? Did she have a deadline and so had to make it presentable in two months? She doesn't tell us. At least in chapter 1, where we might expect this author's voice to talk to us, it doesn't.

2. Facts that don't really add up to anything significant. As you can see from above, Johnson got random snapshots. But when she puts them in an album, there are lots of blank spaces. OK, so there's a dog and a yellow porch. So what? Yes, little details are important, but they also need to add up to something. It appears Johnson had so little, she had to put whatever she had into the book, even if it just fills some of the blank spaces in Sarah's life, but leads nowhere in our quest to understand the governor. There just aren't enough dots to connect.

There are some exceptions - dots that might actually give us some insight into Governor Palin. She's quoted talking about the Miss Wasilla contest she entered for the scholarship money (we know that is the reason because her brother says so):

“They made us line up in bathing suits and turn our backs so the male judges could look at our butts,” she said in a 2008 interview with Vogue magazine. “I couldn’t believe it!”

If Johnson had gotten more quotes like that the pages would turn. Not because the governor says 'butts' but because it sounds candid and authentic. But Johnson didn't get this quote from the Sarah, she got it from Vogue magazine. They were able to get real stuff from Sarah, why couldn't Johnson?

But here's something from sister Molly that potentially offers insight:

From the time she was in elementary school, she consumed newspapers with a passion. “She read the paper from the very top left hand corner to the bottom right corner to the very last page,” said Molly. “She didn’t want to miss a word. She didn’t just read it—she knew every word she had read and analyzed it.”

If it's true (how many of you read the paper diagonally?), it tells us that Palin does her homework. I think Molly believes this and it may even be true. But how would an adoring younger sister know for sure if her sister "knew every word" and "analyzed it?" Did she give her quizzes, or did it just seem like that?

I can't help thinking, if she read everything and analyzed it, how come she was surprised by the sexist nature of the beauty contest?

Johnson didn't have enough paint to cover the whole wall of Sarah's childhood. Instead, she should have just painted one good Sarah story that she could do well with the little paint she had. Something in-depth that would give us a sense of the future governor without trying to cover the whole family history.

3. A general sense of inauthenticity

The beauty pageant 'butt' quote is the only truly authentic fizz I got. All the rest sounded flat. If this were a movie, it would have been filmed in Hollywood, not Alaska, and those "snow covered mountains" with "the soft alpenglow" would have been painted on a set. That's how it reads. Even the part about camping a week with views of Mt. McKinley. Johnson is an Alaskan so I would expect her to say Denali. And Alaskans know the only campground where you can see Denali from is Wonder Lake. Were they always there? But even there, it's a rare day, let alone week, where the mountain is visible. But on that Hollywood set, we can paint over those details.

The contrast between the omniscient pose and the narrator's lack of in-depth stories sounds fake, like painted mountains.

The family stories are second hand and sound like Chuck Jr. and the rest were editing as they spoke. It's not from the heart. It's painting the scenery to reflect well on their politician sister. I don't blame them. They certainly aren't going to make her look bad. But where are Lyda Green's impressions of Sarah? Or one of the losing Ms. Wasilla contestant's?

This book reads like an inspirational book aimed at 14 year old girls. "Sarah Palin - Hero Governor of Alaska and how growing up in the wilderness made her the woman she is today." This is a political biography written in Sound of Music prose.

Johnson didn't have an easy task - write an approved biography of the most popular governor in the US who's still on some people's lists for McCain's running mate, so getting it out by May - when the Governor is going to become probably the first sitting governor in US history to have a baby - was a high priority.

I think that given the buzz on Palin nationwide, a fair number of copies will be sold. (Just one hundred per state would be a reasonable press run.) Those people who really want to find out who Palin is, will buy it for the scraps they can glean. But if the whole book reads like Chapter 1, I'm guessing a small percentage of people who buy the book, will actually read the whole thing.