Occupy Portland, part 4 - You Know . . . Maybe They Really ARE Fighting Dirty

Take a look at the photographs in this column. Doesn’t it look like something significant happened here in Portland yesterday (Friday, October 28)?

A huge sound stage was set up in Pioneer Square, often referred to as “Portland’s Living Room.” A band made up of the youthful classical/jazz/Latin/swing band Pink Martini (they make their homes in Portland and they’re big in Europe), guest vocalist Storm Large, and some musicians from the Oregon Symphony formed the core of the event.

They performed three of their songs and led the crowd in singing almost a dozen classic pop, musical, and folk songs. Twelve different speakers, including two rabbis, three Protestant ministers, an Imam, two U.S. Congressmen, the state AFL-CIO president, and several activists and organizers addressed the crowd, to much cheering and applause. Starbucks handed out free coffee and chocolate at three different stands around the square.

Occupy Portland, part 3 - Democracy is Messy

[Events are taking place faster than I can keep up with them on my blog, so I’ve decided to provide links at the end of each commentary, where you can find information on news about Occupy Portland and upcoming events. Page down for those….]

I don’t want to leave the impression here that I think everything happening at the Occupy Portland camp is sweetness and light, or that I'm trying to sell that notion to anyone else.

There are many other topics I’d like to address about the protest, eventually -- such as the camp’s relations with the city government and Portland Police; the misleading spin (unintended or otherwise) contained in local TV news reports I have seen; the bigger mission and potential outcomes of the protest -- but at this point I felt I should talk about some of the problems I’ve witnessed or heard about.

As they say, democracy is messy.

Every night at 7 p.m., a General Assembly (GA) meeting takes places at Terry Schrunk Plaza, a small brick arena across Madison Street to the south of the encampment, which is federal land. My schedule hasn’t allowed me to make it to a GA meeting, but OP volunteers try to take notes and post them as soon as possible on the Occupy Portland website.

I understand that much of the discussion at General Assembly meetings has revolved around the same safety and security concerns that the greater public outside the camp has expressed: that Occupy Portland seems to include homeless persons, mentally ill folks, recreational drug consuming and dealing individuals, and possibly criminals. (The couple show here are NOT examples of these subgroups, but more typical citizens chatting on a bench in Chapman Square.)

Occupy Portland, part 2 - This Is Bigger Than You Think

On my first day volunteering for Occupy Portland, I verified a suspicion -- or maybe in the beginning it was just a hope -- that what we see in the camps, especially if we only watch the television news, is the tip of a possibly massive iceberg.

There are indeed a lot of regular folks who support this motley crowd, both in spirit and in deed.

And unlike an iceberg, the substance you see above the waterline is not the same as the material below. Although I saw plenty of middle-class visitors and suit-coated businesspeople who just strolled through the camp -- looking around or heading to and from work -- not a few of them meant business. I know, because they stopped to talk to me and hand me things while I was at the information desk (that's me on duty, at right).

A large middle-aged man in outdoor clothing advised me: “Yesterday the city of Portland got their property tax bills; you’ll get a lot of support from the middle if you go after the right targets.” A more sharply dressed man said he had done very well in real estate, appreciation, etc., and “I don’t pay very much taxes -- that’s why I donate so much. We’re fighting evil here.”

Carl Anderson, a military serviceman 30 years ago who since has worked “half my life” in the Wells Fargo Building, a white tower that overlooks the occupation site from the southwest, said his coffee breaks in the Occupy Portland site have gotten longer and longer. “You guys gotta stay here until the next presidential election, at least,” he remarked. He also mentioned that he has only 12 years left before he retires, and I thought to myself: I could never work at any job for that long.

Occupy Portland, part 1 - First Impressions

I knew that if I volunteered at the Information desk I’d be learning a lot more than I’d be helping anyone. But that was part of the point: I figured this would be the fastest way to get a handle on what’s been happening on Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, downtown Portland, over the past two weeks.

You probably won't be able to read it in the above photo, but posted at the entrance to Lownsdale Square, and elsewhere around the parks, are the camp's extensive "Collective Agreement on Guidelines for Community Safety and Well-Being." They dub the Occupy site weapon-free and nonviolent; prohibit any recreational alcohol or drug use; sequester cigarette smoking to the corner of SW 4th and Main; and call for respectful treatment among everyone, among other things. The panel on the right lists the steps to take in response to any threats to safety and well-being on the site. 

I had participated in the initial protest march on Oct. 6 that involved at least 4,000 people and might have drawn in as much as 6,000 or 10,000 -- various numbers have gotten batted around in the media -- but I hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at the site where the long-haul protesters had chosen to camp ever since.

Yossarian Lives! in a tent with Occupy Wall Street

By now I had planned to have an update on Occupy Portland for this blog, but my schedule has kept me from making a full on-site inspection.

Occupy Portland has settled into a pair of city parks about seven blocks from my apartment -- as the crow flies; eight if you have to keep to the streets -- and I’ve strolled by a couple of times as well as monitored developments on the local news. But I haven't yet taken the time to wander through and talk to the protesters.

Occupy Portland is well into its second week. Occupy Wall Street has completed its fourth week. Worldwide “Occupy” protests have spread to 951 cities in 82 countries, according to Wikipedia …

… and this week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

So many commentators have been writing about Occupy Wall Street that I probably won’t be the first to note the wonderful coincidence between Yossarian’s 50th birthday and the Occupy movement’s message of anti corporate greed, anti endless, meaningless wars, and against the government’s abiding bias toward the rich.

But over the past year I’ve been working on a close study of Catch-22 for Book Drum, a British Web site for which I’ve previously profiled Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So Yossarian, the hapless 28-year-old anti-hero of Heller’s 1961 classic, ostensibly about World War II but actually about so much more -- from McCarthyism and war profiteering in every armed conflict to the arbitrariness of power, government bureaucracy, and, yes, corporate greed -- has been much on my mind.

Occupy Wall Street comes to Portland, Oregon

On Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, a crazy idea first proposed in July by the activist magazine AdBusters, the odd little protest that started in New York City’s financial district on Sept 17 (see the CNN Money overview of the phenomenon) went national.

Yesterday -- Thursday, Oct. 6 -- after little coverage in the national broadcast media but plenty of buzz on social media networks, Occupy Wall Street spread to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.

That especially included Portland, Oregon, where someone’s always protesting something, often within ten blocks of my downtown apartment. I hadn’t heard or read much about Occupy Wall Street, but I did find it curious that what seemed to be an ongoing populist event in Lower Manhattan, resulting in arrests and some violence by police against protestors, had not made much of a splash in the news on my local TV stations.

When Facebook friends passed along word of a march in Portland on Oct. 6, I decided to check it out. Here's the initial gathering with the Burnside Bridge across the Willamette River in the background. My wife Carole took this and the next photo.

Shortly after noon I got to Waterfront Park, listened to some of the speeches and comments as the crowd grew, and decided to volunteer as a “police liaison,” knowing that I was older than the average protestor and less likely either to get hassled by the police or to lose my cool.

The Flickering Light of a Book

The recent news that Kindle owners will now be able to download library books into their electronic reader seemed like a positive blow for booklovers and readers everywhere.

It might be. But it makes me nervous.

Brier Dudley, business commentator for the Seattle Times, sounded a cautionary note in his column this week. The deal between Amazon and public libraries may be the turning point at which the latter make a massive shift away from the print to digital media, he wrote. The historically egalitarian nature of libraries may erode as larger portions of public library collections become accessible only to patrons who can afford to own e-books and computers.

He adds that Amazon gets another opportunity to advertise every time someone downloads a book. Most ominous, Amazon still isn’t paying taxes to local governments for sales it closes with residents of a given locale. The company has been fighting California’s efforts to collect such revenues, with some success.

I don’t own a Kindle. I don’t expect ever to own one . . . but there is one in my home.

If anything qualified as the must-have holiday gift for grownups in 2010, it probably was the Kindle. In 2009, 2.9 million Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold, and Bloomberg analysts projected sales of 5 million the following year. By December 31, however, sales of Amazon’s e-book had beaten that figure handily: the company sold 6 million in 2010.

Apple iPads outsold Kindles in less time—an estimated 7.46 million flew out of stores between their April debut and September—but something tells me there were a lot more teenagers in that group, whether they spent their own money or their folks’, than there were among Kindle purchasers. I have to wonder how many of those teen iPad users are reading books on their screens.

Because she had requested it, I ordered my wife Carole a Kindle in late November for one of her holiday gifts. Since the beginning of December (Chanukah was early this year), I’ve been hearing about its manifold delights. I can make notes she tells me, and download them into our home iMac later; I can look up the dictionary definition of any word on the spot. I can carry multiple books in my purse, and when I finish one -- or even in the middle of one -- I can switch to another.

That’s nice, I think to myself, but you’ll never get me to want one of those. I love the heft of books, the smell of them, the physical reality of each one. I grew up carrying a stack of books to and from school (I was infamous for this among my classmates), and I expect to carry pleasure reading in printed form -- nearly always a clothbound copy, as well, not a paperback -- until the day I die.

The cover art and the weight are integral parts of a book’s character: I just finished a 1300-page translation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, and the 4.3 pounds it weighed will always be part of my memory of the experience of reading it. That wouldn’t have been the case if I had read it on the same electronic device I could read any cheap paperback thriller.

Part of the achievement of having finished Proust or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow is finally putting that sucker down. How does Joyce or Pynchon feel any different from Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel or Stephen King when they’ve all weighed and even looked the same in your hand?

If you drop a printed book in the tub, or in a puddle, you’ve damaged one book. If you drop a Kindle, you’ve lost several, maybe even hundreds, of books. Amazon will let you download the ones you’ve already paid for again, on another machine, but you do have to buy another machine. You can even still read a wet and muddy book, but I imagine a dead electronic reader won’t give you a single digital word.

My fear is that the more public libraries are drawn into Amazon’s commercial agenda, the fewer choices we’ll end up enjoying. I’ve seen this pattern with almost every technological “advance” that’s come down the pike over the course of my life. Some of the 33-1/3 vinyl LPs I owned as a kid never became available on cassette. Something similar happened with the switch from VHS tapes to DVDs: obscure favorites of mine like Kobayashi’s “Harakiri,” which took forever to find on tape, took even longer to find on disk.

CDs have stayed around long enough and are sufficiently inexpensive to manufacture that most of the obscure albums and even vinyl bootlegs by Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and even the Banana Splits that I owned as a teen eventually got reissued. (No sign of Catfish Hodge’s solo “Boogeyman Gonna Get You,” however.) Even my friends, personal and Internet based, have turned out their solo and band recordings on CD. The faster technology moves forward, though, the fewer choices we tend to have, because manufacturers can only afford to turn out product that has mass appeal: lowest-common-denominator entertainment, from Stephen King and Britney Spears to the “Transformers” series and degraded remakes of finer original flicks.

It was a disappointment in college when I discovered some of work of writers I wanted to read had not been translated into English and might never be (e.g., the Danish journalist and feminist Suzanne Broegger, and the Polish existential novelist Witold Gombrowicz). Now I have to worry that the library may only order some books in electronic form, or not at all, because only a handful of readers -- including me -- might care to read them.

This is how corporate-driven consumerism actually gives us less choice, makes us less free, in a supposedly democratic society.

P.S. I am currently rereading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities for one of my three book discussion groups, about to open Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America for another one, am reading Henning Mankell's final Kurt Wallander thriller The Troubled Man for my own pleasure, and am making copious notes about Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for the extensive profile I'm writing for the Book Drum website, where I have already profiled Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So you'll see me carrying one or more of the first four books on the streets of Portland over the coming week . . . .

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pica Patter - David J. Loftus

Many different things will tell you that time is passing and – incidentally -- that you’re getting older.

There are the increasing number of aches and pains when you get up in the morning (and sometimes when you go to bed). There are the sports stars in the news and the parents with strollers that pass you on the street who seem to get younger and younger. Former schoolmates have children that shoot up at high speed and soon give your old friends grandchildren.

One of the more subtle ones is how the meaning or usage of a simple word can alter dramatically through the years.

This occurred to me the other day when I wore my black tee shirt that says “PICA.” In this instance it stands for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. I earned it doing one of those crazy artistic gestures: reading literature aloud on a street corner to passing vehicle and pedestrian traffic. (I spent an hour reading from Don DeLillo’s White Noise on one day and an hour reading from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man on another.)

A 21-year-old friend saw my shirt and blanched. She told me that pica is the term for an eating disorder in which the victim chooses to swallow indigestible materials such as dirt, metal, sand, or wood chips. It was the first time I’d ever heard of it.

I thought back to what pica primarily referred to when I was a teenager. It was a term in typography and layout, back when printers actually laid little metal slugs next to one another, with a letter on the end of each one, to make a plate of print to run off multiple copies of posters and pages. Those days were coming to an end during my childhood.

A pica measured 1/6 of an inch, or the equivalent of a 12-point letter. Point size has actually become a more common concept since the advent of word processing on computers, which enables anyone to choose and reset type sizes on documents they create themselves.

But I graduated from college just before PCs and Macs flooded university campuses. I typed my college papers on manual and electric typewriters. Back then, there were only two principal forms of typewriters: pica and elite. Pica typewriters put ten characters per inch on the page -- most often in that classic old font, Courier, which looks positively dowdy when it comes out of a laser printer. Elite typewriters could fit 12 characters into an inch, and therefore dozens more words on a page.

When it came time to do my undergraduate thesis, the difference became crucial. My department limited students to a total of 60 pages for their theses, end notes and bibliography included. As I got into the writing, I could see I might want to fit in more text than 60 pages of pica type on my typewriter would allow . . . so I borrowed an elite typewriter from a friend to tap out the final draft of my thesis. I'm sure there were other students who probably preferred a pica typewriter because they didn't have as much to say.

All of this would have been so much easier to juggle – margins, font sizes, and everything else – if I had been able to compose on a desktop computer or laptop, but they simply didn’t exist for ready use at universities until a few years later. By then, pica as a typographic unit would have ceased to be an issue . .  . but increasing awareness of anorexia and bulimia had simultaneously raised medical and scientific interest in pica, the eating disorder.

That version of pica has not been subject to much formal research. Researchers think it may be attributable to a mineral deficiency, which the eater tries to make up by consuming materials that contain that mineral. Some scientists believe it might be more of a mental problem -- a form of obsessive-compulsive order. Possibly more as an act of desperation, the condition may occur in more than half of pregnant mothers who live in poverty-stricken African nations.

Being a recovering English major and continuing writer, I mainly wondered how the name came about. Apparently, pica as a term for the disease come from the Latin word for magpie, a bird reputed to eat anything. I don’t know how it evolved as a term for typographical measurement, although it sounds like it relates to the word for “small” in any number of Latin languages.

Anyway, it’s fascinating that the same word can turn up in such divergent applications.

Two Years Before the Cast

[We're back!  Obviously there's been a holdup in new commentaries to this site, and we're still not sure whether the permissions and traffic through the ISP is working out, but once all that is squared away, we can get back to timely remarks about the state of the nation and the world. In the mean time, the piece below is a slightly reworked and expanded version of a note I put on my Facebook page last July 17. . . .]

People who haven’t worked as a stage or film actor tend to have two opposing reactions to the notion of the actor’s life.

On the one hand, actors get to do fun stuff and the work’s gotta be easy -- anybody can act, right? . . . but on the other hand, the average person can’t imagine going through constant auditions and getting rejected, over and over, week after week, month after month.

There’s a bit of truth to both points of view, but a lot of falsehood -- or let us say, inaccuracy -- to them as well.

Two years ago, on July 17, 2009, I lost my job. That morning, with no prior warning, after nearly five years of steady employment in that office, my boss told me he was going to have to lay me off. After several hours of panic, my wife Carole said, you know, you’ve been complaining about how you don’t have your days free to audition for commercial acting jobs. I’ve crunched the numbers, and if you can get unemployment, we might be able to buy you a year to try doing that.

When the practical, managerial member of the team says “why don’t you give that dream a shot?” you’d best get on it. It is now well over two years since I last had a full-time day job, and I have begun to suspect I may not have to look for another.

Between that July 17 and the most recent July 17, by my rough count I went through 130 auditions -- for video commercials, print ad shoots, feature films, musical and dramatic stage productions, staged readings of plays, voiceover jobs for radio or video ads and animated films, even part-time work as a tour guide.

That calculates out to little more than one try-out per week over the course of 104 weeks -- except that Carole and I also took four weeks of vacation outside the country during that time. So perhaps it’s closer to an average of 1.3 auditions per week, although in some weeks I didn’t have any and in others I did three or four -- often two in a single day.

And does it feel like constant rejection? Not really. When you do that many, that regularly, the sting of most of them lessens to almost nothing. It’s not that different from many of the going-through-the-motions tasks you have to do in the typical day job. Most of the time you’re not brooding over the audition you just had, or the job you didn’t get, so much as planning for the next audition or possibly wondering about the results of three or four still out there hanging.

It’s like lying on a bed of nails: when there are so many, they hardly cause the kind of pain you’d feel if you stepped on just one.

And to set up those 130 auditions, I had to pursue at least 279 queries or referrals. I posted multiple emails or made telephone calls in response to Craigslist ads, Internet discussion lists, tips from friends, and even an occasional invitation from a director or producer who knew my work. It required constant hustling.

But if you keep at it and develop good work habits (staying patient and polite, knowing your lines, remembering directors’ comments), you will land projects. During the two years after I lost my day job, I got cast in at least 60 projects, from print shoots and industrial videos to film extra work and voiceovers. I didn’t even do six of them due to scheduling conflicts or because I didn’t like the job or the terms (usually, a small role in a stage show for long hours with little pay). Not all of them paid money, of course, but they all entailed on-the-job acting experience, new networking connections, and often a little food or video footage I could use to market my talents elsewhere.

I did a minimum of 64 shoots in those two years, more than one every other week, from posing as a surgeon at Oregon Health and Science University or a potential Infiniti buyer at a Beaverton, Oregon car dealer to multiple sessions on sets as an evil genetic scientist, a movie producer, an Arab archaeologist, a police detective, an orthodontist.

Can someone make a living at this in Portland? If you’re not also a teacher or freelance acting coach, probably not. And for most of the past two years, I didn’t think I ultimately would be able to survive without a day job. I drew unemployment benefits, I did a little temporary office work, and in the back of my mind I just assumed that sooner or later I’d be looking for another full- or part-time office job.

But Craigslist came through last October with a classic work-at-home, set-your-own-hours freelance writing job that uses all my past journalism, research, editing, and proofreading skills and experience -- and more important, leaves me in control of my days so I can continue to audition for commercial acting jobs and do them when they’re offered. Pending the approval of my client, I may tell you about that in another commentary.

As recently as three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined making it as a freelance writer OR actor, but somehow life has allowed me to put together a combination of both. Perhaps 85 percent of my current income derives from the writing, and the rest from acting and modeling.

None of this would have been workable if Carole and I hadn’t already simplified and slimmed down our lifestyle. We gave up car ownership ten years ago, moved to a 667-square foot urban apartment at the center of town, have no mortgage or consumer debt, and simply live on a lot less than we used to -- all for the freedom and flexibility that lifestyle can offer, and long before either of us knew I might be plunging seriously into acting and modeling.

So what was I doing on the second anniversary of the day I lost my job, which happened to be a Sunday? Why, a commercial video shoot -- the 2011 version of the Web ad for the rollout of the AutoCAD/AutoDesk software for Mac computers which I did for the 2010 version the year before -- of course.

And working on memorizing 3 to 4 pages of script each day for the next week and a half in preparation for another video shoot, scheduled to occur over three days. And over the 10 days until then, an audition for a TV show, a meeting to discuss a junket to a national storytelling festival in Utah next February, a rehearsal for a job doing a lead character’s voice for a film screening, and a video shoot for a proposed Web series.

I think I’m doing okay.

[Photos: at top, the author as Sitting Bull in the current Lakewood Theatre Company production of "Annie Get Your Gun"; at bottom, the author as a technogeek in an architectural firm, in a Web ad for the 2010 rollout of AutoCAD/AutoDesk for Macs -- my first paid commercial job landed through my talent agency, and shot on Aug. 14, 2010. For the entire ad, see it on YouTube.]

Osama is Dead; Now, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming - David Loftus

I’ll try to keep this short.

I don’t think May 1, 2011 was (or will turn out to have been) a historic day for the United States of America.

I don’t believe, after the apparent euphoria subsides, that the death of Osama bin Laden will change much of anything for us, at home or in the world.

I don’t even believe justice has been done, and it raises my hackles to have heard the local news broadcasters repeatedly use that phrase tonight. (Hunting down bin Laden may have been right, for us; it may even have been necessary. But if it didn’t involve due process under some system of laws, U.S. or international, then it was not justice. It was vengeance.)

As for my fellow Americans cheering at baseball fields, in public parks, and in various comments throughout the news feed on my Facebook page, I feel a mild disgust and pity.

Most of the time, I try to be a voice of moderation on this blog. It ain’t necessarily so, is typically my refrain. Step back and take a closer look at what’s being said, what we thought was happening, what you and I were inclined to think at first glance.

And my basic message remains that tonight, but I have to make it stronger because the cheering for the death of bin Laden reminds me of nothing so much as the mindless cheering that greeted President Bush’s wrongheaded announcements that we were going to war in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. I opposed them then, and I have seen nothing since to change my opinion.

The cheering from my fellow citizens tonight suggests to me they’re nowhere near to grasping the larger contexts. International policy is not a playoff series, and neither war nor international police actions should be treated like a football match.

Rather than try to preach at length, I’ll just pose a few questions. Ask yourself if you have an answer for them, or whether you’ve seen anyone else ask – let alone answer – them in recent hours.

·      Did the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ever have anything to do with the hunt for bin Laden?

·      If they did, why are so many people assuming they’ll just go on now, and not stop, the way Obama promised they would?

·      Why have more than 6,000 American servicepeople and 120,000 foreign civilians died early and violent deaths over there?

·      Why didn’t we capture bin Laden long before now? What is it that kept President Bush from getting that job done in eight years of supposedly trying his best?

·      Just how is it that the most wanted terrorist in the world managed to camp out comfortably within the borders of one of our greatest supposed allies for the past five years?

Let me know. In the mean time I'm going back to the warm fuzzy commentaries I have been composing for this blog the past week or two.

The Despicable Critters - David Loftus

It’s been an awful month for horses.

Personally, I am not especially sentimental about equine quadrupeds. Growing up a lower middle class city kid, I was never around one, and I have ridden a horse only twice in my lifetime (both very tame and well-trained critters who probably required no direction from me). I can appreciate their beauty and respect my wife’s more informed opinion that, in personality, horses have a lot in common with dogs.

But I am against needless suffering on the part of any living creatures. And two incidents over the past week and a half illustrate -- through infliction of superfluous, ghastly, and ultimately mortal pain on sweet innocent animals -- the far-too-common hatefulness and murderous inconsideration of our “noble” species.

Yesterday, eight horses (one just a week old and another about to give birth) burned to death in a barn fire in Ohio that authorities believe was deliberately set as an anti-gay hate crime. Last week, six racehorses burned to death on a freeway in Colorado because a passing driver flicked a burning cigarette butt -- inadvertently, one hopes, though that didn't make a difference to the horses -- into their trailer.

In one case, these simple and gentle creatures suffered agonizing deaths because some person or persons indulged his (and you pretty much have to assume the masculine pronoun applies in this case) pig-ignorant fears and insecurities, spray-painted “fags are freaks” and “burn in hell” on the barn walls, and set fire to the interior after walking right past the stalled (which is to say trapped) animals. What better illustration could one have of the inhumanity and despicable irrationality of homophobia? Couldn’t the arsonist(s) at least have let the horses out of their stalls and the barn door first?

In the other, a motorist indulged his or her filthy addiction and unconcern for others by “merely” littering on a federal highway … with the result that, again, innocent and sweet creatures died in massive pain and agony. The only thing worse is when a despairing, indebted, and separated or divorced father takes a gun or a match to his children as well as himself. (And yes, that happened across town this week, too.) I hope the law catches up with the malefactors in both of the horse incidents and somehow makes them see -- really see -- the consequences of their actions.

When a human being behaves abominably, we often automatically call him an "animal," but it's hard to think of an act an animal might commit like these two incidents. Saying an animal was behaving as thoughtlessly and murderously as a human would be the worse insult.

We all make mental calculations about when to abide by laws and when not to -- from littering and walking against the light to driving after a few drinks -- but some “simple and harmless” offenses, it turns out, can have far deadlier effects than others. Better to observe the letter and spirit of the law as best you can, as much as you can.

Measuring Happiness Across the Globe - David Loftus

This week’s news included the results of the latest Gallup Poll of global well-being. As widely reported, the study that supposedly measures how happy various countries are put Denmark on top, and Sweden and Canada just behind. The U.S. came in at a sobering 12th place, behind such possibly surprising contenders as Australia (4th), Finland (5th), Venezuela (6th), and Israel (7th).

Now, I have nothing against the notion that the average person in Denmark or even Venezuela is happier than the average American. I only question the survey here as an exercise in critical thinking -- a devil’s advocate response, as it were. As with any poll, the relevant question to ask is: By what criteria did the pollsters measure what they were looking for? I wondered whether average income, state of the local economy, aspects of the education system, or the activity of the entertainment industries in these various nations factored in.

It turns out this is just self-reporting by a mass of individuals across 124 countries. People from Ireland to Burkina Faso, 1,000 in each nation, were asked in person or by telephone to rate their own lives today, and what they expected it to be five years from now, on a scale of 1 to 10. If they decided they had at least a 7 today and an 8 in the future, the survey termed them “thriving”; lower numbers could be “struggling” or “suffering.”

That’s all. The best discussion of the results I’ve run across was by Miami Herald columnist Frida Ghitis. She noted that while wealth, democratic government, warm and sunny weather, religion, and peace and security all tend to correlate with happiness among individuals, these variables often appear to work at cross-purposes on a national level. For instance, many Latin American countries (not very wealthy, and often sporting high rates of crime) rated high in satisfaction. So, too, did the United Arab Emirates and Qatar (highly undemocratic, but very wealthy and inclined to shower their largesse on their tiny populations). China is surging out of poverty but only 12 percent surveyed qualified as “thriving.” (Less surprisingly, restless Egypt and Libya reported 12 percent and 14 percent, respectively.)

For the record, here are the top and bottom 10s:

Countries where the most citizens reported to be “thriving”

1. Denmark (72%)

2. Sweden (69%)

3. Canada (69%)

4. Australia (65%)

5. Finland (64%)

6. Venezuela (64%)

7. Israel (63%)

8. New Zealand (63%)

9. Netherlands (62%)

10. Ireland (62%)

[ 12.  U.S.A.  (59%) ]

Bottom 10: Countries where the fewest citizens reported to be “thriving”

Chad (1%)
Central African Republic (2%)
Haiti (2%)
Burkina Faso (2%)
Cambodia (3%)
Niger (3%)
Tajikistan (3%)
Tanzania (4%)
Mali (4%)
Comoros (4%)

If you want to see the entire Gallup Poll list, go here.


What it comes down to is self-perception, and how each individual, each collection of people, assesses what makes them happy. Americans take their peace, security, and democracy for granted, and tend to obsess about the wealth they haven’t yet gotten, or the things they feel they’ve lost, such as community, or investment value.

I suspect much of what influences these self-perceptions across the planet relates to the general messages that viewers in each country pick up from their news media and entertainment. Go almost anywhere else in the world, and you’ll encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of people who want to come to the U.S., because they see wealth, health, beauty, and clean streets and homes in the movies and television programs we export to them. When we watch the very same programs here, we focus on the crimes, violence, duplicity, and fear in the shows (and in the news stories).

Religion, sunlight, music, and other things may inspire South Americans to overlook their poverty and crime. What surprises me is that so many Central and West African countries saw themselves at the bottom: Chad (the worst), Central African Republic (2nd worst), Burkina Faso (4th), Mali (9th). I’ve been to Mali, and though it is indeed one of the poorest nations in the world, the people seemed very full of life and happy. Maybe television and movies have shown them a lot more of what the rest of the world has, and they lack.

If there were some objective way to measure general happiness from country to country, I’m sure the results would look very different from this (or any other) year’s Gallup Poll. Maybe the U.S. would rate much higher, maybe it would lower. But I can guarantee you that how we view ourselves (or how any other nation’s people see their own situation) is far from an accurate, truthful, or objective assessment.

Invasion of the Wee Beasties (with help from inconsiderate carriers): a few thoughts about germs - David Loftus

The past week’s news of a germs study which suggests we get exposed to bacteria and viruses from places we might not have thought of -- like ATMs and TV remote controls -- shows that technology has brought us closer together in unhealthy ways while maintaining our innocence of the fact. (I’ve provided a lot of links below, but I wasn’t able to find this particular news story on a Web search of either the local newspaper’s site or Google News. But I know I read it in my local daily in the last few days.)

We have all witnessed the ease with which strangers can turn abusive and obscene on the Internet -- in public comments and on discussion lists -- because they can’t see their audience and their “listeners” can’t frown on them in person or pummel them physically. Now, a recent study indicates that fecal matter, E. coli, and other nasty critters hang out in considerable numbers on ATM buttons, remotes, and other locations and implements -- another gift from unseen strangers. News stories in recent years have found similar mother lodes of germs on the handles of grocery carts and inside musical instruments.

Most of it goes back to hand washing: too many people simply don’t do it regularly, or at all. I’ve seen this myself. Every time I go to a public men’s room, I observe that roughly a third to a half of the other males don’t wash their hands at all, and some engage only in the curious non-disinfecting exercise of dipping their hands under running water for a moment without using any soap … as if hand washing were a public ritual that does no good at all but people feel they have to at least pay it lip service, so to speak. I commented on this on my Facebook page in late December and got a relative firestorm of 23 comments in a day and a half. (One friend who did not comment asked me in person later, half-seriously, not to write about such things, it had so unnerved her.)

I was like everyone else when I was younger. I didn’t wash my hands at all, because I didn’t regard my private parts as particularly dirty, or I did my bathroom business without touching them. But it’s not really so much about twiddly bits and creases on one’s person; it’s that you pass through a physical space where hundreds of other people have tarried, some of whom carry disease and touch the seats, fixtures, and handles with their germy fingers. Plus, microscopic bits of human waste are floating in the air, ready to attach themselves to you: if you can smell ’em, they’re there.

After too many winters of catching whatever cold or ’flu virus everyone else has, and too many occasions on which I and/or my wife got sick after taking an air flight because we spent hours in a metal tube with hundreds of other folks -- some of whom inevitably carried germs, I’ve become more sensitive about other people’s contagiousness. Since I don’t drive, in the isolated and familiar environment of a private vehicle, every day I hear strangers coughing, sneezing, and sniffling on buses, light-rail trains, and streetcars … and I know some of them are coughing into their hands and then grabbing poles, seat backs, and hanging straps. It’s not a pleasant thought. More and more, I keep my gloves on or lean against a wall -- even balance without any support while the train rolls -- so I don’t have to touch any surfaces on mass transit.

Have I sufficiently depressed and demoralized you yet? Some further thoughts: The “five-second rule” of dropped food is no good. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is growing. (Maybe the human race could still be wiped out by a plague instead of nuclear war or global warming.) And hands-free faucets may spread more germs than taps you turn on and off with your hands!

On the other hand, we don’t build up germ resistance in our systems without regular exposure to wee beasties. And as much as 90 percent of the cells in our bodies are in fact bacteria, good as well as bad. So there is such a thing as being too careful. (Not to mention paranoid.)

Cannibalism or Homosexuality? Whattaya Asking Me For? - David Loftus

Several nights ago I found myself in a conversation of the sort one usually has at a bar in college or in one’s twenties. I’m not that young anymore and most of the time I only go to bars with my wife, so I don’t often run into this sort of thing these days. But a little bar-hopping comes with my work: as an actor, it’s useful to schmooze and network in order to find out what projects are developing in town, and to remind people I’m active and available. And there tend to be a lot more actors and filmmakers in their 20s and 30s at these events than in my age group.

A guy I know slightly pulled a friend and me over from our conversation to ask us a question his circle had been discussing: Would you sooner experiment with homosexuality or cannibalism? My friend—a young woman—unhesitatingly responded homosexuality. The questioner turned to the rest and said, you see? I gather he was arguing either that females are more open to bisexual experiences or they’re more squeamish about the notion of eating human flesh, while (young, hetero) males tend to be more nervous about homosexual contact … to an extent that they’re more likely to consider eating human flesh as an alternative.

I told them I was not particularly bothered by either. For political or eco-ethical reasons I’ve pretty much given up eating meat aside from fish and shellfish, but in the past I’ve eaten beef tongue and heart, rabbit, steak tartare, LOTS of raw oysters, gazelle meat, and other exotic flesh. So long as no laws had been broken in the procurement and preparation, I wouldn’t necessarily balk at eating cat, dog, or human. (On the other hand, human dignity and civil rights are essential parts of the equation: When one of those “Bodies” exhibitions came to town, featuring actual human figures preserved by rubberization processes after donation by the Chinese government, which could not satisfactorily verify their provenance—prior permission given? deceased with no family? executed prisoners?—I deliberately chose not to attend … despite, and even because of, intense curiosity.)

As for homosexual contact, I can remember the notion bothering me a lot more—in a sense, it was unimaginable—when I was younger, but much of that concern faded steadily away after I was 30 and 40 … ironically, during the period it became less likely ever to happen because I’m happily married. In any case, I found the premise of “experimentation” rather stupid. Either I’d feel like doing it, or I wouldn’t.

The discussion brought back to me a couple of notices I’d read in the Hollywood press over the years. I should say up front that I’m recalling these from memory and I can’t verify their accuracy absolutely; they’re small enough that they might not even be recorded anywhere on the Internet, but the names and the basic scenarios have stayed in my memory.

I remember reading that Will Smith was reported as having considered a script which called for him to kiss another man. Worried about what to do, he had gone to Denzel Washington for advice and Washington, as I recall, told Smith in no uncertain terms to turn down the role—it could adversely affect his image. I felt ashamed of both of them, as actors and as men: afraid to step on a bridge that Michael York had easily crossed back in 1972 with “Cabaret.”

In contrast, an interviewer once asked Jeremy Irons if he had ever had sex with a man. His response went something like: regrettably, no, he had never had that opportunity. That struck me as a classy way to deal with such parlor-game subjects.