Ask Brad and Janet, they're Republicans, they'll lie

I know, I haven't posted for DC or Norfolk, and it's been weeks. I'm sorry. But if I don't post when I feel the need to, I'll never come back to this blog. I caught very little of  last night's convention, and all of it was unpleasant. The Republicans were, as expected, mean spirited, intellectually dishonest ("drilling will lower gas prices"), and cynically hypocritical ("country first...and now the random governor who happens to lack a Y chromosome for VP"). But what I found most shocking was when Mike Huckabee (I believe, it's not in his script so he must have added it at the last minutes), said something like "I'm sick of hearing Sarah Palin called inexperienced. She got more votes in the election for mayor of Wasilla than Joe Biden got in the whole primary." 

The crowd went wild, which struck me as doubly odd, because it was perhaps the most absurd claim Huckabee has ever made, exceeding even Creationism and Supply-Side Economics. First of all, this is clearly untrue. A cursory search reveals that Biden got well over 60,000 votes in delegate primaries not counting Florida and Michigan, where he got over 17,000 more. By contrast, the city of Wasilla in a census just a year later, was found to have less than 6,000 people, and she received less than 1,000 votes in the election (which still constituted more than 70% of the vote).

Second, the claim that votes somehow equal experience is equally absurd. By that logic, David Cook (guy from American Idol) should be president, since he got some 54 million votes (more than Bush received in 2000).

This disregard for the truth is appropriate, in a way, as the Republicans seem to be the party of willful ignorance. Sarah Palin doesn't "believe" global warming is caused by humans, which is like not believing in Haley's Comet or the moon landing. The same is true with abstinence-only education. If kids don't learn about sex, they won't have sex. As for research that shows it doesn't work that's not important. The good kids won't have sex, statistics be damned.

Many before have observed the double standard that would be applied if the daughter of a democrat did you-know-what (I completely agree with Obama that families are off limits, so will not discuss this again). But the level of attack from Palin was really vicious and mean spirited and, again, hypocritical. You're attacking Obama for being a community organizer? Three public jobs ago Sarah Palin was a beauty queen (or PTA president, if you count that as a job). If this is really about putting country first, she should celebrate Obama's service. The undertone, of course, is that he was serving urban people, not real Americans.

Weekday Vegetarian

In a conversation with my cousin last night, we both decided to be weekday vegetarians. That is to say, we will not eat meat, poultry, fish, etc. from Monday morning until Friday night (but will eat meat at shabbat dinner on Friday nights).

This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, and feel good having committed to doing. In light of my no-flying, it seems a small step, but on the other hand I've always had trouble turning down food. I hope this is successful.

The primary reasoning behind the decision was environmental, but moral and health concerns also factored in to it.

In Manhattan

I arrived in Manhattan on Sunday evening, and took the subway to the Columbia University area in the upper west side. I stayed with a friend from college, Adam Levine, and was able that evening to see some other people I hadn't had the chance to see in some time. In the morning I went to Penn Station where I met my friends from school Seth and Jackie.

Seth and Jackie are moving to Switzerland for a couple of years so I wanted to see them before they go. Right now they're staying with Jackie's parents in Livingston, New Jersey, which is where I visited them. Monday we went back to Livingston and Jackie's dad cooked dinner.

On Tuesday, we went into New York midday and went to the Tenement Museum. However, the museum doesn't have a general exhibit, just some guided tours, and by the time we reached the museum the ones that would finish in time to make dinner and our show were all sold out. Instead we browsed the gift shop then walked around the Lower East Side. We walked around and found Guss' Pickles, an apparently famous pickle place. The pickles were good, and we continued to walk around the area. We also went to a delicious kinish place and had egg creams, and finally to Curry Hill, to a kosher, vegetarian Indian restaurant.


After dinner, we went to Times Square to see Spring Awakening. It was a really great show, and enjoyed seeing it, though I don't feel like I have any especially insightful observations about it, so I'll end the post here.

Cambridge/Cape Cod

I haven't posted since I got to Cambridge, the longest I've gone so far without posting. I think this is in part because I have been in Harvard Square where I lived for four years, and in Cape Cod where I have visited for almost 20 summers (writing that phrase made me feel old). There hasn't been the same sense of discovery, of finding new things.

Dark Knight was a great movie, but I'm shocked that it got a PG-13 rating. The last vestiges of respect I had for the MPAA are gone.

I found out about Pandora Radio, which is pretty cool.

And I had a great time at the Cape. I was really nice to spend time with my grandparents, aunt and uncles, and cousins. I went to a couple of the Cape Cod League baseball games with my grandmother, which are a lot of fun. The players are college students, and there's an old-fashioned, upbeat sense of competition and sportsmanship that feels more like some kind of fictional ideal then what baseball has become.

When the Levees Broke

Wow.

I watched Spike Lee’s four-part documentary about Hurricane Katrina on the train. It is among the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen, and it is absolutely the duty of every American to watch. Lee deals with every major aspect of the disaster (up to the time when it was made, around the first anniversary), but not based on how much coverage it got. “Heckuvah job” and “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” each garnered only a few minutes, while a number of incidents that never made the main stream media were covered in much greater detail.

Buy it. Rent it. Borrow it from me if I’m on my way to see you. However you get a hold of it, see this movie.

On the Train Again

I was scheduled to leave on the MegaBus from Minneapolis to Chicago on Sunday night. However, upon finding the bus stop, we discovered it had the combined sketchiness of an abandoned warehouse, a secluded parking garage, and an isolated underpass. As a result I decided (with the encouragement of my parents) to spend the night in Minneapolis and take the Empire Builder in the morning. I booked the train and the room while we were at dinner, and in the morning, took a cab to the train station. The cabbie drove me to what appeared to be a light rail stop near the stadium and announced, “this is the train station.” I informed he I needed the Amtrak station, and he told me that it was all right, we’d get there in time, but that everyone knew that this was the train station. If he was so sure, he wouldn’t have announced it (in 4 years taking cabs at college, I never had a driver announce a location when we reached it), and if he wasn’t sure, it would have been nice for him to check. If you got into a cab, at a hotel, in New York, and said, “the airport,” I imagine the driver would ask if you were going to JFK or La Guardia. Anyway, I got on the Builder just as it was departing, and it was a scenic, if dull ride. I got to Chicago with a couple of hours to spare, rather than 13, depriving me of the use of the storage lockers that use finger print scanning technology and had (from my informal study) a success rate of somewhere around 40%. Next I boarded the Capitol Limited, and rode from Chicago to Pittsburgh, the City of Brotherly Discord (just kidding, no disrespect to Pittsburg). From there I caught the Pennsylvanian to Philadelphia, and from there I got on the Amtrak regional. In total it’s about as long as the Southwest Chief, though in this case on 4 different trains. In a way, it’s nice to break it up, though it was tough having to get up and change trains at 5:30 in the morning, and made Tuesday a very long day (more than 18 hours). Still, I made it to my friend's apartment near Harvard Square, safe and sound.

What’s been remarkable is not the differences in different legs of the journey but the consistency along the way (although cocktails went up from $5 to $6 somewhere between Chicago and Philadelphia). Though in many ways the Northeast Regional couldn’t be more different than the Empire Builder, there is a distinct feeling of train-i-ness that connects them. There is a comforting inevitability about a train, on a set track, headed for a location, not to be diverted. It’s comforting it what ever more seems like an uncertain world.

In Chicago, we passed alongside a train that had probably 100 large box cars with small holes, which were filled with cars (automobiles) and trucks. I’m used to seeing those on trailers, not trains. On the train to Philadelphia, we pulled aside for a freight train that had, among other things, about a dozen flat cars with truck trailers on them. These seem like things that previously would have simply be transported by truck before the sharp rise in the price of gas. There’s been discussion of increased ridership on the train, and more funding. The snack car attendant on the Pennsylvanian said he was running out of food. And the New York Times printed a great pro-Amtrak editorial.

That's all for now.

Herzl Camp

We arrived at camp during lunch. Herzl, like many camps, does not go on standard time rather than daylight savings time. As I understand it, the purpose of this is to get the kids to bed earlier (they do not want the extra hour of daylight). This can be confusing, though especially when one’s cell phone (roaming) is ones main form of timekeeping, and cannot be set to the “proper” time. We saw Jonathan (my brother), and there was a good deal of hugging all around. Additionally, my parents know about 1/3 of the people at camp, so there were frequent greetings throughout the day.

Once we had gotten settled in, we showered and dressed for Shabbat. On Friday night, it is the tradition of the camp to wear white, which ranges from buttoned-down collared shirts to sleeveless tee shits to sports jerseys. The program (age group) in charge of Shabbat that week gathers in an open space near the chadar (dining hall) at 6:45 for what is known as caravan. The group walks around camp, hand in hand, singing, along the main path, and are joined by each group they pass. They arrive at the central field around the flagpole and the line circles back on itself, forming a huge ring. The lower the flags and sing the national anthems of Canada, the US, and Israel, and then sing a string of other (parody) songs, each prepared by a different program.

After that was a boisterous Kabbalat Shabbat. Since the sky was threatening the service was held indoors. Afterward was dinner, which was the standard fare: matzoh ball soup, chicken, potatoes, and salad. After dinner, there was a song session which, according to my brother, lasted twice as long as it usually lasts. As it turned out, during dinner a huge storm had hit camp, downing a number of trees including one that fell onto a bunk, and taking out power to much of the camp. This caused quite a stir, though there was no serious damage to the cabin (though the girls did sleep elsewhere that night), and most of the campers slept in bunks without power.

Saturday saw morning services in an outdoor sanctuary overlooking the lake (it had dried by then), and was an abbridged but spirited service. Shabbat was fairly quiet, though there was a large Ultimate game between the two oldest groups of campers. At dinner, there was a play called 12 Gates which happens every week, and is a very popular tradition. Afterward was a wonderfully choreographed havdallah put on by my brother's program. They sang "Lo Yisa Goy" and walked in circles carrying candles while dressed in all black or all white. It was very cool.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to walk into a musical? Not a play or a movie, but some sort of real-life situation where everyone broke into song/dance. The closest thing I’ve ever come to that happened when I walked into breakfast on Sunday morning. There was music playing, and about 70% of the people in the large dining hall were on their feet, doing a huge, ecstatic dance along to some very upbeat music. The dance was nothing brilliant, and the dancers far from perfect, but it was more than compensated for by the fact that, expecting to go in and eat, I instead found hundreds of people dancing. Moreover, it seemed completely natural to all involved: those dancing, those eating, and those doing both. What was even more spectacular was about twenty minutes later the whole thing happened again, and it was no less amazing, even when I was (somewhat) expecting it. This seems like a strange diversion from my usual themes, but the very heart of travel writing is the report of the spectacular and hidden. Later my brother told me that the Ozos (essentially councilors in training, the position is highly coveted and a huge amount of work; the word presumably derives from the Hebrew ozair, meaning [to] help) choose a song and do a dance to it, which everyone learns over the course of the summer. This may be the case, but the extent to which I am impressed has not been deminished.