The Conscience of a Liberal

What moves the September 15 anti-war march off the top spot in My Back Pages?

Only Paul Krugman's new blog at the Times, "The Conscience of a Liberal." On September 18, apparently, Krugman's occasional responses to his readers blossomed into a full-fledged blog.

Krugman's Times opinion pieces are a pleasure to read. Smart, progressive, and so well written. It's stuff you just don't see in the mainstream media. His first blog entry contains a helpful graph of income disparity in America since the early part of the 20th Century, along with an explanation of that disparity's political sources.

It's the kind of stuff my friend Steve Novick knows so well. In fact, I would say Steve, who is running for the U.S. Senate from Oregon, easily knows as much about economic policy as Krugman, high praise but it's no exaggeration. When I saw Krugman's chart, and read his initial blog entry, my first thought was that, thanks to Novick, I already knew what Krugman was talking about.

I guess what I'm saying is this: Oregon voters are the luckiest, because they get to elect Paul Krugman to the U.S. Senate in '08, by voting for Steve Novick.

Washington, D.C., September 15, 2007

We stood in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, and mingled with the anti-war protesters gearing up to march. You couldn't imagine a more diverse crowd. Old, young, clean-cut, ragged out, dressed up, dressed down, white, black, brown, you name it. They dressed like hippies, like soldiers, like tourists, like death.

And they seemed to represent every cause imaginable. Ten minutes after listening to a speaker lament the occupation of Palestine I ran into a friend who works for AIPAC. Veterans back from the war stood near the wingnut with the megaphone ranting about government ID implants in newborns. In a lot of ways, it was like an outdoor rock festival, just without the rock bands.

Down Pennsylvania Avenue, along a two block stretch, a much smaller crowd had gathered. I would put them all between 40 and 55, white, clean-cut, in pressed shirts, shorts, and tennis shoes. All dressed the same, all of them intensely angry. As the march passed by they shouted at the protesters, calling them out as individuals and hurling insults at them. They called the men cowards and the women Iraqi whores. I have never been near an angry mob. It's a scary experience.

I took this photo after the marchers had passed by their vicious counterparts, and things had relaxed a little. Maybe you can see, in the faces of the people behind the banner, the jubilation, optimism and peace that carried the day.

Sheesh . . .

If you want to be reminded that, despite everything, we are still in the infancy of the internet age, try modifying your Blogger blog to allow expandable posts that jump to the full text on a key word such as "continued . . .", so that readers fascinated by, say, the intricacies of street parking in Washington, D.C., can read all about it on a separate page, but those with less interest in the subject (freelance photojournalists in Bavaria, perhaps, to take one hypothetical example) can read the first few paragraphs, decide they are not interested, and be on their way to the post about my virtual heartthrob Vienna Teng.

I tried to make this change today because, you know, I try to be accomodating here. It's the least I can do.

I thought it would be a simple thing to fix, but soon I was down the rabbit hole, in a land of help pages and HTML code as frightening and inscrutable as any episode of H.R. Puffenstuff. There weren't any talking flutes, but it was almost as terrifying.

(Maybe this will reveal my Luddite tendencies, but the blogs devoted to computer code are at least amusing. In the main post, Code Wizard will say something like, "I've developed a fix to create expandable posts on Blogger, using CSS style sheets to modify the Beta layouts version," (at which point I'm already lost) and then, in the comments, Bat Girl will say, "Great, Wiz! But have you tried using a recursive betaflecker, to make the fix optional on each data post entry?" And then will follow about 150 comments that seem to reflect an intelligent, thoughtful, problem-solving discussion that would be helpful if I could understand any of it. I would laugh if the writing on these blogs wasn't so concise, and the comments so admirably to the point. It's like listening to brain surgeons. You might think it's funny they're speaking nonsense, but you can't laugh because, well, these are brain surgeons. Another thing: You never see posts on computer code blogs veer off into tangents and personal attacks, like they so quickly do on the political blogs. Make of this what you will.)

Anyway, you would also think it would be easy to explain how to make an expandable post on Blogger. I can get to the HMTL template of my blog and make changes to it. I actually know what a style sheet is. All that I need is a simple "find this code, add this, now find this code, now add this, boom, voila" type of thing.

I finally found a page that took this approach, on a blog titled, ominously, "Make Money on Your Blog." But the person who wrote the helpful instructions also wrote, as a conclusion: "This will direct people to your page and make money for your blog." I don't believe this, and it's not exactly why I wanted to break up the posts on my blog. And doesn't this last line sort of destroy the author's credibility? Because how could someone so misguided about the reason for making an expandable post be a reliable source?

But whatever. I made the change, and it worked. The problem was that the fix, which is apparently the standard fix on the Blogger site, puts the tag ("continued . . ." or, if you don't modify it yourself, the embarrassingly enthusiastic "Read more!") at the bottom of every single post.

Meaning that you, my readers (all four of you), would be led to believe that my one line posts directing you to my latest self-absorbed Nervous Breakdown essay were just teasers when, in fact, no, those posts are only one line long. This is not what we need, since I'm embarrassed enough to be writing those essays and directing people to them from here. Tricking you into twice reading my one-line post directing you to the essay I've written about MYSELF -- well, that's where I draw the line. Yes, I've drawn the line pretty far down the field, but still, that's where the line is for me.

This expandable post thing on Blogger must be a common problem, by the way. It would explain why you can find about 500 web pages devoted to the subject, and why Eric Spitznagel's posts on his blog, for example, are never broken up with jumps marked by key words.

The short of it is, I gave up. Until I figure this out, you'll just have to read every word of every post, or do a lot of scrolling down through material about street parking in D.C. and the frustrations of working with Bogger to get to the pocket book reviews and Vienna Teng videos.

By the way, this was meant to be a post comparing Gore Vidal's memoir "Palimpsest' to "The Education of Henry Adams" and reflecting, wistfully, perhaps, on the genre of detached comic memoirs of alienated children born into wealth and privilege.

Hopefully I'll get to that later today . . .

The Parking Gods Always Provide

It's an axiom of urban living that everything works fairly well, even if you have no idea how it will. Or maybe I just lead a sometime-charmed life.

Take, for example, my current parking situation.

When I moved back to D.C. last spring I rented a studio apartment in a building with a parking garage. Last fall I found a bigger place to move into. It was perfect, except that it had no dedicated parking space. I had no idea about the street parking situation -- I knew I would need a residential parking permit, but I didn't know whether street parking would be easy, or even possible -- but I took the new place without investigating the situation. I trusted urban fate, figuring the parking would somehow work out.

The first thing I discovered was that, except for a few hours on late Friday and Saturday nights, street parking in my neighborhood is abundant. This was a shock. I live in D.C.'s U Street neighborhood, one of the places everyone in D.C. goes to party, even George Stephanopoulos. I expected the parking to be competitive (hordes of women abandoning their cars in the street, running after Mr. Stephanopoulos, trampling everything in their path, casually using up all the available parking in the process), but generally, at any given time of day, there are vast open spaces on every block. Unless it is late Friday or Saturday night, you can park wherever you want.

The second thing I discovered was D.C.'s street cleaning program, something new since I last lived here. Once a week each block gets swept by a street cleaner, and never are both sides of a street swept on the same day. This means once a week you must move your car for the street sweeper. Sometimes you have to move your car twice. If you parked along a curb swept on Tuesdays, for example, and on Monday you move your car across the street, you've likely moved it to a curb that will be swept on Wednesday, which means that on Tuesday night (or early Wednesday morning) you must move your car back to where it was Monday.

You get the idea. It's basically a fancy way of freeing up parking spaces by making everyone move their car every week. It's probably why there's so much parking in my neighborhood, for those with permission to park here. But it is a mild pain in the neck, and a burden for absent-minded people like myself.

I should say, for the record, that my friend Doug thinks there are no actual street sweepers, and it's true I have never seen one.

Anyway, I also learned that if you forget to move your car the city doesn't actually tow it. Another shock. When I went to law school in upstate New York, you had to move your car across the street once a week and if you forgot, you had to take the bus out to the remote fenced-in lot with the attack dog that charged the fence and tried to kill you, and the huge bald guy with tattoos, who sort of resembled the dog, now that I think about it, and who mightily restrained the dog while he accepted your cashier's check for $100 and returned your car. I wanted to tell the huge guy with the murderous dog that this whole move-your-car-or-get-towed-and-pay-$100-to-get-your-car-back thing seemed like a giant state-sponsored scam, but I thought better of it.

But in D.C. they slide a $30 ticket under your wiper and call it good. Which ticket, you can pay on-line.

Civilized, right?

I was relieved to discover this, because I had looked into renting a space in a garage. Not only are there no garages in my neighborhood, but the monthly fee was several hundred dollars, much more than the $120 monthly cost if I ignored the street sweeping signs completely and let my car collect weekly $30 tickets (although presumably at some point even the D.C. government's patience would be exhausted and they would tow it, but I am not so absent-minded as to let that happen and anyway I digress).

Stick with me, dear reader, for I am about to make my most magical discovery about parking in my neighborhood. It turned out that I didn't need to park on the street at all, because on the other alley on my block (my block has two alleys, one on either side of the historic theater that fronts U Street) there is an apron of asphalt against the wall of the fancy new condo building that, I discovered, unknown to anyone, was owned by the city. Just that small patch. Because it had no signage, you could park there without fear. The city couldn't tow you, or issue a ticket, because parking there had never been prohibited. And the condo building couldn't move your car because they didn't own the land.

For months after this discovery I had luxury parking in one of D.C.'s most popular neighborhoods, a secret space in an alley on my block that no one else (it seemed) knew about.

Of course it didn't last. Too soon after I discovered the secret parking on my block, it disappeared. The chili dog stand next to the historic theater put up signs, threatening to tow anyone that didn't obtain a permit from them. No more secret free parking.

But then another magical thing happened. I discovered a nearby block (I'm not saying where) along which the street sweeping signs have disappeared. Probably because there are no signs anymore, on this magical block the D.C. police don't ticket cars during street sweeping days. It can be difficult, but if you find a space you can leave your car there forever and not get a ticket. I tried it during my recent 2 1/2 week vacation. Sure enough, when I came back, my car was right where I left it, no tickets fluttering under the front wiper.

I guess the other rule of urban living is that nothing lasts. Soon, I'm sure, signs will appear along the magic parking block and my secret no-hassle long-term parking will disappear.

But by then I'll have figured something out, even if it's only how to remind myself to move my car on street sweeping days.

Kapuscinski's Legacy

On cue, as if the splashes in this blog had made a ripple in the world, the editors of Tin House have published dueling essays about Ryszard Kapuscinski in their current issue.

Steve Almond, lined up to defend our intrepid Polish foreign correspondent, doesn't dispute the errors in Kapuscinski's reporting. Instead, he celebrates Kaupscinski's dedication to the noble mission of increasing the West's understanding of Africa. Fair enough.

Binyavanga Wainaina makes a narrower, and to my mind stronger, point. He first notes Kapuscinski's ability to turn out brilliant work. In "Another Day of Life," comprised of early Kapuscinski reportage from Angola, Kapuscinski is "a writer of profound and careful wonder."

But then Wainaina reads "The Emperor," about Ethiopian dictator Haile Selassie, and it all goes downhill. "The Emperor" is filled with factual errors, the most notable being Kapuscinski's description of a Selassie aide whose job is to wipe the pee from the dictator's dog off the shoes of visiting dignataries. In fact, Selassie treated his guests with respect, and would not have let his dog degrade them. So, what are to make of a writer who, apparently deliberately, gets this wrong?

There are other mistakes, if you can call them that. Kapuscinski says Selassie was "no reader" when in fact he studied the Ethiopian and Western canons and held a profound esteem for reading and learning. Kapuscinski says he never signed anything when the opposite is true. Wainaina demonstrates that Kapuscinski has given the reader a caricature of Selassie, the African Dictator Stereotype in place of the real and more complex person. Wainaina argues that "Shadow of the Sun" is similarly beset by cliches about Africa and its people and it is hard, in the end, not to wonder how much a simplistic and inaccurate impression of Africa adds to our understanding.

Almond and Wainaina both tacitly acknowledge the power of Kapuscinski's writing. Whether he was nailing it in "Another Day of Life," or phoning it in in "The Emperor," the man could write. Kapuscinki's writing is always spare and beautiful, devoid of sentiment, full of grace and power, and it casts a spell. I read "Shadow of the Sun" mesmerized by that spell. It's interesting to note the power of good writing to seduce the reader.

The question that comes to my mind is, "What was Kapuscinski thinking"? Granting that he got so many fundamental facts about Africa -- his life's subject -- wrong in "The Emporer" and "Shadow of the Sun," the natural question is, What was going on upstairs?

Wainaina says Kapuscinski's mistakes reveal his state of mind. He suggests that Kapuscinski may have believed the cliched myths he propogated about the African rulers he profiled. Wainaina describes the idealistic rulers of African nations who, in the 80's and 90's, "self-orientalized" and came to "believe their own bullshit completely." (I'm paraphrasing slightly). "Their parliaments and other institutions that regulated them let them get away with murder," Wainaina says, "by mindlessly validating not just the good they did, but everything they did."

The implication is that the Kapuscinski of "Shadow of the Sun" is one of these enablers, a writer whose critical days are behind him and who is only calling in the company line.

I'd like to know. I wish it weren't too late to sit down with the old man, read him one of the passages that Wainaina quotes, and ask him what he thought. Was history in Africa really, as he said in "Shadow of the Sun," "free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data"? Had history really achieved, in Africa, "its purest, crystalline form -- that of myth"?