Ugly American

When we firmed up our plans to travel to Barcelona several months ago, my goal was to spend a certain amount of time most every day for the past couple of months to learn at least the basic phrases of Spanish or Catalan that could get us around the city, through the airport or metro, in restaurants, walking the streets. That was the aspiration. But of course while I downloaded several basic language programs, I did absolutely nothing to advance my knowledge of the language until a couple of days ago, when I finally learned the following key phrases: No hablo espanol; Habla ingles?; and Donda esta el bano? (there are some accent marks strange to me in those phrases, but they wouldn’t help me in pronunciation). I’m just hoping those three phrases can get me through a week in Spain. But I’ve also read that English is spoken to some extent in many of the tourist areas where we’ll be. So hopefully my three phrases will get us through. At least I’m trying not to be the ugly American I am.

Obama on 60 Minutes

It was refreshing, heartening to watch and listen to President Obama last night on 60 Minutes, speaking intelligently, knowledgeably, seriously, articulately in full sentences and paragraphs about his decision to take out Osama bin Laden in a risky special forces mission. It was, in a word, presidential, and it had to remind all of us who voted for him in November 2008 why we had done so. There have been moments – too many – when I’ve questioned the wisdom of my vote – his caving in on a health care plan that included single payer before the negotiations even began, his fumbling arms-length participation in that debate for most all of 2009, his reversals on Guantanamo, his diddling on “don’t ask, don’t tell,” his weak stimulus program, and his apparent inattention if not indifference to jobs. His ability to speak has consistently been impressive, though we mostly see him in scripted and teleprompted appearances or semi-scripted press conferences. What we saw last night was a lengthy interview that went beyond his speaking ability to reveal much about his thought, his decision-making process, his concerns, his doubts, and most important, his ability to take a military and political risk (55-45, he put it) that I don’t know how many others, particularly his many detractors, would have taken. There’s an obvious comparison that could be made here, probably in a humorous way, between Obama’s performance in both the raid and the interview and our previous president’s performance in attempts at both thought and speaking the English language, but I’ll let it go with this apophatic sentence (you can look it up). But I only hope that this becomes a turning point and that it’s followed in the next 18 months by similarly resolved, risky, and persuasive action, in both foreign and domestic policy. I do so want to vote for him again.

Spring

Our first real late-Spring day, 74° and sunny, only a breeze, first morning walk in shorts and t-shirt, children out playing, dogs barking, doors and windows open, grills cleaned, pork loins on the smoker, eating on the deck, two rose-breasted grosbeaks at the feeder (first time), the sun setting, the promise of summer.

Eye Exam

I had my annual eye exam today, which has for the past few years become an annual reminder of my getting older. Once again, I have a change in prescription, again in my right eye, and again caused by growing cataracts. I’m not real clear (no pun intended; well, maybe a little) on just how cataracts affect focus – does it matter that I do? – but I’ve noticed the past few months having problems reading signs when I’m outside, particularly while driving. And my optometrist explained to me that this was due to the cataracts, and it will only get worse, and at some point I’ll have to have cataract surgery, if not the gouging out of my eyes (I think he was just laying out the options). But the good news of that, he said, is that the surgery would go a long way in correcting my nearsightedness (now some 55 years old). I asked why not just go ahead and cut away now? It’s an option, and some people do it, but my insurance doesn’t cover cataract surgery until it reaches a certain point (even though the surgery is inevitable; inevitable that is if I live long enough, and the insurance company is betting I won’t). I could go ahead and have it done, he said, if I wanted to pay out of pocket, about $5000 per eye. But I think I’ll call the insurance company’s bluff on this one.

War Room Photo

In the infinity of analysis following Sunday’s killing of Osama bin Laden, one thing I find interesting is the interpretation of this now-famous photo of President Obama and his security staff watching in real time the attack on bin Laden’s compound:

Most commented on about this photo is the expression of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, her hand over her mouth – is she about to gasp? cry? barf? The usually more level-headed Joan Walsh describes her in Salon as “beyond anguished; her hand is over her mouth, her eyes red-rimmed.” She describes Obama as “grim” and Biden as “stricken,” the military leaders (I only see one, and he’s looking at his laptop screen) as “granite-faced,” and the civilian leaders “grimacing.” This kind of psychological analysis of photographs is silly at best (and Walsh is not at all the only one), particularly the attempt to ascribe different thought or demeanor to each of the individuals. To me, the most that can be said is that everyone in that room is (thankfully for us all) serious, grim, focused. I certainly don’t see Clinton as “beyond anguished.” Her posture, her hand over her mouth, is much like mine in any number of department meetings over the years where little more than the distribution of travel money or the recycling of paper is at issue, not the killing of the world’s #1 terrorist. And maybe my computer doesn’t have the resolution of Walsh’s, but I can’t at all make out her “red-rimmed” eyes (any more than Robert Gates’ on her left (arms crossed in anguish?)). This projection of one’s own desires and biases as interpretation is much too common in today’s media. The cliché that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is just that, a cliché. Sometimes – maybe most often – a picture is just a picture. And any words can only distort it.

Cooking Asian

One of the literary pleasures of cooking Asian foods is reading the packages of the ingredients. Tonight I fixed a Mu Shoo Vegetable dish with rice noodles (Sinbo Jiang Xi Rice Stick). Here are the simple 3-step instructions for cooking the noodles:

1. Put rice stick in boiling water and cook for 6-8 minutes, stirring occasionally.

OK, that’s pretty straight forward, as long as you’re not looking around for a stick made of rice but realize the reference is to the noodles.

2. Flush rice stick with cold water or tap water for for 1 minutes.

Here it gets more problematic. One might be inclined on first reading to flush the rice stick (noodles) down the toilet, but one has to interpret “flush” as “rinse,” or the whole dish is lost. But there are still questions: What’s the difference between “cold water” and “tap water”? Does the “cold water” have to be bottled? Or from a mountain stream? Does the “tap water” have to be tepid, warm, or hot? Or can it be cold as well? And we’ll just assume the “for for” is a typographic tic. But what does “1 minutes” mean? Could it be another typo? – “1 minute”? or maybe “10 minutes”?

3. Then it can be finally treated rice stick in soup and other different ways. e.g. fried rice stick, cold-dressed rice stick, etc.

Let’s ignore the confusion of the two Latin abbreviations (the writer was probably a marginal graduate from an American community college), but what might “finally treated rice stick” mean? Maybe just “used”? And I can only, using my graduate degree in English literature, deconstruct “fried rice stick” to mean “stir fry” and “cold-dressed rice stick” to mean “salad.”

But then explication is one of the pleasures that Asian cooking affords.

Surviving Belief

I don’t know if I am more humored or saddened when I hear or read survivors of disasters such as last week’s path of horrific tornadoes across the south claim that their lives were spared by God’s answering their prayers:

"We were saying our prayers as it was coming down the street. There was a rumbling and this loud woosh," [University of Alabama student Shaylyndrea Jones] said.

"Sky [Lisa Rice’s 21-year-old daughter] said, `We're going to die.' But, I said, `No, just pray. Just pray, just pray, just pray,'" Lisa Rice said.

"We just started praying," [Shelby] Lester said. "The house was swaying."

Of course we’ll never know how many of the hundreds who died in the storms also prayed right before they were killed – they’re dead. Superstition Religion is a selective source of comfort for believers. Random chance is a much more reliable explanation for how we get through this world.