Mad Props-Slutwalk takes over the world!

About a year or so ago, I had the idea that I would write a list (book?) for my hoped-for son on what it is to be a man. I have always felt that there are rules to "manhood" and I was probably hindered in my growth without knowing, in short and simple format, what those rules were.

So, imagine this: I've just had my daughter. One night after watching her and her mother fall asleep, overcome with fierce pride and anxiety for them, I struggle to find words for my desires for them. My beautiful wife and I are already discussing the next one. I have to admit it, I want a son...badly! I was raised in a household full of women and as you may have read before, my Dad and I were it for the representatives of the Y chromosome. My meandering mind takes me to the thought of how to describe to my son the concept of what it means to be a man. To start, I decide to make a list. I have that list right here, so let me refer to it to get this right.

How To Be A Man:

• Rule #1: Protect the weak.

Okay, that's as far as I got. All the other rules seem to refer back to this one. I can think of several moments in my life where I followed this rule, and some where I didn't. But it all comes back to this.
Protect the weak.

Open doors for others. Stand on the outside of the sidewalk. Feed, clothe, house your family. Don't take advantage; of your size, position, or abilities. I could go on, but all of these basics boil down to protecting the weak.

To that end, I want to give a shout out to the organizers of the "Slutwalk" events happening all around the world. If you haven't heard of these events, they were organized after a Toronto police officer gave a speech at a local college, where he advised the female population to not dress provocatively in order to reduce the incident of rape at the college. Another example of "blaming the victim," the officer unleashed a firestorm of feminist disapproval.
Soon, women (and men) all over the world were marching while dressed as "sluts" to remind us that No means No, once again, and that our bodies are our own, and no matter the situation, rape is rape.

I guess growing up surrounded by women has helped me to understand this simple fact that may be hard for most men.

I applaud these women who have decided to take back their identity. As a father of a young woman, I can only hope that as she comes of age this concept has been driven home, and she is free to do what it takes to make herself feel provocative, powerful and pretty, without someone twisting that to take her power. Like I said, my job is to protect the weak, and the best way to do that is to take away their weakness.

Much like the women of slutwalktoronto.com have done.

I salute you. 

Where's Arizona Headed?

Let's start with some things we all know:

1. The United States government is corrupt. Since Nixon, or before, our country has been sold to corporate interests.

2. We've been sold a picture of America which is simply not true. The nuclear family of the 50's doesn't exist and never really did.

3. We all want what is best for our children and in the larger view what is good for America, and her continued existence.

4. Arizona, being a western state, is in better shape as far as infrastructure than those states that were traditionally centers of power in this nation.

Okay, some might argue these sentiments, and they're welcome to. This blog is called "Correct me if I'm wrong..." for a reason. But these are at least my observations and they bring me to the premise of this blog posting. So I'll argue them:

1. Since the Supreme Court released its judgement in the Citizen's United case, the ability of Corporations to influence the political debate in this country has gone unchecked. There may be many examples of this, but the one that sticks in my mind is the fact that Sarah Palin can operate a SuperPAC while still being employed by FOX News. This demonstrates the interweaving of large conglomerate corporate interests with the political interests of powerful individuals. As people donate to SarahPAC, they are probably not aware that she is a paid representative of a media outlet. So because of their ability to inundate public discourse with money, their free speech is more available than my free speech, or even of the free speech of other possible Republican candidates. Thus, the corporation is unfairly able to influence political decisions, and has unequal representation.

2.  Since "Leave it to Beaver," the image of 50's America has been one of homogenous tranquility. All the families were white, and father knew best. The idea of product placement wasn't as pervasive then, but we all knew the best cigarettes to smoke, and that Borax was the best cleaner. An image was created and people have been trying to live up to it ever since. Still, that show was fictional and the real world of the fifties was one of racism, sexism, and political intolerance. Now, we have "Mad Men" and while slightly more honest about the reality of the fifties and sixties, that show still demonstrates a sexy ideal. The story most people share of the real fifties is filled with hard work, acceptance of hard times, and aspirations for better... later.

3. I don't think there is much argument here, except that this argument is used to create an "other" in our nation which would do harm to this ideal. For example, on the right the argument is that the left wants to destroy the future for our kids by taking away freedoms and spending our money; while on the left the argument is that the right wants to destroy our children's future by raping the planet in the search for one more elusive dollar, while ignoring the community responsibility that is education. Neither argument is accurate, and only serves an elite class, both liberal and conservative, that doesn't act at all in the interest of American ideals.

4. On the east coast, whose infrastructure is almost a hundred years older than that of the west, there is a crisis occurring as that infrastructure crumbles around our ears and the civic monies available to rebuild it is gone. The east's ability to develop is seriously hampered by the lack of current grid technologies as well as the extreme cost of maintaining the overdeveloped plumbing and roads. Just repairing old bridges has stymied development as far west as Detroit.

So all of these points can be argued, but I want to use them to develop a premise. An idea for my State, that represents all the possibilities we can take advantage of:

Arizona is poised to lead the nation.

For many who live here, Arizona is viewed as a quiet backwater with clean air and lots of sunshine, where conservative values are realized but remains under threat of immigration and liberalism.

A broad stroke, as Arizona means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but viewed through the lens of my thirty-plus years here, I would say that is the overarching ideal.

Arizona came about at the end of the Civl War, a western outpost for Confederate sentiment. The cowboys that borrowed the Hohokam canals to develop Phoenix were a rag-tag bunch from all over the east braving the desert to create a hard-scrabble existence. The five C's; Cotton, Copper, Cattle, Citrus, and Climate, were the resources these tough people would use to scrape out their place. Of course, this ignores what was here at the time, a forgotten northern outpost for Mexico. These indigenous peoples, the Yaqui, were accommodated then marginalized by the growing metropolis of Phoenix.

Today, we still try to live by these ideals. We consider ourselves to be a rural society, scraping by, as we are the sixth largest city in the nation. We maintain that our five C's are still the most important resources we have even as we destroy them. For instance, Cotton and Citrus fields have largely been paved over as the city grew, and even if they hadn't a global economy has required that those agrarian industries be moved to more undeveloped nations. Copper, at an all time price high, has largely been mined out in Arizona, as the traditional companies which mined the metal have been sold, repackaged and re-sold to prevent bankruptcy after bankruptcy. Cattle is an environmentally needy industry. While diminished in Arizona, the cattle industry still exists but has been shown in study after study to no longer be environmentally sustainable. Effecting lastly, our Climate, which brought out a large number of tuberculosis patients years ago, has sustained vast change as our cities developed and the larger climate of the U.S. changed. What a mild spring we had this year. The irony of our mild spring, wasn't lost on me as I watched the midwest flood, and now burn.  Politically, we consider ourselves to still be the vanguard southerners who developed here a hundred years ago. While subdued by legislation and media, our racist sentiments still pervade and are used against us to generate unsubstantiated fears.

If you froze time and this is where the people of Arizona stood, I think it would be a fair description.

So where do we go next? How do we come to lead the nation?

At every transitional moment there is opportunity. Opportunity for both momentum backwards, or forwards. Arizona, at this transitional moment can dramatically go either way.

First, if we don't take advantage, stay the course, we could fall into the same trap that the rest of the nation is in. Like every State, we are suffering the current downturn. Our strongest industry of the last three decades (not one of the five C's, by the way,) construction has been virtually destroyed by the housing bubble. Only the service industry is continuing to grow in Arizona. Our current investment in education, infrastructure, the arts, etc., is set to maintain this direction. The only housing we'll be building is giant mega-mansions for the wealthy people who own the service companies and cheap, bad quality housing for the underpaid service industry employees. We're poised to ignore our resources to make the environment unacceptable for anyone who would develop our State differently. Republican or Democrat, it doesn't matter. We got here together and it'll take all of us to get away from this future.

The other direction is where we can jump ahead easily and become a driving force in the future of our country.

Because all of our primary industries have taken a hit, we have the opportunity to step back and create a future from whole cloth and go in a direction none of us have seen before. Because we were developed later than the east coast, we don't have the obstructions that they have to future development. Our grid is almost capable of handling our technology driven progress (progress as a nation. I'm not presuming to choose the direction for the State.) The resources of the future, sustainable resources, are Arizona's in premium. They call Florida the Sunshine State, but even they can't argue that the Sun hits here more and harder, and more regularly. Because of Arizona's singular tri-level geography, we also have more wind, and the Colorado is still flowing here. These resources go largely ignored here, but that is slowly changing. We can develop our State as the new energy leader and as the requirements of a technological future require it, we'll be ready to lead.

Politically, we've continued to stymy this innovation. We must abandon our ideal of protectionism of a reality that never existed. With real analysis, those who fear "others" and "outsiders" will realize that they too exist as a part of that population. The abandonment of this non-reality, which is easy to do by the way, will eliminate the ability of fear-mongers to take advantage of us and free us to accept the ideas that can propel us ahead of the nation. As I said, the government is owned. But in reality it is only being borrowed, and we can take it back and create something new and wonderful with it.

Go back an look at the four premises of this article. You will see that essentially, I am arguing that we've been lied to, and because those lies have fallen apart, we have the opportunity to be honest with ourselves and use that honesty to build a future that can save Arizona, and by extension America.

I present this article as an introduction. I hope there is lively debate on this one. I'll be back on this topic in the future. Thanks for slogging through it. If you, Dear Reader, have comments, please put them down. Good or Bad, Love me or Hate me, I'll take it all. If you don't want others to see your comments, of course I can be reached by email: wscotgrey@gmail.com. But, I hope you choose to display these comments. 

Our future can't be decided in vacuum.

A Message For Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to the Dads out there.

This is going to be my second official Father's Day, and the question of what it is to be a good Dad, and the wider question of what it is to be a good man struck me as I discussed my wishes for this Father's Day with my beautiful wife. As a stay-at-home Dad, my idea of a good day would be to have it off from the responsibility of parenting, but then, I'd also like to spend the day with my Dad. Actually, it was while discussing this idea with my father that the larger question of what it means to be a good man came about.

First, a word about my Dad.

You know, you don't get to pick your parents. I'm sure that there are many out there who could easily find fault with their parents. I'm no different. My Dad is no saint.

But, if I had to pick, I wouldn't choose anything different. In the past couple years, as I've raised my own child, I've come to realize the sacrifices that he had to make to live up to the title "Dad." My sister and I were born when my Dad was just a kid. Well, back in the late 60's-early 70's he was of the age expected to behave like a man. On a date, Dad got Mom pregnant and stuck by her. I can't say it was officially a shotgun marriage, but Grandpa made it clear the behavior he expected from his son. Since then, we've heard all about responsibility from Dad, to the point of it being a punch-line in family conversations.

Their marriage was doomed from the start and my sister had the brunt of that. I came six years later. Soon after that they divorced. In what was a very unusual move for the time, my father was granted custody of us. So, in the 70's when the woman was expected to raise the children, Dad took custody of two young children. He could've pretty much walked away, but he didn't. He stuck around. That alone makes him worthy of the title "Dad."

"But wait... there's more!" In the thirty odd years since, Dad has scrimped and saved to give my sister and I what we needed. He went to school, had a career and helped countless people in the process. A saint? No, but definitely worthy of some praise. So here, for Father's Day, Thanks Pop!

By the way, he hates this kind of praise, so if you read this, send me a comment, I'll pass it on to him.

And that leads us to where my father and I were yesterday. As we discussed whether we would hide out from my family for Father's Day (he told me to spend the day with my kid, after all,) the conversation wandered around to what we expect for our kids. The question was raised: "What does it take to be a Dad?"

My Dad is part of the 60's generation, a "Baby Boomer." He still has his hippie ponytail. His father was part of the "Greatest Generation." So, when Dad grew up the pinnacle of the industrial revolution was in full swing. Cars were American, and huge. The people were all white, save for some "negros." Pop came up in a world of clearly defined values which his generation were to ultimately test.

For Grandpa, the rules were simple: To be a man you had a job, which you showed up for whether you liked it or not, and this afforded you a home, where you put your wife and 2.3 kids. The joy of family was enough, and if you had what you needed, maybe a little more (but just a little), you were successful.

For Dad's generation, they tested all of those values. Property wasn't necessary, communes were popular. Finding your place required deeper questions: To be a man, your values, more than that of societies, were what you needed to relay to your children. A job was important, but it should be something you were drawn to. What a home was took on vague rules, and multiple families (think "Brady Bunch".) The world was bigger, and they were seduced by its grandeur ( I'm talking in generalities, my Dad never had much money to be seduced with.) As the country reached the limits of its growth, the idea of consumption to create growth was introduced rather than create a new metric. So for many success came to mean having more than the next guy.

So here's my generation. I'm a Gen-X'er, but barely. I grew up in a time when consuming more reached epidemic proportions. The News became a commercial. Advertising reached into every nook and cranny of society. Every conversation became a sale. Now, we're constantly selling ourselves to others so that we have something to buy the next "thing" with. If you really think about it, what is a blog, but an opportunity to sell yourself to the world? My favorite blogs all have something for sale on them. Buy, buy, buy!

So I ask myself, what is a man today? To be a man today can have many meanings, but the one using the measurements of our forefathers goes like this: A man makes enough money (notice the job loses its importance here,) to provide his family(which he'll put off until he reaches this goal,) with a SAFE home, usually in a gated community, and the best schools for your kids (if you have any, putting off family isn't easy genetically,) and all the things to keep those kids entertained so that they don't ask to go outside, where it is no longer safe (even in the gated community.) He drives the most luxurious car he can afford, because the safest gated communities are miles and miles away from the places where business happens (those places were built by Grandpa's generation, and would be difficult to move.) He considers himself conservative because he goes to church, but he spends until he owes more than twice what his stuff was worth, and he does this gladly, because he wants the stuff that the guy who gave him the credit to do that has (I know, confusing right?) And his church feels safe to him because the whole place is a sales pitch, and that he understands because he has grown up with that.

So what are the fundamentals for me as a Dad? For Grandpa, I have the home. For Dad, I do the work that I want, and I pass on the most important ideals to my child.

All the while, I want more.

Man, do I want more. I fantasize about winning lotteries, coming up with FaceBook sized ideas, etc. I think more about success and the trappings of success than I do of how to get there. And I'm no different than most men my age. But I have lost the concept of just how successful I really am.

My beautiful wife said to me the other day that she was fully content and happy with our life together. While I was proud of the accomplishment, I was surprised. I had to admit that I am never satisfied. There is always something more that I feel I should be achieving.

So what do I teach my daughter this Father's Day?

I guess the most important thing to teach her is that I'm here and I'm trying. Again, when I think back to the reasons why my Dad is the one I'd pick if I had the choice, just showing up was the most important thing. So, ultimately, Pops had it right once again. He told me to spend this Father's Day with my family. In this confusing time, just be there, and always be there.

That's the real definition: To be a man, just show up, always.

Happy Father's Day!

Arizonans act the A$$ at the Cake Concert

This friday, my lovely wife's birthday, we went and saw the band Cake at the Mesa Amphitheater.

Calexico opened and showed unusual refinement. They layered their rhythms beautifully. Their mix of modern rock and traditional latin melodies created an easygoing air as the desert sun set. Try as they might however, Calexico seemed unable to create a lot of energy. Their rhythms were a little too mellow for this large a venue, especially as an opening act. Still, Mad Props. They are a good band. People should see them.

In between Calexico and Cake, there was a statement from an immigrant rights organization (I can't remember their name, I was distracted.) Bravely, their representative took the stage by herself, and gave a short (probably less than two minute) speech about voting and how important the latin vote is going to be in the next election.

With their standard boorish behavior, some Arizonans decided at the word "immigrant", to yell ridiculous comments at the woman. Statements like,"I didn't pay to hear no speech," or "If you don't like Arizona's policy, go back to Mexico!" As I looked around at comments that seemed all too common at a progressive rock band's concert, I wanted to shout those people down. I wanted to, and I am no coward, but I am also no idiot. There were a lot of these  bigoted opinions floating around. So instead I shouted at the representative too. I yelled, as she was reminding us to go vote, "Hell No! We don't vote in Arizona, and No One is Going to Make Us!" Of course I was being patronizing, but before they realized it, I was getting approving nods from those nimrods closest to me. I photographed them as they moved away a moment later.

After a longer speech by the local radio station that was promoting the concert, which drew no boos or catcalls, Cake was ready to perform.

I have to say, I love the new album, and unsolicited, I'll promote it. The music is different from their previous albums, but still has the distinctive sound that makes their sound so much fun to groove to. I understand that this is their first self-produced album, after their first non-studio album. And in addition to being a more group effort (the whole band was involved in the writing process, something that wasn't typical for their previous albums), this album was created in their all-solar-powered studio in Sacramento.

So, in addition to making an album as carbon-neutral as possible, and doing so as a collective, and trying to promote attention to various social causes (they gave away a tree at the show), Cake has produced an exciting addition to their already substantial catalog.

Oh, and it was a great show too. Simple in effects, but strong on performance. And since it was the music we came to hear, a show strong on sound was spot on. Kudos to the band, and on behalf of my fellow Zonies: We don't mean to be so backward, we're just a little sun-spotted.

If you're interested in seeing a great band, or learning about them check out their website at: http://www.cakemusic.com/ In addition to being able to follow their tour, and hear their music, you'll be able to ask advice, or read advice they gave others. It's an entertaining visit.

Thanks again to Cake for stopping by the Valley. I know my wife loved the show, and it was a great birthday. She just wishes they'd have played "Stickshifts and Safetybelts". It's our song.

Disappointing Politics

You can hear in the background the Queen song, "Another One Bites The Dust," dah-dah-bump-bump-bump.

The sharks are in the water after Anthony Weiner and his ridiculous penis tweets. When will politicians learn that once you hold a press conference, your private life is pretty much gone. Especially now, with big brother not being some nameless government organization, but a nameless mass of people bouncing info off each other. Weiner should have been especially careful, since he is the liberal attack dog in Congress, his target is bigger than most. When the Republicans have an organized and well funded attack structure that has taken down such liberal institutions as NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and with such simple tactics as creatively edited video, it behooves every liberal politician to be alert. When will they learn?

Still, my biggest disappointment isn't that Weiner isn't smart enough to avoid weiner jokes. After years of watching the political landscape I've come to expect them all to fall. If it isn't money it'll be sex. Or like John Edwards, money and sex. Scrutinize them long and hard enough and eventually they all fall. The bastion of conservative politics, Ronald Reagan, at least let the Iran-Contra deal happen, if he wasn't involved directly, and the icon of New England liberal policy, Ted Kennedy, drowned a girl once.

No, the disappointment comes from what I considered to be the last best hope for honest journalism, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Considering that Stewart and Weiner are friends, I expected a strong response from The Daily Show, when after a week of defending Weiner,  the truth about the penis pics finally came out. Instead there was tepid comedy that didn't reflect the betrayal that Stewart must have felt. When even The Daily Show can't retract a week of reports that defend their liberal standard, it becomes clear once again that whether liberal or conservative, all reports are biased. I had given up on mainstream journalists. First TV reporters and then print journalists failed to be unflinchingly honest. It could be that since Don Bolles got blown up, and the pay started to disappear, that the idea of leaving the building for something other than going two blocks for a press conference, or up on the roof for the weather report, became more than it was worth. As conglomerates come to monopolize the media, I weep for my daughter. Her options for responsible journalism are nil. And my last hope, a comedy show, has blinked in the face of scandal. It is all too bad.

Update: After returning home and watching Jon Stewart on yesterdays Daily Show cut himself trying to make fun of Anthony Weiner, I am sated. I still feel he is not demonstrated the full impact of his friend's betrayal, but at least he's trying. Maybe there is hope yet!