Not Housebroken

So now that a more (apparently) normal age group has arrived at Lupin for the Western Naturist Gathering, I also notice that an intimacy workshop had been scheduled, and the restaurant had a vegetarian pasta available for $9.95 last night–which sold well.

I can at least hope that the restaurant will henceforth be friendlier to vegetarians, if not vegans, and that organized naturism will take further steps away from the erotophobia expressed by so many.

The age of the group is troubling. It could be argued that younger naturists simply could not take the time away from work in society that increasingly demands more labor for less money. But I am inclined to think that systemic problems within organized naturism remain.

Capitol Hill Blue carries a story that “Army medical examiners were suspicious about the close proximity of the three bullet holes in Pat Tillman’s forehead and tried without success to get authorities to investigate whether the former NFL player’s death amounted to a crime, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. . . . The doctors — whose names were blacked out — said that the bullet holes were so close together that it appeared the Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.” But the Pentagon concluded this was “friendly fire” when there was no enemy action in that place at that time to be confused about. It seems his mother finds this suspicious.

I’m not wild about attention to celebrity soldiers. For every story like this, I wonder how many other stories go unreported and uninvestigated. I sense an injustice. But we can also look to this story as evidence that those other stories might even exist, a possibility unexamined in the media.

An earlier story describes Tillman this way: “Interviews also show a side of Pat Tillman not widely known — a fiercely independent thinker who enlisted, fought and died in service to his country yet was critical of President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq, where he served a tour of duty. He was an avid reader whose interests ranged from history books on World War II and Winston Churchill to works of leftist Noam Chomsky, a favorite author.” This raised the specter that Tillman might have been shot by fellow soldiers for disloyalty.

Today, however, Tillman’s final moments are described this way:

It has been widely reported by the AP and others that Spc. Bryan O’Neal, who was at Tillman’s side as he was killed, told investigators that Tillman was waving his arms shouting “Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat fucking Tillman, damn it!” again and again.

But the latest documents give a different account from a chaplain who debriefed the entire unit days after Tillman was killed.

The chaplain said that O’Neal told him he was hugging the ground at Tillman’s side, “crying out to God, help us. And Tillman says to him, `Would you shut your fucking mouth? God’s not going to help you; you need to do something for yourself, you sniveling …”

This casts Tillman in a rather different light, more like General George Patton berating a “shell-shocked” (that is, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder) soldier. It is hard to imagine someone who views Chomsky as a “favorite author” even enlisting, let alone berating a fellow soldier for cowardice.

There are serious inconsistencies in this story, and I have a hunch that if the truth ever emerges, it won’t be entirely flattering to Corporal Tillman.

The Naturist Society is holding its Western Naturist Gathering at Lupin Lodge today through the weekend. A lot of people are coming and Lupin has raised its price of admission for the event.

It is early, and the group that is here, will by definition be a group more committed to organized naturism than most naturists. But one thing that is striking is the age of these attendees, which, on the whole, appears a bit younger than the usual Lupin crowd.

A recognized problem of organized naturism is that its membership is aging, both in Canada and in the United States.

Membership at Solair for people over forty runs $500 a year. Members under forty pay $300, and college students are charged a $150 fee. In spite of the price concessions for younger members, the average age at the resort is 55. This mature age average was emphasized by Sam Miller, a medical student from Riverside, California, who is 32 years old and a member in a California nude resort. “If a young person is enlightened enough to go to a (nude) beach or resort, they’ll find that they’re outnumbered by people who are not like them. They may go once or twice, but going back becomes a lonesome kind of endeavor”.

One of the arguments I’ve made is that organized naturist rhetoric goes beyond the slogan of “nude is not lewd” to prude, and that prude is inconsistent with body acceptance, leading young adults to conclude, I suspect, that organized naturism charges too much money–typically including several hundred dollar initiation fees for membership–for too much of the same old sexual hypocrisy.

In Northern California, the age difference between attendees at Red Rock Beach, who must be in sufficiently good physical condition to get down (and back up) a steep trail, and even attendees at somewhat-easier-to-access Little Beach (the north end of Muir Beach) with the members at Lupin is striking. Both Red Rock and Little Beaches are in Marin County, a county with the highest number of clothing optional beaches in California. Santa Cruz County has the second highest and is just over the hill from Lupin.

Santa Cruz appeals to a health-conscious and progressive market, as can be seen downtown, where a theater was among the first to show Michael Moore‘s Sicko, and Bookshop Santa Cruz prominently features a “Bush Countdown Clock.” Organic and sweatshop-free clothing stores can be found here, along with an independent organic grocery. Kiva Retreat House is located nearby, offering “a gathering place for people to come and reclaim their natural self,” including hot tubs, a sauna, cold plunge, and massage. Santa Cruz also features an extraordinary number of alternative medicine practitioners.

Lupin, located near Silicon Valley, then known as Lupin Naturist Club, took a hit in membership beginning with the dot-com collapse. An unwise choice of manager caused membership to plummet. Since evicting this manager last year, Lupin membership has rebounded somewhat, but the membership is, on the whole, old enough to raise serious questions about the club’s long-term viability. The club has done little to appeal to its market just over the hill in Santa Cruz and has been reluctant to improve restaurant offerings to include organic, vegetarian, and vegan fare.

And today, it appears that Lupin membership may be old even by the aging standards of organized naturism.

According the latest National Intelligence Estimate, the four-year old war on Iraq has increased the danger of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I think I, and an awful lot of other people, could have told you that, certainly at least three years ago. Of course, that’s also what I thought the war on Afghanistan would do and a major reason I opposed that war, which we are also losing.

“If Republicans insist on blocking a change of course in Iraq, Democrats will give them the opportunity to explain this. Lots of opportunity to explain this,” [Senate Majority Leader Harry] Reid said. “We are going to have votes during the night. We’re not going to let everybody go home and have a good night’s rest.”

So tonight, we are scheduled to wait out a Republican filibuster in the U.S. Senate opposing a timetable for withdrawal, and according to the Telegraph, “Senator George Voinovich, a close ally of Mr Bush, delivered a withering assessment of the situation in Iraq, declaring that the Bush administration had ‘f****d up the war’.”

I went to see Sicko tonight. Right wing claims that Michael Moore has highlighted only the positives in other health care systems and only the negatives in the US health care system ring distinctly hollow.

I enjoy good health and as a student, I have access to subsidized health care at my university. But as a student, I will likely rack up $100,000 in student loan debt by the time I finish my PhD. Moore also points to free education in France.

Meanwhile, heroes of 9/11, who worked in the toxic rubble of the World Trade Center, in Moore’s film, wind up in, of all places, Cuba, to receive care denied them in the U.S. A lot of people in a lot of places have longer life expectancies than in the U.S. Cuba is one of those places, and that hospital looked far nicer than anything I’ve seen here.

While hospitals in the U.S. dump the indigent on skid row, and insurance companies raise the denial of claims to a high art, Moore shows free, universal health care, elsewhere.

What are we doing? And how does it make any sense?

It turns out the textbook I had earlier selected for the public speaking class I’ll be teaching was out of print. It’s okay. This one is better, more compact, and probably cheaper (I’m seeing it available for around $12). It is:
A Pocket Guide to Public Speaking
Dan O’Hair, Hannah Rubenstein, and Rob Stewart
2nd Edition, 2007
Bedford/St. Martin’s; ISBN: 0312452071
Please support independent booksellers.

Even behind bars, Paris Hilton has access to the media. Now she says she’s found “God,” presumably the god of Abraham, and will stop acting dumb. According to the Independent:

Hilton’s conversion appears to have taken place with remarkable speed. Just on Friday she was crying in court and calling out for her mother as Judge Michael Sauer overturned the sheriff department’s decision to transfer her to house arrest and ordered her back to her 8ft by 12ft cell. “It’s not fair,” she whimpered.

Actually, the version I got was more about screaming than whimpering.

After her conviction last month, Hilton enjoyed distinctly cushy treatment from the LA sheriff – who, it has since emerged, received a chunky re-election contribution from Hilton’s grandfather last year. First she was told she would serve only 23 days of her 45-day sentence as long as she behaved herself. Then, barely three days after she checked herself into the prison system on 3 June, she was sent home to serve out the remainder of her sentence under house arrest – for unspecified medical reasons.

Unspecified medical reasons? For some reason, only CNN would report that according to TMZ.com, she had a problem with the food. “I was not eating or sleeping. I was severely depressed and felt as if I was in a cage. I was not myself. It was a horrible experience,” she told Barbara Walters.

So “distinctly cushy treatment from the LA sheriff” wasn’t good enough for her. The mattress on the cot was too thin, the pillow wasn’t what she was accustomed to, and the blanket might have been scratchy. Plus, the food sucked.

So this spoiled rich bitch–to call her anything more polite would be an insult to others of her ethnicity and gender–now hopes for help from the biggest daddy of them all, a daddy that many turn to on the rationalization that they need help to manage their behavior, a behavior that Hilton has used in her remorseless and relentless self-promotion. According to the Times:

The comments appeared to be further confirmation that Hilton and her advisers are trying to make up for the public relations disaster of her behaviour last week, when was dragged back to jail crying and screaming after a Superior Court judge decided that she should not have been released after serving three days of a 45-day sentence for a breach of probation.

Ah, yes. Screaming was the version I got. Screaming for attention from a media all too willing to grant it to her as a diversion from real issues.

More television stations have been taken off the air in Pakistan as the military-dominated regime widens its censorship.

The military was infuriated by television coverage six days earlier that showed thousands of supporters of the [suspended] chief justice [Chaudhry] shouting “Musharraf is a dog!” and “The generals are traitors!” at the gates of the supreme court. Since then all public meetings of more than five people have been banned in Islamabad and television stations have been ordered to stop live broadcasts of the chief justice’s rallies.

This has been going on for a while, and I’ve been watching quietly.

Some time ago, Pakistani President Musharraf submitted a “reference” against Pakistan’s Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, alleging misuse of power. Musharraf had demanded Chaudhry’s resignation, detaining the Chief Justice for several hours, while Chaudhry refused to comply. As Chaudhry had apparently been willing to hear a few too many cases against the Musharraf regime, members of the legal establishment interpreted this as an attack against the independence of the judiciary. There has police violence against the Chief Justice and against widening protests opposing Musharraf. “Within days of the judge’s suspension, police in Islamabad used tear gas against demonstrators and smashed equipment at the privately-run Geo TV station which had showed pictures of the protests. President Musharraf later apologised for the incident.”

Yet, “the same channel had its high-profile discussion programme banned a day earlier. And three TV channels were briefly taken off air earlier in the week for running footage of bloody clashes between police and lawyers.” And it is now clear the government has abandoned even the pretense that it isn’t trying to suppress coverage of the unrest with a formal order prohibiting satellite channels “from telecasting programmes, including live talk shows and discussions, on the issue of the presidential reference against Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.”

The Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) accuses the media of broadcasting “gruesome/gory scenes of mutilated bodies of tragic incidents of terrorism creating fear and unrest in the society which serves the purposes of the terrorists.” So those who support the Chief Justice are now being cast as terrorists, while on May 12, “pro-Musharraf Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) cadres clashed with those of opposition parties” in Karachi, preventing Chaudhry from speaking.

A statement attributed to “The president MMA, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Maulana Fazlur Rehman, and PTI Chief Imran Khan” claims:

There is mass uprising against his autocratic rule. May 12th Karachi mayhem have exposed him and his allies totally. Now in a desperate move he has on the one hand gagged the press and is imposing pre-censorship on electronic media and on the other he is openly dragging in the army to protect his personal interests and political exploits. Nothing can be more disastrous for the country than using the armed forces for searching political survival.

The Bush administration has continued to back Musharraf, who capitulated to Washington in Bush’s “war on terror” rather than be seen as a supporter of the Taliban. Pakistan might otherwise have been attacked the way Afghanistan was, where, after nearly driving the Taliban out of the country, the U.S. is now slowly losing ground, and where the Taliban apparently are in effective control of the southern third of the country, while warlords undermine central government authority in almost all the rest, and the country now supplies 90% of the world’s opium.

It no longer seems credible that Musharraf can retain power in what has become a very dangerous situation. Nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India have been improving relations, while Islamist groups seek further restrictions in Pakistan under what they see as Islamic law, and have engaged in kidnappings and threatened violence to accomplish their ends, while India has long blamed such groups for attacks in the disputed Punjab territory. The BBC writes, “But no one in Pakistan underestimates the brute power and guile of the military,” and it seems to me likely that another coup, such as that which brought Musharraf to power, is in the offing.

I will be teaching Public Speaking instead of Interpersonal Communication, from 12:00-1:10, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The text is Public Speaking: Challenges and Choices, by Dan O’Hair and Rob Stewart.