California, USA: Angeleno-stan and a bubba map

Recent story in The Guardian: the Los Angeles Police Department was planning an ethnic enclave map, to identify the regions of LA where there might be terrorism brewing.  Problem was, they only were planning to map ethnic Arab enclaves.  They’ve been halted on the grounds of racial profiling, and the program is entirely scratched.  I’m not a friend of racial profiling, and, I don’t think it advisable for Los Angeles to grow the Angeleno equivalent of Londonistan.  The potential incubator of violence is certainly an issue for the UK.  Someone was trying to be proactive, no doubt.  The question is, why leave out everybody else? 

A quick look at the low points in LA History:
Now Los Angeles has a history of racial conflict, and it’s worth reviewing–but neither to revile nor excuse LA. 

There were the military v. Hispanic Zoot suit riots of 1941, where a town crammed with servicemen, marginalized Hispanics, and lots of rumors which set of a wave of tit-for-tat murders and consequent riots.  Since LA had a swollen population of displaced men from all over the nation (and for many, the first time off the farm and in the bars), a police force that would have been swamped by this event, and a marginalized Hispanic population in a concentrated urban area, you could easily say that conditions were favorable for prolonged violence, regardless of the town. 

Lesson No. 1: Displaced people strain the capacity of law enforcement. 
Lesson No. 2: Marginalized people don’t buy into the system. 
Lesson No. 3: You have to have capacity to be effective.

Then there were the Zebra murder serial killings of 1973-1974, when a splinter faction or subgroup of the Black Muslim movement (actually just plain flat a group of psychopathic killers) went around killing white people as products of some evil genius rather than people in their own right.  Police were entirely stumped by the random nature of the killings, and did try some racial profiling in order to sweep through and find the murderers. 

Lesson No. 4: Eventually the murderers were caught, and not through racial profiling, but through an informant. 

Since 1973 and the consolidation of narcotrafficking routes, the LAPD has been trying to get a handle on the gang wars between the Crips and the Bloods–versus the Latin Kings–versus–the Mexican Mafia, la eMe–starting in 1973 and continuing forward into today. 

However, there are so many social indexes involved in this phenomenon, and I will list only a few: it’s more about urban blight and lost opportunity–and the way prison culture is set up, which reinforces, at least with gangs, the racial nature of protection and violence.  Not to mention the fabulous profits for narcotics traffic out there, which fuels the economy of gang war.

Lesson No. 5: see Lesson No. 2, marginalized people don’t buy into the system, and add that urban decay creates competition that tends to settle along racial lines at least some of the time–a lot of the time.
Lesson No. 6: If there isn’t a legal economic outlet, then the illegal one will grow up and grow out, and
Lesson No. 7: There will be conflict as the state tries to bring security, or, contain insecurity. 

And then, for my last LA example, the brutal handling of Rodney King, whose abusive arrest was filmed.  Later, the four police officers that beat him without mercy were cleared in court, which spurred the Rodney King riots of 1992. 

Lesson No. 7: To avoid racial conflict, the state has to ensure equal protection and rights under the law.

Back to the Angeleno-Stan Map 
From this admittedly punctuated and facile overview, it seems pretty clear that most of these incidents are related to larger social movements: World War II for the Zoot suits; a pathological approach to the resentments underlying the Civil Rights Movement for the Zebra Murders; urban decay and drug traffic; and for the latest incarnation, the Global War on Terror Since 9-11.  Unfortunately, no one has ever drawn a Bubba Map for the White Supremacists of Idahoan enclaves (or Kansas City enclaves) or for those pockets of KKK still flourishing in East Texas and outside of Baton Rouge, Louisiana or wherever they might still be.  Probably some Bubbas in Los Angeles too, making hate and raising Cain, and with the continued potential for real violence against society at large.  In the meantime, Arab-Americans are being racially profiled in Los Angeles and elsewhere.  Going through the lessons:

Lesson 1: Displacing people through mapping and targeted enforcement will lead to more, not less, instability.
Lesson 2: Marginalized people (through racial prejudice or lack of economic opportunity, or, both) are more likely to not buy into society.  But since one way society has of marginalizing populations is through racial profiling, it’s counterproductive to do it officially.
Lesson 3: The capacity to be effective might include an enclave map, but not one totally focused upon one ethnic group.  Like a Bubba map, a psychopath map, etc.  But that’s a lot of people to map: why not try something else?
Lesson 4: To get informants, you have to have a relationship.  To have a relationship, you have to have someone who believes that the system will take care of him rather than marginalize him.
Lesson 5: Economic revitalization will help people buy into the system and put violence–racist or otherwise–away.
Lesson 6: and help eradicate the violence associated with illegal economies; and
Lesson 7: Equal rights and protection under the law is a necessary component to the long-range goals of law enforcement.

So, mapping Angeleno-stan  was never the best approach.  Maybe that money could go into mapping better economic revitalization instead, for the good of all races and creeds.  It’s a thought.

 

The Oil Patch: A language of its own

I just found this treasure at a local used bookstore: The Petroleum Dictionary, by Lalia Phipps Boone.  Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950.  

Well, the heyday of Texas-Oklahoma well drilling is over, although you can still drive by and find those workhorse pumps attempting to get that last drop out of the oil sands below the prairie.  Mature oil fields: but back in the day, the oil patch developed its own Americanized language, which took from the world of cowboys and machinists, and then gave the language back again.  It is a language of common sense, sweat, and romance: people in love with their jobs and the way of life it represented.  And you’d have to be in love with it: it was loud, dangerous, and dirty work, in every sense of the word.

One tradition that I think derives from cowboys is the contempt for farmers: farmer’s oil, for instance, is ‘a worthless black substance resembling oil that comes from blue shale’ and farmer’s sand, is “the productive sand which allegedly would have been reached if a dry hole had been drilled further.  No doubt those farmers contemplating oil leases would have preferred those Texas oilmen to drill all the way to China.  Heck, I think today that all of the U.S. would be inclined to agree with the farmers, given that 20/20 hindsight. 

Ms. Lalia even mentions one pimp and two madams in her book: the gentleman is named Ben Hogan of Pennsylvania, the “Wickedest Man in the World”; the ladies, “French Kate” (of course, French) but also “Lizzie Toppling”.  So you can just imagine what she left out–in particular, the madams of Texas and Oklahoma.  I wonder who the wickedest man in Texas was?

However, you can find other sources:  for instance, this deathless oil painting decorated the Dixie Hotel in Beaumont–an establishment run by Miss Rita of Beaumont, as a matter of fact.  The painting is by Aaron Arion, and combines the 1880′s with a small nod to the flatness and vistas of Depression era muralists such as Tom Lea and Thomas Hart Benton: Spindletop Viewing Her Gusher. 

We don’t allow this kind of thing these days: gushers, I mean.  Once the sign of success, we have now decided that it Wastes the Product.  We don’t allow human trafficking either, but somehow that’s been harder to change with advanced technology.

Here are some excerpts from the Foreword:

To spud in, which originally meant to indicate initial drilling operations, has undergone extension to designate the beginning of any activity.  If one is starting a meal, a job, a game, or a drink, he is spudding in.

Now you also have to think that this term was a joke about planting potatoes at one point.  Sort of a way to contrast the Drill and the Shovel in the scale of human enterprise.

The nouns roustabout and bird dog have also undergone generalization.  Originally roustabout was the name applied to the laborer who assisted in the loading and unloading of river craft in the United States.  In the oil field the term is applied to several different kinds of workers.  . . .   In drilling, he may be either an unskilled laborer or a skilled one.   . . .   Needless to say, he aspires to be a tool dresser or a roughneck.  The activity of any roustabout is roustabouting.

A bird dog is a field geologist: the person who can smell out the oil and point those roughnecks in the right direction.  Nowadays, we use technology. 

What I’d love to hear, from others: what’s the slang in other languages and other states?

Fiction about the American Oil Patch:
♦ Honor at Daybreak a Western by Elmer Kelton, about Central Texas, the spudding of wells, the fights, and the human trafficking during the not-so-great Depression
♦ Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan, about oil, fraud, and the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, set in the Harding Years of the U.S.

Photo: columbia.edu; texasescapes.com

 

Kurdish-Americans: paranoia in the ‘burbs

Well, gotta love this:

Some faction of the Kurds have revealed their own strategic goal by dissassociating themselves from it.  That is, some diaspora groups are protesting in the United States that Turkey wants to invade Kurdistan for Kirkuk.  It doesn’t have anything to do with PKK depredations on their soil, of course–or the incipient threat of destabilization throughout Iraq, spreading north, and compromising Turkey’s security in general.  Oh, no, it’s that oil again.

Let’s go for that conspiracy scenario, just long enough to kill it For Ever:
1. Turkey, with, uh, WAY MORE military capability than the U.S., has decided that they could conduct war with Iraq in a far more efficient fashion than the U.S. ever could. 

Nah.  The paranoids may have a point with that efficiency thing: on the other hand, seeing that the U.S. actually has the capability, and can’t guarantee security, it seems past ridiculous to think that Turkey would go flying, marching, and tanking on in to the same revenue-threatening and life-threatening black hole of Iraq in order to take on a town that is primed for resentment and strife.

2.  One protester stated that Turkey is not afraid of the PKK, but rather afraid of a Kurdish state.  And of course this makes, yes, perfect sense. 

Nope: The PKK wants to bomb Turkish towns and resorts, killing innocent people and being sneaky about it, disrupt the economy and create conflict and strife.  The Kurdish state wants to ship oil through Turkey and get on with making money.  Uh, I know Turkey is completely unfavorable to the idea of generating income, preferring instead to foment domestic instability and gleefully hailing each incident of lost infrastructure.  It’s just this attitude that makes Turkey a force for good in the international system–

Personally, I believe that Kurdish-Americans would go a lot further by deprecating the PKK and trying to help Turkey provide goods and services for its own ethnic Kurdish residents.  Oh, and building partnerships to keep those pipelines in northern Iraq in good order: for the good of Iraq, Kurdistan, and Turkey–heck, the world at large.  Hope you’ll think about it–and then do something constructive. 

Kirkuk is a mess, but not Turkey’s mess:
Consider the machinations, forced importations and deportations that have been occurring in Kirkuk: the blame doesn’t rest with Turkey: a history of forced Kurdish deportations from the Kirkuk area has been rectified with new human rights violations–forced non-Kurdish deportations from Kirkuk. 

The stratagems may be based upon history, but history has not taught compassion.  Right now, the paranoia of the non-Kurdish Kirkuk residents is the justifiable paranoia: because they’ve been had.  It’s a bad business, and Turkey’s got nothing to do with it.

 

Rambling: Travailin’ Back from Computer Insanity

Well, there is no way to re-start and gain impetus without apologies first.  I’d like to think it was a deep dark cyberwar but I doubt I’m that important: My computer broke, and after several emergency procedures, I had to give it up.   Support personnel were very supportive, but there’s only so much you can do by phone.  Yo, I do not pass the computing I.Q. test.  I did pass the manners test, though: I have been polite to everyone, even though I wanted to grab someone’s collar and yell out my frustration.  However, wisely these poor support people know better than to put their collars in anyone’s vicinity.  It’s got to be tough though–being on their end of the phone.

So, I lost it all–all of it recovered or okay to lose, except: addresses and passwords.  Cut off from my community!  It’s been bad.  For the last few days I couldn’t access this account, kept getting a password loop.

But that’s more than you want to hear: suffice to say, I’m back, and

if I have inconvenienced anyone, I humbly beg your pardon.

 

Ramblin: Advice with Subtitles

A friend of mine in Costa Rica showed me this video:

and I thought it was great.

 

Costa Rica: The CAFTA / TLC Referendum, part 1

On Sunday, October 7, Costa Rica’s voters approved the entry of the state into the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with their first-in-history vote by referendum.  In Costa Rica, the agreement was known as TLC, or, Tratado Libre Commercio (Free Trade Treaty) and was hotly contested, publicly fought, and barely passed.   

The dramatic enactment of democracy in Costa Rica barely made a stir in United States news agencies.  For instance, the Washington Post published one short article on October 8, page A-11, dateline: Mexico City, with the results of the vote.  Other local news in states with large textile concerns were a little more interested–many in the U.S. believe that CAFTA will continue to take manufacturing jobs away from U.S. labor.  But I was there and can write a little about the conduct of the controversy.  The photos below (not the map, which is from NPR) I took this month.

CAFTA/TLC
The Central American Free Trade Agreement is a burgeoning economic community in the Western Hemisphere.  Its member countries are: the United States, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic–and now, Costa Rica.  Because the Dominican Republic is considered Caribbean rather than Central American, the agreement is sometimes called by the acronym DR-CAFTA or CAFTA-DR.  It is a counterpart of sorts to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.   Belize and Panama are not signatories to the agreement. 

The Caribbean states also have their own trade agreement (in which the U.S. is not a signatory), but (as stated earlier) only the Caribbean’s Dominican Republic is a signatory to CAFTA.

The case for Free Trade
A free trade agreement allows states to lower tariffs between each other and can be bilateral or multilateral.  Currently, a network of free trade treaties, both bilateral and multilateral, link states of the Western Hemisphere to each other, but they differ in membership and content.  Increasing numbers of multilateral ties both reflect and facilitate the rise of global markets.  Under these agreements, states are given better access to each other’s markets and can export and import more easily.  For Costa Rica, this may enable an influx of engineering and technical assistance, serve to modernize its business management, and streamline its markets for agricultural products–both crops and value-added agricultural merchandise.  It may also add to the job pool for labor, both skilled trades and unskilled.  

Costa Rica is in urgent need of new engineering and better infrastructure, both governmental and non-governmental.  Costa Ricans that I talked to working in business look forward to the development of new kinds of management and new opportunities for their talents.  Costa Rica’s hospitality industry also stands to gain significantly from the agreement.

China
With the EU as a prime example, the global economy appears to be settling into trading blocs which are able to command greater portions of economic power.  This trend has not always aided the Western Hemisphere in gaining economic power for itself–for instance, the U.S. and Central America are further threatened in the textile/soft goods market by the economic power of China.  It should be noted also that China is developing economic power in the Western Hemisphere as well.   Recently, China opened a new consulate in Costa Rica and President Arias will be visiting the state later this month.

The case against Free Trade
While I was in Costa Rica, it was quite obvious that U.S. commercial presence was already quite strong within the state.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect to me was that many of the arguments mirror arguments in the U.S. over the Farm Bill–large agriculture, particularly that of U.S. grain producers, might threaten the local agriculture in Costa Rica.  This argument was fought mostly over rice–with the rights of Costa Rican domestic rice producers versus the rights of householders to cheaper rice imports.  As always, agriculture hires the most workers and accounts for significant portions of Costa Rica’s GDP–yet it is not as efficient  (or as subsidized) as U.S. grain crops.  Other crops, such as coffee, are currently administered in very small farms utilizing micro-climates and small confederations of farms.  Any unification of coffee markets, for instance, are going to change the nature of local power structures within Costa Rica. 

Most of the agricultural labor, for coffee at least, is migrant labor from Nicaragua–already a member of CAFTA–which seemed to prove to many Costariccenses that CAFTA was not providing jobs for agriculture for their neighbor state.  

Other arguments focused upon a dread of change to various government monopolies such as energy, telecoms, social security, and utilities.  The arguments against change for telecoms, for example, centered upon the state’s mandate to provide service to all against a competitive influx of multinational corporations which might improve efficiency but not provide service to all.  This argument was largely theoretical – TLC did not abolish the national telecommunications monopoly– but serves as an example of the conflict between old and new that Costa Rica will now confront. 

A third aspect of change is that Costa Rica’s environmental importance to the world (cloud forests, rain forests) may well be under assault from continued development.  As usual, this argument seemed to originate more from the international community than from Costa Rica itself.  Nevertheless, coffee growers, for instance, have marked environmental damage due to climate change on their own ability to provide coffee on the market.  Increasing development from the tourist industry and the development of resort/retirement real estate threaten the environmental benefit that Costa Rica’s undeveloped regions bring to the world.   

Further Reading:
PINR, May, 2005: The fight against CAFTA in the U.S. and U.S. reasons for backing CAFTA
U.S. Trade Representative site: CAFTA page, including links to the text of the Treaty

  

 

Ramblin’ on: Segue into Latin America, Spanish

A minor adventure:
I’ll be posting this week and weekend (and so forth), but my regular readers might find the schedule to be off here and there, because I’m on a month-long tour into the Spanish language.  I’m so close to being bilingual, and yet: I’m not.  So I’m taking my fate and my frustration with the word ‘almost’ and packing it into a suitcase along with my shoes, my verb book, and my toothbrush.

La Profesora, la Bruja
As far as U.S. language education is concerned, I think I’ve had most of the problems and some of the benefits.  One semester out of eight I had a native Spaniard, but Dios, that was high school, ages past; in one university semester I had a very good speaker who had traveled all over the Spanish-speaking world.  Two semesters I had the witch from hell, who quite frankly knew little Spanish at all.  The poor woman was ninety years old and her feet hurt, so I don’t blame her–much–but on the other hand, she was wasting time . . . . I learned no Spanish from her except how to say “the devil himself”.  Hmmm.  Wonder why that stuck.

The rest of the professors had exceedingly diminished expectations of our spoiled, Amer-anglicized students (yes, the students from hell, or at least, Purgatory).  Almost all of them are in it to endure only, because we try to keep Spanish-speaking people on the other side of the border around here.  Oh, don’t get me started on that one.

Las frases mas ridicula
Another problem I find with U.S. language instruction: I always learned how to say things I would never say in normal conversation.  My brother has a joke about this: he says, that in Spanish he learned to say “Tengo un lapiz muy grande” which is, “I have a big pencil”  and then we both just laugh.  Pues, quisiera a decir mas que esta, y en la semana que viene, lo empezare’.  (I want to say more than that, so next week, I will get started on it). 

How my coworkers have suffered
uh, Que sufrio’ mis colegios, (I think).
So, I have spent a lifetime making attempts at the workplace to engage Spanish speakers in conversation, with some good results.  We shall see how it goes. 

So, perhaps upcoming:
Por eso, los que vienen:
One great thing about going now is I’ll be able to report some different kinds of news than usual.  Some really important issues for my own home state (the U.S., if you haven’t figured it out by now) are obscured by celebrity nonsense, Congressional scandals, next years’ Presidential elections, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. 

But there are more immediate issues just to the South.  New/upcoming issues in Latin America include some important referendums for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), at least one new Chinese consulate in Latin America, new rulings at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).  Who knows what else I might find out–once I can talk like a sensible person–but more importantly, listen with understanding.

Photos: Witch from easleys.com; JohnTunger, with La Loteria game piece.