Book list: Meditations on change

I recently finished Mark Doty‘s School of the Arts, a wonderful book of poems by a poet who will soon be teaching at Rutgers. (Picture at right from Doty’s Web site, is of a reading in New York in 2006.)

The book is a meditation on change — on the movements of history, on aging, on death. It is a book awash in images of altered architecture, of finality, and full of unanswered questions:

Which is worse, decay or restoration
that turns the past to a model of itself,
out of scale, new materials gleaming?

he writes in the title poem, questioning not just gentrification and preservation efforts — though they are the nominal peg — but our own penchant for myth making, for sentimental revision.

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What would Austin Powers think?


I’m not breaking any new ground when I say that shoe-tossing incident in Iraq reminds me of the scene in the first Austin Powers film when Random Task throws a shoe (a la Odd Job and the razor-brimmed hat in Bond) at Powers. “Who throws a shoe?. Honestly.”

Anyway, I saw this game on Rob Tornoe’s blog and had to pass it along. It seems pretty simple: Grab a shoe and toss.

I know that there are many Democrats out there who have been waiting for just this chance. Go for it.

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Central Jersey goes to Washington


It’s official. Lisa Jackson, former New Jersey environmental commissioner, has been named by Barack Obama as the next administrator of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. (See photos of press conference at Obama’s site; photo above is from the EPA via NJ.com.)

Obama said of his pick for the EPA:

Lisa has spent a lifetime in public service at the local, state and federal level. As Commissioner of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, she has helped make her state a leader in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and developing new sources of energy, and she has the talent and experience to continue this effort at the EPA. Lisa also shares my commitment to restoring the EPA’s robust role in protecting our air, water and abundant natural resources so that our environment is cleaner and our communities are safer.

Jackson, who lives in East Windsor, has a good reputation among New Jersey environmentalists — aside from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, who sent an “open letter” to the president-elect that “harshly criticized Jackson’s tenure at the DEP,” saying that

Her actions as commissioner, Rauch wrote, “have been nothing short of appalling,” and “raise troubling questions about her fitness to run an agency of much greater size, complexity and significance.”

PEER, however, is a distinct minority, with the larger green groups offering praise of the nominee.


What’s most interesting is the response from the current EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, to spruce up his awful record (see the four-part series in The Philadelphia Inquirer that starts here) with the glow coming from the incoming administration. Johnson said Jackson “is poised to build on the many environmental successes accomplished since 2001” — a comment that shows that Johnson was as deluded about the damage his agency has managed to do as President George W. Bush has been about his place in history.

“While environmental responsibility is everyone’s responsibility, I am particularly proud of the role EPA has played in bringing about record results on behalf of the American people and our environment. Our air is cleaner, our water is purer, and our land is better protected than just a generation ago.”

True, but this is despite eight years during which we have taken massive steps backward and due mostly to the efforts of the Clinton administration and state governments who have been forced to deal with the delitirious impacts of environmental degradation.

So, we ask that readers send their congratulations to Lisa Jackson and consider sending Stephen Johnson a referral to a good therapist.

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Prescribing reforms for drug policy

In a humane world, medical marijuana — i.e., the use of pot to mitigate certain debilitating conditions — would be accepted as a matter of course, a normal part of treatment.

But in most states, New Jersey included, it is illegal.

State Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, is looking to change that. He’s sponsored legislation — S-119, New Jersey Compassionate Use Medical Marijuana Act — that, according to The Star-Ledger,

would require the state Department of Health and Senior Services to evaluate requests from physicians who recommend marijuana to their patients to help alleviate a “debilitating medical condition,” defined as cancer, glaucoma, HIV and AIDS, or chronic illnesses that cause “wasting syndrome, severe or chronic pain, seizures and severe and persistent muscle spasms.”

Patients the health department deems worthy would receive a state identification card verifying their enrollment. Patients, and their primary caretakers who do not have a history of drug convictions, “shall not be subject to arrest, prosecution or penalty” provided they possess the card and no more than six marijuana plants and 1 ounce of “usable marijuana.”

The legislation is scheduled for a hearing Monday, which will feature testimony from a couple of local residents — Gerry and Don McGrath of Robbinsville — who will tell the Senate Health Committee “about how their son, Sean, regained his appetite and reduced his suffering before he died from cancer four years ago.”

“I strongly believe that once members of the Senate Health Committee listen objectively to stories like ours on Monday, they will vote yes on the bill, bringing it closer to becoming law and help those currently suffering in New Jersey,” Don McGrath said.

I’m hoping that a reasonable discussion can be had, though it’s more likely the antidrug fearmongers will take over. Read some of these papers on the medical marijuana issue from the Drug Policy Alliance.

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