When I wrote yesterday about my Neighbor from Hell, I didn’t intend to start a discussion about how to deal with the nuisance.

I should have realized comments would go that way, though. And I’m glad they did because as always you guys came up with ideas that are interesting, helpful, and delightfully devious (sometimes all three at once!).

In the long run, I’m pretty sure the neighbors will have to deal with Mr. Karaoke on their own, non-violently but decisively. Some of your techniques will surely be put to good use.

As it happens, though, this week we caught an unexpected break. And yes it did involve “people in charge.”

After the week’s third party, I begged Mr. K’s landlady to give him an ultimatum: stop the noise or be evicted. This she would not do. But she talked with him, then called me back with a story that, at first, didn’t make much sense. Mr. K was quite indignant because he claimed that he now had the city government’s approval for all this racket!

He had gone to the chief of police and the city council and gotten specific permission to hold musical events (by invitation) around the city in honor of what landlady called “Mexican Mardi Gras” — Carnival, the extended pre-Lenten festivities celebrated down south.

Nobody is going to be so churlish as to begrudge a neighbor an occasional loud holiday celebration.

But Mr. K. — who frankly shows more signs of arrogant cluelessness than malice — decided that the city had given him carte blanche — for parties, for rehearsals, for pretty much anything. The government approved of him. He had Followed Procedures. So how could the neighbors possibly have any legitimate objection?

I went to city hall and explained our dilemma to the mayor. He gave me a fair hearing, talked with the police chief, and by the end of the day the chief had sent a sergeant out to Mr. K’s place with the message that the city had not endorsed anything beyond by-request holiday performances during Carnival.

With luck, this will keep Mr. K. quiet until seriously nice weather sets in. Then we’ll see. I’ll be very, very surprised if this buys us long-term peace.

Am I happy that I went to “officials”? Nope. But this time, in all innocence, those very officials had triggered the problem and they decently took responsibility.

And as I wrote yesterday, when you’re facing a dilemma that increasingly looks as if it can’t be solved politely, it’s easier to live with yourself if you can say, “I tried everything else before I resorted to guerrilla warfare.”

I’d say we’ve now tried everything else.

Do me a favor, if you would. Go back to yesterday’s post and take another look at the second part — the part about mindset and hesitancy to act. Because I really do think that the way everybody’s handled (or failed to handle) this mini-mess bears on our current situation as lovers of freedom in an unfree world.

That’s what I’d like to talk about in part III.

—-

But first … you want a LOL? I wrote the above Thursday afternoon and scheduled it for later posting. As it turns out, I’d rather not post it at all, except that I promised part II. I’m adding this coda at 6:30 Thursday evening — while listening to the sounds of Mr. K’s latest “performance.”

The best I can say is that he is keeping the volume down this time.

But yes, we’ll have to solve this problem ourselves.

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Since last July neighbors and I have been forced to deal with an intractable problem. A man who lives just across the intersection acquired a professional-grade karaoke system and has held approximately 35 blindingly loud parties in a doorless garage. His music can often be heard five blocks away; this close it’s like a jackhammer to the brain.

When asked to turn the music down, the man smiles, nods — and goes right on doing exactly what he wants to do. Sometimes he responds by turning the volume up. The police come out. They make him lower the noise to something more tolerable (but still plainly audible inside our houses). He keeps it low for an hour or two. But his next party goes on at full blast.

I’ve never called the cops on him. Not my style. Others have done the calling. But I talked to him three times and when that failed, I got his landlady to chat with him. That — and winter weather — gave peace-loving neighbors a small break. For a few months we had to put up with “only” two parties a month, not the two a week we endured last summer.

Then suddenly this week we had springlike weather — and he threw three parties-from-hell in four days. The first brought two calls to the police. The next two featured lower volumes of music — but a crowd of people dancing and shouting in the street.

This emphatic return of jackhammer music and unneighborly behavior triggered a community crisis — and an awakening.

And the whole process feels like something freedomistas, or could-be-freedomistas, are going through in the wider world.

—–

People in this neighborhood pretty much keep to themselves. I’ve learned just this week that all last summer people were thinking pretty much what I was: “This is godawful. But surely it’ll be only temporary.”

Then we moved on to, “I can’t stand this one more minute. But nobody else seems to mind. Maybe I’m just some grouchy old weirdo.”

We would jam in our earplugs or crank up our own music and spend his party evenings gritting our teeth and fantasizing about clever, bold, devious — and entirely unrealistic — ways we’d get that bastard. We felt impotent. Our lack of ability to change the situation enraged us perhaps more than the actual noise did.

The first sign I saw that others were suffering came when one of the tenants in Mr. Karaoke’s building heard one of my requests for quiet, came to my house a few days later, and begged me to call the police. He said he didn’t have a phone, but also that he was too scared to call on a nearby pay-phone — that he feared Mr. K and his friends would punish him. (This despite the fact that Mr. K has never threatened violence to anybody.) Too scared.

He’s the one who told me the police had already been out several times. So others are upset. But who are they? Where are they?

Realizing I was no longer just speaking for myself finally gave me more gumption, more motivation. That’s when I got the landlady to buy us that (unfortunately temporary) reprieve.

Then came false hope. When a week would go by without a party, we’d all breathe a sigh of relief and think, “Thank God. Maybe it’s over now.”

Because we were in this state of hopeful denial, this week’s three noise-fests just devastated us. We finally had to face the fact that absolutely nothing had been solved and that as we looked with anticipation toward the coming months of better weather we’d also have to cringe with dread, knowing that every pleasant day might be turned hellish by this one man.

I know this thought process was common because this week’s return of chaos finally got neighbors talking with each other. Our angry, frustrated thoughts poured out. We belatedly realized that we were well-and-truly stuck with this situation and neither the police nor the landlady, despite all their visits to and talks with the culprit, were going to save us. We would have to come up with our own plan. We would have to stomp our own snakes.

But even after being smacked in the face with reality and making the first tentative beginnings of an organization, we weren’t quite ready to believe that we had exhausted all the possibilities of the “people in charge.”

And as it turned out, “people in charge” really did have one more part to play — even though I’m pretty sure it will end up being the part that goes: “Well, we really couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we hadn’t tried every, single last means of working within the system. Now we really know we’ll have to take care of it, ourselves alone.”

This whole thought/action process sounds ridiculously — and sadly — familiar doesn’t it?

—–

More tomorrow.

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• Good for people who’ve suffered brain injuries that affect speech. Bad in the long run for privacy.
• National Geographic is usually pretty good. But it appears their new series, which starts next week, sets out only to portray us all as loons. So much for progress. (Tip o’ hat to H.)
• Here’s a perfect example of the long arm of the U.S. government.
• Might not agree with this guy 100%. But bless his noble heart. (Nice backgrounder on him, too.) I’ll soon be reading his book.
• And here’s another doctor with courage — though it may be too little, too late for millions of children: “Ritalin Gone Wrong.”
• Thugette. Every time I see stuff like this, I recall how, just five or six years ago, we were constantly assured that Tasers would be solely used in encounters that would otherwise call for deadly force. The term “compliance tool” was never uttered. Now it appears they’re merely “educational devices.”
• Of course the lie about inflation is even bigger than this says.
  
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I turn the blog over this morning to two commentors at Earthineer:

Oilman2, who says that small farmers (and by extension many more of us) should opt out.

And Earthineer founder Dan Adams who answers that we should opt in.

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• The strange birth of New York’s gun laws.
• Oooh, now this is cynical. And fraught with … well, just fraught. (Tip o’ hat to JB.)
• Darn. They’re ruining it for me! (Tip o’ hat to MJR.)
• At least Twitter is is trying to mitigate its consent to censorship.
• “Why Conservatives Should Be Libertarians.”
• The Barefoot Bandit will probably serve just under five years. Federal and state sentences to be concurrent. Seems a reasonable mercy — and with luck a chance for that bright but screwed-up boy to get his head together. (HT to PT.)
• A troop of gorillas visits a human camp. (First couple of minutes are boring; stay with it.)
• The halo effect. And its impact in politics. (HT Beth and Dave Gross.)
• A free privacy tool for you Windows users. And another. Both look useful and — better yet! — easy to use. (Courtesy of JB.)

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The following was sent to me by a long-time reader with the subject header “I HATE Flying.” But it says more than that. Thus my headline.

What follows is all from reader JP:

—–

Hey Claire,

Due to financial issues, I surrendered, and took a contract because I need the money. Part of the work requires me to travel to Austin, Texas; and Eugene, Oregon. Yesterday, I came back from Austin, and went through the TSA portal.

I have flown exactly six times since the TSA was created. The last time was 5-1/2 years ago. EVERY SINGLE TIME I have been awarded extra attention. I think I mentioned a previous time where they forced me to turn my trowser waist down to see if there were any balls down there [sic].

On the way to Austin, I was selected for the stupid scanner. I opted out, and got the full pat down – much worse than five years ago (and that was bad). Yesterday, on my way home, in a very busy airport, I was selected yet again.

The first problem, was that they made me stand in a small 3-sided box and wait about five minutes. I was already shoeless, beltless, jacketless, hatless, and humorless, so I finally asked a blue-shirt exactly how long I was going to have to wait before I was molested (yes, I used that word).

That seemed to spur them, and they opened a little gate (with no latch of any kind), and waved me, and a wheelchair-bound man into the pat-down area. I was told to step into a little area and spread my feet. Silly me, I put my feet on these little orange-yellow Ronald-McDonald SHOE marks on the floor. Blue-shirt said to spread my legs wider – much wider.

Next, I was ordered to raise my arms to the five-and-seven position, palms up – a gesture I saw in several religious paintings from the renaissance – identical to sinners raising their hands in supplication to an angry god. Even the gesture of surrender in a scanner could not be more sordid, in my view.

I told my polite, blue-shirt that I considered this a violation of my 4th amendment rights, a violation of my person, and I only complied under duress. He said, “That’s nice.” He proceeded to tell me what he was doing at each stage. And, there were a LOT of stages. Somehow, blue-shirt seemed to think that if they touched my privates with the backs of his hands, then it would be more-better.

As I stood there, I watched the poor bastard in the wheelchair. He was made to elevate himself out of his chair; lift each dead leg; push himself forward, almost falling out of the chair; take his gloves off, and so on. He was clearly paralyzed, with the telltale wasted lower body, and obviously not a threat.

They asked me to take a seat, which I refused, then demanded that I lift each heel so that he could swab my now-filthy socks for yet another scanner. Wheelchair submitted to similar treatment. He was affable and polite, and seemed perfectly at home. I don’t know why I was morbidly fascinated by the spectacle.

We waited together for the green-light allowing us to find our respective tubs-o-stuff and I asked him how often this happened to him. He looked up at me, anger showing in his face, displacing his former smiling, affable, “chattel smile” and told me “Every time. Every damned time.”

The change was a light-switch. Seen only by me. When blue-shirt returned, the switch flipped again, and Wheelchair’s grin returned.

An hour-or-so later, I met up with Wheelchair again. I asked him if he noticed how the 13 year-old girl in my line was given a choice of scanner or metal-detector. He said, yes, he’d noticed that. It angered him that they would give a 13 year-old a “choice.” But, not because she was allowed to opt-out. Rather, because they should have naturally directed her to the metal detector, as it was clearly no radiation threat.

Wheelchair made a deep impression on me. The underlying anger was something to behold, and the blue-shirts were completely clueless that they were held in such deep contempt by him. They think Wheelchair may have actually liked that whole process. With me, they knew what they were dealing with. I hid none of my disdain.

My hope is that there are lots of Wheelchairs out there that are being misinterpreted. That they are legion, and unknown to their counterparts around Amerika.

I have to hope that, otherwise, the alternative is too depressing.

JP

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The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought …. It took forever and then it took a night.”

– Dr. Rudiger Dornbusch

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word – these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

– Aldous Huxley

My new-old house has a pleasant sun porch. Makes more sense hereabouts to call it a rain porch.

It’s not heated or insulated, but it’s small enough that five minutes with a portable heater makes it cozy. So the dogs and I sit out there a lot. Though the porch has big windows that face the street, I can relax in a bentwood rocker, sip coffee or wine, and gaze out onto the nearby hills in privacy. The house across the street, like many in the neighborhood, is a repo that’s been sitting empty for months. Nobody sees me as I gaze over its roof and watch the sun set or the storms roll in.

I love the way rain runs down the glass, rendering this rather unpretty neighborhood soft and impressionistic. The reflections of taillights on the rainslick pavement are like Christmas.

Tonight, with the aid of a glass of white Zinfandel, it looked so beautiful I could almost cry.

But tonight, too, I reflected on how unsafe it now feels to be in what I once thought of as my own country. Door-kicking cops. Unchecked surveillance. TSA VIPRs roaming the highways. Authorized assassinations. Infinite detentions. Plans to revoke U.S. citizenship without due process. Perpetual wars. Asset forfeiture and coerced plea bargains in place of justice. A government that considers every individual to be a criminal while considering itself to be above all law. So many things on the verge of chaos and collapse.

When I was a kid during the cold war, I had this image of the Soviet Union as a place that was always gloomy — perpetually leaden skies, perpetually leaden people, gray and brown garb, no joy. Even as a young adult I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the idea that even in darkest Siberia they had sunny days. Or that Russians loved their country. Or wore bright colors. Or that they sometimes sang and laughed and danced and joked.

Even now, I have to make a conscious mental adjustment to picture unfree places having sunshine or joy. Or residents who burn with love for them. It’s hard to consider that unfree, threatening places have the same small joys and great beauties as freer ones, when you create a little haven from the politics. Beauties like rain softly blurring the view through big windows. Or lights glowing on the pavement like Christmas. Joys like eating cherries and chocolate and sipping wine in the company of sleeping dogs.

Of course, I’ve just conflated two different kinds of mental adjustment.

I knew the USSR was unfree; in my childish mind I just couldn’t picture it beautiful. I know this spot is beautiful; in my all-too-adult perception I’m just having a hard time reconciling its peaceful beauty to how unfree and dangerous the country that contains it has become.

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No, not happy news like about crippled orphans being rescued by blind puppies (though that’s good, too). Not glurge.

But in the biblical flood of bad news, good news does occasionally bob to the surface and I’ve been saving up bits of it to brighten your day. So here goes:

• Rhode Island may defy the NDAA. (Tip o’ hat to JS.)
• The most important secret of a prosperous economy.
• Remember the homeless man with the golden voice? Well, so far, so good. (HT to SC)
• Obama (not intentionally, of course) might bring back the Constitution.
• Gaston Glock did an amazing thing.
• Speaking of homeless-but-talented, a homeless whiz kid is a semi-finalist in a national science competition, and the attention is helping her family.
• TSA may — may — apologize to some old ladies it abused. (Okay, I grant you it’s not much; but it’s something.)
• There was once a great pirate botanist. (Tip o’ hat to PT.)
• You don’t have to be a swashbuckling young man to perpetrate Outlaw acts of courage. (HT to MJR.)

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