He's Back!

Wonderland

2011-10-28T18:50:00.002-04:00

When I wonder whether the hassle of getting ready for our return to California this time every year, Mother Nature gives me renewed incentive.

Long time

2011-09-26T14:28:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I posted anything here and I'm not sure why that is.

But some of it has to do with morale, some with laziness, some with yet another bike accident that has laid up my right clavicle this time (last year at this time it was my left clavicle) and a pretty good case of ennui.

In the middle of the liturgical season of Lent–which runs roughly alongside late winter and early spring–I decided I was going to take a holiday from the close attention I have always paid to politics and events. It's so easy, almost impossible not to, stay abreast of what is happening in the world moment to moment and I always thought that was exciting and a good thing.

But I think it has been sapping my energy and draining my morale, so I thought to take a break.

Even in rural Vermont one picks up enough in the ether to be more current with the world than one could probably have been just a generation ago in a major news center. Nevertheless I have found it a relief not to check the Internet constantly throughout the day.

Then I tumbled from my bike and was very lucky to only break a collarbone since I knocked myself unconscious and most of scraped along the road for 20 or 30 feet leaving large patches of skin behind.

And shortly after that hurricane Irene visited Vermont with a greater vengeance that had any storm since the hurricane of 1938. By the time she reached Vermont she had been downgraded to a tropical storm, but she dropped 10 or 11 inches of rain and somehow, the ground already saturated from a lot of rain previously, tore through these small poor little Vermont villages and towns reaching incredible havoc. Though our placid pond became for a few hours a raging sea we were lucky enough and high enough that our house was spared. But we watched incredible debris rush by us on the pond and over the dam below where it tore out the roads and several houses in the village.

Some have asked why we were better prepared. In much the same way as we have asked over and over again about 9/11. The answer of course is that we are human and are limited imaginations will not conjure what is too frightening. We are now calling this the 500 year flood and may it be at least that long before these hard-working people face anything like it again.

Even as I write this it sounds like whining and self-serving because those who have lived here their whole lives (unlike flatlanders like us) are not whining or complaining. I overheard a woman in the store whose house had been destroyed state to another person–we are going to be all right; what can we do to help you?

Who Has The keys?

2011-08-10T12:55:00.002-04:00

An old joke has it that the only way to tell the inmates from the staff at an insane asylum is by who has the keys.

So one has to wonder now who has the keys to the financial markets.

I suppose there is a range within which markets can be expected to trade when there is a modicum of confidence abroad that people of judgment and sanity are sitting in the places of power. We all understand that these are human like us, can't know the future, that unforeseen events can derail the best plans, but somehow we trust that there is some ground on which the rest of us can stand while things shake out.

The markets these past couple of weeks have felt – again – the way they did in 2008 when all this began.

Here's the tough reality.

If we all lose confidence simultaneously that somewhere someone sane is in charge, game over.

That means either chaos or something new.

Stay tuned.

Revenge

2011-08-08T10:57:00.003-04:00

I've never been a big fan of that expression "What goes around comes around," maybe because it never was clear to me how it worked, spatially.

But today I think we're seeing it in the downgrading, first of U.S. government debt, and just a few moments ago, of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack.

It's basically revenge for the beating Standard & Poors took for keeping triple A ratings on all those crazy instruments that first rode the markets into the stratosphere and then dropped them into a cavern so deep we apparently still haven't found the bottom.

Not that S&P didn't deserve the beating. Supposed to keep an eye on things so the rest of us would have some ideas of whether it was safe too invest in them, instead they were totally in bed with them, unwilling to risk their fat fees by downgrading.

And, in fairness to them, no doubt they were as clueless as the Master of Wall Street about just what a bunch of junk was in those packaged deals.

So today they have their revenge.

And everyone is back on their case, only this time it's not because they failed at due diligence but because they have hurled an insult at the 800 pound gorilla and the 800 pound gorilla doesn't much like it. Even though, as the markets seem initially to be showing, there's not much that big tough guy can do about it.

I don't suppose any president – not even one whose opponents call him everything from a socialist to an Islamist – can afford to admit outright that the path we have been on as the last country standing after WII and the Cold War is no longer either sensible nor sustainable. Jimmy Carter made a mild effort to say that and had a movie cowboy slaughter him in the next election.

But that's the reality. And we'll either face up to it and make the painful adjustments (beginning with a serious downsizing of our global military presence) to we will have it shoved down our throat.

Beginning with the rating agencies we created to serve out own purposes.

Gabby

2011-08-03T08:10:00.002-04:00

Looking for something to feel good about?

Look no farther than the floor of the House of Representatives during the vote on the debt ceiling on Monday night.

As the debate got underway there was a stirring on the floor. A couple of members broke decorum and stood on their chairs to see what the fuss was about.

Gabby Giffords had just entered the chamber.

She was being aided by someone who had hold of her left arm, and her astronaut husband was close be her other side. But she walked onto the floor to her desk.

Whether she spoke or wrote the words that explained her extraordinary effort in making the trip from Arizona for this vote is not clear. But her sentiments were.

She said she had watched the debate with growing sadness. Not only because the Republicans refused to take part in a debate that would end – as all political debates must – in a compromise in which each side concedes something to the other, but because she heard some of her liberal colleagues threatening to do exactly what the Republicans threatened, even if from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

She found it unthinkable that responsible members of congress would let themselves become so petulant as to risk the credit of the United States rather than cast a vote that made them uncomfortable.

She said that she came there to do the job she was elected to do. And, while she must have found the bill as distasteful as anyone in the chamber, she voted yes.

Gabby Giffords has secured her place in the updated "Profiles in Courage."

Disheartened?

2011-08-03T07:53:00.002-04:00

Yes, disheartened.

And while I am among those who wish the president might have taken a harder swing at the Republicans before giving them so much in the debt ceiling battle, I am not among those who either believe it would have given us a better bill, nor those who wish he had let the Republicans have their petulant way and bring the nation to default.

The reality is that so long as we continue our adolescent belief that there is some magical, so-called free market way out of the issues that are bogging us down, keep electing people who refuse to bargain and compromise, the country is ungovernable.

The president has apparently decided that, rather than win some emotional battles by returning the Republican assaults in kind, he is going to do what he must to get the best he can.

Does he understand this may well cost him the 2012 election?

He has to. His organization brought down the Clinton juggernaut at its most powerful; he's a practical politician.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, who got himself caught in a different but just as big a mess, Obama seems to have no illusions about what rabbit he might pull out of his hat to save himself. Whether there is a Ronald Reagan out there with enough Hollywood in him to appeal to our adolescent longings and make us take another run at our fantasies, remains to be seen.

In the meantime (and, God knows, this is a mean time) Obama is like the manager of a baseball team that has traded away its best players but has half of the season yet to play. He will rotate his pitchers a little differently, encourage his infield to play in a little closer in hopes of cutting off some runners at the plate, all the while knowing there is no way he can prevail unless the other teams falter.

Sometimes they do.

Bad Deal?

2011-08-01T07:11:00.003-04:00

What we are now witnessing is the deliberate effort of those who make up the majority in the House of Representatives to wreck the country's economy so they can rebuild it as they think proper.

I hate everything I have been able to find out about the deal just made to raise the debt ceiling and avoid a technical default of the United States Government.

Everything, that is, except that there is, finally, a deal.

And what did we expect?

We elected these irrational people in petulance because President Obama didn't turn out to be the savior who could and would save us from ourselves. And now they are behaving predictably and we are even more petulant.

Yes, I believe Obama could have invoked the place in the Constitution that says that the nation's debt obligations are not subject to vote. And that would have kicked the can down the road even further than this despicable deal does.

I don't know whether this will help or hurt him in his reelection, but I do know that the petulance of Democrats on the left – my territory – while justified, is going nowhere until we can persuade our fellow voters that slashing spending on the public good while giving free rein to the plutocrats who now own an inordinate share of the nation's wealth is a bad bargain for the entire nation. And for the world.

Now that Apple has more cash than the United States government we can see that the moment that actually arrived some years ago – when the power in the world shifted from nation states to corporations – is out there for everyone to clearly understand.

Many of my friends believe that is a good thing. They have adopted the knee jerk distrust and even hatred of government even as they have been suckered into believing that business –because it has a profit motive – will always produce a better result.

I think business has an essential role to play in nations. As does government. Business celebrates greed and greed does produce many useful things for a dynamic economy. But it requires a referee, not only to keep the 800 pound gorilla from gaining control of the entire apparatus, but for providing basic needs for those who, for whatever reasons, are unable to provide it for themselves.

We so-called liberals had better figure out how to explain all this to the voters. But then there is the business cycle that very nearly sunk us all so recently (and without government intervention, would have brought down the whole house of cards), and if those who forced this most recent bad deal have their way, will again.

And then there will be pleading from all of us for government to rescue us from ourselves.

Monastic

2011-07-31T11:29:00.003-04:00

It's been more than a month since my pervious entry and I'm doing this one only to stay alive in this medium.

I blog for my own reasons, much as I keep a journal. Except in the case of the journal I burn them every couple of years because I write for myself only. I once read a piece by a woman who had just found her mother's journal many years after her mother died, and she was shocked and upset. "I thought I knew my mother," she wrote, "until I read her journal and encountered a woman I didn't recognize."

Well, she did know her mother, but as her mother, and as her mother chose to show herself to her daughter. No, none of us can control what other's think of us or how they perceive us, but we do have some choices about that. When I write in my journal it is as much to expunge the toxins that build up in my wounded ego as it is to record events. I make an effort – not always successful – to listen to some of my more lurid and petulant feelings and thoughts before letting them escape my mouth.

This medium is one step below that, free associating that still monitors content enough so that if, in the rare event that someone actually reads it, they won't encounter something so noxious as to deeply offend.

I have also taken a holiday from the close following of political, financial and world events as has been my habit since I was an adolescent. In part that must be the result of having been alive for 71 years and seen how impossible events are to predict, let alone influence. Somehow recently I have made a quantum leap from admiring my children and their peers as they take on the world, to realizing that, in the sense that I once believed myself to play a significant role in the world, they now own it.

The President is more than twenty years younger than I am. The Congress is filled with people nearly my age who need to step aside and let others have their innings. I am constantly chagrined at how many young people seem to be clinging to what I view as the frightened views of right wing politicians, but then these things run in cycles and i have been here for several.

Yesterday we looked at old photos from a box that has been sitting in the attic for several decades. When I saw pictures of myself thirty years ago I could read in my expressions a sense that what I thought and did mattered powerfully. The expression was a combination of excitement and anxiety. And ignorance.

It's cool in Vermont today, but not cold. The sun is shining, but scattered clouds fly by and provide periodic shade.

So far no meteor has hit the earth today. Bloodied but not (yet) bowed.

Throwing Kisses

2011-06-14T14:41:00.004-04:00

Basil June 14, 2011

People who throw kisses are hopelessly lazy.
– Bob Hope (1903-2003)

***

Are you aware
Nelson asked me
that when you come to a dramatic point in the liturgy or your sermon you hold your breath? Stop breathing?

I do?

Uh huh. A couple of weeks ago when you were carrying that leather bar you used to take to football games, down the aisle, describing your shame when your father found out about it, you stopped breathing for so long I thought you might pass out.

That afternoon playing tennis I sprinted for a hard shot deep
to my backhand
managed to just get my racket on it return
it limply
and tear back to the forehand side only to watch my
opponent drop a soft shot right where I had
just been
my heart beating so hard it sounded like a bass
drum in my ears until I finally remembered
to take a breath

I asked Nelson – the choirmaster – to teach me how to breathe
he tried

two summers ago I chipped a tooth
You clench your jaw, don’t you?
my dentist accused
Uh huh I admitted So do I he laughed His smile
vanished: Well, Stop it! he demanded

O Snail
climb Mount Fuji
but slowly, slowly. – Issa

somewhere a diaphanous line on one side
refusing to engage on the other
preserving a hidden place
from which you can stroke some smooth
stone
and feel the earth’s constant cool against your
boiling body

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, commenting on American impatience with Germany’s reluctance to commit wholesale to our recent wars: If the Germans, after the experience of the first half of the last century, and with the knowledge of what their forbearers did in the name of Kaiser and Fuhrer, have decided they don’t want to study war no more, then that is neither surprising nor, to some of us, a matter for regret. (NY Review of Books. June 23, 2011)

One wonders what or how
we learn anything

or if we wait until everything learns
us

Jaron Lanier, in a piece in the same issue, “You Are Not A Gadget,” writes a poignant paragraph about the development of the web: The Rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new positive information about human potential. Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind? In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.

Puts me in mind of watching a two year old boy focus his considerable concentration – and undiluted delight– on giving an equal portion of hay to every cow in the barn

Who knows when I first began
holding my breath
clenching my jaw or
why

or what about Gabby Giffords’ – smiling –photo
yesterday
set up a flutter in my stomach that reminded me
of descriptions I’ve heard from pregnant women
about their earliest sensation of another
life
ripening inside them

if you live long enough you begin to
share
the persistent conviction that the noisy façade
those omni-visible people and events present
is for distraction from
another – not so much secret as ignored – layer
forming beneath the
stormy surface sponsoring

sweet long drawn out breaths to
loose those taut jaw muscles for a soft-lipped kiss
embraced by the morning moment the
sentinel song the earliest
bird sings sending the signal

yes, there is going to be another
day
and
you’re invited

Rain

2011-06-11T14:46:00.002-04:00

What a fickle species we are.

Two days ago I was moaning about the heat and worrying that the newly planted seeds in our vegetable garden might fry.

Today, after more than two inches of rain since 4am, I am wondering if the seeds may rot.

The pond has overflowed its banks. It's chilly, too chilly for June, even in Vermont.

I am rather enjoying a rainy day, though I am already feeling the affects of missing my every-other-day bike ride, and wondering if the forecast for more rain over the next couple of days will come to pass.

I don't know where the Canada geese go on days like this but I haven't seen them today. I looked on the web for suggestions of ways to keep them out of the garden where they have recently taken to bringing their young, leaving their green turds on top of what we hope to be eating in a few weeks. Nothing very helpful except the consolation of seeing the numbers of hits on those sites which lets me know I am not alone in suffering this plague.

Every creature has predators and enemies, but we are perhaps the leader in the numbers of naturally occurring phenomena that we expend energy seeking to rd ourselves of.

In the half of the year we spend in southern California we are conscious of the inevitable outcome of millions of people living in a region that averages only a few inches of rain a year. In Vermont we have fewer people than any state except for Wyoming, and we have more than enough rain.

We are a perverse species. Likely a passing phenomenon.

Weather

2011-06-02T12:28:00.002-04:00

The debate about whether weather change is being run by us or by some cyclical force beyond us strikes me as silly.

Not because there aren't smart people on both side of the argument (hugely greater number on the side that says our burning fossil fuel has at least significantly added to and accelerated the process), but because it's becoming more and more obvious that whether it's us or not, our life on the planet is becoming a bigger challenge every day.

Yesterday here in Vermont the sky turned a strange orange color around 2pm. The only other time I have seen a sky that color was in Kentucky when a tornado came through. Then the sky turned deep black and from across the pond I saw a bolt of lightning come down from a cumulous cloud and strike the ground, and I knew we were in for a big one.

I turned on the weather radio and heard all sorts of dire warnings that confirmed what I was watching.

Cosmos, our eight year old terrier, began to pant and shake so hard I was afraid he would have a heart attack. I took him up into my lap where he was willing to stay, but his terror didn't subside.

Springfield, Massachusetts, an hours drive from here had a tornado cross the Connecticut River and slam into downtown, leveling buildings, killing four people and badly injuring scores of others. Who ever heard of a tornado in Springfield, Massachusetts?

We don't run this planet. We didn't give birth to it and we're among its most recent inhabitants. In our short tenure here we discovered the seeming magic that came from excavating old plant material that was buried over the eons and crushed, and burning it, releasing energy that has transformed human life.

Unfortunately it seems also to have transformed our weather and atmosphere in ways that are the equivalent of poisoning our own nest.

Not to mention the hazards we now know nuclear power – once looked to be the answer to supplying the energy we need without adding carbon to the atmosphere – hold.

You have to wonder if we may have outsmarted ourselves. The unintended consequences of so much of our cleverness does raise the question of whether it is possible to outsmart whatever we mean by nature.

Whether it's already too late no one seems to know. But that a major American political party can still make it an article of faith that any attempts we make to mitigate the destruction that weather is wreaking on us, is a waste of taxpayer money, does not bode well for our future.

Interloper

2011-05-31T16:16:00.004-04:00

Visitation of the BVM May 31, 2011

Men, said the Devil, / are good to their brothers: / they don't want to mend / their own ways, but each other's. - Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)

I guess none of my friends made the cut for the Rapture. I’ve done some checking and the usual suspects seem to still be hanging around, still battling gravity. Which is something of a relief to me as I had wondered if I was going to feel again like the kid in the third grade during a pickup baseball game in the backyard, standing alone after everyone else had been picked.

I doubt Vermonters are eligible for the Rapture.

After Howard Dean signed the Civil Union bill in July of 2000 making Vermont the first state to provide marriage rights to same-sex couples, you started seeing signs tacked to trees all over the state.

Take Back Vermont. Remember in November.

That confused me. I’ve experienced people here as the most live-and-let-live I’ve ever known. Our tiny (500) town, bedrock conservative (or maybe libertarian? The former town manager used to say to me when I showed up to vote, Your vote won’t count here, Blayney; just give me your ballot and I’ll fill it out for you.) has three high visibility gay couples, from off, that I can think of.

Finally someone told me about a Vermont legend (I’ve researched it and can’t document it) about an article in Playboy magazine in 1968 that said, There are only 400,000 people in Vermont. If 200,000 of us move up there we can have a state of our own. And many believe that happened. Howard Dean – Dean as in Dean Witter of Wall St. – who came to UVM and never left is their poster boy.

The point? You can come here and do pretty much whatever you please, but don’t try to take over our kingdom and foist your high-falutin social engineering off on us.

That guy in the photo wearing the floppy hat? He and his wife are sheep farmers (Peaked Mt. Farm). Their cheese is wonderful, as is their array of goods you see in their stand at the Farmer’s Market. But Bob hasn’t always farmed. If you Google him:

[He joined Jones Lang LaSalle in 1981, where he has served in various capacities, including manager of both the Property Management and Investment Management teams of the Eastern Region of the United States. Mr. Works was also manager for the Times Square Development Advisory and Chelsea Piers Lease Advisory on behalf of New York State and the president of GCT Ventures and the Revitalization of Grand Central Terminal for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority until he retired on December 31, 2001.]

what you find is he was in charge of redoing Grand Central Station in NYC, which was apparently aggravation enough to turn him into a Vermont farmer.

That lady with the sly grin is Linda who married a Japanese man. They have been working with Cornell and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop strains of rice that will flourish in Vermont. Seems their hybrids, developed from grains that grow on Hokkaido – same latitude – have taken hold. Not a lot for sale yet but the little we’ve eaten is like no other rice grown in this country.

I thought you’d like to see how Tracey’s coming along (in year 5, 6, 10?) with his log cabin. All Tracey ever wanted to do was dairy farm in Vermont as his relatives have for generations. After he graduated from the University of Connecticut 30 years ago he bought a herd of Jerseys and has never looked back. Like all dairy farmers he has to be skilled at everything from cobbling together aging machinery to animal husbandry. He reckons he could have finished the cabin long ago if he didn’t have to fit working on it between farm chores. I asked him how he ever learned enough to cut the logs right and fit them together.

Hell, I don’t have a clue until I get going and see what happens. He ended up taking apart the first multi-year effort after it was half built because he hadn’t treated the logs right, went back into the woods, starting from scratch. If he ever tires of farming he could be a great contractor.

Or therapist. Kids –including ours – have spent many an hour in Tracey’s barn helping with chores and pouring out their unresolved issues to the wisest, best listener they’ll ever know.

And then there’s Harold – though that slippery little fellow in the picture must be son-of-Harold, reclaiming the sunny spot by the mud room door, so Lacey, before she steps out, shouts, Harold, I’m coming out!

600,000 people live here now (Wyoming is the only state with fewer), so maybe the 200,000 responded to that Playboy article. The income level has risen in the past two decades from $20,000 to $38,000, putting us in 20th place. Not everyone would find living here wonderful. It’s often surprising who does.

Spring

2011-05-26T18:32:00.003-04:00

While we have been in sumptuous exile in southern California since December, Vermont has experienced the kind of winter we all say we remember as kids but never see any more.

As soon as the snow let up it began to rain.

When we arrived back a week ago our friends were grumbling. They tell us they love a cold, snowy winter until about March, and then they are ready for a respite. This year there was no January thaw, just relentless winter from December first until the rain that began in late April.

Then two days ago it turned to Vermont spring perfection.

The grass dried out just enough for me to be able to mow without making deep ruts. The trees, which have been ver slow leafing out, burst and are now nearly full.

But the swan that was on the pond has been dispatched by the fish and game people.

The town had grown quite attached to the big handsome bird, a mute swan, we learned. None of us had ever seen one here before. We have tired of the Canada geese since they morphed from a novelty to a plague over the past decade, and we kind of hoped the swan might discourage them from nesting and making more geese.

When I asked the fish and wildlife people why they shot the swan, they sent me a letter with an attachment explaining Vermont's policy of ridding any body of water in the state of any swan that may show up. Turns out they destroy all the other natural habitat. The attachment – which I am unable to reproduce here – made perfect sense, though it raised in my mind a seeming equivalent to the immigration policies that fear the "other" will do harm to our life if we don't raise barriers.

Be wary of those sorts of comparisons, Blayney. Here is the opening of the head of the department's letter to me that summarizes their reasons:

Dear Blayney,

I have attached the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department's position statement on the control of mute swans in Vermont. The Department's mission is to protect native species of wildlife and their habitat.

Hard choices. Beautiful spring on the pond.

Not In La Jolla

2011-05-25T10:05:00.003-04:00

Jackson Kemper May 24, 2011

Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that is how dogs spend their lives.
Sue Murphy
***

Yes, it’s been raining in Vermont since we got back and people are sick of it. But coming from off you are startled by the spring green, finding it easy to overlook the lack of sun.

For a while.

The night we got back, just as we were about to climb into bed a rogue lightning bolt lit up the dark sky followed by a clap of thunder that rattled the windows. Cosmos, a California dog by temperament, exited his crate and came to the side of our bed, paws up, tail tucked under his rear, small, furry, anxious face in mine: Time to go back; it’s not safe here.

That same lightning and thunder frightened four heifers in the field by Tracey’s barn so badly they bolted right through the barbed wire, electrified fence and went missing for three days. A neighbor spotted them as she was driving on the road by another field and alerted Tracey. Did he have a hard time getting them back? I wondered. Oh no; he whistled once, called them each by name and they ran toward him as if they were in the Preakness. They kicked up their hooves as they followed him back to the barn, prancing like Santa’s reindeer. If cows can smile they were laughing with relief.

Before we returned, friends sent us photos of a Mute Swan that had taken up residence on our pond. We were thrilled at the idea but by the time we returned the swan was gone. Two days later a neighbor told me the game warden told her they had shot the big elegant bird. When she asked why, he explained they are aggressive and territorial, driving away native birds and eat vegetation voraciously. What’s more, they’re not only not native to Vermont, they’re not even native to this country.

Knee-jerk liberal that I am, I fired off an email to the state wildlife department protesting that this smelled like our national argument about immigration and the “other” among us. That was before I bothered to check the internet:

As an introduced species it is of concern because of its effects on native wildlife. Its aggressive nature can disrupt the nesting of native waterfowl. It is protected in some states, but not others. Some states are attempting to control Mute Swan numbers.

Now do I have the courage to say that I would have been delighted if the swan had destroyed all the Canada geese eggs and eaten the vegetation that covers the pond by mid-summer? Whose wildlife engineering will be honored?

Despite the long, bitter winter and a fire in a large downtown building, Brattleboro, our nearest big city (pop. 8289, 3797 male, 4492 female) looks much the same. Leaving Mocha Joe’s (the first coffee house in the world to come out for Barack Obama) I ran into a man walking his pig on a leash down Main Street (we’re not in La Jolla any more, Toto) by Sam’s Department Store. (If Sam’s doesn’t have it, you don’t need it) Children petted the pig (and kissed him!) while his handler explained that he was house trained, cleaner than a dog or cat, and next month when he turns a year old he will be a boar.

In two weeks Brattleboro will sponsor the annual Heifer Stroll when young farmers parade their animals down Main Street. Every politician in Vermont will be there; the crowd will be larger than the town’s population. We’ll watch from in front of Mocha Joe’s.

If the rain doesn’t let up soon, long enough for the grass to dry so I can mow, I am going to have to fly a flag from the chimney so we can find the house in the field. The vegetable garden looks beautiful, as does the apple tree, but it’s still too soon and too wet to plant.

Yesterday not long after I filled the bird feeder (some warn not to do that because bears love the seed), as we had our breakfast, a chipping sparrow and then a rose-breasted grosbeak came and ate. The male gold and purple finches are sporting their vibrant early spring mating colors.

Friends

2011-05-17T18:41:00.005-04:00

Thurgood Marshall May 17, 2011

The naming of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers. – Marshall MacLuhan (1911-1980)

***

A little box in the inconspicuous upper right hand corner of page 31 in the current NY Review of Books:

Have You Ever Been Sued By A Good Friend?
I am a law professor conducting a research
study in which friends sue friends – and I
would like to interview you about your
experience in the relationship and the legal
system’s response. Our conversation should
take about an hour. Please email
whenfriendssuefriends@gmail.com for details.

An hour?

How about a couple of years to unpack what exactly it means to call someone a “good friend”, or what broke my heart in so many places it wasn’t enough to simply let go of what I thought was likely a lifelong friendship?

It’s Thurgood Marshall day on the liturgical calendar, meaning the church marks him for something like sainthood. No requirement of a certain number of miracles, though his biography and considering that he was appointed by Lyndon Johnson seem miracle enough.

Justice Marshall played a role in widening my world of friends. Just last week on Cosmos’ and my morning walk we encountered this guy we would once have laughed at as so “other” he was out of our realm. But now I let myself revel in his beautiful, bold statement. I asked him about it.

Purple’s my color, man, he said unnecessarily, chortling, the color of royalty and passion and nature at its most extravagant. I wondered if he knew about the purple house just a couple of blocks from the beach? He didn’t but said he would head over there first thing. We all love it, and the lady who lived there who always wore purple everything. I have a feeling she may have moved. Or died.

I chose to think of her as a friend, though we never spoke. Him, too. How can you not consider someone that “out there” less than a friend of the life we’d like to be brave enough to claim for ourselves?

The other; that’s what freaks us out. Last night PBS ran a piece on the Freedom Riders who rode buses into the segregated south in 1961 to challenge Jim Crow laws. I grew up in the south believing negroes were other. It didn’t seem right that should mean they were poor and live in squalor, but neither did it occur to me that they should ever inhabit the same world I did. The films made it seem like a long time ago, because now the blacks didn’t look like other.

Driving home the other night a possum slithered across just in front of us on a busy street, disappearing between two parked cars. My heart skipped a beat to think that homely little creature somehow manages to carry on in a world designed for us in which he is consigned to other.

On a flight from Portland to San Diego last week, Lacey was among the handful who remained on board at the stop in Sacramento. The flight attendant was exclaiming about something as she neatened the cabin. What’s up? Lacey asked. Sea World is bringing penguins on board, the attendant told her, and they’re going to let them stroll the aisle. Lacey was incredulous. No way; what if they poop? The attendant laughed: Who Cares?

Shortly after takeoff the pilot announced the penguins’ presence and that they were going to take a walk. (It is now safe for you to move about the cabin.)

And damned if they didn’t. To the clicking of a hundred camera phones and the applause of the happiest collection of fliers anywhere in several decades.

Either we’re all aliens here, or none of us is. If none, then friends. So sue me.

Breathtaking

2011-05-11T16:44:00.000-04:00

May 11, 2011

When an aide suggested to First Lady Bess Truman that she might want to tell her husband to “tone down” his language, she replied: “You don’t know how many years it’s taken me to get him to say horse manure!” After his presidency, Truman discovered his wife Bess at the fireplace of their home, burning old letters he had written to her over the years. Shocked at the sight, he exclaimed, “Think of history!” She replied simply: “I have.”

One wonders at our kind, after a mere century of seeming to outwit gravity – briefly – we can now take a casual attitude toward traveling six miles above our planet, looking down onto snow-covered volcanoes as we speed from San Diego to Sacramento to Portland (Oregon) in a few hours.

Am I the only rube with nose pressed against the porthole, considering those beauties thrust up by subduction, the heavy oceanic plate colliding with the lighter continental plate? Imagine the uproar as the heavier plate was driven down creating pressure that melted the rock into magma those volcanoes spewed into the air.

Look at those fertile farms that eruption provided.

OMG, there’s LA! Just look at it. The guy sitting in front of me just reclined his seat into my face so he can sleep. The woman across the aisle has a spread sheet on her laptop screen. Hey folks, LA is sprawled beneath us. Want to see what we’ve done with our turn at bat? There she is!

That’s Camp Pendleton, the open green space from the mountains down to the Pacific. You work out the irony that the Marines have preserved the largest, most beautiful open space on the Southern California coast so they can practice invading other countries from the sea. San Diego loves Pendleton. It protects us from fellow aliens, but maybe even more, from LA. If the Marines ever abandon Pendleton, San Diego will quickly become a suburb of LA.

On our ho hum approach into San Diego – ho hum because I have done it so many times I no longer even pick up my feet as we clear the top of Laurel Travel by a frog’s hair – I spend a couple of minutes with Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester, just long enough to learn this:

The organism Prochlorococcus is probably the most abundant living creature on the planet, and it produces as much as 1/5th of the world’s atmospheric oxygen.

Are you kidding me? Now here’s maybe the most humbling thing about this krill, which we never see because it’s so tiny, and which provides one out of every five of the last breaths I just helped myself to:

We didn’t even know it existed until a couple of young graduate students discovered it in the Sargasso Sea in 1986.

Got that? 1986. I was 46 years old, headed for Southern California and what would turn out to be my final post. I thought I was well seasoned, figured I knew just about everything necessary to health and salvation.

I’m a day later than usual with this Zone Note because we were in Portland meeting a granddaughter. We stayed in the house of friends I knew more than fifty years ago, met again a couple of years ago. Their house is filled with treasures of their long (by human measure) lives and those of their forebears, some of whom I knew.

Safiya gave her mother a run for her money as they both labored in an effort quite incomprehensible to men. The two of them – and their father (and grandparents) – are gradually gaining strength, adjusting to a reality more changed than the human imagination can fathom in advance.

As I considered the century and a half of wonders in our friends’ house, I tried to picture what Safiya’s house may be filled with over the next century. What her grandchildren will find funny about those photos of their great-grandparents.

And how many breaths the prochlorococcus will grant her. Easy enough to calculate: simply count her total breaths and divide by five.

Death Photo

2011-05-05T16:34:00.002-04:00

A man I know who spent his career with the CIA sent me a photo he said had been obtained by someone in Pakistan where the man had held a post for several years.

It was of Osama bin Laden's mutilated body.

Gruesome. So gruesome I was torn between my curiosity and my horror.

Two days later the President announced that he would not release photos of the body. I emailed my friend and asked him what to make of the photo he had sent. He replied that it was a photo shop fake.

The President has made the right decision.

I understand what a feeding frenzy it will be for those who think they had found fare even richer than the question of the President's birth certificate. And with the rest of us who, despite our best intentions, can't turn off our prurient obsession with the horrific.

Photos of bi Laden's corpse will no more end speculation about whether he was actually killed any more than Obama's long-form birth certificate has satisfied the "birthers."

But at least it spares the rest of us an encounter with our worst selves. And shows some consideration and respect for the Islamic world.

Lesson Learned?

2011-05-04T15:46:00.002-04:00

The national jubilation over the execution of Osama bin Laden has begun to give way to more sobering consideration.

One perspective (which I remember speculating about before we invaded Iraq) is that our response to the attacks of 9/11 met the hopes of those who sponsored them better than they had dared imagine.

What that view holds is that bin Laden learned from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that the way to defeat a super power is not in winning on the battlefield, but in pinning them down over scores of years as they lose their young soldiers a few at a time and drain their coffers dry in the effort.

We were so pleased when we drove the Islamist government out of Kabul even though I have heard from friends at CIA that they were not only unrelated to Al Qaida, the terrorist group that planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks, but they wanted them out of their country as well.

It proved such an easy victory for us that we withdrew the overwhelming invasion force and began preparing to invade Iraq, a country that had no part in the 9/11 attacks. There will be an endless, never resolved debate about why we did that. Did we really buy the seemingly trumped up evidence of weapons of mass destruction? Did we really consider Saddam such a threat to the world that we were justified in attacking?

Or, as has always made more sense to me, did we feel the need to establish a presence in the region from which we could ensure access to the oil there, and Iraq looked like the best chance to do that?

Whatever the motives, we badly miscalculated. I saw a quote from a retired soldier (retired because of wounds suffered in Iraq) who says he fears those who fought in Iraq will be remembered for having fought in the wrong war in the wrong country.)

Unfortunately Barack Obama – who was on record as being against the Iraq invasion – felt the need to prove his credentials to to become our commander in chief, and did that by calling Iraq a "wrong war of choice," and Afghanistan the "right war of necessity."

So when, early on in his presidency, he was called on to make a decision in response to our generals' call for more troops in Afghanistan, he must have felt his campaign required him to pursue it with vigor.

Vice President Biden was reported at the time to have lobbied hard for ramped up intelligence and training of small bands of special forces to go wherever threats are uncovered, rather than having our armies invading countries at vast cost in life and treasure.

bin Laden is said to have learned that the hubris of great powers prevents them from backing off a failed mission until they have bankrupted themselves. Many believe that was why the Soviets finally left Afghanistan with their tail between their legs, and contributed greatly to their financial and then political collapse.

It would be hard to argue that the trillions of dollars we have spent vainly trying to shape that region to our liking hasn't been a huge contributing factor in the recent economic catastrophe that nearly took down the international financial system.

I regard the execution of bin Laden as a necessary evil but not a moment for great celebration for our nation. Although it shows the awesome power and expertise of our intelligence and special forces to pursue those who seek to do us harm, it would seem to make a mockery of the gargantuan effort we have mounted in that region over the past decade.

Joe Biden would seem to be justified if he is taking satisfaction in seeing his view vindicated.

Great powers are not known for learning humbling lessons. Any chance of our proving the exception?

Carrying On

2011-04-25T15:15:00.003-04:00

The Christian calendar marks Easter Day as the day Lenten disciplines give way to celebration.

As usual I am not ready.

My Lenten discipline – giving as wide a berth to the minute-by-minute press of events, as I am able in this media saturated culture – is turning out not only to offer some relief from the anxiety all that can trigger, but actually has given me back quite a lot of time I hadn't even realized has been taken up with all that.

I may sneak a peek at the wedding coming up in Westminster Abbey later this week, of what's his name and what's her name (I am, after all heir to the flock of The Archbishop of Canterbury who will certainly be leading that parade) but I'm afraid the University of Texas collecting gold bullion, and apparently scores of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan tunneling their way our of prison, are going to have to go along without my focused attention.

I will be carrying on my Lenten discipline into the Easter season.

Good?

2011-04-22T16:06:00.003-04:00

A Jewish friend asked me why the day on which Christians mark Jesus' execution is called "good."

I've heard lots of speculation over the years, about it being derived from "God," or being called good because it was a good thing Jesus did for the world. Wikipedia says it is a perversion of an ancient name for God.

I have always been more drawn to the events surrounding Jesus' death than what we are supposed to celebrate on Easter, which is mostly understood to be Jesus' overcoming death.

Presumptuous of me as it certainly is, to take exception to the Atonement, one of the central teachings of the Church over the centuries, I nonetheless do. Not only do I find it a horrible understanding of how God – who's name is said to be synonymous with love – would go about resolving the dilemma if human perfidy, but it provides an unpersuasively cheap exit for us.

So God provided God's child – who is of the same substance as God – to die a painful death, and that means we are off the hook for whatever nasty things we may do?

Don't we wish.

The Jesus story is way more ancient than 200 years. And every culture and religion has some form of it.

It underscores not the way out of the human dilemma (sin and death), but the means of living with it in such a way that it loses the power to render human life meaningless.

Perhaps the first piece is giving up our battle against death itself. We are a part of the life/death cycle like everything else. It is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be embraced.

By some unimaginable gracious process we have come into being for a season. In that wondrous season we may spend our lives in celebration of this gift and welcoming others who are celebrating it with us.

Sounds so simple, but seems always out of reach.

It derives from our zero-sum understanding of our being here, the conviction that anything someone or something else has is something or someone I can't have.

The resurrection of Jesus on Easter – and the resurrection of virtually every figure of religious nobility in some form – is meant as the conviction that nothing we will ever face has the power to take away the gift we have been given, the gift of being here.

Not even death. You must have lived to die.

What is marked among Christians on Good Friday is the reality of suffering. We suffer not necessarily because we have done something wrong or bad, but because it is a part of being here.

To affirm that is Good.

Beachcomber

2011-04-19T16:49:00.003-04:00

Pesach April 19, 2011

You will never know how much it costs us to keep that saint, that wonderful old man [Gandhi], in poverty.
- Indian poet and Gandhi disciple, Saronjini Naidu

***

The mocking bird begins his frantic song in the magnolia tree just outside our bedroom window at first light. In December he doesn’t tune up until 7am. He synchs with the time change so we still don’t hear him much before we go out with Cosmos. I suppose it could be annoying to people who sleep. I often find myself waiting for him to begin, even as daylight begins to crest Mt. Soledad earlier.

One night last week he sang all night.

If you’ve been reading these notes for long you know my impatience with our late-arriving species’ insistence that our fellow fauna and flora adjust to our comforts.

A favorite sight is those ceramic owls people put on their roofs to dissuade seagulls from roosting, surrounded by a flock of chattering gulls. Gulls have found the wire basket on the chimney next door – designed to deter them – a shelter to hatch their young. The seabirds have no curfew, trading loud, no doubt lewd, jokes and arguing rudely through the night. Screaming gulls have had no more impact on ocean view prices than the Rose Canyon fault that comes ashore directly beneath my feet as I write.

I’m reading Simon Winchester’s Atlantic: Great Sea Battles. Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, And A Vast Ocean Of A Million Stories. It provides everything the title promises. Winchester writes that the Atlantic was born and will die. We humans, not around for its birth, won’t be for its death. Without it we would never have been here, but without us it will continue on for a long time.

NASA has announced that the Kepler telescope, put into orbit in March of 2009 to search for planets that have the possibility of supporting “life,” has identified 1,235 of them. So far five are near earth size, and orbit within the habital zone of their stars. So much for our exceptionalism.

Returning from an ocean swim the other day, that sense of well-being sparked by immersion in our primal broth was short-circuited by a note taped to our door by a neighbor complaining about Cosmos’ barking.

We live in a crowded neighborhood by the beach. Cosmos polices it with a terrier’s territorial resolve. He has resigned himself to the inevitability of most humans, but our doggedness hasn’t dented his energetic exception to skateboards and to Mickey, the muscular chocolate lab who hangs in front of the surf shop across the street.

In desperation we have borrowed a collar that, when he barks, sprays a squirt of citronella in his face. It seems to have at least toned him down, except for face to face meetings with Mickey when he would endure anything rather than surrender his honor. Something sorrows in me for having to curb that nobility for our ease.

His determination to clear his corner of Mickey would likely be the end of him, but I can’t quarrel with his hunting down skateboards.

This morning the shiny blue tractor combed the beach, removing kelp before tourists arrived for the day. No chance, I guess, that we’ll ever decide to try fitting in here.

Downgrade

2011-04-18T14:40:00.003-04:00

I guess Standard & Poor doesn't want to be the scapegoat in the next crash.

I need to think more about this, but off the top of my head I'd say downgrading the likelihood of the Congress and the President coming to an agreement about tackling the deficit before the 2012 election is a largely symbolic gesture. A kind of scarecrow. After all, they retained the super duper current rating.

But the markets seem to get the point, symbolic or not.

The future is now.

Maybe.

Or maybe S&P meant it as a threat. You guys get your act together or we're going to rain (maybe send a blizzard) on your parade.

It's still not clear to me whether there is an honest difference of opinion about the nature of our current economic precariousness and of possible solutions, or whether the seemingly (to me) nutty proposals of the Republicans are aimed at what they perceive to be the Democrats' most politically vulnerable points.

I have no doubt they have succeeded in persuading a hell of a lot of Americans that cutting taxes and slashing public spending on anything except filling potholes and making war, are the best ways of bringing us back to our former place as the world's most powerful and feared nation. Hidden and not so hidden persuaders have become so ubiquitous and clever since Vance Packard first used that term, that it is possible to persuade people whose incomes have stagnated and fallen in the past forty years, that further cuts to the taxes of those who have impoverished them is somehow in their interests.

But do the legislators making those cuts really believe it?

S&P doesn't give a damn which it is. Democrats – while feebly trying to point out that cutting taxes and making war have not done much for most of us – have somehow been cowed by the ferocity and financial power of Republicans, and so make their case cautiously and all too quietly.

In a better world the downgrade might jolt us all into coming to our senses.

But this isn't a better world. And we crows have now seen so many different scarecrows, we hardly give them a glance.

Bird Song

2011-04-15T13:59:00.003-04:00

A mocking bird perches on a branch of the magnolia tree outside our bedroom window and, at first light, begins to sing a chaotic and entrancing song.

The song lasts for the better part of a half hour. It may go on longer but by then it begins to harmonize with countless other birds' singing that begins later. (The seagulls respect no timetable, carrying on rudely night and day. The night herons that arrive from somewhere sometime after the first of the year, have a monotone cry that becomes an ominous warning that they are back and will take up tenancy somewhere in our neighborhood and rain a downpour of their excrement on that winter's unlucky landlord.)

Until the spring time-change the mocking bird's wakeup call comes at a respectable hour, perhaps as late as 7am.

But beginning in early April and into July his morning greeting comes earlier and earlier.

Which for someone my age is rather comforting, because I sleep much less than I once did, and far less soundly. I often lie awake waiting for him to begin.

When I had a day job I would fret though a night in which I found myself awake. I worried that I wouldn't have the strength to do whatever it was I faced the following day.

For a period a group of university students rented a house on the street just below ours, and on Saturday nights they would crank up a large noisy party after the bars closed at 2am. I went to war with them and eventually they tired of me and moved.

I've discovered since I shifted from a job to which I reported in return for a paycheck, to writing for my own ends, it doesn't seem to much matter how much sleep I get. I don't know anyone my age who sleeps soundly through the whole night – aging prostates alone can prevent that – but some still struggle with various remedies, hoping to reverse what I suspect is part of the cycle of aging.

Though I spend much less of those waking hours wrestling with the world's woes or my own, it is a time in which I often consider the eventualities that so much of life is devoted to holding off. You know what they are.

And that mocking bird seems not to be mocking my growing frailty, but putting it to rich, complex music.

Marco! Polo!

2011-04-13T15:27:00.001-04:00

Adoniram Judson April 11, 2011

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
– William Hazlitt (1778-1830)

Period pieces. This song. Perry Como sang it best. Anyone out there under fifty who knew that lighting a woman’s cigarette could be a romantic gesture?

You start to light her cigarette and all at once you love her. You've scarcely talked, you've scarcely met. But all at once you love her. You like her eyes, you tell her so. She thinks you're wise and clever. You kiss goodnight and then you know. You'll kiss goodnight forever. You wonder where your heart can go. Then all at once you know.

Someone once said there is only one love song that begins with the word fish. (Hint: Same composer)

When arrived in La Jolla – I was the new rector of St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church – my favorite warm-up for the upcoming interminable Sunday was to walk down to busy restaurant, bar, gallery, Prospect Street on Saturday night and join saffron robed Hare Krishnas who snake danced through the crowds of tourists chanting The Maha Mantra:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

I suppose I began joining them as a sort of smart-alecky thing, wondering what it might be like for someone who had come down for a Haagen-Dazs to realize the guy in jeans at the end of the Hare Krishna line was the same guy presiding at the church altar the next morning.

So far as I know my children were the only ones who were ever scandalized.

After the second or third Saturday I began to find the chanting and the rhythmic movement transporting. The legitimate Hare Krishnas, in their trance, never gave any hint they were even aware of me tagging along.

I suppose it made more sense than I knew, nebulous religious refugee from the sixties, drawn to the trappings, language and music of another ancient guild.

As I am to the ocean. Some think I am without nerve endings, or perhaps vestigial, swimming in the mid-50s ocean in winter, sans wet suit. The buoyant salt water, swells lifting and dipping me like a cork, have a like effect on my nervous system as the Krishna conga line. Often I lose boundaries between me and everything.

Last week, wishing to shed the world’s weight, I swam in an ocean a little more turbulent than I would normally. Once through the break, the swells began reassuring, inviting me – as I looked back at the extravagantly priced houses that now looked like tiny huts – to submit a couple of the most vexing issues to same shrinking perspective.

I chose our Middle East Wars and the abortion controversy, both threatening to bankrupt us. A seal barked, a pelican folded her wings and crashed, the sunlight glanced off a school of several thousand bait fish as they simultaneously darted left, not a one breaking formation. I rolled onto my back, the swells pitching, disorienting me. Marco! Polo!

After a long hot shower I went home and disabled the news and opinion sites my computer feeds me every day.
The forty days of Lent are for shedding addiction at least long enough to get a look at what you hoped it would distract you from. I may hook them back up after Easter.

Withdrawal. Hmm. Wars. Abortion.

Masters

2011-04-11T15:49:00.002-04:00

Whether or not you are a golf fan, you may have watched the gripping drama that unfolded in the final round of the Masters Golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia yesterday.

A 21 year old from Ireland led the tournament all the first three days, taking what looked like perhaps an insurmountable four stroke lead into the final round. I asked a couple of my golf savvy friends whether they thought he could hold his nerves together. To a person they believed that he would.

He didn't.

He shot an 80. You know several people who pretty consistently shoot below 80. It was heartbreaking.

As he was unraveling an amazing duel for the prized green jacket was setting up among ten players. Two of them were young Australians. Amazing for a country of renowned athletes, they were hoping to become the first Aussies to win at Augusta.

Just when it looked as if surely one of them would, they both faltered just enough to let a 26 year old South African make an astonishing run of five birdies on the final holes and sink a putt that won the tournament by two strokes.

Even my wife, who regards watching golf as exciting as watching grass grow (which you actually do watching golf) was glued to the TV.

My admiration for the talent and steely nerves of those young guys climbed up another notch as I watched.

Respite

2011-04-09T13:16:00.003-04:00

The decision I made last week to step aside from monitoring politics, the environment, the economy, until Easter (April 24) is proving uneven.

I like the idea of a time out, and most religions have seasons set aside for that. For Christians it is the forty days of Lent that precede Easter. The usual disciplines involve abstinence from alcohol or cigarettes, or sugar, caffein or whatever addiction has threatened to claim ownership of one's life.

I have never been able to tolerate most of those vices (except for sugar) enough to make giving them up for a period provide much of anything except the false pride that wrecks the point of most fasts.

Though there is not much to boast about in giving up news, I still have to guard against congratulating myself for acknowledging that the world can get along without my supervision for a couple of weeks. As a young man I believed it was my civic duty to keep abreast of the news, and it was no hardship for a news junkie like me.

The issue, of course, is the illusion of control. Or of needing the world to improve in order for my soul to be all right.

You've likely heard the story of Pope John Paul saying his prayers before bed one night during a particularly stressful time (maybe the sex scandals that have besmirched the church?). He says: "Lord, I'm exhausted, spent. I'm going to sleep now and you're going to have to look after things until I am awake again."

The line between refusing to engage the world and holding your appropriate concerns about the world's injustice lightly, is fine indeed.

Lent

2011-04-04T16:11:00.003-04:00

For those of us trained in the Christian tradition the forty days of Lent provide a time for reflection and repentance.

Repentance in its original form means to change direction, literally turn around.

Many traditions provide formal periods for this. In fact the Christian Lent is fashioned around both the forty years Israel wandered in the desert after their exodus from Egypt, and the tradition that Jesus spent forty days alone, fasting in the desert to prepare himself for his public ministry. (It was there that he was tempted by Satan).

Even when I was a pastor, a manager of the institution guarding and promoting the customs and traditions, I always found it took me a few weeks into Lent before I got into it myself. It was hardly the only way I was out of synch with the obligations of the institution.

Lent has been underway for several weeks now and just this morning I began to be overwhelmed by that sense Shakespeare described so well – of the world being too much with me.

I wonder if I have the discipline to do what occurred to me as the appropriate antidote?

To set aside these next few weeks all reading and fretting about the state of the world.

The New York Times, Salon, Alternet, Poltico; there must be a couple of dozen sits I check regularly. And of late they have weighed on me in ways I know mean I am losing my perspective. And myself.

We'll see.

Whose View?

2011-03-31T15:15:00.002-04:00

I am among those who view most of the Republican agenda at the moment as a sham.

I can't believe the know-nothing views on climate, and the insistence that the United States can have her way in any and every situation in the world, are held by rational people. There may be cynical reasons for espousing those views, believing that they are easier to portray to those of us who are impatient with subtlety, and whose votes will decide who wields power.

But I exchange often with friends who call themselves conscientious Republicans and who seem honestly to hold those views.

Winston Churchill was right: democracy is the worst political system in the world, except for all the others.

Oh God!

2011-03-30T18:40:00.003-04:00

If you don't have a strong stomach, or if you don't want to risk never again being able to feel proud of being a citizen of the United States, stay clear of the April 14 issue of Rolling Stone.

I have persuaded myself that I know war removes everyone's humanity.

I think I have no illusions about our soldiers being any less cruel than the soldiers of any other country.

I have never thought I could keep my sense of myself intact under fire, seeing my friends killed.

But seeing the pictures from our soldiers fighting in Afghanistan has torn a gaping wound in my sense of myself, caused me torment for the part I play in this.

We are the richest nation and we spend more than twice as much on our military as all the rest of the world's nations combined. That has come to mean wherever there is combat, we are there. And often as not the arms and materiel on both sides of the fight have come from us.

Believing, as I do, that President Obama is a man with a conscience, his sleep must be tortured with the images of the carnage over which he presides.

God save us.

Why Bother?

2011-03-30T13:56:00.004-04:00

Today is a day that began in dis-spirit, perhaps because I tossed for most of the night.

And why?

What with confusion about Libya and what's a proper response from our nation to their turmoil, dueling opinions about the ongoing nature and future of our economic life in this country and the world, I find that the older I get the more uncertainty I must live with.

About everything.

One my walk up to my writing station this morning I took a stab at reducing the most basic issues to as few propositions as possible.

1. On balance, am I glad to have been here?

I have no conscious memory of having asked to be in this existence, but here I am. I think it a legitimate – even urgent – judgment each of us makes, consciously or not. Glad to have been here, or wish I might have been spared?

2. Having exerted considerable effort over 70 years to shape my life (and, truth be told, the world) to my liking, does the result suggest I am in charge?

Sounds a little fatuous at first, but in fact the judgment about that determines just about everything about how to live here. If I am in charge, then not only is my life and the world in even deeper trouble than the Tea Party people claim, but I am failing miserably at my task. If I am not in charge (setting aside for a moment who or what might be, or even if there is an "in charge") then I am free to do what I can and let things unfold as they will.

1. On balance I am glad I got a shot at this life. Some days less than others. But I have not (yet) seriously considered what Sartre said is the only real human choice – suicide. Lots of days I have experienced even fleeting moments of ecstasy.

2. I am not in charge. I happen not to believe anyone or anything else is either, but that's for another time. So many things in my life have turned out miraculously (miraculous because I could never have imagined such an outcome), and some have been disappointing. Expending energy is worth doing because we seem designed to do that. Like lions to hunt. And, like lions on the hunt, we produce endorphins when we make an effort, and those endorphins make us what we call "happy."

As for whether we should be flying combat over Libya, or whether our dwindling middle class being swallowed by a few very rich people and corporations is going to do us in, I have my opinions and I will lobby for them.

My efforts have had precious little success in recent years. But I am nonetheless glad to be here.

Fire

2011-03-29T14:21:00.002-04:00

Fire

John Keble March 29, 2011

Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids. -John Steinbeck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1902-1968)

The year we moved to a country in the Ring of Fire I turned 12 and Elizabeth Taylor, then 21, lit my fire.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flOvM4Z355A

Before I knew anything of biology or the reproductive imperative I sensed enough of a new power – having been formed as a mid-20th century WASP – to hide the glossy photo of Elizabeth Taylor with the tops of her milky white breasts visible above her red taffeta dress – in the bottom drawer of my bureau underneath Capt. Marvel comics.

Rather than embarrass myself further, I thought to give you a look at what some others said about her, all of which feels like a sort of vindication of my long obsession.

Camille Paglia in an interview with Salon:

She wields the sexual power that feminism cannot explain and has tried to destroy. Through stars like Taylor, we sense the world-disordering impact of legendary women like Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. Feminism has tried to dismiss the femme fatale as a misogynist libel, a hoary cliche. But the femme fatale expresses women's ancient and eternal control of the sexual realm... It was rooted in hormonal reality -- the vitality of nature. She was single-handedly a living rebuke to postmodernism and post-structuralism, which maintain that gender is merely a social construct... Elizabeth Taylor could control men. She liked men. And men liked her. There was a chemistry between her and men, coming from her own maternal instincts. I've been writing about this for years, and it was partly inspired by watching Taylor operate on-screen and off. The happy and successful heterosexual woman feels tender and maternal toward men -- but this has been completely lost in our feminist era. Now women tell men, you have to be my companion and be just like a woman; be my best friend, and listen to me chatter. In other words, women don't really like men anymore -- they want men to be like women. But Elizabeth Taylor liked men, and men loved to be around her because they sensed that... The canonical shot of Elizabeth Taylor sewn into that white slip in "Butterfield 8" is one of the major art images of my entire life! She is Babylonian pagan woman -- the goddess Ishtar, the anti-Mary!

NY Times article by Mel Gussow March 23, 2011:

She was pursued by paparazzi and denounced by the Vatican. But behind the seemingly scandalous behavior was a woman with a clear sense of morality: she habitually married her lovers. People watched and counted, with vicarious pleasure, as she became Elizabeth Taylor Hilton Wilding Todd Fisher Burton Burton Warner Fortensky — enough marriages to certify her career as a serial wife. Asked why she married so often, she said, in an assumed drawl: “I don’t know, honey. It sure beats the hell out of me.”

People Magazine March 24:

Elizabeth Taylor was laid to rest Thursday at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, Calif., in a small, private funeral attended by friends and family that began 15 minutes after schedule – under instructions she left.

Dick Cavett describing doing a magic trick before an audience as a young beginning actor:

That night, about halfway back among the dimly lit diners, I’d glimpsed a female figure who, in the near-darkness, could almost have passed for Elizabeth Taylor, if you squinted.

In a merry jest, something made me say, “I’ve done this trick a hundred times and I keep having this fantasy that some day the person who comes up and helps me will be some famous, luminous movie star. Like Elizabeth Taylor.”

Just before tossing the rope out front, I detected movement in the dark. I could see a striking apparition in white, gliding smoothly like a Rose Bowl float toward the floor-level stage.

It was.

And it was true what’s been said so often. Her beauty would take your breath away.

I’d love to know the technical explanation of a strange phenomenon. First gazing upon that sublimely gorgeous face, you were struck by the fact that she was even more beautiful in person. Yes, the camera and screen did not — and how silly it sounds to say — do Elizabeth Taylor justice.

Looking at each other, I could feel palpitation. (Mine, of course.)

Suddenly I was all thumbs, but figured she was probably used to having that effect, and that relaxed me. Some.

What was nice about her was that she seemed to be genuinely enjoying the moment, fascinated by the trick and earnestly and conscientiously following my instructions. A less classy celebrity might have clowned and tried to screw me up.

Then I said something I regretted.

On about the fourth cut-and-restore, she had some trouble severing the rope and I heard myself say, “You can cut it, Miss Taylor. Just think of it as the marital bond.” She was so concentrated I hoped she might have missed it.

There was a noticeable murmur of disapproval from a few, but before I had completed a wince, thanks to whatever gods there may be, she laughed.

Heartily is hardly the word. The Taylor laugh wasn’t just any laugh; certainly not that of a refined lady. She gave out with the great full-throated guffaw known to her friends. It was a robust and delightfully bawdy thing, more appropriate to a stevedore than a beauty.

We shall not see her like again soon.

©2011Blayney Colmore

For a look at a Colmore spending passion in another idiom, take a look at Jen’s recent time in Zambia: www.livingcompassion.org/trip-blogs

Friedman on Declaring War by Congress

2011-03-29T14:19:00.001-04:00

What Happened to the American Declaration of War?
March 29, 2011 | 0853 GMT
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By George Friedman

In my book “The Next Decade,” I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic.

World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war. The wars fought since have had congressional approval, both in the sense that resolutions were passed and that Congress appropriated funds, but the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think. The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress. Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him. Not only does it make his position as commander in chief unassailable by authorizing military action, it creates shared responsibility for war. A declaration of war informs the public of the burdens they will have to bear by leaving no doubt that Congress has decided on a new order — war — with how each member of Congress voted made known to the public.

Almost all Americans have heard Franklin Roosevelt’s speech to Congress on Dec. 8, 1941: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan … I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, Dec. 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”

It was a moment of majesty and sobriety, and with Congress’ affirmation, represented the unquestioned will of the republic. There was no going back, and there was no question that the burden would be borne. True, the Japanese had attacked the United States, making getting the declaration easier. But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.

Forgoing the Declaration

It is odd, therefore, that presidents who need that authorization badly should forgo pursuing it. Not doing so has led to seriously failed presidencies: Harry Truman in Korea, unable to seek another term; Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, also unable to seek a new term; George W. Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq, completing his terms but enormously unpopular. There was more to this than undeclared wars, but that the legitimacy of each war was questioned and became a contentious political issue certainly is rooted in the failure to follow constitutional pathways.

In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea. When North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman took recourse to the new U.N. Security Council. He wanted international sanction for the war and was able to get it because the Soviet representatives happened to be boycotting the Security Council over other issues at the time.

Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways. First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter. Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered. Whether Congress’ authorization to join the United Nations both obligated the United States to wage war at U.N. behest, obviating the need for declarations of war because Congress had already authorized police actions, is an interesting question. Whatever the answer, Truman set a precedent that wars could be waged without congressional declarations of war and that other actions — from treaties to resolutions to budgetary authorizations — mooted declarations of war.

If this was the founding precedent, the deepest argument for the irrelevancy of the declaration of war is to be found in nuclear weapons. Starting in the 1950s, paralleling the Korean War, was the increasing risk of nuclear war. It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties. In that sense, it was argued fairly persuasively that the Constitution had become irrelevant to the military realities facing the republic.

Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general. If that was so, then constitutional procedures that could not be applied to nuclear war were simply no longer relevant.

Paradoxically, if nuclear warfare represented the highest level of warfare, there developed at the lowest level covert operations. Apart from the nuclear confrontation with the Soviets, there was an intense covert war, from back alleys in Europe to the Congo, Indochina to Latin America. Indeed, it was waged everywhere precisely because the threat of nuclear war was so terrible: Covert warfare became a prudent alternative. All of these operations had to be deniable. An attempt to assassinate a Soviet agent or raise a secret army to face a Soviet secret army could not be validated with a declaration of war. The Cold War was a series of interconnected but discrete operations, fought with secret forces whose very principle was deniability. How could declarations of war be expected in operations so small in size that had to be kept secret from Congress anyway?

There was then the need to support allies, particularly in sending advisers to train their armies. These advisers were not there to engage in combat but to advise those who did. In many cases, this became an artificial distinction: The advisers accompanied their students on missions, and some died. But this was not war in any conventional sense of the term. And therefore, the declaration of war didn’t apply.

By the time Vietnam came up, the transition from military assistance to advisers to advisers in combat to U.S. forces at war was so subtle that there was no moment to which you could point that said that we were now in a state of war where previously we weren’t. Rather than ask for a declaration of war, Johnson used an incident in the Tonkin Gulf to get a congressional resolution that he interpreted as being the equivalent of war. The problem here was that it was not clear that had he asked for a formal declaration of war he would have gotten one. Johnson didn’t take that chance.

What Johnson did was use Cold War precedents, from the Korean War, to nuclear warfare, to covert operations to the subtle distinctions of contemporary warfare in order to wage a substantial and extended war based on the Tonkin Gulf resolution — which Congress clearly didn’t see as a declaration of war — instead of asking for a formal declaration. And this represented the breakpoint. In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.

Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.

After the war, Congress created the War Powers Act in recognition that wars might commence before congressional approval could be given. However, rather than returning to the constitutional method of the Declaration of War, which can be given after the commencement of war if necessary (consider World War II) Congress chose to bypass declarations of war in favor of resolutions allowing wars. Their reason was the same as the president’s: It was politically safer to authorize a war already under way than to invoke declarations of war.

All of this arose within the assertion that the president’s powers as commander in chief authorized him to engage in warfare without a congressional declaration of war, an idea that came in full force in the context of nuclear war and then was extended to the broader idea that all wars were at the discretion of the president. From my simple reading, the Constitution is fairly clear on the subject: Congress is given the power to declare war. At that moment, the president as commander in chief is free to prosecute the war as he thinks best. But constitutional law and the language of the Constitution seem to have diverged. It is a complex field of study, obviously.

An Increasing Tempo of Operations

All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.

It is said that there is no precedent for fighting al Qaeda, for example, because it is not a nation but a subnational group. Therefore, Bush could not reasonably have been expected to ask for a declaration of war. But there is precedent: Thomas Jefferson asked for and received a declaration of war against the Barbary pirates. This authorized Jefferson to wage war against a subnational group of pirates as if they were a nation.

Had Bush requested a declaration of war on al Qaeda on Sept. 12, 2001, I suspect it would have been granted overwhelmingly, and the public would have understood that the United States was now at war for as long as the president thought wise. The president would have been free to carry out operations as he saw fit. Roosevelt did not have to ask for special permission to invade Guadalcanal, send troops to India, or invade North Africa. In the course of fighting Japan, Germany and Italy, it was understood that he was free to wage war as he thought fit. In the same sense, a declaration of war on Sept. 12 would have freed him to fight al Qaeda wherever they were or to move to block them wherever the president saw fit.

Leaving aside the military wisdom of Afghanistan or Iraq, the legal and moral foundations would have been clear — so long as the president as commander in chief saw an action as needed to defeat al Qaeda, it could be taken. Similarly, as commander in chief, Roosevelt usurped constitutional rights for citizens in many ways, from censorship to internment camps for Japanese-Americans. Prisoners of war not adhering to the Geneva Conventions were shot by military tribunal — or without. In a state of war, different laws and expectations exist than during peace. Many of the arguments against Bush-era intrusions on privacy also could have been made against Roosevelt. But Roosevelt had a declaration of war and full authority as commander in chief during war. Bush did not. He worked in twilight between war and peace.

One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done. The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.

The Importance of the Declaration

A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things. First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously. Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens. Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war. And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided. When we look at some of our wars after World War II it is not clear they had to be fought in the national interest, nor is it clear that the presidents would not have been better remembered if they had been restrained. A declaration of war both frees and restrains the president, as it was meant to do.

I began by talking about the American empire. I won’t make the argument on that here, but simply assert it. What is most important is that the republic not be overwhelmed in the course of pursuing imperial goals. The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.

There are enormous complexities here. Nuclear war has not been abolished. The United States has treaty obligations to the United Nations and other countries. Covert operations are essential, as is military assistance, both of which can lead to war. I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?

My readers will know that I am far from squeamish about war. I have questions about Libya, for example, but I am open to the idea that it is a low-cost, politically appropriate measure. But I am not open to the possibility that quickly after the commencement of hostilities the president need not receive authority to wage war from Congress. And I am arguing that neither the Congress nor the president have the authority to substitute resolutions for declarations of war. Nor should either want to. Politically, this has too often led to disaster for presidents. Morally, committing the lives of citizens to waging war requires meticulous attention to the law and proprieties.

As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that. It also prevents a president from acting as king by default. Above all, it prevents the public from pretending to be victims when their leaders take them to war. The possibility of war will concentrate the mind of a distracted public like nothing else. It turns voting into a life-or-death matter, a tonic for our adolescent body politic.

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Jen's Africa Blog

2011-03-28T15:11:00.002-04:00

My daughter Jen is a Zen monk in a community in Murphys, California.

Quite a beautiful and amazing place and community.

They have a project in Kantalomba, a squatters' community in Zambia where they have been involved for several years, first helping people get the basics, water, food.

Since then they have been working on getting electricity, have built a school, a kitchen and eating area where they now feed several hundred children every day, a health clinic, several houses.

And they are helping people get involved in several entrepruenerial projects: making stoves for cooking, making beautiful fabric and aprons.

You can see it all at www.livingcompassion.org when you click on Africa blog.

Air Traffic Controllers

2011-03-24T16:09:00.002-04:00

Federal aviation safety investigators have worried for years that the fatiguing schedules that air-traffic controllers work could undermine safety, an issue that resurfaced Wednesday when the tower at Washington's Reagan National Airport went silent in the wee hours.

Two jets landed without clearance from the control tower at the airport that sits just two miles from the White House shortly after midnight Wednesday, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The supervisor on duty, the only person staffing the tower on the over-night shift, did not respond for more than 20 minutes.

The above is from a news story that has, justifiably, gone viral in the past 24 hours. We all laugh about how we get on airplanes and surrender all control. But we laugh because we believe there are so many totally reliable backup systems that the idea of planes trying to land but being unable to rouse a sleeping traffic controller is ridiculous.

I can't be the only one who sees the irony in this story.

In 1968 the air traffic controllers went out on strike over work rules they felt were not merely unfair but dangerous to the flying public.

President Reagan fired the whole lot of them. Supervisors ran the system until hurry-up training began replacing the fired controllers.

Reagan was lionized for standing up to the union. The popular myth at the time was that American unions had become too powerful politically and financially and were pricing American products and services out of the global marketplace.

Never mind the logical absurdity of considering supposedly overpaid air traffic controllers coddled workers who could be replaced by a call center in India. Someone – a Republican movie actor President – had showed what a tough leader could do.

I am among those who mark that event as the symbolic beginning of the dismantling of not only the power of American unions, but of American manufacturing and of blue collar working America, the much vaunted middle class that became our biggest boast following WWII.

In recent weeks in Minnesota, in Indiana and Ohio, we have seen the audacity of Republican governors as they set out deliberately to destroy the right of workers – in this case public employees – to organize and bargain. This is in prefect concert with the dynamic that has in the past generation placed all bargaining power in the hands of a small financial elite and left American workers with little or none.

In the same period our economy has shifted from one that produced goods and services that were useful, to new financial instruments created by a handful of investors. The collapse of those new instruments, that produced nothing except the chimera of vast paper wealth for a few, has nearly dismantled the global economy.

And led to our nation, so recently the envy of the world, struggling to simply provide a decent living for its former working class.

And now – iron of ironies – two planes made frighteningly difficult landings at Reagan airport, two miles from the White House, because the lone air traffic controller in the tower had no backup and had worked long hours and fell asleep.

What goes around comes around.

Running The Joint

2011-03-23T14:56:00.002-04:00

When our children and grandchildren come from the east coast to visit us in California to escape winter for a while, some weather gremlin picks up their vibes and visits us with weather we hardly ever see this time of year here and which is all too reminiscent of what they hoped to leave behind.

Lacey and I struggle not to feel responsible and not to apologize as if we managed the weather.

And we fail miserably.

Our mostly compassionate children have a hard time restraining themselves in their disappointment.

In actual fact, even the days that don't offer our usual perfection inevitably have large segments of warming sun, which provide plenty of chance to get outside and play.

When we were moving here from Boston in 1987, a friend who had spent growing up years here, said, "You're going to hate southern California. All anyone ever talks about is the weather."

Now I am embarrassed to admit that I spend many days proving her right.

On my morning walk with Cosmos, we stop to chat with the veteran surfers, and the conversation often begins: "Did you see the weather in Chicago today?"

As if there were some virtue on our part in this nice weather.

Oh no, we don't run the joint.

Weirding Out

2011-03-21T13:53:00.003-04:00

Maybe it's universal?

You wake up in the morning and something in your central nervous system is sending out warning signals of an indeterminate nature or origin.

You just know all is not well.

There was a time when I believed there were people who were better equipped than I to deal with what life brings. I suppose that's what makes an infant bond with her parents: necessity. Bond, trust, or face life's unceasing uncertainties with no defense.

Along with the rest of you I have recently been reading all sorts of insider things about leaders and how they respond to crises. You might have thought Halberstam's withering account – "The Best And The Brightest" – giving us an insider's view of how the brain trust JFK brought with him to Washington managed the war in Viet Nam. Captive to their previous experiences, driven by irrational prejudice and political fears of memories of the McCarthy years and cries of "Who lost China," they waded into a morass they didn't understand might have taught us that lesson.

Perhaps only Robert McNamara had the honesty and decency to acknowledge not only how wrong they were, but how arrogant in assuming they were so bright that they refused to consider the views of those who questioned their judgment. And he has been vilified for waiting decades to do that.

The lesson for me is not that those were bad people, but they were simply people, caught in a situation in which they acted out of that same irrational angst that we all often wake up with some mornings.

Is there an antidote?

Likely not.

We have evolved a political office (many political offices now) in the presidency which, along with unconscionable power at the fingertips of the one in that office, simply calls on greater capacities than the human nervous system has yet evolved to cope with. The result is a man (so far only men...today I read that Obama was pressured by women – starting with Hilary Clinton – to sign on to attacking Libya) who must act when he can't have much idea what the consequences may be.

One reason I am drawn to Obama – and the same reason he is suspect by many – is the sense one has that he understands and acknowledges, even as he acts, that he is in over his head. Over the head of any mortal.

If the tsunami/earthquake/nuclear meltdown in Japan didn't make clear the terms of our tenure here, nothing ever will.

Yes, there are countless recriminations about who failed to do or anticipate what. And likely many will be called to account.

But the reality is that Japan – a small island nation with a large, sophisticated population requiring vast energy for which it had none of the fossil fuel under its own soil – did what it had to. And what we will all have to if we stick around a lot longer.

And they paid the price.

As will we.

Some mornings it weirds me out.

Why Not?

2011-03-17T15:08:00.002-04:00

Our grandson woke his mother this morning at 1am to ask her to "fluff up my pillow."

She declined.

But what could it have cost him to ask?

Somewhere along the line I developed a reluctance to ever ask for anything. I don't mind trying to manipulate and trick people into giving me what I want, but my aversion to asking directly is total.

When I wish to portray it in a favorable light I tell myself it is because I don't wish to burden others with my needs. I prefer to tend to them myself.

In a less favorable light it is explained by my hating to be turned down. And my feeling of not being worth bothering for.

I notice that our children are much less reticent about asking for what they want/need. And their children less reticent than they.

Sometimes it irks me because my bones are infused with admiration for a form of pseudo-modesty that will do almost anything to keep from seeming needy or expecting anyone to help.

At 70 I am almost certainly beyond the point at which I can expect to rid myself of neuroses I have fostered all my life.

But maybe I could start tonight. I'll ask Lacey, once I'm sure she is sound asleep, if she'd fluff up my pillow.

You Feel The Earth Move?

2011-03-16T15:31:00.002-04:00

That great line from Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," in which Robert asks Maria, "Did you feel the earth move?" after they have made love, takes on added significance with this astonishing recent report about the effects of the earthquake/tsunami that has wrecked Japan and sobered our entire species.

Whatever hubris remains might be chastened by this. Guess what, people; we don't own the joint.

Quake Moves Japan Closer to U.S. and Alters Earth’s Spin
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: March 13, 2011

The magnitude-8.9 earthquake that struck northern Japan on Friday not only violently shook the ground and generated a devastating tsunami, it also moved the coastline and changed the balance of the planet.
Multimedia

Global positioning stations closest to the epicenter jumped eastward by up to 13 feet.

Japan is “wider than it was before,” said Ross Stein, a geophysicist at the United States Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, NASA scientists calculated that the redistribution of mass by the earthquake might have shortened the day by a couple of millionths of a second and tilted the Earth’s axis slightly.

Not all of Japan jumped 13 feet closer to the United States, said Kenneth W. Hudnut, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey. The shifts occurred mostly in the area closest to the epicenter, and stations farther away reported much less movement.

That part of Asia, to the surprise of many who look at the geological map, sits on the North American tectonic plate, which wraps up and around the Pacific plate and extends a tentacle southward that part of Japan sits atop. The Pacific plate is moving about 3.5 inches a year in a west-northwest direction, and in that collision — what geologists call a subduction zone — the Pacific plate dives under the North American plate.

Most of the time, the two tectonic plates are stuck together, and the North American plate is squeezed, much like a playing card held between the thumb and forefinger.

As the fingers squeeze the card, it buckles upward until the card pops free.

In the same way, the North American plate buckles, and the eastern part of Japan is slowly pushed to the west. But when the earthquake, which occurred offshore, released the tension, the land jumped back to the east.

As it unbuckled, a 250-mile-long coastal section of Japan dropped in altitude by two feet, which allowed the tsunami to travel farther and faster onto land, Dr. Stein said.

On a larger scale, the unbuckling and shifting moved the planet’s mass, on average, closer to its center, and just as a figure skater who spins faster when drawing the arms closer, the Earth’s rotation speeds up. Richard S. Gross, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, calculated that the length of the day was shortened by 1.8 millionths of a second.

The earthquake also shifted the so-called figure axis of the Earth, which is the axis that the Earth’s mass is balanced around. Dr. Gross said his calculations indicated a shift of 6.5 inches in where the figure axis intersects the surface of the planet. That figure axis is near, but does not quite align with, the rotational axis that the Earth spins around.

Earlier great earthquakes also changed the axis and shortened the day. The magnitude-8.8 earthquake in Chile last year shortened the day by 1.26 millionths of a second and moved the axis by about three inches, while the Sumatra earthquake in 2004 shortened the day by 6.8 millionths of a second, Dr. Gross said.

Such changes are not unusual, and even without earthquakes, changes in ocean currents and atmospheric conditions usually have even greater effects. “The Earth is always wobbling, and the length of the day is always changing,” Dr. Gross said.

What is perhaps most surprising about the Japan earthquake is how misleading history can be. In the past 300 years, no earthquake nearly that large — nothing larger than magnitude-eight — had struck in the Japan subduction zone. That, in turn, led to assumptions about how large a tsunami might strike the coast.

“It did them a giant disservice,” said Dr. Stein of the geological survey. That is not the first time that the earthquake potential of a fault has been underestimated. Most geophysicists did not think the Sumatra fault could generate a magnitude-9.1 earthquake, and a magnitude-7.3 earthquake in Landers, Calif., in 1992 also caught earthquake experts by surprise.

“Perhaps the message is we should re-evaluate the occurrence of superlarge earthquakes on any fault,” Dr. Stein said.

Quien Sabe'?

2011-03-15T13:27:00.001-04:00

Ides of March, 2011

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst. -Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Cruel irony Japan
the first – and so far only – nation to taste the
bitter fruits
of our using our unnerving discovery uncoupling

basic building blocks of stuff
co-opted by our species’ strange suicidal resolve
to mend
our differences by splitting apart each other

now suffers a rip in the fragile fabric of
our nest
from the seemingly opposite impulse to harness this
elegant innovation to quell our avaricious appetite

for fossil fuel

Oh what we never know as we go about our
daily round
so pleased an infant’s first success
on the potty

infant (enfant, Fr. def. not speaking) we are
so pleased
with ourselves as we rearrange the cosmic tinker toys pretending to ourselves that we

get it

our beings lightened by the flush
of accomplishment
reassuring us any untoward excess from our effort
has safely vanished

Saturday as we wondered keeping watch from
the edge
of our continent for a tsunami from the
other side

a sea lion made his way onto
the beach
near us settling on the rocks sunning dying resting watching us sensing rogue currents maybe merely

random choice

we’ll never know

Nukes

2011-03-14T14:04:00.004-04:00

With Japanese nuclear plants melting down following their earthquake and tsunami, those of us who have wondered for some time what unintended consequences there may be to fiddling with the basic structure of matter before we really understand the basic nature of matter, are seeing.

After taking a typical liberal position against nuclear power because of its danger and the problem of what to do with radioactive waste with a half life longer than our species has been around, I began to rethink the issue when it became clear that weaning ourselves from fossil fuel was not only going to be horrendously difficult, but was going to take longer perhaps than we have to stop polluting our atmosphere to levels that no longer sustain oxygen breathers.

Like us.

Other obvious problems with nuclear power are political (NIMBY), expense, and the fact that it takes at least a decade from the time the commitment is made until a plant begins to provide power. There is also the as yet unsolved problem of long term storage of energy which means having to build power plants close to the user.

I think one can still make a case for them, even in the face of the horrible consequences being faced by Japan (and, due to winds, the rest of the world), because it begins to look as if alternatives – wind, solar, wave – will not provide enough energy at acceptable cost until we improve them and figure out the storage issue.

But the core (pun intended) issue is that, while we have figured out how to capture energy from splitting what we once considered the most basic for of matter, the atom, and achievement that is nothing short of dazzling, we do not yet understand enough about the most basic building blocks (if you don't mind an archaic metaphor) of the universe to really know how to manage what we are doing.

Maybe we never will.

Because we are enmeshed in the system we are trying to decipher, which makes the effort a version of the old Zen puzzle of trying to take out your eyeballs and stare at yourself.

It is a cruel irony that Japan would have been the first (and so far only) nation to suffer the horror of our new discovery used as an instrument of war, a horror of such dimension to have so far sobered those who might have been tempted to use it since. And now it looks as if Japan will once again become the poster child for dangers we have known about but declared acceptable because the technology seemed both a marvelous solution to a terrible need, and because we persuaded ourselves we could control all eventualities.

Human hubris will do us in yet.

Who Knew?

2011-03-10T14:05:00.002-05:00

Shedding our penis spines helped us become human, DNA study hints

Genetic comparison with chimps suggests that losing chunks of DNA – including one associated with penis spines and facial whiskers – played a crucial role in making us huma

Ian Sample, science correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 9 March 2011 18.00 GMT
Article history

The secret of human brain power and social structures may owe more to lost DNA than anything else. Photograph: Gert Janssen/EPA
Scientists have identified a clutch of subtle genetic changes that have shaped our minds and bodies into the unique form that sets humans apart from chimpanzees and the rest of the animal kingdom.

The work by researchers in the US represents a landmark in a search that has occupied philosophers and scientists for millennia and one that goes to the heart of understanding what it means to be human.

The findings offer up the humbling conclusion that the secret of human success may owe more to what we lost along the path of evolution, rather than anything we gained.

When the human genome was first deciphered more than a decade ago, some scientists expected to find extra genes that explained why humans had an intellectual edge over their closest living relatives and other species. But since diverging from chimpanzees around seven million years ago, it turns out that our human ancestors lost several hundred snippets of DNA, which together led to traits that are uniquely human, the researchers claim.

In ditching these chunks of DNA, our ancient ancestors lost facial whiskers and short, tactile spines on their penises. The latter development is thought to have paved the way for more intimate sex and monogamous relationships. The loss of other DNA may have been crucial in allowing humans to grow larger brains.

Intriguingly, hardly any of the lost DNA was from genes, which make the proteins that are the building blocks of life. Instead, the missing DNA came from areas of the genome that regulate where and when certain genes are active.

"Like someone looking for their keys under a lamp post, the genes were the easiest place to look for differences between humans and chimpanzees, and in many respects those have been studied pretty well," said Philip Reno, a co-author on the study at Penn State University.

"But there is a larger unknown in the form of these other regions of DNA, and in those we are only just beginning to find ways to pull out the differences between humans and chimpanzees."

In the years since the human genome project was completed it has become clear that humans and chimps share around 96% of their DNA. Of the three billion pairs of "letters" that make up the human genetic code, genes account for less than 2%.

The US team compared the complete human genome with sequences from the chimp, macaque and mouse. They found that humans lack 510 short sections of DNA that are present in the other animals. Intriguingly, only one missing piece of DNA affected a human gene directly. The vast majority of lost DNA disrupted parts of the genome that control how genes are expressed.

One missing section of DNA was found to block a gene that, in other animals, stifles the growth of brain cells. Losing that DNA may have been a pivotal moment in human development, as it allowed parts of the human brain to expand into the most complex organ known.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how our ancestors lost another piece of DNA that gives rise to both facial whiskers and sensitive spines on the tip of the penis, both of which are found in chimpanzees and other non-human primates.

Penile spines – which make the penis more sensitive and speed ejaculation – are more common in animals that face intense competition for mates, and where females are likely to mate with many males in rapid succession.

The loss of penile spines may have allowed our ancient ancestors to copulate for longer, a development thought to have nurtured monogamous couples and paved the way for more complex social structures.

When the scientists checked their genetic discoveries against the Neanderthal genome, they found the same chunks of DNA were missing, meaning the DNA was lost more than 800,000 years ago, which is when our human ancestors split from the Neanderthal lineage.

The scientists are still working out what many of the lost sections of DNA do, but expect to find more evidence of how humans differ genetically from chimpanzees.

"There are going to be many different features that make humans unique and I don't think we're close to describing all the links between genes that make us different from chimpanzees," said Reno. "We are just getting the initial picture."

Chicken Little

2011-03-09T15:12:00.003-05:00

Fascinating piece somewhere on today's internet about several states considering establishing state banks or putting their state on the gold system, or even establishing their own currency.

I was a member of a writing group for several years one member of which wrote a different version of the same piece virtually every time he wrote.

It was about the chimera of money.

Full disclosure: this was Brattleboro, Vermont, the town the 60s never left.

Nonetheless, Roger was not only a gifted writer, he was a brilliant thinker. And his point: money, greenbacks, currency, are pieces of paper. Even hard change has no intrinsic value.

Money's usefulness is entirely dependent on our agreement that it has value.

In another article on the internet – title, "Cognitive Dissonance" – the writer goes into elaborate detail about how the so-called reforms enacted following the near fatal collapse of the global economy two years ago, have done nothing to address the causes of that collapse. And goes on to describe – in detail as long and elaborate – the near inevitability that we will soon again see the world economy come apart, only this time with greater damage than before, perhaps truly fatal.

Although that article is impressive in its sophisticated understanding and debunking of the complex international economy, it fundamentally comes down to what Roger wrote: the whole house of cards remains standing because we believe it is strong.

The moment we all cease to believe that – and Malcolm Gladwell has explained that it will only take a couple of key people to raise the question for it to become a mass movement – it is game up.

I'm not sure I have ever more devoutly hoped for anything more than I hope this doesn't happen.

First Light

2011-03-08T15:42:00.001-05:00

Geoffrey Anketell Studdert Kennedy March 8, 2011

Hell is being defined by your circumstances and believing that definition. – Peter Gomes (1942-2011)
***

There’s a Zen story that Yoko told me: A king sent his messenger to an artist to request a painting. He paid the artist the money and the artist said, “OK, come back.” So a year goes by and the messenger comes back and tells him, “The king’s waiting for his painting.” And the painter says, “Oh, hold on,” and whips it off right in front of him, and he says, “here.” And the messenger says, “What’s this? The king paid you 20,000 bucks for this shit, and you knock it off in five minutes?” And the painter replies, “Yeah, but I spent 10 years thinking about it.”

(John Lennon, in The Last Interview, by Jonathan Cott in Rolling Stone, January 6, 2011.)

I experienced a version of that story my first year in seminary when Marty Bell, the smartest person there – an FBI agent and Zen master before seminary – opted out of course work his senior year to write his magnum opus.

The week before Thanksgiving Marty knocked on his tutor’s door and handed him a 300 page paper. Here. When his tutor regained his composure he protested, Marty, you’re supposed to work on that the whole year. You can’t hand it in now. Oh, Marty responded, OK. He put the thesis in his carrel where it rested, untouched, until May when he returned it. His tutor called it the finest piece of work he had seen by a seminarian.

One of the privileges of long life is being awake before dawn most mornings, hearing the world begin its day. The songbirds make a symphony in the half hour after first light. The seagulls call out to each other through the night, especially during a strong gale. They annoy a lot of people (as do Zen masters). I love their frantic exchanges.

We live across the street from the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club and they are not keen on sharing air space with the noisy, rude birds that steal food from children’s picnics and show no respect for rank in choosing their moment of release. (Remember Red Skelton’s skit featuring Gertrude and Heathcliff, seagulls circling the beach? Heathcliff: Beach sure is crowded today, isn’t it Gertrude? Gertrude: Yeah, kind of takes the sport out of it.)

Several years ago a clergy colleague and I – dressed in our ecclesiastical finery – were on the club patio during some occasion that included us (wedding?) when he was suddenly, unceremoniously, painted with seagull shit.

After it happened enough times the club hired a raptor, a Harris Hawk, whose handler brings him to the club three days a week and releases him to menace seagulls. The day we watched he perched for a long time on the roof next door, seemingly uninterested in the gulls that circled and dove at him. When crows began to pester him he took shelter under fronds in a palm tree. His disgusted handler whistled for him to return. He did, after many commands.

We’re done for the day, his handler said, I’m going to have to cut down on his food; he’s not hungry enough to be interested.

I’ve long been drawn to the theory – now apparently without much support – that birds are descendents of dinosaurs. It stirs fantasies of what sort of species might be our legacy when we finish here.

And whether Marty Bell and the artist in Yoko Ono’s story – seemingly immune to the disquiet that drives most of us – might be our evolutionary precursors? Content with their lot, feeling no need to feign hunger when they’re sated?

Blather

2011-03-03T15:35:00.003-05:00

Blather is all I sometimes feel I have to add to the commentariat.

Especially when it comes to big international issues like how best for us to respond to the unrest in the Middle East, particularly the current one in Libya.

But, what the hell, that's what democracy brags about, providing an open forum for everyone, and this medium does much to encourage it.

What to do in response to the attempts to unseat the dictator of Libya? I have no idea. I was once drawn to the idea of a no-fly zone to keep him from slaughtering the protestors. Then our Secretary of Defense and a couple of my friends with experience in such matters (I didn't learn much about combat tactics in seminary) explained that it not only was an incredibly complex thing to do, but also adds another piece to the miserable record we have made for ourselves in the region over many decades.

And what about the soaring price of gas at our pumps, thanks largely to the unrest in Libya? It seems certain that the fragile recovery could be wrecked by, say, $5 a gallon gas here.

The financial analysts I read say the reason the financial markets have held up as well as they have through this is they believe this spike in oil prices is temporary, triggered by political events that create uncertainty but will subside.

The political analysts I read believe the oil rich region on which the world depends for virtually half of its energy needs will never return to the facade of stability we helped engineer by supporting royalty and dictators who did our bidding in return for ongoing support.

It would only increase the blather quotient for me to say which side I believe.

But it is a little more substantive when I say it seems certain history will not, for the first time, go in reverse so we can expect life to return to something we would recognize as the "good old days," so we can breathe a sigh of relief and resume normal speed.

Whether an irony or simply human nature, my daily routine continues much as it has until something requires me to alter it. That could be aging – I stopped running for exercise in my mid-50s – a financial shock – we pretty much stopped going out to dinner, cut out our driving unless absolutely necessary in the financial panic a couple of years ago – a natural disaster – we live a block from the Pacific in winter and a predicted 2" rise in sea level could require us to get around in our kayaks, as if we lived in Venice – or any number of other unpredictable changes beyond our puny control.

One thing we know for sure: when one reaches 70 – as I have – the odds of an impending dramatic change increase many fold.

Peter Gomes

2011-03-01T17:16:00.001-05:00

The lion shall lie down with the lamb, but the lamb won’t get much sleep. – Woody Allen

Walking up to my writing station just now, mentally composing a witty, lively Zone Note, my cell phone rang. Lacey: Peter Gomes died.

I was a new, 34 year old Rector of a pre-Revolutionary War Episcopal parish west of Boston in 1974 when I heard that Harvard had hired a 32 year old black Baptist preacher to succeed Charles Price as Minister in Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Divinity School.

[Oh, man] I thought, [old Harvard has caved to the revolution.] The Rev. Charles Price (Harvard ’41), a former professor of theology at Virginia (Episcopal) Seminary, had perfectly, handsomely, articulately, old-school-edly, brought distinction to that awesome post for the previous 11 years. And now Eldridge Cleaver was going to fill that slot?

Then I met Peter.

Maybe you’ve seen him on television giving one of his beguiling interviews, or at a presidential inauguration reciting the opening prayer that must have made God come to full salute. Or perhaps you have been lucky enough to sit at his feet in Memorial Church as he held those supersized intellects in thrall.

He grew up in Plymouth – and is perhaps the world’s authority on that historic village – descended from fisher-folk in the Azores. One of his favorite openings to the old Yankees in his annual visit to our parish was, My people came over on the Mayflower also, but they were in steerage. He loved twisting the title of his august Harvard appointment into Moral Professor of Christian Plumbing.

At a dinner shortly after we returned from our Zimbabwe sabbatical, Peter said to Lacey, I really must go over and trace my roots… But please, Lacey, tell me there are no snakes. When Lacey told him the disappointing news about spitting cobras and black mambas, his brow furrowed, he threw back his head and said, I’m afraid I’ll have to stick to English cathedrals.

Peter wouldn’t object to my calling him a fop. He was friends with every English bishop and spent his summers over there cathedral-hopping. I suppose I must have seen him dressed in something other than a suit – and almost always a vest with watch in one pocket, fob in the other – but I’m having a hard time picturing him any other way.

When he came to preach Peter and I would spend a few minutes before the service vesting, preparing ourselves. Invariably David, mentally retarded and without guile, would make his way into our vesting room and plunk himself down for an amiable chat. I would invent some subterfuge to get him out while Peter looked on, amused. Once, after I closed the door behind David, I said, Oh, Peter, what if he turns out to be Jesus? And I turned him away?

Peter looked over his glasses and down his nose at me and replied, I just choose to believe he’s not.

He was the last person to greet me with the archaic, Rector! and coming from him it sounded like high praise.

What I was going to write about today was my habitually referring to myself as a child of the 60s, a counterfeit claim that Peter cut through simply by his multi-faceted life. You will read that he was gay, and though that may be, the only reason the world became aware of it was because, when a group of mean-spirited fundamentalist students were demanding the University fire Peter’s gay assistant, Peter stood on the steps of Memorial Church before a demonstrating mob and began his defense of his colleague: As a gay man, I… I know what that cost him, not because he was ashamed of his identity but because, despite a personality that overflowed Harvard Yard, he always wished to carry out his duties on the strength of his vocation without exploiting his exotic, puzzling identity.

Peter was a proud, black, gay man, willing to hold those things up to scrutiny when called for, but never as the heart of his passion: sponsoring a divine love unnervingly without bounds.

Peter himself – his dress, his manner, his brilliant, piercing rhetoric – lived within boundaries Queen Victoria herself would have approved. But the reach of his calling – to the disaffected as well as masters of the universe, counter culture and culture maven – summoned all sorts and conditions of people from their fearful hiding places into the light that shone around a small, round preacher who made you laugh at yourself and then dared you to lay claim to your most outrageous self.

As Peter did.

He will forever go from Strength to strength.

Equanimity

2011-02-28T15:04:00.002-05:00

It tells you more about me than about the world to know how I manage to maintain a semblance of equanimity as I see consider the fragility of whatever it is that holds the world together.

Only gravity is the best we can honestly say.

What I do is write. Like this blog.

Because what writing requires is that I focus on some micro moment, distracting myself from the overwhelming macro that not only spins rapidly out of control (at least mine), like a child spinning, spinning, until she topples over.

The micro moment for this morning is provided by two humans whose fortunes have been forever altered by the ocean, that blood stream of the planet that has so much to do with the macro fortunes of our species.

One, a man visiting from Massachusetts, reportedly an experienced ocean swimmer, was swimming from La Jolla Shores to Scripps Pier and back, a perhaps two mile course familiar to people who regularly swim in the ocean here. It was a rather nasty, cold day, rough but not wild surf, a day most of us wouldn't do that swim. But he was here from Massachusetts and one could understand his decision to take the opportunity.

I think I may have seen him take to the water in his wet suit as Cosmos, our terrier, and I took our afternoon walk. Sometime later someone (described in the reports as a "friend") reported him as long overdue. The massive rescue effort that we see here with discomforting frequency – boats, helicopters, surf boards, jet skis – took up the vigil, went through the night and into the next afternoon before giving up.

By last night reports were surfacing that the man may have been a fugitive from justice, fleeing a court appearance. It seems the woman who reported him missing, and may have been staying in the hotel with him, wan't his wife. Now we are all wondering if this was a scam, an attempt to disappear while leaving evidence that he drowned. Jokes among the surfers that he was in Mexico enjoying a Corona while the Coast Guard spent precious resources searching for him.

The other was a woman who was scuba diver in those same waters. People in the edge of the surf saw her body floating, managed to haul her ashore. Guards did CPR but she was pronounced dead when they reached the hospital. At this moment I know nothing of her age, the circumstances – was she alone? Not likely. Was she experienced? Did she have a heart attack, Drown, run out of air? – nor who may be mourning her.

The ocean is our mother, the source of our origins. And she can cause our end.

I feel as at home in the ocean as I do on land, maybe more. I understand that is in part because the ocean is my mother, and in part because it will be the end of me. One of us may have used it to hide, one to make her exit.

A tiny piece of yesterday, causing an indiscernible ripple in the global currents. And capturing my attention.

Duh

2011-02-25T16:22:00.004-05:00

This winter when we migrated back to California we found that our (grown) children had ordered up a big, soft bed for Cosmos, our 11 pound terrier.

They have been appalled for years that he sleeps in the crate (cage, they call it).

We patiently explain that he prefers the crate. We put him in it when we picked him up as a 4 month old puppy, and he has spent every night in it for the past 9 years. They are projecting onto him their own views about comfort and love, which don't translate into dog terms.

But there was the dog bed they had ordered up from L.L. Bean so we figured we may as well put it out there for him if he should be looking for a place to spend the odd afternoon. Because, you see, he's not allowed on the furniture.

We have lots of fine antiques. Not that he would choose to jump on the furniture since he hasn't been allowed his entire life.

We had barely taken the bed out of the box and put it onto the living room floor when Cosmos climber onto it. That night when I turned of the lights and locked the doors he left the bed and went into his crate for the night. Lacey and I were pleased to be able to tell the children that though he likes the bed, he chooses to sleep in his crate.

A week or so ago Lacey got up and walked past Cosmos' cage; he wasn't in it. She looked around the corner and saw him on his new bed. Where he obviously had spent the night. She was quite put out with him.

That night she and I debated whether we should put him into the cage and shut the door.

But why? we asked ourselves. And despite a strong urge to answer our own question the same way we answered it when the children were little: "because..." we couldn't come up with a good reason.

What's more, we discovered he has been hopping up onto the bed in the guest room for years, waiting for us to leave before taking up his perch by the window from which he can maintain his vigil over the street. We discovered this when the man at the surf shop across the street said he sees his little head in the window when he is walking his dog. And Cosmos barks.

Who the hell owns this place? we ask ourselves. "Who's in charge here?"

Duh.

Winter

2011-02-24T16:44:00.002-05:00

Before I moved from New England to Southern California, I not only assumed enduring winter was part of human life, but I suspect I was even a little self-righteous about those who face winter hardships having more character than those who don't.

After a decade in San Diego we retired to our 1830 farmhouse in rural Vermont.

In November.

I have joked that I said to my wife, "If I can muster the energy, I'm going to kill myself." But it was only partially a joke. Not that I really would kill myself, but that I found the cold, the drab, and especially the lack of luster to the daylight, incredibly depressing.

She was still doing work in California and in April I went with her. One afternoon I took a long swim in the ocean. When she came home I asked, "What were we thinking?"

That was 15 years ago. We found ourselves a nice little apartment near the beach, and we now come to California at the first serious sign of winter in Vermont, and don't return until some neighbor gives us the all-clear, sometime in May.

It's true that those who spend winters in New England have more character.

Unions

2011-02-23T13:40:00.002-05:00

I am old enough to remember when George Meany and Walter Reuther were among the country's most powerful men. Not to mention Jimmy Hoffa.

They were revered by working people and despised by the powerful rich.

Which pretty much broke down between Democrats and Republicans.

Growing up in the household of a father who was in management (Procter & Gamble) the photos of those labor leaders in the newspapers looked to me like the mug shots of dangerous criminals. Dangers to the common weal.

But as my views of the world began to be shaped in my 20s, the 1960s (I was 20 in 1960) I began to view them differently. To the chagrin of my conscientious, hardworking father, I began to consider them as the guardians of the blue collar workers who formed the backbone of the nation's workforce but who hadn't the individual clout that big money provides.

One of the great mysteries that historians may be able to unravel is how it happened that the Republican Party, the historical protector of the interests of the rich and powerful, managed to persuade those whose piece of the economic pie has gradually shrunk since 1973, that they really represent their interests, not the Democrats.

Certainly the Democrats share the responsibility for that, having ceded to the Republicans the unassailable myth of the wonders of the free market. The idea that everyone – top to bottom – make out better when the markets are left to function without regulation, supports the belief that unions, because they fight for the wages of working people, end up pricing American goods too high.

And until Ronald Reagan, in a draconian and perhaps illegal move, fired the striking air traffic controllers, the divide between working people's unions and management's money power, remained. In that one stroke – which somehow got portrayed as a move for the common man against the thuggish labor bosses – an ideological shift of epic proportion was underway.

Now, beginning in Wisconsin and apparently spreading fast, the perilously slow economic recovery has fueled the Republican resurgence in Congress and in State Houses, and given them confidence that this is the moment to strike a death blow against unions.

Now it is undeniable that the pendulum had swung too far in favor of unions and labor in the 1950s, and as the commercial world shrank, it meant our labor costs were indeed pricing us out of the global market.

Despite the huge new competition from foreign workers – especially from China and India – there are signs that manufacturing jobs are beginning to return to our shores. Foreign wages are rising and the benefits of work done well close at home may be trumping whatever different labor costs remain.

But we are on the verge of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. Because without collective bargaining, the American worker, without the ability to represent hims(her)self against the great power of management, will continue to gain a smaller share, and our middle class, once the envy of the world, will disappear.

I suppose it is too much to ask of people who make millions, billions, to see that agreeing to paying those who produce goods more of the share is ultimately in their own interests.

But it is.

Provocateurs

2011-02-22T15:35:00.001-05:00

Peter’s Chair George Washington February 22, 2011

Between truth and the search for truth, I opt for the second. -Bernard Berenson, art historian (1865-1959)

14 years ago when I
stepped off the loveliest ledge on which I ever perched in
30 years of preaching
into the void of writing full time

Hugh Davies
the estimable Pooh-Bah of
Contemporary Museum of Art San Diego said
When you come back we’re going to make you
the museum’s Writer-in-Residence

a gesture of such generosity it nearly reassured a
man of medieval manner making an uncharted
career change in late life that he was only
marginally mad

having balanced grace and budgets myself I figured
[grateful for the gesture, Hugh, even though you
understand I am going 3000 miles to the
remote Green Mountains of Vermont]

You’ll be back he said
and before the next winter
I was

but what I wondered does an aging cleric
know about contemporary art
Hugh’s shrewd smile whispered what does an aging cleric
or estimable museum director know about anything

which was when I discovered we were in the
same business
tossing idols ideas and artifacts into Sheol
watching while we wonder

each walk through that
cathedral of incredulity boosting my
courage to carve a step to try to tread
a nano footfall forward into the void

with your feet in the Pacific you look up to the right at
Ed Ruscha’s iconic image of the Clipper Ship
running before the wind with the inscription
Brave Men Run In My Family

cross referencing intrepid sailors with Bob
Hope’s counterfeit claim to Jane Russell in
Paleface (1948) as he deserts turns tail and flees
the attacking Indians

look left to the bursting blossom of
Pleasure Point Nancy Rubin’s bodacious boats floating
above the museum defying sanity, physics, and the
city’s fearful leaders who had cancelled the piece

when the wind turned against it

someone suggested we first process reality
rationally then irrationally in nighttime dreams of
our own creation and in daring daytime dreams provoked by self-appointed provocateurs artists poets painters circus

performers wreaking havoc

Citizenship

2011-02-17T15:26:00.002-05:00

I annoyed a friend in conversation yesterday when – in response to something he said about the people of Greece, where his brother lives – regarding government and taxes as alien entities that interfere with healthy living – I asked, sarcastically, "Oh, was Reagan once president there, too?"

He, though thoughtful, has been brainwashed by the hagiography that surrounds Ronald Reagan decades after he left office.

No doubt it is too simplistic to try to pinpoint one incident or moment in which the germ of this self-defeating idea was planted in our national psyche, but if I had to choose one it would be when President Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers on August 5, 1981.

Many cheered that seemingly brave stand against unions' power to disrupt the country, but few at the time could have seen the fallout that we reap today.

Reagan began his political career by jumping onto the bandwagon of the tax revolt in California that resulted not only in Proposition 13 – the first big push back against taxes, property taxes in that case – but in his being elected Governor of California and then President of the United States.

The fact that taxes were raised substantially and government grew under his leadership of the country has been lost in the memory of his rhetoric against government and taxes. ("Government is not the answer to our problems; government is our problem.")

Startling to realize that 1981 was thirty years ago, more than a generation. A huge number of people were born since that idea became national cant.

President Obama is the first President since who quite clearly doesn't share the idea. But he also is President of a nation of people who do. And his responsibility is to do the best he can to govern that nation.

How much he can cut into it in the four or perhaps eight years he has in office remains to be seen.

Tree Huggers

2011-02-15T17:07:00.001-05:00

Thomas Bray Mawlid al-Nabi February 15, 2011

A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
- Greek proverb

We were circling the giant sequoia (Sequoiadendron gigantum) – the oldest living things on earth – three of us reaching as far as we could, touching fingertips, managing to envelop perhaps a third of the great thing’s girth.

This feels so wonderful, the Empire State – as this tree is known – whispered. Hugging trees seems to have gone quite out of fashion for the moment. Something, I understand, having to do with a political divide.

We were taken aback, not so much by the sentiment, nor even by the unusual experience of hearing the tree’s voice – which we normally filter in service to our wish to keep reality within manageable boundaries – but because, when we set out to reach as far as we could around her in order to guess at her dimensions (30 feet diameter at the base, 20 feet at 4.5 feet above ground, and still 16 feet at 48 feet high!), we hadn’t considered at first that we would be hugging her.

But hugging her we were.

Empire, I asked, hoping – since this was California – it wasn’t too forward to call her by her first name, you’ve been here so much longer than we have, seen so much, I wonder if you’d mind helping us get a little better perspective?

Something about the way her bark smelled, and her top seemed to embrace the cloudless sky. made her seem friendly, inviting. Gladly.

Right now the news from Egypt is rattling the whole world, I fretfully offered the news of the day.

Our arms had grown weary from reaching for each other’s fingertips and we were no longer hugging her, but we were leaning against her, our saps running alongside each others’.

Oh, Egypt, – I was pretty sure she smiled somehow – seems like only yesterday Moses was in Egypt rallying people in the public square in protest against the arbitrary rule of pharaoh.

For a moment we were struck mute, struggling to absorb what she was telling us. Moses? You were here then?

She laughed, no question. See that big black gash on my side, 70 feet up? We all almost fell over backward trying to focus that high, finally having to back away several feet to see the place she meant. That was from a lightning storm in – the way you measure time – 800 BCE. My cambium layer was still fairly vulnerable then and for a couple of decades it looked as if I might soon become compost. Here I am nearly three millennia later – the way you measure time. Using the conceit I have heard your 70 year olds use, I guess I am in my late middle age. (Laughter that shook her branches.)

Oh yes, I remember Moses, and his hot-headed general, Joshua. Took them longer than they figured to make their way to that new land. Still a work in progress. Curious, how impatient your species is. We don’t give ourselves a name until we’ve been at it for at least 500 years.

I was feeling a little petulant. Well, maybe not, but we don’t last a fraction of that.

Oh, sorry, didn’t mean to offend. My grandfather told me he saw the first hominid (that’s what you call yourselves, isn’t it?) trying to build a fire here. But most of the burn scars you see on us are from lightning fires. A century ago you decided you could manage the forest better. Sure hope you and Egypt have more luck with your politics than you’ve had managing us.

The sun was getting low in the sky and the warm sunny day was turning chilly, the snow on the ground working its cool through our boots. Ms. Empire State, – I wondered when, if ever again, I would get this chance – you have wisdom, perspective we can never have. I’d be so grateful if you might leave us with just one helpful insight.

I’ll never be able to tell you how, but I saw (felt?) her embrace in a way that warmed me, made me feel – in some unfamiliar way – protected.

One has to wonder, she began, speaking slowly, whether the pluses of your amazing brain outweigh its minuses. You have such brief life-spans (we count each of your “years” as a century) it’s impossible for you to see what a recent arrival you are here. Still experimental. You think we are old, but in the history of the planet we, too, are recent.

I understand your brain (consciousness?) won’t let you rest. But perhaps you might embrace your moment here as serendipity, an invitation to take a tiny piece of the action in a sublime, unfathomable drama.

For almost a full day – until the dispute with Avis about my bill for the car rental – I felt quite at home here.

Egypt

2011-02-14T17:18:00.002-05:00

For the west all this may have begun when Moses – a formerly invaluable member of the royal household – stood before the throne of Pharaoh and demanded, "Let my people go."

Now – in addition to there being nothing new under the sun – what is striking about this moment is that nothing really significant has changed. One old general has been replaced by another group of old generals. In large part their motivation was to make certain Gamal Mubarak did not succeed his father as seemed to be in the old man's mind. Ever since Anwar Sadat took power the country has been ruled by the military. Gamal Mubarak had no military experience.

The crowds in Tahir Square provided the means by which the generals might make sure their fears went unrealized.

It was not a revolution. Not yet. Whether it may turn into one – which a true democratic election would signal – remains very much to be seen.

Nonetheless, it is hard to ignore the unrest that seems to be sweeping that region.

And even harder to figure out where it may all lead.

At least we may have learned – I devoutly hope we have learned – that arms, whether borne by our own superb military or by those to whom we sell them in those countries – no longer seem capable of keeping the world in the form we would wish.

Lost In The Cosmos

2011-02-09T13:30:00.002-05:00

A few responded to last week’s Zone Note; Interesting, Blayney, but what’s the point? Hoping to reassure, I answered, Please, don’t trouble yourself.

Boredom is cover for terror, routine an illusion we design to decorate the abyss.

Last night Lacey and I ventured into the semi-canyons of downtown San Diego to have dinner with friends visiting from Minneapolis. Excited, not having seen this remarkable couple for nearly a decade. We’re at the Marriott downtown, she said. Cool, we’ll pick you up.

As we made our way we could see the imposing roof of the Marriott. Navigating one way streets we finally came to an intersection from which we had a straight shot. Alas, the two-story neon sign read Hyatt.

No problem, we’re in the hotel district. Lacey took the wheel and we felt our way. The Marriott sign! We squeezed through the labyrinth to the valet entrance where we had agreed to meet. They weren’t there. Despite protests from the man guarding that portal, Lacey stayed with the car while I went inside to use the house phone. We have no one here by that name. I have dreams like this. I insisted. Maybe they’re at the Downtown Marriott, the operator offered. There’s more than one? Instead of hanging up on me she gave me directions which were vaporized in my mental meltdown. Back at the car I had to own up to not having paid attention, either to where our friends said they were staying, nor the operator’s directions.

Never mind; downtown San Diego isn’t that big and, mirabile dictu, after a few turns that earned us rare horn honks, there we were, the other Marriott, only 15 minutes late. Lacey double-parked, I went in. No friends. Same routine. No one registered under that name. In a moment of brilliance Lacey phoned the number our friends had given, of the hotel (Our generation on display; none of us had thought to give each other cell numbers), and yes, there is yet a third Marriott in downtown San Diego.

We were now a full half hour late (Did I mention that the husband of the couple is legally blind? We once went on a walking tour of the Amalfi Coast with them and watched, mesmerized, as he hiked those high bluffs with the sure-footedness of a mule). We asked if someone might tell our friends (if they’re still there) we’re on our way.

Until at long last we pulled alongside the third Marriott at a No Stopping sign and there they were. The intensity of my greeting may have matched Stanley’s embrace of Dr. Livingstone. Brilliantly, Lacey had called the restaurant to say we would be late, and, mirabile dictu, she drove us right to it without missing a turn. The three of them got out, I slipped into the driver’s seat to look for a parking place. I circled a few blocks a few times, struggling to memorize my turns, not only to find my way back to the restaurant, but, later, the car.

After a couple of wrong turns I found the street. I remembered because the name of the restaurant was close (India Street, Indigo Grille), ecstatic to see the restaurant as I turned the corner. In I went, triumphant. No Lacey and our friends. I walked through the restaurant three times, trying not to draw attention to my recurring panic. A waiter approached me: You looking for the men’s room?

I fled, walked the next block. How I could have missed it? What now? Back again to Indigo, where just to the left of the front door, partially obscured by a low partition, Lacey and our friends were enjoying a glass of wine.

Dinner was great, though I got into a jalapeño I hadn’t spotted in the soup and hiccoughed my way through the last 45 minutes of dinner. The waiter must have sensed my endorphin drought; despite my demurring dessert, he brought me a small rich chocolate pudding.

Last night I dreamed I worked on the assembly line at a Saturn plant and, angry about something, stole a truck (Saturn didn’t make one, did they?) which I drove recklessly through the plant grounds. Several people tried to flag me down. When I stopped, a foreman approached me and said, We understand and we’re not going to prosecute.

The beautiful photo of the Barred Owl was taken last week by Conrad, our neighbor in Vermont. Conrad was blowing snow from his driveway and the owl perched above him on the Bluebird house, supervising. One conjecture about why we consider owls wise is they can see in the dark. You do see, the point? No? Ask Athena.

Changing

2011-02-04T12:05:00.003-05:00

After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, there was much speculation about that marking the end of irony.

Who could bear to be ironic in the face of such monstrous human evil?

Well, the answer was not long in coming. The New Yorker, perhaps the Prince of American Irony, took maybe a couple of weeks to return to its long-standing ironic tone. (Unless you consider that cover the week after the attacks – a drawing so dark you had to look hard at it for some time to see the twin towers barely discernible – ironic.)

And here's my nomination for the current most ironic fact:

President Obama and his handling of the popular uprising in Egypt.

At the National prayer Breakfast – a strange iconic American phenomenon to which all public figures are required to subscribe – he said that the Presidency had deepened his faith. The report I read didn't quote him any further in explaining what he meant. Since that word, faith, is freighted with such ambiguity and cultural baggage, it seems generally to be used by people who wish to reassure others that they are basically good, well intentioned.

But in this case I daresay President Obama may have meant that occupying this post which we routinely refer to as the most powerful person in the world, has deepened his realization that no one either really understands the events that unfold across the world every day, nor has the power to profoundly influence them.

Another report suggests that Barack Obama has found the events in Egypt this past week undermine his seemingly firm convictions about the United States always siding with popular uprisings.

I loved Noam Chomsky's response when an interviewer asked him what he would do if he were President. "If I had managed to do what was required to reach that office, I no doubt would do exactly what President Obama is doing."

The irony of all this is that Obama's election was thanks to his campaign's ability to appeal to our hunger for change, for things to be different.

And what we nor he could have known then was that the change to come would be more in him than in the world.

Point?

2011-02-02T15:31:00.005-05:00

At least three people responded to a recent piece I wrote by asking, "What's the point?"

"Don't trouble yourself," I reassured them.

I have been away from preaching long enough so few remember complaining that my sermons rarely seemed to get to the "point."

"Interesting," I would be told, "but you never finished the sermon."

How to explain the troubling double-edged sword?

There was no point. There is no point. Not, mind you, that I ever give up my own search for one. Just that I struggle never to seem – at least when standing in some place of authority, like the pulpit – to know the point myself. Because I discovered early on that when one draws a conclusion from a position of power, surprising numbers of people subscribe to it.

The other side of the sword is that – at least so far as preaching is concerned – I believed the proper role of the person in authority is to uncover as clearly as possible the reality as (s)he sees it. Hold it up to the light with as few distractions as one can manage. And then invite the hearer/reader to decide what to make of it.

Multitudes of problems – not to say antagonisms – raised by this method. We look to those in authority to clear up our dilemmas. We hire them to decipher the mysteries that vex us. We find the effort to do that ourselves frustrating and exhausting. For the authority to simply paint a picture and leave its meaning to the viewer, or to admit that (s)he doesn't have the answer, can be prelude to assassination.

I felt the weight of that dilemma in major ways as a preacher.

It has been liberating to offer my work in writing rather than face to face.

The best I was able to come up with for those who wrote asking me to explain the point of that rambling, eclectic, seemingly disjointed piece, was: "Boredom is self-inflicted."

Leaks

2011-02-01T16:04:00.002-05:00

Brigid Groundhog Minus one

In Biasers Voles, Delphine Seyrig explains to her young lover the difference between politeness and tact: Imagine you inadvertently enter a bathroom where a woman is standing naked in the shower. Politeness requires that you quickly close the door and say, “Pardon, Madame!”, whereas tact would be to quickly close the door and say, “Pardon, Monsieur.”

(From Good Manners In The Age Of Wikileaks, by Slavoj ZiZek in The London Review of Books. January 20, 2011)

We went to dinner with friends who told us they had discovered a restaurant that serves really good food at a reasonable price. It was that, and more. The maitre d’ [did I get that right, Little Rabbi?] greeted our friends by name, ushering them to their usual table. Their favorite waiter recommended a wine he knew they would like, explaining it came from a vineyard on the slope of the only mountain range in California that runs east/west rather than north/south, which means it gets different sun and wind.

They liked it.

Perhaps the restaurant’s only shortcoming was the difficulty of finding a parking place. Our host dropped off our wives and he and I went on a hunt, circling several blocks until he finally decided to risk of parking in a lot reserved for several shops, all closed.

We lingered over dinner, savoring the exotic wine, even ordering desserts; we must have been there nearly three hours. We apologized to the ladies for the long walk back to the car, but were relieved to see that it was still there.

As we approached the car I heard the other wife say, There’s someone in my car. (Neglected to mention that our host was driving his wife’s very nice car, and she had occasion to critique his efforts.)

Sure enough, a tall man emerged from the driver’s side of her car just as we reached it. This your car? Too nonplussed to express either anger or fear, she allowed as how it was. We pulled up and parked here two hours ago and noticed your car was running. Figured you must have gone into that gas station. We came back just now and the car was still running. I reached in and turned it off.

Lacey and I were laughing too hard to pick up the initial exchange between our friends, but I did hear him say to her, Good thing this buggy gets such great gas mileage!

When we arrived home the pizza shop across the street that closes every night no later than 9PM was open, door ajar, lights blazing, no one in sight. I took Cosmos for his late night walk, returning around 11PM, shop still open, still no one there. I checked; cash register open and empty, no body on the floor. I closed the door, extinguished the lights.

Oh yes, the water main beneath our street burst the day before and three men spent all day in a hip-deep water-filled excavation. As darkness fell they filled and blacktopped. But when I went across to the pizza shop I saw water streaming out of their new patch. We began the series of phone calls that resulted in another crew coming out the next day and making a new incision in the old scar. I enclose a photo of their work in case the Farmers Insurance blimp failed to get a good shot of it – along with the idyllic scenes of dolphin and whales – while filming the golf tournament up the street.

In the morning when the man came to open the pizza shop I told him what I had found the night before. Nothing missing and he assured me he had turned out the lights and locked up when he left at 9.

My French repeater carriage clock is keeping perfect time, thanks to the years-long efforts of Son Ling, but Saturday night, just after I closed the pizza shop and called the city, I realized I hadn’t heard the clock chime all day. I depressed the repeater button. Silence.

In the morning when I strapped on my Casio Wave Receptor Watch that picks up a signal every night at 3AM from somewhere in Colorado, it was blinking numbers and symbols in some language I never learned. I must have bumped one of the little toggles and sent it into an arcane mode. For the three years I have owned the watch I have had to consult the manual when migrating across time zones to figure out how to ask it to reflect the new time.

I lost the manual. So I began pressing the toggles. Now I have to bury the watch under a pile of shirts because it is in some alarm setting that periodically warns me of something. I am back to wearing the watch my father bought it for me in Hong Kong on my 17th birthday that sets by twisting the stem.

The other photo is of a handmade sign that was tacked to the telephone pole on the corner this morning. Derek Olson and I have seem to have ingested the neighborhood karma.

Until I toss out the Casio, or perhaps give it to a grandchild who can decode it, I will always know the time in Dubai.

Egypt

2011-01-31T20:21:00.003-05:00

Is it because I am so much older, or because the world is now so different?

Remember the days when people's revolutions were overturning regimes all over eastern Europe?

And we were exhilarated because it seemed like an affirmation of American love of liberty and the dignity of the individual sweeping the globe.

If you read about what is happening in Egypt you will see that we no longer see things quite so simply. And rightly so.

Yes, Hosni Mubarak is a dictator. But as is so often true, he is our dictator. Since our invasion of Iraq didn't exactly become the harbinger of democracy in the oil rich Middle East as we assumed it would be, that has left us with Egypt, and Mubarak, as the closest and last we have of any sort of ally in the region.

And that support has been costing us more than a billion dollars a year, more than we're giving to anyone else in the region except for Israel. (Well, not counting what the two wars in the region are costing.)

Suppose the Muslim Brotherhood becomes the ruling group?

Maybe the most remarkable thing is to read the statements of our policy makers in the region, past and present. Aside from their admission that we don't have any way of predicting the outcome of all this, the tiny smattering of comfort they provide is this:

There's really nothing we can do to affect the outcome.

Goldman & Niebuhr

2011-01-28T14:20:00.003-05:00

A friend in the investment business sent me a Bloomberg story today about Goldman Sachs' recent troubles.

"Long overdue," was his take.

What we once would have found appalling we now regard as routine, or maybe even brilliant.

When asked during a hearing about Goldman recommending investments to its clients while the firm was taking positions betting those very same investments would fail, Blankfein, the firm's CEO said he saw nothing wrong with that. He pointed out that Goldman was a "market maker" which meant they were supposed to make moves that lent to an orderly market, and, at the same time they were advising their clients of investments with the risk level they had said they wanted.

It may make perfect sense in the world of high finance, and it may be legal, but it stinks of an ethic and attitude that forms a culture I would never knowingly choose to live in.

Rinehold Niebuhr wrote Moral Man and Immoral Society a couple of generations ago. In it he suggested that each of us may be able and even eager to live in a way that cares for others, but the larger society requires rules to keep us from having our predatory drives rule.

When the ethic of every person for himself became the national norm perhaps 25 years ago – government is the enemy, taxes are a nearly illegal imposition – the life of the nation turned predatory.

Something will come along to cause a shift in the other direction. But who knows when? And it will surely be only after we pay some very painful price for what we came to think of as the beneficent invisible hand of the "free market.

Obama's Audience

2011-01-26T15:10:00.002-05:00

For someone who loves language, words put together, the cadence, rhythm, Obama's presidency would be welcome even if you weren't in synch with him politically.

I in fact suspect I am, though as so many have pointed out almost from the day of his inauguration, it's pretty hard to tell.

And that, I think, is his genius and his problem.

Genius because he is President of 300 million people who are as reluctant to accept the leadership and authority of a president as we are of our own parents. So a certain amount of opaqueness is essential.

And problem because he is a member of the Democratic Party which means that other Democrats expect him to fall into line with their wishes, while Republicans devote their energies to removing him in favor of a Republican.

What I heard between the lines of last night's speech (and having been a preacher for many decades I understand that even the most careful hearer filters the speaker's words through her own nervous system) was something like:

"The world is fraught with peril, governed by forces we neither understand nor control. A couple of years ago we felt the ground shake beneath us as the largest and most sophisticated economy in human history looked to be on the verge of collapse. By every one of us agreeing to do things we had promised never to do, we, just barely, managed to steady the world's economy enough to keep going.

"We are a species with a short memory. Already, though there is still more misery and uncertainty than we ought to tolerate, those who play the biggest role in the world have begun to find new ways to gin up the huge profits we believed for a brief period were part of what nearly sank us.

"Now I don't honestly know what may help us get fully back on our feet, nor whether we can find ways to give those in the middle and lower ranks a shot at work and wages people need to feel useful. But there is a bunch of things we're going to try. Because we can't know for sure, we'll argue and fight over them.

"Living in a world connected in every second in every way is an experience new to all six billion of us. To ignore that or pretend there are things we can or ought to do to push back against it is a fool's errand. So we're putting our heads together and putting in extra hours to see if Malcolm Gladwell was right about a million guesses coming out better than the expertise of a single genius.

"I promise to do the best I can, and I'm asking you to do the same.

"Good luck and good night."

Eloquent.

Olbermann

2011-01-25T17:44:00.002-05:00

Is it going to shock you to know that I have never heard Keith Olbermann's voice?

But then neither have I ever heard Rush Limbaugh's voice.

Up until about a year and a half ago I used to at least listen to NPR when I was driving somewhere. (I seldom drive when in California, and in Vermont am often out of range of any NPR station) but I gave that up too.

It may have something to do with my age (70) and finally having surrendered whatever remaining egomania that led me to think I was obligated to keep up with the chatter or the world would go its own way.

But even more, I think, it has to do with being unwilling to get sucked into the hysteria with which virtually all information is delivered through print, voice and televised media. I read a couple of newspapers online most days, follow a couple of the media online (Politico, Huffington Post) and check in periodically with a couple of political bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Josh Marshall).

But even they can roil up the blood, a condition Satchel Paige warned against long ago.

I tease that I have dropped out of mainstream culture on both coasts: no television in Vermont and no car in California. (In fact we do have a car in California but I rarely drive it; Lacey needs it for work. I walk to my writing station and back most days, and everything I cherish – the ocean, tennis courts, restaurants, yogurt and coffee shops, and, during the best of times, Lacey – are within a two minute walk of our apartment.)

We have a television set in Vermont but not hooked up to receive a signal; Netflix. And we do have basic cable in California, which has meant in the past that I watched an occasional football game or golf tournament. Even that minimal watching seems to drop my morale and annoy Lacey, so I am considering letting even that go.

All this is about wanting, at this late time in my life, to decide as much as possible, how I wish to spend my remaining time and energy. I will soon be gone and the world will go on with people raging at one another. It is an honorable expenditure of calories if you wish to spend them like that.

I'm becoming more and more drawn to quiet.

A Tear At The Edge

2011-01-25T16:41:00.002-05:00

It became clear to me that scientists and seekers of perfection from all walks of life have been courting the wrong muse. It is not symmetry and perfection that should be our guiding principle, as it has been for millennia.... The science we create is just that, our creation. Wonderful as it is, it is always limited, it is always constrained by what we know of the world.... We may search for unified descriptions of natural phenomena, and we may find some partial unifications along the way. But we must remember that a final unification is forever beyond our reach.... The human understanding of the world is forever a work in progress. That we have learned so much, speaks well of our creativity. That we want to know more, speaks well of our drive. That we think we can know all, speaks only of our folly.

A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision For Life In An Imperfect Universe by Marcelo Gleiser

We’re myth-makers, we humans.

We make them and then they make us. I sometimes see the myths still lodged in me like calcium, in my bones. They form a unsettling pattern. My shaping years – five (1945) to 12 (1952) – were in Charlotte, North Carolina, long enough to mark me as a Tar Heel.

Some of my strongest memories are of my father teasing me about what I now know are ways I am different from him. When I did something he saw as mindless he referred to me as Epaminondas. (Google it). I wasn’t as hurt by that as I might have been had I not understood that the story of the little black boy was told in good (racist) fun.

Uncle Remus was a staple (I thought – wrongly – that Tar Heel referred somehow to the tar baby.)

One of my fondest memories of time with my father was watching the boxing matches on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports during TV’s earliest days. (download the tune, To Look Sharp… for 89¢ at Amazon.com). How come, I wondered, the negro fighters always win? I never felt very secure with my father but I admired him for knowing just about everything there was to know.

Well, he began – I could tell from the way he lowered his voice and furrowed his brow, this was coming from on high – Dr. Mayer (our doctor who sat at the pinnacle of our family’s Pantheon) explained that negroes have a thicker skull than whites, and so can absorb harder blows to the head.

I was hugely grateful to have access to esoteric information that sorted the chaos. I doubt I got it then that this scientific fact meant that negroes had a smaller brain cavity. But there were so many other obvious clues to our relative superiority – they did the dirty jobs, lived in the ghetto, spoke grammatically incorrect English, were poor, couldn’t use our bathrooms or go to our restaurants, sat in the back of the bus – that this one fit neatly into one of the most pervasive myths that organized my reality.

Maybe the myth was shaken somewhat when we moved from Charlotte to Manila where we were a racial minority. But these were the last days of colonialism and we went to the American School where (I learned only last year at a reunion) dark skin Filipinos were excluded. When I was chased one afternoon by a group of boys about my age, who laughed and called after me, Hey white monkey, binnie bakla…(roughly, Homo), I may have gotten some sense of what it’s like on the other end of that myth.

Freshman year in college I roomed next to John Edgar Wideman, perhaps the first black (no longer negro) person in my world as a peer. He was big and aloof, and scary, to me. I could not have known then that he would go on to be an All-Ivy basketball player, receive the highest academic and achievement honors in our class and become one of the most accomplished writers of our time.

His mere presence in the room next to mine blew a major hole through one of my foundational myths.

Fast forward to seminary after what could only be called my conversion from southern racist to civil rights junkie. (No zealot like a convert.) When Jon Daniels, a seminary classmate, was gunned down in Hayneville, Alabama while registering black voters in the summer of 1965, my consciousness shifted from righteous do-gooder to terrible foreboding about the realities of our racism and the awful cost of ridding our national psyche of its scourge.

In his letter from the Birmingham jail to the white clergy who had asked him to ease off, Dr. King told them he was fighting for their freedom from racism perhaps even more than for oppressed blacks. I got it that while I was now on the other side of the divide on the issue, the racism of my childhood remains, indelibly, in my marrow.

I once told my children the first thing I notice when I meet a person of color is the color of their skin. They were incredulous. I wonder if they wept with excitement and relief as I did the night Barack Obama was elected? Perhaps they really did merely see him as the better candidate.

When Lawton Chiles was running for reelection as Governor of Florida (1994, he defeated Jeb Bush) he was attacked for his surprisingly moderate racial attitude. Someone asked him, Governor, you were born and raised here; you trying to tell us you have no racial prejudice?

Oh, hell no, Chiles responded, I’m shot full of prejudice of all sorts, but I try not to let them rule my life.

We choose our myths. They ennoble and sustain us until realities shift. Then they imprison us.

Who Knew?

2011-01-19T18:27:00.001-05:00

If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit. -Robert Brault, writer (b. 1938)

who knew

the expanding universe could cause such
consternation

as he lay near his end Albert
Einstein asked for a pencil and pad to
make one more run

at disproving himself

willing apparently to return his
Nobel Prize
if only he could turn back the
clock
to time when everyone understood

the universe was static or
at least
contracted again after expanding for
awhile

but no luck

the universe so they say is not
only e x p a n d i n g
but e x p a n d i n g
fasterandfasterand
in a few billion years

those stars Cosmos (the terrier) and I see on our
evening walk
about which Frank Sinatra
crooned

will have sped sofast and
so far away from us
that there will not be time enough even
atthespeedoflight
left for their ancient fading light
to reach us

and except for our moon (Fly me to the moon
Let me play among the stars
Let me see what spring is like
On a-Jupiter and Mars
In other words, hold my hand
In other words, baby , kiss me)

and a couple of other nearby
celestial neighbors we’re
Dancing in the dark,
Till the tune ends
We’re dancing in the dark,
And it soon ends.
Were waltzing in the wonder
Of why we’re here;
Time hurries by,
We’re here and gone.
Looking for the light
Of a new love
To brighten up the night.
I have you to love,
And we can face the music together;
Dancing in the dark.

and understanding that facing the music turns out to be one of our
least developed skills

my old faithful French carriage
clock
is softening me up for the discomfort of the universe
relentlessly
speedingupandawayfromme by

dependably striking the hour and half
hour

a full five minutes before the big
hand
hits the mark

Debate

2011-01-12T16:55:00.003-05:00

The debate about the motives of the shooter who shot Congresswoman Giffords and 17 others, several fatally, goes on.

There is the obvious issue of no one wanting to sound the wrong tone and end up either seeming callous or perhaps committing a gaffe that could cause harm to a political future. Sarah Palin, who has turned her lightning-rod style into a media grabbing asset is understandably uneasy at talk of the shooting having been motivated by the kind of heat she generates. Interesting that she uses inflammatory language – blood libel – to accuse her accusers, seeming to defy rather than try to appease her accusers.

Some have wanted to emphasize the seemingly obvious mental instability of the shooter rather than partisan politics as an explanation for the horrific slaughter in Arizona.

A couple of things I haven't seen in print, and don't expect to, are: how the general atmosphere and rhetoric in the country may work on an already deranged mind; and the near primitive human fear of any event that shows how a random moment can tear the cover off our vain wish to believe we can manage the unfolding of reality.

I don't think Sarah Palin ever imagined her wild use of language might result in such a horrific thing. I believe if she could have known that she would not, for instance, have run the ad that showed Ms. Giffords in the crosshairs of a rifle scope.

But it becomes incumbent on those who take it upon themselves to play a role in public life to conduct themselves as grownups. Even though we all harbor adolescent rage and fantasies throughout our lives, when we presume to lead and influence opinion, we tacitly agree, or ought to, that we will do so responsibly, considering the consequences of playing to the worst in all of us.

That may be too high a standard these days, but without it we stand to see ourselves become like so many nations choosing despots to try to satisfy our worst fears and angers.

But at the heart of the tears and rage in this debate is the simplest, oldest, most basic fear in the human panoply. It is the reality that we find ourselves here by some mysterious chance over which we not only had no say or control, but no prior knowledge. And despite our lifelong efforts to tame that mystery and domesticate it for our own purposes, it rules us until it carries us away.

Still Here?

2011-01-11T18:07:00.002-05:00

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. -Ben Hecht, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, director, and producer (1894-1964)

A discalced [Google it] Carmelite, in enclosure for more than 40 years, who likely saved me from far worse than perdition [Google it], harboring more potentially lethal health issues than anyone I’ve ever known, told me that when she opened her eyes in the morning and saw light, she said to herself:

What, still here?!

Any number of recent surprises have reminded me of the evolutionary insight, ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis. [ Google it]

Lacey’s colleague received a phone call this week from a woman who said she had bought some fine European furniture from Ross 50 year ago and wondered if she might be interested in looking at it, maybe wanting to buy it and put it on the showroom floor.

Ross was the founder of the design firm and the grandfather of Lacey’s colleague who is now the principal in the firm. She went to see the furniture and was thrilled that a half century of use had confirmed its quality, and in a decision that defies all the ugly gossip about American culture, particularly southern California culture, she eagerly agreed to buy the furniture back.

Cosmos marked his 9th birthday on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany which, properly understood, is the Christian Feast that tears down the parochial walls that always threaten to turn religion into a bellicose power struggle.

Lacey’s father would have been 105 on the same day. If ever there was a man whose life oozed across every conventional boundary in Fairfield County, Connecticut in the first half of the 20th century it was Jarvis Jennings.

As I round the corner of Girard turning right onto Silverado on my way to pick up my mocha at the Brick & Bell, I first pass the kind and thoughtful man in the motorized wheelchair who came here from Philadelphia many years ago for the same reason I came from New England. Then, before I see him, I hear the schizophrenic preacher who commandeers the first bench on that block from which he warns every passerby about the necessity of acknowledging the awesome majesty of God.

Yesterday he must have gone totally off his meds because he was on his feet, part way into the street, and his always resonant voice was double its usual decibel level. I normally pick up my coffee and move on to the museum, but his booming bass cadence was so thrilling that I sat at a table and marveled at his energy and unmistakable purpose.

For a preacher who routinely suffered laryngitis every Holy and Easter Week for 30 years it was hard not to envy the instrument with which the oversized white-haired street preacher had been endowed. That virtually everyone except me seemed able to pass by without altering an iota of their appointed round, was some solace to a preacher accustomed to feeling invisible.

It’s too subtle, trying to measure how much the inevitable entropy to which one gives increasing obeisance as friends and one’s own bodily and larger connections begin to fray and break, accounts for the depth of dispirit etched by news like the shooting of a young Congresswoman and the others gathered to be with her.

If there is any heart to take it may be lodged in that unlikely exchange between Ross Thiele’s granddaughter and the person who had furniture, lovely, loved furniture, that he had sold someone in her family two generations ago.

Ross could no more have imagined that furniture, cherished and increased in value in a century he would never see, than I can imagine Congresswoman Giffords’ infant children telling her grandchildren the story of how her heroic recovery became a symbol for a new chapter in public life the nation longed for but had found no figure to rally round.

Dispirited

2011-01-08T14:30:00.002-05:00

I was probing my feeling of being dispirited when I saw the report of the young Democratic Congresswoman from Arizona had been shot. One report said she was killed.

Hard to say just why this lends to my sense of futility so profoundly. I had never heard of her before.

Someone who offers herself for public service. Even allowing for the hypocrisy we all know campaigning and governing requires of the most integrity-filled person, the very act of stepping up deserves respect even if we disagree totally with the person's views.

Civility is too weak a word for what we owe these people and each other in the public realm.

Dispiriting is too weak a word for how this news strikes me.

Change?

2011-01-06T17:36:00.002-05:00

There has been a lot of skepticism and deriding of the "Change" slogan that marked President Obama's election campaign two years ago.

But any measure taken from a distance – as history will do – makes clear the remarkable record this administration has run up in its first half term

What hasn't changed is the anger and skepticism that seems to be abroad in the country and that the Republican Party has made no bones about exploiting it, an agenda which they have publicly put ahead of everything else, including making contributions to governing.

One supposes the claim of the new Speaker of the House to be responding to the public outcry he interprets the Republican sweep in the 2010 elections to be, refers to the sole aim of defeating President Obama in 2012.

My guess is they will find that a less than compelling message for people who are eager to see the nation regain some of its mojo.

The unemployment numbers remain stubbornly high even while other economic indicators give investors hope that we are steadily moving away from the economic collapse toward a better future.

The truth is that we humans fear change above all else.

What we want is certainty.

Which is beyond human grasp.

It Is?

2011-01-05T19:29:00.001-05:00

It ought to be plain / how little you gain / by getting excited / and vexed. / You'll always be late / for the previous train, / and always in time / for the next. -Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)

In one of his albums recorded live James Taylor is heard to say, We’re going to take a break. I have no idea why we take these breaks, but everyone does, so we do, too.

Who ever persuaded us to greet January 1st with the amnesiac energy our dog displays every time we walk through the door?

It was a good idea. So long as we think we can learn one new thing, be surprised, the possibilities are boundless.

For the first time over the New Year’s weekend I ran across the word catercorner in a New Yorker article about the Vatican library . (Catercorner to a shiny new elevator was a carved Baroque portal…). I’ve heard the word all my life but never seen it in print. I think I always heard it as catty-corner and thought it must have something to do with the way a cat can be in one spot and then, almost instantly, in another (or something like that.)

And, what do you know? Wiktionary says that while it comes from the Friench, quatre (four) + corner, it morphed in folk etymology first into catty or caddy corner and then kitty-cornered, apparently because of some notion like mine.

Lacey and I were feeling adventurous, maybe because we had never done anything yet in 2011, so we made a reservation at a splashy new restaurant we have heard people talking about and seen mentioned in shiny magazines.

I dressed up, the first signal I had no idea what we were getting into. The maitre’ d – maybe even the owner(?) – cruised the floor, giving guided tours of the plates that had been delivered to those who ordered the most daring offerings from the menu. He was wearing tatty jeans and his worn shirt hung down beneath his stained sweatshirt.

He never made eye contact with us.

With good reason. When the waiter had tucked us into our booth and solicitously draped our tablecloth sized napkins in our laps, he presented us with menus with great ceremony, offering to answer any questions when he returned with Lacey’s Prosecco and my beer. (betraying how not ready for prime time I was).

Lacey is far more sophisticated than I, but even she said later that she felt panic when she looked at the menu. There was only one mention of something I recognized; bone marrow, which I know as what Cosmos gnaws from the bone the butcher gives me.

We found a couple of appetizers we thought we could manage, topped them off with dessert and cappuccino, and left pleased we apparently hadn’t disgraced ourselves and had a perfectly good starter meal for under $150.

In fact it was a great evening because at the next table four elegant men and one movie-beautiful woman ordered everything on the menu, a different wine with each course, regaling each other, and us. The meal faded into the background. We would have paid at least that much for the floor show.

Periodically I burn my journals. I once thought my children might want them to write my biography. The thought turned my heart to stone. I have burned them on the fire we do twice a year in Vermont, and, as I did this new year, in the fire pit on the beach where the aging surfers gather every morning to asses the waves and sometimes even surf.

Moleskine journals are hellishly fire resistant. I used to think it was because they were made from the tiny animal’s hide. (How many moles must die for this?) until I saw that it is Moleskine with an e, named for Moleskine Sri, the Italian company that makes them.

It must have taken a full fifteen minutes for the cover to get hot enough to begin to shrivel, giving the flames access to the a year of my auto-therapy. Man, you’ve got tiny handwriting. For one uncomfortable moment I thought the pages might survive the fire. Then Damon poked the flames and the journal was consumed. Safe for another year, Blayney, comforted outside-wave Dave.

Later Lacey and I had the conversation that has become a staple recently, about how well our powers (and bodies) are holding up after all these decades. You think you’ve lost any brain power? she asked kindly.

Sure, some. I mean my old issue with names has gotten even worse. And sometimes when I’m writing I can’t come up with a word I want even though I know exactly what I want to say. But I can find something close and that thingy in word processor will find the word I want.

You mean thesaurus? By the way; are you aware your turtleneck is on backwards?

It is?

New Year?

2011-01-03T15:15:00.002-05:00

Sounds like Republicans would like to start off the new year right where they left off the last one.

Extending tax cuts and claiming the discredited claim that has no impact on revenues/deficits.

Repealing the health care bill that so tortured the Congress and the entire country last year.

Attacking the Attorney General because he hasn't put prosecution of Wikileaks' Assange on fast track.

In other words once again adopting demagoguery as their form of governing.

I have never run for public office. If I were considering it this year I would welcome running as a fiscal and social progressive, which I take to mean seriously considering how to keep the economy growing so revenues will increase but not burden the economy with tax breaks for people who don't need it, won't spend it, and which every responsible economist says will do more crippling damage to the country's future.

And I would want to consider what the Wikileaks show about life in today's world that requires rethinking the way we do business. The ridiculous volume of material that is classified, and the near impossibility of keeping secrets in a cyber world. To respond as if prosecuting people who have leaked the information (has anyone wondered how we could prosecute Assange since he isn't an American citizen) might restore our ability to keep material secure is to ignore the most basic realities of today's world. Perhaps prosecuting the American soldier who is alleged to have provided all that data to Assange is appropriate, since he could have disobeyed orders, but even so, prosecuting him will do nothing to address the new reality.

And that's the real point of all this, for Democrats as well as Republicans. There are inescapable new realities in the international market place, in the contest for what nations will need now to do business in the global economy. National borders become easily crossed, if not ignored in the cyber world.

Trojan Horse

2010-12-22T16:44:00.003-05:00

So, what to make of this sudden rush of success by Obama and the Democrats after two miserable years of nothing but obstruction from the Republicans?

It seemed to begin with the passage of the bill that threw a bone to the Republicans by extending the tax breaks for the top 2%, and one to the Democrats by extending unemployment benefits. (Now surely the Democrats can make some political hay by contrasting those two moves!)

Don't Ask Don't Tell has been a bone of contention since Obama's election. But Republican opposition to that disappeared. The START Treaty, providing for mutual reduction in the nuclear arsenals of both the US and Russia – once couched in tired Cold War scare rhetoric – seemed to simply melt away over the past couple of weeks.

I see that President Obama has scheduled a news conference and speculation has it that he may do a little crowing about the successes of the lame duck Congress that had been predicted to be nothing but partisan swill.

What to make of this?

Republicans feeling more generous now that they have gained control of the House? I very much doubt that these blow-hards who have made obstruction their sole interest the past two years, can have had such a sudden mellowing.

Although I can hardly believe they can have forgotten so soon how Newt Gingrich squandered the Republicans' last opportunity to put it to the Democrats, it looks as if they may be warming up for a move very like the one he made that gave Bill Clinton back the initiative and likely his election to a second term.

One of the early votes that will come up after Congress returns to session will be a bill to raise the debt limit. The bill that just passed – with some bi-partisan support – raises it only enough to get us through until March.

The so-called Tea Party candidates who were elected and take their seats next month have vowed to refuse to extend the debt limit without draconian cuts in budget items that no politician would seriously consider. John Boehner, the in-coming Speaker, has given an interview in which he said this will be the moment in which these idealogues will be required to become adults.

If they go forward with forcing a shut down in the federal government – as they did under Gingrich – it's hard to see how it could do greater harm to the Democrats than to the Republicans who will be in the majority.

Politics is a fun sport, though sometimes people get bloodied.

Innocence

2010-12-17T16:12:00.003-05:00

I am having the surreal experience of reading Howard Zinn's, "People's History of the American People."

I can see why many schools and universities refused to use it. I am still in the pre-revolutionary colonial period and it has not so much changed my understanding of the beginnings of our nation as altered my sense of where the emphases should be.

He tells the story of our founding from the perspective of the Native Americans, the indentured (mostly white) servants, and the (mostly black) slaves.

It should come as not surprise that the history we all learned was written by those with the most power, and that we saw very little of those with little or no power.

But it does. Because we have all been fed such a powerful story about the nobility of our "founding fathers" that we – at least I – have never stopped to consider that they had a lot to lose if the story were ever told from a different perspective.

I hope it isn't merely cynical to say that those with a lot to lose use their power to hang onto it. I was surprised to read Zinn's claim that the money and power was concentrated in fewer hands then than even now. And that the greatest fear the powerful people in the colonies lived with was the possibility that the slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants, and poor whites (who, landless, hadn't the right to vote) might one day combine their grievances and turn against their masters.

In order to guard against that they did what right wing Republicans do in our day; trump up charges that they are being exploited (in their case by the British, in ours by elites) and turn their anger away from those who are in fact lording it over them.

So now I read that most Americans are in favor of arresting Julian Assange, the Wikileaks leader. They have been persuaded that this bad man is harming our government. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that he is carrying out one of the most sacred tenets of democratic society, uncovering government secrets that make it easy for government to use its power to maintain its power even when it isn't in the true interests of people.

Not to mention that seemingly forgotten bedrock of our legal system, the presumption of innocence.

It has always been true that those with power will behave as they feel they must to maintain it, all the while maintaining the noble fictions that persuade the rest of us that they wish for us to share that power. It would be silly to expect otherwise.

Vigilance is required.

Holbrooke's Last Words

2010-12-15T13:54:00.003-05:00

Could anything make plainer the futility of our efforts to have our way in Afghanistan than the debate about what to make of Richard Holbrooke's supposedly last words before undergoing anesthesia from which he never wakened?

I would love to believe he said something close to what was reported about pleading to end the war, because he has long been associated with its prosecution. If that meant one of the war's main architects had lost confidence in it, perhaps others have, too. And losing enough confidence to actually begin serious planning for withdrawal is long overdue.

But give the poor dog his due. Holbrooke was in an emergency room facing what he must have known was perhaps his final hours. And he surely was at least partially drugged against what must have been excruciating pain, not to mention anxiety.

To try to make whatever he may have said somehow formative for the most urgent foreign policy issue facing our nation, is not only ludicrous, it shows the desperation of all of us, on both sides of this issue (if there are still people enthusiastic about that war) to grasp at the weakest straw.

It may be that for the world's mightiest military power, and maybe even – despite our clear slippage – still the formative economic power, to have to face our limits and weakness is more than we can manage. And way more than a President or our generals can bear to sponsor.

If that is so then it falls either to the rest of us to disrupt the nation as we did during Viet Nam (which seems unlikely absent a draft), or – God spare us – some event of such catastrophic weight as to cause us to stagger and reassess our willingness to stand against the rest of the world.

Health Care Bill

2010-12-13T16:07:00.003-05:00

Maybe someone can explain to me how a Virginia State judge ruling a central provision of the Health Care Bill passed by Congress as violating the Constitution is not judicial activism.

Yes, of course I am aware of the role of judges in finding a law that doesn't fall within the boundaries set by the Constitution, but this decision appears to strain at gnats to find some way to accomplish what Tea Party types have vowed to do. This seems clearly a case of a court inserting itself into the political process. Precisely what conservatives have been accusing courts of doing since Brown Vs. Topeka.

I confess to being grateful for judicial intervention at some few moments that clearly call for overturning an historic injustice that politicians are too afraid to legislate against.

I can even make a case – though it sets my teeth on edge to do it – for the most notorious decision likely to be made in my lifetime, Gore Vs. Bush in 2000. Though we all want courts to rule strictly on the basis of law, not what they hope or think needs doing, the courts are the third branch of government and the first responsibility of government is to protect the citizens.

One could make a case – as I have in the past – that fears about the unknown consequences of the 2000 election going on undecided for much longer (maybe even beyond inauguration day) were so dire that it required judicial intervention even though that violated every known precedent. (indeed the unsigned 5-4 decision explicitly said it was not to be understood as precedent setting, absurd on its face since the Supreme Court's main function is to establish precedent for lower courts).

I have found myself on both sides of that argument over the years. But I could see the case.

In this case not only are the circumstances totally different, but it would be hard to try to say the outcome was of equal weight.

I suppose you could say the Virginia Court is simply wanting to hasten the day when the Supreme Court will decide the issue. (The Virginia judge refused to order a halt to implementing the law while the case makes its way through the higher courts).

But for a judge to throw a monkey wrench into the tortured effort to cut the Gordian Knot that health care has been to our nation for two generations strikes me as the height of conservative political hubris.

It's not hard to argue that Obama should have picked energy or the environment or the economy ahead of health care, but he didn't. And he and the Congress and the country endured the agony of an arcane and protracted struggle before finding a compromise that could pass a frightened and recalcitrant Congress. No one likes all of the bill. But at last something has gotten the country off a dime.

If the higher courts uphold this decision – and the Supreme Court agrees – you can kiss off a lot more than health care reform.

Hysteria

2010-12-10T17:22:00.002-05:00

When you find Charles Krauthammer begrudgingly praising President Obama for outsmarting the Republicans with his tax bill, and Paul Krugman not so begrudgingly accusing the President of deserting the Democrats for that same bill, you have to believe hysteria has finally eclipsed reason among the chattering columnists.

More likely the reality is that President Obama meant what he said – it wasn't just the usual political spin – when he told his angry supporters that he had struck the best, the only deal he could with the obstructionist GOP.

Though it's a mystery to me why he seems to have closeted himself with the Republican leadership, made the deal he had to, and then announced it to his own Party, who seem to have been left waiting outside the negotiating room, this President sometimes appears to actually care more about how to make the best deal he can than about the political fallout.

You can admire or scorn him for that.

With the ongoing caveat of his seeming to be carrying on the insane militarism he inherited, I continue to believe President Obama is the best President we have seen since at least Franklin Roosevelt (Kennedy simply wasn't in office long enough to judge) and that we're likely to see for a long while to come.

I think it is quite possible he will suffer the fate Jimmy Carter did and for some of the same reasons.

President Carter was the victim of the first oil embargo and the taking of hostages in the American Embassy in Teheran after the Islamic revolution. He was also the victim of his own determination to actually address the systemic issues he saw the country facing, notably growing dependence on imported petroleum and an unwillingness of Americans to become conservers and not only consumers.

Ronald Reagan laughed at President Carter during the debates, accused him of unfounded pessimism about America's future, may have been able to gain assurance that the hostages would not be released until after the election (Carter flew to meet them as they were released the day of Reagan's inauguration) and promised us that he would remove all impediments to making wealth, which would enrich the whole country.

It was the American mantra, Republican and Democrat alike, until the election of Obama. Unhappily for him, he thought his election was a mandate for addressing the problems that had grown incrementally worse since Reagan's misguided policies seduced the nation.

Who can say whether he should have chosen energy before health care? It looks clear to me that either of them could bankrupt us.

He may have too much confidence in his own intellect and ability to persuade. And I will wonder to my dying day whether his decision to escalate our Afghan adventure was out of conviction or another moment in which he felt squeezed into a corner.

My prediction today is that if the economy doesn't get a significant boost in the next year and a half (with unemployment falling below 8%), and we are still seeing body bags return from Afghanistan by this time a year from now, we will see Michael Bloomberg come into the spotlight as the candidate of neither the nasty Republicans nor the hapless Democrats.

No third party candidate has ever won. Yet.

Tax Fight

2010-12-08T17:40:00.002-05:00

I can only hope – though I seriously doubt – there may be a dimension to the President's decision to cave on preserving the tax cuts for the wealthy that I know nothing about.

Though profoundly shaken, my gratitude for a President who has dignity and intelligence, remains.

But this deal looks not simply bad, but unnecessarily retrograde.

Wikileaks

2010-12-07T15:59:00.002-05:00

While I tend to be sympathetic with and even admiring of Assange and his publishing of the incredible array of diplomatic exchanges, I am not sympathetic with the seemingly surprised outrage people are expressing about his arrest.

I am reminded of a conversation of which I was a part in the early 60s, with three older women, the wives of Bishops of the Episcopal Church, who had gone to St. Augustine, Florida to protest against Jim Crow laws and had briefly been put in jail.

Two of them were wonderful old Yankee women, tough, plain spoken and to-the-manner-born.

The third was black, the wife of John Burgess, Bishop of Massachusetts and the first black man to lead a diocese in the American Episcopal Church.

Someone asked them why they had gone on the protest.

The two Yankee women spoke of their enjoyment at watching the discomfort of the southerners who, while racists, also prided themselves on being genteel and well mannered. The women said they knew it would make them uncomfortable having to arrest proper ladies like themselves.

Once they had spoken Esther Burgess – who had waited with obvious discomfort for them to finish – said that she went knowing they were likely to become targets for violence.

"Surely, Esther," one of the proper women protested, "you aren't suggesting that we were there to promote violence."

"That's precisely what I am suggesting," she responded.

One of the first things we were taught when we became involved in protests against what we considered unjust racial laws and habits was that we were likely to find ourselves the targets of violence, likely to be arrested. And if we were not prepared to face that with some equanimity, and hadn't the discipline not to retaliate or feel sorry for ourselves for being on the receiving end of injustice, then we should stay home.

The one interview I have seen with Julian Assange leads me to think he may have the inner discipline to be able to endure the consequences of his actions. He seems to value his vocation more than his personal safety and well-being.

I suppose – unlikely but not impossible – that he has indeed been arrested to face rape charges. But it would be the height of naivte' to think that governments he has exposed and embarrassed would fail to find ways to shut him down.

Dr. King never had any illusions about the likely fate he faced. That made his witness all the more impressive. We'll see if Assange is made of the same stuff.

In the meantime he has changed the international conversation in ways unlikely ever to be returned to its pre-Wikileak terms. For that he has won his place in history.

Taxes

2010-12-06T15:41:00.003-05:00

I don't know when taxes became political shorthand for certain defeat.

Maybe it was the so-called Reagan revolution when so-called supply-side economics promised that unleashing the greediest instincts of American plutocrats was the surest way to ensure prosperity across the entire economic spectrum, richest to poorest. It used to be called trickle-down economics and was once pretty discredited by all serious economists.

When it was resurrected as supply-side economics – suggesting that all that holds back an economy eager to expand was heavy-handed regulations keeping entrepreneurs from realizing their potential – we all behaved as if something new had been invented.

In fact the Reagan revolution was not only discredited early on, first by David Stockman, Reagan's budget director (Reagan spoke of taking him to the woodpile to punish him), my understanding is that Reagan did his own version of raising taxes when that became necessary.

Nevertheless he is now enshrined by this generation of Republicans as the anti-tax hero. And any suggestion of raising taxes, no matter the economic necessity, instantly expels one from the ranks of orthodox Republicans.

This latest edition in which Republicans have managed to hold up extending unemployment benefits so long as Democrats want to return tax rates to those with incomes above $250,000 to the level they were before Bush, seems to a rational person (me) not only completely wrong, but also a perfect opportunity for Democrats to make the point that Republicans are most concerned with cushioning even further the already soft cushions on which the richest Americans sit.

And if they have to abandon those who have been unable to find work in this miserable lagging so-called recovery to do that, well, so be it.

I am among those who don't believe $250,000 is an extravagant income in these days, though it certainly is when measured against incomes around the world.

But that isn't really the point. $250,000 is enough to live well. And it is enough for someone to consider they bear an obligation to help support the government that makes life possible, and lend a hand to those who have been run over by an economic collapse that was caused in no small part by the shenanigans of big money people inventing arcane financial instruments to line their own pockets and which have turned out to be attempts to make chicken salad out of chicken shit.

Consider this a rant.

Wikileaks

2010-12-03T15:47:00.002-05:00

Whatever the motives may have been behind the publishing of all those previously classified documents, the practical effect has been what ever story of this sort is: the story has become the story.

Which means politicians posture, journalists bray, and the rest of us watch as if it was the last two minutes of the Super Bowl with the score tied.

What may be truly extraordinary about this moment is that it seems those in high places who are used to being protected from scrutiny are discovering what the rest of us learned some time ago: privacy is a vestige of former times.

I don't mean to seem smug about this; there is much about it that causes me real sorrow.

Whoever said that if we could read one another's minds there would be no friends left in the world would feel vindicated today.

Which of us has not held back a criticism until we feel we are not only out of earshot of the person we wish to criticize, but are now speaking with someone who – even if she disagrees – will never rat us out?

There is much about the global marketplace that I find worrisome – the loss of blue-collar jobs in our country, everything I wear of use being produced by sweat labor – but I think the chances of retreating to the days of national parochialism are nil.

I can imagine the sorrow of those who have felt protected in the past. As a young man I worked in a church across the park from the White House and I well remember the thrill I felt at being in those high places where the men (all men then) had the swagger and self-confidence of people who know they are beyond reach of the sorts of accountability most of us face daily.

Today there is a story that Nigeria is going to hand down a felony indictment against Dick Cheney for some part he played in a bribery case before he became Vice President. I have been told that many of those who played a role in prosecuting our Iraq and Afghanistan wars are wary of traveling to many countries (like Italy) where they are rumored to be under secret indictment.

Many of those who, like me, have pressed since Viet Nam days for greater accountability by such people are finding the Wikileaks drama exciting. I am not among them. I don't have any idea what this new world is going to be like. Certainly different.

But I am certain we have crossed the point of no return.

On We Go

2010-12-02T18:01:00.002-05:00

No mater howe many times we do it – and we tend to do it at least twice a year – crossing the continent in the course of a single day never fails to astonish me.

Yesterday at 8:30am we left our farmhouse in rural Vermont. It was raining and i had on my Vermont gardening shoes to load our luggage into the car. Half way to the Hartford airport I realized I hadn't changed into my more presentable shoes that will now spend winter on the floor of the mudroom.

Chicago at midday was 23º and light snow. As we taxied to the gate I watched several planes be de-iced before they were backed away for takeoff and wondered if we might end up spending the night in Chicago.

Lacey is braver than I. She took Cosmos out of the airport for a pee so he wouldn't end up having the be the stoic he often is, going more than 12 hours in his crate without relief. That means she has to come back through security but somehow she manages, and even found the line that didn't require taking Cosmos through the x-ray.

After a nice lunch at Wolfgang Puck we made our way to the gate for our leg to San Diego, wondering if we would find it cancelled. Nope. We left nearly on time. The pilot mollified us by apologizing at some length for the inevitable delays, one for a light in the cockpit that came on and wouldn't go off, which was benign and easily fixable (though required a long filling out of reports), and then being shifted from our original runway to make way for a couple of jumbo jets that apparently took precedence and created enough turbulence that the controller thought it would be better for us to take off from a different runway.

Several times during the 4 hours to San Diego he came on the intercom to tell us what splendid time we were making and bragged about the perfect clear weather we were heading for in southern California.

It was beautiful all right. But even more impressive to me was the three of us, who had walked out of our house in San Diego that very morning, walking into our apartment in San Diego the evening of the same day.

Only in China or Russia could you cross so many different time zones and climate changes without ever leaving the country.

I know what a devilishly hard time we are having governing ourselves these days, and i devoutly hope the silliness that passes for serious political discourse may recede at least enough to keep some of the long term unemployed able to collect checks, take serious looks at the disasters we face in pollution and climate change, and push back against our penchant for making our way in the world with big guns.

Whether we do or not, it is quite incredible to go from Vermont to California in a single day, 3000 miles and an environment as different as one could imagine, and still be among one's fellow citizens.

No Mas

2010-11-29T20:49:00.001-05:00

California Here we come...

Andrew November 30, 2010

Lighten our darkness we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night… (From An Anglican collect for Evensong)

So destabilizing to have traveled the
exotic sunny tropical ways
of Cuba
only a fortnight ago

why, even a swim one bright afternoon at a
Caribbean beach by a
hotel built by the Soviets (shoddily) during
their period of hang-the-cost steamy

western adventure
just down the road from our furtive
folly at the Bay
of Pigs

and now a sip of rustic
V-e-r-m-o-n-t w-i-n-t-e-r
Cosmos’ pads icing over on our evening
graveyard trudge

so dark

so soon

so what?

are 70 years too few to for a heart to
learn by heart
the ominous inexorable extinguishing of
the long lush lazy

afternoons’

promiscuous promise?

And why isn’t the first surprising
snow suddenly showering
the scattered skim of pond ice so
it seems surely soon
solid

offering otters an early
opportunity
to show off startling spectacles of
show man ship

and

transporting the dogs into paroxysms
of athletic ecstasy

adequate compensation?

surely we can count on the exquisite ladies
aid quilt we won in their
lottery
to defend us from all perils and dangers of this long

night

For What?

2010-11-24T15:05:00.001-05:00

Thanksgiving, the favorite American holiday.

Thanksgiving for what?

For big bargains on Black Friday?

Or for having been born into the richest nation in history?

Or for having been born?

Everything about this Thanksgiving says we're in transition from whatever we used to think ourselves to whatever we're going to think ourselves.

And we're not happy about it.

Human are conservative, prefer the status quo, what feels familiar, even though we know by the time we're a very few years old that there is no such thing as the status quo. You've heard the joke about Adam saying to Eve, as they were being driven from Eden: "Darling, this is a time of transition."

When N. Korea dares put a stick in our eye, or Iran, or some Afghan with a IED, you know the test of how and when the American Empire will spring its unpluggable leak is underway.

So, what do we have to be thankful for this Thanksgiving?

Everything. Except what we think we want most.

Condoms

2010-11-20T14:04:00.003-05:00

I doubt anyone can know at this point what it means that the Pope has apparently sanctioned the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

While this may seem a narrow ruling, its implications call into question the entire structure of Roman Catholic moral theology since Thomas Aquinas.

The RC Church has held since then that the moral (divine) purpose of any act is determined by its natural consequence. Anything that interferes with that natural consequence is a violation of the purpose for which it was designed by God.

In the case of sex, the Church claimed that procreation was the natural outcome and anything that sought to interfere with procreation violated moral law. The Church has been stuck with this miserable stance for lo these hundreds of years. When people asked me why the Church clung to such a stupid and dangerous position I pointed out that there was no way they could relax that stance without bringing down the whole house of cards.

Now, in one seemingly simple, humane gesture, the most hard-nosed Pope in my lifetime, has pulled the card out that will eventually bring down the whole house.

Tanks?

2010-11-19T12:10:00.002-05:00

I have been absent from this space for two months because I have been busy with other things and because I know so few actually read this blog. I never cared to make a fuss over it; just another way for a compulsive writer to vent, whether into empty cyberspace or not.

But this morning's news that we are sending tanks to Afghanistan sent me into apoplexy.

Have we zero historical sense?

Is everyone running our nation too young to remember the photos of the burning Soviet tanks in Afghanistan, photos that made us happy because we had supplied the shoulder fired missiles that destroyed them? And guess what? Those resourceful people saved all those weapons we gave them and have been licking their chops waiting for big, juicy targets.

Counterinsurgency calls for using tanks? Against what. Against whom?

Sanity has long called for our finding as face-saving a way out of that morass as we can, as quickly as we can. We decided a last gasp might be to beat up the insurgents so badly that they would cry Uncle and come to the table.

That assumes that they will stand and fight our military like the Japanese did on the Pacific Islands.

From the outset, from long before the outset of our effort – with the British and then the Soviets – the usually fragmented tribal groups in that region put aside their ancient difference long enough to adopt a common strategy until they drove the foreigners from their soil. Each power brought all its resources to bear while the Afghans did their hit and run strategy, bleeding the human and materiel resources of the occupiers until they lost their stomach for the fight and withdrew.

The old definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over with expectation of a different outcome has defined our effort in Afghanistan.

I am a liberal Democrat, a supporter of President Obama. I think he has done as well as any president could have with dealing with the financial collapse he inherited. His health care bill may or may not be a first step towards doing something about the unsustainable course it has been on for a generation, but at least it is now on the table.

But he either is truly captive to the generals (though my military sources tell me they want out of Afghanistan as badly as I do. One person who knows General Petraeus told me he believes Afghanistan is hopeless.) or he, too, has swooned over the imagined responsibility to use our military might to sustain our place in the world.

But tanks?

Middle Class

2010-09-18T14:20:00.002-04:00

One of the most ambiguous terms in the language is "middle class."

When I was growing up I remember it being both pejorative ("That's a very middle class attitude.) and positive ("The middle class is the backbone of this nation.")

But I don't remember anyone ever defining what it means or who it refers to.

The obvious answer, that it refers to those with incomes between the poor and the rich, might be more convincing if someone hadn't said to me on my 60th birthday (10 years ago), "Welcome to middle age." When I asked if he really expected me to live until I was 120, he rolled his eyes to let me know I was pushing the language too hard.

Nonetheless there was a day when we all might have agreed that there was a prospering, flourishing middle class in this country. Perhaps its zenith came after WWII when GIs who came home to a GI Bill that provided education and job training resulted in a massive increase in high school and college graduates, and the building of Levittown communities in which families could own their own houses for the first time and expect their children to rise higher in education and income than they had.

Those were the days when "Made in USA" was the sought after label on everything from dishwashers to cars. (There was even a city in Japan that named itself USA, Japan so it could put that stamp on what it manufactured.)

The news this week that the number of our citizens living below the poverty level increased by 14% in the past year, meaning some 44 million Americans are impoverished, is shocking.

The causes are numerous and complex but the fact is not only unacceptable, but surely does violence to what we and the world has understood America to be about for more than two generations.

That we are mired in arguments about whether to continue the lowest taxes ever for the highest one percent of us, rather than about how to reinvigorate a stagnant economy so people who are willing to work hard can expect a fair share of the pie, is a national disgrace.

If you have not seen Bill McKibben's piece on his visit to the White House with a group of young people who want Obama to put back onto the roof of that house the solar panels first out there by Jimmy Carter and taken down by Ronald Reagan when he moved in, you must find and read it.

Not because solar panels on the White House are going to created jobs, but because they are a symbol that the nation is serious about addressing serious issues, and not merely looking for arcane new ways to make rich people richer.

So far President Obama seems persuaded that he must do nothing to trigger Republican opposition to attempts to change the national conversation and direction. McKibben writes that he is not ready to give up on him, but getting closer.

Are Newt Gingrich and Sara Palin such overpowering people that we must wait for them to set the agenda and then oppose them?

If so we are simply the mirror of the Republican opposition and the nation will fall further and further behind the rest of the world and, maybe even more important, away from our national ideals that have honored the great middle of our people who work hard and pay taxes.

Rough Water

2010-09-14T18:56:00.002-04:00

September 14, 2010

Time engraves our faces with all the tears we have not shed. - Natalie Clifford Barney, Author (1876-1972)

It had promised to be a long, tedious trip. For several months we planned to fly to California for the La Jolla Rough Water Swim, the granddaddy of the open ocean races that we used to swim every year when we lived there full time.

Two weeks before, drafting off the guy in front of me, I touched his wheel and brought myself precipitously to the ground, bicycle intact but clavicle not. End of my first post-70 race, but Lacey was still swimming so I was going along as trainer and cheerleader.

First leg of the flight, Hartford to Charlotte, caught my interest a little because not only was Charlotte where I grew up, but the first time I ever flew, June of 1947 a polio epidemic threatened to quarantine the city and my grandfather told my mother to pack us onto a DC3 and fly from Douglas Municipal Airport to LaGuardia.

It’s still Douglas (now International) Airport but the languages, races, nationalities dodging each other through the crowded terminal could just as well have been at Heathrow. The attendant, engaging but authoritative, explained to me in a Latin accent that there were no empty seats to San Diego so Lacey and I could not be together.

Stuffed into the window seat and my collar bone began to ache. A handsome swarthy man sandwiched himself into the middle seat, and a young woman of uncommon beauty took the aisle seat. With the announcement that the flight was nearly five hours my heart sank. My Tylenol, in a suitcase overhead, may as well have been in Africa.

Shortly after takeoff the man next to me took out a journal of middle eastern studies and began making notations in the margins in an exotic, unfamiliar script. I watched, fascinated for several minutes at his speed and dexterity in forming complex characters.

You a political scientist?

I used to be. Now I am a diplomat.

I would have subjected my aching body to the torture of the long flight just for the conversation that unfolded. 38 years old, he is the youngest ambassador in Afghanistan’s foreign service. At the moment he is posted to another country in that region but he spends considerable time in this country where his parents live, where he received most of his graduate education, and where he consults in various guises that he left to my galloping imagination.

He ducked none of my hard questions about the wisdom of our engagement with his country, challenged my entrenched opinions about the middle east, fossil fuel, tribal rivalries, until, by the time we made that always dicey touch-down at Lindbergh field in San Diego, he could have signed me up to lobby for our continued engagement with Afghanistan.

When I pressed hard about whether Afghanistan is really a country at all, not many regions and tribes that battle each other and come together only when the British, Russians or Americans try to subdue them, he smiled patiently and asked me about the book I was reading, Freedom Summer.

It is about the summer of 1964 when college students from all over the U.S. went to Mississippi to register black voters, teach black children in “freedom” schools, and counter the experience of southern blacks that all white Americans wanted to keep black Americans poor, uneducated and disenfranchised.

As I described the book Khaled’s smile deepened. Ah, so you understand from your own experience about regional rivalries.

When we had been speaking for some time the young woman in the aisle seat leaned across and said, I’ve been listening to your conversation. My husband is Persian, from Iran, and I have been studying a little Farsi.

She was on her way to Camp Pendleton to introduce a new secure communications system her company has developed.
I usually travel in casual dress, she explained, not doubt aware that Khaled and I were making an effort to keep our eyes from her award-winning expanse of leg, but I had no time between the office and airport to change.

You look beautiful, Khaled assured her unnecessarily, in an affirming manner affirming with no trace of leer, a skill I knew beyond my reach.

Not until they had both left the plane ahead of me and I reached overhead for my bag did I remember my clavicle.

When Lacey finished the Rough Water Swim on Sunday, in the most challenging conditions I have seen in the more than 20 years I have been a part of the race, the trip proved richer than if I had won the race myself.

What Next?

2010-08-30T18:12:00.002-04:00

In recent days I have had conversations with clergy who head a couple of what were once called "Cardinal" parishes. It was a reference to the closest the Episcopal Church comes to the red hatted prelates once revered in the Roman Catholic Church.

These were the posts so many clergy dreamed of. Though our ordination vows say nothing about big numbers of people or money, most of us were never fully weaned from the American dream of success in which we were immersed.

If the clergy with whom I spoke are representative – and I suspect they are far more representative than they were just a few years ago (and far more than they wish), the church might be as good a place as any to dig into the changes that have wrenched our nation from her conviction of the past couple of generations that we sit atop the world's pyramid by divine plan that will continue us deep into the future.

As is true for so many who believed that their success required and was built on their ingenuity and hard work, these people seem baffled by how far and how fast they have fallen. One major church that anchors a central square in one of the most envied cities in the nation is struggling just to meet payroll. The rector told me he now confers with lay leaders every month to decide which bills they can let go another month without risking having the phones turned off.

In one sense this is not representative of the culture at large because the business of the church – God, salvation – has been sliding towards anachronism for centuries.

But in another it may be a canary in the mine if you believe the mortgage markets and the arcane financial instruments that played a key role in the financial collapse were not merely without sound basis, but had no essential purpose other than to ramp up the bottom line.

When the essential vision of a person, a nation, a corporation, is lost, it is only a matter of time before the downward slide.

My father went to work for Procter & Gamble right out of college in 1935, at the peak of the Great Depression. The company put him in a neighborhood grocery store in the South Bronx as a stock boy in order for him to learn the grocery business where its essence was.

And he did.

He believed that P&G had a mission to produce the best products possible at the best price they could manage on behalf of the households across the country. He truly believed what he did made life better for people. It's easy to be cynical about such a romantic idea of selling soap, but it not only made P&G one of the most successful consumer products companies in the country, but it motivated my father for more than 30 years.

My two clergy friends are wondering what the church's business is in the 21st century.

Our nation that for more than a generation persuaded us that we were the shining light on the hill, has seen that light dim to a flicker. Even Barack Obama, perhaps the most stirring orator to lead us in at least a generation, is stumbling as he tries to define our mission.

What Next?

OOPS!

2010-08-21T16:08:00.002-04:00

A week before my 70th birthday I made a false move on my bike, skimmed my front wheel against the back wheel of my friend riding in front of me, and WHAM! I went down and, among other things fractured my collar bone.

Changes lots of things very fast.

It's a displaced fracture with the two bones out of place by as much a 2-3 inches, so I likely will be having surgery in the next few days.

Changes lots of things very fast.

Seems the Israelis and the Palestinians will begin talking again, first time in several years. But what about?

The jobless claims rose to a new high this week. Remember economists saying jobs would be the lagging indicator in the recovery? But with what some say is an effective unemployment rate (adding those on unemployment benefits to those who have given up looking to those working part time who want to work full time to those working at jobs below their skill level and former wage level just to stay alive) at perhaps 16%, and it's hard to keep calling all these people without work the lagging indicator.

How do you consider a war over when you still have 50,000 troops stationed in the war region?

Haven't heard much about the Afghanistan surge lately.

Here's hoping the world and my economy have at least one more trick up their sleeves for recovering.

Nothing is forever.

No More War

2010-08-20T08:57:00.002-04:00

Arianna Huffington is right when she tells American progressives that Obama "just isn't that into you."

Although I guess I number myself among progressives (raise the FICA tax on those above $105K, spend government money on jobs to rebuild infrastructure, raise taxes on the top 1% – but not this year, mount a national campaign like the man-on-the-moon campaign of the 60s to develop energy sources free of burning fossil fuel) but I have never felt comfortable signing on for an ideological cause.

I think the structuring of taxes should be cannily set between fairness to those on the lower end while encouraging risk taking entrepreneurs on the higher end. I don't pretend to know how to wean our economy off the arcane financial shenanigans that reward a handful of people who seem too often to end up being bailed out by the government they love to hate, but we will have no chance to return to the kind of country we all say we want to be so long as our national wealth production is concentrated on Wall Street while our factories and small businesses languish.

But most of all we have to face reality about the limits of gaining our way through use of our military. One might have thought Viet Nam would have taught us that. The problem as I see it is a combination of being dependent on fossil fuel, the illusion of American exceptionalism, and the Pentagon as perhaps the largest and only growth industry in the nation.

The only way President Obama is going to have the courage to disengage from Afghanistan before we drain all our resources and follow the Soviet retreat in shame, is if the country rises up as we did during Viet Nam.

Right now not only are there generals running virtually every department of our nation's place in the world, but the mindless Republicans are still shrieking that making major war is the only way we can prevent more 9/11s. Obama is a politician. He listens to the winds of public opinion. Who could have imagined Lyndon Johnson would leave the presidency because of public opposition to the war?

Who knows whether this country will ever again regain its sense of fairness? But it's a cinch that, so long as we are squandering our wealth and our young lives in making futile wars, we have no chance to address fairness or anything else.

Listen!

2010-08-13T11:18:00.002-04:00

A recent article in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg suggesting that the Pentagon and American leaders are growing tried of failed negotiations to stop Iran's nuclear buildup, looks like another of those journalist plants to try out reactions. He writes that the Israelis have already likely decided to go ahead, and he claims that the orders from the Pentagon about the possibility of Israeli bombers flying through air space crowded with our planes, are "Don't shoot them down."

While no one in the west is happy with the thought of a nuclear Iran, we – who let this genie out of the bottle 65 years ago – have, of necessity, learned to live with more and more nations joining the nuclear club. If we have created the instrument of human extinction we are hardly in a moral position now to bully or negotiate other nations into not picking it up.

Iran wants the bomb for the same reason we first developed it: to gain the attention and respect of any nation tempted to do them harm.

N. Korea may be the scariest nation to go nuclear so far. We did everything short of war to prevent them from succeeding in that. All our attempts failed. The result is precisely what they sought: serious attention from us and from the rest of the world. That they are a failed state, starving their own people to pay for these weapons may be reprehensible, but it doesn't change the dynamic they intended.

I have to assume our military and civilian leaders understand all this far better than I do. I hope to hell they do because bluster and trillion dollar military budgets are impotent against a rogue state or terrorist organization with a nuclear capability. Israel may truly believe that this is the most serious threat to Judaism since the holocaust, (one might argue that not all the world's Jews live in Israel, nor is every Jew a Zionist), but trying to stop the threat with a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities is likely to prove disastrously self-defeating.

You must believe Iran is willing to accept total annihilation of itself if it were to nuke Israel. If they are that insanely fanatical then all is already lost. I choose to believe that, while they have different, often seriously conflicting interests with ours, they are like us in wishing to live out their lives without being consumed by a nuclear conflagration. If that is true, continuing diplomacy, not matter how difficult and frustrating, is our only choice.

In the meantime we could stand a little apart from our own sword rattling – especially in that region – and consider why Iran might feel the need to go nuclear. We have about run out the string on cowing other nations through use of our undeniably unmatched military. The rest of the world figured out even before our Viet Nam stalemate how to use lesser local power to hold off a massive military opponent until the opponent tires.

I can't tell whether Obama doesn't yet fully understand how critical it is that we make a major shift in how we do business in the world, or is political captive to those who have a huge interest in continuing on as we have been. It seems pretty clear that the Republicans have their teeth set for even more military power, still sure our failure to bring the world to our ways is not using our military to its full capacity.

The change we are looking for is not more of the same.

Hiroshima

2010-08-06T13:41:00.002-04:00

Do you suppose those who dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima has any idea it was the Feast of the Transfiguration on the Christian calendar?

Doubtful. As I recall they had wanted to drop the bomb earlier but bad weather required them to postpone it.

So it ended up on the day that marks the story of the disciples being with Jesus who went off by himself to pray. They wearied of waiting and fell asleep. The story tells of Jesus meeting Moses and the prophets. When he returns to his friends his face is so bright, so backlit that they have to avery their eyes as if they were looking at the sun.

You see the irony of the two events.

There is no stuffing this genie back into the bottle.

The mystical Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin marked the splitting of the atom as the point at which the human species moved into its next great development. For, so he wrote, we had learned how to reach into the very structure of the matter from which we and the earth are formed and alter it.

Jesus sad that we must lose our lives in order to save them.

If Hiroshima marked the means by which we will leave behind a species that has proved so careless of the planet that bore and sustains us, perhaps this will fulfill Jesus' prediction.

Whether it does or not, surely it reminds us that we, too, are made of atoms and molecules that split and form new beings.

Remember O man, dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.

Firm Foundation

2010-07-28T11:17:00.002-04:00

How Firm A Foundation

Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility. – Augustine (354-430)

****

What must the people who dug the cellar hole for our house must have been thinking as they struggled with rocks bigger than they were, running water that wouldn’t be diverted from the spot they had chosen, and doubts about whether they would have the strength and stamina to clear enough land for grazing their sheep?

It was the late 1820s and they hadn’t the wealth to buy large laboring animals that could help with the hauling. It had been less than 50 years since Vermont had become the 14th state, having reluctantly surrendered her status as an independent kingdom. The attitude lingers in the foothills of the Green Mountains to this day, like the scent of a fading fragrant flower as fall approaches.

Vermont was growing fast (from 1763-1791 the non-Indian population rose from 300 to 85,000!) and would reach a number just before the Civil War which has been diminishing ever since.

The pond, which was one of the chief reasons we bought the house, wouldn’t exist for another 70 or so years when they dammed the streams that flow from the surrounding hills to generate power. Our village, Jacksonville, is legally a part of the town of Whitingham (Brigham Young was born here) and was formed for the sole purpose of forming the Jacksonville Electric Company from whom we still buy power. (That they buy from the grid).

The 8 mills of various stripe (grinding, saw, leather) that lined the banks going down into town are long gone, though you can tell their foundations from the surrounding rocks by how neatly stacked they are.

When we looked at the house 30 years ago I thought it seemed a little precarious. Lacey thought it had the potential for perfection.

The next week we brought an architect friend up to give an opinion. The three of us descended the hazardous, rickety old staircase into the dirt cellar to have a look at the foundation. It was easy to see that as they dug they set the heavy rocks aside and used them to make the foundation.

We stood in awed silence for several moments considering the stream that entered through the northeast corner and exited through the southwest corner. Steve, our architect friend, took a couple of steps and gave a support beam a nudge with his foot. It swung free of its footing. We stood wordlessly for another brief spell while I waited, already disappointed, for his sobering counsel.

“Oh, what the hell,” Steve said, “this place has been here a lot longer than we have; it’ll be here long after we’re gone. If you like it why don’t you just buy it?”

I don’t think I thought we’d ever actually live here. It used to spook me to see daylight through a few places in the foundation. We’ve mortared some of the big ones. I once asked a contractor friend about pouring a cement cellar, sealing off the stream.

“Oh no, you don’t want to do that. That stream will eventually lift your house right off its moorings. Got to let it run through.” Since it had been doing that for 160 years I guessed it must be OK. He did agree to put a layer of gravel down on top of tarp and that did wonders to dry the house out while allowing the stream the run of the place.

I would be lying if I told you the place hadn’t needed Lacey’s design genius and a Jim, contractor savant, to rebuild the barn that had long ago collapsed and make it into the place that feels like the most home I have ever known. Such a plain 19th century New England farmhouse, it surprises people who come inside. There are places – like my writing studio above the barn (Lacey Colmore Design, Jim Strattner Contractor) – that border on elegant.

But one trip down cellar to change the water filter or check the mouse traps, and I can see the sweat labor and Vermont rock on which it all depends.

Dog Days

2010-07-16T10:55:00.002-04:00

Vermont is normally a place people come to seeking relief from summer heat.

This summer we are more like Mississippi.

I don't know how much that may have to do with the media's relentless portraying our country in a malaise so deep they report people may return control of the congress to the Republicans.

President Obama manages to see through legislation on health care, economic regulation and reform that has eluded every president since Harry Truman, and he slides lower every day in people's estimation.

I wonder what Cosmos thinks.

I'll guess: If I lie motionless until this heat passes maybe I'll live long enough to growl down some of those naysayers.

Meander

2010-07-10T16:33:00.003-04:00

My novel, "Meander: Wooing Ms. Maudie", is available at Xlibris.com and from Amazon.

Xlibris.com has it is hardback, paperback and E-book.

At the moment it is available from Amazon only in paper and E-book.

A love story between Maudie, fictional daughter of the president of Zimbabwe, and Oscar, a young white American. They meet as MBA students at the Wharton School of Business at the U. of Pennsylvania, have a love affair that takes them back to Zimbabwe after business school and into the intrigue of the politics of that troubled country.

After you have read the book i wish you would let me know how it affected you. I meant to weave into that love story as many of the unresolved unfolding issues abroad today: gender, race, sex, American foreign policy and espionage, cross cultural values, and scores of other matters I often wonder about. Please do read the book and write me.

Meandering

2010-07-06T15:52:00.002-04:00

Dog Days July 6, 2010

I don't hate my enemies. After all, I made 'em. -Red Skelton, comedian (1913-1997)

[A note about Meander: Wooing Ms. Maudie, the novel I have just published and told you last week is available on all the usual spots. I jumped the gun a little. You can get the paperback and the Kindle editions on Amazon now. If you put Meander into the Amazon book search engine it will show you the Kindle version. If you enter Meander: Wooing… it will also show you the paperback.

If you go to http://www.blayneycolmore.com you will see paperback, hardback and E-book. Because it is a print-on-demand book it will take some time to get it, but it is a little less expensive. They tell me all three types should soon be available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram (the distributor most bookstores use.)

If you would like a book signed with a tender inscription by the author, let me know and in due course I can provide that.]

The last day before the heat descended, I made a trip to the dump and then on to the bank to see if we had put our wills and our end-of-life instructions in the safe deposit box as we both remembered. One trip, two stops meant to clean up our detritus. The bank was air conditioned. Somehow the dump – which wasn’t air conditioned – seemed a more productive and satisfying stop.

Lacey pointed out that the burn pile where we toss all the brush to be burned on the next cool rainy day (will there ever be such a day?) looks like a lush garden now. Flowers of every variety have seeded and arranged themselves in a dazzling array of color. She exhausts herself tending the gardens she has painstakingly cultivated. The burn pile surely intends no mocking of her hard work.

We’ve had an extravagant number and variety of birds this summer. Cosmos and I watch them come to the feeder on the stone patio outside the kitchen window. Though we finally found a baffle that baffles the chipmunks, they still come to feed on what the messy eaters – especially the piggy finches – knock onto the ground. Cosmos’ terrier shrieking at the chipmunks can make me spill my tea. So I’ve gone out every other morning to sweep the husks away.

Last week we were gone overnight and when we returned not only was the feeder eaten down to nothing, but there were no husks on the ground. Now I wait for the birds to empty the feeder and they take care of the clean up.

Yesterday I swam across the lake and as I paused by the opposite shore and looked up, a bald eagle was perched on a branch just above me, seeming to consider whether she could drag me to her nest and retire for the summer while her chicks fattened themselves on me. After I chatted her up she low-flew me but apparently decided I was too old.

Or was she, like much of the country, marking our national day on Monday, relishing that, despite Benjamin Franklin’s wish that the turkey might be our national bird, she is?

Evidence everywhere that when left to their own devices,
our earth and her feral inhabitants put on some pretty clever displays.

Meander

2010-06-29T12:23:00.001-04:00

Meander
Peter & Paul June 29, 2010

Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened. – Dr. Seuss 1904-1991

***

The attached photo shows the editorial staff who created the novel Meander: Wooing Ms. Maudie taking a break. The novel was released this week and you can have a look at it at http://www.blayneycolmore.com .

The author is on the left. The senior editor is relaxing in the middle, and on the right is the book’s final arbiter. The picture was taken in the emergency department of Massachusetts General Hospital after Sylvia, my senior sister had an unscheduled meeting with a car door as she was riding her bike to meet my junior sister and me.

She is tough as dirt. After a full day of searching every inch of her for the injuries we were all sure such a terrible crash would cause anyone, let alone someone 73, the docs surrendered, unlocked the neck brace and gave her a pass.

My junior sister Perry who edited several community newspapers over the years is now a chaplain at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital. She shepherded us through the complex labyrinth of a busy hospital with a dexterity I think I once had but has now become rusty.

Over the five years during which I gave up on Meander as the moon waxed and waned, my multi-skilled sisters provided encouragement, reassurance and, as I neared the finish line, hours of volunteer editorial expertise.

I wrote you last winter that the book’s protagonists, Maudie and Oscar, had taken an unauthorized walkabout from which I wasn’t sure they would ever emerge. After I begged and cajoled they repatriated so I could finish their story.

Maudie, fictional daughter and heir-apparent of the president of Zimbabwe, and Oscar, white American son of an Episcopal priest, meet as MBA students at Wharton in Philadelphia. Maudie is single focused on her vocation to lead her country. Oscar, who has turned down a Fulbright in literature to try to learn a useful skill, becomes nearly as single focused on Maudie. She is powerfully drawn to him but not for the long haul he wishes. The intrigue of their relationship is woven into the dangers and dilemmas of a country descending precipitously into chaos.

My interests were around the ways in which the changes in gender relationships, racial and political attitudes, blurring boundaries between corporate and state entities, U.S. heavy-handedness in the developing world, and the hunger of young people to put their stamp on the world, might play out in a love affair.

The book is available through the web site - http://www.blayneycolmore.com - and the usual channels – Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Ingram – in hardback, paper and e-book. If you want to order it in e-book form on Kindle from Amazon, you may have to go to the Kindle store to see it. I think it is a little cheaper through the web site.

I am so eager for you to read it and learn what you see. I have not scheduled a worldwide tour yet, so if you would like me to come and meet with a group, let me know and I’ll do my best.

The book is dedicated to Richard and Mo Davy, our precious friends who took us under their wing during a seven month sabbatical in Zimbabwe in 1984. Richard is a surgeon who ran a clinic in the rural southeastern Lowveld, delivering babies, brain surgery, tending countless malaria cases. Mo, the kind of omni-skilled nurse found only in the world’s few remaining truly remote places, can deliver babies, care for wounded animals and reassure a klutzy American priest he hadn’t offended with his sorry Shona sermon.

They were both born in Zimbabwe. Unlike most white people they didn’t leave when life became nearly untenable. They said it is their country and no matter the outcome, they couldn’t bear to abandon it.

We have remained close to them over the years and after decades back in this country, still use them as guides for living life as a great and unexpected gift. Richard has been diagnosed with cancer. They often have electricity for only an hour a day. Their savings evaporated with the country’s collapse. To hear them tell it you might think they had just hit the lottery.

Despite providing my inspiration, Mo and Richard will find Meander naïve. They will forgive my American myopia as they always have.

Meander

2010-06-28T10:39:00.002-04:00

After five or so years of literary bouncing back and forth my novel Meander is now in print.

I will be writing more about it in coming days, but wanted to alert you that you can find it at:

Drones

2010-06-25T08:42:00.003-04:00

Is anone else uncomfortable (what a weak word for it) with our shifting to making war with drones?

A friend sent me a training video of two young American military – a man and a woman – sitting in what for all the world looks like a booth in a video arcade in a mall, separated by a makeshift wall as in office cubicles. They have a set of controls, joysticks, are looking at a screen and are talking through a microphone to someone one presumes is of higher rank, while listening through earphones to commands.

Only instead of Darth Vader the targets they are tracking are real people in real time. As they report what they are seeing ("The target has just emerged from the house and is walking toward the vehicle. He is alone; i think i could hit him without any collateral damage. Request permission to fire.")

You see the young woman press a button and seconds later you see a flash followed by a conflagration.

Now it is tempting to love all this. Not only because it is so high tech and sexy, but because it can destroy and enemy without risking Americans. (Or at least not risking us in the immediate sense.)

Which, for both strategic and moral reasons, is why I view drones as a huge slippery slope down which we are sure to plummet.

I am generally opposed to war, for reasons of cowardice and because history suggests it not only never solves the issue intended (yes, I understand about Pearl Harbor), but has so many unintended consequences it inevitably sets up all the conditions that will morph into the next war.

But I have to admit I admire warriors. Maybe because I don't believe I would be brave in battle. People who can face the terrible conditions of warfare and continue to function are of a different breed.

But not people who sit in a booth and push buttons.

War is already too enticing to the darkest parts of the human psyche. Even a nervous coward like me can get excited by a battle scene in a movie. And I never tire of reading accounts of those who have been in the unimaginably challenging exchanges of fire and lived to tell it.

Although rules of war is something of an oxymoron, there have been rules of war (and of engagement within war) since we hurled rocks at each other. They are often ignored but nevertheless understood. And we presided over tribunals following WWII in which high ranking Germans and Japanese were tried and convicted of violating those rules. And some were executed.

Now the UN has suggested that dropping missiles with drones may be a war crime.

Moving from morals to more selfish concerns, how long will it be before others develop drones? If the example of nations developing nuclear weapons, the answer surely is not very long.

I asked a friend who has a long and distinguished background in national security (oxymoron) why General McChrystal would ever have given that interview to Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone! The most hippie, anti-war magazine on the stand. And it seems Rolling Stone took two weeks to do fact-checking, including calling General McChrystal and his staff to check quotes. So it's not as if they were blind-sided.

My friend said it is because generals – especially generals with a career in Special Forces – are stupid.

I probed him hard, because everything I read leads me to believe these guys are brilliant, with advanced degrees from the most prestigious universities.

I came to understand wat he meant was short-sighted, totally focused on the mission of the moment, unable or unwilling (uninterested?) in possible consequences beyond the mission. That's why they're good fighters; nothing distracts them from the demands of the moment.

Which is why we have a civilian controlled military. Those sitting in the oval office, the Pentagon, State Department, not returning deadly fire, are presumed to be able to look ahead to consequences beyond the immediate mission.

But recent history suggests they too get caught up in the adrenaline rush, not to mention the political issue of facing down a media savvy general. For a moment it looked as if President Obama had acquired his presidential moxy. But then he barely paused before naming General Petraus and reaffirming his commitment to "stay the course."

Drones make it all too easy. For the moment.

I remember during a demonstration against the Viet Nam War in 1968, a guy next to me said, "President Nixon should have to come out into Lafayette Park every morning and do his business sitting on a bucket with the whole world watching. The war would be over in two days."

It does take an inhuman does of arrogance to make war. There need to be dire and clear consequences built into the decision.

Harold

2010-06-16T10:02:00.001-04:00

Evelyn Underhill 2nd Quarter Taxes
June 15, 2010

A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule. – Michael Pollan, author, journalism professor (b. 1955)

****

If we get a thunderstorm before 8 o’ clock on a morning in early June – so the local farmers tell me – it means we’re going to have 40 days of rain. They don’t say whether those 40 days would be consecutive or spread out over the summer, but given last summer, when tomato plants drowned before their blossoms could fruit, it was discouraging to be wakened by rolling thunder last Wednesday at 6 am.

Last summer Lacey named the red-sided garter snake that lives under our back stoop, Harold. I think she hoped being able to call him by name might make him seem less alien.

The trick seems to have worked for Harold – who feels comfortable sunning himself on a rock only a few feet away – but not for Lacey who still suffers panic and light-headedness when Harold slithers across in front of her as she’s weeding. In fairness, Lacey is pretty much as she was when Harold last saw her before going for his winter nap, while Harold has enjoyed a growth spurt that has made him quite impressive.

Two nights ago we were coming home around 9. It had been raining all day and into the night. By morning the rain gauge would fill to more than 2”. As I pulled the car into the garage, despite the pounding rain, the car engine and my late-adult hearing, I got the full measure of Lacey’s blood-curdling scream.

As I was certain it would be, Harold had come out for an unusual evening stroll. Not only did nighttime lend an extra air of ominous to the encounter, but Harold was swimming from the garden toward the back door (which Lacey had just opened) in the puddle created by the rain coming off the roof. Lacey hadn’t anticipated seeing him like that.

It has always galled me that we do nothing when we are in California in winter to capture what little rain we get and use it for irrigation. San Diego is the ninth largest city in the country and most years gets less rain than we got in Jacksonville, Vermont last week.

The local winery (yes, there is a winery here, maybe even growing their own grapes) put up a sign advertising their old barrels. Perhaps to ease my conscience about our profligate water use in southern California, I bought a barrel to catch rain here in Vermont to irrigate Lacey’s gardens.

The barrel (half-barrel) filled to overflowing in the first drenching rain.

The past month has put a significant dent in our myth that we are owners, not tenants on this planet.

Tracey, our neighbor dairy farmer and sage, was nearly dancing a couple of weeks ago after he brought in his first cutting of hay. Beautiful, rich, dry hay, nearly two weeks earlier than usual. The next day it began to rain and has every day until this cloudless morning. Last year when many farmers never got a second cut, one of our kids asked Tracey how he was going to keep his cows in hay through winter. He smiled, looked into space:

Dunno exactly; guess however I did it other years we didn’t get good hay in.

Every couple of years a family of skunks nests under our front stoop. (Come to think of it, they haven’t showed up since Harold moved in.) Their perfume filters into the front hall and Cosmos won’t move from there day or night. I asked Tracey whether there is some trick to persuading them to relocate. Again the smile and the far-off gaze:

Could burn the house down. Or wait for them to leave. They get bored with a place after a spell.

The earth’s ruptured aorta in the Gulf is not the first sign that we are in over our natural depth here. Consider that we have made ourselves dependent on recovering this fossil deposited by the earth’s crushing force over millions of years. At first capturing it and spending it ramps up our illusion of being powerful. Until we realize we are poisoning our own nest.

To stretch the matter perhaps to its breaking point, our spending history’s largest budget hoping to subdue those who cause an unpleasant scent in our national hallway turns out to be a form of burning down our own house.

I hope it’s not too late to prove our willingness to adapt rather than subdue, but it’s hard to picture how our species might look as a partner to Gaia.

As I write, Cosmos is on red alert, nose pressed against the corner beam of my writing studio above the barn. God – and Cosmos – knows with whom I share this space.

Making Time

2010-06-09T10:53:00.002-04:00

****

Forget wars, religions, famines and poems for the moment, Dr. Ridley [b. 1958] writes. This is history’s greatest theme: the metastasis of exchange, specialization and the invention it has called forth, the ‘creation’ of time.

You can appreciate the timesaving benefits through a measure devised by the economist William D. Nordhaus: how long it takes the average worker to pay for an hour of reading light. In ancient Babylon, it took more than 50 hours to pay for that light from a sesame-oil lamp. In 1800, it took more than six hours of work to pay for it from a tallow candle. Today, thanks to the countless specialists producing electricity and compact fluorescent bulbs, it takes less than a second. (NY Times. May 17, 2010)

I had a dream dear
You had one too
Mine was the best dream
Because it was of you

Come darling tell me
Now is the time
You tell me your dream
And I’ll tell you mine
(Lyrics by Neil Moret/Albert H. Brown/Seymour Rice 1899)

Maybe the most unexpected bonus of
Late life –
Time

Now I even remember many dreams

Like a few nights ago an interview with my
Probation officer
Who knew my offense? He, I presume. I had come to ask
if my probation period may have ended

I waited outside, a paper clutched in my hand – who knew what was on it?
He, I presume – while he finished up with someone

You have an appointment?

No, just wanted to check on the date of my release.

Long explanation – lost in the murk of the dream – of when that might be
Not yet

You were a very troubled guy when you first came in.

I’m much better now. I think miseries are cyclical.

So I guess that’s what you’ll be looking for again, huh?

****

Walking along Western Avenue in Brattleboro Saturday after
The Strolling of the Heifers along Main Street
I became aware of a man 100 yards ahead leaning on a brick wall
The wall – which is being meticulously rebuilt – reminds me of the brick
structures Thomas Jefferson built.
I decided to make the man – disheveled, huge belly hanging over his belt – into a robber waiting there to
rob me

I designed the encounter:
Here’s my money.
(I hid the Filipino silver peso money clip that belonged to my father)
Give me your credit cards.
That just creates a big nuisance. Take the money; it’s nearly $100.
Give me your credit cards. (Pulls a handgun from his pocket.)
I’ll just cancel them.
Give me your cell phone.
I’ll cancel that, too, and they’ll be able to trace you with the GPS.
Bam! Bam! (Damn. Right on Western Avenue.)
Wonder if Lacey or the kids will bother getting the novel off my hard drive? I’ve already signed the contract with the publisher.

I nodded as I passed him, he nodded back – without expression.
I’d say the exercise kept me entertained for nearly a mile of the
mile and a half
walk back to my truck

Do you suppose that drill ruptured the
earth’s aorta?

Dr. Ridley was born the year I graduated from high school.
He is so right about time.

Ouch!

2010-06-04T16:43:00.002-04:00

At least the census is hiring...

President Obama must be beginning to feel like Job. That's Job, not jobs.

I wonder if it ever occurs to anyone that if he fails at this job – that's job, not Job – that we all fail? He is wrestling with a huge can of woes we have been kicking down the road for a long time. And he's not likely to fix it soon, nor without our help.

Electing those naysayers is our right, but it's for certain it's going to dig us deeper into the ditch that is already over our heads.

Maybe no president can dent this; maybe we'll just have to take our lumps and see where we come out.

Have you noticed that there is no country that has ben spared? Even China, the poster nation of late, is having strikes, suicides and air no fit to breathe.

President Obama isn't God. He's just our president.