Christmas and Progress

I've decided in my older years that the best part of the season is Christmas Eve. This is the one day when everything is possible. Because it hasn't happened, the next day still holds the potential for a happy day and for gifts that won't leave me scratching my head over what to do with them. On the eve, I can think only positive thoughts about family without having to watch the day deteriorate as someone raises the issue of Health Care or Iraq. Yes, Christmas Eve is lovely. It's the one day that resembles those phony picture of snug sentiment, yule logs, and eggnogs, that we are fed by our media and by our own faulty memories. The reality is something more complex in many fractured families. I've come to the conclusion that whoever hosts a family dinner probably loves the guests best as they leave.

Still, eve or not, I find myself engaged with the idea of progress. This idea did not jump unasked into my mind, as the poets say. I read an article in the latest edition of the Economist, which asked the question about where there had been progress we could point to and how we might measure it if we felt there had been. The essayist went back into history to find examples of what might be considered "progress," and finally identified two areas in our lives where there had been change for the better. These were science and the economy (he was talking about the changes since the Industrial Revolution when there was no real middle class and working conditions were appalling). This being the Economist, the article conluded with a lecture on the need for regulating both science and the economy, with which I heartily agree but would also add on religion.

It's an interesting question about progress and I don't think the Economist essay is anywhere near the last word. For example, xactly what is progress? I've often heard the word coupled with the phrase "you can't stop," as in some juggernaut of change that carries both posiive and decidedly negative outcomes. They put through the high speed railway from London to the south coast, a positive, but threaten one of the most scenic parts of Kent in the process--far beyond negative, I should say, and venturing into lunacy. Yet, none of us would deny the massively positive changes that medicine has brought us, just to use one example. Or the conveniences of travel that we take for granted.

Most of us think of progress as a change that is rational, productive, and helpful. Even if I accept this definition, though, I reserve the right to hedge on whether things that meet this criteria are always beneficial. Keeping someone elderly alive at the cost of their suffering doesn't meet my requirement. Progress in this area would be someone talking wisely to me about end of life issues when I am there rather than assuming that every single day of my life is equally valuable. I shall come back and haunt anyone unwise enough to keep me artificially alive just because the science allows it.

At one point, the essayist admits that many measures of progress are really accounting: how many infants die, how long people live, how much money they earn, and so forth. And I fully agree with him. As I write this and think about this question of progress, I find I would define it another way. I would ask, how more self-aware have we become because of the advances in our world? Are we better people? Are we wiser in setting our standards for our own ethical behavior? Have we learned to accept the responsibility for thinking rather than choosing sides as if we were playing the Super Bowl? Have we asked ourselves not just what we think but why we think it? Have we gone into that journey within to face who we really are and accept that we are not always right and not always nice.

One of the Greek or Roman philosophers (it's late and my Bartlett's is back in Denver) said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Yessss. That's what separates te truly thoughful: they don't spout regurgitated ideas from someone else. They form their own ideas and accept the accountability for them. My idea of progress then is a time when by education and tempermanet we are able to look dispassionately at ourselves. This to me is the real, hard work of living. Until then we are still the same grubby, competitive little animals we ever were no matter how long we keep ourselves alive or flaunt our wealth to our neighbors.

Fairy Tales Our Parents Taught Us

This new business with Tiger Woods has prompted me to revisit the whole concept of relations between men and women and what we think we know about them. In our culture, we expect a monogamous relationship, partly because that’s what our various religions promote but also because, for good or bad, our society has decided the primary beneficiaries of marriage should be the children and children do better, we are told, in stable, two-person relationships.

Obviously, not every culture agrees and there have been and are societies that foster multiple marriages, mostly increasing the number of permitted wives in what seems the idea that if you can afford her, you can have her. Interestingly (to me anyway), examples of marriages with multiple husbands don’t come quickly to mind—mine anyway. I must admit to a bizarre admiration for anyone who can satisfy and keep happy multiple partners; it seems hard enough to maintain a positive relationship with just one, human beings as complex as they are. Again, though, that’s just me.

Still, I found myself thinking about this whole business between men and women and marriage as I watched Tiger Woods venture into the tabloid media and lose forever any semblance of privacy. He’s going to be the Paris Hilton or Brittney Spears of the golf world ever after. I hope he’s got a strategy for dealing with the inevitable heckling when he’s on the golf course again (we do so like to create heroes and then judge them).

The problem is, in my humble view, this culture tries to define the roles of men and women from two conflicting viewpoints, power and so-called “family” values.

Many young women—I’ll start with them since I know them better—have all too often been encouraged to look on marriage as salvation. The myth of Snow White says it all. The man is supposed to be rich and powerful to deserve her. All she has to be is beautiful. Through her husband, she can enter a world of power (his) and comfort (provided by him) and all she has to do is have children (to cement her position in his life and his bank account), maintain a household, and keep herself in shape.

Unfortunately, this world outlook has a lot of pitfalls and a great many drawbacks. For one thing, it makes the woman/wife completely dependent. It also makes her vulnerable to other marauding women who envy her lifestyle and would like to replace her. This is particularly the case when the husband is famous and wealthy. I’d say attractive, but that doesn’t seem to be a requirement as long as the bank account is.

I’ve been watching a marriage here in Colorado where this pattern plays out. Not that he’s rich and attractive, but he is the breadwinner and she’s never worked. She is completely dependent on him and he doesn’t try to hide his contempt for her. Of course, this is the failing of both parties, but because she doesn’t want to work she’s made a deal with the devil in order to be kept. He derives pleasure from the feeling of power over her lack of power. A sick example of this pattern, but I think it makes my point.

Many young men, on the other hand, seem to be socialized to compete for the trappings of power. Cars, boats, technology—all are advertised with pictures of provocative models—young women who fit the culture’s idea of beauty. The message is clear: earn big bucks and you’re entitled to the benefits. It doesn’t matter if your breath melts plastic or your stomach pours over your belt, you’re entitled to all your money can buy. Unfortunately, there are any number of women only too willing to be bought.

Hence Tiger Woods’ problem. He has a gorgeous wife and gorgeous children and “family values” say that should be enough. But at the same time he’s wealthy and operating in the world of power, best exemplified by Bill Clinton who answered “Because I could” when asked why he’d strayed..

When men stray, there are the inevitable defenses and accusations. I read in somebody’s blog that it must be Woods’ wife’s fault since she must not have been giving him enough sex. Don’t ask me how the blogger came to that conclusion since she’s had a child recently and they must have had sex sometime. Someone else I know said straying is built in to the entire male sex since they would all do it given the opportunity. Well, I don’t see where that is true either.

So I think we need to take a look at the fairy tales we’ve been force fed, particularly about marrying princes and princesses or even, in this case, contracting celebrity weddings. Being the best golfer in the world doesn’t really mean Tiger can have every bimbo and gold digger on the planet without having his business sold to the National Enquirer. Nor does being married to power and money really mean that the happy-ever-after and the prince of his wife’s dreams were ever guaranteed.

Ms. Palin's Cheesecake

I never thought I’d say thank heavens for Sarah Palin. I finally see some use for her beside (dangerous) comic relief. She's a glorious side street to national affairs. What’s really tickling me is how her calculated self-promotion makes amazing study in contrasts with the serious business being done quietly in the nation.

What has prompted my reconsideration of her is the cheesecake photo on the cover of Newsweek. There she is in shorts, making the most of her trim figure and posing like a swimsuit model. I found myself saying to her, “Wow—go for it. You’re the best diversion the nation could have because while we’re watching your narcissistic nonsense, the government can go on about its quiet and needed reforms.”

Talk about bread and circuses to keep the crowd roaring. She does it all by herself.

Thousands of lobbyists ferreted out of advisory committees:. Has she noticed? Does she care? Ms. Palin dons her shorts and does a perfect imitation of a gold digger: I’ve got it, baby, I’m flaunting it, and I’m gonna get rich.”

Parts of health care reform squeak through in the senate: Our Sarah does a book tour through the small towns where her adoring fans are more likely to be found than in the more educated and cynical cities, the very places she would have to carry if she were a serious presidential candidate.

Careful calculation and risk assessment start to reduce unemployment: little Miss Nike tries stir up the birther theory that Obama isn’t US born, an idea thoroughly discredited by Hawaii, the Hawaii newspapers, and ME (I saw his mother pregnant with him).

A weary Obama authorizes more American troops to Afghanistan: Ms. Palin announces a new political theory of tit for tat. “I was swiftboated over my son, Trig; therefore, it is an acceptable strategy. Let the dirt begin, it’s all fair in the political process.”

Ms. Palin never found a fork in the road let alone took the high one.

But, as I said, I have a new appreciation of her role in the world. While the emotion-driving, fearful, credulous among us have found their heroine, she is busy focusing their attention on her. I can envision Ms. Palin in shorts and provocative smile on a campaign poster for one of her opponents. Presidential? Hardly.

I had been worried that some populist swell would put her into contention for 2012. Oh she’ll be around and she’ll make a lot of noise and she’ll undoubtedly come out with some advantage for herself—but, baby, as all the aging bimbos can tell you, enjoy the ride because it doesn’t last longer than you’ll be able to pose in shorts for Newsweek. .
m>

Craven me

I haven’t been commenting much on political things lately, partly because of the apathy I wrote about in an earlier blog but also because I haven’t been able to get a handle on our president. He is so remote and self-contained that he makes me realize that I have probably succumbed to the sports media form of public debate. I rather wanted to see him exert some muscle and act out in some way my own anger over the way the previous administration ran the country into the ground.

Of course he hasn’t done that—and he’s not going to. His methodical control has left me somewhat perplexed. I am forced to recognize that the shout and yell form of political discourse had infected even me. So I’ve been quiet. I had to regroup. Could all this needed and careful reform actually be boring? Could all the needed change he is bringing actually be tasting like medicine without the spoonful of sugar?

I’m very much of the school of we’ve brought this upon ourselves when things go wrong, as they certainly did with the presidency of George W. Bush. History may, of course, prove him right, but I don’t think so. Not many of us really wanted to see the super rich become the obscenely rich or for corporate America to remove the pretense of even liking the public let alone wanting to do right by us. But outside of voting in the Democrats we haven’t really had our pound of flesh. It’s coming in small doses—keeping lobbyists off government advisory panels and restricting former high military brass from serving as lobbyists and advisors—so we keep saying, hey, change is coming. But it’s coming without drama and without real satisfaction for the vengeful (yep—me) among us.

All this convinces me that it’s really difficult to come down to earth after an adrenaline rush. During WWII with its shortages and bombing and enlistments, people lived high—they could be killed at any moment, there was a ferocious thrill to the latest news, there was a sense of everyone being in something together. Then came peace. It could never compete.

My former boss, the president of the University of Hawaii, was a dynamic dynamo, bursting with ideas and thoroughly exhausting to anyone who worked with him. Everyone said they wanted calm and more emphasis on planning. The next president brought those qualities and lo and behold people started complaining about the lack of excitement. Yet the calm, quiet president laid the groundwork for the next burst of advancement.

I have the feeling that when Obama is through with his work, this nation will have been transformed. Very quietly and without fanfare he is rebuilding. We need this. I just hope that the country can get beyond its fascination with celebrity politicians and understand that the qualities making a politician charismatic are not the same qualities needed to run a complex bureaucratic government.

But what the hell, craven me, I’m looking forward to the fireworks when Ms. Palin tries for the presidency. It will be such fun to oppose her.

Snow Birds

I have a new appreciation for people who turn into snow birds when the weather turns cold. Until now, I thought all they had to do was shut up their house (if they had one) and drive south and enjoy the weather. I hadn’t realized all the logistical challenges that go with it.

For example, there’s the mail. The post office will hold it for only a month so if they’re going home periodically (as we are) travel has to be timed what the PO is willing to do. Otherwise, the mail has to be forwarded, with uncertainty built into the system or else some relative or friend must be delegated to retrieve and forward it.

Then there’s the banking. To take money out of home accounts entails using ATMs, which in turn incur charges from both banks. It can cost around $5 for a single transaction when both banks whet their whistle. I’ve got around this by opening an account with a local bank and writing checks (we do remember those, right?) on my home account. Still, it took thought and some scheming.

Then there’s the medical stuff. Prescriptions have to be transferred to the new location and then transferred back. Doctors and dentists have to be located or else one has to fly home for treatment. Everything otherwise has to be scheduled during the times one is home. It’s surprising how difficult it sometimes is to get an appointment with a regular practice. Unless prior arrangements have been made, standing in pain in a receptionist’s office doesn’t seem to cut the mustard.

Then there’s the internet. Many people pay for satellite service—these are the pros as it turns out. The RV parks provide some basic service, but it quickly gets clogged up by people who insisting on connecting to the towers, remaining on all day, and downloading movies. The alternative is connecting to the cable service (along with the TV) and buying a router, which is its own set of dark challenges to the uninitiated. The providers provide the service far faster than they provide the support. The free advice from Best Buy is just that—free, and unless you have the standard system they can only guess what you need.

Finally, there are the mysteries of the highways and road system, including the drivers. Arizona drivers seem to like blocking lanes and providing a laconic wave around the car rather than moving. It seems to be a state-wide thing as we encountered these blockages in various towns on the way down to Phoenix. Denver drivers would be leaning on the horn and throwing various digits. Down there, drivers just edge their way around the stopped vehicle. We also have learned to expect the unexpected. In Globe, Arizona, a police helicopter landed in the middle of the road with much waving of arms and parking of police cars to create a landing spot; nevertheless, it was quite diverting.

I think the biggest learning curve for us first-timers, though, has been the differences between the states. Arizona is not New Mexico and neither is Colorado. New Mexico drivers are very dexterous at changing lanes very rapidly and in very tight spaces. One can only drive straight there and let the cars weave their dance, hoping that one of them won’t hit you. Let a snowfall happen and they wind up in the median on their roofs. Colorado drivers are used to mountain driving and icy conditions. They gear down a lot and buy snow tires so they don’t hit the median (a pleasure left primarily to the California drivers trying to make a winter drive to the East Coast). You can always tell a novice driver in Colorado: they’re the ones using their brakes down the hills and ending up with smoke billowing from their wheels. I suppose somewhere someone is saying “Those Colorado drivers, those novices don’t know how to drive.”

Despite everything, it’s been an interesting experience and we’ve even participated in some of the RV resort’s activities—pretty good for a pair of non-joiners. Next year, though, we hope not to be novice snowbirds anymore.

Back to the OK Corral?

For those anyones who haven’t been reading any blogs on this site—the answer is simple. I’ve been hit by the big A. No, not swine flu or any of its derivatives or wannabe viruses. It’s apathy with a capital A. I am beaten down, wrung out, and becoming increasingly indifferent to whatever is happening in the world.

It’s both sad and surprising that this is so. Until recently, I had a few dregs of passion left. I actually found pleasure in the self-immolating behavior of the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party. I cared whether they destroyed the world with their moral judgment on other people. I was repulsed as I watched them doing the same things they purport to condemn and, when caught, pleading the fact of their “human weakness” and begging for the understanding they deny to everyone else (think Limbaugh and his “unfortunate” addiction to painkillers—not a moral lapse of course since they were originally prescribed for him, dontcha know).

I think I lost my appetite for exposing them when I realized that it didn’t matter. Let one idol fall, another rises to take its place as long as the new voice is as shrill and venomous as the one it replaces. This country has gone mad. We are now so addicted to the frantic voice of sportscasters that we cannot recognize quiet, good public work. Everything must be magnified, brutalized, and broadcast for us to even hear it and there are all too many willing to give it to us.

Recently, Ken in Canada sent me an article from a UK newspaper in which the author bemoaned the lack of civility and respect among teenagers. I smiled grimly. Teenagers are merely the tip of the iceberg. On this side of the pond, we have a soldier killing his comrades, supposedly in the name of religion, just as the nation recognizes Veterans Day, we have a hospital worker infected with Hepatitis C stealing drugs and leaving her own used syringes to infect scores of patients, we have fraud on such massive scale that it is almost sufficient to bring down the government.

My apathy, I suspect, has something to do with how powerless I feel. Yeats was right. This is no country for old men—or women for that matter. It has become a place where self-interest rules among the powerful and greed among the lesser. It has a become a place where it is quite acceptable for leaders to become millionaires and to spend billions on war, but it is some sort of moral outrage for some poor slob to get a job if he or she was slapped with a felony for possessing a minute illegal substance or for some sick people (god forbid) to have medical coverage provided by the same government that gave out billions in corporate welfare. Hear the moral outrage in the insurers’ bleat (keep in mind they are reporting profits of around 18%) that sick people buy insurance only when they are sick. The insurers only want to insure the healthy while they are healthy—actually become sick and see how long you keep your insurance and then good luck getting any more. And yet the lobbies fight to keep things as they are.

For those who wish to tell me that I am a traitor to capitalism, I would say I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at exactly what it was like to live in a time of “rugged individualism,” little government, and unregulated commerce.

We just came back from Tombstone, Arizona—yep, the OK corral and all. Walk through the cemetery at Boot Hill and you come away with a sense of the reality of the American West. Deaths from falling down mine shafts (no OSHA), from smallpox, tuberculosis, and childbirth (no Dept of Health), from stabbing, shooting, and clubbing (only defense is your own gun), from suicide (particularly the prostitutes who were shunned if they contracted syphilis—never mind the men they got it from). Yes, sir, these were the days of good old family values. I saw only two or three graves of people who made it into their sixties or beyond. Grave after grave contained the remains of victims of crime or babies who never made it to their first birthday.

I once wrote a speech of my president about the shooting at the OK Corral. I tried to make an amusing point about how this shootout could not have occurred given today’s media. There would have been television cameras at every viewpoint. There would have been interviewers asking the principals about their strategy and their equipment. There would have been interviews with legal pundits asking about possible legal outcomes. Even the undertaker would have been pictured polishing his hearse. In other words, it couldn’t have happened without turning into a farce.

Perhaps that is why I feel such gloom these days. We have one third of this nation—one third!—who want to turn back the clock in the face of a world that has changed politically, technologically, and culturally. No wonder our politics so often appear farcical.

As I watched the re-enactment of the shootout I realized that America has not really moved on from the past. Things are just as ambiguous and subject to interpretation and violence as they were then, except that today were are infected by a sort of self-righteous hypocrisy reflected in the drivel that fills our newspapers (no wonder they’re dying). At least the Clantons never preened as paragons of family values. Ike Clanton was roaring drunk as was Doc Holliday at some point during the events leading up to the shootout.

Rather than all this palaver over trying to prevent people from getting a handout, we could surely benefit at this time for Congress to quit feathering its own nest (they’re nearly all millionaires anyway), get beyond partisan politics, start listening to the people they are supposedly representing (not the lobbyists) and let the president do the job he was elected to do.

Living Small

Well, here we are in Arizona, the land where no one need apologize for being old and overweight since nearly everyone is. As we approached Apache Junction, site of the RV resort we left the trailer at last June, we made sheepish jokes about whether we would find a puddle of melted plastic where the trailer was since it was 114F when we left. How hot was it? I unwisely left some unopened wine in the car. The wine blew the corks out of the bottles (yes, plural) and emptied on the back floor. All I could say, stupidly, is that I didn’t know (until then) wine could do that.

In fact, the trailer was fine except that all the things attached to the walls with adhesive had fallen off. Think tie backs for the curtains, hooks for hotpads at the stove, and the inside thermometer. The resort was another matter since there had been a major rain storm (unheard of here) that flooded the grounds. Apparently the low spots went under several feet of water. All we experienced was some mud under the unit, which turned our folding chairs a romantic tan (they were white), and served us right for storing anything under there in the first place. Now we know.

It’s amazing how much learning curve there is when you move from using an RV just for camping to using it for living, as we plan to do over the next few months. Minor irritations with one another over trying to occupy the same space at the same time required major negotiations regarding priority, life style, and precedence. We had to relearn how to stake our space amicably and set up a timetable. We now take a walk around the one-mile perimeter of the park first thing in the morning, have breakfast, workout on the treadmill and bicycle in the fitness room, then take a dip in the pool. Of course, all this will be subject to yet more adjustment once all the other RVs return and things are much more crowded. But right now afternoons leave me free to write and Sid to read, although he’s already meeting contemporaries and I fully expect him to start playing bridge with them and joining them for coffee poolside.

I’ve written two chapters on the new book despite working on the trailer to get it comfortable—didn’t know that there’s a big industry here making blinds that fit over the outside of the trailer windows. It makes a huge difference for the inside temperature but I’d never seen it before. Of course, I’d never been in 114F before—well, maybe once at Palm Springs and I thought it was the closest thing possible to being in ring 5 of Dante’s inferno.

You gotta admire the human spirit, though. It’s amazing how creative one can be when necessity demands. We have made multiple runs on Walmart buying space-extending gadgetry. Sid’s idea of storing plates vertically suddenly made the cupboard over the stove seem capacious. We celebrated that achievement, as well as his suggestion that we store all the pots in the oven. Even a few extra inches makes a huge difference, something I would never think about much in the Denver house. We have been like kids at Christmas congratulating ourselves over organizing ourselves. He’s even used the fold-down television shelf in the bedroom to house his shirts. Not a single cranny is safe from being appropriated to other uses.

I have to admit it’s a huge adjustment from a 3,000 square foot house to a 30 foot trailer with one slide out. But I just looked at the national weather and it was 34 degrees in Denver with snow flurries. Today it was 86 degrees here and the pool was warm. I think I’ll take it although I suspect that learning to live small is likely to either be character-building or a quick trip to the loony bin. Time will tell.

Covered in Yellowstone Mud

The recent PBS special on the National Parks has left me feeling profoundly depressed. Given the fact that I love these parks, as do most other Americans, it strikes me as strange that I should not feel the uplift and “super” humanity that the six specials have argued I should. I’ve felt my share of wonder at the beauty of these parks--most recently Denali and ten or so others through the years--but not from this series of presentations.

Some of my discouragement may be my own misguided expectation of the series. For me, the National Parks are, as the series claims super frequently, a source of inspiration and beauty, an uplift to the human soul and part of what makes us human. If it’s part of a national park, I expect—I know—that certain things will be so. There will be rangers who love their work, there will be wise advice on where to hike, and there will be standards of care to preserve what I see for those who follow. I also know that what I will see will fit the standards of what I have come to expect from a park belonging to the nation.

Yet having now seen the series, I feel grubby and very small. I’ve never done anything to damage our parks and yet I feel coated with dirt and besplattered by the bubbling mud of the Yellowstone geysers.

Perhaps I deserve to feel this as the series earnestly seeks to raise our awareness of the tenuous way the parks came into being—we could so easily have lost them and still can for that matter. I guess my reaction is partly my surprise at the attack that came out of the television screen. I was expecting a celebration rather than a rather tawdry expose particularly when it was clear that I was part of what was being condemned. I am a human being and by definition I am as guilty of the desecration as anyone else.

Now, I am not saying that the expose was undeserved. Far from it. I was sickened by the Arizona senator who used his position to set up toll booths for people wanting to see the Grand Canyon even though it was national park land. I was likewise sickened by the lumber companies who clear-cut virgin forests in the Smokeys (with the blessing of the forest service), even after the land was not theirs—and nothing was done to them. I was sickened by the Wyoming ranchers who were prepared to shoot anyone who tried to stop them grazing their cattle on public land in the Tetons and then years later claimed the protected park as a Wyoming treasure and even put the mountain profile on the state automobile license plate.

These were the jackals, the carcass-strippers, the ones who looked at a landscape and saw only profit. Yet they weren’t alone. There were also the others—the ones who were photographed mugging for the cameras at scenic points, the ones who were taken back to the places where they had scratched their names and were required to removed the defacement, the ones who visited Mesa Verde and yodeled like the plains Indians even though they were visiting the ancestral homes of settled agrarian farmers, and the ones who took the forbidden lava rocks from Volcanoes National Park only to mail them back in guilty packages when the promised curse appeared to coming true.

Yes, the series appears to be saying—the national parks have had to endure despite our careless indifference to the harm we inflict. And lest we forget we are capable of the worst—the series even reminds us of the infamous internment of Americans of Japanese descent during WWII, even though a number of these people had worked hard to preserve our parks.

I’m not going to buy the DVDs of this series. I don’t need to as the message is clear: just by visiting the parks and riding over roads cut into the wilderness, I am part of the process of loving them to death. The parks are not our manifest destiny to destroy—any more than our planet is. I’m going to have to rethink my relation to the parks (maybe that was the idea), particularly since Congress has recently voted to allow people to carry guns into the national parks. I can see little benefit to this except to the poachers and pot growers and I fear that yet again our parks may be in danger.

When will we ever learn?

The Guilty Pleasure of Humor

The latest edition of The Atlantic, a magazine I don’t usually read unless confronted in the airport by a layover of three hours and a bookshop stuffed with paperbacks dealing with spies, politicians, murderers of the worst sort, and rapturous virgins wishing to be otherwise (you can learn a lot about a city’s intellectual climate and reading habits by checking out the airport bookshops), contains an article called “Cheap Laughs: The Smug Satire of Liberal Humorists Debases Our National Conversation” by a Mr. Christopher Hitchens.

This article, which I shall call hereafter as Cheap Laughs, reminded me somewhat of the Puritan take on the maypole and the achingly self-important banning of all forms of frivolity and pleasure lest anyone be happy. I know there are scholars who study humor in all forms and I don’t want to create a maelstrom of indignant accusations about whether I have any background to justify taking on the topic. But what the hell—I’ve got my own opinion and I value it as much as Mr. Hitchens does his. Cheap Laughs didn’t convince me that liberal humorists will bring down this country: what it did was convince me that we as a people are desperate to find some relief from the oppressive self-importance of politics and culture wars.

I’ve always thought of humor as the way we deal with things that perplex and oppress us. We can either take them as seriously as they do themselves and throw ourselves over the precipice with the lemmings, or we can find a way to laugh as a people, and by doing so cut the tension. It’s a bonding thing, in other words. Think Lenten ribaldry when people dressed up as bishops and wore pigs' head masks—misrule like this was allowed for a few special days but would have been blasphemy and punished anytime else. The church wisely knew that people had to let off steam even if meant mocking the very things they valued intensely during the rest of the year.

What we choose to laugh at says mountains about what is important to us—just as the airport bookstores show what entertains us and passes the time—and humor can run from very crude to highly sophisticated and ambiguous. It can be gentle, as Will Rogers showed, or more pointed like that of Mark Twain, or over the top like Archie Bunker, who by providing something we could agree was ridiculous, provided an escape valve. The best humor I have heard has been self-deprecating, as when Ronald Reagan and even George Bush talked to the Press Club in Washington or when someone like George Clooney deflected personal attack with good humor and grace. These responses give us hope that some form of good manners and civilty can exist.

In the end, I can’t imagine why Mr. Hitchens, limited himself to the liberal humorists when there is so much “humor” in every spectrum of political and social thought these days (watermelons on the White House lawn, anyone?), but I also think he’s missed the point. We need humorists on all sides of all issues and we need to see the vital role they have to play for us. Somehow, I think the national conversation will survive humor from either side—and I shudder to think what will happen if we ever muzzle it.

The Like of This Man: Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy’s recent death had to bring back memories for anyone alive during those years. This is so because the Kennedys were as much a cultural as well as a political phenomenon. Every magazine in existence ran stories on their family lives, their fashions, their religion, their sports, and their children, as well as their political lives. Like them or not, agree with them or not, the family was inextricably tied to the times we all shared and would, I believe, seem strangely out of date today were they starting their careers now, maybe because they created the times around them.

Ted’s funeral reflected how most of us in the US saw the family in its heyday: larger than life, slightly over the top, dusted with religion, and quite unpredictable. The UK viewed the family quite differently, reflected in the quite different coverage of Ted’s death in the London newspapers. Over there, the nation never forgave Joseph Kennedy for his Nazi sympathies and tended to distrust the Kennedy children because of it. Not everyone loved the Kennedys, even in this country.

The various eulogies of family and friends, however, did much to humanize Ted Kennedy for me in ways that public displays of Camelot grief for the family could never have achieved. After I’d listened to them—and, yes, I watched the various ceremonies and gatherings—I found myself wishing that I’d had the chance to work with him. I would probably have been quite intimidated, but I would have loved the aura of energy and vitality that obviously was part of who he was.

I did meet him once—actually twice on the same day in 1990—when he visited the University of Hawaii at Manoa to receive an award from the School of Public Health. The dean of the school, a very well connected political force in his field, had invited the Senator to give a talk on universal health coverage—the topic, it appears, that still refuses to go away.

Since the school was the primary host, the president’s office was involved only in a ceremonial capacity. At least, as I remember, I wasn’t immediately involved until I was informed suddenly that my presence was needed in a welcoming group just as he was to come into the administration building. I recall hustling down the stairs to be part of a group of university vice presidents (with me representing the president’s office). He shook hands with us all very seriously. I just said “Welcome to the University of Hawaii,” and he nodded that shock of grey hair. Then he was whisked away.

“What happens next?” I asked our University Relations people. Like us, I don’t believe they had been completely involved until this point. I was told he was going over to Kennedy Theatre to give an address. This gave me an unpleasant intuitive feeling. “Who’s greeting him there?” I asked. The answer saw two vice presidents and me rapidly crossing the campus through the back ways to beat the Senator to the theatre.
We were standing there in a line along with the theatre director to welcome him again when he arrived.

When he reached our reception line, he glanced down at us. I knew he recognized us, but he didn’t say a thing as we welcomed him again. I can only imagine he was used to the strange ways of protocol and maybe just inwardly shrugged. Ah well. It would have been worse if we hadn’t been there. We followed him in and watched from the wings as he gave a firestorm of a speech about healthcare reform. The theatre was packed: the Kennedy name was working its magic as usual.

In his last twenty years of service to the nation, Senator Edward Kennedy built a towering reputation as someone who cared. It’s a tribute to him that even a very uncomfortable John McCain showed up at his memorial service. I don’t personally feel that there’s anyone left in Congress whose name alone conveys the sense that someone is watching the shop while all too many others are merely feathering their nests. I suspect we shall not look upon his like again, mainly because the present times are so very different.

Cruise Control

Well, we’re back, and now they tell me there are books about the best way to take cruises. I had no idea. I imagined you sat on deck chairs, sipped rum drinks, and enjoyed being waited on. Silly me. Our Alaska cruise and land tour met all the superlatives, but after it was over, it dumped us on the wharf in Vancouver, British Columbia, exhausted and cranky. Worst part of it was that it was entirely our own fault.

What did we do wrong? Let me start at the beginning.

The first overly ambitious thing we did was drive from Denver to Vancouver.

Now, in the four days it took us (not to mention the four back), we saw some wonderful things: Montana and Wyoming are beautiful states (when the wind and the snow aren’t blowing). The B.C. lake town of Osoyoos where we crossed into Canada from Spokane looks like the Italian lake district. We saw neat “historical down towns” (see previous blog), ski resorts we’d never heard of before made into downhill bicycle meccas, and wineries we didn’t have time to stop to explore. We bought blankets at the mills and saw saddles being made at Hamleys in Pendleton, Oregon. This cross-country jaunt, in fact, could have been a vacation trip in itself. But, as might be expected, at the end of it, we arrived in Vancouver already tired before we had even begun the main trip.

The second mistake was not checking out beforehand what could be brought into Canada when we returned.

After two days of visiting family in Port Moody, we flew up to Anchorage. We’d planned to arrive a day ahead of time in case of any delays as we didn’t want to miss the land tour. That’s when we learned that Alaska makes the most of a brief tourist season by charging heroically for hotels. Anchorage is the state’s main business city and looks much like any similar mid-West city for that matter. Much of what must have been the historical section of town was washed away by the tsunami in the 60s so we spent most of our time in the historical museum and visiting the gift shops, which were lined up almost five to a block on the main streets. I bought some souvenirs, including a walrus tooth and some Alaska curved chopping knives called ulus with bone handles. Nobody told me that Canada severely restricts animal parts, particularly ivory, from entering the country. Or that ulus are considered weapons even though they are sold as kitchen implements. More on that later.

The third msitake was not realizing how much endurance parts of the land tour were going to require.

We started the tour at the Anchorage hotel and went by train (via Wasilla of certain fame and where jokes were surprisingly prevalent) to Talkeetna, the original setting of the tv show “Northern Exposure.” This is the jumping off point for climbers on Mount Mckinley (known as Denali locally) and Sid wanted to see where he’d climbed, so we signed up with Talkeetna Air Taxi. We were very lucky because the weather permitted us to fly around the mountain, but one of us had tried reindeer sausage that morning and the result was a very sick passenger when the plane landed. I will say no more, but the moral is not to try reindeer sausage unless you are absolutely sure your stomach will welcome it.

When we reached Denali Park, we found that the park requires all visitors to enter the park on the park’s buses, school buses with small seats. We spotted bears, caribou, moose, fox, wolf, and ptarmigan, but when we did, everyone on the other side crammed over to the other to take pictures. It was fun, but very intimate at times. When we got off the bus at the end, my knee was so stiff I had to hop down the stairs and my back was demanding naproxin.

The most challenging part, though, was at the end of our land tour when we were getting ready to fly to Anchorage and join the ship at Seward. That night we learned that Fairbanks airport was closed due to smoke from forest fires and we had to leave the hotel in the wee hours next day to be driven to Seward, which was going to take about eleven hours. I’m not sure we would have made it as well as we did had it not been for our tour guide, Debbie, who played games with us and even sang the Alaska state song. We couldn’t stop more than once if we were going to make the ship deadline so the night before, we trekked out to the supermarket to get something to take with us.

We fell off the bus at Seward and went directly on to the ship. Naturally we were late since we didn’t get there until around five and boarding had started at 1:00 p.m. There was a vigorous raffle going on in the main entry hall as we found our cabin and collapsed. We didn’t even eat dinner that night. It was now that the ulus I had bought caused me trouble. My suitcase went missing until I received notice quite late that it was being held in security. I had to go down to the second deck and hand over the ulus to be held until we reached Vancouver. Incidentally, we didn’t find out about the Canada restrictions on animal parts until the second night on board when the newsletter announced it. If I’d known, I would have mailed the stuff from Anchorage and saved myself having to post them in Skagway.

The fourth mistake was booking shore excursions in advance.

The cruise line, for the obvious reason that they were receiving commissions and actually owned many of the gift shops and tour companies, encouraged us to book early on shore excursions if we were not to miss out. So we did. They were expensive and we hated to miss them but we were tired and they became one more grueling thing we had to get up early to get off the ship at the appointed time. Actually, Sid passed up on the last one and I went alone. The tours were great and worth it (or most of them anyway), but we soon discovered that these same tours were available on the pier once we got off the ship and we could have taken them at any time we wanted. In other words, we could have waited and seen what we wanted to do.

Would I do this cruise again? Oh yes. The Hubbard Glazier was amazing and we got a close-up when the ship navigated to within five hundred yards of it. I saw the animals and eagles I wanted to see and watched sled dogs running. I saw the magnificence of Denali, mountain and park. The Royal Caribbean ship was wonderful, even if I was too tired to appreciate much of it.

But I would do it differently.

First, I would FLY to the starting point of the tour. Second, I would do the cruise first, before any organized land tour. If I was tired after the land part, I could just sleep on the plane home. Third, I would book only a couple of land tours from the ship and only those where my heart would be broken if I didn’t do them. Fourth, I would not over-plan my land activities, leaving some of them to be spur of the moment as I felt like it. Fifth, I would understand that while seeing Alaska is important, so is the experience of cruising. And, fifth and finally, I would research the advice and experience of others who had done it before me.

I guess you can say I will have the next cruise under control.

On the Road

Having just returned from a series of cross-country jaunts, one from Denver to Phoenix and the most recent from Denver to British Columbia where we took a tour to Alaska (more on that in another blog), I’ve come to the conclusion that our entire nation is one large gift shop. It seems that every little town along any road that boasts continuous traffic towards a destination relies on some gimmick to tempt travelers to stop and spend money.

Of course, 16 days of driving over the last six weeks doesn’t make me an expert on roadside attractions, but having also driven all the Western states and down to Florida, I will claim some experience. I’ve found these “ploys for a pause,” as I call them, if not informative and entertaining then at least diverting. To quote Shakespeare, I’d call most of them much ado about nothing.

My favorite is what I call the “make a joyful noise” category, where a town has to invent freely, as in Arizona. Beside rest stops, there’s not a lot to see in vast stretches of desert, so Arizona has been very creative. If you want to see the world’s largest petrified tree, it’s here waiting for you. It probably had to be trucked in for your pleasure, but then so was London Bridge, another Arizona transplant. You can also see a meteor indentation and a real-fake replica of an Indian pueblo along with the casinos with names about wild horses and thunder that clearly cater to truckers, judging from the lines of parked rigs. Everyone can get in the act. Rest stops have prominent signs saying that vending is not allowed, so entrepreneurs from the reservation have built shop fronts along the rest stop fence and people trade money and jewelry over it.

Next is the “let’s-gussy-it-up” attraction that I saw all across Montana and Wyoming. My gosh—how many jails did Butch Cassidy find himself in? How did he ever have time to be an outlaw? It seems that every town with any claim to anything has “a historic downtown.” These downtowns are more or less impressive depending on how rich the town was to begin with. In some, there is a row of brick buildings now housing gift shops, sometimes augmented with some kind of tram ride up a mountain with a sign saying “Welcome, bikers.” In others, there is a row of run-down, fading wood buildings, some of them leaning precariously but at least showing their age. In the end, all the historic downtowns tend to look the same and all have converted their passenger railway stations into restaurants.

Now I have to be fair. Many of these same states have genuinely wonderful things to see that are worth the stop. Route 66 is a case in point and I learned that people actually drive what remains of it as a summer vacation. There are signs along the side of the interstate indicating that at the next exit, one may see some remnant of “Historic Route 66.” Going off on these exits invariably takes one through towns (Gallup, New Mexico, is one example), where the highway is also the town’s main street. Invariably, this road is four lanes wide and the shops and stores along it have 1940’s architecture, what can be seen of it that is behind hanging t-shirts bearing the highway marker. One town has turned itself into a celebration of the ‘50s, with diners, big-finned cars on display, and more kitsch than I have ever seen in my life. I even spotted a plush bear wearing motorcycle goggles and a Route 66 t-shirt. People are proud of their piece of history and it probably is the main reason they still have a livelihood.

Despite my cynicism—how many times did I ask ‘do you suppose it has a historic down town?’ as we approached some small town barely on the map—I have to admit I’m a sucker for these things. Route 66 was part of my generation, as was Highway 40 across Wyoming and the other roads that pioneered touring. During those days, Chevy sold thousands of cars with its slogan made famous by Dinah Shore: “See the USA/ in your Chevrolet” and travelers were assured that “You can trust your car to the man who wears the star.”

These were the years when Jack Kerouac channeled national restlessness into a form of self-discovery and everyone tried (or wanted ) to take to the road. Without Route 66 there could have been no Kerouac—or interstates, or strange little mom and pop motels that still cling to their shabby existence in the shadow of the big hotel chains, or even the free ice water and 5 cent coffee that are still offered as a bit of nostalgia (providing, of course, you stop to see their animated dinosaur and buy a few souvenirs at the same time).

Ah the open road. Despite all the commercialism though, some things are still the same. Montana and Wyoming are still beautiful although there is far too much of them, kids still demand to know how much further it is, and the dog still throws up on the back seat.

Beer at the White House

The latest flap over the Harvard professor and the Cambridge, Mass., cop brings back a lot of memories of my life in the president’s office at the University of Hawaii. As most of you know, I was special assistant to the president and not only his speechwriter and aide-de-camp but also his troubleshooter and later vice president for university relations. Among my thorniest challenges and potential public relations disasters were those faculty members whom I shall charitably call prima donnas. This is what the Gates flap makes me remember.

Prima donnas then came in two types: those who had not yet slithered up the academic ladder to the point they felt they deserved to be and were, therefore, acting out of insecurity; and those who had slithered up the pole and were inclined to want to remind everyone of both their struggle and their achievement and were acting out of security. Both types were achingly sensitive to the least slight and since they were located in an absurdly conformist environment—a university—all they needed to do was claim violation of academic freedom or some injustice and all hell would break loose: faculty senators would call for administrative reviews, indignant letters would be written to the media, and aggrieved professors would stand up in various meetings and preach that the university should be setting the prime example of social and personal justice (particular emphasis on the personal).

All would be taken very seriously and sometimes mediation was called for to settle matters—if two professors had a major disagreement (like over whose office was larger) the president sometimes had to step in. Such is the way of universities where someone once said that the infighting is vicious because there is so little to fight over.

Given this background, I have a different take on the Gates/Harvard matter than our rabble-rousing media. I see it as a clash of cultures. The Harvard prof felt himself poorly treated for a man of his stature—worse, he wasn’t even recognized, no name cachet at all. Horrors. He spoke to the cop as he would complain to his dean, who has long ago figured out how to defuse him. The cop reacted as he would to any potential street criminal he thought was doing B/E.

Both were wrong: Gates for not realizing that professorial tantrums don’t work off campus. The cop for not realizing what it means to be working in Cambridge, Mass, where there a gazillion universities. He’s not in the streets of New York or LA. He’s in the mean streets of the most competitive, snobby higher-education capital of the US.

I once observed one of the English profs in my department start to work himself into a tantrum in the office of English Department secretary. She’d been there forever and was unimpressed. He had been given a parking assignment at an auxiliary lot rather than right next to the building. Horrors—he had to park with us junior faculty who were glad to get any parking at all. She looked at him with the most beautiful of smiles and said, “Why, Professor XXX, parking next to the building is for important people.” He had a choice: try to argue that he was important (very undignified) or just swallow it and walk away muttering (not good but not as bad). He chose the latter. If the cop had been there, he might have cuffed our good prof and what good would that have done?

So, I guess my advice to our prof and his cop—and to our peerless leader Obama—is get over it and use some common sense next time. And if there’s any room on the beer wagon, someone should invite me to the White House where I could bang a few heads together. I got pretty good at it in the president’s office.

A Knowing Universe

Every once in a while, I’m reminded of what George Wald said about life. He shared the Nobel Prize for working out the chemistry of vision and later became a mystic. I was privileged to know him in Hawaii when he spoke at a conference I organized. “We live,” he told me, “in a knowing universe that wishes to be known.”

I was thinking about this when I received a phone call from Ken, a close and dear friend in Canada, who has worked with me on matters and history pertaining to the Halifax bomber, in one of which my father lost his life during WWII. I’ve never been completely sure that Ken is sympathetic to my tendency to mysticism (coincidences meaning purpose etc.) but after what he had to share with me, I suspect he might be more inclined that way.

Ken recently came back from a cruise to Europe. It sounds as if he had a much better time that he was expecting before he left, but the whole idea of traveling is so fraught with inconvenience these days that he prefers to stay home and do startlingly beautiful photography of the various wildlife that cross his acreage. Anyway, this time he went. It was a large liner with several thousand others on board and he and his wife were seated with three other couples, complete strangers before this moment.

Hang with me—you need to know all this or there is no wonder, as Dickens would say.

The couples exchanged addresses and phone numbers, as couples do after a week of enforced intimacy and pledged to keep in touch. One of the couples came from a town not far from Ken, so he gave him a call the other day. They started talking about the restored Halifax bomber in Trenton, Ontario, for which I wrote my first book Extraordinary Things to raise money for the endowment fund. Ken soon found out that this fellow had an uncle in the RCAF, but he didn’t know very much about him except that he flew Halifaxes.

One thing led to another in the conversation and Ken thought he might see if he could help since the Halifax Families Association of which I am director and Ken is advisor exists to help families with research. “Which Squadron?” Ken asked. It turned out to be 640 Squadron, which those of you who follow my saga will know was my father’s squadron. Surprised and rather intrigued, Ken looked in his considerable air force library for this uncle and very quickly determined that the uncle in the RCAF was none other than the navigator on my father’s crew. I’d been searching for him without success for several years.

What were the chances of this, I wonder? Among thousands of passengers, among hundreds of dinner tables, that they should be there at the same moment on a cruise that Ken was reluctant to go on. An improbable coincidence? But this is the third similarly huge coincidence I’ve personally experienced in regard to the Halifax. Without those coincidences, I would never have found the wireless operator or my father’s family. If I stopped to question them, I guess I'd never believe them. I guess they've primed me to look for purpose and meaning.

Today, AOL is reporting the death of Henry Allington, who at 113 had been the world’s oldest man. He'd experienced the horrors of WWI and, despite being nearly blind, spent his later life urging the world not to forget those who gave their lives in the horror of war. I think the coincidences surrounding the Halifax Bomber that I’ve experienced give me the same message. The universe does not wish us to forget these young men. I know I will never forget the loss of a crew where the youngest member was 19 and the oldest 27, and I will not forget all the other crews on other aircraft and in other uniforms lost flying Ops.

Now if it's not asking too much, I'd like another coincidence please. I want to find the family I haven’t been able to find, that of the pilot, Doug Thomas of Toronto, Ontario, so I can bring him back to his squadron family.

Vampires and All

I was talking with my friend, Tyler, the other day about vampires and he suggested there are degrees of vampirism—the less vampirish lamenting the horrible way they are forced to stay alive, the more, of course, having no regrets whatsoever.

Our discussion was particularly relevant to me given the imminent sentencing of Bernie Madoff, whom I see as a vampire of a particularly 21st Century type. Vanity Fair recently published a lengthy article on Madoff and his sons, mainly focusing on how much his family (all of whom worked for his firm) knew about the swindle. It’s a good question because the answer will determine how many others join Madoff in jail. All, of course, plead innocence.

How much one is willing to believe (or disbelieve) strikes me as an interesting question in its own right that many people seem to cast in terms of a failure of values or ethics.

The values group blame the investors who, they say, were blinded by greed and didn’t ask how Madoff was making money. It’s tautological: if they’d been honest, they would have asked how Madoff was succeeding where others weren’t. That they didn’t ask provides one more example of how society is going to hell in a hand basket. Certainly, Madoff was a cheat and a criminal but, they would argue, there are always cheats and criminals in any society. Anyone morally righteous and honest would not have been cheated because they would have asked about fair and right profit and realized something was terribly wrong. No sympathy here: send Madoff to jail and stress individual responsibility and let the learning curve begin among the investors.

The ethics group, on the other hand, prefers to point to some moral flaw or sociopathy in Bernie Madoff’s genetic inheritance. How, otherwise, could he have cheated his friends and those who trusted him? They would argue his fraud must result from some character flaw (or worse) with the bilked investors merely innocent victims. The only protection from the sociopath, they would argue, is regulation so let government intervention begin and let the losses be mitigated.

On a cynical note, let me say that I am attracted by neither position. I find both somewhat hypocritical and more or less fluid depending on how much the government is willing to mitigate: the most dyed-in-the-wool values evangelist tends to stretch out a hand as far as the ethicist. To me the larger question is one of character.

There may be some who feel that my distinction between ethics and values is too precise and that talking about a general failure of character is merely a diversion. While I can respect that position, I have to believe there is a larger question here, one that underlies and perhaps emphasizes a good deal of what passes for public debate these days. Let me explain.

The other day, George Sweanor, whose blog is linked to this one, forwarded a wonderful letter from a comrade not in arms but in conflict. This man had been part of an enemy air force charged with bombing England at the same time that George had been charged with bombing Germany. They met after George returned from being a POW at the Great Escape Stalag. Between the two men, both separated and joined by a common war, there grew a lifelong friendship based on compassion, empathy, and a wisdom that grew beyond judgment and pettiness. That’s what I call character and I think we’re missing it today. How easy it would have been for them to carry forward all the jingoism and propaganda of the wars. Yet they did not. They recognized a common humanity that illuminated them and, in a way, set aside the horrors of the conflict in the hope of communication and understanding.

As I say, this finding of common ground is character, and it is missing in those who indulge in name calling and vitriol, particularly from the group I have come to call the valueists. These are people who use their so-called values as ways to distinguish between themselves and others and deride those who do not agree with them. I have found values, whether they be religious, cultural, or political, not generally compassionate despite original founding principles that might suggest otherwise. If I have to be honest, I am frightened by those who use their values as clubs to beat others who do not share them.

I guess, when it comes to vampires, I am uninterested in whether they have approved values or whether they justify their behavior by appeals to their own survival. I prefer vampires, if I must have them, to be willing to drive the stake through their own hearts.

Taking Back Death

A few days ago, I had to say goodbye to my little cat. She had been with me for 171/2years and her life spanned all the meaningful events of my recent life. She came up from Hawaii with us when we moved to Colorado. She was there when my grandson was born and there when I lost my husband of 37 years. She moved into a new house with me and was the one constant as I tried to rebuild my life.

I knew it was time to let her go when she started having seizures and I realized they could only continue and get worse. Despite knowing this, though, I grieved her loss intensely and found myself wondering what it was so hard for me to let her slip away.

After much reflection, I realize it wasn’t really to do with her. She’d had a wonderful, long life, much loved and cared for, and I knew that keeping her alive would have been merely selfish. My grieving was a tsunami of emotion, built in volume by every other loss in my life. Her death made me remember every one that had preceded it, some of which I understand now that I have never discussed, let alone dealt with.

For example, I found myself dealing not only with actual death but also figurative regret. With little Squeak, I mourned again the loss of my mother, husband, three dogs, and four cats but also more intangible things such as the father I never knew (killed in WWII), the mentally ill grandmother who was unreachable during my childhood, the brother who died the year before I was born, the end of my professional career, the onset of new physical challenges, and the realization that I can no longer promise myself that I still have time to achieve the things I wanted to as a young woman.

You might say that a lot of issues were triggered by the loss a little black-and-white girl of barely ten pounds. These were things I had congratulated myself as having laid to rest or else never had dealt with.

The opportunity to reflect and grow is probably the gift that death gives us It’s a time when those remaining alive can touch the membrane between life and death and perhaps see just a little further. It’s also a time, I believe, to look at one’s own beliefs about death itself.

I’ve never found much comfort in religious leaders who preach about resurrection and expect me to be joyful. In my experience, there is no substitute for dealing with grief. If it’s not now, then it will be later. I also don’t accept the idea that our animals are kept out of whatever heaven is being promised. Life is life. If I want to believe in the Rainbow Bridge where the animals wait for us, and if I agree with the Indian belief that it is the animals who will decide who crosses, then I will do so. I don’t know when it was that we handed death over to religion: it’s the only power they really have over us. They threaten and promise but in the end, everyone dies alone. I think it’s time to make death personal again and take it back from the constraints of religious dogma.

Meanwhile, I am going to believe that I heard my blue heeler, Kepa, settle for the last time in my office after we had to put her down. I heard the familiar chink of her tags on the wood floor and I smiled—she was home. I’m going to believe that my late husband was on the other side to greet our pets. I’m going to believe that I will see my husband and mother waiting for me as well, along with all the other animals I have loved and that my little Squeak will be sunning herself as she waits for me.

.

Looking for Someone to Hate

This is not a generous time in America’s history. There are always difficult times, but this time it appears that a large number of people are looking for someone or something to hate.

It’s not easy finding something credible to hate because there seem to be fashions. Thirty years ago, people hated the Women’s Lib movement because it upset too many apple carts. Talking about uppity women these days, for example, sounds really old-fashioned. The hate on that topic died when the Equal Rights Amendment didn’t pass—life as we knew it was preserved and equal rights went on to be supported in other ways.

Hatred, I’m told, is born out of insecurity. There’s nothing more likely to trigger that insecurity than not having a support group of like-minded individuals. Apparently, the group that hates together stays together. But I do think there’s also an element of desperately clinging to things as they (never) were and demanding that life conform. In this, there’s an element of arrogance and also King Canute-ism: he’s the king who commanded the tide not to turn with predictable results.

According to the latest reports, there are over 900 hate groups in the US. Traditional hatred is well represented among them. There are anti-semitic, anti-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-abortion, anti-government, and anti-ethnic groups just for starters. You can even start your own rant: one man was so angry over a zoning decision up in Granby, Colorado, that he built a home-made tank and tried to take out the town. Of course, he was the exception to being part of a group since he didn’t much like people period. But he shows the common denominator of these groups: hating requires release through violence and builds on a shared sense of injustice and threat.

Case in point: what motivated the 88 year-old bigot to start shooting in the Holocaust Museum? As one might predict it started with the mundane and banal: he thought he was shortchanged in his Social Security check as retaliation for the venom he had been spewing on his increasingly deranged website. I can imagine him working himself into a frenzy of hatred by imagining that others, people definitely not-him like minorities or in this case, Jews, were getting the things “due” to him. Let a few visitors to his website agree with him and the only outlet for the pent-up emotion becomes taking a rifle and opening fire. I’m not discounting the possibility of senile hyperactivity but it seems his whole life had been one long grievance.

And grievance is really what all this hate is about. We have a whole lot of people with grievances against a changing world that is not behaving as it should and they fear they are losing their place along with all the certainties they had believed in. The more threatening the changes the more hatred .

Well, I have news for the hatred groups of this country: You never were in charge of your world. You only thought you were because it was familiar. You were just as powerless as the rest of us in the face of technological change, political expedience, and cultural diversity. It’s just taken you a lot longer than the rest of us to become aware of it. To a certain extent, we have all been cheated. We believed our values were the only right ones and, in some instances, we gave our lives and our futures for them. But our values were only loaned to us and only because they were useful to the world at the time we were encouraged to believe them.

Let’s move on, guys, and get out of the way of the people who have to deal with today’s world. It’s theirs now and they’ll have their own illusions and disappointments.

Mrs. Hyde

I just reread my blog on Sonia Sotomajor and realized that I sound very prickly. Some of it, of course, may be the slow recovery from my knee surgery which is making me very impatient. But, to be honest—and I really do try to be that in this blog—I can almost draw a straight line in my life from initial naivete to a certain cynicism that now invades my thinking, particularly when it comes to those on the Right, or should I say those who now claim to be “conservative” rather than Republican. Was there ever before such a divorce of convenience?

The line starts with my childhood experience with an independent and unpredictable mother, which started me off well with my own independence. I think the word used most to describe me was “hard-headed.” I still get called that once in a while by those who dare, except now I take it as a compliment where before I knew it wasn’t really a good or lady-like thing to be. I know that because it seemed as it the world was a solid phalanx of people determined to mold me into something I wasn’t. Oh well—I was a tomboy and didn’t fit in well with curls and dimples.

Then came my early marriage to an older man that was opposed by virtually everyone including his family. Because I was only a teenager, it was thought appropriate to discuss my perceived shortcomings openly and in front of me. Since the marriage lasted 37 happy years, I had plenty of time to cause what we can delicately call a certain amount of reconsideration of me. The experience started my career of defiance and to tell me that I couldn’t do something became my marching orders not only to do it, but do it better than anyone else.

My college experience added competitiveness to the defiance and independence. I can remember being told not to take a course from a certain professor as he didn’t like women. I took his course and survived. Then I was discouraged from graduate school because I had a husband and child—the scholarships went to the men in the department who showed more promise. I couldn’t let that one go by. Without much help except from my mother and husband, I made it through the doctorate.

Now—I am not always defiant, independent, and competitive. I am told by others who should know that I am also generous, compassionate, responsible, and kind. Because of my background, I hate injustice and will go out of my way to help if I can. My Mrs. Hyde, if I can call it that, comes out only under certain circumstances. And generally, these are when I have the misfortune of having to deal with certain types of “conservatives.”

My Pavlovian response to the Right, comes, I believe, from the echoes of voices that I have had to still or overcome in my life. Politics on the Right always seems to be angry and—worse in my mind—judgmental, unkind, and rigid. Conservatives only seem to be happy when they are judging someone for transgressing the code of behavior they have selected for us all or watching as someone else gets punished. It’s like the older sibling, having pointed a finger, standing by with a smirk as a younger brother gets disciplined.

But now, I have a new perspective on all this.

I used to wonder how the more obnoxious Right-people could make such unpleasant, personal attacks on those who disagree with them and how they could come to conclusions so obviously at a tangent to facts. But then I realized that facts and rationality weren’t the point of the fun. It’s all about emotions. The politics of NO, the Rush Limbaughs of the world, and the flag waving is all about releasing pent-up and frustrated emotion.

I watch these Right-ers shifting ground, working themselves up into a frenzy of indignation, and sputtering out the name-calling, and see they are having a wonderful time being indignant, put-upon, and righteous. My gosh-it seems like fun to be completely right in their own minds.

By temperament and training, I have been conditioned to step back and analyze. I’m beginning to think, however, that I may have been missing something. I write to express my concerns and worries about what the world is becoming. Perhaps I would do better to throw a bloody good tantrum.

Go, Girl

Golly. Gee. Sonia Sotomajor said that a Hispanic woman might have better insight into issues regarding women and family than “objective” white men. To hear the outrage (in the US largely coming from old, privileged, white males on the right who hate parting with the least shred of control) is to assume that all the decisions made by “objective” men regarding women and children must always be the height of wisdom and fabled objectivity.

Let’s take a look at that.

My grandfather wouldn’t educate my mother because it would be a gift to another man. Golly. Gee. My mother was property that he didn’t want to improve and give free to someone other man. Never mind her talents or even her eventual children (me), it was all about goods and property. Same time period: children belonged to the man and he could remove them from the mother with no explanation or recourse on her part. Wife beating was merely someone exerting his husbandly rights. Golly. Gee. If you look on women and children as belongings I guess such decisions seem very “objective.”

Then there’s the lovely practice of genital mutilation—very “objective” indeed if you don’t want another man trespassing on your private preserve. Take away her pleasure and she may not stray. Or covering a women head to toe so she doesn’t attract attention—makes lots of sense if your woman belongs to you and you don’t want to risk someone stealing your exclusive reproductive rights. Whipping and stoning is a very nice touch—let’s keep those women in line and their legs tightly closed. After all, it's in the Bible, isn’t it?

And what about the genial practice of binding feet among the aristocratic classes in China. If a woman couldn’t walk she proved the man’s wealth since he didn’t need her economic contribution. Golly. Gee. Cripple the woman as a demonstration of wealth. How “objective.”

The thing I most dislike about the paternal tradition is not only its paternalistic assumption of knowing what is best for a women but also its dual emphasis on competition and display. Historically, men compete with other men by hiding their women, amassing large numbers of them and thereby denying them to others, raping to show power and superiority, refusing them education and then sneering at their lack of it.

This admittedly one-sided analysis is only exaggerated to a certain extent. And I certainly do not excuse those women who profit from becoming decorative and expensive trophies. I guess there will always be experts at making lemonade from other people's lemons. But claiming that men have the innate ability to be “objective” without input from those who actually bear children does not strike me as a sensible, let alone wise, attitude for either of the sexes yo accept, let alone promulgate.

In this country, the times have long changed from when women were chattel (won in poker games, anyone?)although even their getting the vote was a study in prejudice against female intelligence and stability. In other parts of the world children of eight can still be married to much older men and then not divorced unless a male relative makes the complain in court. It must be wonderfully ego-building to feel superior to a whole class of people without having to do anything to earn it except being born.

I say hail to a woman not afraid to take on the smug, paternalistic demagoguery of the males on the right. This is one qualified lady who knows her legal stuff and knows reality. It may be clichéd, but I repeat what I was told as I systematically outperformed all the men in my graduate programs—“You go, Girl.”

Torture Mon Amour

I really wish Dick Cheney would slide into the bog of retirement and let the peat close over his head. The only way I can be tempted to want to hear what he says (repeatedly) to justify himself is if he is hauled before the War Crimes Commission at the Hague.

When I was growing up, torture was something that the bad guys—the enemy did. The good guys, the Allies were above that and it was a plot line in war movies that the hero would be mistakenly underestimated by the enemy because he was apparently “soft” until, of course, the hero won.

Admittedly, a lot of this was propaganda for the home folks to keep spirits and resolve high, and admittedly also the side that wins gets to control the history books, but I was raised on the idea of torture as uncivilized. Torture has probably always been part of us, but the British liked to portray themselves as obtaining information through shrewd intellectual gamesmanship.

When Sid Scott, the sole survivor of my father’s Halifax crash in 1944, was interrogated by the Nazis, they threatened to shoot him if he didn’t give them details about his squadron. He gave them only the required name and serial number and also told them, “We don’t shoot German POWs in England.” His interrogators looked at one another and backed off. Apparently, they accepted what he said to be true. Sid says now that even if they had tortured him they wouldn’t have got much since they knew more about his squadron than he did. Torture, it would seem, is not a substitute for a good spy network. If the Nazis could find out details about squadron leaders, aircraft, and leadership without torture, it seems there are other ways to get what is desired.

But that was WWII and maybe the ideal of the gentleman flyer was a carryover from WWI. Today, it might be argued, things are very different with the threat of nuclear weapons. Still, it’s a matter of involvement. When a dictatorship uses torture on political prisoners, the rest of the population can (or may want to) distance itself from the inhumanity of it. Everyone is, to some extent, a prisoner of the regime. Those who disappear from the streets are only the most visible symbols of general repression and injustice. When the regime changes, there is room for the population to reclaim self-respect by repudiating the past.

The extent to which we are willing to accept that argument, of course, forms the basis of war trials, but at least the population can claim to have some shred of decency left.

But even that excuse, weak as it is, is not the case when a population accepts the idea of torture and allows it to be codified into its legal system. At that point, the greatest victim of organized torture is the self-respect of the population that allows it because there is no where else to shift the blame. It has nothing to do with the evil of the person being tortured. It has everything to do with who the people are. Are they a people who torture? If they are, they align themselves with South American dictatorships, near Eastern demagogues, and genocidal African lunatics.

Perhaps I am just naïve. Perhaps torture has always been one form of political expression and perhaps even the British have done it. But I certainly don’t want to be part of a culture where torture is legally enshrined, if only because if it’s part of our judicial system, anyone of us might be subject to it.

Au Revoir Immortality

I hadn’t thought before about how much recovering from surgery resembles what Hospice likes to call the grieving process and death researchers call the steps to acceptance. There even appear to be the same stages although in different forms and emphasis: denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance (more or less) among them.

This correlation really shouldn’t be surprising now I think about it. Surgery, after all, usually entails loss. In many cases, it means parting company with some body part, even if in my case it was a torn and useless meniscus. The impact on the body is still enormous and there is certainly suffering of one kind or another. My sister, Wendy, told me she was on morphine for two months after she had knee replacement and I’ve been on Tylenol for the past three weeks for a supposedly kinder procedure.

Of the four stages, I empathize most with the denial part of the process since I went into the surgery with a large dose of it. I lapped up the surgeon’s telling me that the operation was routine and non-invasive, which I, of course, took to mean that I’d walk out of the hospital in some slight discomfort that I would nobly overcome and set a recovery record for this type of surgery in a woman my age. Ha.

I really should have known better as I sat in the surgeon’s waiting room where the closed-circuit television continuously played some video about animals—not your usual cutey-pie stuff but footage showing a wolf cutting out a baby caribou from its mother, chasing it down, and killing it, followed by a killer whale hunting down seals for dinner and eating them in the middle of waves died red from their blood. The images of rending flesh should have warned me to give up my daydreams.

But the anger part was a good second. I couldn’t get the surgeon’s office to return my phone calls asking them what I could do about my painfully cramping calf and thigh muscles that the pain meds weren’t touching. When I limped in at last with gritted teeth to get the stitches out, I learned that the office admitted to internal communications challenges and they hadn’t received my messages. If I hadn’t been so grateful to just be free, I might have said something unrepeatable. Instead, I just vented my feelings that evening to Sid, who patiently listened to me and reminded me I had survived and was on the road to recovery. I realize now that I needed to be angry about something at that point, if only to express the shock of having my body invaded and two weeks of pain.

The bargaining part of the process came afterwards—at the start of the three weeks of physical therapy I’m now embarked on. In comparison to the cramping, bending and stretching the knee is a breeze. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to negotiate how fast the physical therapists expect me top do things like squat—my latest nightmare. The therapists, of course, will get me to do whatever I need to despite my bleats. The negotiation is merely letting me have the illusion of control over my life, which, I suspect, is what terminal patients are trying to regain.

Yes, I’m coming along. But the surgery has made an impression on me. I’m being forced to accept that maybe my body is that of a senior lady, even if she has been something of a jock in her day. I’m not going to parachute or bungee jump, nor am I going to ride roller-coasters or speed boats. I’m not going to try to advance my skiing skills beyond where I am and I’ll leave the steep stuff (where I first got injured) to Generation X; I heartily wish them luck in avoiding injuries. In fact, I am not going to be anything other than wary to avoid obvious threats to my body. Now I know I can get hurt.

I guess you could say I’ve been grieving the realities of what time does to even an active body. The usual creaks, aches, and limitations of age are mine now and I’m not going to avoid them. It’s really too bad because I don’t feel my age—or maybe just don’t want to. In fact, I guess what I’ve primarily accepted (finally, you might say), is that I am not immortal. Shucks.

I Want the Same Care as My Cat

Last week I went to have my knee scoped. My joint was done in by an old cartilage tear from being on a ski slope I had no business being on and a much newer tear caused by riding a stationary bicycle. Not even a real bicycle for heaven’s sake. I must indeed be getting old.

Sky Ridge Surgical Center, where the surgery was done, was very good with attentive staff and a crisp proficiency—they see idiots like me on a regular basis and know how to deal kindly with us. My surgeon was communicative and said it was routine and went very well. I had more than adequate pain medicine. I was in bed for two days, had about three days of real misery when I used two crutches, three days of moderate with a single crutch, and the last two not bad on a cane. All as predicted, more or less.

So why, might you ask, am I so discontent? Simple answer: Because I am envious of the surgical patients down at Dr. Weldon’s Coal Creek Veterinary Hospital here in Aurora, Colorado, where I take my cat, Squeak.

Squeak has had her share of surgical misadventures, like the time she ate a small rabbit, furs, whiskers, and all. The only evidence left behind were two paws. She had to be cleaned out, which would have been enough except that she then ate a mouse on top of it and required surgery. It must have been some tropical madness that suddenly gave a well-fed middle-class cat the overwhelming desire for fresh meat, but whatever the reason she came home with a line of neat stitches and a collar to prevent her from removing them.

I found myself remembering her as I sat brooding about my own discomfort. In contrast with me, she seemed to have made a remarkable recovery and was down moping only a couple of days before sitting in the window making irritated faces at the nesting birds outside.

When I took her in today for her senior annual exam (she’s nearly 18) and her rabies shot, I asked Dr. Weldon what they do to help their patients after orthopedic surgery. “Oh,” she told me,” we massage the area, do acupuncture and chiropracty, and treat them with heat.”

I drooled with envy. Right now I could kill to have a massage on my aching calf and thigh muscles and on my back, which is cramping from the tilted way I am walking. My massage therapist is willing to do it but only with permission from the surgeon since I still have the stitches in place. The surgeon is busy doing surgery as he should be. His staff is too busy with other idiots like me to get back to me. So I am stuck.

In the old days, it was common to give massages in hospitals. It’s a lovely lost practice that was especially common in Europe which gives more credence to the idea of a therapeutic massage. I can’t think of a time when it would be more soothing or kind than just after surgery when every muscle in one’s body is traumatized. I am in love with the idea of a long, sweeping movement followed by a deep knuckle into the middle of my cramped, tight calf muscle. Ah luxury. I would be willing to pay whatever it takes for the comfort. But it’s just out of reach and I guess it will just have to wait.

Part of me admires the contextual brilliance and technical artistry of American medicine. We have dandy machines like MRIs and incredibly evolving techniques. I know my surgery was done perfectly and the result eventually will be wonderful. But the other part of me wants the comfort of something like a local shaman to provide hands-on psychological comfort and attention.

I wonder if Dr Weldon would be willing to include me among the cats, dogs, birds, and rabbits.

Not Your Usual Mother's Day

Well, it’s that time—the day when, in my mother’s words, they trot the old girl out of the rest home, stick an orchid corsage on her, and turn her into mother of the year. It’s all around me. I’ve been getting gooey forwarded e-mails and the supermarkets are full of folk snapping up bouquets. I guess it’s nice that we can have a cathartic cry in our beer over the little, grey-haired old lady who sacrificed so much for us to get ahead, except for the selective memory going on. The gooey-est e-mail I read—the one saying that “mother” is another word for “angel”—came from a friend whose mother was a major narcissist and with whom she has an estranged relationship. I guess it is silly time in family relationships.

In my (admittedly limited) experience, families are fraught with the perils common to all human endeavors. Given the odds of a congenial bundle of joy landing on one’s doorstep, it’s a miracle if the personalities thrust under one roof get along. Some people just naturally seem to have the skills to raise children who love one another (to my mind, the primary parental responsibility other than keeping the kids from killing themselves) but also in my experience it’s more likely that people unthinkingly visit on their children all the misery with which they were raised and then expect special recognition for having done so. My former mother-in-law, as an example, expected sweet, flowery expressions of appreciation regardless of how unpleasant and demanding she had been through the years. And she was not above comparing cards from her offspring so she could judge who she thought loved and appreciated her more.

Don’t get me wrong—I am no mother hater. But I am a pragmatist. Since my mother died in 1985, hardly a year goes by without some major reevaluation on my part. Some of the things she did for me were kind and marvelous. Others were highly destructive. The contradiction between what she intended and what she accomplished was so extreme as to leave me completely confused.

It’s been the work of the last twenty years of my life to try to figure out who she was completely separate from her role in my life. Interesting question: if I had met and worked with her and not been her daughter, what would I have thought of her? If I answer honestly, the result would have been mixed.

On the one hand, as a colleague rather than a daughter, I could have admired her commitment to life and her optimism that somehow, no matter things appeared, there was something within her power she could do that would turn things around. For the most part, she succeeded. I could have respected her dedication to her nursing profession. Her patients and fellow staff respected her skills. She did a job well and took pride in it; she was loyal and no quitter. I could also have admired her strong sense of responsibility—she gave her best—and her slightly off-kilter but wonderful sense of humor.

At the same time, I am her daughter. I know even colleagues would (and did) find it difficult to deal with her emotional outbursts. Her feelings for someone could change dramatically in an instant and she looked on disagreement as betrayal, although an outsider might have been easier to know what was likely to upset her. Until I grew too old to be physically disciplined, I couldn’t always connect my punishment to whichever one of my numerous sins had got me in trouble (probably my tendency to answer back—but that’s another issue). If I hadn’t been her daughter and what she called “high-strung,” perhaps I might have understood more of the incredible pressures she was under, raising a child alone first in post-war Britain and then in Canada, a completely new country. But that would have been asking a great deal of a child, even one who accepted immense amounts of responsibility at a very young age.

It's taken me years to even get to the point where I can begin to sort out my feelings for this complex, forceful woman who blew through my life like a hurricane.

I suppose we are all mixed bags of successes and failures as parents. I hope one day that my son doesn't write something like this about me. All I can say is I tried my best, which I am sure she would say also. This is why I think there should be an asterisk and footnote to this whole idea of Mother’s Day. By all means, let’s celebrate the things that went well in our family dynamics. At the same time, though, I think the day should permit us to lay out both the strengths and the weaknesses of what we learned from our parents, meditate on our relations with our own children, and see if we can lessen the baggage we pass on from one generation to the next.

Of Moral Universes

One of the few sites I follow carefully is Judith Gayles “political waves” (http://polwaves.planetwaves.net/ ) She spends a great deal of time searching blogs and national newspapers daily looking for profound and interesting political articles, which she either reprints or links to. These are serious thought pieces with careful substantive comment. I recommend her wholeheartedly and if you haven’t checked out her site, please do. I hope one day she sets up a donation site as she spends so much time hunting and gathering for us.

One of her recent editions included an article reporting on the research of Jonathan Haidt from the University of Virginia who maintains that liberals and conservatives “inhabit different moral universes.” In order to demonstrate this, he identifies what he calls “five foundational moral impulses” that are hardwired into who we are as a species. His five are listed below with his explanation. (This gets increasingly interesting, so hang in there).

Harm/Care: Not harming others and relieving suffering.

Fairness/Reciprocity: People have rights that need to be protected.

In-Group Loyalty: Patriotism and loyalty are vital.

Authority/Respect: Social order should be a primary goal

Purity/Sanctity: Chastity and respect for life, lust and greed are bad.

Liberals, he maintains, prioritize the first two; conservatives the last three.

Most of us are probably some combination and if you’re not sure where you stand, you can go to Haidt’s site www.yourmorals.org and take some tests. That’s what I did, and I found that—just as I have always maintained, I’m somewhere in the middle, favoring conservative positions sometimes and liberal at other times.

Sure, I believe very strongly about harm/care. I’ve been grateful for public education, public-supported healthcare in Britain and Canada, and the willingness of the US to take in an immigrant and give her a chance that was denied to her elsewhere. But I’m no-raise-the-ladder thinker (the British call the phenomenon “I’m all right in my corner, Jack”). I’m glad to extend the opportunities to others in the hopes they will pay back as I have tried to do. I’m always intrigued by people who tell me they are “self-made,” when they have accepted public education, FEMA, air-traffic control, dispute mediation, fire services, protection from cheats and swindlers, and so on, and fully expect the government to “do something” in the face of natural disasters, economic downturn, and national pandemics.

I hate injustice and have walked on picket lines to protest various issues. Yet I have a problem with all the claims of rights. I think it has turned the US into a nation of lawyers where nobody knows where we stand until some court or another has clarified what ought to be common sense. Anybody can claim their rights have been violated and the consequences can be ruinous.

In-group loyalty and patriotism I will support to the extent that the loyalty is deserved. I’m not going to blindly support or excuse a crook just because he or she happens to be on my Super-Bowl political team. Like Hilary Clinton I initially supported Barry Goldwater until Kent State happened. People just walking across campus were shot. That could have been me. I learned then that authority—all authority—needed to be questioned. My friend Peter loves to label me a screaming liberal because I don’t agree with his extremely conservative positions. He doesn’t want to see the nuances in where I stand because (I suspect) his positions are based on what he finds comfortable.

Authority/Respect is important to me. I pay my taxes, and unlike others, don’t feel it’s “my:” money once it leaves my hands. I like having fire service and police protection. In these hard times, I’ve particularly enjoyed my local library. I wish that there had been more respect for authority and balancing of competing “rights” when it came to regulating the financial markets in their mad scramble for unregulated profit. If there’s a law for the common good, I really don’t like breaking it deliberately.

Puriity/sancitity I am not so hot on because in my experience “respect for life” in social issues turns people self-righteous and judgmental (sometimes even hypocrital as it’s almost impossible to live perfectly). I do not want anyone interfering in my family’s end-of-life decisions, for example. I had to decide whether to approve heroic measures for my dying mother. I had to decide to administer morphine to my dying husband, knowing that it was depressing his respiratory system and hastening death. I needed no “guidance” from others to do what I believed to be right and had anyone said something to me—no matter how well-intentioned—I would have heaved them out on the sidewalk. Yet I also support groups that protect society’s suffering and seek to protect farm and family animals from abuse.

Personally, I would argue for some compassion instead of the quick rush to judgment, along with pragmatic experiment as to what works. God save me from the theoreticians. I’m very fond of a section from Milton’s Areopagitica, “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race . . . “ Lets judge things by how they work before rushing to condemn because it suits our particular prejudices. I guess it’s all a matter of balance and self-awareness. That’s what Haidt says. America needs to balance the founding virtues. I would also argue for some good manners instead of all the shrill screeching about who’s right or wrong and which side we are on. We are all on the side of the United States.