Seniors Dealing with Life

And What, Pray Tell, is a Conservative?

2012-01-29T13:48:00.000-08:00

It's not often that Sid and I have conversation about political things. He is moderate, leaning Republican. I am moderate, leaning what I call common sense because I definitely do not fall into the category of "liberal." Political conversations in our house are usually muted so neither of us gets either overly passionate at the idiocy of the political process (particularly now) or too depresssed over the state of the world.

Still, today we started talking about the definition of the word "conservative" Exactly what does it mean--and I mean to us rather than to political parties who have their own agendas.

Sid looked at me quizzically when I asked the question and repeated the definition of conservative as "someone with something to conserve." "Yes," I replied, "but what is the definition of something? What exactly are we trying to keep?"

I realize this interesting question is capable of many answers. Some people just want to conserve their money and the means by which they make it. Others want to conserve the nation as they know it--the bastion of privilege for the succcessful (and if you're successful, the world looks pretty all right to you just as it is).Yet others may look back on the world as they once knew it, when things were comfortable and assumptions unchallenged.

I sympathize with all this. I suppose we all can. But the devil is in the details and even looking back on my life, there are some awful details along with some bucolic memories. Let me explain.

I was born on the south coast of England. We're talking Beatrix Potter here. Daffodils in the spring. New born lambs dancing on the Downs, walking along the Sea Front, and taking the train to London. Lovely. Nostalgic. People didn't have a lot and seemed content with it. However, and to be bloody British/American about it--my brother died in infancy because there weren't the anitbiotics to keep him alive. I have three bridges and on-going dental work because British dentisty was primitive then. And, even better, the British school system decided when I was eleven that I was not university material. My mother emigrated to Canada in part because of the latter and I went on to earn a doctorate and work as part of an academic team that RAN a major public state university. To Britain, I was a throw-away. America welcomed me and was rewarded by my contribution over time.

Given this background, it's no surprise that I support state investment in public education, state involvement in health care, and state guarantees that everyone has a chance. Until the "conservative" movement broke onto the scene, I thought these were American values. The past few years have been a wake up for me.

Sid, on the other hand, had what I (and I think he) consider an enchanted childhood. He was raised in small-town Cheyenne, his mother stayed home and raised her childen (mine was a single mother who struggled), and his father walked home for lunch. He was encouraged to go to university and to have a profession. Things may not have always been easy, but he had the solid support of his community behind him.

Gosh--I'd like to conserve that too if I'd ever had it.

I think the difference speaks to what we mean by "conservative." I'll go out on a limb and say that "conservatism" means trying to maintain /impose (take you pick) the values and ideals of that time in our lives when we were the most comfortable.

For me, the most comfortable time was when I was in college at the University of Hawaii and, for the Ph.D., the University of Washington (Seattle). I didn't have scholarships because for most of that time I wasn't a US citizen, but the tuition (particularly in Hawaii) was something my husband, Chuck, and I could afford and he believed in my talent. It was the first time that anyone had done so beside my mother. It's THIS experience I want to "conserve."

In in the interest of "conserving" then, I have no problem offering some version of in-state tution to highly talented "illegal" students who graduate from high school because I speak from my own experience in saying these students will return the investment made in them. The fact their parents were illegal does not elevate me to raptures of indignation--that is the matter of luck. I came into the country when being British entitled me to special treatment because of "allotments." I was merely lucky in the times. I also have no problem with making sure that there is some rudimentary medical/dental care available to people who need it, regardless of whether those people are "worthy." At one point, I wasn't thought "worthy"--in class conscious Britian, I wasn't see as being a "clever" girl who could rise above her "class." I feel it does me no honor, nor those who gave me my chance, to sit in judgment of others who may yet serve the nation in unexpected ways.

Yep--I'd say I was conservative, although the Peters and Newts of the world would never see it.

Many among us should just be grateful that their prescriptions for others were never applied to their ancestors (at least if they're not Irish and Asian) and would benefit from standing back and defining their own use of the word "conservative." As my hero Shakespeare says, give us all our just deserts and not one among us would escape whipping.

Welcome conservatives--if you are brave, do what I have--look in the mirror and be prepared to shudder.

Things I Have Learned

2012-01-21T03:57:00.000-08:00

The most valuable lessons in life are usually the ones we learn for ourselves and often the hard way. When they work properly, these are the things we can count on--the rock solid foundations that form the cornerstone of our changing selves and our understanding of the world and societies we live in. In fact, it's my own experience that once we let other people dictate what we see in the world--that's when the trouble starts.

We are something of a flawed species. I'm not original in this thought by any means. The various satirists throughout history--from the ancient writers at the dawn of written communication until media stars like Colbert--have all had a field day with our fallibilities and self-delusions. For a species with the unique abiility to speak and think, we have quite a track record of refusing to use them. In constructive ways, anyway.

Our current policitical mayhem is a case in point. Our candidates for president are not questioning the foundational principles, instead they represent a dismal attempt to be the most bigoted, uncompromising exemplar of a set of principles that are badly in need of being examined.

How long, for example, are we going to allow our lives to be dominated by a set of rules coming out of the sands of the Middle East? All the religions developed there--Islam and Judaism and the latter's offshoot, Christianity--have the same foundational basis. They all need reexamination. If we don't like them ruling our economies through their oil, why on earth are we letting ideas developed by a group of nomads rule our lives and the way we think?

In the spirit (my own) of setting aside two-thousand-year-old agendas and looking directly at the world rather than letting anyone control my mind by telling me what to see, here's my list of the things that I think I know. I may be wrong, but at least they are my own ideas rather than ill-digested pablum, which is what I see all around me.

1. All religions and political ideas sound plausible and idealistic when presented in their most abstract form.

Take Christianity to its fullest implication of sharing with others and you get Communism. Take Capitalism to its extreme and you get the reaction of Marxism. There is a spectrum, a range. Do we understand that? Can we determine how far along a curve we are willing to go? Of course not. Self-promoting demagogues have stolen that discussion by substituting "rules" and "moral laws" supposedly to put us good in god's graces--as if anyone could--and many believe them.

2. All religions and political systems are to be judged not by what they say but by what is done in their name.

Yes, Islam is responsible for violence. Sorry. But so is Christianity. How many times do I hear people say that someone is not really Christian or not really Muslim. But on what basis? The Bible is full of smite this people and destroy that people. People who say Christianity is not a violent religion need to stop cherry-picking the Bible. Politicians who claim to represent god and religion need to be shunned--god does not need Texas politicians speaking for him.

3. Political leaders gain and retain power by telling people what they want to hear and concealing whom they really represent.

There are several well-established ways in which people become leaders. Some as they say are born to leadership; others have it thrust upon them. One would like leadership to be a sacred trust instead of a way to become rich. One of the first questions I now ask about anyone running for office is exactly where their money comes from. It's a given of human nature that we will vote for our own best self-interest. We need leaders who don't pander to us worst impulses by trying to make us feel moral for being selfish. This is a shared planet.

4. Systems created by human beings--religion, political, legal, educational etc.--are suspect because they are created by human beings.

There is no such thing as a perfect or infallible system. Even the founding consitution of the United States is not absolute and is not pefect. The founding fathers knew this because they put in provisions for it to be changed as needed. Much better to look at the consitution as a living document. Many of those using it to hit other people over the head have not read it, let alone understood it.

5. The poor will always be among us and the power struggle between the rich and poor is a given.

Aristotle made the case long ago: the rich will want the power because they have the money; the poor will want the power because they have the numbers. The challenge is to maintain the balance of these competing interests. Wishing the poor were different doesn't make them go away anymore than trying to make them more "deserving." What is the right balance? Ninety-nine to one doesn't sound balanced to me--in fact, it sounds like the firing solution for a civil war.

6. Complaining that the world has changed for the worse because it isn't like the ones we grew up in is a waste of breath.

The world changes, period. In our minds, it may change for the better or the worse, but our opinion is immaterial. The sun shines, the tides rise and fall, and the world changes. In fact, individually we are part of the reason that it does change.

7. Scapegoating others (illegals, gays etc) is one way in which we allow others to manipulate us.

It's high time that we looked at how much self-interest lies behind the current efforts to look for someone to blame for our own economic excesses. While we allow our focus to be on peripherals, we don't look at the underlying issues such as who's benefitting from our distraction? As many have said before, follow the money. Power is silent and exercised in back rooms. It is not out on the media waves screaming about being reborn.

8. Few people allow themselves to recognize how our lives are now governed and controlled by corporate interests (see above: follow the money).

In the guise of free trade, which is free only for corporations to send jobs abroad, our health, food, poiltics, media, mililtary, entertainment, and energy and so forth are under corporate control or influence. And you can add to this religion (those TV ministers are millionaires). This whole idea of a nation "under god" is a fraud. It can be traced back to the late nineteenth century when big companies had a PR problem and paid big money to ministers (who else?) to conflate capitalism and Christianity--not that it was hard to do since the Puritans had conflated it before them (if you're rich, it's proof god loves you).

And, finally:

9. It is almost impossible for people to give up money once they have held it in their hands.

I always found it easier to pay my taxes if I had never seen the money to begin with. This is a general principle: it is much easier to give a tax cut than it is to rein it back once given. Tax cuts are a short-term subsitute for hard thinking in the long-term.

A Sour World

2012-01-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

Recently, I took down one of these blogs because it bored me. I was giving the same old message of 'we need to look at ourselves' at a time when no one wants to. It takes rational disinterest to stand back from the pleasures of one's prejudices, and we're sorely lacking in that as a nation and as a world. One day, we're going to look back on the lunacy and wonder what we were thinking. But that's for later.

Right now, people want to hear only what agrees with the minds they have already made up. We've just lost one of our major public intellectuals--Christopher Hitchens--and in reading the tributes being published for him, one theme stands out. People who didn't like his ideas had little to offer in the way of debate with him--they resorted to name-calling because they couldn't muster decent arguments. I read him even when he dabbled in lunacy (he thought the neo-cons were the only way to stop Islamic fundamentalism) because it was an interesting lunacy. When he moved back to the middle, I cheered because I at least needed him to be an independent, inquiring, moderate in order for him to be a moral compass. He was right about proud (and ugly) anti-intellectualism around him.

I'm no Hitchens--that kind of intellectual brilliance drives me back to writing because I cannot sustain the type of debate he exemplified. But I can learn from him. What I see in his work--and also attempted in my own--is the revelation of the very sourness that lies in the basement of our being.

We are at root tribal creatures. We herd. We want the loud-voiced leader who spout maxims we don't have to strive to understand (we're also lazy, of course). We want a religion that flatters us into believing we have every right to eat whatever walks or flies on this planet. We want politicians who benefit us in various ways (mostly getting out of the way of our making money). We want a culture that never changes and people who believe like we do.

We are greedy and paranoid. We want to be protected. We may make noise about wanting to be independent, but let there be one listeria-cantaloupe outbreak, and hear the cries for government to protect us. We treat money as if it is something real rather than just an artificial representation of labor value, and we live in fear that some undeserving person might get something we didn't.

We are also aggressive and territorial. Religion's only excuse for existence is the preaching (more or less successful) of a set of values and ethics. Too bad that once religion gets established, it becomes just like us and uses our herding instincts and paranoia to its own advantages. Want to be a member of a herd: join our congregation. Paranoia? No problem. We've got redemption on tap, not to mention confession. Need to work out your dislike of people who don't think like you? Great--we have a crusade you might be interested in.

I'm not talking here exclusively of the US elections--prime horrors though they are--but of the tendency of the whole human race. People offer up short-term solutions on the belief that political actions can somehow change basic human nature. Well, they can't. In another hundred years, who the heck is going to care whether we have gay marriage? illegal immigration? In less than that, medicare and social security won't be a problem because the baby boomer generation will be gone, and we'll be crying for population. We may be very glad of those illegals we have now been led to despise (many married to and parents of Americans).

Things change. We don't seem to.

One thing I've learned about us and our politics--our demand as fleas for a greater voice in managing the dog--is that we get what we deserve. Right now I can't imagine why anyone would want to lead any country, let alone the US.

We Come, We Occupy, We Wonder

2011-12-02T22:16:00.000-08:00

I used to advise the president I worked for to always "bump it up," when he was faced with something controversial. By this I meant (and he understood me to say) don't get caught in the grubby little details where you will be attacked by grubby little people. Rise above the swamp and look at the larger picture, the one that matters over time--or over centuries for that matter.

Very fortunately, I worked then for a man who was capable of doing this and who, thereby, earned my loyalty.

Today, I look around for anyone who can understand the concept of "bump it up" let alone put it into play. Where are the leaders who, in the words of Isaac Newton, "stood on the shoulders of giants" and looked far into the future? Or--given that we live in an addled, self-focused world--can at least look beyond just getting elected, reelected, or rich.

If such a person were to emerge, I have my own ideas of what the vista would look like.

First, I would think someone wise and aware of history (instead of trying to rewrite it) would conclude that we are in disarray. Our various protest movements are disjointed efforts to say that something is seriously wrong with the world. And while it might be tempting to think that this unrest might mean that people are becoming more aware, what it really means is that self-interest is riding supreme: the rich have grown attached to their money; the poor can't find work, and the middle class is afraid of losing its creature comforts. No one wants to be the first to give up anything.

Second, I think that the wise person would see that the fixes being proposed are just as self-serving as the irresponsible actions that got us into this mess, not to mention that they are all short-term. Long-term, futuristic solutions evade us because people want to wake up and find the problems solved so they can get back to watching Hoarders or some other reality show--and feel superior to the disturbed people among us.

Personally, I long ago concluded that as a species we have built-in handicaps. We're tribal, meaning that we long for a great leader to emerge who will make decisions we agree with and allow us to continue in our indolence and lack of personal accountability. We are also competitive and rather nasty if we think someone is beating the system in a way that affects us directly. We like to scapegoat and snoop on other people's lives and pay lip servive to morals we don't practice. We also like spectacles, particularly taking public figures apart in the media. It's just who we are and we have a media that panders to it.

If we really think about it, at least as a modern species in the West, we have known only two economic systems (I don't count the hunter-gatherers here). The first was feudalism. It made slaves out of those working the land and produced an aristocratic class fit only to wage war. No one in their right mind would want to go back to that, although there are many in the world living that system right now. The second has been the growth of Capitalism, sprung from the early enterpreneurial merchants in the newly emerging cities (I count Communism and Fascism as bizarre reactions to or distortions of Capitalism). We seldom question those things that seem self-evidently true because we are used to them as we are now used to two hundred years of Capitalist thinking.

One of the things people don't seem to undestand about Capitalism is that it requires continual growth. The stockholders must be fed, the CEOs don't get their bonuses without growth, and competition cannot be sustained without the continual move forward. When people rhapsodize about a time when people had integrity and pride in their work, they forget that it was during the time of the small city merchants who met a need without the continual striving to be bigger and better and opening branches everywhere. There was time for craftsmanship and customer service then. When capital was removed from the artisan, there was no time left for anything that did not provide a profit. Few people today mention corporate America and integrity in the same breath.

Please let's talk about this.

Capitalism will not be satisfied until the last mineral has been fracted out of the earth, the last animal has been slaughtered in the name of profit, and people have been returned to serving the needs of the aristocracy among us who are fit only to war with one another over what is left of the planet. Is this really what we want?

Who the Hell Are We?

2011-11-22T17:05:00.000-08:00

Today, the news media (corporate) reports that an executive with a German car manufacturer made the mistake of driving in Alabama (where the company had built a plant) without his passport. He was arrested. When one of his associates brought his passport, he was released, but still has to appear in court.

The reactions to this are both predicable and informative of the great divide among us. Some people said it was a pity to have done this to a legitimate visitor on visa given the fact that the states are trying so hard to attract foreign investment (millions of dollars in incentives for this company). Others are saying, serves him right for not carrying his passport at all times; they cite experiences in Europe where they had to produce theirs.

I've been in Europe, little dogies, I AM European (to the extent the British will admit it) and I thought we were better than them over there. If they want to have police states, deity bless em, but that's not the home of the brave and free. Except I guess some of us want to be nasty and impose the police state over here. I'm left wondering why when so many of us have been trying to escape it.

So who the hell are we?

My answer: we are two different sets of people. One set of us is hell bent on applying the rules--goddam, I conformed, so can you. I was raised on a set of values and I'm going to apply them, because by golly they were applied to me. I listened to those old-time preachers and they sounded good to me, so you'd better go my way or I'll call you unAmerican, and I don't care if the rich keep their money as long as the poor, whom I disapprove of, don't get any of my hard earned dollars.

Before you throw me to the curb here--this has pretty much been the attitude of the Catholic Church through the ages, but also, to be fair, of the protestant evangelical sects that replaced but did not depose the varieties of spiritual experience.

Then there's the group that resonate to the idea of class warfare and raising the banner for the poor and downtrodden. It's easier to sympathize with this group because--well--the poor are the poor. But let's admit it, many of these guys know how to play the system. I've seen it myself. I've also seen companies die from union efforts at creating utopia.

So, who the hell am I?

Like so many of fellow independents, I chose from both sides. This, I think, is the great distinguishing characteristic between us in the middle and the dream-ons who populate both extremes. Increasingly, there will be more of us because we will refuse to be forced into choosing between two equally stupid options that don't fit in the twenty-first century.

To our current political wantabes, who are among the nuttiest I have ever had the misfortune to have rammed down my throat on TV, I want to say this: back up on the phony religion (there's a whole bunch of us who see it for the manipulation it is); quit with the ideologies (they're boring us); figure out what's going to work with what most of want: a stable workable approach to life; quit with your theories in favor of what works; and spare us your pretenses and hypocrisy.

If the American tradition is hard work and speaking straight--here I am. Catch up with me if you can.

The Season of Our Discontent: The Occupy Movement, or am I just being Cassandra?

2011-11-20T10:56:00.000-08:00

I am getting sick to tears of people saying the Occupy movements have no "goals" and no "platform" so there's no way to tell "what they want." I gnash my teeth when I hear this--and I hear it from people close to me. They are completely missing the point.

The goals of the occupy movement are two: first: finding a way to let people have a say in decisions currently being made far above their heads by big money; and, two, allowing the expression of massive disgust with our political structures. Right now, approval of Congress stands at 9%. Where is the 91% going to find an outlet beyond sterile polls in the media that elected officials ignore at will?

Obviously, some of the disgusted among us joined the Tea Party. Others took their tents to city squares and plazas. It's the same impulse, but with entirely different targets. The Tea Partiers want to dismantle government as the answer to everything. The Occupiers want reins on corporations and the wealthy.

And let's be clear about it: there are anarchists in both groups.

The problem with dismantling government is the dog-eat-dog culture that's left. Without regulation, we get tainted food, predatory business, and a culture of cheating. Human beings are not very nice to one another--and a good read of the Bible shows it has always been so. To people who want to hit me over the head with the Bible: please read all of it first.

The problem with curtailing business is the possible discouragement of innovation and new products. No one wants to do that.

But we are blind fools if we don't recognize the corruption and greed in our system of capital investment and stockholders. One small example: Our local toll road (state supported by bonds) is raising its prices. When their books were looked into, it turns out they have been paying multimillion dollar bonuses and perks to the employees and board. When called on it, they said, essentially, "Everyone's doing it." They're probably right.

And where is this all headed?

The problem for the nation is that the Tea Partiers are older, richer, and white and believe in the mantra of arming themselves under the rubric of "Law and Order," which is largely enforced by the local police. The Occupy movement is younger, many of whom have little to lose anymore, and willing to use their bodies as a form of political protest.

Hello---does anyone else beside me see a looming problem? Meanwhile, locked in ideological debate over trivial crap and playing at being ideologically pure rather than protecting the country, Congress plays Nero's fiddle for the coming onflagration.

So, yes, the Occupy movement grew up out of frustration and it prides itself on being disorganized. It leaves to us how we implement it, but it tells us we are not alone in our discontent.

So what can we do?

In my case, I will no longer drive on our toll road. I will also try to punish manipulation by withholding my patronage. Today, Sid bought a jar of Heinz gravy. The label said $1 off. The implication was clear: behind the label was a coupon for the gravy. When he looked behind the label, it was a dollar off something else entirely. If I ever buy anything made by Heinz again, I am complicit in their cheat.

Admittedly, Ketchup is not difficult to make and is hardly likely to hit Heinz very hard. So, in my own small way I shall go further to support my local small business. I'm going to drive to a local egg coop and look at how they treat the poultry. If I'm satisfied, I'll join and buy my eggs from them in preference to the inhumane treatment in large processing plants. I've been to one. They stink from the carcasses of dead birds and not just the guano.

For me, the Occupy movement is a call to look at myself. Who am I? What do I believe? What is my ethical responsibility to the planet, to human beings, and to our fellow travelers. Sorry--I do not include corporations or the wealthy among those for whom I should feel responsible. Neither did Christ--for you Bible thumpers.

If some of the the rest of us go through this same process, I would say that the Occupy movement has already achieved one of its goals. We all ought to be out there with them because it's the only thing on the horizon with at least a glimmer of hope for the future. We could use some right about now.

Revisionist Politics and the Bible

2011-10-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

Just when I think I've heard it all, something comes along to remind me that we probably will never find bottom for human willful stupidity. I lived (somewhat) through Sarah Palin's rewriting of American history--after all, I have some degree of familial interest in the ride of Paul Revere since my grandfather's family were redcoats and probably there--but Republican hopeful Cain leaves me in tears wondering if that party can field a candidate on this side of ignorant.

For those who don't know what I am talking about, Mr. Cain pronounced Jesus Christ a conservative. Has he read the gospels? Or is he just spouting the Christian brand and hoping that someone salutes without looking too far into things.

Jesus Christ a conservative. Please! I am no religionist. I think all religions are dangerous, none less so that the Christian. However, I do this on the basis of knowledge. I know the enemy. I have actually read the Bible, not just listened to the cherry pickings and pretty sayings (King James version) spouted as homilies on Sundays before a fidgeting congregation already looking at their watches. In particular, I have read (and studied) the gospels, which are the purported history of the Christ.

So what do I learn. Christ does not like bankers. In fact, he hates them and drives them out of the temple. He also doesn't like rich people. They have as much chance of getting into heaven as a camel passing through the eye of a needle. In other words, zippo. A young man came to Christ as asked what he had to do to earn heaven. "Give away all your stuff to the poor," he was told. The young man went away "troubled." I'll bet he did. Why should he give away his ipod, his car, his flatscreen to undeserving illegals here to drain his tax money. Christ's minstry was to the poor, the undertrodden, the disinfranchised, and we're not talking about people earning less than $200,000. Christ would tell us that any of us with anything to our name should give all way and embrace a life of poverty.

Compare this with the Puritan ideas (those nasty little folk that England threw out because they were obnoxious) that wealth means that god approves of you. Not in the New Testament he doesn't. The Old Testament is a different cup of tea. But that's where it says people can own slaves, turn their daughters into prostitutes, and stone people to death. Hello, anyone. If you are following the Old Testament, you are not Christian (logic: you have to follow Christ to be Christian). Christ apparently negotiated a deal for humans; he got god to back off, but notice that hell isn't there in the OT. It shows up in the NT with the Christian era, thus allowing the born-again movement and thunder and brimstone preachers.

The bible and its supporters are neither consistent nor even particularly informed about the document they like to hit us over the head with.

No, Mr. Cain, you claimed Christ as so many have before you--to justify wars, to justify killing those you don't like, to justify persecuting others, to justify slavery in the South. But this man was no con servative. In fact, he would have been the first to tell you that your job was your fellow man, not supporting those who make money off his misery. Mr. Cain, please accept my wishes for you : pffffft (the sound of your deflation.)

Our Corporate Masters

2011-10-06T02:32:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I listened to an interview on Public Radio. A fellow from some free enterprise institute was asked if he thought there was corporate responsibility for creating jobs in this country. His reply was predictable but unusually chilling in the coldness of his certainty.

Personnel are a just an entry in the expenses column, he said. Asking a corpotation to hire more people is the same as asking them to raise their expenses. Providing jobs is not their responsibility. Corporations owe nothing beyond making profit. They aren't the same as the government, he said.

Beyond the fact that I made that same argument in a previous blog--corporations are not governments--I find his easy dismissal of any responsibility beyong lining the pockets of the wealthy to be repulsive.

If I had been interviewing this cold fish, I would have asked him why, given that corporations exist only to generate profit, they insist on doing their best to prevent the government from governing the people it has sworn to serve. Instead of demanding greater and greater profit squeezed from public resources, why aren't they out there being businesses instead of buying our legislators and lobbying for laws to the own advantage.?If they are not governments, what are they doing on Capitol Hill in the first place. That, supposedly, is where governing goes on, not in the boardrooms and the CEO bathrooms.

Instead of demanding concessions from us taxpayers, they should be paying us for the privilege of having access to our markets.

By any measure, our largest corporations have done well in this country except when their own greed has pulled them down. Economists now look on them as small nations in their own right. Walmart Stores, for example, ranks twenty-second in GDP revenues when compared with the economic resources of the world's nations. That's right--in comparison with national GDPs, Royal Dutch Shell ranks thirty-fourth, Exxon Mobile is thirty-fifth, and Toyota ranks forty-fourth. The only things larger than these corporations are countries such as the US (still the world's largest economy) and other nations including (in order) Japan, China, Germany, France, and the UK.

Looked at another way, of the top 100 economies in the world, 44 are corporations. The figures are not mine. I borrow them from the work of Tracy Keyes, Director of Strategy Dynames Global Limited and Thomas Malnight, professor of strategy and general management.

Figures such as these make it very difficult to feel sympathy for pathetic bleats regarding the need for ever yet more concessions and the continuance of subsidies that serve only to enrich the bonus checks of higher management. It doesn't make for compelling reading when what jobs remain in this country (free trade ventures seemingly only free to the extent that our jobs are freed to other countries) are held hostage to the corporate desire to wring yet more profits as the expense of this nation.

I'm not surprised that we are seeing the start of a grassroots movement that is spreading across the country. People are staring to recognize how much we are at the mercy of our corporate masters.

Just in the food industry, they centralize production for efficiency, destroy our local businesses by undercutting costs, and then feed us foods laced with chemicals to preserve them while they are shipped across the country to us. They claim lucrative farm subsidies and then drive out the smaller farms who are unable to compete. All this is justified by giving us more "choice" and lower prices. The logical end place for this is very hard to comtemplate. They will utterly control our food.

In the face of this, I have resolved to buy local wherever I can, although how much can one do in the face of oil companies with incomes larger than most of the nations of the world?

I, for one, hope this occupy Wall Street movement continues because the stakes are very high. I read somewhere that we have 300 million guns in this country. Let's hope we can bring about peaceful change and have our voices heard. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

The Two Questions to Ask of Politics

2011-09-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Like much of the rest of the world, the US is in the middle of a social revolution that none of us likes, mostly because it is launching us into the unknown. We stand helplessly watching as our banks, governments--and even the manufacturers we once trusted--almost casually break their bonds with us.

Many now long for a more familiar world. It's not that life in the past was so wonderfully simple. It was just more predictable. People knew the rules, and there was comfort knowing they were in place and could be seen working. Today, it seems that the people who get rewarded are the ones who not only don't follow the rules but act as if they never existed.

Yesterday, the BBC reported yet another trader scandal in Switzerland where one man has cost his employing bank two billion Euros. The reporter commented that not only had the bank obviously not learned anything from the last round of losses in 2008, but that the trader had no motive to care since he was being paid anyway and not working with his own money. In other words, there was nothing in place to prevent him gambling with other people's money--probably because there's a fifty-fifty chance that the gamble might make a lot of money (and grow bonuses). We wouldn't hear about the gains except on the bank's annual statement; the losses, however, make the front page. It will probably cost the trader's job as a public penance. But it's really the fault of the bank's policy that permitted it. Money conquers all.

Given all the self-interested scrambling for money at all costs, it's rare to come across someone who asks who in the hell we are as a people and what makes us "us." Yet, this is exactly what we need to be doing.

The problem is that rather than self-evaluation, it's much easier to look around for others to blame. It can't be us, people say, we are still the good, solid people we always were: it's the poor, the minorities, the people who have children they can't support, the sick, the "illegals" who take handouts, and those who won't take responsibility for themselves--they're the reasons things aren't going well. We do that, of course, without looking at our roles in such things as the housing crisis--"investing" in houses we couldn't afford and planned to flip for a profit, until of course, that couldn't be done anymore because so many people had been doing their own get-rich scheming.

As I see it, the most frightening part of all this is how this country's anger is being turned into an ugly emotional bloodbath. People are voting race and class rather than looking to the future. Unfortunately, the inevitable outcome of all the hate will be a civil war fought along racial and class lines. Is this what we really want? Wasn't one civil war enough? And won't those screaming about big government now be among the first to demand its intervention when riots hit suburbia as in London--just when the government has been emasculated and the states aren't strong enough to respond?

This gloom and doom is all well and good, you may be saying, but so what? If it's going to happen it's going to happen. Anyway, what can one voice and one vote do? Aren't I better off just buying a gun and living out in the country?

Well, I guess one can indeed buy a shotgun (the arms manufacturers would love that), but civil wars have a nasty habit of finding even the hidden and no one will be safe if the money collapses and the economy tanks.

Instead, I would argue the most important thing we can do is make sure we know what it is we are casting that one vote for. That starts with us really taking responsibility for ourselves and beginning to think about politics rather than emotionally reacting to what the corporate media chooses to feed us (and if you trust the media, remember the influence peddling, corruption, and fall of the Murdoch news empire).

The other day I read a commentary that suggested it was hard to understand politics unless one had participated directly or been on the front lines. Well, I've been on the front lines. For a year, I worked the university's lobbying team at a state legislature. I came away with an eye-opening education and a deep cynicism that led me to ask two questions of everything proposed or passed. These questions are 1) Who is paying? and 2) Who is benefiting? In the case of the latter, if there was any benefit to the person supposedly being served, it was incidental. The real beneficiaries were often hidden and silent.

I found that the best way to get to the bottom of political will and motivation was to step aside from the distractions. For us, that means forget about minorities and whether they are showing poverty fat when they shop at Walmart; forget about who is paying what in taxes; forget about whether undeserving people are getting medical care; forget about whether one group seems to get more breaks than another. These are the manipulations that prevent us from looking at the far more serious issues. Our attention is being deliberately drawn away from what matters.

Instead, ask the questions.

1) Who is paying? In the case of the current political upheaval, who is funding it? Answer: You have a political pressure group on the Right paid for by corporate interests. You also have a Congress on both sides that has been bought and sold by corporate interests.

2) Who is benefiting? Answer: corporate interests who gain from war, gain from tax benefits and advantages, and gain from being designated "people" by the US Supreme Court. All we gain is the emotional excitement of fighting with one another while the economic riches of this country are quietly moved to off-shore subsidiaries.

It's not a question of "big, bad corporations," but you have to look at them objectively. Our "reliable" US brands have been sold to the cheapest labor markets. We are now just expected to serve them as silent, "reliable" consumers, although how much longer we can afford to buy any of their products is questionable with so many of us now living in poverty. Many corporations, however, are enjoying record profits.

In fact, our corporations are now becoming our shadow government, wielding social power through the jobs they offer (those that still remain in this country) since many of them don't pay taxes. Of course they wouldn't hire during a presidency they don't approve of. They'll sabotage any effort made during this administration.

With the right poltical leadership, our corporations will open up minimum-wage jobs by the score, with no benefits of course (they'll leave that the US health care plan). By then, the long-term unemployed will be so glad to get any job they won't complain. All responsibility for healthcare benefits will be abdicated to what's left of the US Government (just as they did with pension plans). They will also support privatizing Social Security (not because it's bankrupt--it's absolutely not) because there is a large sum of money that could be "managed" into high corporate salaries and potential profits, once they figure out how to pare payments to the people who bought this insurance and paid for it all their lives.

When this all plays out, it will be a charade. Congress will "bend" to the will of the Tea Party all the while serving corporate interests because "of the jobs they provide." In fact, I'm prepared to believe that the entire economic crisis is entirely artificial. Some may say I am being unduly harsh on our corporations--but our memories are short and I find myself doubtful of their ability to control themselves. Remember Enron, anyone? The BP shortcuts? Countrywide?

Biscotti Jars and China

2011-09-04T18:24:00.000-07:00

I went out shopping today. It's one of life's pleasures, as long, that is, that I can find things that I want to have in my life. It didn't take long, however, before I began questioning whether the things on offer would really meet that criteria. In other words, were the things being offered for me to buy really the things I wanted to have?

There's a bit of a story here. A few weeks ago, I met Kimi in Las Vegas to celebrate our August birthdays. Beides the slots, one of my favorite things is to go see the garden display at the Bellaggio Hotel. It's always artistic and dramatic and once we've taken pictures, I like to browse the shops around it. This time, I went into one that specializes in Italian imports. I fell in love with a biscotti jar. It was terra cotta and showed the Tuscan countryside with a villa, cypresse (cypress trees), and farm implements--very traditional. I debated for a long time and the only thing that prevented me from buying it was the problem of getting it home on the plane. If I'd had my car there, it would have been a done deal.

Back home in Denver, I regretted my decision. So, I trekked off to Park Meadowns Mall (one of our upscale shopping centers) today, looking for a biscotti jar made in Italy or Portugal. I couldn't find one. Oh there were biscotti or comparable jars all right, but invariably, they were what I consider to be fakes. They were made in China. There was no way I would buy one of them. And I'm not talking about Penneys or Sears here. I'm talking about Dillards and Sonoma-Williams. The latter did have things from Portugal and France, for which I commend them, but there were all too many things that were mere imitations, and not always the best.

This led me to consider the larger meaninng of my quest to find something authentic.What does it mean to us as a society? All I can conclude is that for every thing we buy made in China, we deprive someone in Europe and the US of their jobs just so we can buy cheap imitiations. I suppose I should say someones plural because it takes a lot more than one person to make something of lasting value. I can see cheap-o stuff flooding the discount shops like WalMart and Kmart and even Target, but when it invades even our upper scale shops it means that these store also condone peddling this stuff to us. I have to wonder not only about them but also about the corporations supplying them. Have we become so addicted to accumulation that we don't even care what we collect?

The corporations with their bottom line of squeezing every penny are no small part of this. They slap their names on things they have made outside the country, claiming they need a sweatshop workforce to be competitive. What they are really doing is sending our jobs overseas to get things made more cheaply, and I do put the emphasis on cheap. In going offshore, I think they underestimate us seriously and they run the risk of us boycotting them, which they will deserve.

Today, I went out looking for beauty and quality. I found mere imitations, a cynical assumption of the style of another country to be paraded as real because our corporations have equally cynically assumed we will satisfied by it. From what I can gather, imitation has been China's method--copy the work and design of some other county and sell it cheaper. I, for one, do not see buying cheap stuff as satisfying anymore. In the future, I will look for where something is made and choose accordingly.

I can't be the only one feeling this way. I have to believe there might even be room for a new set of stores called Made in the USA or Not Made in China. Maybe the choices in them would not be as numerous. But I would feel much better knowing where my money is going.

In the meantime, I guess I will just have to go back to Las Vegas and hope they still have the biscotti jar.

In the Congressional Sand Box

2011-08-03T21:21:00.000-07:00

Well, they raised the national debt ceiling and agreed to some sort of budget reduction and everyone is running around with the usual posturing: both sides claim not to be happy with the outcome and both say they will send the most intractible politicians to the joint reduction committee. The result: they've kicked the budget wars down the road to where they will simply recur in stalemate in this committee. We raised the debt ceiling, which most people agreed had to be done, and scored very little in political gain or common good for the country.

And all this so the super rich don't have to pay their share of the taxes? Please--those of you who argue that letting the rich keep their money creates jobs--where are they? The rich have kept their money in unprecedented amounts, so where's the employment?

If anyone wants to see the result of this so-called budget trimming, they should look at the FAA budget which Congress failed to authorize. Did we save money by freezing the FAA budget as the most naive Tea Baggers believe? Hell no! The Federal government has lost $250 million in fees so far that would ordinarily go into the public coffer. This money is going into the hands of the delighted airlines as windfall profit. This is exactly what is going to happen with all these efforts to reduce the national debt because these people are short-sighted and trying to apply the rules of microeconomics, such things as the home and business budget, onto macroeconimcs, finances written large as in national budgets and multinational corporate funds, some of which are larger than the entire funding base of the U.S.

I'm sorry Tea Baggers, but the rules of macroeconomics are vastly different from those of microeconomics. If you cut household spending you can save a few dollars and the benefit is personal. If you cut government spending, you cut jobs, contracts, and services. Most Tea Bagger objections seem to be based on spending money for the services sector. But which services are they talking about? the inspection of our food? the operation of our air lanes? the protection of our coasts? the provision of meals to disabled seniors? school lunches for the neediest children? the regulation of our businesses and the professional services we provide to one another? the inspectors who try to ensure that our houses don't collapse if we slam the front doors?

I would ask them to keep in mind that every onerous rule and regulation is there because someone cheated. It's like the TSA: we all pay the price for one idiot who tried to blow up an aircraft by lighting his shoe laces. There's a reason for them all and they may seem silly, but they exist because of us.

Which brings me to the purpose of this blog. If there is to be credible, careful pruning of our national investment in this country--and that's what government spending is, an investment--we need to pare the choices carefully with an eye to getting the most service for our money.

Looked on this way, Planned Parenthood, for example, provides care to womem who otherwise lack medical services--cutting it out because it also provides abortions (less than 10% of what they do) is counterproductive because it costs relatively little, prevents expensive hospitalizations, and saves women's lives. The FAA makes possible the entire airtraffic lanes that crisscross the country and permit flights into and out of this nation. Why on earth would Congress want to have FAA officials working without pay right now and on their own time out of a sense of the importance of their work. Does Congress really want to see airtraffic shut down?

We need a Congress that wields a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.

And what have we got? We have children throwing sand at one another and complaining that daddy hasn't come out to the sandbox to save them from one another.

Why on earth don't we go back to the work of the committee that previously prepared a series of proposed budget reductions. That work has been ignored. Why reinvent everything? Why don't we have some basic economic courses taught on Capitol Hill? Just because someone gets elected doesn't mean they have any sense. They've proved that.

I'm going to hope that the wiser, more experienced heads on Capitol Hill, people like Sherrod Brown of Ohio, can pound some sense into these others. Because when it comes to the budget, and as Shakespeare says, "We have scotch'd the snake, not killed it."

The Media Are Us

2011-07-21T20:51:00.000-07:00

It used to be fashionable to ask Miss America contestants if they thought the media was to blame mounting violence in society. The young woman's reply was always no, she didn't think so, and she came up with some alternative indictment of parents, or schools, or even a crisis in faith.

I was thinking about this the other day as I watched the Murdoch debacle and the demise of the News of the World, and I realized that if I were to turn back the clock and suddenly become nubile while still keeping my experience of years of living, I would beg to differ. Yes, Mr. Parks (that's how far back I go), I would say, the media have a good-sized share of the blame, but so do we all who lapped up squidgy-gate and the rather vulgar conversations between Prince Charles and Camilla. Wherever did we think they got this stuff? We didn't ask because we wanted to know and, after all, they were the wealthy and privileged and it's their duty in life to entertain us. It only counts when the media do it to "ordinary people" like us.

But I'm going to go further and also say that the media have a good sized chunk of the responsibility for the roiling anger consuming this country. The media does not come out (usually) to promote political agendas on the front page. Such opinions are supposedly by-lined and put on the editorial pages, where people can pick and choose which op ed pieces confirm their own prejudices.

But there are subtle ways that the news on the front page can appear to be objective while still presenting a politically slanted view. Let me explain. When I taught college English, I used to tell my students the story of a car accident that supposedly occurred at the bottom of the campus. One car broadsided another. At first I told them that one of the drivers was in his late 80s, just returning from a visit to the doctor's office. The other car was driven by a man in his twenties. Speed was not considered a fctor.

Who might they think was to blame? The wisest ones, onto my ploy, said they didn't know enough. I caught a good number of them assuming that the senior driver was "probably" to blame because everyone "knows" that serniors have declining driving skills.

All right, I'd say, here's some more: the 20 year old driver had a suspended license, there were three other men in the car with him, one of them was partially undresssed, and there were beer cans on the back floor.
My students looked a bit ashamed but then went on to do the same thing. Now, it looked like the younger folk were to blame.

The devil was in the details provided and withheld. And it happens to us all the time if we rely on the media for our information instead of looking more deeply ourselves.

On Tuesday, July 12, The Denver Post ran a front page story with the headline "Draft Ramps Up Kid Rules: The Child-care Lincensing Plan's Focus on Quality Meets Quikc Skepticism." The lead paragraph stressed that the proposed (note: only proposed) rules would "impose (notice that word) sweeping changes on Colorado Licensed child-care centers." The second paragraph quoted "some" child care operators as saying the proposed changes were a "vast overreach." The next paragraph named the operator of three centers who didn't say anything about the overreach business but commented that health and safety needed to be balanced with quality and that there be some flexibility.

By then, all those opposed to government intervention in anything were probably thumping their chair arms and yelling about damned government sticking its nose into everything. This would probably produce a very nice rant if the reader was a tea-bagger, meaning that he or she was probably not going to read the rest of the story on 7A buried inside. Now, on that equivalent of a back page, we learned that the proposals are a draft to be negotiated by the parties involved and that many of the suggested policies were recommended by childcare operators themselves because Colorado is one of bottom states when it comes to regulating early child-care providers.

Looks different doesn't it? The devil was in the order of the details in this account and since the "balance" didn't come until the end, one must conclude that the writer intended to stir things up. In other words, we were snookered and it was a non-story. However, the next day, the Post ran an editorial no less saying that the draft policies went too far as if the story had been credible and only the media reporting had "saved" the day.

Having actually served on some of these committees to propose anything, I know how they work. You throw everything in but the kitchen sink so it can all be negotiated and people can work together as a team to discard anything really unreasonable. That is how democracy and consensus work. In this case, though, the media picked out the controversy, played it up irresponsibly to sell papers, and by doing so fanned the flames of division. Who needs enemies when you have media fighting for readership?

But let's be honest. We get the media we deserve. If we aren't willing to educate ourselves to look skeptically at what is presented to us as fact and if we aren't willing to embrace even a rudimentary form of intellectual engagement with the world--and we're seeing mounting evidence that many of us are not--then we are going to continue being presented with gossip masquerading as truth. Shame on us for settling for this.

What Manner of Insanity?

2011-07-03T16:35:00.000-07:00

I find myself more than discouraged these days--I am actually sickened by the sight of small minds and petty unkindness trying to force itself upon humanity. I am left to wonder what manner of insanity has fallen on this country that urges people to force their will on others in the name of pesonal and repressive theocracies which all too often take the form of repression against women.

Why women? In many societites women are property. They are hidden under veils to prevent men other than their husbands coveting them, mutilated so they are not tempted to enjoy sex, stoned to death when they violate any male-created taboos, uneducated so they are not tempted into independence, and made to understand that their only value is in producing children. If men could have their own children, women would probably be killed at birth.

Let anyone believe I am talking only about the Middle East, which is only the most obvious example of this, we need only to take a look at our own southern and midwestern states, the bastion of political repression and the glorious old Righty values thrust at us by the moral arbiters of "American Values."

Yes, the Righties want a balanced budget--how moral. Yet they plan to have this budget balance by cutting programs for the poor, most of which serve women--those rogues who have been abandoned by their husbands (must have been for cause) and those whom they want to believe are in the country illegally (they creep across the border, dodging the cacti, just so they can go to US emergency rooms to have anchor babies and rack up our national debt.)

Now--I don't mind paying my 18% even if it does go to these "undesirables" but I resent like hell watching super-rich Richties calling for a balanced budget where they are not even on the seesaw. That makes their idea of a balanced budget something theoretical, something to be done by others while they defend paying not a cent and claiming that they "deserve" their money. When they divorce, their settlements run in the millions. When the poor divorce, the women head down into poverty.

Wanting to cut the programs that serve the poor and women shows the real motivation of the Right. They just don't like the poor and they positively froth over women who produce children in poverty, all the while wanting to deny them abortions even in the case of rape. They do this without even trying to recognize that not every woman served by the programs they want to cut is minority, trying to play the system, or popping out welfare babies (remember Reagan?). A whole lot of these women have been abandoned and not by other women. Yet, the Righties want to cut the education that might make these women independent and they want to deny them information about reproduction that might limit unwanted pregnancies.

Anyone? Does this make sense?

Unfortunately, the rhetoric of the Right is nothing new. Every society has beaten up on its women. So why am I so discouraged by something that predicatably recurs? I have to say it's political and it has to do with the matter of will. Right now I have no trust in our political leadership to do the right thing.

Governing a nation as diverse as this one requires leadership to do what is right, not what is ideologically pure. We aren't on the frontier any more. The values that allowed people to fight off bears is not what's needed in an overpopulated world. I want a president who takes a stand. I want to see leadership into the 21 Century not into the 19th.

We have a problem with illegal immigration. Instead of building walls that keep no one out, drop the judgmental nonsense and fix the problem once and for all. If it means issuing work visas, be pragmatic and do it. Quit the self-righteous pontificating. So a lot of people don't like abortion--they also don't like supporting unwanted children. Get over it. No one is forcing anyone to have one and the decision to have one is tragic--leave the woman alone. So people don't like gay marriage. We no longer live in a society that encourages people to have 15 children to populate the country. We don't need more families. The gays are doing us a favor. When they want families, they adopt the neediest children among. Let them have whatever they need to raise these children and if it's marriage to protect their families, so be it.

I want a president who understands the world has changed and doesn't try to conciliate these idiots who still want to live back in the 1800s. President Obama: please stop trying to be a community organizer. These people are too dangerous to deal with. Please start looking at what this country needs to be a civilized nation in the 21st Century. And please stop pandering to the worst among us.

What Would Shakespeare Blog

2011-06-12T19:12:00.000-07:00

Recently, I accept the challenge to imagine what Shakespeare, the greatest writer in our language that ever was, would blog about if he were alive today. I found the experience both amusing and profound. I'm sure he would have laughed at the same pretensions and lunacy as we do, just as I am sure he would be just as depressed at how little we have learned from those before us. We are still the same people, just in different times and settings and, unfortunately, armed with better and more destructive technology.

Here is what I wrote:

One thing about William Shakespeare, he never met a human being he couldn’t bump up into an archetype. His characters were never just people. That’s not how his brain worked. He looked for meaning and played with life by asking questions. What if Aristotle’s idea of the tragic hero could be tweaked, maybe turned upside down, and used to show how we grubby human beings fall short of anything like true heroism? What if a sociopath were to be dropped into the middle of unreflective, morally complacent people—who would win? What if an ambitious man were suddenly shown a short-cut to real power, how would he handle it? Shakespeare populated his world with people faced with moral, ethical, and emotional problems and moved them on his chessboard while he worked out his answers.

In the end, his “answers” had to be partial because unknowable things can be resolved only in the acceptance that “the rest is silence.” But what a journey he took us on.

Shakespeare took his characters where he found them: from history books, from the ranks of the royal courtiers, from everyday people around him. He turned every one into a moral or intellectual lesson. He found no shortage of material in sixteenth-century England, just as he would find no shortage now. The world is still populated by the same greedy, unaware, willfully ignorant, morally complacent, and unreflective types. He would understand modern politics because he had seen it all before.

For example, he wrote about a king who confused the power of his position with his personal authority. “A dog’s obeyed in office,” was the sad lesson that king had to learn. He could have been writing about George Bush. But the lesson he might have drawn from the Bush administration is that just because one has the power to do something (like invade another country) does not mean one should. At the end of the Shakespeare play, the stage is littered with the bodies of the king’s family (you can never just remove a targeted piece of evil like Saddam Hussein, Shakespeare told us, everyone must suffer in the process). The stage at the end of the Bush drama is littered with the deaths of thousands of people who gave their lives abroad and the near death of our economy. A dram of evil, indeed.

What would he have made of Bill Clinton? Here was a man capable of doing good and admirable in so many ways, yet brought down by his own weaknesses. The tragic flaw, Shakespeare might have pointed out, just as Aristotle described it. The rueful Clinton, apparently having learned his lesson, now says he indulged in a sordid affair “because he could.” Prime Shakespeare material. He might have said the same about Representative Weiner.

Or how about the swath of Tea Party candidates? “A flag upon the waters,” Shakespeare would have said. He never liked popular movements anyway. He didn’t trust the people not to be ignorant and just go for popularity.

All in all, Shakespeare wrote about power. His subjects were courtiers, hangers-on become pawns to those in power, women who encouraged murder but wanted to be blameless, parents who destroyed their children, and psychopaths who ruined others just for the experience. Today he easily could find comparable if not exact duplicates. With the internet, he would only need to read the headlines.

Shakespeare was fascinated by the getting, the keeping, the abusing, and the losing of political advantage. Politics and history were his natural milieu. He showed us the truth of Santayana’s comment that those unaware of the past are doomed to repeat it. So, as we head into yet another election cycle, it would behoove us to remember this cynical and yet hopeful observer of humanity, who would advise us that nothing is new under the sun. We could do a lot worse than to go back and and reread his plays.

Growing Old Graciously

2011-06-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

Growing old is something of a conundrum: for something we are told exists only in our minds, people seem to spend every waking hour thinking about it. The problem is that no one quite knows what to do. Even our media is hopelessly conflicted on the subject.

On the one hand, the media hits us with ads for every manner of potion, lotion, hair dye, viagra, and other chemical known to humankind, all designed to prevent or reverse time. We're shown admiring portraits of people who have surgically tightened, smoothed, and sucked away their age, the implication being that if we look like "before" pictures it must mean we are lazy or cheap. Into this category fall those "raging against the light" (to quote Dylan Thomas) and those older men and women who pursue youth by literally pursuing youths, using the mantra, "if I can get away with/afford it, why not?" No one HAS to look old is the mantra that keeps plastic surgeons in their Ferraris.

On the other hand, we are given unctious sermons on accepting ourselves as we are and growing old "gracefully," which seems to mean not whining about getting old, accepting whatever stereotype of age our culture decides to imnpose on us, and showing up on time to babysit the grandchildren. Usually, though, it's tied to appearance as few overweights (even the mild forms) are said to be aging "well."

If we take all this nonsense seriously--which I can't--what, then, are we left with? The apparent choice seems either to take action against a sea of sags ( the solution approved by a society that links appearance to success) or get off the boat and sink beneath the waves (a solution not favored by people who still have alert minds).

Well, I neither desire nor wish to pay for growing old "well," nor do I wish to recede into a rocking chair waiting for the ultimate call. Instead, I propose to grow old "graciously." Allow me to explain.

You are at a busy airport with heavy luggage and someone you don't know offers to help. What do you do?

a. Say you are perfectly capable of handling your things. You're not a cripple, thank you very much. You've got enough money to pay for a porter if you want one.
b. Agree to the help but complain about how things are so rushed these days and warn the person not to damage your suitcase.
c. Although perfectly capable, accept the help with a smile and thanks.

If you chose a), you're still trying to compete with the big dogs in the world of power. If b) you have sunk into self-pity. If c) you are gracious. The person who offered help to a) will walk away muttering about old farts. If b) the person will feel used and manipulated. If c) the person will feel they have done a good deed and, who knows, maybe they'll be a little bit kinder to other people for the rest of the day. The younger folk are so unkind to one another these days, a little genuine humanity and concern for others might go a long way.

Little acts of kindness--the pat on the shoulder I got from the waiter at lunch today, the unexpected offer to open a water bottle with a stuck cap, doors held open a little extra long for me, help pulling my suitcase off the airport carousel--can only be done for children and seniors because we are believed safe to show kindness to. They don't think we're still competing or slighting others--frankly, because we're supposed to be mature and grown beyond egocentrism and greedily grasping for a world that is no longer ours. Some of us anyway.

I believe growing old graciously means providing a model of maturity and compassion for those behind us still locked in the rat race. We don't have to be rich, looking fifteen years younger, and flattening and shaping our aging bodies to compete with the people to whom youth really belongs. We carry with us the marks life has put on us, but we have one thing youth doesn't: we have experience and instead of spouting about the good old days, it would behoove us to behave as a model of them.

Fortunately, experience is one thing that's safe from botox.

To Be Human Is To Lie

2011-05-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

Let me state up front here what I am talking about when I talk about lying. I believe to lie is to be human. I'm not talking about being political. In the case of the latter, I think the case has already been made by far more clever and intellectual thinkers than I. Given the prospect of the next ballot, politicians look no further. They lie because their purpose is to be reelected and getting voted in means accommodating the majority. The cleverest thing successful politicians do is hold a wet thumb to the prevailing winds. I'm not talking about them. I don't feel them worth it.

I'm more concerned with us--the overpopulated population where every person is narcissitic enough to beleive their casual inattention to politics entitles them to an equal vote in its administration, These are the people who hear the slogans, the appeals to prejudice, and the attempts to convince them of their (vastly overblown) superiority. These are the ignorant who flaunt their lack of knowledge as a virtue and claim that obvious disparities in education and understanding are mere intellectual prejudice. Unfortunately, these people, lulled into compacency by the rhetoric of those in power, are the least likley to accept the need for humility. My own bias, which I freely admit, is against these people, many of whom thunp the bible as the answer to all things and --worse, much worse-- preserve their own importance by trying to force others to follow the prescriptive paths they themselves do not follow.

These are the people who, when caught out (as in indiscretions with multiple women), delight in providing a moral twist to their selfish agendas. "I'm only human," they usually bleat, begging for the understanding and forgiveness they deny to others. Their hypocrisy plays as dismally on the national scene. Please, they say, let's not end billions in public subsidies to the oil companies, they're looking for oil for us, they're keeping the prices down at the fuel pumps, they are serving us all. Except, they fail to talk about the corporate self interest: the millions in corporate bonuses that might be threatened by a decrease in public support and the potential drop in the stock value, not to mention the commensurate decrease in fund flowing to the politicians tasked with maintaining all of the above. If they're not directly benefiting from corporate lobbying, they are enthralled with an idea of--you name it--some drummed up idea of America's past, over which they can't or won't exercise the skepticism that is as part of America as apple pie.

I lament the loss of native cynicsim regarding human behavior, greed, and complete selfishness that has marked most of the history of this country. The Founding Fathers got it. Go read Tom Payne on the abuses of power and see how carefully Jefferson and Hamilton balanced competing interests. Give me a break, I want to yell at these people (and maybe some of you say I already do). Instead of looking at these so-called ideals (which never existed), do a group examination of people's motives. See all the rhetoric and see all the backpedaling. We are a bunch of people who lie for our own advantage. Hell, we're not even the only species who does it. We learned at one of my university conferences that even apes will lie to get out of trouble.

Now let me address a miconception here. Some of you may say I am a Democrat because I have opposed so much of the Republical agenda. I did so because it is illogical, uneducated, and stupid. But that does NOT mean I am a Democrat. I am a common-senser. It's just that the Republicans have given me so much more to write about. For example, the world will not end on May 21. Take it from here. Those who spent their savings in anticipation of the world ending are not wise--just broke. The self-deluded Rapturists will still be among us on the 22nd, annoying those of us who see beyond their millennial delusions, paricularly when they try to reset the date by arguing their calculations must have been incorrect.

I have news for rapturists. No one could be so lucky to have things end like that--tied up in a bow by some deity stepping out of the sky. Not a chance. chums.

No, it's just business as usual down here on earth. We will still be the same grubby, selfish little creatures we always have been, trying to put up with the craziness of those who believe they have the answers when most of the rest of us are still trying to find the questions.

Bin Laden--The Fall Out

2011-05-07T07:20:00.000-07:00

Judging from the reactions starting to come in from around the world, I was not the only one with questions about the recent death of Osma bin Laden. Some European nations question the legality of the operation that finally found him, others point to what they see as U.S. violation of its own claim to be a nation of laws--unless inconvenient they are saying--in not bringing the man back for trial. Justice is justice, they say, until the U.S. wants revenge.

But the point for me is not whether there was confusion and wild shots, or whether the U.S. was justified in executing what was obviously a long-planned operation (CIA agents had the house under observation), or whether Pakistan "knew" about what was going to happen (if they didn't "know" bin Laden was there, I suppose they might not "know" about the U.S.) although they certainly know about the billions they are taking from us in aid and for this reason alone their efforts to have it both ways are at best disingenuous.

The point for me is what it means about the U.S. as a nation and as a people.

I was disturbed when I saw the celebrations reported in the media: open-mouthed roars of approval and chants of USA, as if we had just won a medal at the Olympics. We killed a man in his home--and now we celebrate in a surge of mob chanting? It's not whether he was evil--he was. It's about who have we become?

In a way, I understand why the young people chanted. There is so little in our lives where we can feel part of someting larger than we are, something of which we can be proud. The elite branches of our military have some of that pride. Some may still linger with the Space Program. But that's about all I can think of. Sports and athletes used to be a source before all the strikes and lockouts and suspensions tarnished the image. Only sports writers can generate any enthusiasm for athletes paid in the millions and even then it's mostly about the charities that some of them support outside of their day jobs. Religion has become just one more thing to justify killing others, and mega-churches just convince us that it was all about money after all. Capitalism--while still the best system in theory--has devolved into greed and cheating: who can be proud of corporations who illegally foreclosed on active-duty military thus saving billions and are now offering only millions in restitution, all the while offering bonuses to the executives responsible? Even the Olympics has become merely a medal chase. And our media and literature seldom call us to become our better selves.

So I get it: for one brief moment, capturing bin Laden appeared to be something that could give young people the feeling of being part of something beautiful and something meaningful. The last times we had that feeling was when WWII was over and when we landed on the Moon. Those were jubilant moments of which to be proud.

But where is the pride now? My Tea Party acquaintance has found some in the bin Laden raid. "See," he says, "torture works." Is that really the message he wishes to draw from this? I find it very difficult to be proud to be part of a nation that promotes torture. I don't wake in the morning feeling good about human beings being water boarded. I was raised to believe that the US represented good things and that it was enemy who did things like that. I also don't feel good about being part of a country that values and rewards selfishness and cheating.

I had hoped that President Obama might build on the swell of community that got him elected because it was a mighty gathering of young people who opened the office to him, united to defeat the status quo and the ugly posturing of many politicians. But it was only a dream. No one person could stand against so many entrenched interests although he has tried his best.

So where do I end up? I feel strongly that we as a nation must decide what we want to be known for. Are we a people who cheat, let our elderly freeze to the floor in their unheated apartments, let children starve because we don't like their parents, deny education to the next generation because we want to go on our cruises, destroy the planet because it's there to make us money, and loot from one another after a disaster because we can? Will we go into the history books as a nation of dog-eat-dog?

I'm sorry. But it will take a lot more than assassinating a man to get me feeling proud of being alive.

Bin Laden

2011-05-03T14:37:00.000-07:00

Am I the only one disturbed by the open-mouthed glee shown in the media at the news of Osama bin Laden's death? Is no one else reminded of the tasteless rubbing of the US flag in the face of the statue of Saddam during the Iraq war? Am I alone in the finding the display almost adolescent and lacking in good manners? Surely we are more mature than this as a country?

No one denies the horror of 9/11 nor the provocations provided by bin Laden's terror group. But he'd been silent of late, showing up in videotape every once in a while like Marley's ghost to shake his chains and threaten death and damnation. I considered the Taliban, with its murderous treatment of women, its diffused terror cells, and its appeal to religious fanaticism to be far more relevant. In this new world of horror, bin Laden had become a side issue, a non sequitur, at best a mere symbol while the real damage was being done elsewhere.

My reaction to his death? No jubilance, I assure you. My thoughts go to the 6000 lives, the billions of dollars, and the political posturing we had to endure to catch this one man. I also think about how little this is going to mean in terms of the terror. The killing won't stop. The flow of our national resources out of the country won't stop. Our armies will not come home any sooner. Other, smaller terror units will take up the slack of violence, like the Greek myth of the multi-headed hydra: you cut off one head and two more grow. So we caught and killed Osama bin Laden--so what is different today than it was yesterday?

Instead of such jubilance and glee, surely we would have been better off bowing our heads for the lives lost on 9/11 and the thousands since. What we see in the media is mere revenge. I would like to think we were more thoughtful and self-aware than that.

The New Republicans

2011-04-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, the Republican Party was something I could and did vote for. It stood for a set of principles that made sense from a particular, kind of old frontier point of view. There was a rallying call for independence, self-reliance, and a thoughtful Buckleyesque take on politics. William Buckley was persuasive, honorable, arrogant (of course) but above all rational. The man thought. While I didn't agree with him on all things, I felt I could go to him for intelligent engagement with the issues. I felt I had a choice between Democrat and Republican on the basis of two sincere but different approaches to the common goal of building and sustaining the US.

My god--what a difference fifty years makes.

What does the Republican party stand for now? Is Donald Trump the best they can do? What happened to intellect? What even has happened to seeking the good of the country? We elected a Republican government and they proceeded to pillage the country and enrich themselves. John Boehner now says they are willing to let the US default They throw around threats like they know what they're doing.

Let the US default? Here we go: over time, our money tanks, food heads for the stratosphere because we import so much of it. Oil? with our valueless money, consider how much welfare BP and the others will extend us. Plan to stay wherever the oil crisis finds you. Our houses become worthless because no one can afford one. Imports will zoom in cost, hence causing massive layoffs among industries relying on them. Our businesses and corporations will immediately leave the country as the money flows into more stable currencies--hence more unemployment. Inflation will run rampant as people fight over what little food and supplies there are left. If you think the US has a problem with gangs, wait until there's no food. So, my Canadian friends, if this happens, I'd advise you to get your money out while you can.

In other words, the anarchists will have won. And if the Republicans wanted to destroy governmemnt, they've done it and taken us along with them. But why doesn't that surprise me? They've been planning for this: busy feathering their own nests to protect themselves--it's the poor and the minorites and the elderly--the drains on the economy in their eyes, who will bear it. The very people they've fulminated against from pulpits and stumps. I guess these new republicans really do believe in the rapture and that starving half the country to death is just part of the prophecy.

And now Obama has released his birth certificate. Too bad for the birthers. Obama WAS born in Hawaii--just as I for one said--and at Kapiolani Hospital--just as I said--I SAW his mother, for god's sake. But now birthing has gone--the harassment won't stop. It never does with bullies--and that's what the Republicans have become. Trump is implying that Obama got into Harvard (thereby denying some white good old boy --like Bush I suppose) because he was an undeserving minority. Obama came from the most prestigious, expensive, and storied private school in the State of Hawaii, Punahou School. Punahou graudates GO to Harvard. It's expected. The fact that Obama graduated from Harvard with highest honors doesn't count. Trump himself went to business school at the University of Pennsylvania--was he denied a place at Harvard by some undeserving minority? He'll demand Obama's school records so he can play admissions officer. Come on, you idiot. Let's have something useful rather than the rallying of the National Enquirer-addled.

And if you are going down that silly path--and it looks like you are--then as someone who WAS involved with universities and their admissions policies, let me tell you that applicants with high scores are turned down everyday in favor of others who show the potential to grow. If high scores were all that was asked for, Cal-Berkeley would be 100% Asian. Plus many students have a rotten first year in university (if the university is any good). Things haven't settled down for them yet. The transition hasn't been made from high school to college. I earned less than a 2.0 (C) for my first semester average. Next semester I earned a 3.5 (B plus) then some semesters earned straight As after that. I graduated with honors but did not make Phi Beta Kappa because of that first semester. I earned a 3.8 for my Master's work and straight As on my Ph.D. coursework. It's called giving people a chance and it's supposed to be an American virtue.

I can keep on shouting these things till the cows come home, but I have little chance of persuading anyone any more than my one voice could on the birth certificate. I want these clowns in D.C. to get off this posturing, understand that Tea Party yelling is only one political force among many others, and take a long look at who has bought Congress. But no--it won't happen. These people want to fritter their time believing the worst necause they just don't like Obama. In fact, let's be honest, they just don't like us.

The Budget According to Faith

2011-04-09T11:36:00.000-07:00

If ever we needed proof of the political power of money, we have only to look at the latest craziness in Washington D.C. From watching the posturing and the namecalling, one can easily see it's not about the budget--it never was--it's about cramming social and economic philosophy down the gullets of everyone else. It's budget by a series of faiths and beliefs offered without a shred of evidence beyond mere enthusiam. You can't debate this nonsense rationally because people are entrenched in what they think they "know" about economics--without ever having studied it--and about human behavior--without ever having examined their own.

Does this sound like religion anyone? I think so. We now have budget built by enthusiasm and faith.

On the one hand, we have those with "faith" in the free enterprise system. They don't know much about it really except that they think they'll get jobs from it and it fits in with their illusions about what it means to be the type of personality they think they approve of (while not living up to the standards they want to impose on others). Notice--most of these types are over 55 and they aren't calling for changes for that age demographic. Who do they think they are: Congress? These folk are paid for by corporate leaders (notice who's funding the Tea Party), a fact they ignore because they are too busy trying to legislate punishment for people who a) don't have much money--how dare they exist? b) women who want to control reproduction--they should be practicing abstinence, and c) anyone who wants an education--if their parents couldn't afford to send them to decent schools they shouldn't have had them.

Primitive, Old Testament stuff--but how satisfying to the rich who can feel morally superior.

On the other hand, we have those with "faith" in the economic theory of spending ourselves rich. If we have to thank Reagan for the trickle down theory which turned out to have dams, we can thank Keynesian economics for the idea of government manipulation in the economy.

Now, I have NO problem with government presence in the economy and financial markets because the equation is simple--down goes policy up goes greed. Think back to Enron. The California legislator who pushed for deregulation of the California power grid didn't even bother to run again as his promises of benefit sank amidst the rolling black-outs. There are things the government should control in the public interest.

But, government is hampered by too many competing interests. Every one of the regulations put on industry and investment is there because someone gamed the system. If nobody cheated, we wouldn't need regulations. However, believing that we can anticipate every single way that people can cheat one another or screw the system just leads to a mares nest of regulations that ultimately protect no one. And it's not just business who cheats--there are plenty of the unrich who are gaming the entitlement programs too. We live in a climate of cheating--but that's something we need to address rather than just pointing fingers at the other side while ignoring our own responsibility.

We need common sense--not slogans, not winks, not private conflicts of interest, not legislators whose only purpose is reelection and lining up a cushy job later. We need rational heads and a national debate over where in the heck we are headed as a country. I really wish our current administration would cease trying to moderate and conciliate amidst this very ugly climate; let's cease the name-calling and have that unpleasant conversation in which everyone (including the rich) are both part of the problem and part of the solution.

In the meantime, save me from the enthusiastic--please.

Speaking of Clowns

2011-04-02T20:31:00.000-07:00

I was wondering who was going to jump out as another clown from Commedia dell'Arte (sorry, I misspelled it last blog--it's been some time since I was in graduate school studying the Italian theatre) when abricadabra, there he was.

He of the "You're fired" fame. Donald Trump. All of a sudden he's raising the birther theories again but this time also accusing Obama of plagiarism. The first charge has been disputed by the State of Hawaii so many times that the courts have ruled law suits over the matter frivolous and refused to hear them. Tiresome.

Re the second charge: No one has ever come forward to claim any authorship of Obama's work, and even with confidentiality clauses (trust me, I'm a writer) little words slip out here and there that lay hints. I've never heard a thing about Obama's work. Until I see proof rather than speculation, I'm not going to fall for this one.

What I can't figure out is why Trump and why now?

Since I love conspiracy theories--almost as good as millennium theories about the end of the world--let me try second guessing possible reasons. My first thought was that by taking the Tea Party rhetoric to its ultimate extreme, he was setting himself up to divert attention from Ms. Palin. Here would be someone unhinged enough to make her look reasonable. I have noticed lately that she's been keeping a low profile, even going over to Israel and trying to look informed. Could he be trying to help her? After all, she said recently that Obama's birth should be off the political table. That won't go down well with the radical fringe, but might sell a bit better to the more moderate (and much larger) block of voters.

But then I wondered if that was too obvious. What if there is something more devious? What if he was really wanting to run for president? What if his sudden attack on Obama is also an attack on Ms. Palin? Does he think she's gone soft? Does he think he can pick up her fringe and parlay his business background and his television exposure into a legitimate run? But then, why has he joined Fox when there are campaign laws against media exposure that gives unfair advantage?

I wish I could see some sort of strategy that might make me respect him. I weep for some intelligence rather than namecalling and lies among our political leaders, but I suppose that's asking too much is this world of dumbed down. We have no public intellectuals anymore--no William Buckleys for example--who can make sense of the political quagmire this country wallows in. We have only media "personalities", many of whom make their living by outdoing one another in attacking and yelling.

But then--on the other hand, maybe I'm overthinking this. Maybe Trump has joined Fox because that's where he belongs. If that's the case, Mr. Trump has done one honest thing.

In the words of Stephen Sondheim, "So send in the clowns/ there have to be clowns/ don't worry they're here."

Commedia del'arte and US Politics

2011-03-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

We're just back from a cruise to the Mexican Riviera (Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas) and packing up, getting ready to turn the RV over to its new owner and transport ourselves back home. The RV experience has been informative, but it turns out that we are bricks and mortar people after all. With the end now in view, we are barn sour, in the way of horses that really don't want to be out on the trail and are longing for home. Yes, definitely barn sour.

Admittedly, this feeling of wanting to get everything over may be impulsive, but it is entirely human. When there's an end to something, we all tend to look forward and want to be on our way to the next part of our lives. In many cases, though, there's rather more at work. It certainly is so in my case. I want to get on the road because I am tired of being the only one around here willing to disagree with everyone.

I felt somewhat the same way on the cruise as I have in the park. Mostly, the people on the cruise were the same (white, middle class, comfortable, tending to Tea Party) or else were reluctant to admit they had other ideas until they were alone. I, of course, being me, twitted some of them, only to be met with awkward expressions of "Well, eveyone has an opinion." That this was a euphemism became clear when several told me later that they fully agreed with me.

I am now of the conclusion that many US citizens have been silenced by the posturings of the noisiest among us and have retreated into a type of resignation to avoid trouble. Only privately are they are willing to tell me that Ms. Palin, one of my previous targets in this blog, scares them. Indeed she should, since our lady of the plattitudes and the barmaid's wink, represents the dumbing down of our education, political, and cultural lives.

Now, I am not really into destroying dinner conversations--although on occasion I have managed this extremely well--but I am getting really tired of maintaining polite silence so no one is offended. For heaven's sake, how long have we been so politicially delicate that we have to consider every opinion or crackpot idea as equally valid? Am I really supposed to be silent and agreeable when I get e-mails presenting me with a new "game" whereby I can earn points for shooting illegals running across the border, one of them a pregnant woman pulling two children behind her?

I'm sorry, World, there are opinions and arguments based on junk science, historically incorrect facts, prejudice, and just plain ignorance. Not all opinions are equally valid. Many, in fact, should be exposed post haste because they are dangerous, ill-intended, and mean. Here are a few of my favorites:

1. The word god does not appear in the US Constitution--not even once--and that was deliberate.

2. Recent claims that the southern states seceded in order to protect states' rights ignore the fact that the rights the states were protecting were to keep slaves, something the southern states said quite clearly at the time.

3. The link between illegal immigration and crime isn't proved. Here in Arizona, the controversial sherrif Joe Arpaio, ran for office on cracking down on illegal immigrants to reduce crime; in fact, his county is the only one where crime actually increased depite detaining record numbers of illegals. No one seems to care, which suggests the voters like his message rather than his results.

4. Slashing education budgets does not assure efficiency and effectiveness. Also here in Arizona, legislators believe there is "administrative waste" with schools paying "exorbitant" salaries to administrators. The newspaper did a careful analysis this week and found that the schools here pay less in administrative costs than in other states and, in the wake of budget cuts, have been using whatever extra money might have gone into the classroom on such basic needs as building maintenance.

I could go on.

It's all very well to talk about having wrong-headed ideas aired so there can be a collision of truth and error and thereby some education, but I'm not seeing the second part of this process happen. Everyone is being so polite that the errors are never exposed. What happens then is that by sheer repetition, people believe something to be true because they've heard it over and over and it's never been challenged.

Me being me, I have my own theories about how to challenge the foolishness. Henceforth, I intend not to dignify ignorance by trying to argue with it and point out its errors. I intend to use humor.

So let me begin by saying that I consider Ms. Palin (let me start with her since she's such an obvious target) to be a great comic character. She belongs in the Italian Commedia del'arte as one of the clowns. Let's call her the harlequiness and describe her as a mischevous practical joker. She's known by her costume, a diamond design in bright, fashionable colors and a dunce cap on her head. On stage, she gets into foolish scrapes by trying to meddle in other people's business, and when she is caught, she simpers and tries to get out of trouble by using her charm and glamor. She is paired with an equally foolish grandfatherly figure who rubs her arm in a comic attempt at seduction. She is basically just silly until she or some of the others take her seriously; then she becomes pompous and self-important and things become confused and mixed up until she is exposed amidst audience laughter. In the end, she's just one of the clowns Shakespeare used to bring some levity to the happenings of the important people in his plays, sort of a female Bottom from Midsummer's Night's Dream.

This is how I am going to look at her from her on, along with the other clowns like the Tea Party media voices. I invite you to join me in laughing at the clowns, along with the preoverbial emperor, for their lack of clothing.

I am the Planet: Hear Me

2011-02-23T09:50:00.000-08:00

For the last thousand years, the occupants of this planet have been pursuing a weird form of self-adulation. They have created gods in their own image, imagined these gods to be benevolent parents conferring the goods and benefitrs of the planet upon them, and believed that their own self-generated impulses to be absolute truth. The planet begs to differ.

Today, we see the planet start to reassert itself. Our religions may tell us we are a god's special creation, and we may be egotistic enough to want to believe it, but in fact this god we have created did not create us. The planet did. If a god created anything, it was the conditions out there in the universal void that allowed a round piece of rock to develop an atmosphere and water and top soil enough to generate some form of what we call life. In other words, us. We are no special creation. We are just as subject to weather, earthquake, fire and famine as any other living form.

If I look at us from the planet's point of view, we--and the economic theory of endless consumption we promote--are the most dangerous thing that the planet has created. In terms of nuisance value, we reign supreme. Ungrateful, polluting, greedy, hell bent on overpopulating and stressing this planet, talking about space travel so we can do it to other planets, why ever would this planet want to put up with us?

When we were fewer, nomadic, and technologically ignorant, we could be tolerated because we did little harm and the earlier people at least made some show of being grateful for the life the planet sustained. Now we are inflated with our egos, grateful only when we are given the funds to consume more of the planet's resources. Money is not the root of all as wits like to say, it's us believing we are entitled to it that is.

Well, the planet is telling us several things: resources are not endlessly renewable and there are consquences to our greediness. We are already starting to see food shortages, and these will continue. The Middle East uprisings are not the glorious push for freedom that Americans (particularly conservatives) like to believe; they are a push for food and the other basic necessities of life. When these are not forthcoming, all the fancy constitutions in the world will be worth nothing.

Down in Arizona, people wear guns on their hips in the grocery stores. There is something profound about this, even if the gun bearer doesn't look as if he has pondered the meaning of what he is doing beyond exercising his rights, because the next civil war in this country will be over food and the unequal distribution of the nation's resources. The wealthy one percent will hire guards to protect their food supply. The rest of us will be left to flight over scraps until we too have a revolution.

Special creation indeed. This planet gives and takes. Right now, it is restless and probably quite sick of us. It got rid of the dinosaurs. It can get rid of us. Yet, we go around flattering one another that whatever we do to the planet is fine as long as there is money to be made.

Money means nothing to the planet. It couldn't care less if we have the latest i-pad or cheap airline tickets. It also couldn't care less if we kill eachother over food and oil. It would, in fact, be happier with the human species gone. A million years from now, who will be left to care if we annhilate ourselves? If there is anyone, we will be a mere footnote in their history telling a cautionary tale about a barbaric time when politics and religion conspired to overpopulate the planet, exhaust the resources, and nearly wipe out the human race.

We ought to be directing our thanks to the planet for what it has given us instead of filling the coffers of some church that merely flatters us and some politician who appeals to our ignorance because that is all we have and want to hear about.

Leaders of the War and Peace

2011-02-16T21:26:00.000-08:00

As a species, we tend to glorify the creative forces among us--those people who initiate new things like internets, cures for diseases, new government structures, and wondrous works of technology and art. You know, the big stuff that gets an age named after it. The bronze age, the age of steam, the age of electricity. Schools teach the famous names of these movements, well, maybe not the bronze age, but we all know about the Curies, Salk, Whitney, Edison, Crick, and Gates et al. The pioneers of each new field are lauded and feted with prizes of various value and prestige, well deserved, of course, but perhaps inclined to blind us to what happens next. I'm thinking here of the classifiers, statesmen, and philosophers who follow behind, looking beyond the joy of creating something that did not exist before and on to the question of what such discoveries really mean and how they interact with one another.

I found myself thinking about this process the other day by recalling a poignant scene in the David Lean film, "Lawrence of Arabia." It occurs toward the end. One of the sheikhs, played as I recall by Alec Guiuness, tells Lawrence that young men fought the war but must now leave it to old men to negotiate the peace. In that moment, Lawrence's role in the war he has so passionately fought is over and he knows he is no longer wanted. The world is now in the hands of others.

It's not hard to imagine a similar thing happening in regard to the protests in Egypt. The revolution is over, thank you very much, and now the politicians, and the military, and the business-as-usual-men, will take over. The protestors will undoubtedly fight their marginalization and they may earn a few up-front concessions, but eventually their own protests will turn on themselves and become ugly. 'Twas ever so with mass revolutions--they are difficult to control because of the varying purposes and motives within them. Undoubtedly, the idealistic and ethical among the protestors will be indignant about being lumped together with a criminal element, but it will be inevitable. Attacking a CNN female reporter in the square is one example; it smacks of hysteria and thuggism and will be used to show the unfitness of any protestors to play a role in building a new constitution and country.

Yet one cannot be too judgmental on this process. The qualities that build enduring nations are not the same as those that defeat armies and tear down walls and barriers. With few exceptions, revolutionary leaders capable of inspiring men in desperate battle seldom make effective leaders of the peace. It's rather like the current political process in the US these days--I wonder if it isn't easier to be part of the minority party snapping at the heels of those in power rather than being in power and trying to make sensible decisions for our future.

A Little Revolution Now and Then

2011-02-05T18:28:00.000-08:00

I haven't felt much like writing of late. Partly it's being strung between two homes--one the 27 foot RV down in Phoenix and the other our main home, both of which require attention when left to their own devices. When we came home this time, the hot tub blew a freeze plug, emptied itself, and fountained water at us. Fortunately, this happened with us on premises or who knows what further mischief it might have done. But I'm fully aware that the RV is lying awake at night without us there, plotting what to do to us when we go back.

It's not as if there hasn't been a lot to write about. Floods and weather everywhere, political upheavals, economic misery--it seems that Sid may be right when he commented the other day that Mother Nature dodesn't like ugly. Since we've been ugly all right, I guess we are being served the results of our polluting, uncaring, and insensitive behavior.

But there's something more in the air that speaks of unrest. In particular, I've been watching the events unfold in the Middle East with very conflicted emotions. Anyone British with any sense of history has to look at the world's trouble spots and recognize the heavy hand of Victorian empire. India, Pakistan, Palestine, Africa--Britain was right there. And while a case might be made for the advantages of the British raj--language, legal system. education et al, I sense in that argument an echo of Kipling's "taking up the white man's burden" of bringing civilization to those deemed to be in need of it. The native populations seldom took the same view of the garrisons among them.

But quite apart from that, history tells us that empires cannot hold for long. Greece, Rome, France, and Britain--not to mention the German Reich--have been among those to learn that lesson. There are always barbarians at the gate, not to mention local populations who object to seeing their goods and treasure take a one-way journey into the coffers of their conquerors.

History also tells us that when these empires crumble, it is am ugly process. Seldom are fuindamental changes brought about through moderate transition. Telling Tom Payne that he should negotiate a transitional process with King George would hardly be persuasive. The colonial rebels wanted action and wanted it now. It's a given that those in power never yield authority willingly. There must be force or the threat of it to effect change. We might wish that things were different, that everyone behaved in rational ways, but that is not the way of the human species.

But there is more than Egypt. In my opinion, we have two revolutions going on right now--the physical uprising in Egypt and an unrecognized one in this country.

Egypt's is the most obvious since our media is in love with it. One can only shake one's head at the current Egyptian premier who had only to look at his country's demographics to predict the unrest. When a country has a predominance of educated people under 40 who have no prospects for employment and careers, it is only a matter of time before they spill into the streets. This is their version of the tea in the harbor in Boston. There will be change in Egypt. It is inevitable. But it is very unclear whether the change will address the issues of the young or will prove to be yet another corrupt regime that started out idealistically but was coopted by special interests.

The US is on the opposite end of the spectrum, but we have just as many discontents. One look at US demographics tells the story. In this case, the population is an aging one. People over 55 are in the ascendancy. If younger people may be (stereotypically) expected to be passionate and looking for opportunity, our aging population may be expected (stereotypically) to behave like a querulous octagenarian, opposed to change, mired somewhere in a familiar past, self-involved, and dedicated to its own comfort. The octagenerian will not take to the streets but certainly takes to the airwaves and the ballot box. Given the passion for the status quo, it remains to be seen whether the weapon arsenal built up in this country will be used against its citizens. If it is, it may be the well-armed over 55s against the younger minority population.

I don't mean to be unduly pessimistic. As the captain of Red October said in the novel, The Hunt for Red October, "a little revolution is a good thing now and then." I wish Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, and the other countries with oppressive leadership all the best in their search for a brighter future. I just hope that the passion pouring into the streets translates into wise and humanitiarian decisions further down the line.

No, I Don't Blame Sarah Palin

2011-01-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

Fate seems to play strange things with my life. I was in Denver for the trial of Timothy McVeigh and now find myself in Arizona for the recent assassination attempt on the life of Representative Gifford, gunned down by a disturbed man whose motive is unclear but tied somehow to personal delusions and demons. It is hard to see how shooting a nine-year old child, senior citizens, and a legislative aide serves a satisfying political purpose, but no one ever said the mentally ill needed to make sense.

Now, mental illness is something with which I have had some slight connection. My mother was a psychiatric nurse, first in the UK, then in Canada, whose career ended with service in a high-security prison facilty for the criminally insane in Matsqui, British Columbia. My own grandmother suffered from dementia caused by a stroke for all of the time her life overlapped mine. I grew up knowing my mother's patients and visiting the facilities where she worked, even including the prison at Matsqui. While not a trained psychiatric professional, I still have more personal insight into mental illness than many others who are busily arguing over responsibility for this last terrible event in Tuscon.

This morning's Phoenix paper is full of finger pointing, particularly at Sarah Palin. I think all this is completely useless and a mere continuation of the very things that have brought us to this point; this country is enduring national division, as significant as the one during those terrible months and days leading up to America's Civil War. We are divided with both sides locked into positions as securely and morally smugly as those who went to war to impose their versions of truth..

Nevertheless, I believe that blaming Sarah Palin, as various members of the media are trying to, is both disingenuous and a copout. Now, as every reader of this blog knows, I am no great fan of Ms. Palin's simplistic self-promotion nor her pandering to the worst among us. I must admit a grim satisfaction to watching her get bitten on her butt by the tiger she attempted to ride. Yet I do not link her to the shooting-- except for her complicity in the general mood that has swept the country.

One thing I quickly realized about mental patients is that their pathology is a distortion of the culture around them, a parallel universe but not one that is completely unrecognizable. For example, I once saw a disturbed man in Italy attempting to pinch someone's rear in a train station. He was no threat, but it seemed to me that he was desperately trying to be part of a culture from which he was excluded and in which his disability did not allow him to participate.

Only someone who interviews the shooter may be able to explain the desperate motives that led him to kill. But my guess is that somewhere inside his brain he had a crippled vision of the culture around him. America is a culture that is easily misperceived, particularly by those whose brains can see only the shadows of the culture around them. Partisans on both sides of every issue have villified one another and expressed their positions absolutely--there is no grey, only black and white. This verbal assault is not supposed to lead to actual murder. If such happens, those who have spoken harsh words publicly are the first to deny any responsibility--this, of course, is a given since accountability is uncomfortable. Nevertheless, there have been historical precedents when political thought led to assassination, and one has to wonder how someone can deny any responsibility when faced with the murders of Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy. There IS precedent and as Representative Gifford said herself, there is an effect when people indulge their prejudices.

So, I do not blame Ms. Palin. Hers is only one voice. There is enough blame to go around. I do believe, however, and very strongly, that the beloved Constitution of this country did not and should not merely be one-way, with the conferring of freedoms and benefits. Those who choose to exercise their rights need to understand that the right of free speech comes with the price tag of responsibility for what is being said. I would think a great deal more of Ms. Palin and the media that supports her and the other pundits, if instead of reloading and having her staff defend her, she looked in the mirror and shuddered. I might also think that the US was maturing if it stopped the pernicious practice of finding scapegoats rather than taking responsibility for itself.

An Illegal Is Not Just a Mexican Bird

2011-01-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

Recently there has been a flap down here in RV land—our park, which shall remain nameless lost its activities director. He had been directing things here for six seasons, long enough to build an empire and have followers. He was given a severance package and twenty-fours notice to remove his rig to another park. Ashes and sackcloth followed. People were in tears, people threatened not to return next season, people cursed the park owners. You would have thought someone had been killed.

The reason for all this heartbreak? It turns out that the activities director was not a US citizen and was working illegally. In other words, he was an illegal alien to the extent he was violating his tourist visa.

The situation (his unlawful employment) came to light when various parks and businesses catering to RVers were called into a meeting and told that there was going to be a crackdown.

Right there, you can tell he wasn’t Mexican. When Mexicans are involved, the IRS raids, arrests, and sorts thing out later. The director was Canadian. The park was warned, he was given a severance package, and he was moved out quickly (probably on advice of legal counsel) since his RV space was part of his pay package. No arrest. No jail. No deportation. Genteel, as these things go, and definitely preferential.

Now what gets my goat and the reason for this blog is that the same people wearing ashes and sackcloth have been the ones passionately complaining about illegals here in Arizona. The law has been broken, they’ve said loudly, and why couldn’t these people wait for work permits and green cards, why don’t they learn English, and why don’t they go back where they came from? The whole matter has been turned in a moral maelstrom in the park.

The many Canadian RVers don’t really understand the seriousness of the situation so think he treated shabbily with only 24 hours notice. The director’s followers see the loss of their little privileges and wonder why now after six years (good question). And the self-righteous among us are busy stereotyping all Mexicans into vicious criminals and drug runners (even the children) in order to defend the director from label of illegal: he was a good guy, why aren’t they out catching the real ones.

Now I’m not in favor of illegal immigration myself (I went through what I call the sewer of the regular process to emigrate to Canada and then the US) but I am a foe of hypocrisy. I am making myself unpopular, of course, pointing out the fallacy to those folk now saying the director “at least came legally into the country.” He came in on a tourist visa, chums, that says specifically that he may not accept employment in the US. The law is the law, and—yes—anglos, I want to tell them but don’t, it applies to you too. I think it says reams that this park is just about one hundred percent anglo.

I’m glad the director wasn’t taken out of the park in handcuffs. I’m glad he’s not sitting in INS jail with all the Mexicans awaiting a hearing. I’m really glad they didn’t shut down the park and freeze assets (which would have seen the lot of us trying to find spaces in 24 hours with no refunds), but I am very disappointed in the park’s willingness to expose all of us to those risks (and, yes, the IRS and INS can do that).

The little legalistic core in me, left over from dealing with federal investigations on campus (which no one in their right mind would ever want—trust me) says there’s a reason the figure of Justice wears a blindfold.

Life's Illusions 2011

2011-01-02T09:55:00.000-08:00

Anyone reading my blog through the years will not be surprised by this list. This is where I stand and it lies behind everything I have written. As we start 2011, therefore, I'd like to thank you all for reading my work. It's been a personal adventure for me and I hope a source of interest and amusement for you. Here's hoping that the new year is kind to us all.

• Religion and Politics are not ends in themselves—they are symptoms of the people who support them. If people did not need to feel secure and superior, neither would exist.

• Organized religion is a corporation providing a service: giving pre-digested answers to life’s great questions, licensing human behavior, and providing employment.

• Religions exist for community. They become political when they legislate human behavior and then attempt to enforce it.

• Spirituality does not require an organized place of worship or prescribed ways of recognizing blessings.

o The founders of a religion are the idealists. Followers take and pervert the original ideas as people sign on. It is much easier to gain followers by promising benefits than asking for sacrifice.

o People can create better myths and beliefs for themselves if they go out to a hillside in complete darkness and try counting stars.

o It is entirely possible to be ethical and not part of organized religion.

o Any religion looks ridiculous if its basic beliefs are examined closely. Contrary to religious belief, science is not a religion. It is subject to hypothesis and correction through evidence. Belief and truth are not the same. Try telling the creationists to prove or disprove their beliefs.

o Parents who raise their children in an organized religion without thinking shut down young minds and then act as enforcers for religion if the children start to think for themselves.

o Politics is not the art of the possible: it is the art of the expedient, particularly in lining the pockets of those who know how to play the game. Too often, any good done for society as the result of political action is incidental and accidental. The wisest question to ask a politician is “Who is benefitting from this?” or, more bravely, “How are you benefitting from this?”

o Religion assumes prominence when people are starving and stressed. At other times it is one more form of oppression, purporting to add spiritual authority to human unkindness.

o Religious and political “values” are merely slogans to sway large numbers of people by referring to ideologies and ideas that people know only by name and have not taken the time to examine. Anyone who really studies politics and religion should be scared witless by them.

o Wars are a form of profit seeking and taking. Lunatics start them, people die for them, religion justifies them, and armament manufacturers encourage it all. Money is not the root of all evil. People believing they deserve it is.

Both Sides Now

2010-12-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

Recently I started writing my autobiography. Benvenuto Cellini once said anyone who had achieved anything had the responsibility to do so. What Cellini actually said was more along the lines of every important man (of which number he included himself) needed to do so, but I'll make his comment more inclusive.

I'm finding that writing about my life is far more difficult than I anticipated, not the least because I've needed to confront my demons with honesty and persistence, none of which I expected when I started. I'm finding, like Judy Collins in her song about life and clouds, that life's illusions are seductive side alleys.

Writing about life and living means dealing with parts of life that have been neatly (or maybe not so neatly) locked away in the file cabinets that are our brains. Sometimes we have tried to dump these memories because they are painful, or because they reveal us in ways we would prefer not to show the world. Whatever the reason, if one is to write an autobiography rather than a straight history or a journal, it is necessary to deal with feelings, prejudices, fears, unruly emotions--the things that make us human and also make life difficult. The good stuff in our lives is easy. It's the darker things we learn from--and, as I am learning, we all have them.

I've written many times in this blog about my dismay with religion and politics. Both of these pursuits have been with us since our earliest days as human beings. At least, we assume they have since every time we come across a new cave painting or carving, the first guess we make is that it is ceremonial and has to do with religion. Part of that is extrapolating onto ancient people our own need to find purpose in life and to express the wonder of our own improbable existence. I've been reading a history of the British Isles and have to wonder how my ancestors survived the plundering, warfare, plagues, and natural disasters--why me? why any of us? why didn't our ancestral lines die out? I suppose this is why we pay professional religionists to tell us what to think about these things.

When it comes to religion, I get the human impulse, but at the same time, I doubt the "accepted" answers we are told we have to believe. I cannot accept the idea of some godhead sitting in judgment of the day to day activities of four billion people in the world, and I am offended when someone says that their lucky escape from some disaster was a deity's handiwork when that means that all the others who weren't so lucky were on his s-- list. It doesn't work that way--and herein my problem both with religion and with politics: they are the creation of the human species, born out of our need to feel part of a group, and, even more, to feel superior.

There's a Jewish joke about a town always needing two synagogues: the one you attend and the one you don't. The implication, of course, is that your synagogue (or church, or school, or political opinion) is better than the other. All this is absolute nonsense. Nothing religious can be proved--that's what faith means--yet we are willing to kill each other over it. In politics, I doubt very much that someone asked directly to support a political prejudice (the poor are lazy for example) can produce any data to prove it. It is sufficient only for the speaker to feel good about themselves by judging other people.

If you look back to the last time we were told that the US was going to hell, that freedom as we know it has been lost, and that our children will never know the "real" America, it occurred when Reagan was running for president and he was talking about Medicare (which he promised to oppose). We older folk gratefully accept Medicare these days as undoubtedly we will accept the newest health care reforms in the years ahead. Obamacare may well be one of the cornerstones of our future. Politics is the art of finding people's prejudices and getting out in front of them--all the while hoping that people are too vain to notice.

I think Cellini is right--we all need at some point to sit down to look ourselves in the mirror and ask what the heck we are about. I highly recommend writing an autobiography, finding out why we are so willing to accept the closing of our minds through religion, why we are so willing to give up our individuality in the name of conforming to some political position or other that makes absolutely no sense when looked at in the dispassionate light of day, and why we don't trust our own observations of a universe that deserves so much better from us.

Looking Back Down the Road

2010-12-10T21:10:00.000-08:00

These days, we hear endless talk from certain circles about not liking illegals, not liking the national debt, not liking Nancy Pelosi, not much liking the unemployed (but loving the unemployment rate as long as it is going up or down), not liking paying for education, not liking anyone else getting something for nothing all the while greedily accepting whatever pension or public slop comes down the trough. Everyone's unhappy with something; some are unhappy with everything; some just don't want anything but anarchy; some just want change for its own sake.

All this compaining seems to be burned into the human psyche.

I bet when they were building the pyramids, Kufu the stone carver grumbled about all those freeloading illegals come over from Sinai, stealing jobs from the locals and having too many children. And what about the pharaoh, how intelligent is it to run up the national debt just to build a tomb? It has to be the influence of all the homosexual courtiers waving about more than their fans. And what about Ramses, the new wonderboy stone cutter that everyone wants to carve on their tombs? It's all about youth anymore. Now back in the days, life was good: women didn't meddle in politics and children were raised to respect their elders--not playing in the streets but working to help support the family. There was more discpline and more respect for the gods--today we need to burn more incense, slaughter more sheep, and return Egypt to what it once was.

So as Kufu chips and shapes the blocks of masonry, he dreams of returning to this wonderful past. It's a time he hardly remembers except through the haze of years--choosing to forget the violence, illiteracy, and short lifespans that were part of daily life. It was a halcyon time for Kufu because it was familiar and he had a place within it. The fact that it may not be for anyone else escapes him.

Kufu's unfocused nostalgia continues today. It lives on among our conservative brethren who would like to return us to something, although I'm not clear what.

Is it, I wonder, the days of the early Republic when members of Congress fired pistols in the halls and beat one another about the head with canes? When the South based its economy on cotton and slavery? When a woman who didn't conform was burned as a witch? Or is it the early 19th Century with the settlement of the West when graveyards were full of children dead from lack of medical attention and when law was only as good as the fastest draw? Is it the late 19th Century when women and children were the chattel of their husbands and only men of property could vote? Or was it the early 20th Century when the world was consumed in war after war? When my grandfather would have denied me an education because teaching a woman more than housework was a waste? When my grandmother would have been startled by my irreligious attitudes? When my greatgrandparents would have sent me to work in the mills to help pay the rent?

I have to admit that I can do a credible Kufu too. I remember happy times from my childhood in 1950s Britain. People seemed more neighborly. Life seemed less rushed. There wasn't such an emphasis on what Wordsworth called getting and spending. But before I get carried away, I remember my mother and her friends doing a Kufu over the loss of Britain's empire. Having an empire meant prestige for her generation; yet how many among us today would advocate acquiring one? My memories are obviously cherrypicked.

The kids raised today will probably look back on life in the early 21st Century as familiar because it is all they have ever known. Now that is a thought.

Guest Commentary on the Land of the Rich

2010-12-08T16:24:00.000-08:00

What a farce this all is. One person ( Assange ) publishes some info about a criminal and that criminal decides to get him, one way or another by attempted deceitful arraignment on trivial charges in order to get him into the USA. Seems to me that by this procedure, it indicates the info contained was likely genuine. I presume the US has promised Sweden favourable consideration for the next franchise of Kentucky Fried Chicken for this favour.

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Rich

2010-12-08T12:44:00.000-08:00

Just when I thought the Republicans couldn't display more hypocrisy, blow me down if they don't go ahead and best their own record. Whatever happed to fiscal conservatism and paying down the national debt--the stuff they hit us all over the head with during the recent elections? Apparently gone with the wind when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy.

For the wealthy for heaven's sakes. For people making over $250,000 a year. I've never earned anything like that and I consider myself upper-echelon middle class. Even for two people to make that amount means each has a a pretty good salary. But even if one cavils over the exact point where wealth begins, I just can't see giving wonderul tax breaks to billionaires who can't spend the money they already have in their lifetimes and just sit on it or invest it abroad.

I guess I don't get it because I'm not Republican. George Bush once said to an audience of very wealthy donors that some people called them the rich, but he called them his base. I can't think of a clearer statement of what the Republicans represent--the wealthy, the greedy, and the corporate. In the case of the latter, remember those financial sociopaths who said proudly they were stealing "granny's savings."

And we are about to reward them AGAIN?

I can't pretend to understand the ways of politics even though I've worked with politicians but I do know a little bit about dealing with devils. I would have played chicken with the Republicans and I would not have blinked. OK Chums: no tax extension for the middle class, OK none either for the rich--and you be the one with the angry fallout both from your base and the electorate because extending the tax cuts for the rich is widely unpopular. Obama's problem is that he has a heart in a business where that is a liability and appears a weakness.

I rather hope the Dem rebels do filibuster the "compromise." It deserves to be because it rewards greed and self-interest. But then I suppose the Republicans will conveniently gloss over their own inconsistency: the national debt goes by the wayside when it comes to rewarding the people who have bought their toy congressmen.

Wiki Leaks

2010-12-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

Several readers have wondered why I haven't commented on the Wiki Leaks disclosures. I suppose it must seem strange since I've had an opinion on everything else and a demonstrated wilingness to share it with the willing and unwilling. In this case, though, I find it hard to have one because I've always assumed the political and ambassadorial worlds were underhanded and two-faced anyway. When it's your job to deny oil, nuclear power, influence, and power to everyone else, you probably aren't trying for halo of the year.

In this respect, the releases simply confirm my assumptions. Some Muslium leaders drink, other leaders feel entitled to buxom assistants, some flatter people they despise, some feather their nests with the money stupid other leaders think will buy their support, some pay their mistresses on expense accounts--'twas ever so and I'm afraid it is the stuff of yawns. The National Enquirer does better because it's not hampered by any connection to fact. I read the leaks with the same feeling I have when reading that George and Barbara Bush are divorcing, Miachel Douglas is dying even though he is popping up in Disneyland looking hale, and aliens have landed in DC, demanding the key to city of New York. The leaks are all innuendo and gossip--nothing earth shattering like when Israel plans to take out Iran's nuclear capability or when someone is going to plan an assassintation attempt on North Korea's Kim. Now THAT would be interesting. But cocktail party chatter? I've said worse about my boss and the Regents.

What I do find interesting is the reaction to the leaks. Someone told me that he considered the posting of the documents to be treasonous. Well, they can't be treasonous since treason has to be committed by a citizen of the country. Allenge is a citizen of Sweden not the US. I don't even know if it's espionage since I can't see who stands to profit except the military and diplomatic circles who need to do a better job of protecting their files, and I'm sure that's not what Allenge had in mind.

Frankly, I think there needs to be more of this sort of embarassing accountability. I rather enjoy seeing things come full circle and bite the perpetrator in the ass. I'm sure that the security system was put in by one of the big corporations running this country. Instead of Allenge, why not go after Halliburton or whoever put it in. Now that the Supreme Court says that corporations have the same rights as individuals, I'd love to see their asses sued off, just like the rest of us individuals. Oh, baby, you want free speech like the rest of us (supposedly) have? Be prepared to enter the slammer just as we can.

But of course our ham-fisted government is going after those who have exposed the cocktail chatter. God forbid that any of them might be playing guessing games about the future just like the rest of us, that they might admit in an e-mail what most of us have been saying anyway. Common sense reign? Of course not. Trumped up charges of rape, which I am sure are the result of US pressure on Sweden, and shutting down the site--free speech be damned--will be the result.

I say let him release the rest of them. Let's get rid of the idea that we are so infallible that our golden words must be protected against the light of day. Indeed, let's find out whether any of these so-called public servants are worth the money we spend on them.

Give Me a Break--Please

2010-11-22T08:55:00.000-08:00

I suppose it was inevitable—tea party members now want to change their image of wild-eyed lunacy into something more like a respectable third party with appeal for thoughtful moderates. I listened to an active tea partier the other day, freshly returned from a rally where I can only assume the leaders told them to evangelize and try to make such a case. He tried, I questioned, he got huffy.

All I can say is that it ain’t gonna happen because wild-eyed lunacy is all the Tea Party ever had. Once the politics of NO is gone, there is no basis for the party’s platform. They have no approach to ruling the country except for not liking the way things are going and slinging slogans.

Now, I am not discounting the rational among them—and there are some, perhaps even many. But they weren’t the ones who got the tea party candidates elected. The ones who walked the streets, attended the rallies, donated the money, and had a wonderful puff of resentment beneath their wings were the angry, and I doubt their sincerity beyond their own self-interest. Given a choice between the personal sacrifice they preach for others and making some of their own, I haven't seen any evidence that any would give up a shred of their personal entitlements. Reduce Social Security checks in order to balance the budget that they say is a primary focus? Not on your life. Not on their backs. They earned their rewards--let the cuts fall somewhere else.

Do I exaggerate?

This year there is no increase in social security benefits because there is no inflation. COLA allowances are tied to inflation. No inflation, no increase. To listen to them as I have to, you would think the government was cheating them of a birth right. “My expenses are going up,” bleated one, “it’s disgraceful that there’s no increase this year.” Considering that most people use up what they contributed to Social Security within ten years or so, the disgrace is seniors who burden the economy and demand that the nation meet their medical needs, all the while denying care to the young because it might reduce their current benefits.

What sense does this make? Tea Partiers, mostly older, mostly male, mostly white, denying care and support to the next generation on whose shoulders the future economic development of this nation rests? This seems to me the world turned upside down: seniors more important than the nation’s future.

Sorry tea partiers. On every level, I just don’t buy you as this nation’s future. I’ve always thought of governing by looking to that future. I can’t get into the idea of governing by looking to the past. Even if you are comfortable there (all right in your corner, Jack), the rest of us thoughtful moderates aren’t. Your creature comforts matter less to me than the corporations who run this country and, increasingly the world; they are doing so without oversight while you guys wave the flag, trot out a Christ who would disapprove of the lot of you, and still cling to the folorn hope that Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii.

The tea party moderate? Give me a break. Please.

After the Ball

2010-11-03T11:08:00.000-07:00

Now that it's done and the usual political crowing is clogging the airwaves, I suppose it's time to consider the what next of what the US will be living in the couple of years ahead.

We have just returned into (partial) power the same folks who took us into a unnecessary war on the basis of lies, cost over 4,000 lives and nearly bankrupted us; lifted all regulation on financial markets and therby nearly destoyed our financial system; fought tooth and nail to turn our social security savings over to the same financial markets (Bush says his greatest regret is not privatizing it); and tried to oppose any and all legislation on behalf of the planet that might get in the way of profits. And that's not just the Republicans--some of the Democrats were on board with that agenda too. Every time we get these people in power, they promise fiscal care and prudence. Every time what we get is one group becoming insanely rich while the rest of us get screwed.

I don't get it.

Why would people drawing social security want to end it? Do they have other sources of funds and so don't need it? Why not value it for the precious thing it is? People on medicare want to end medicare? They say they want to get the government out of medical insurance--don't they realize that privatized medical care will drop them first thing? People who have never studied economics think they know how to fix the economy? People who have never been unemployed are experts on unemployment? People whose houses have lost multiple thousands oppose regulation that might prevent the worst mortgage and lender abuses? Just goes to show that ignorance and prejudice must be a sexy sell.

I've been a lukewarm supporter of the Obama White House. I was a Hillary supporter but my bottom line at that time was anything BUT the Republicans and BUT the corporate power brokers. The corporate players were in disarray then because of their own excesses so the Democrats got in. Now, the Corporations have come roaring back along with the Conservatives and their self-satisfied hypocrisy and flat out greed. Of course, they needed complicit ignorance among the electorate.

One thing I have said consistently is that we have changed from a republic into an oligarchy. As my friend Ken says, this country is run by 30 corporations. You can count Halliburton and its craven puppet Dick Cheyney as a good example. Halliburton profits from war--it thrives on it--its stock goes through the roof--its executives get big money and raises. Halliburton needs profits and so we go to war, allowing Halliburton to get no-bid contacts from politicos it has bought and paid for. But add to it the banks, big oil, pharmacueticals, big agriculture, big media, etc. These are the interests that run this country. They buy and sell us daily and we are too besotted with the chaos they deliberately sew among us to see it. Obama at least spent our money on us. We can now look forward to it siphoning back to its corporate masters.

Over time, I suppose I will return to the fray. One can be apathetic only so long and this, after all ,is my planet too. My current home state, Colorado, seems to have taken a thoughtful stance on political reality--bless you my fellow Coloradans for not saddling the world with Tom Tacredo as Governor and Tea Partier Buck as US Senator. I'll cling to the hope that in the next two years we can all get some common sense.

Election Day USA

2010-10-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

Here we are--the election is just a few days away and all I can feel is apathy. I have been beaten into the ground by all the yelling, lying, fingerpointing, and just plain hate mongering. I have seen far more of the ugly parts of my fellow human beings than I could ever want to. It has been a bloodbath of ignorance and irrationality and what's worse is that regardless of what happens, nothing is going to change.

If the Tea Party candidates are elected, we will watch the spectacle of the System teaching them just what they don't know --a process I liken to housebreaking. They'll ride in on the wave of changing everything to suit them and find out just how little the system will let them.

If the Democrats win, it will be more years of Republicans fighting tooth and nail to prevent anything useful happening that will move us forward--not because it is always wrong but because it bears the label of Democrat.

If the Republicans win, they will promptly renege on every campaign promise made because the current system is so personally rewarding for them. They will simply get richer while the rest of their followers are caught up in spurious debates over immigration and healthcare reform, which they had proposed in the first place and then suddenly said were socialism. I guess it's socialism when the Democrats propose the same thing.

I suppose we get what we deserve--but the scary part for me is how we are manipulated through our own vanity. That and the populist, alarmist media who pander to the most vociferous among us. There is lunacy in the air. It is palapable and I despair that rational debate will return in my lifetime.

Mexico and Amigo Care

2010-10-26T20:52:00.000-07:00

Poor Mexico. The country is America’s whipping boy, blamed for everything from illegal immigration to illegal drugs, and the State Department has issued warnings about the larger border towns (Tijuana, Nogales etc.), pretty much advising Americans not to go there because of violent clashes between drug gangs.

Poor Mexico—but not just because the US tends to blame its far smaller neighbor for its own problems but because (as with Canada) it fails to recognize the important service Mexico (and Canada) provides. If the US-Mexico border were ever permanently closed, I would argue that the US would be the greater loser.

Some time ago, we visited Algodones, a border town where California and Arizona touch just south west of Yuma, Arizona. The border is quite casual going into Mexico—no documents needed—you know you are in Mexico because of the street hawkers. They’re not offering the usual serapes, ponchos, sombreros, and pottery. Instead, one calls, “Lady, you need dental care? Admit it! You need dental work.” Another calls “Eye glasses? Best price in town. $100 for trifocals and frames.” “Look here! Look here! You need a pharmacy?” Billboards on top of the buildings advertise everything from crowns ($300) to liposuction to face lifts.

Mexico, in other words, has become the cut-rate medical center for US citizens without health insurance. There are no children to be seen, no young adults, no family couples. Instead, the streets are full of US seniors carrying tell-tale purple plastic bags full of prescription drugs (from the Purple Farmacia—the largest in town). The local (very good) restaurants are full of white haired visitors, and stores cater to a more adult taste (no nudes, no skull-and-crossbones t-shirts, and no two-for-one grande margueritas).

Mostly the town is full of medical offices and happy clients: Who wouldn’t be happy when teeth cleaning costs $15? The streets are clean and the buildings in good repair, suggesting not only respectability but prosperity. No one appears to actually live in Algadones, however. There are no food markets or clothing stores. Apparently people live in places like Mexicali and commute to their offices, which occupy a strip that starts at the border and stretches about 100 yards south. The further from the border, the more shabby the offices and the lower the prices. But right at the border, the offices look well furnished, and, if asked, the seniors using their services say they are well satisfied with the care.

Everyone is busy making money and both sides of the border get in the act. Just north of the border are Indian tribal lands, so every car parking pays the tribe $5 for the day. The lot is huge and was packed (the tribe also has a decent hotel-casino where people can stay while having procedures). Coaches from various retirement homes and RV resorts as far north as Colorado come down every three months or so on a schedule to allow residents to make doctor’s appointments and pick up prescriptions. People driving from California to points east plan to stop at this town. Everything is cheerful. The pharmacy clerks call everyone “amigo,” and both sides seem generally delighted with the exchange, although it pays to get references when having something as complicated as a dental transplant.

The only downside is the wait at the border to get back into the US. Last year, it took us over an hour to snake through customs. Still, even that had its amusing side as people compared what they had paid for various things and had a chance to giggle at some of the strange things going home. Every western and northern state and all western Canadian provinces were represented in the line—along with a few stragglers from New York and Maine.

Looked at from the senior point of view, Mexico provides an incalculable benefit to US residents, who gladly avail themselves of its services and have a good meal while they’re at it. I think we can call this Amigo Care.

Tuned in to the US Elections?

2010-10-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

The other day one of the readers of this blog reminded me that I have international readers who aren't that into American politics. Make that interested in or involved with. Fair enough. I'm from a smallish island nation (Britain) that was very self-involved, so I think a degree of tunnel vision probably goes with the territory of being human. We all tend to think ourselves the center of the universe and try to make the appropriate arguments ("But because it's so economically huge (substitute whatever measure you wish), the US HAS to be the center"). Ain't necessarily so, as the song goes.

All this leads me to an interesting question: if at this time and place, the rest of the world isn't much interested in US politics, is this a good thing or not?

Right now, the US is undergoing a raging battle for its national soul. Everyone is unhappy in one way or another and, according to a Japanese proverb, when elephants dance, the grass beneath them suffers. This is not to say the rest of us are the grass, but it does imply that the clash of large forces tends to create chaos as it happens.

Chaos is what's happening in the US and no one here can relax until this clash somehow finds resolution. For that reason,I do believe this is something that the rest of the world needs to watch. Let me explain--in my own prejudiced words and views--why I say this.

There are at least three sides to the clashes occurring in this country.

One is a so-called Tea Party that claims a pedigree stretching back to the founding of the country. According to the polls, this is the party of the previously empowered (older white males) who see the emergence of new elements (minorities, non-Christians) and they don't like it. It's a rebellious group that is proving itself rather incompetent in selecting respectable candidates (they're shooting off their mouths in crazy ways). It's hard to be credible when all you want to say is either no or to hell with it. Unfortunately (and take note here, World) these are the kind of people who once in power are likely to send in troops to places with orders to kick butt.

These people are closely linked with corporate interests because the party advocates little to no government (for other people, of course, as they have no intention of giving up their government pensions). Corporations love smaller government as it means less regulation on their ability to make money. For the rest of us, and the rest of the World, it means if the conservative Republicans, of which the tea party is part, get into power, we can be once again at the mercy of these unregulated corporations--as we were before with the global financial meltdown. If the Republican party (and these tea baggers) get back in, we can look forward to more of same. If that happens, I'll be looking for a remote patch of land to live on and grow my own food.

Opposed to them are the so-called liberals, who traditionally have supported unions and social programs. Corporations are seldom found in this group, for obvious reasons--they are asked to pay for the programs, which cuts into their profits. The liberals are usually called "bleeding hearts" by the conservatives, because they favor universal health care, free public education, and support for the elderly and infirm. Conservatives want all support to come through churches (probably with a good dose of evangelical prosletyzing and judging who's really worthy of help along with the care packages).

Somewhere in the middle, opposing both sides, are what are generally called moderates who try to weave their way through the mess of ideology created by the other two. This moderate group tries to be practical about the nation's future, favoring steady as she goes over (1) an angry, judgmental godhead who wants people to suffer if they don't plan for their futures and (2)a nation committed to "social justice" (hence labeled socialist) for groups that the conservatives don't like (homosexuals, minorities, illegals). All many people know about socialism over here is that they don't like it.

So, yes, rest of World, I'd keep an eye on what happens next election here. It could very well determine US foreign policy. It could also happen in your own country if you have corporations that can buy lobbyists and legislators, as they have in ours.

So, as I say--this is not just a political election, it is an election about what kind of USA there will be in the future and how it will react to the rest of the World. This election, World, I'd stay tuned if I were you.

Ranging ag

Cellphones Mon Amour

2010-09-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

A luddite I am not: I do not go around smashing technology because I am wedded to things as they are. In fact, I think I've been very welcoming of most of our advances.

I owned a PC in the 1980s when they first became generally available (don't even ask what I paid for it. Hint: I had to take a loan and pay it off over time and I used WordStar and Xywrite word processing programs). I've even done fairly well learning to use the television remote, which looks like it could launch a space shuttle and has buttons so small you need a magnifiying glass to read them. The VCR programmer was another matter, but the less said about that the better.

What I want to talk about is my new cell phone.

All I really want in a cell phone is basic stuff, like store a number, dial it, answer a ring, let me know if there's a message, and shut on and off in a reasonable manner. I started ther service when I was widowed and wanted to be able to call AAA if I got a flat. My first phone, which I kept for many, many moons was just that. I learned the features as I needed them and I was happy as a clam until I forgot the thing in Starbucks outside Flagstaff and no one turned it in. It must have been someone less savvy than I because who else would bother with something so ancient?

Well, there I was in Arizona, six hundred miles from home and no phone. I didn't feel like driving home on long, empty roads without one and I didn't like the idea of waiting outside the restroom in some rest stop pleading with someone to make a call for me. Something clearly had to be done. I headed into the local Radio Shack. That's where I encountered a glittering world of the modern cell phone. It was culture shock.

When I was a child, I used to watch the weekly serials down at the local cinema. Kid's matinee it was called. One favorite was Flash Gordon, sort of a space cowboy who went from planet to planet and was always in some dire strait or another. The new cell phones were worthy of him.

"Do you want internet access?" the clerk asked me. He had this sort of doubtful look on his face as if he didn't believe at my age I knew the difference between ROM and RAM. Since those phones made my TV remote look deprived and required monthly IP access charges, I shook my head. He looked at me with pity.

"I have internet access on my home PC," I said with stiff dignity. "I use Skype long distance calling through my laptop. I just need a basic phone."

"Games and built-in camera? Choice of ring tones?" he asked. I shook my head. "Well," he said, "they come basic with all phones so it's a matter of quality and choice."

"Won't need them," I said.

"Blue tooth?" He asked. I had to think. I remembered that my grandson had a blue tooth on his game set. "I prefer to use a headset in the car," I replied. He looked at me sadly. His eyes said it all.

"Well," he said, "here's our most basic phone." I looked at the gleaming monster he handed me. It sat in the palm of my hand and cost almost $200. I looked at the others. This was indeed the cheapest as they were costing upwards of $500 amd looked like little tvs. He saw me looking at them and took one down. He turned it one way and it was a phone; when he turned it around he could type text onto the screen. He did it quickly using his thumbs. With my arthritic thumbs, it would take me hours to tap anything in.

"Cute," I said. That must not have been the right thing to say. "These are mini computers," he corrected me. "You can watch movies on them." I smiled sheepishly, not able to imagine watching something that small for hours. I would see double at the end.

I finally left with my "basic" call phone. It came "free" with renewing my two-year commitment to T-Mobile, which I would have done anyway since the service works for me. He had to show me how to open the darned thing (it slides instead of flips). I have used the camera once, just to see how it worked and promptly forgot how to do it except when I get into it by mistake--then it's tricky to get out of it. After several weeks I've managed to figure out how to set speed dial and how to change the ring tones. I can get my messages and finally set my PIN. It works. That's all I asked.

But, just to remind me whom these phones are meant for: my grandson grabbed the phone when he saw it, played everyone of the games on it, told me that it would connect to the internet if I ever wanted it, and asked why I wasn't downloading the cool tunes for sale as ring tones. When I explained I wouldn't be doing all that, he looked at me with the same pitying eyes as the Radio Shack clerk.

The Time Before Elections

2010-09-23T10:18:00.000-07:00

The few weeks leading up to an election have to be one of the most depressing times around. Those who are all right in their corners--thank you very much, Jack--are worked into fever pitch that something they believe is their "right" (no matter whether it is an entitlement from the government) will be taken from them, and those who are not all right in their corner--why isn't the government doing something for me?--all seem to get worked up into a froth of self-interest and hypocrisy wrapped in the mantle of some ill understood ideology that sounds good because it confirms personal prejudices.

I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored. What I find personally offensive is not the naked self-interest--goes with the territory of being human, I suppose--but the delusional attempts to turn selfishness into something rational (even admirable) by finding some expedient jusitification for it (thank you Ayn Rand and your book on the virtue of selfishness).

For someone who has been reading Aristotle, Plato, and Karl Marx lately(and they're amazing congruent, at least in my viewpoint, which I'll explain later), this whole season is one of the ugliest times around because it exposes much more of my fellow citizens than I really want to know.

To recap a bit: Aristotle said quite objectively that there is a natural conflict between the rich and the poor in a democracy--it's a power struggle as he saw it, the rich wielding money and the poor countering with numbers. The only way to maintain a democracy, he said, was through balance and trust: if you favor the rich, you get revolution; if you favor the poor you get economic reprisals because the rich hoard their money (in our version, banks refuse to give loans). It seems both sides need to be somewhat unhappy for the enterprise to function.

I think the wealthy are more aware of this process than the average citizen but everyone these days seems out for themselves and most political thinkers have historically recognized this.

Plato, for example, decided that balance is all very well but that the poor and undeucated really couldn't be trusted to rule themselves because they are just too--well--poor and uneducated. What was needed was a ruling class of people bred and trained to govern. In other words, he tipped his hat toward the rich and the noble (who else got educated?). Unfortunately, our rich today tend to become civic minded only after they have accumulated more money than God can count. On the way up they are anything but noble. Someone once said that behind every great fortune there is a great crime. That may be a bit too glib for my taste, but it does seem that on the way up they tend to think of the poor as inconvenient in expecting what they consider hand-outs, except, of course, when the poor are useful in some economic way.

Now, Marx went the other way. He agreed with Aristotle that there is inevitable conflict, but he came down on the side of the poor, except he clouded the issue by insisting on calling them the workers and focusing on the means of production to the point that his ideas underpinned an unworkable and destructive system that left out the rich entirely (the only way to wealth was through political corruption), hence destroying Aristotle's thought from the other direction. Jesus Christ, incidentally, falls into this category although he never ventured into economics directly except to castigate the rich and the priests (also rich) for oppressing the poor--see what his thoughts are being used to justify these days: things like using personal wealth as a sign of personal virtue (a good Puritan belief that God rewards those He loves with material benefits). In a fit of his own despondency, Christ once blasted a fig tree because it had no fruit--a metaphor for the rich denying food to the poor; I doubt cutting off unemployment benefits and denying medical care would have appealed much to him either.

I guess the depression I feel is at the gross lack of self-understanding I see around me and, worse, the actual celebration of willful ignorance and disregarding the procession of our past. Our political elections seem designed only to fan the flames of the very qualities that make us less than we can be.

Very few among us even acknowledge the concept of balance as a political goal--I give Obama credit for being one of those few. He's been steering a careful course, trying to restore that balance. But look what he's getting for it. This country has gone overboard for the rich in the past administration, basing such things as tax cuts on the political premise that if the wealthy retain their money and spend, the economy will lift all ships. Well, it hasn't. All it did was unleash the greed and self-interest that Aristotle said it would.

I will vote for any candidate who talks seriously about Balance (and not just of the federal budget, which will inevitably cut programs that serve the poor). But my fears are real and I don't see much beyond mere reacting replacing careful thought. All I know is that if the political pundits are right and we return to the unbalanced emphasis on wealth that set us on our current path, I see trouble ahead.

The Senior Season at Yellowstone

2010-09-12T16:08:00.000-07:00

There's nothing like the national parks when it comes to bringing out stupidity. I don't know what it is exactly. Maybe it's just excitement that breeds obliviousness, but it seems seeing a bison or an elk reduces otherwise normal people to quivering bowls of jelly.

We're just back from Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks where we encountered all the best that humanity has to offer. It seems, unbeknownst to us that there is a phenomenon called the "senior season." I guess it must be all those seniors (like us) who figure the regular summer season with kids--make that noisy kids who can never walk anywhere--ends with Labor Day thus ushering in a period with fewer cars and available hotel rooms.

Whatever the reasoning, the period between Labor Day and the closing of the park (starts shutting down the end of September to end of October) is now one of the hot times to visit. We couldn't reserve any rooms in the park lodges even a month in advance and paid $140 a night for a Super8 room in Jackson. The Visitor's Bureau told us we were lucky to have found a room at all.

Yellowstone it appears is as popular as the Grand Canyon as a destination, judging by all the tour buses disgorging their Asian visitors and by the two rows of seating packed with spectators that circled around Old Faithful, which faithfully erupted on time. We stayed at West Yellowstone, which is actually fun as far as tourist towns go. All the animals we saw (bison and elk) were along the park road leading to the town, and the bison indeed did walk down the middle of the road. Herein lies some of the stupidity we saw.

For those who care for details, bison (American buffalo) weigh around 500 pounds. They don't see very well and are inclined to lumber along rolling their eyes and looking unimpressed. Each year, one hundred large animals get hit by cars and cause $150,000 in damage, presumably to vehicles. We were stopped on the road to let three rather large bulls walk down between the rows of cars when the very small car in front of us pops the sun roof just as one passes and a woman suddenly pokes her head out to start taking pictures. It startled me so I can't imagine it pleased the bison. The one next to her car started and then veeered away. Good thing it wasn't in a mood to be cranky as the animal was as large as the car and its head was pretty much on a level with hers. Only thing more silly were the occupants of cars up ahead who were running back down the road and trying to get beside the animals for more pictures.

The presence of animals did really strange things to people. Cars stopped in the middle of the road while the occupants got out. Other cars parked under signs that said do not park alongside the road. I saw one SUV parked across three handicapped parking spaces. Maybe you can't get a ticket if you don't park properly?

But it wasn't just animals. The geyser fields were another source of mischief. Apparently, there were those who didn't believe the warnings about unstable ground that can give way into scalding underground cauldrons. One fellow actually lay on his stomach on a slippery boardwalk because he wanted to dip his hand into runoff water to see if it was hot. Since the signs said the water in some locations could range from 160 to 280 degrees, one can only wonder about him. I suspect this is where the Darwin Awards might have originated.

Then there were the drivers--and not just of the trucks and RVs. I discovered in Old Faithful Lodge that power wheelchairs be a powerful extension of personal aggression just like the large trucks, invariably driven by older men possibly trying to recover lost youth and power by driving 25 in a 45 mile zone and refusing to use pullouts.

Ah humanity! Was it worth it? Of course. The national parks always are. But with visits to Yellowstone now at an annual rate of nearly 600,000 a year and all the others equally being loved to death, I would have to think hard about going back. On the other hand--I'd really like to see Yosemite.

Guest commentary: Stephen Hawking, Religion, and the Bus

2010-09-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

I am delighted to include a guest commentary--a welcome relief, I'm sure, to readers of my blogging. Ken is British, a WWII vet, former nuclear engineer, and wise observer and commentator--certainly someone deserving of being called cool-old-tech. Comments are welcome and can be attached below or sent to Ken via me at kepad123@aol.com. Diana

I spend much of my time these days trawling the Internet for items that interest me.

Today I read on several web sites that Stephen Hawking has dropped his latest bomb. He has declared that God had no part in the creation of the universe. Some statement eh? and one that is likely to cause more than the occasion murmur within the walls of The Vatican, as well as in a few other places. Of course this was no great surprise to me because I came to this conclusion many moons ago, and I was not a Cambridge scholar.

The statement has such profound and far reaching significance that it totally upsets the apple cart onto the very basis of religion, to such an extent as identifying all brands of religion as being baseless and by doing so puts at risk the employment of all those in the religious community or should I say industry?

Just think, can we now expect to see Rome and the C of E having closing down sales? Expiry of lease? I wonder: Will Hawking now be asked to return the medal he was recently awarded by Obama ? and will Israel now have to change its tune as will Mecca? and will the US mint have to go into overtime to strike new coins? – Should generate some interesting times .

I was writing to a long-standing friend the other day and was pleasantly surprised to receive a very chatty reply in which he touched on our similar ages and the very cynical attitude he has to religion. In fact we seem to have identical views as atheists /agnostics etc., altho in my case I said that I leave the door open just a crack in the unlikely case of someone offering a reasonable argument against. The crack was merely an extension of my caution as a life long engineer to avoid burning ones bridges and regretting it later.

He and the few remaining colleagues that have have at least one thing in common with me. We all have little or no time for the current way of life. It has been usurped by the kids and they have neither the inclination or experience to run it, so we can only blame ourselves. With the end of WW11 we were so exhausted with 5 years of effort and deprivation, that we sat back, believed that it was all over and everything would be fine from now on. How wrong we were, our lack of care created a vacuum and the kids ( aka baby Boomers ) moved in to occupy the space, and the situation is now beyond recovery. The new deity was as obsessed with the new stately pleasure dome as was Kubla Khan, and there was no shortage of help from such as the Beatles of the 50s right up to the Jacksons of recent times

During the first few months of WW11 Neville Chamberlain said when referring to the stalemate in 1940, “Hitler has missed the bus.“ Well, I can modify that to suit myself and say that when referring to the current and dismal situation that Britain and most of the world is in, that I did not miss my bus because I was on it. I got off, way back now after I decided its destination was no longer of interest to me and have little intention of re-boarding it in this world, and I know of no one of my years who thinks otherwise.

However, now that Hawking has kicked my foot from the door, I must say that I am delighted to find someone of academic substance to give credence to my rebellious views, as I have no doubt many other free thinking persons are when getting support from such a quarter. Good for you Stephen!.

Trust

2010-08-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

Aristotle continues to fascinate me as I read further into his study of politics. In his opinion, one of the greatest dangers to demomcracy is running for office because it exacerbates the conflict between rich and poor--the greatest threat in his opinion because it can lead to civil war.

It works like this: The rich believe they should have more say because they have the wealth. The poor think they should have more power because everyone is equal and there are more of them. Both have a point, he says, and both are wrong because whichever one gains the power will govern in their own interest and not for the common good. This, he says, is the flaw of democracy.

I’d add another flaw. It’s quite possible for a group of people to exercise their democratic right and vote in a dictatorship. Hitler was elected to power. But I digress.

Running for office is dangerous to the common good, he says, because candidates for office have every reason to become demagogues and appeal to the naked self-interest of each group. Particularly damaging is what Aristotle calls “the wanton behavior of the popular leaders.” In other words, graft and self-interest, leading to an erosion of trust and the destruction of balance between competing interests. Maintaining a democracy, in other words, requires balance and trust.

How do we compare? Not a lot of balance these days, I’m afraid. It seems that 39% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of 5% of the population and that 5% has learned it can do without most of the rest of us. Producing wealth doesn’t require a middle class or even much of a blue collar workforce when money is made by manipulating funds across nations.

I’m reminded of what someone once told me about the car rental business. “Hertz isn’t in the rental business anymore. They make more off the insurance they sell. So they’re an insurance company that rents and sells cars on the side.” Same thing can be said for the large corporations. They really aren’t into customer service and producing a product. Their major money comes from creating and spinning off subsidiaries. They manage by crisis. Just ask BP and, for that matter, the Corps of Engineers, the subject of an unflattering documentary called “The Big Uneasy.” But then, who cares? There’s no accountability beyond maintaining stock prices and CEOs are proving to be yet another disposable product.

As for trust—well, the depressing roster of politicos called on the rug—and I’m sure those are just the ones we know about—doesn’t create much of a climate for it. Plus the ravenous media who have turned journalism into pandering create a fertile climate for national paranoia. Those who were screaming about Obama attending the Rev. Wright’s Christian church are now screaming about his being Muslim. The only consistency appears to be that it’s OK to make up facts as long as you don’t like the man.

For those who think I exaggerate on the press, consider the headline (real)” Thirty percent of Americans support the Tea Party.” Impressive? Turn it around: “Fifty-six percent do NOT support the Tea Party.” I don’t about the others who are undecided. I guess they don’t have TV sets.

Aristotle’s point on democracy is that if the friction between rich and poor is allowed to widen and deepen the result is civil war. So he’d say what we need is some balance. Here’s my idea of it:

Tea Party—calm down. You do not have the market on civil rights. In fact, many of your members (male, white, over 50) didn’t support the civil rights movement when it happened; it’s only the most blatant hypocrisy and ignorance that is driving your self-righteousness. You are being funded by corporate interests, which means you are being used.

Media--go back to the days when your profession was honorable and you had some ethics. Mainstream media should not be the same as the paparazzi. Let’s have some Pulitzer Prize winning investigative stories that don’t just confirm everyone’s biases.

Republicans—for heaven’s sake repudiate some of the lunacy. Candidate Maes’ comments that he doesn’t have to pander to the moderates is going to turn off everyone. Remember when you received 1% of the vote with an extreme candidate? If you feel you can’t win without the extremes, it tells me that you have become a party of extremes.

Democrats—will you please stay out of things that don’t concern you. And will you please understand that you are never going to get the Republicans to agree with you on anything until they find their voice and their direction. It wouldn’t hurt you to find a clearer voice either.

If democracy matters more than just using a slogan to beat someone on the head, then it has to matter to all of us. Maybe we can learn to trust that our government really has our best interests at heart--once our collective heads stop spinning. Until then, screaming at one another may be cathartic—but how valuable will that be when this country goes up in smoke and we live under martial law?

Selling in a Down Market

2010-08-16T00:36:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally did it--we put the house on the market. It took months of preparation--downsizing, sorting, and packing things away to unclutter the place, conducting serious negotation over what could go to Goodwill, and removing pictures from the walls that could detract from the archeterctural details of the vaulted ceilings. The windows were professionally washed and all routine maintenance completed in the house(hot tub, sump pump, evaporative cooler, fireplace, windows), the papers duly filled out detailing screened, cedar-lined pation, new roof, new high efficiency furnace, new water heater, and generous concession on the now-aging carpet. The garden was put into perfect shape. Up went the sign--and what happened?

One showing, and that person complained that our appliances weren't stainless steel.
Our real estate agent says no one else will look at the house because we have an industrial grade evaporative cooler rather than central air conditioning (never mind that an evaporative cooler is a good choice for Denver because it puts moisture into the air).

Such, it seems, is the way of selling a house in Denver these days. Apparently, I made the mistake of putting major money into maintenance (I have a binder of everything done to the house and it's thick) rather than glamour.

It's been a number of years since I last sold a house and I must admit I'd forgotten how vulnerable one feels-- and not just because one's furnishinigs are suddenly fair game for comment from people who would never otherwise be inside the house. "Not my style," said the person who wanted stainless steel. I hadn't thought it was about my style, but apparently it is. "It's price wars and a beauty contest," my agent says. Except, I have no idea of what today's buyer considers the criteria for beauty except of course for the stainless stuff.

I suppose this all results from buying a house in a development where there are lots of houses with only a few floor plans to differentiate them. It's like a predator with a school of fish. How do you choose? There they all sit with their standard four to five bedrooms, three to four bathrooms, three-car garages, representing the homeownership we are supposed to mortgage ourselves for and thus declare ourselves having lived the American dream.

Right now, there are approximately thirty houses for sale in our development and those around us. Thirty all roughly the same. I suppose I can't blame the agents and buyers for categorizing the houses in order to get make some sort of order out of chaos. Buyers also have to wonder whether the houses are going to lose value over time. I suppose they want to get as much as they can for as little as possible. It's a given that even with a full price offer, the financial loss on this house will be significant.

I suppose I should look on the loss as the cost of living in the house, which has been comfortable and welcoming. If I'd been renting, the money would have been gone anyway and I'd have nothing to show for it. Perhaps also I should look on the house as a sort of generational endeavor--the people before us did so much (actually they ran it into the ground and unloaded it when it started to give trouble, but no matter), we do so much, and then it's passed on. With this market, untold millions of people are probably trapped in houses they'd love to unload so maybe houses are going to remain in people's hands for longer. If there's a silver lining, maybe the home improvement people will benefit as bored homeowners try to prepare for the next beauty contest.

In the meantime, Sid says he'll check to see if we can change out the fronts on our black appliances to stainless steel.

Telos

2010-08-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

I’ve been rereading Aristotle’s Politics lately, feeling rather glad that our thinking has advanced a bit since he wrote that there are some people who are born to be slaves and that women are naturally inferior. As usual, I had to get beyond those parts and, as usual, once I did, I remembered why I find him worth the time.

Most interesting to me are his concepts of the goal of politics and his concept of telos, roughly translated as meaning purpose or use.

To paraphrase, Aristotle believes that politics exists to train citizens to recognize the good and do noble things. Since contemporary politics seems to exist to aggrandize politicians, enrich corporations, and convince citizens they are being kissed while being screwed, that sounds quite refreshing. Naïve, perhaps—given the enshrined role of greed in every level of our political and social life—but still more attractive than the world of lobbyists and naked self-interest on every level.

The telos of human beings, Aristotle says, is to be happy, which means living what he calls a virtuous life. This, of course, begs the question of what virtue means. Virtue, he says, is doing the right thing because it is right. Note—not expedient and profitable. Someone living without morals and ethics cannot, by definition, be happy no matter how that person feels.

All of which is well and good, you might be saying—but what’s in it for us? I would answer, telos. What, in other words, Aristotle offers us is the challenge to look into the purposes of our own political structures. In this, he invites us to link outcomes to our purposes.

Consider, for example, the former administration’s political purpose in removing all impediments to individual initiative and economic expansion. Who was made happy? Obviously the upper echelons of business and investment in this country. Did it make them virtuous? Hardly, since a bunch of them are in jail. All Bernie Madoff managed to do (beside rob his friends) was demonstrate how unregulated exchange between people leads to economic cannibalism.

If I were someone from outer space suddenly cast into American society (and presuming I could understand the language) what conclusions might I come to about the purposes of the government? Well, for one thing, I might conclude that there is no clear purpose. In fact, there are multiple purposes working to undermine each other. The result of all the tumult being that no one’s better nature is appealed to. Listening to the excuses and posturing offered by those in political power, I would, in fact, have to conclude that the term public service is an oxymoron and the only service provided being what is bought and paid for.

Which brings me back to the question of slavery. We aren’t too hot on the subject of a class of people born to be slaves. Aristotle was talking about physical enslavement, particularly of losers in various wars, so I think there’s another way to consider this. If we define slavery as he does: slaves are people who work and act for other people’s purposes than their own, then I think a case could be made for intellectual slavery. How many times have people spouted unexamined truisms about such things as justice and virtue without ever examining them? War is a dirty business—why is it glorified? Why do some argue that if a majority vote for something then it is all right to tyrannize the minority? Why do we believe that our way of life is the only way? Why do we trot out Jesus Christ to urge him to bless our efforts in some ignoble personal pursuit? Why do we accept some political or philosophical position because our parents did or for some reason of guilty national pride?

It seems to me the way to virtue these days is to look for the rational in every situation, and open up assumptions to the light of day. This requires reason, debate (real debate and not just yelling), and a curiosity to find the truth collaboratively. If we are unable to do this and merely parrot the enthusiasms that clog the world around us, then we are indeed no more than slaves.

Haven't Lost My Touch After All

2010-08-02T19:11:00.000-07:00

I can still clear a room all by myself. How did I do that? I met up with an honest to God Birther. I probably shouldn't even give that a capital letter since it justifies the argument that Obama was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii. One of our local Colorado politicians called the people who cling to the theory "dumb-asses." He was asked to apologize, which is a pity, because he is right.

Our local newspaper chided the politician and said the people who believe this crazy theory are "sincere"--HAH. In a pig's eye. They may believe (or hope) sincerely he wasn't born in the US, but the insincerity lies in the reasons why they choose to ignore overwhelming evidence to the contrary--some of it my personal observation since I knew Obama's mother slightly from my undergrad days the University of Hawaii.

The birthers purport to be trying to rectify a great wrong--an ineligible man has been elected president. But it's not that at all. They hate him. Now, if they were sincere indeed they'd look at themselves and be honest about why that is so. There have been many Democrat presidents, many liberal leaders, many others who run in fear from the Republicans, who have not generated the level of personal venom Obama has. What is it that has created such a threat to the nation that thse loons don't attack on the many legitimate grounds for attacking any political party in power? What makes Obama such a target?

Well, it's pretty obvious, isn't it? He's from Hawaii for one thing, the newest state and the one the Mainland US is least able to comprehend. Hawaii's ruling culture is heavily Asian and the folks there don't do things the same way. They don't confront one another; instead, as I like to say, they go one floor down and cut the floor out from around your feet and you never know what hit you. I would guess shrewdly that Obama has made his way in Chicago politics by applying a lot of Hawaii--quiet, scandal and confrontation free, highly effective, and not given to blowing his own horn. Good old Hawaii. If you want drama and conflict and winners and losers, Obama wasn't your man--when you elected him, you said you wanted an end to Washington politics--well, deal with it--maybe you didn't after all.

Then there's the fact of his parentage. It was a heck of a brave thing in Hawaii of the early 1960s to mix African and Caucasian. There weren't many Africans to begin with. Obama's father was the first on the campus. I remember about three others later--all from Nigeria, I think. They were glamorous young men, at least one of whom had studied at the London School of Economics, with self-assurance to the point of swagger. Hawaii was intrigued by them, but the marriage was still unusual. It had been only twenty or so years before that the Massey case hit the headlines (look it up on the internet if you don't know). That's why I remember meeting Obama's mother when she was pregnant with him--she had come with his father to a foreign student gathering where Obama senior was talking. I overheard her friends talking about her, worried that in Africa multiple wives were acceptable. I was horrified for her--that's why I remember so clearly.

So, given this background, where I had lived a tiny bit of Obama's story and knew infinitely more about Hawaii than the birther I was confronted with, I took the bait and pointed out where ignorance was intersecting with foreign-phobia. Birthers can't forgive Obama for having a foreign-sounding name and for having a foreign father and a mother who later lived in Indonesia. It's all just too outside mainstream America. Never mind that John McCain was born in the US Panama Canal Zone--my late husband was too and we had to get a State Department Birth Certificate to prove his citizenship. I'm sure McCain has one too. Would the birthers have pursued McCain on this? Doubtful because they agreed with him (at least until he went a bit off message).

The birther left rather suddenly from the gathering where I met him--I can do that to people. Part of my charm, I guess. But the fact remains--the world is moving on. I quote here (from memory so it may be completely accurate) my favorite poem from the Rubiyat: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on. Nor all your peity nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

Bumping It Up

2010-07-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

Just because of who I am, I tend to confront problems by seeing what has to be done, putting my head down, and just getting on with it. It's probably the residual British in me--just get on with it and don't make a fuss, as my mum used to say.

I used to believe this grim sense of determination was how I made my way through a doctoral program while teaching full time and keeping up my end of family life. I just kept plodding until I was there. The race, in this case, nopt going to the swift, who may have won the initial prizes, but to the steady and persistent.

From the vantage point now of an approaching birthday, however, things seem more complex and in some ways more poignant. I find myself asking sbout human motivation and how the impact of a single life is to measured.

When I was in the president's office at the University of Hawaii, one of the regents told me to advise my workaholic boss to take more care of himself. "Institutions have no memory and no gratitude," he told me. Many people would agree with him, and it's almsot a truism to repeat the observation that no one on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time at work. Yet I'm not at all sure that my boss would or could have agreed with him.

The reasons why people behave as they do are myriad and complex, which makes me wonder whether the behavioral research really has the universal application with which it is presented to us. I'm not sure my boss would have been happy kicking back at that time of his life. He was in a drive to succeed mode, building a university legacy. He needed to accomplish great things (which he did) and he had the family and staff around him to support him. Whether the university remembered what he did was immaterial. He had an intrinsic drive to achieve that he measured by his own standards. In other words, he was in control empowered by what he needed to do at that time in his life.

It seems to me that we have constantly shifting needs and reward structures throughout our lives. Those who later regret their efforts at work might have confused their need for respect with the trappings of their career. As King Lear was to find out, "a dog's obeyed in office." Once they left the job, there was no basis for their public authority. But that doesn't mean what they did in their career was unimportant; it just means that the validation of their career did not last for a lifetime and they are stuck in a rut.

It reminds me of the old public relations mantra that when faced with a media blowup (frequent in a university president's office), a good response was to "bump it up a level." For example, when faced with a protest march on the president's residence, talk to the media about freedom of speech. Politicians do this all the time, except they also manage to drop in something about this being a great country.

Bumping it up is probably a good idea when it comes to human motivation. The most profitable question is not necessarily "Am I identifying too much with my work?" but "How is the work I do at this moment and the way I do it an important part of my progress as a human being?" Not "How important am I?" but "How important is this experience in my life?"

For some reason, I must have needed to plod my way to that advanced degree, possibly involving some element of competition. It must have fulfilled an intrinsic need because once I had earned the doctorate, only my assistant ever used doctor in front of my name. Whatever part of me was stirred by earning the degree apparently had been satisfied by completing it.

As I read him, John Milton was dealing with the need for self-examination and self-validation when he talked about the need to test our "virtues": "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 where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat."

Perhaps that's what we are all here for: to place ourselves out there in the race for the immoratal garland, whatever that may be for us.

When the Cuckoo Says Cuckoo

2010-07-27T08:57:00.000-07:00

Back in the days when Switzerland had the monopoly on cuckoo clocks, my mother brought back two from a stay in Geneva. Hers was a bit over the top. It had a musical box, which played “Never on Sunday” on the hour and had a set of gaily painted dancing figures that came out with the cuckoo. When I inherited it, my son became famous for hiding the pinecone weight from the chain that controlled the music box. Couldn’t blame him since the clock was on the wall not far from his room.

Mine was more traditional. It had the stag’s head and rack, with carved game down the side of the box, all in a shade of dark brown. It did not have dancing figures, but it did have a full-voiced cuckoo. The bird’s voice was ambiguous, however. It didn’t really sound like the bird—more a two syllable bark that could be interpreted in a number of ways. In fact, it took an act of will to make out “cuckoo.”

Of late, I’ve been involuntarily hearing the bird pronounce the word “trouble.” I suppose it must mean I’m in a rather discouraged mood. We’ve been getting the house ready for sale and discovering that we need to correct things that were never right to begin with—like not done properly by the original builders. There was supposed to be a fixed ladder in the window well, for example. The crawlspace was supposed to have insulation installed. I am left to wonder how these things—now corrected—got by the original inspection. But then, considering that a gas stove had been installed in the house without a required safety vent (that was spotted by my house inspector), I’m surprised that the previous owners didn’t gas themselves. Probably didn’t cook much, I guess.

It doesn’t take much for a latent personal cynicism to creep into my thoughts these days. The announcement by Tom Tancredo is a case in point. I’d previously thought of him as a one-issue person (illegal immigration) until I read the platform of the party he has now joined. My heavens: talk about trying to recreate the past—turn back the voting rights act, repeal the endangered species act, remove protection for women seeking abortions, eliminate the IRS (well, I might be tempted on that one) and the Food and Drug Administration (untested food and drugs anyone?), and that's just to name a few.

I find it hard to believe anyone really wants all that—it strikes me more as a type of protest against what the world is becoming. It reminds me of what I had Bill, one of the characters in my novel “The Way to Dusky Death,” say meditatively: “This isn’t the world I grew up in, and I don’t like it.” The world Bill hungers for is predictable because it is familiar. I suppose that is what lies behind the Tea Party movement as well. The world is changing too quickly and the nation is evolving into something very unfamiliar.

Even given the fact that most of us feel displaced in one way or another—I shudder to think what will happen if those who look backwards get back into power. Admittedly, my house is one small example—but if these flaws got past the original inspectors, what would have happened without any inspection at all? Contractors cut corners for profit—that’s well known. Without the threat of inspection, I imagine they would have cut many more. My house might not even be standing. Yes, I’m pretty cynical and I’d send a house inspector through even a new house.

Actually, right now I’m trying not to think about things I can’t do anything about. I need a rest from the panic our media promote. Trouble is, people want to feel panicked about something, in this case, the future.

The nonsense over Obama’s birth certificate is cuckoo (sorry, couldn’t resist) and anyone reasonable would have laid it to rest long ago. The reason it continues is because the birthers don’t like Obama—he’s the minority future and it’s not familiar. Doubting his birth certificate is an insult to Hawaii (where I am from) because the state has repeatedly said the certificate is genuine, and it was reported in the Honolulu newspapers (as was my marriage—that’s how Hawaii does things) and to have fabricated the birth certificate would have meant changing the newspaper archives, where it has been found). Sorry, birthers, you have to get beyond forging an African birth certificate and address the real reasons you hate him.

One of these days, I hope all this craziness will be done. I suppose it can’t happen until people feel more secure and hence more rational. Until then, I’ll try to hear the word “cuckoo” whenever the bird comes out.

Lockerbie and Oil

2010-07-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

The news from the gulf is mixed. On the plus side, maybe they've got some of the oil capped. No one is allowing themselves to be too optimistic, but anything that stops the oil flow is a good thing.

On the negative side is BP's possible role in the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
It seems (see how careful I am being) that BP lobbied the UK government for the release to facilitate an oil deal with Libya. Now, I know that politics make for strange bedfellows, but this particular deal (and BP isn't exactly denying it while also not quite admitting it)has a very unpleasant odor--think the stench of dead wildlife along the Gulf.

I suppose in some way I'm not surprised. Corporations, as I have said before numerous times in this blog, have no souls, memories, or regrets (except for being caught). In this respect, corporations are sociopathic or psychopathic (depending on whom you ask)--if one can apply the same standards as one does for human beings. something the Supreme Court recently ruled is appropriate. If corporations have protected free speech, I guess they can also have mental diseases as well.

Until lately, my UK cousins used to chide me about US corporations and how money grubbing and unethical they appear to be. While I'm certainly not happy about the spill--or the role of arch-corner-cutter Halliburton--I'm grimly smug that this was a UK corporation. Corporations are corporations the world over and once they get big enough to affect national politics, they seem to morph into something extraterrestrial where they think their self-interest should be the dominant political reality of wherever they happen to be based. Piss us off too badly, they say, and we will move off shore and then good luck getting your tax base and kiss goodbye to all those jobs we provide.

That the UK released the bomber in return for an oil contract is crass. This is not honorable national policy and I think honor is still, or at least used to be, part of the British heritage. The US might do that sort of thing (although it would have been political suicide given that many US citizens were among those littered around the Scottish countryside)but that the UK government did it convinces me that the land of my birth is no longer what I remember. I suppose my cousins will now claim that the UK sold out to US capitalism. Hell, the US sold out to US capitalism, but so did anyone who ever tried to make money on the stock market. And don't get me started on banks.

We used to say in the president's office that two things were capable of bringing down a university presidency in very short order. One was athletics and the other fraternities. Given what is happening these days, I'm starting to think that corporations are what can bring down a national presidency. All of this wouldn't be so frightening if a large portion of the country hadn't allowed itself to be distracted by specious arguments; there's a reason why the conservative right is leading the charge against financial regulation--they are doing the bidding of their corporate masters without even realizing it. The release of the Lockerbie bomber merely brings the relationship between the corporate world and a national government out into the open. Anyone who thinks this is an isolated instance is just fooling themselves.

It's Not the Economy After All

2010-07-11T21:28:00.000-07:00

These days, we're accustomed to media polls telling us that the primary focus of our lives is the economy. Day after day we are bombarded with information on job creation and the number of jobless claims to the point that we might--or I at least--might assume there is some objective thought being dedicated to understanding how the economy came to be what it is and which approaches show more promise for the future.

Judging from the same media reporting on joblessness, such an assumption would be wrong. Ten percent or so unemployment is a sobering number when put into perspective of the 20 million unable to find jobs. But turned around, that same statistic means that ninety percent do have jobs--whether they like them or not is another matter--and that ninety percent probably doesn't much care about the others. In fact, the ninety percent have proved themselves much more interested in the political/culture wars than in the economy.

Colorado Springs is a case in point. The Springs is a bastion of conservative thought. Focus on the Family is located there, along with myriad retired military whose prescriptive outlook had led to one letter to editor writer describing the residents as misers and scolds. The Springs is also home to various initiatives to cut government spending that have now constrained city government to the point where parks are now closing, street lights are being turned off, and fire and police services curtailed. Rather than being disturbed by the potential impact, wealthier Springs residents have solved the problem by adopting their local park as well as a personal, residential streetlight which they are paying for to be turned on. This, of course, means that the poorer neighborhoods will remain dark and without places for children to play.

This economic survival of the fittest is nothing new. There has always been a streak of moralistic judgment among the conservatives. In its simplest form it goes like this: there is a self-evident tautology: people must be poor because they are lazy; if they were not lazy, they would not be poor. In order to prove this point, Colorado Springs is perfectly willing to deny services to the poor, even if it means decreased fire and police protection for everyone. It would seem the residents of the Springs are willing to see their houses burn down in order to prove they are right.

Being proved right, in fact, is the prime motivation of much political discourse these days. It's much more important than the economy. Conservatives in particular--although they are not the only ones--are willing to distort and deliberately misconstrue facts that do not conform with their preconceived political positions. These positions have most likely been inculcated since childhood, and by adulthood have solidified into a stonework that is oblivious to any type of reason. Unfortunately, these cemented opinions are vulnerable to anyone wishing to manipulate them. In its worst form, people holding these opinions hear only what confirms their own ways of thinking. No growth is ever possible among these people, yet they do not see themselves as the victims of absolute thinking that they are. In fact, they see their mission as making sure they pass on their ways to their children.

Perhaps something positive may come from the experience of the Springs. Perhaps some people may even think for a moment about the lunacy of indiscriminately squeezing government spending. I for one hold out little hope. These same people are agitating to put back into power the same failed economic theories that started with Reagan and have proved again and again that they do not work. The sad thing is that the fact they didn't work is not the issue--the issue is proving who is right.

Moving

2010-07-01T13:11:00.000-07:00

I remember reading somewhere that a fire is as good as a three moves. At the time I thought that draconian—after all, who could possibly want to lose all one’s possessions, not to mention a house, in a set of indiscriminate flames? After weeks of packing in preparation for putting the house on the market, I have a better appreciation of the sentiment.

Packing is extreme weightlifting for the soul. It’s not just the physical part of finding, packing, and storing boxes that’s the challenge, but the intellectual and emotional workout of deciding just how much of the past is indispensable, how much of the present is worth keeping, and how much the future might have need of anything from the other two.

Of the three, parting with the past is the most fraught because of the emotional baggage that attaches to every little souvenir or memento, particularly if it belonged to departed family members. Getting rid of Mum’s thimble and salt and pepper shaker collection, for example, became akin to rejecting her. She wouldn’t have had any trouble saying 'Oh for heavens sakes get rid of it' if something was worn out, but I struggled with letting go of anything. Once or twice I dumped something and then went and took it back from the trash.

I guess it’s just me. When Mum’s things were delivered to me after her death, I found she’d thrown out my brother’s Hornby train set, something I was never allowed to play with and would have liked to have. Apparently, she didn't have any trouble parting with it where I would have agonized. I was upset because getting rid of his things felt as if she’d shut me out of his brief life yet again. I used my perturbed feelings to finally put the thimbles and salt and pepper sets out for Goodwill, so I guess downsizing can also be a way of settling old scores. I still have plenty of her things, you understand, but my final criteria became keeping the things with happy, mutual memories. It was hard, but I did manage to get beyond keeping things just because they were hers.

Almost as challenging is parting with the present because the memorabilia is connected to lives as they have been lived: family, education, hobbies, marriage, children, career, friendships and everything else. It devolves into “What won’t be missed?” Well—as it turns out--it depends. For us it became three questions: “Is it replaceable? Does it have value?” but most important “Are we willing to pack this and pay for it to be shipped across the country?”

Under this rubric, every object had to prove its own worthiness, even art projects left over from the children’s school years. Of course, certain things had defenders and many times Sid said “It doesn’t eat much,” meaning that it’s something small enough, easy enough to transport, and—dammit he wants it—to slide into some packing box somewhere. In my experience, this part of moving generated the most discussions. We had an ongoing one over a TV table with sixties pointed legs that Sid had had for twenty-five years; our compromise was that it went as long as he was prepared to make the case he would use it in his workshop. Parting with a shabby kitchen storage unit became easier when it was presented as either this or that (that being a favorite kitchen table with a cutting board top).

Which brings me to packing for the future. This part requires clairvoyance. “What kind of life are we going to lead where we are going?” This begs the further questions of who are we? and what are we becoming? The danger here is to assume that moving automatically means we change as people. Probably not. For a time the skiing equipment was in danger, but cooler heads prevailed since we liked the idea of having it regardless of whether we used it as much as we have in Colorado. On the other hand, given my years, I think I can predict safely that I will not be using my ice skates again—white, size 10 ladies, hardly used, anyone need them?) Sid has finally parted with his technical climbing gear in recognition that he and I will probably lowland hike rather than try charging up fourteeners. Similarly, I got rid of a lot of baking pans—cake decorating is not in my future—and a bunch of cookbooks—who am I kidding about how much I plan to entertain?

Yep, moving is fraught. But the difference between it and a fire is vital. I get to choose what we keep. A fire makes the decision without any knowledge of me or what I value. So I’ll take the packing boxes any day although they’ll have to carry me out of wherever we move to—I’m not doing this again anytime soon.

Lunacy

2010-06-19T08:42:00.000-07:00

Well, the Republicans (or Conservatives, depending on whether they want to distance themselves from the Right by redefining terms to their advantage) have finally gone over to the dark side--the dark side of the moon. Our word lunatic comes from the French word for moon because it was once believed that crazies were under the moon's influence (as in police blotters go nuts during a full moon). It would seem there has been a lot of full moons lately, the largest of them presiding over the apology to BP for making them set up a fund to compensate people who lives and livelihoods have been damaged by the oil spill.

Just in case someone has been lost in the woods somewhere, Representative Joe Barton of Texas apologized to BP before starting a Congressional hearing on the Gulf spill because the US Government forced the company to create an escrow account of $20 billion to compensate the damage they caused by cutting corners on safety in regard to deepwater drilling. The said Rep. Barton, a well-known stooge for the oil industry from which he has received lavish funding, is all the the more dangerous because he has been (there's a move afoot to remove him) the ranking Republican on the house energy committee. In other words, he's supposed to be protecting our national interests while being in the pockets of those he is supposed to be regulating. Apparently he sees no conflict.

The uproar over his lunacy has been ferocious, particularly from those living along the Gulf coast, and the Republican party has forced into damage control by making him aplogize for apologizing, something he did grdugingly, sort-of, and half-heartedly. He's a good little paid-for politician who knows where his bread is buttered.

I once blogged on how corporations are not governments. Corporations are for profit; governments (theoretically) are for people. This is a huge difference and one that the Republican party has long forgotten. Corporations have no memory, are incapable of gratitude or regret, and when faced with accountability are prepared to declare bankruptcy, dissolve themselves, and reform with another name. Look at what happened when the head of BP came to testify to Congress: he said he had no knowledge of anything and once the hearing was over left his job. I am left wondering why--if he knew nothing--he didn't bring someone with him who did. Answer: he was sent to stonewall before the company moved him out of harm's way. New leadership can't be held responsible, don't you know--when appointed, the new CEO can claim the same ignorance. Another definition of inanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome: did anyone really expect to get satisfaction from a corporate CEO who rakes in millions in salary for cutting corners?

As someone born outside the US I have always been fascinated by a certain group within the US (see, George, I didn't say America to mean the US) who loudly proclaim their prejudice against education (except as a route to a good job). Perhaps it's the egalitarian part of democracy that trips them up--I suspect they confuse equal rights with equal talents. These folk deny what they can't understand, and, judging from the ignorant letters to the newspapers, I'm inclined to say there is plenty they don't get or even want to. It's much easier to mouth slogans than think, and if there is a group of likeminded around, well, then prejudices and ignorance become truth.

Recently, Professor Frank Fenner, emeritus professor of microbiology at the Australian National University, and no slouch at science (he worked on eradicating smallpox) predicted that the human race will be extinct within the next 100 years, the result of overpopulation and overconsumption. Outside of adding self-centered stupidity to his causes, I would say we have brought it on ourselves. Unfortunately, when we go, we'll probably take all forms of other life with us. But then, I suppose, the planet can shake of our dust and start again.

Helen Thomas and the Big Hypocrisy

2010-06-09T11:37:00.000-07:00

When I was younger, the two looming female forces were Bella Abzug and Helen Thomas (Betty Freidan--whom I once met--was much too ladylike to be one of the abrasive forces although she was indisputably influential). Bella and Helen were out "there" in any number of ways--speaking out, confronting, visible. At that time, they were challenging what a paternal society "knew" about women. Not so fast, they were saying, don't underestimate us or we will use it against you. Way to go, ladies.

Bella, of course, was Jewish, while Helen is of Lebanese descent, an interestsing contrapoint that nevertheless shows how much they had in common rather than what separated them. They worked together to form a national association for women.

Bella died in 1998, her dream of a zionist state long realized. Helen kept going, a rambling dinosaur of a woman who could still make a difference at going on 90. Along the way she made numerous enemies, as anyone would with the capacity and opportunity to challenge and embarass presidents--ten of them no less. She asked the same impolite questions of them all and never hid her own preferences or as many would say--prejudices. As she grew more elderly, she let her feelings be more open, as in the way of people who have reached an age where pretense seems a waste of precious time. So in a moment of complete exasperation she said what many felt but were too circumspect to say.

I will admit it. I have felt completely fed up with Israel's hogging the role of victim. While I would never say (or think) anything quite as awful and over the top as wishing anyone back to the holocaust, I have frequently said I would like to bang
Israeli and Arab heads together--a point I have made more delicately in this blog by saying a plague on both their houses because both of them are playing the game of "I'm a bigger victim than you are."

Helen Thomas committed the apparently unforgivable sin of bringing her frustration out into the open--in probably one of the stupidest ways I can imagine. As a result, Hearst newspapers, in a move worthy only of the glorious hypocrisy of William R in his heyday (find me a war or we'll start one of our own), dumped her. Had Hearst been in a better mood, they would have scolded her--which leads me to think there were other reasons (probably a lot) why this was a good time to move her on out.

What sticks particularly in my craw, though, is the subtext to her retirement--the hypocrisy of the journalistic profession in maintaining that they can be absolutely neutral in news reporting. There's no such thing. Just by choosing what to report and including or leaving out particular details, the news is slanted one way or the other. Look at the coverage of the Israeli detention of the Turkish ship. Leaving out or not stressing the fact it was in international waters is an editorial decision, as is reporting on the weapons wielded by those on board: it ranges from armed thugs with weapons to relief workers with slingshots and knives. Details are everything. I used to teach this to my freshman students; I can't believe that journalism profs teach anything different unless they are totally incapable of introspection. All I can say is God help us all if that's the case.

I shall miss Helen Thomas. I shall not miss the sinking feeling I get when I read our newspapers and wonder how reliable they are. In the meantime, I will try to find balance by reading (eat your heart out Sarah Palin) the UK newspapers on line, the Economist, and the Wall Street Journal, and by listening to the BBC as well as keeping an eye on the news headlines from papers around the world. By doing that, the only thing I will miss is who is divorcing whom in Hollywood.

Finally, I'm Mad as Hell

2010-05-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the latest corporate hypocrisy--BP asking for "patience" in dealing with the oil spill when they had no patience at all when we asked about possible environmental impacts--I am now as angry as the rest of the country. I want heads to roll, particularly those of the people I hold responsible.

So who do I hold responsible? Whoever argued for no regulations on corporate behavior should hang their heads in shame and go home. Whoever argued for trickle down economics (the money never trickled--it just stuck to the upper echelons), should go home. Whoever pandered to Americans by saying they deserved all the world's oil and were willing to send our troops to ensure its supply should go home. Whoever says "Oil spills happen" should go home--they don't happen, they are caused. Whoever said "Drill, Baby, Drill" should go home and drink an oil cocktail, because that's what the world's wildlife and people will be dinking.

This oil spill is a worldwide tragedy with the capability to end life as we know it. If you think I exaggerate, look at the gulf stream and how it flows into currents around the world.

Whoever said that making money was the American way and the government should get out of the way and go home. We human beings are greedy and we need regulations. Even the Bible has rules for living that basically say hands off your neighbor's property. You can imagine why those rules were needed even thousands of years ago--and there wasn't a government to blame then.

Look, you idiots, look at what your policies have brought us to. Look at the homes that have been lost. Look at the livelihoods gone. Look at the damage to the environment--all in the name of capitalist freedom. Who will you blame when the land is a desert from lack of water, when we are dying from the cancers caused by the chemicals around us, when the seas are dead, when the animals are gone, when wars are fought over food? Will unregulated exploitation of the land and corporate "freedom" seem so admirable then?

And now, you idiots, you have the temerity to want to put back into power those people with the same philosophies that got us into this mess, including a Louisiana congressman who wants to limit BP's libability for the spill. Are you insane? Are you so blinded by your team Tea-Party or Team-Conservative that you can't see the damage and you just want to win so badly that you don't give a damn if we destroy the planet?

Why do you insist on claiming that America is the bastion of self-made people? No one is self-made unless they never attended public school or state universities, never benefited from medical advances made possible by state support, never consulted doctors trained at public institutions, never called on the police for protection, never called the fire department, never demanded the government jail scammers and criminals. All you so-called self-made people are the first to bleat when something goes wrong that you think the government should fix so your miserable lives continue the same.

Well--let me be the first to issue a call for the planet. It's my home. Your idelogy and who is "right" matters not a damn to me. As far as I am concerned all religions and political parties can go over a cliff. If oil is the big problem,let's reinstate gas rationing. None of us has a god-given right to fly when we feel like it or to drive large cars across town. But doing so will mean that we--we who complain when the price of gas goes up over $4 when the rest of the world pays that for a litre--we will have to admit we serve the world and not the other way round.

I am not a conservative. I am not a liberal. I am not a member of either or any political party. I couldn't care less. I am a pragmatist and a realist. But I will say this: I will vote for anyone who has a shred of decency, is practical, and has the intelligence to look far ahead. I, for one, am not prepared to commit environmental suicide so some one can have gas to drive to the beach.

No Country for Old Women

2010-05-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

William Butler Yeats had it right: there are places and times not for--in his case--old men, but also for old women as well. One of these is a wedding. I'm just back from attending a wedding in Washington state. It was held outdoors in a beautiful setting, the weather was perfect, the bride right out of the pages of a magazine, and everything well organized and happy.

Why then, one might ask, do I say I didn't feel I belonged? Let me answer that by stating my (new) philosophy of weddings. Weddings, I have concluded, are for the young.

Note that I talk of weddings, not of marriages. Marriages are the union of two people. Weddings are the elaborate, expensive celebrations written about in bridal magazines, planned to the last degree often by a new profession called wedding consultant.

Marriages can be held in a judge's offices with at most a corsage for the bride and maybe a carnation for the groom. Weddings are held in romantic locales, require $2000and up dresses plus formals for the groom and his attendants, flower arrangements that carry out a color scheme repeated by the cake, and several thousand dollars' worth of elaborate photography that inevitably includes a picture of a champagne bottle nestled among an invitation and the bride's shoes.

Marriages may be celebrated by a retreat to a local restaurant or someone's back yard. In the UK, it may be a retreat to the local pub. Weddings, on the other hand, require catering and an orchestra.

Finally, marriages cross every age barrier. Weddings, on the other hand, and as I said before are for the young by their very nature. The hours before the ceremony are taken up with false eyelashes, zippers, nylons, and frantic straightening of bows and curls. This is when relatively normal young women turn into bridezillas fully convinced that the least flaw will ruin whatever future life awaits them. I speak in generalities here because, happily, the bride did not make this transformation. She was, indeed, the wonderful young woman she has always been.

But even given the fact I wasn't needed much in the way of curls and nylons and was free to take long walks on the beach, I still felt out of place. The reason was the nature of the exuberance of youth. I had little in common with the young friends of the bride and groom, nor they with me. It didn't help that I beat a hasty retreat when, overtired and overstimulated, the children of the guests expressed their frustrations in the normal way: crying inconsolably at the disruption in their lives.

I now know I am old because I remember my own child doing the same--only way back then I was young myself. I admit it--I have become a Yeatsian old person, and a screaming child makes my ears ring and my heart rate rise. Any illusion I may have had before this wedding, any self-congratulatory estimate of my bearing my age well, dissipated as I made a hasty retreat rather than bend down to console the little one. I have never felt my age quite so much before, nor in some respects my own redundancy.

Yeats talked about the generations teeming and the young in one another's arms as a sort of scary reality. We who are older must recognize they are the future, and we who have had our day must bend before them. I made my contribution to the world--hopefully, I did some good. But it is theirs now, and I yield it gratefully to them.

I hope the world will understand if next time I just send a check.

Kent State

2010-05-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

The recent coverage of the anniversary of the Kent State shootings has aroused a series of long-dormant feelings for me. When I heard the informative coverage on Public Radio (providing a lot of information that was new to me), I realized that I had not thought about those events for years. It is strange that this should be so, as the shootings affected me deeply and changed forever my political outlook.

I was a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at the time, teaching freshman English and politically independent but leaning more conservative. After that day, I joined those opposing the war, developed a mistrust of political leadership that survives to this day, turned away from the Republican/Conservative philosophy, and confirmed an absolute horror of what I call primary certitude, the ugly tendency to form opinions without benefit of facts and then inflict them on other people.

There had been protests against the war on the University of Hawaii campus, the major one involving the take-over of the university’s administration building, where I was to have my own office many years later. The sit-in was composed of a mixture of students and faculty who camped out on the second floor for several days. There were later removed and arrested, although the charges were dropped. We were so naïve, that a couple of young faculty members went down to bail out a colleague and found that bail could not be paid by a check. Cash only, please.

When the news came of the shootings at Kent State, I was horrified and remember saying, “My God, they’re killing their children.” I was thinking of the older generation who were supporting the war and all the politicians who called those protesting the war unpatriotic, communist, criminals, and worse. These were the people who, upon hearing that the national guard had opened fire on unarmed students, said too bad they didn’t shoot them all. The world split into a generational divide at that moment: there were people out there whose hatred of those who didn’t agree with them could erupt at any moment into violence. That day, the world became less safe, and comfortable assurances about tolerance and community evaporated with the smoke of the rifles turned on the students, all the more tragic since one of those killed was an ROTC student just walking to class and not even part of the protest. That could have been me.

These days, these same people of primary certitude have found new targets: illegal immigrants, homosexuals, poor people, abortions. The hate and passion directed to the long-haired hippies that erupted that day into killing has not gone away. It has merely found other outlets and leaves me wondering why the US needs scapegoats. Is it a driving need for conformity in a country that claims to be tolerant? Is it an unconscious need for authority? Is it the self-righteousness of certain religious sects? Is it the reinforced ignorance of narrow education that despises anything different? All I know is that historically, this country has tended to express differences in raw language designed to incite and vilify.

I have the same concern now that I did when I heard of the shootings. Unless we can learn from what Kent State has to teach us, we will be doomed by our own hate speech and Kent States can happen again.

Schools Teach, Churches Preach

2010-05-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

As anyone who knows me can tell you, I have a mostly hate relationship with organized religion, that is if you can call it a relationship at all. I avoid it like the plague. Through a combination of circumstances, mostly wanting to support Sid in his grandfatherly role, I agreed to go with him while his grandson participated in a geography bee. The boy attends a Christian school, so I had a partial idea that I might hear some remnants of religion, but thereby hangs a tale as they say.

As an educator, university professor, and renaissance scholar, my expectations tend to be national. I was expecting a Geography bee conducted under the auspices of an organization such as National Geographic, whose Washington DC offices I once visited to thank them personally for their grant in support of my conference on perceiving nature, held in Honolulu in 1985. In this assumption, I was completely wrong.

The geography bee, if one might call it that, turned out to be sponsored by a geography council supported by an association of Christian schools. Are you with me so far? The occasion opened with prayers in the main church, followed by prayers by various persons in the rooms assigned to various grade levels. I was already feeling something akin to a consumer going to a store and being treated to bait and switch.

The bee itself contained such “geographical questions” as which river Christ was baptized in, which city’s walls came tumbling down at the sound of a trumpet, and the name of the hill upon which the crucifixion took place. To be perfectly fair, many of the other questions sounded more geographic, but those prior were standouts in what I came to call (privately of course) The Sunday School bee. To do well in this bee, one needed to know the general place settings of the Old Testament. So much for the national competitions that these children will face as young adults. I highly doubt that National Geographic would ask only one question about Europe, and so many about Israel and the Holy Land.

But such is the way of religion. And such is the way when religion controls the school setting and the curriculum. I’m reminded of the song Che sings to Evita in the eponymous musical. “Get them while they’re young, Evita” he sings to her as she gathers children around her. I’m sure that the parents are happy with the setting or they wouldn’t have sent him there. The teachers seem like nice people, in the way of missionaries, which is just what they are.

I felt like a curmudgeon looking at all these good people, but also thinking how many years will it take for these kids to be deprogrammed to become the scientists and thinkers we need in this country. They’ll have to adapt once they get to college. Unless, of course, their parents send them to any of the evangelical universities around.

Schools teach; religions preach. I wish people would get clear on the difference.

Goldman Sachs and the Woodshed

2010-04-27T21:51:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago (how many doesn't matter) I knew someone in Honolulu who was dating a salesman for one of the radio stations. His job was to go around convincing business people that their lives and profits would be infinitely improved if they were to buy advertising time on the air. He was a bumptious type, loud, arrogant, full of himself. Probably he was just young and insecure, but his bravado offended me, particularly when he patronizingly referred to his empoying radio station, the largest and most prestigious in the Islands and at which he was the most junior of sales people, as "a nice little station." It put my teeth on edge.

I was thinking of him the other day as I followed the Goldman Sachs executives trying to tell Congress that they are too ignorant to understand the ways of Wall Street. I already had my prejudicial views of the young turks I imagined to be responsible for the financial manipulations, so I can't say that I was shocked, but it did confirm for me why I dislike (and always have) the testosterone-driven adolescent cant of a certain type of self-centered swinger. I use the latter word because I can't think of anything better to describe the kind of irresponsible, almost gleeful, kicking to the side of any responsibility. It's Kenneth Lay and Bernie Madoff except this time skipping along just inside the law and saying aren't we clever, catch us if you can, and we've stolen granny's savings but look at the bonuses we got.

The only thing I dislike more than them is the lawyer's chorus. I can say the words now before the lawyers can: "My client absolutely denies any wrong doing. He has operated completely within the law." I think the reason I dislike the lawyers is that they also fall into the pattern of adolescent rule-bending. It's as if these guys didn't have any limits put on them as children and don't have any ethics. Some of them needed to go over somebody's knee.

The only good thing about arrogance is that it's consistent. I've never seen anyone I'd describe as arrogant (and on a university campus they abound) who wasn't so consistently. This means they do not see any reason not to let their innate superiority demonstrate itself on every possible occasion. This provides amazing comic relief, as in the testimony before Congress. Who in their right mind, knowing that Congress is considering legislation to curtain their trading, goes to Congress and blows them off. It would be wonderful, if it wasn't our money, our housing, and our jobs they have destroyed so they can retire early.

Frankly, I hope Congress gets it act together and pins Wall Street's ears back. Or if not that, takes them out to the woodshed and teaches them some humility.

Greater and Lesser Utopias

2010-04-18T13:05:00.001-07:00

The world is a crazy place these days. For example, there’s Pope Benedict looking like the ghost of Tiger Woods, going around dressed as the spirit of confessions past. Then there are the Tea Partiers, who held a convention down here in Phoenix (July 2010), revealing once and for all they are the party of whites. No diversity there to distract them from their dreams of Utopia—small government, health care to the deserving, longevity to those who can afford it, and success to those who impose their economic imperatives untrammeled on the world.

Utopia’s an interesting concept. The first one I read, Sir Thomas More’s version of the same name, talked about an ideal world that had never existed and, given human nature, never could. It was a paean to a golden time when human beings might get beyond their greed (gold and precious stones were treated with contempt) and lack of care for one other. In fact, Utopia was an ideal society based on Christian principles—and, gasp, it turned out to be Christian socialism. There’s that dirty word—socialism. Self-proclaimed Christians hate to hear it yet fail to realize it is a logical extension of their own professed beliefs. In America these days, Christianity is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere with kicking the crap out of illegals, doing away with social security so the elderly poor can starve or freeze because they failed to save enough for their old age, and leaving all social programs up to charities (as long as the half-way houses and shelters aren’t in “respectable” back yards).

The Arizona Statesman reported on the Tea Part rally in today’s paper and commented that most loose organizations of enthusiasts seldom last for very long. I’d love to believe so, but this group, if one may call it that, has revealed an American underpinning of self-delusion and unkindness that may lead to some longevity. For one thing, they have an amazing tolerance for hypocrisy.

They wish government out of people’s lives, yet want legislation to ban abortions: the government it seems should look into other people’s lives just not the Tea Partiers’. They want individual liberty yet want to give long prison sentences for relatively minor failures to conform and God help the Gays who don’t conform to their assumptions about marriage and sex. They want to believe in the perfectability of human beings, rather like the 19th Century idea of the Noble Savage who has been damaged by the polluting laws of civilization and who can rise again to his old glory if only freed of the chains that hold him back. (I wonder if any one of them has read “The Lord of the Flies.”)

They want to pick and choose what they are willing to pay taxes for without understanding that wherever the money is spent it drives the same number of jobs. John Ruskin once commented that complaining about the rich buying luxury goods was senseless because the luxury trade provided livelihoods for just as many people as if the rich had spent their money only on basic necessities. Government spending provides jobs. They don’t consider that many more people will be out of work if they shrink government. Who will pick up the slack? Will corporate America come rushing forward to provide new jobs—we know where they stand on sending jobs abroad. For this, the Partiers have no answer beyond platitudes. Sometimes I think there will be no peace until the country is either on the breadlines or involved in another Civil War.

It has always been my understanding that government’s job is not to protect our guilty bastions of self-interest but, like wiser parents, to prevent us from killing one another—plenty of which has happened in the past, and not just in the incessant wars that government involves us in. Now there’s my gripe—where you have a government, can war be far behind? This is a government of the people, not of Churches, not of corporations, and not of special interests, no matter how flattering these interests may be to who we think we are or could be.

Sir Thomas made neither the error of mistaking self-righteousness for morality nor believing that Utopias could ever be reality. A Christian life is a communal life, he said. Wow. This coming from someone who gave his life for his religion—executed because he would not put his king above his conscience. Let’s see some of these Tea Partiers give up something of theirs for their beliefs instead of just hitting the rest of us over the head with them. If this is indeed a nation under God, just where is all the other, inconvenient stuff such as loving others instead of promoting calculated self-interest as the way of the world?

The Master of the Dung Heap

2010-04-14T22:46:00.001-07:00

I was listening the other evening to Our Lady of Wasilla screaming her message to her tea-baggers and found myself reminded of Aristophanes’ definition of a popular politician: “a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.”

Aristophanes, of course, lived roughly 2500 years ago, in politically charged and fractious Greece, the cradle of our political system, so I suppose one can say that politics was ever so, or more pointedly, two thousand years hasn’t seen much change in human beings as they relate to the avenues of power. I think he would recognize us and probably satirize us as he did his contemporaries. He would have much subject matter.

One thing has changed, though, and I have to point to this to us as our unique, modern contribution. We now have the means to broadcast the voice, breeding, and manner over the country and around the world. Not only that, we have created a new form of pundit who fits the definition of popular politician just as well. That idea is both depressing and amusing (in a rather horrible way).

I can picture what Aristophanes would make of Olberman and Limbaugh. He’d probably have recognized the type and written a play about them: Orwell’s barnyard where the animals are equal but the pigs a little more equal, and a raft of other animals, such as the cock of the barnyard, the influential master of the dung heap, try to work around the pigs. The point would be to introduce some levity as well as some perspective into people who take themselves far too seriously.

When I was an instructor in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I remember one of my fellow instructors (we were very junior and slightly mutinous) having a cartoon pasted on her door. It showed a very large shaggy dog with a dialog balloon coming from the depths of the fur on its back. Inside the balloon were the words, “We junior fleas demand a greater voice in the running of this dog.”

Now that Ms. Palin has become a corporate juggernaut (it was reported tonight that she’s earned $12 million this year), she may be seeing herself as a rather large flea these days. I wouldn’t blame her actually. But she needs to keep in mind that a flea is still a flea. Real power is silent and secret. It operates behind the scenes. The powerbrokers are never seen, not even in the backrooms, certainly not out on the Boston commons carrying a placard.

Loud denunciations and easy slogans are not where the real power is. Such efforts are useful to someone, but not to the person using them. Ms Palin will be well rewarded for her efforts—as indeed she has been—but the real power will continue on the way it always has, in dark places where the principals are known only by accident now and then.

This is the way it was 2500 years ago and it is the way, it seems, it will always be as long as we fleas believe we are running the planet.

Words That Don't Stay in Place

2010-04-11T22:15:00.001-07:00

It seems these days that we are in some sort of a lull. As George in Colorado Springs says, these halcyon days make him wonder if the political opposition (right wing) is merely regrouping.

Personally, I think it's just that it's hard for them to maintain a level of alarmist high dudgeon when there is so little reward for it. The politics of no require a regular infusion of indignation, and that's hard to maintain in the face of repeated defeat. People like the idea of health coverage and many wanted the public option; insurance companies will continue to shoot themselves in their feet over the need for profit, so it's only a matter of time--which is pretty much what the right understands and is so angry about.

Anyway, Sid and I are between culture wars right now. We are here back in the RV resort in Apache Junction after a relatively (for us) smooth trip down from Denver. The weather this time was good--no complaints there, but we opted to come through a canyon from Show Low to Globe, which, while it was spectacular, was also rather sobering. About every mile there was a marker saying "in the memory of . . ." In one area there was a gap in the guard rail marked by three crosses and wreaths. It seems that our highways are rapidly becoming cemeteries, or at least memorial chapels.

Pretty much can be said about Congress these days with the announced decisions not to seek office again. Don't get me wrong there. I think a good changing of the guard is not only a good thing but something necessary. Some time ago, I wrote a blog about Obama, wondering if he was the bitter medicine we needed to take if we were to get back on track. It seems I was right, except he has been more polished than I expected--or perhaps more than I deserved in my president. He has been quietly moving forward on the things we need to do while all manner of shrill fallout has harmlessly fallen to ground about him. The extremes on both sides--left and right, but particularly the right--are actually becoming boring. One wishes they would get beyond their one-note diatribes and get a life.

One thing about being set down in the midst of a group of people who disagree completely with me is the opportunity it provides for reflection. I find myself wondering to what extent there is a generational war going on. I heard that a lot during the 60's, but I wonder if Right and Left aren't clashing over control of America's past. I hear people throwing around the Constitution as if the document were capable of easy interpretation. Hundreds of years of intricate case law and precedent should disabuse them of the idea that language can be pinned down to one meaning, but that point seems to be eluding them. Words are slippery, as T.S.Eliot once said: they do not stay in place.

So much has to depend on good will if there is to be any resolution of anything, let alone something as substantial and our future. That's what we're lacking since it seems more important to the frantic among us to simply howl at the moon and be damned to doing anything worthwhile. I for one would like something better.

Obama's Census Choice

2010-04-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

I must admit I was surprised when the White House announced that President Obama identified himself solely as African-American on the census form. He could have checked White as well or written in Mixed Race, but he didn't, so the statement he's making is clear about where he feels he belongs.

Don't get me wrong. This is his absolute right. It's his life and his family and these issues are never easy. I can imagine he wanted to be the same as his wife, his two daughters, and his mother in law. I used much the same reasoning when I became an American citizen, but I was never asked to renounce being British (or at least the Brits said I was still was and that was enough)so I could keep what I was born with and celebrate both parts of me.

But even allowing for understanding the difficulties, I can't help a niggling discomfort wondering how I would feel if my half-Hispanic grandson should decide he is solely Hispanic and blows off the rest of his ancestry. Actually, I know I'd be hurt. I've done everything I can to help make him proud of his Native American roots but I also want him to be proud of the generations of hard-headed, hard-scrabble, farmers, soldiers, teachers, doctors, and nurses, that are my direct contribution to his father. Whether I like or even approve of them, they contributed their genes and deserve to be in the picture. I'd hope he could embrace us, warts and all.

Obviously, I feel forcing people to choose just doesn't make sense anymore. In my own case, while the choice might be obvious, I'd still want to insert footnotes probably because I lived most of my adult life in Hawaii. There one is more likely to describe ancestry by nationality rather than race, mainly because things are so mixed up that multi-racial is about the only possible label. A young person might list, for example, Hawaiian, Portugese, Chinese, Japanese, German, Scottish, and English (or more) as ancestry and be proud of it because it reflects the history of migrants to the Islands.

Even the label "Caucasian" suggests multi-racial. It binds together the products of milennia of migrations and intermarriages, even though people use it as if it refers to a genetically and culturally cohesive group of people. It doesn't--anymore than the term African-American can encompass the African sub-continent and the spread of its people across Europe and through Asia and into and through the Middle East. If our DNA testing is right and we take the long view, we should all check the box for African-American.

I look foward to the day when this nonsense of race fades into the past and it no longer matters. About forty years ago, Time Magazine ran a cover story on what Americans would look like in a hundred years. I remember the cover well. It showed the various possible combinations of very handsome people, all of them a golden-honey color. This is where we are headed, I believe. It's certainly true of my husband's family: three out of four grandchildren have to be described as mixed race.

I think it will be a very good thing for this country once we get there.

Still, I can't help feeling sad how Obama's choice has effectively cut away his late mother and grandmother. And for that matter--not that it makes much difference to him I'm sure--how he has pushed people like me away as well.

All Politics is Local?

2010-03-28T12:19:00.000-07:00

I've been told repeatedly that all politics is local. I don't choose to believe this, because if it's true, it's a depressing indictment of the voters and the people who seek political office. Why? Because it means people vote only for their self-interest and those who seek their vote appeal only to the local vanity and greed. Despite much evidence to the contrary, I'm still naive enough to hope for a degree of statesmanship.

In my opinion, only local politics should be local. National and international issues should be conducted on the national and international level. That means in the interests of all of us. Even people in parts of the world we may not like: it's their planet too.

I used to believe that providing elevation in perspective was the job of the US Senate--until, that is, they started behaving like raccoons. For those who aren't familiar with the habits of the juvenile delinquents of the animal world--just ask anyone who has an outdoor fish pond. Raccoons have a nasty habit of pulling fish out of the pond, taking one bite, leaving the fish to die, and then going back for another--sort of killing for the sport of it.

Lest anyone not see the connection I'm making, this is precisely how the Senate has been behaving and by extension, the Republican side of Congress as a whole. It is full of people, comfortably covered by their cadillac health plans, who don't give a rat's ass about other people declaring bankruptcy over medical bills or struggling to care for senile elders at home; they prefer instead to spend public resources on tax cuts for those who don't need them and provide full employment by sending troops to war.

Oh they make noise about caring about people's physical walfare--but primarily for political gain. That's why the Republicans now vociferously oppose the very same plans they proposed when they were in power. It's all a game: what do we need to say to get reelected? Actually do something---pulllease. If this was a Republican-sponsored plan see how fast the concern for socialism would melt away. Right now, the UK, Australia, and Canada--surely not your average socialist states--are wondering what all the fuss is about. They've been taking care of their citizens' healthcare for generations and haven't slid into moral decay.

Which brings me to another thought. How many of these people spouting anti-socialist rhetoric can even define socialism and distinguish it from fascism, oligarchy, nationalism, and communism? I'll be willing to wager that Ms. Palin can't, yet that won't prevent her from trying to get out in front of the herd and lead them somewhere (maybe to Russia since she has telecopic vision and can see it from her house--I tried this summer at Wasilla, but no such luck).

Well, sorry Peter et al, there is already plenty of precedent for what the health plan proposes. The government already mandates our buying auto insurance. Do you really want to go back to the days before it was required? Drivers have to be licensed to assure some modicum of safety. Do you want to take a chance on who's on the road with you?

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Universities and colleges haven't hesitated to comply with federal requirements if it means money. Businesses comply with federal interstate laws, farmers feed at the public trough by holding back production, medical offices comply with FIRPA--it's all around us. Freedom is a complete illusion until, it seems, it hits the wallet and reminds us we live in an interrelated, interdependent world. How big hypocrites are we? Consider that question when people want the government to protect them from Mad Cow Disease entering our food chain, unsafe drugs appearing on our shelves, and unsafe cars filling our showrooms.

In my opinion again (and I write my own stuff instead of regurgitating other people's ideas), we shouldn't be basing our vote on whether a candidate for office supports moving the state fair from Pueblo to Denver. We're better than that. Or if we're not--then let's stop all the bitching about how the government is not keeping criminals behind bars and preventing drug dealers from fighting turf wars on our streets.

In My Corner, Jack

2010-03-22T23:07:00.000-07:00

So they got the first part of health care reform through the house. Good show. But, while it is historic, it is hardly premature. There’s been talk of the need for this for generations, and I even edited the publication of Michael Dukakis’s proposed health reform plan when he was in residence at the University of Hawaii. I left Hawaii in 1993, so that should tell you how long ago that was.

Still, the current plan must be doing something right as no one is pleased. I’m reminded of the song from My Fair Lady where Rex Harrison sings about a quarreling couple: “And rather than do either, they do something else that neither likes at all.” No public option, but loads of good stuff anyway, such as regulating the health insurance industry with its record profits, to whose bleats I can say only that they brought it on themselves just as the financial sectors of this country brought their industry down around their ears.

As far as I am concerned, however, it’s not the health care plan that I am most relieved about. It’s the fact the hate and violence that seem to pass for political discourse on the right did not succeed in derailing the legislation. Had the bill been defeated, we could have looked forward to a generation raised to believe that spitting on legislators, calling them racial slurs, screaming down opponents, and forgetting inconvenient hypocrisy by denying its existence are all acceptable forms of behavior.

As I watched the distorted faces chanting Kill the Bill I was reminded of the disgusting behavior exhibited after the civil rights legislation when whites taunted and menaced black kids entering previously all-white schools. It seemed at the time that the South might go up in flames, yet time passed and the generations after have to be reminded of the struggles leading up to the legislation.

And time does change things. Recently, some of those people back then, whose distorted faces were shown on news television, apologized for their actions. Time has brought clarity. With hindsight and if one wishes to be somewhat charitable, one can say that the sixties were a time of insanity, brought on by uncomfortable social changes.

Today, I suppose we might say we face uncomfortable economic changes. That’s what this is all about—what’s in it for me? If I don’t have a job, what is the government doing taking care of anyone other than me? I feel angry and frustrated and frightened; therefore, I will listen to irresponsible radio figures who sound just as angry and frustrated and frightened as I am, and I will scream and make assassination threats and then –one day—I will look in the mirror and (perhaps) feel ashamed.

The world is not going to end because people earning over $500,000 a year have to bear a tax burden equivalent to what I carry on my comparably miniscule pension. Nor will it end because 32 million more people have the opportunity to purchase (notice: PAY FOR), insurance denied to them because they once had some illness. Nor will it end because 47,000 poor children in Arizona, one of whom has a brain tumor and can’t afford treatment, will get a chance to regain health coverage.

The British have an expression for narcissism and self-absorption: “I’m all right in my corner, Jack,” they say. I can only hope that when people see what is actually in the bill and understand that someone cared enough to get this thing through Congress they won’t give in to the hysteria we can expect in the months ahead.

Appeasement

2010-03-04T17:55:00.001-08:00

Why am I getting the feeling that the Obama is behaving like Chamberlain when he sought peace in our time from Hitler?

Could it be because Obama is trying to negotiate with fanatics who hate us as much as the Nazi’s did? Who see negotiation as blood in the water? Who believe that the poor and the sick deserve all they get because if they were worth tuppence, God would have rewarded them just like the corporate bosses?

Could it be because I am currently in Palm Springs, the original American version of let them eat cake and if they can’t afford to play here, well, piss on them.

I am sitting in a resort where the tariff is over $300 a night ($99 last minute on Travelocity). It’s pretty, Italianate, and pricey—the banquet tonight is $110 per person and will undoubtedly be palatable but unspectacular. That’s the careless way it goes when expenses can be deducted. Today at lunch, one of the medical professionals gathering here held forth on how superior the American medical system is (ranked 37th in the world and behind Costa Rica?) and why a public plan (like Medicare, which they are all on and enjoying) would yield substandard care. I replied, “It would be better than nothing, which is what millions of Americans now have.” He looked shocked. I don’t know whether it was because I had the temerity to speak up or whether he simply hadn’t considered the point.

Obama’s problem is that he expects these resort denizens to give up something for the public good. That’s not what it’s about in this modern America of ours. It’s everyone for themselves and those that have despise those who haven’t. This viewpoint curls around the edges of the Republican positions. It’s not even that they oppose something because the Democrats propose it. It’s because they oppose anything threatening the comfortable niches that have carved out.

I really can’t blame them for wanting to keep the privileges they undoubtedly feel they have earned, Palm Springs among them. After all, once the herd moves into town with trailer parks, fast food, and cheap, carnival thrills –there goes the neighborhood. If there is a public option, after all, more of these (usually) minorities might even live longer and what would we do with the surplus population?

As I say, I can understand the self-protection of these individuals, but at the same time, this is not the behavior I expect of my government. The government of this country was designed to be a system of checks and balances. Obama has forgotten that in his Hawaii-based, Asian philosophy. Checks and balances are by nature confrontational. They have to be. He needs to take a stand for what he knows in his heart is right before he squanders any more of the people’s support who put him in the White House.

I, for one, need a clear call to action from him or else I might as well say to hell with it and go have a cocktail at the pool.

The Elderly and Assumptions

2010-02-16T03:09:00.000-08:00

When I taught freshman English at the University of Hawaii, I used to give the students a newspaper headline and asked them to tell me what they supposed the story was about. The headline was "Elderly Couple in Freeway Accident."

Most of them told me it would be about why more restrictions were needed for senior drivers since they were sure the senior driver was at fault. The wisest among them said they didn't know enough to form a conclusion, but that didn't stop the majority from forming opinions based, as they later admitted, on their own thoughts on the subject of who might be called "elderly."

The use of the word "elderly" is interesting because it's another one of those terms that are defined subjectively. AARP has snagged the word "senior" which they define as anyone over 55, to the great displeasure of those under 65 who wish to defer being called that. In fact, some "seniors" say they are offended when the first AARP magazine arrives in their mailboxes. I admit to being a little shocked myself, but I soon balanced it by realizing that all that had happened was I had entered the market demographic that AARP likes to target: those of us, it would seem, who have little to do except become "active seniors" on our way to choosing our pre-need burial sites and caskets.

I think my students learned something that day when I began to give them further details about the accident. I told them that the other driver involved was a teenager. I asked then what they assumed. They said the teen probably had other teens in the car and was texting and/or speeding. Boy--they were tough on their fellow teens.

Then I gave them the actual story, which involved a run-away truck that had clipped the teens' car and pushed them into the elderly couple's sedan, putting the couple into the hospital with serious injuries. My student's were chastened and I thought it was a great exercise in assumptions. Not to be beaten down, though, they became indignant over what they said was the newspaper misleading them. "Sorry, Chums," I said, "you can't blame it all on the media. You were there too."

I was thinking about this other day when I was reading an impassioned article in the Arizona paper about how politicians are "not listening" to the people. Well, I wanted to say, maybe it's because the people aren't worth listening to. If my students had been in charge, there would have been even more restrictions on drivers over 65 and on drivers under twenty, neither one of which would have made any difference to the accident as it happened. All the legislative mayhem and protests that might have followed would have been caused by jumping to conclusions and not taking the time to look at all the details.

I think this happens a great deal of the time. In my more cynical moments, I suspect the media do this in order to generate controversy and have something to report. I will say H1N1 and rest my case, although I could also point to the most famous case of all: Orson Welles and the radio broadcast about alien invasion. People died in the panic caused by that program.

Finding out what really matters takes time and most people, it seems, would prefer the comfort of unexamined assumptions that sound good on the surface and flatter whatever it is they think they already know, or at least fear. This tendency does not give me comfort when I consider it drives political forces in most democracies. My late husband used to say, "Every head a vote, no matter how empty."

I have my own assumptions about things, I will admit. I try to control them because I know better, but that doesn't stop me from assuming that politicans are for sale, that unregulated corporations and financial institutions will gamble with the national capital if it makes them short-term rewards, and that laws are fashionable rather than just (the latter opinion, expressed on a jury selection questionaire, made me the first potential jurist both defense and prosecution eliminated from the pool).

Maybe what we all need is good dose of distrust in what we are told and what we read.

Liberals, Conservatives and All That Jazz

2010-02-08T19:53:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, in which he tells the history of statistics and shows how we are inclined to find (and trust) patterns where there are none. Our illusions about significance, he says, blind us to how much chance rules our lives. In his crosshairs are, among other things, polls, wine ratings, sports scores, and the stock market.

This is the kind of book I love: rational, demonstrable, skeptical, and amused at the human ability to willingly delude ourselves into meaning where there is none.

While I enjoyed all the statistical blunders he describes (including the OJ trial), one of the founders of the field of statistics he discusses particularly interested me for another reason. This is one Thomas Buckle who wrote two volumes of a planned trilogy on European civilization from a statistical point of view. The third never materialized because he caught typhus in Damascus and died in 1841. This might be unexceptional except a doctor offered to treat him, an offer Buckle declined because the man was French. Therefore, as Mlodinow points out, Buckle died.

British xenophobia aside, I find myself imagining a modern counterpart: Mr. Buckle as a Republican choosing death over being treated by a Democrat.

While we may dismiss my musing as merely playful, I wonder if that’s not what has been happening in our politics. Rather than solve anything together, both parties would prefer to see the patient die while pointing the finger at one another and calling one another names.

This leads me to another musing: why has the word liberal become so vilified when the word conservative is just as culpable. Both words describe the outer edges of the bell curve Mlodinow describes. Statistically neither side of the statistical deviation has any claim to moral majority, liberals and conservative claim about 30% on each end, with the rest of us clumped somewhere in the middle. Yet the conservative deviation has set itself up to be the middle.

Conservatives, of course, are (primarily although not exclusively) Republicans who disapprove of the party and wish to distance themselves from policy decisions that are unpopular or difficult to defend. They claim it was Republicans (not conservatives) who allowed themselves to be bought and sold by corporate interests thus bringing on the corporate bailout; it was Republicans (not conservatives) who took the country to war on the basis of a flimsy excuse; and it was Republicans (not conservatives) who racked up a massive budget deficit.

Conservatives like to cherry pick the ideals of the party. They argue they are fiscally prudent, flag waving patriots, free enterprise supporters, and believers in free enterprise and American predominance in the world. Their banner holders are the new populists who promise to listen to the people (until corporate money starts pouring in). You must forgive my cynicism here as, being senior, I have seen so many protestations of political virtue dashed upon the rocks of opportunity.

I must admit I am no fan of liberals either when they display the same absolute behavior (and they do). That I find the moralistic posturing of the conservative right more annoying is really my own problem. My particular wrath is reserved for the invisible hand (and not Adam Smith's) that runs the government and country.

That invisible hand is not the marketplace but Big Business and Big Finance. I've talked before in this blog about how corporations are not governments and I am discouraged how many segments of the population simply cannot see the larger picture any more than they can see how their own behavior contributed to our meltdown.

Our gullible media (itself a corporation) does from time to time expose the corporate benefit behind the Middle East wars, yet the same people raising hell over lapel pins can find nowhere near the same anger against the financial manipulations that have robbed us of pensions and home values; in fact, they seem poised to vote back in the very same people who allowed the mayhem in the first place. I am confounded.

Corporate America will support conservative candidates because they will be less likely to regulate the financial markets; it does not take much to predict where they make the major contributions in their own interest. The recent Supreme Court decision means they have no limitations on their donations to political campaigns, so there will not be even the pretence of covert funding. Conservative candidates can be expected to reap a funding bonanza.

Given all this, I don’t understand why anyone would want to be called conservative, let alone choose that name for themselves, when it implies being a stooge for big money. Liberal is bad enough—but to be called conservative? I’d be pretty upset if someone tried to call me that.

Tea Parties and The Holy Land Experience

2010-02-06T19:39:00.000-08:00

The sociologist in me is fascinated by the emergence of rival tea party factions in the midst of what pundits are calling a grassroots reform movement in the US. I'd love to believe that but I despair when I hear that the "rival" groups are actually being managed by an organization paid to consult for the Republican party and the two supposed factions are managed by offices next door to one another.

The cynic in me is really my own personal bullshit meter but now and then it is capable of becoming un-cynical (for want of a better word) until it finds evidence yet again of the inconsistency, corruption, and moral vacuity of a large part of the world. I'd love to believe that tea party people are really thinking for themselves, but I think it more likely that a bunch of people operating on enthusiams and unexamined assumptions about how the world should be are being manipulated yet again for somebody's profit.

Let me state here that I have nothing against the founding principles of the Reublican party. What I object to is how this party allows itself to be bought by corporations who have no interest in anything other than themselves and to be directed by a bunch of religious nuts. I could probably live with the corporations. They at least are not hyprocritical--they've made it clear from the start that all they're interested in is profit, which at least creates jobs. I cannot live with the religious mentality that goes to the Holy Land Adventure exhibit in Orlando and weeps at the reenactment of the crucifixion, complete with rock singers dressed in Arab clothing. "Come thrill to the Crucifixion, real blood!, talk to the Virgin Mary."

Yes, you must be saying, she watched Bill Maher's Reliculous. I did. It's slanted, it's no respector of unexamined belief, and it hits on the the most bizarre nonsense associated with all the world's major religions. I laughed. I looked on in horror. And I realized that we need to do more of what I call choosing to believe, with emphasis on the choosing rather falling down in awe before so-called authority. We don't need graven images these days when we have televised evangelicalism.

Those of you who have heard me hold forth on the subject of religion know I am not anti-religious if you define religion as spirituality. I am anti organized-religion where hypocritical hucksters create laws and ideas not in any Bible (as if a bunch of nomads living in the desert long before technology are really that authoritative), and use these phoney ideas to leech money from their followers. If humans are made in the image of their creator, surely they have enough sense to judge for themselves what they believe in. Are we so poverty stricken that we cannot accept our own spirituality unless someone is giving us the latest made-up laws to get into whatever we define as heaven.

America, Reublicans, Religionists, let's for heaven's sake get over this absolutism that has taken us by the necks and look at ourselves in the mirror. Your unexamined belief and willingness to wallow in a bath of emotion is paying off for someone or it would be promoted and enforced.

There are no answers. No one can give you the laws for living except in the most day to day forms. No one can promise you a heaven of your preference. You aren't going to get raptured up to heaven--no one is that lucky. If this world is destroyed it is not the creator who does it--it will be us.

A Pair of Recluses in Arizona

2010-02-03T05:15:00.000-08:00

It’s been six months now since we made the decision to bring the travel trailer down to Phoenix, site it permanently in an RV resort, and turn ourselves into part-time snowbirds. During those six months, much has happened, including an offer to publish my second novel from a commercial publisher, and the end of the on and off decision making process by which I decided not to sell the Denver house just yet. But far and above has been the learning curve involved with becoming semi-gypsies.

I must admit that some of the learning curve was anticipated—living small and spare is different from living in a large suburban house with basement and crawl space into which to stuff things that have dubious immediate purpose and only a “maybe” future ahead of them. Storing the unnecessary in an RV is undesirable if not impossible, so what is not obviously essential finds its way to the well-stocked local thrift shop. I have six hangers in my little bedside closet and that—as they say—is that.

The more important learning curve has, however, has involved something more profound since it touches on who we are and, more definitely, who we are not.

When we started this adventure, we were open (for us) to breaking out of our conventions of social behavior. In other words, we started conversations with fellow campers and looked forward to participating in planned resort activities. There was a morning coffee group of older gents that suggested Sid would not be always looking at me as he drank his; there was a hiking group we both could join; and there were planned social events such as potluck dinners and breakfasts.

While we were happily imagining this world of social contacts, however, we forgot a basic component of the whole equation. We forgot that we were us.

The old gents coffee klatch turned out to be a morning bitch about politics (liberal, black president)and things that go wrong with RVs. A large percentage of the park residents turned out to be blue collar or retired small business owners with McCain-Palin stickers on their trucks. We were fortunate in finding the only other couple (we believe) who are middle of the road like us. They were classier than us—daring to have an Obama-Biden sticker on their truck—but the message to us is clear: Arizona is a red state, the RV is a red zone, and we don’t fit in.

The hiking group turned out to be a group of “getting to altitude and staying there” extreme hikers (extreme for a group of supposedly over 55 anyway). We went with them on the first hike, a fairly simple walk in Lost Dutchmen Park. Ordinarily this park has some of the most mellow walks in Apache Junction, but the group went at a fast clip and ostentatiously stopped for the stragglers (us) to catch up to them. We were holding them back and let us know it. We decided to go off on our own in future. Last time I looked, they went hiking on Picacho Peak south of Phoenix, which has a fixed rope because of the steepness, a trail so narrow around an outcropping that is has a wire cage to catch anyone sliding off, and a reputation for having “no mercy” on hikers. OK—glad we passed on that.

The social events were a study in insanity. No matter how early one arrived, the best tables were marked with post-its as being reserved. This practice was apparently approved since many of the attendees were returners and wanted to sit with friends made over a number of years. Same time next year has real meaning in the park.

Reserving tables ahead of time meant that newcomers without these associations were relegated to the left-over seats around the perimeter with no chance at meeting people. At New Year’s, we got there early only to crushed so tightly against a wall people had to get up to let us out, Even though we’d bought tickets, we left without eating.

The worst evening as far as I was concerned was the so-called Hawaiian night. It was potluck so I cooked a ten pound pork butt, haole kalua-pig style. It made a mound of shredded meat so huge I thought I’d have left-overs to bring home. I don’t know what the others thought was Hawaiian food (one lady brought a small bowl of hominy???) but whatever it was there wasn’t enough. The food ran out before the diners did, something that would never have happened in Hawaii because of the custom of generous sharing.

Then to make matters worse they had “Hawaiian entertainment,” consisting of clowning around in Dollar Store raffia skirts. I was so offended I gave a short demonstration of the few steps I knew to the song they were jumping around to. There’s a picture of me on the web now in which I look a complete and overweight idiot. To me what they were doing was as bad as making whooping sounds and claiming it to be American Indian.

So, we’re now back to being our usual socially reclusive selves. We’re enjoying the weather, the park is safe and convenient, and we’re doing what we want at our own speed but except for Bob and Lynda, we are by ourselves.

And we’re finding it quite all right.

On the Back of a Whale

2010-01-15T07:57:00.000-08:00

The Japanese say that their country rests on the back of a whale and earthquakes happen when the beast shifts its position. I've always liked this concept. Beside requiring an incredibly accommodating whale, it reminds us the planet is not inert but alive in the sense that there is a limit to the nonsense it will endure from us.

Now, I'm not saying we are responsible for earthquakes. In the face of no better way to understand their causes, I subscribe to the theory of plate shifting and continental drift. I lived almost 40 years in Hawaii. People living in the Islands know all about moving hot spots as the plates shift. In fact, the newest island, Loihi, is forming now under the ocean off the Big Island.

What I'm saying is if we can't control earthquakes, surely we can control ourselves. If we believe we are on the back of the whale, then common sense says we should respect the animal and understand it will behave like a whale. Why are we surprised when the whale shifts and brings earthquakes and tsunamis? Why are we wasting our time listening to ignorant claims of a pact between Haiti and the devil? It's the whale, for heaven's sake, just doing what it does.

I feel the same impatience watching people in Haiti being dragged out of sub-standard housing that collapsed around them as I felt when I watched Katrina survivors begging for water and food. Worse, I have every expectation that we'll see scenes just like this again when one of our West Coast cities is devastated as New Orleans was. Just what we will need: the media yet again arriving (when relief workers supposedly can't get in) to report every juicy detail of human misery and then provide fodder for the pundits comfortably back hime to shovel out their uninformed guesses and unhelpful speculations.

In fact, sad though I am for those in Haiti, it's the media that I am most discouraged about. Haitian family members in the US and around the world need to know about their loved ones and old neighborhoods, but this continual replaying of the same scenes recalls those dreadful days after 9/11 when we had to endure hours of watching the planes hitting the Twin Towers. It was pandering to our own worst tendencies to want to be entertained. Panders, in fact, is what the media have become in their desperate attempt to keep ratings.

Back when I was in college, eons ago, Marshall McLuhan was just hitting the circuits. His idea was prophetic: he said the medium was the massage (sic). He used the word massage because he wanted to say that the new form of instant communication and broadcast were inevitably going to shape what was broadcast. Today, our technology allows us to view and review (ad nauseum) human suffering and at the same time distance ourselves from it. We have no way to process what we are seeing except to watch it unfold like a movie or television show.

Our technology has, in my personal and admittedly senior opinion, debased our abilities to think metaphorically. Perhaps if we could envision the earth as a living creature, we might be better at not assuming arrogantly that everything here is for us to use and discard (a viewpoint for which I will not forgive the creation myth in Genesis). We might be better at helping our fellows instead of judging them. We might be better at remembering John Donne's words that no one of us is an island, even if some allow themselves to be smug and comfortable and moralistic.

l

Christmas and Progress

2009-12-25T20:35:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-07T14:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-05T09:05:00.000-08:00

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. .
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Craven me

2009-11-30T21:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-07T19:37:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-09T21:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T16:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-20T14:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-09T12:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-20T18:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-18T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-17T08:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-11T18:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-01T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-27T06:44:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

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.