Freedom and Detainees

President Bush is quoted today as saying it is "absurd" to criticize our handling of the people we have detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Since a veil of secrecy has been raised around the place we can't know for certain what is taking place there. But why did we choose a piece of Cuba in which to imprison these people, if not to avoid the constraints of our own laws that require certain basic rights for prisoners held in this country? What about the flights we are hearing about, of jets chartered to the CIA, spiriting prisoners to countries not bound by our rules about torturing prisoners?

One of two things must be true about all this. Either the threat of terrorism is so potent that it must be met with the abandoning of all our historic guarantees - innocent until proven guilty, the right of the accused to be represented by council - or we have finally simply decided we are no longer going to hold to those standards. For whatever reason.

If the first is true - that we cannot afford the luxury of the freedoms we have enjoyed because of the danger posed by terrorism - then the terrorists have won. They have forced us to become like them, to regard any means necessary to prevail as legitimate. If I am being cavalier when I say that I would rather take my chances living in an open and free society than try to find safety by jetisoning those freedoms, so be it.

If, on the other hand, it turns out that the Bush administration has, for whatever reasons, used the terror of our time to gain a stranglehold on the way we live our daily lives, they are going to have a lot to answer for.

And I believe they will fail.

More Nature

There were only five Canada geese on the pond when we returned to Vermont two weeks ago. Since in past years there have sometimes been dozens, we were thrilled. We reckon this pond will sustain maybe ten. More than that become a problem. The big question was whether the game warden had searched for and shaken any of their eggs. In an attempt to curb the population explosion, they shake the eggs (or some of them) which keeps them from developing but the bird continues to sit on them and doesn't lay any more.

Two days ago we spotted goslings; first a family of 7, then one of 5, meaning an addtional 12 birds on the pond. The odd adult may be one whose mate was killed or lost. I have not learned to tell male from female and don't know which the lone adult is. Yesterday the 5 were down to 4. I have heard the turtles sometimes kill them, though I thought tutrtles were plant eaters. They do cross the road and are in danger of being hit.

Cosmos, our terrier, chases the adults off our field back onto the pond. They are much larger and no doubt tougher than he is, but they do return to the pond when he comes running and yelping. We first warn them off the field when the babies are tiny, for fear that he might catch one and/or the adults might do him in if he got close. They grow fast and within a week or two they will be able to get onto the pond fast enough to evade him.

At my best I understand all this as my being a part of the local ecosystem. When the geese first began nesting by the pond, I thought we would get rid of them, that they were a temporary phenomenon. Amazing how fast they went from being a romantic subject for movies and tourists, to pests. But I went right along with the culture, wanting to figure out how to keep them away.

I have failed. And I am rather glad. I wonder if they look up at our house, hovering over the pond, and wonder how long they will have to put up with us?

The Dismal Science

Economics has been called the dismal science. Dismal maybe, but science? I don't think so.

A friend cornered me the other day to explain his latest doomsday scenario which this time has to do with the fact that we can no longer calculate with any confidence the cost of those things that matter the most to us. He was focused on the environment which, he says, is in such terrible shape, that trying to figure the cost of renewing it is beyond the scope of any method now known. He has many schemes which he believes will do in our species if not our planet, and he is so smart and talks so fast, I am usually dazzled.

This time we got into the matter of the schizophrenic tracking of oil; it's availability and its cost. Virtually every day we read a report of how much supply the U.S. has, how much is able to be pumped and refined, and what the long term prospects are for pumping oil from the shale in the future which is rapidly becoming a consumption race between the U.S. and China.

And the reports are not simply different from day to day, they are often directly contradictory from one day to the next. Today the price of crude rose more than a percent because it was reported that our reserves were far smaller than previously estimated. Last week the price had dropped below $45 for the first time in months because the reserves were reported to be much larger than previously thought.

The reality is we really don't know much. We agree to act as if someone does, and we entrust to unfortunate icons like Alan Greenspan judgments beyond the reasonable ken of human knowledge.

The morning after Bill Clinton's inaugeration, he and Hilary are reported to have woken in the White House, and Bill looked over at Hilary and asked, "Can you believe this shit?"

Now some have said that made them feel as if Bonnie and Clyde had taken up residence in the Presidential mansion. It made me feel as if someone with accurate perspective was in the Big Seat.

Choosing the Nuclear Option?

Anyone else think all this noise about seeking a compromise in the Senate fight over rules for debate and confirmation of judges is smoke screen? For whatever reason, it looks to me as if both sides - or at least those with the votes on both sides - want to move from the long period of posturing to settle the matter one way or the other. Whether that is because each side believes they have the votes (they can't both have counted right, and I suspect some of the unknown votes are holding out for some juicy payoffs) or because they are more weary of the stalemate than they are afraid of the outcome, I don't know.

David Brooks, who sometimes has an exalted opinion of his influence, tried to shame the senators into reaching a comrpomise with his snide column yesterday saying they could find one if the moderates would become as active as the zealots. I confess to a certain weariness with all the hype, though I do fear this president being unleashed from the restraints of the old senate rules.

A piece on local (Albany) NPR this morning told of level 3 sex offenders (those considered likely to repeat) getting subsidies for prescriptions of Viagra.

George Orwell could never have come up with such a bizarre story.

The South Koreans say they have made a big leap forward in stem cell reasearch that tags the cells to the person and the person's illness. President Bush says he will veto any bill that proposes such a thing.

Who could have dreamed we would come to this?

Shame Relief

Not surprisingly after yesterday's posting, one person emailed me (blayneyc@earthlink.net) asking how one can find relief from shame. Not merely some neurotic sense of shame, but the consequences of some shameful thing one may have done that caused ripples of sorrow for others. I will answer that person in due course personally, but the issue is so broad-based, I believe, that I thought to post something about it here.

Shame that is not neurotic or inappropriate, that is prompted by something shameful one has done, deserves serious attention. Not only because simple justice requires it, but because what buddhists call karma, the consequences of one's acts, keep recurring until somehow the momentum is broken.

Assuming one has made an attempt to put things right, which means acknowledging one's malign action and doing what can be done to set things right (sometimes nothing can be done), the time comes to recognize that none of us is able to live totally as we wish or believe we should.

There comes a moment when one has to move on. That may require tough psychotherapy or it could be some sort of spiritual discipline like sitting meditation in which one lets the offense come into consciousness, look at it honestly, and then watch it leave.

But like a scar from any wound, it will leave a long-lasting, perhaps permanent mark on one, a reminder of a moment of human weakness. Humility, a virtue that makes life rich in reality, is fed by those scars.

Of course this can also be an opportunity to face down our old friend ego, who wishes to persuade us that, despite all evidence to the contrary, we are the center of the universe, and until everything about us is as it ought to be, the uiniverse will be off-center. In fact it is a monumental conceit of ego that makes us believe something we have done is so much worse than what anyone else has ever done, that it cannot be forgiven.

Few of us, with the exception of Hitler, Pol Pot or Stalin, have committed such a grave sin.

Shame

Today I feel shame as an American. News reports of the brutal torture and death of two young Afghans in U.S. custody are stomach turners. At the end of the NY Times article the reporter writes that several of the interrogators came to believe the man who was tortured to death was innocent. He was a taxi driver who drove past an American outpost at thr wrong time.

Now I'm not one for wringing my hands about this sort of thing. Terrible things go on in the world and we certainly have no monoploy on perpetrating them.

But there are circumstances in which they are not only more likely to happen, but are even sanctioned, encouraged. And our attitude toward our place in the world during the Bush administration is as provocative of contempt for the parts of the world that are different from us as any I have experienced in my lifetime.

I believe one can practice and discipline one's self to become more open and peaceful in engaging the world, particularly the often frightening stranger. To call entire nations evil or to regard the sometimes necessary use of violence as good and just, is to make ourselves a malign and corrupt force among nations. In fact we take on the very characteristics we have claimed we are trying to eradicate with our military might. We have set up an international mirror and have yet to recognize that we are looking at our own disturbing image.

I worked hard over many years in psychotherapy to release myself from the shame that my family used to shape what they believed were proper values. It is a crippling and cruel tool in the hands of overbearing parents. Because I believe my parents thought they were doing what parents ought, using averse conditioning to shape behavoir, I have been able to forgive them, realize that their failings, like mine as a parent, were their best effort at the time. I deplore shame as a shaping tool.

But not when a national policy toward the world turns self-righteous and without reflection or self-doubt. Then I believe shame is the right name for what they (we) are about. And national repentance is the antidote to shame.

Merciful

A doctor friend and I have been exchanging emails about what it is about dying that is so hard for we humans. Every living thing dies. But we treat it as if it were a terrible assault on us, the breaking of a solemn contract. We both quoted Woody Allen's aphorism, "I don't mind dying; I just don't want to be there when it happens."

And my doctor friend said Woody is so right. We fear losing control more than anything and there just is no way to get from life to death without surrender. As he wrote, "At least we have morphene, valium and hospice," meaning that when the time comes to surrender, there are reliable aids in making the surrender peaceful and merciful rather than assaultive.

I am at that age (65) when there is a rash of dying among my friends. It seems that many chronic or perhaps hidden diseases, become active at this point and take out those who had coped pretty well when their bodies were still resilient. Those who make it through these next five years without serious incident have a statistical chance of living into ripe old age.

Ripe is the operative word, not old. A man in my last parish had his 110th birthday last Bastille Day (July 14). When he was 101 I asked him what it was like now.

"It's become a game," he said, "just to see how long it is going to last."

As you might imagine he is enjoying his aging even though he is about out of gas physically. He can still laugh, eat and read. I wonder if he still fantasizes about the things I still do. I bet he does. When I was 30 I assumed I would be done with sensuous and exotic dreaming by my age. I'm so happy to still be entertaining outrageous imaginings.

Here's to morphene, valium and hospice. And life-long fantasies. With that good a safety net, I'm willing to chance a long life.

Star Wars

Today's NY Times reports that the Air Force is seeking permission to begin work on creating weapons that could be used in space.

I suppose, given the consistent human habit of choosing species suicide, this development is predictable and perhaps inevitable. Ronald Reagan worshippers insist it was Reagan's stubborn refusal to bargain away the Star Wars initiative that finally convinced Gorbachev to throw in the sponge and dismantle the Soivet Union. I still believe he was the first Soviet Premier to look realistically at the numberfs and acknowledge that the only way to continue the expansionist dreams of that nation was to forego any concern for the human beings who were its citizens.

As we continue to squnder our seemingly endless wealth on war and star war, we may, sooner than we imagine, find ourselves in the same predicament. The tape of Osama bin laden saying his plan is to bleed the US financially seemed grandiose several billion dollars ago. Today, with the collpase of the dollar and the upsurge of China, it may not look so crazy.

But even supposing we have the resources, what will it mean for our nation to be the first to pollute and endganger potential development and exploration beyond the earth's atmosphere? As we withdraw from every treaty designed to promote cooperation among nations, from Kyoto to nuclear non-proliferation, we become the outlaw. Are we so eager to prove our superior power that we would risk the very future of our species?

It seems perhaps so.

Mark Lilla

I may build this into a longer Zone Note (if you don't receive my Zone Notes email me at blayneyc@earthlink.net) but in the meantime I wanted to alert you to the end piece in today's (Sunday) NY Times Book Review by Mark Lilla, titled "Church Meets State."

It is particularly interesting because Lilla was a religious conservative until he spent some years in Europe and learned more about the historical role of religion in European politics.

I doubt he will persuade true born-again people, and he certainly will not dissaude politicians who have found riding the dangerous stallion of fanatic personal and charismatic religion a dependable mount from which to attract votes.

But if you want to better understand the chasm we are leaping into in this country in this unholy alliance, Lilla describes it well in this short article. And he explains why those of us who are unrepentant heirs to the 19th century liberal tradition need to become more vigilant in monitoring what goes on in the public square. It will not do for us to dismiss the matter.

It is not for nothing that portraying the conflict we are in in the middle east (and across the globe, thanks in no small part to our foreign policy) as a "crusade" (Bush backed away from the word, but not the idea.) has put us into a quagmire to which there is no visible end or solution. In a clash between religious ideology, annihilation of one or the other becomes the only possible end.

Reason and religion need not clash.

Coping

Watching the Bush administration manage the nomnation of John Bolton as Ambassador to the UN is very like watching the Bush administration address global climate change. If you cannot persuade people of the rightness of your position, see if you can't bully them into it.

And you know what? It works pretty well. At least it makes them come out a winner, by the world's measure. The longer term issue of whether they are cutting off their nose to spite their face - after all they have to live in this world with the consequences of their choices too - seems too distant a concern for them to bother with.

The third article in a three part series in the New Yorker on climate change, written by Elizabeth Kolbert, makes me wonder if the Bush approach may be their way of coping. They must know, or at least have been told, that things are unraveling in their approach to the world; and that the world's climate is going to bring us to the brink of extinction even if we take on the drastic reduction strategies experts are recommending.

Over years of spending time with people facing tragedy and disaster, it seems some cope by entering fully into the fearful reality of what they face, doing what they can to mitigate the terrors. Others deny and bully, hoping either to not have to face it, or maybe, by sheer force of will, somehow cause the potential disaster to dissipate.

Reminds me of the manuscript of a sermon, with an handwritten scribble next to the typed text: Point weak, pound pulpit.

And whom is the shouter hoping to persuade? Usually himself. The Bush crusade has adopted a quasi-religious method that believes, or hopes, that vigorous action will alter the mind of God. Whether it is the nomination of John Bolton or the widely accepted science that human beings are a main cause of global warming, shout them down. In fact the Bolton appointment, like Bush I's nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, looks like a deliberate stick in the eye of their detractors to show that they can prevail against the heaviest tide.

Good luck with global warming.

Migration

When I was first approached by the church in southern California where I spent my final nine years as a parish priest, I was in a parish in Dedham, Massachusetts, a pre-Revolutionary War town that touches Boston on its southwest corner. Ironically, there were vaudeville jokes about the two locations. A Boston dowager tells her friend that she took a trip to California last summer. "How did you get there?" her friend asks. "By way of Dedham," she explains.

We checked the map and discovered that the two are almost as far apart as two places in the continental U.S. can be. "Why it's nearly in Mexico," I remember thinking. And our first couple of years in San Diego were, as I told old Yankee friends, more like moving to another country than like moving to another part of this country. But when we had lived there nearly a decade, and I decided to retire, we found the move back to our Vermont farmhouse an even bigger wrench than we had the move west. It didn't help that we made the move in November, after the leaves had fallen and before snow made winter pretty.

Fact was, we had wrecked ourselves for New England winter. Thin blood and thin skin altered these tough old New Englanders into snow birds. We have come to love Vermont, regard it as one of the nices places on earth. Our 19th century farmhouse sits on a multi-acre pond across the road from the town burial ground. Perennial gardens, vegetable gardens, hiking, biking, lake-swimming, and visiting with family and friends who live in the east, make the warm months a pleasure.

We will go there tomorrow, on our annual migration, just in time to see the surprising yellow/green hue that turns the color of the woods just before the leaves pop. Blue birds, great blue heron, finches and pollywogs provoke some hormone in us as ancient as our species. Our most hardbound friends think we've got it backwards; they like the winter and find those of us who show up this time of year lacking in character.

My pride has given way to choosing. I vote in Vermont and pay taxes there. It is home. We bought a plot in the graveyard across the street. But when that November wind, rain and 40º weather strips the trees and assaults our bones, we'll swallow our pride and return to southern California to wait out the hard weather.

God Knows

My novel went to the publisher yesterday! I feel as if I have given birth. But I am not sure whether the offspring is viable, or whether I want it to be. It is an unholy mess. Like my mind. I have been working on it (this is my third novel; the fist two remain in hibernation on my hard drive) for over three years. (Three years ago I published a collection of my Zone Notes, short mostly non-fiction pieces, that felt less risky somehow.) The novel made one abortive journey to the publisher several weeks ago - I freaked out and called it back to do more revision. I sent write-only discs to my sisters, both talented editors, hoping, since they could not alter the discs, they might pronounce it wonderful and I could send it back in. But they printed out hard copies from the disc, nearly 200 pages long, did meticulous edits and sent the edited copies to me by expensive snail mail.

So I did two more edits myself and sent it off. I know, had I not done that yesterday, I would have gone to my grave thinking I could have made it just a little better. Which I could have.

The title: God Knows; It Isn't About Us - and the wordy subtitle - If You Want More/You Better Die/This Is All There Is/Here.

Lots of people have said they would like to host events across the country where I would go and talk and hawk the book. I hope I don't lose my courage between now and the time the book comes out, probably in 4 to 6 months.

So we're about to do our semi-annual migration east to Vermont. And the book will be rolling around at the publisher.

Tony Blair

We haven't paid a lot of attention to Britain's general election that is underway today. Perhaps because they campaign only for several weeks rather than years as we do.

But the results will show much about our own nationa political life. Blair is suffering from his loyal friendship with President Bush, particularly in the mattter of Iraq. The British electorate, much as ours did last year, has come to believe they were lied to about the real reasons for invading Iraq. The stated reasons have all been shot full of holes. One wonders whether the electorate will punish Blair in ways they did not punish Bush for his lies.

One commentator has said that if Blair wins, it will be Margaret Thatcher's eight electoral victory, meaning that the British Labor Party has adopted much of the old Conservative Party agenda. In the eyes of many, the interests of old Labor, a better deal for lower class and working people, has been set aside for the so-called Free Market agenda that seems to have co-opted political discourse in so much of the world.

I am a Clinton fan, but I made a like criticism of him, especially after he signed the Welfare Reform package that has knocked so many truly impoverished people into despair. It may be that the impetus for this view of life and government; that free markets are the most effective way of benefitting the entire society, and that the bottom line trumps all other matters, is so strong no one can run against it.

The economic disaster gathering in our country and perhaps the whol world, is, I suspect, a result of our enslavement to an ideology that ignores many dimensions of reality.

It would be heartening if today's British election gave some hint that the world is beginning to return to its sense. But, since no party in that election has proposed a plan that would return government to some attempt to manage the economic welfare of its poorest, it would be hard to see how that might happen. One wonders the same about our country. Would a Kerry victory have been really good news for those who struggle at the lowest economic places among us?

Strategy

Despair is a strategy. Optimism is a strategy. Anger is a strategy. Even fear is a strategy.

I once believed those were affects, aspects of human personality that we couldn't choose because they were involuntary. We don't control them.

I also once had contempt for my clergy colleagues who had chosen their vocation rather than, as I perceived myself, having been chosen for it.

I now know my contempt was a form of fear, fear of my own mixed motives.

I still think we are largely in the dark about our motives, not because they are so remote, but because, like spider veins, they have so many facets it is impossible to choose one and call it the central one.

Acknowledging my own mixed motives, about everything, has made me less judging about other's motives. And it has made me understand that I, too, am driven by so many hopes, fears, passions, appetites, that trying to pose as virtuous or sinister is just that, a pose.

So I salute you in whatever strategy you have chosen to make this day work for you.

Repent

I repent. In an earlier posting I supported the administration's wish to make changes in Social Security. I no longer do.

But not because I think all their ideas are bad. If there were a way to provide for those who wish to invest some small part of their payroll tax in a private account so that it would not jeapordize the solvency of the program, and had some safety net, it would be a good thing. Because the money would get into the economy where it could work, and history has shown that long-term investing earns a higher return than Social Security pays.

And I have long believed the most important purpose of Social Security is as an insurance program against people becoming impoverished in their old age. So when President Bush suggested that there be a means test, so rich people would receiver a lower percentage from the program than poor people, I thought that was a good idea.

Now it looks like more of the Bush bait and switch. Of course the very rich will feel virtually nothing from reducing their Social Security checks. But the actual numbers show that poor people will not be raised substantially, and middle class people will be significantly reduced.

Finally, one comes to believe that this administration really does want to totally dismantle the programs for insuring care for poor people put in place as a result of the horrors of the Great Depression. Perhaps we have forgotten what this nation went through. Never again, we have to say.

Hard to know whether all this is merely cynical oil-rich millionaires having hijacked government and skillfully blinded the very people who will suffer. Or whether they honestly believe that removing all the safeguards government has put in place in the past seventy-five years will result in everyone working harder and making more money.

But whichever it is, it is a disaster looking to happen. You and I, who have been around a while and know the vagaries of human history, need to make our voices heard. I tend to focus on the soul of a nation that turns its back on its most vulnerable members. But the plain money facts are enough.

This so-called Free Market approach to all of life is nothing short of a jungle designed for the rich.

Time

A reprt I heard only fleetingly this morning on the radio as I was getting dressed said we Americans sleep more hours than we spend in any other way. The second most hours are spent at work. Third, according to this report (who keeps these numbers?) is watching TV.

While it comes as no surprise, it is sobering to think of the hours spent before this screen that, if you believe Marshall Mcluhan, actually alters one's perceptions of reality. It's not merely the content about which there is so much fuss, and posturing, but the nature of the medium itself that is of consequence.

I discovered this about myself many years ago. I am, I assume, about as addictive a person as most Americans. I have had my bouts with smoking and drinking and eating. But it wasn't until I heard a lecture back in the early 80s, by the head of an elementary school in Boston, in which he spoke about the effects he saw in children from their TV watching, that I seriously took a look at my own.

It was, literally, sobering. I put our TV in the closet, as an experiment, for the forty days of Lent, the church's season of discipline and denial. The children were angry about it; I was devestated. I discovered that I used the medium like a drug. I sat in front of it for hours, my mind numbing into some unreachable dimension.

When Lent ended we left the TV in the closet. Though we have had one, off and on, since, we have never resumed TV watching. Now I wonder where I ever found the time to watch.

I am sometimes chagrined at how removed I am from many conversations. But I am as grateful for having been able to break my TV habit as I am to have quit smoking and drinking martinis.

It gave me my life back.

Hope & Optimism

May 1. Always a day, over the years, that filled me with excitement. The end of winter. The end of school. Summer.

This year it feels more ominous. Perhaps because I am now so long past school, retired, so I don't stagger into a summer vacation after a debilitating year at the job, I no longer get the adrenilin rush I used to from the coming of summer.

But it feels more substantive than that. The so-called "nuclear option" the Republican Senators are considering, the utter seriousness with which conservative Episcopalians are determined to dismantle the fragile coalition the church has been for many decades, George Steinbrenner's annual spring threat to fire every member of his Yankees if they don't start winning games, a big sewer spill into the nicest beach in San Diego, a block from where we spend the winter, all come together in this normally benign time of year, to make me wonder.

Someone has made a distinction between optimism and hope. Optimism is the confidence that I can, with cleverness and hard work, make things come out as I wish. Hope is the willingness to work for what I believe, knowing it will come out as it will, and somehow that will be all right. Even if it isn't as I wished.

The unwillingness to compromise we see all around us; in the Senate, in the Episcopal Church, strikes me as desperation. When we feel things have gone out of control, we become ideologues, our determination. more vigorous the less certain we are, to gain a strangle hold on how things come out.

So-called liberals are less likely to prevail in these times because a large part of our agenda is tolerance of differences and opposition. We believe a healthy system includes people of every stripe, meaning compromise is essential to every decision. The conservative agenda is more about getting it right, even if those who don't agree must be thrown overboard.

Makes me hopeful but not optimistic.