Blayney's Blog

Winter

2011-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

So recently we were sleeping with a fan to cool us.

Then we were nearly swept away in a flood.

Now this.

Omnipotent

2011-05-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

Transients

Philip and James May 2, 2011

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
Lynda Barry (b. 1956)

***

Days that go off course early have a way of diverting from the intended route a few more degrees every hour
until by nightfall
you find yourself somewhere unrecognizable
no worry
listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go. – (e.e. cummings 1894-1962)

which may account for how I ended up at the
Brick & Bell cafe @7:15am
hoping to re-collect myself at a tiny table off in the
corner of the patio with
my mocha and my journal drawing deep yoga
breaths psyche searching

suddenly surrounded by nine loud
men
noisily pulling tables and chairs to convene their forum
on
how to evade cell phone charges in Europe how much
cabs cost in Rome

and without so much as a
may I
backed into my chair knocking over
my mocha
spilling it onto my jeans my journal and all its eccentricities tucked inside confirming course correction so far futile

enduring outrage at a world as yet
unwilling
to unwind under my direction requires energy

the striking 7 ft rattler that slithered across our
path on a sunny high desert hike without apology for
altering our route
the huge old canopy tree thrusting up the sidewalk creating a perfect skateboard launch until the city
chopped its roots to smooth my walk

the precipitous slope some realtor somehow slipped
by the regs about not building in canyons being
cleared by hand by two Mexican laborers to erect two
multi-million dollar houses in a hurry before
the land makes its return to the ocean
bottom

the Scarlet Tanager who flew into our front
hallway
introducing unscheduled havoc into his
day and ours
the rude seagulls that perch and poop on people’s
precious cars

the pair of gulls performing astonishing acrobatics
one chasing the other that had just
snatched something sumptuous off the beach weaving bobbing swooping low at the exact wrong instant smashing into a surfer’s car headed home after a sublime session converted to grief as the bird flopped

its end on our asphalt

impromptu brushes with our transience
impotent efforts to stay the course
buy friends earn praise counter self-condemnation
seduce us into laboring in vain to eradicate whatever
makes a mockery of our longed-for
omnipotence

Osama bin Laden

2011-05-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

There can't be a web site in creation that hasn't waded in on the killing of bin Laden today.

While I am a part of the United States and thus am in awe of the intelligence and courage that finally brought down this man who became our nation's most recent symbol of danger and evil in the world, I don't share either the jubilation of the revelers in front of the White House last week, nor of those who made the pilgrimage to ground zero today.

My reasons are many but chief among them is our love of finding a symbol that will make a complex issue seem simple.

Bin Laden became that symbol for us in in the misnomer of the war on terror which we seem unable – despite President Obama's early efforts – to excise from our conversation.

I am no intelligence expert (and the only one I know is jubilant about this killing) but I'd be willing to bet that Osama bin Laden had long ago ceased to be of great significance in the operations of terrorists who seek to do us harm. In fairness that is partly because we drove him into deep hiding. But it is also because he has never been a central spokesman for Islam.

Whatever martyrdom that may now surround him will be largely of our creation.

And it seems only rational to assume that the assault was not only an assault on the man we have been hunting for a decade, but on the easily wounded pride of Islamic jihadis without significant connection to bin Laden. Which would suggest that this has stirred the hornet's nest anew.

Now, having identified bin Laden as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks almost from the outset (whether he was in fact or not) we were backed into a corner from which we could emerge only by last night's stealth operation.

I have long sided with Vice President Biden who wanted to fight terrorists with intelligence and small bands of special forces. Last night's operation seems to bolster the argument for that. It is no mere irony that the president made a near equation between the death of bin Laden and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of combatants and civilians in the wars we have waged since 9/11. The wars seem to have resolved nothing, and in fact to have ramped up the rage of people in those countries higher than before we went to "save" them.

I wish we weren't so dependent on oil from that region that we can't afford to simply let it figure out its own future. I wish we hadn't become the only super power just when we did, tempting us to use the moment to try to cow any serious challenge to our hegemony for at least a generation. I wish that we hadn't become so out-of-balance rich in comparison to the rest of the world, that we became wary of any other country that seemed to challenge us, and created such envy in the less affluent countries.

I can wish a lot of things. But these things are as they are, and they require even a thoughtful president like Barack Obama to do things I'm pretty certain he could never have imagined himself doing before he felt the weight of his office.

On the day he gave the final order to carry out the mission that killed our arch enemy, he then boarded a helicopter to go see the devastation the tornadoes had wreaked in the southern states and to offer solace to those people. He flew back to Washington in time to put on his black tie and attend the White House correspondents' dinner where he did the stand-up comedy routine now required of the president on that occasion. (I thought the jokes – his and the professional comedian's – were pretty lame.)

God save the United States from ourselves.

Our Species

2011-04-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

One of the very conservative financial opinion writers I follow (yes, I do watch that side of the street, too) had a screed this week against Earth Day and its supporters whom he regards as eco-terrorists.

His reasoning is that they (we) hate our own species and regard ourselves as alien to the planet, looking forward to our own extinction with diabolical glee.

I took the criticism to heart because I have often written of our species as a passing phenomenon in the geological history of our planet, and take heart in believing that the planet will survive us.

I say that not because I am self-loathing. I feel lucky, privileged to have been born human on this planet.

I say it first simply as a matter of fact. We are a very recent development in the history of the planet and there surely are more reasons to believe we likely won't last longer than, say, the dinosaur, than there are reasons to believe we will. The writer himself acknowledged that we are an inauspicious species on a tiny planet tucked away in a corner of what is likely only one of billions of universes, so to make a big deal of ourselves is ignorant hubris.

Now he may be right that our complex brains, consciousness, which so far as we know is unique to our species on this planet so far, will sponsor innovation that will sustain us longer than mere biological and geological history would predict.

My own sense is that tendency to interpret the fate of our globe anthropomorphically is not only a narrow parochial exercise, but also leads us to make short-sighted decisions that ignore our place imbedded alongside and dependent on all the other species and phenomena.

I don't believe the likelihood of our species having an end – just as we had a beginning – is a tragedy in the history of the earth. Any more than I consider the certainty of my own death a tragedy. It is simply the culmination of the wondrous story that began several decades ago with my birth.

No doubt many of the things people who fancy themselves green are misguided and self-defeating. The system of which we are a part is way more complex than the human brain is capable of fathoming.

I have been impatient at times with naturalists who managed to close down a lovely beach I grew up on because human activity was disturbing the habitat of the Piping Plover. I seriously doubt either that snow fence will save the bird, nor that the extinction of the bird will be any more terrible for the planet than the extinction of the millions of species that have disappeared since life first appeared here.

But the conviction (or religious belief) that the so-called free market is a more dependable mechanism for balancing the needs and demands of the various species – so-called Social Darwinism – than those who conscientiously work to responsibly conserve our mutual habitat, is nothing more than human hubris.

Have its sponsors noticed what the freeing of the global market of its restraints resulted in just a couple of years ago?

Be grateful we're not finally in charge here.

Weather

2011-02-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

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

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

In November.

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

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

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

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

home again

2006-08-04T04:26:00.000-07:00

After crashing my truck into a tree, breaking my right wrist - I am right handed - and being mysteriously locked out of my blog for some time, I am glad to be back again.

Fascinating article in the current New Yorker about blogs and professional journalism. I agree with the writer that blogs are not journalism, which is why I like them and think they are valuable. I generally bristle at the trash on Drudge, but I like it that they sponsor themselves as a gossip site rather than a news site. That is, they hear something and pass it along and it is up to the reader to decide whether it is true or not.

I have many observations to make about living with pain and becoming dependent after my accident. Both are conditions I would never have chosen and am eager to be rid of, but like most pain this is a master teacher.
More...

Insanity

2006-06-12T16:46:00.000-07:00

Today - which would have been my mother's 92 birthday, though she died at 68 - someone in the Defense (Offense?) Department said of the three men who commited suicide in the prison camp at Guantanamo where they had been held for nearly four years without being charged or given a hearing, that he considered their suicides an act of asymetrical warfare against the United States and its allies.

We have now gone far beyond George Orwell and Doublespeak.

I am tempted to believe that the tanking of the money markets the past month - a month in which, historically, the markets rise - is because of the loss of confidence that those who are at the highest levels of our government have lost touch with reality.

He said this shows that they have no regard for life, ours or theirs.

As if it is nothing that we have held these people under the most inhumane, inhuman, degrading, destabilizing conditions, with no hope of it ever ending.

If ever there was proof that the purposes of those whom we call terrorists had succeeded in terrorizing us to the point at which we lost all touch with those things we historically have held sacred, by which we defined our role in the world, this was it.

For shame.

Al Zarqawi

2006-06-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

The insanity of war - not only our war in Iraq, but all war - has been reinforced by the news today that the leader of the insurgents in Iraq who come from outisde the country (Jordan in this case) has been killed. Since we have associated him, at least in reports by our government, with the worst of the danger we face there, you might think there would be rejoicing over his death. In fact Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (who reports say President Bush's father tried unsuccessfully to unseat last year in an attempt to rescue his family and the nation from further embarrassment) warned that this was likely to stir up more violence in retribution.

The price of oil rose on world markets for fear of much the same thing.

So, one might ask, what success might we have on the battlefield that would move forward our stated goal of a lasting peace in that tortured region?

I daresay what we have stupidly acheived is to move ther clock back to pre WWI days when the various groups now fighting against each other were tribal groups with different interests who had no intention or expectation of coming together as a single nation. Western powers created Iraq out of disparate groups because it suited our interests. And by means of military force - first British, then ruthless dictators like our then ally Saddam Hussein - the country remained a country.

When we removed Hussein the door was open for the groups who have waited all these years to return to their battle against each other.

We are a stiff-necked, short-sighted nation.

Iran

2006-06-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

What must it be like to be President of the Unites States and read that fewer than 30% of the citizens approve of the job you are doing?

I am a consistent and sharp critic of this president and the troglodytes who surround him. But it seems more clear than ever that we have a fatally flawed system of electing presidents and we are paying a huge price for that as a people. As we have been saying for a couple of years, in a parliamentary system, with numbers this low, this administration would have long ago been forced to submit its Iraq policy - along with its economic policies - to a vote of confidence and would surely have lost, requiring an election. Because we have put so much power into the office of president, presidents are tempted to take drastic action - particularly if they are a lame duck president - without regard for the views of the electorate.

Having said all that, it now seems clear that the administration's about face on Iran and Iran's nuclear activity, is a direct result of having spent its political capital on Iraq and now must temper its wish to impose a military solution.

Frances Fukuyama said, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that history had come to its conclusion and now free market capitalism and democracy would hold sway for the duration. That lasted only very brief time. There will always be those, waiting in the wings for the opportunity to challenge those who have held sway, and Iran is only one.

If this is the end of history it will not be because the American dream has gone international. It will be because the genie we let out of the bottle on August 6, 1945 has made its final mischief.

And still we see a long line of those eager to name 1600 Pennsylviania Avenue as their address.

Sacre blue!

Approval

2006-06-02T13:20:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday night at my writing group I wrote a piece that was as satisfying and - if I may boast - as good as anything I have written there previously. I am seriously considering using it as the basis of my Zone Note next week, the piece of writing I send out most weeks to an audience that has grown to something over 550 readers.

Here's the issue: it is not only revealing but it has some salty language, liberal use of what we now refer to as the F word.

But it works. The F word belongs in the piece and the revelations are hardly prurient, just, well, revealing.

My most recent book - God Knows; It's Not About Us - is far more revealing really. But there is something about a book that provides more distance than a piece of writing that goes straight into people's mail boxes when I press the send button. When I travel around hawking the book, I am sometimes asked about the parts that are somewhat raw - mentioning body parts and feelings about them and people in general. I take the fiction option. The book is a novel, I say. And it is, because even though much of the book - not all by a large measure - is taken from my own life and would be recognized by those who know me, I felt free to take that experience and do with it as I please. Thus creating that genre - the fiction memoir - that annoys so many who feel writing should stick to the proven categories and not cross boundaries.

But the piece I am considering sending out with the press of a button next week has many dimensions that give me pause. I already get bounce messages from some systems that refuse mail that goes to more than some fixed number of recipients. And maybe the F word will clog many more filters.

But the worst part is wondering what readers will think of me. Probably a third of those who receive these notes are people I don't know. People write and ask me to put their friend or relative on, someone to whom they have been forwarding them and who would like to receive them directly. But I feel more safe distance from them than from those I do know.

You see I used to be a parish pastor. My role saved me from being seen clearly for who I am. I am no more profane or sensationalist now than I was in my 30 years as a pastor, bt I no longer have that heavy role through which people filtered me in their own minds. Because they assumed I must be pious, they heard what I said and read what I wrote as pious.

I never once used the F word in a sermon.

Maybe that's why the past 10 years, writing as the spirit moves me rather than as I think a congregation can tolerate, has felt like such freedom.

Look for the Zone Note.

Nature, The Sequel

2006-05-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

So now that they took eight beavers from our pond over the winter, it appears that we have four young ones remaining, who are more active than their forebears and less shy around us. Last night our terrier, who regards any moving thing in our field as an affront to his hegemony, spotted three beavers chomping spears for their dinner at the pond's edge and took off after them. Instead of moving hurriedly into the pond, slapping the water with their tails and diving as their parents have always done, they turned and prepared to do battle. Luckily Lacey managed to call Cosmos off before he reached them because he has no idea that any animal could stand up against him.

There was actually a report last year of a woman in Vermont coming unexpectedly on a large beaver that had gnawed its way into her tralier and it bit her badly.

The game warden showed up yesterday and, under orders from the state and federal people, shot two of the adult geese. He said he had been ordered to shoot the babies, now only a few days old and the lighter colors of their downey feathers, but he said he couldn't bring himself to do that. The geese are a nuisance, make a mess, are a health threat, and are in numbers much too large for their habitat. I know it is the right thing to shoot them, but something about it doesn't sit right with me. Only one of many pieces of evidence that confirms what Vermonters call me even after being here more than two decades: flatlander.

Today I see no evidence of any wildlife, no geese, no Mallard ducks, no beavers. But they will be back. Those babies must be hidden away somewhere in the tall grass or nearby woods by their newly widowed mothers. (The game warden said he shot the biggest birds, so they would be the fathers).

The first really beautiful spring day is marked by this clash of civilizations.

Polls

2006-05-18T08:37:00.000-07:00

So one source is claiming that Fitzgerald has already indicted Karl Rove and perhaps the reason for it not yet going public is they grand jury has not yet decided how many counts to charge him with. But the biggest news around the blogsphere is whether this news is good or not.

Will it make any real difference?

Likely not. Although it is always a mistake to count out any politician, especially it seems a conservative Republican - remember Nixon - I am pretty tempted to say the recent percipitous drops in the money markets could mean the final abandonment of this president by his formerly loyal supporters. In my last blog I suggested that the free fall of his poll numbers, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, mean bad news for the entire country. And the stock market, as my financial advisor likes to say, is like taking the country's emotional temperature.

I'm not sure just what it means that some polls put his popularity smewhere below 30%, but even for yellow dog Democrats like me (one who would vote for a yellow dog before voting for a Republican), having a president so lame a duck is a little scary.

Remember when Clinton was under siege for his blow-job and there was talk og his unleashing a strike against Bin Laden? People said he was considering that only to boost his ratings. If Bush were to try to start a war against Iran, can you imagine?

Well, I have just talked myself into being glad for his low ratings!

The Beef?

2006-05-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

As I write I am looking out over an idyllic Vermont scene, a 20 acre pond in mist, surrounded by a forest dressed in that preternatural early spring green.

And I am thinking about the financial markets falling out of bed today after an amazing run these past few months.

I have never understood investing although my life depends on those who do. Or at least who understand it better than I. Or at least are willing to put money on the line.

Here's what I cannot fathom. A president whose apporval rating has fallen into the range of Nixon's during Watergate. A trade deficit with the rest of the world that sets a new record every day. A dollar that has lost a signfican portion of its value against all of the world's currencies (with the possible exception of the Zimbabwe dollar). A national debt that, last I heard, would require each American family to pony up somewhere around $30,000 to pay off. A reckless foreign policy that has now even separated us from our former lackey, Great Britain, who yesterday told us, as the stern uncle Britain sort of is to us, to close our disgraceful prison in Guantanamo.

Now in the face of all that the stock market has been hitting near historic highs for the past several weeks.

Go figure.

Historically, so I am told, the stock market forecasts events six months in advance. What is this market forecasting that makes it see good news for us six months from now?

I do believe all this is good news for the human family, down the road. Nothing is forever and empires crumble. But in the short run it is likely to be tough for everyone as matters reassemble.

Or maybe the markets know something?

John Edwards

2006-05-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Check out John Edwards and see what you think.

I thought he was the best of a weak field of the four top candidates in 2004, but that was damning with faint praise then.

Since then he has been traveling the country building a case for the Democratic Party making its case in 2008 on rebuilding the middle class. He is studying ways to make it possible for hard working people at the bottom end of the economy to climb out. It was Bill Clinton who said that anyone in this country who is willing to work hard and play by the rules should have a chance to make something of him or her self.

That is quite counter to the message the Republican party has been selling for a generation, that the so-called free market can make you rich. And if you find yourself falling behind it is surely your own fault.

The Republicans have stacked the rules, the tax laws and busines perks, in favor of the richest Americans.

Can John Edwards find ways to help us wean ourselves from the lottery mentality that says a few of us can beat the odds, get lucky and become filthy rich, even while increasing numbers find it harder to simply stay even?

I wonder if John Edwards might adopt the simple but telling slogan Republicans used when Ronald Reagan ran against Jimmy Carter; Had enough? Vote Democratic.

Da Vinci Code

2006-05-07T10:02:00.000-07:00

I confess to astonishment at the furor over the book and now the movie. In today's news a Niegrian cardinal has called for legal action against the movie. He is quoted as saying it is an inalienable human right to be respected.

We Americans started this, I suppose, with our list of inalienable rights in the prologue to our declaration of independence. The pursuit of happiness may seem a stretch until one understands that the right to pursue happiness is not the same as the right to be happy.

And the right to seek respect does not guarantee respect.

The Da Vinci Code is a fanciful story. Because it takes off from religion we recognize, adds elements from recently translated documents from the early days of the Jesus movement that show incredible diversity of belief and opinion among Jesus' followers even then, and weaves a thrilling tale, millions have read the book and even more will likely see the movie.

I can't imagine a more successful publicity campaign for the movie than to have the church hierarchy take a firm stand against it.

I loved the book; read it in one sitting. It touched many of my hot buttons and stirred fanciful thoughts I often have about the machinations of religion and the church.

I understood all along it was fiction.

I have recently published a novel - God Knows; It's Not About Us - that some have said is thinly disguised memoir. And while I made no attempt to hide myself in it, I felt free to do with the material from my own life, what I pleased, soaring into long flights of fancy.

We take ourselves too seriously.

Zimbabwe

2006-05-07T09:32:00.000-07:00

I don't know how many of you follow the sinking fortunes of Zimbabwe, the southern African nation that won its independence though a bloody struggle in 1980. At the time Robert Mugabe, elected president by a surprising majority in a nation deeply divided along tribal lines, reached out to all the minorities, tribal and racial, in what looked to be the most promising development in Africa in our lifetime.

Our family spent a sabbatical there in 1984 and, despite the grumbling of the white minority who had enjoyed royal lives before independence, it was one of the most wonderful places we had ever experienced.

Since that time - really since the death of Mugabe's wife Sally - Mugabe has become a ruthless dictator whose only interest is in clinging to his power. In his desperation to do that he has brought the country from one of shining promise - Samora Michel said to him at his inaugeration in 1980, Zimbabwe is the jewel of Africa, take care of her - to a train wreck.

Inflation appraoches 1000% and people are starving.

The problem of virtually all the productive farm land being in the hands of white farmers needed to be addressed. Mugabe probably had a chance to make a creative run at that when the farmers, finally seeing the handwriting on the wall, offered to give up some of their land and at the same time teach Africans how to farm.

Instead, after he fared badly in elections, Mugabe decided to hang on to power through demagoguery. He turned loose his militias of thugs to invade white farms and either kill of throw the farmers and their families off the land. Now Zimbabwe, that once exported enough grain to feed most of southern Africa, can't feed herself.

Recently a Zimbabwean exile asked an American friend, "Why don't you invade Zimbabwe, where you could actually do some good?"

Though it does have some rich minerals, we have no compelling interest in Africa, like oil. So this lush land, where our species emerged from the primal ooze, is left to the devices of a tyrant every bit as ruthless as Saddam Hussein.

Rumours

2006-05-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

It was ever thus. When the president appears in the oval office with one of his key people to announce an unexpected resignation, everyone comes to atention. Because it is fun. Yesterday it was even more fun than following the misfortunes of yet another Kennedy politician. Bad news for Republicans who would have considered Patrick Kennedy's woes a god news days had it not been for Porter Goss. And the fact that the Bush handlers would not have waited a day, so they could enjoy a day of one Democrat heading for rehab and another - congressman from Louisana - for court, should tip us off to the urgency of whatever it was that made getting Goss gone a priority.

One of the less admirable traits of our species is our attraction to the miseries of others, especially those we label our opponents. The misperception is that their downfall will enhance our rise. We seem never to learn that we almost always go down with those we drag down.

I was once head of the nominating committee of a board that governed an institution. Our chair had been named suddenly when the long-standing chair died suddenly. He came to me and said that he understood that he was an interim appointment, not the person for the job over the long haul, and he assured me that when a more suitable candidate appeared, I should not hesitate to tell him and he would gladly step aside.

All of that happened and I did go to him and he was gracious.

But when I announced it to the full board at an official meeting, I felt a strange pall settle over the room. For a moment I didn't understand what was afoot. But it suddenly dawned on me that, though no one disagreed with what I had done, they were all uncomfortable with me - the assassain - being in position to do it again.

I quickly announced that in addition to the resignation of the chair, I was announcing my own resignation as well.

The relief in the room was palatable.

Scandals

2006-05-05T13:17:00.000-07:00

As I was about to write a piece about the Colbert embarrassment of the president (which I will do below), came the announcement of Porter Goss' resignation as Director of the CIA. The bloggers are having a field day with this one. From the outset I thought Goss' appointment was one more stick in the eye of Bush's opponents - a habit he has, like his father's appointment of Justice Thomas to the Supreme Court, more to vex his enemies than to make a god appointment. Goss was a political hack who had ties to the intelligence community because of his seniority in the House, and it looked, and still looks, as if his appointment was more about clearing the agency of those who were not Bush loyalists than about serious beefing up of our security.

But the bloggers smell a political scandal linked to the disgraced and now jailed congressman Randy Duke Cunningham who, with his cronies, apparently kept an apartment where they drank, whored and made mischief for their liberal Democratic opponents while they posed as true blue conservative guardians of American values. We'll see.

But it isn't good news for the fortunes of our nation, this ongoing circus as the Bush presidency unravels. If it were true, as Bush has told us for the past five years, that we are in a war of attrition - which I regard as a misapprehension about the nature of the threat posed by Al Quaida and Islamist extremists - we would likely have lost it by now with the ineptness with which this administration has waged this so-called war.

Now, as for The Colbert performance with the president sitting miserably captive, I am of at least two minds. On the one hand I think the breakdown of human contact between political opponents in Washington as a terrible thing. When I lived in D.C. in the late 60s and early 70s, those who opposed each other bitterly on the floor of Congress during the day would often spend the evening together eating, drinking and exchanging in a friendly manner. And the Press Dinner was always a chance for that to happen on a large scale. So I hate to see it become bitterly partisan.

On the other hand this president has become so isolated, and seemingly oblivious to those who differ from him, one can hardly blame Colbert for using the occasion - the only one possible - to insert some reality, albeit sarcastic. I actually thought his biting criticism of the press' fawning coverage of Bush was more to the point even that what he said about Bush himself.

I have to admit that I enjoyed watching it. But that it had to happen says bad things about the climate in our nation.

Conversation

2006-05-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

In the May 11 issue of the New York Review of Books, in a wonderful review of Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art," (Yale University Press, 336 pp. $27.50), Russell Baker carries on a conversation of his own worth the price of the review.

I am a member of what we call, rather grandly for what it is, a Salon. Like the classical understanding from the 18th century, it refers to conversation (presumably once carried on in salons) in which no conclusion is reached nor expected and which has no agenda besides the mere pleasure of exploring whatever happens to arise in the course of 90 minutes.

Four of us, all men in our 60s, meet at a local Starbucks every other week and, over a latte, discuss everything from our distaste for current American foreign policy, to our increasing agnosticism about what is behind and beneath things, to our speculations about what sustains and derails long term intimacies of various sorts.

If we have anything in common - aside from our love of conversation - it may be our each having attempted over many decades to work out our relationship to the Christian religion and then to metaphysics in general.

And if anything characterizes our conversation it may be our common delight in imagining ways in which our own species has contributed to the inevitability of the end of our species. Likely most people listening in - and I sometimes wonder if those others in Starbucks lurking behind their laptop screens may be spying, wondering if they should report us to homeland security - might well regard us as sadists.

In fact what we are is old. And that is what I suspects makes our conversations so wide ranging and lacking in either panic or hostility. None of us expects to live a lot longer, nor do we any longer feel responsible for seeming to be working up solutions to the great dilemmas of our kind. Sardonic might describe it.

But the real point is delight in 90 minutes of conversation without direction or purpose. Miller says is has largely disappeared from our culture if not our world. He lays blame at the feet of all the electronic gagdets that clutter our days.

But what about this forum? I love having this conversation with you.

Long haul

2006-04-27T21:34:00.000-07:00

The tough part about big change is not the change itself - that requires adreniline and ingenuity, you have to have your wits about you and rise to the moment - but gradually settling in for the long haul.

My friend whose wife died last Sunday told me that he is just beginning to understand that she isn't coming back. Or, in terms he, a doctor, would put it, this new situation is irreversible.

Joan Didon, in her powerful recent book about her husband's sudden death, "The Year of Magical Thinking" describes the weird experience of being a rational person - she remembers one of the EMTs describing her to another as "a cool cookie" - but she can't stop herself from doing what she calls magical thinking. She doesn't want to give away her husband's shoes because he will need them when he returns.

Her rational, logical mind knows better, but some dimension she has never encountered in herself before, persists in creating scenarios that deny the finality of what has happened.

Our Vermont neighbor's 8 year old daughter was killed in a car crash this time last year. Her parents' house is now a shrine to her. Some of the other neighbors have worried that they are going to get stuck in this painful place, be unable to get on with their lives.

But what does that mean, "get on with the rest of our life?" We have coined the term "closure" for what we mean by "get over it." My experience is that we never get over it. Why should we? That doesn't have to mean our productive, even happy days are over. It means that we now carry a scar, a place where our love for that person pierced us - our psyche and even our body - and we are marked forever.

That's what takes getting used to. And we do. But getting used to it is not getting over it. It is incorporating it into the new reality.

Work Is Done

2006-04-24T14:46:00.000-07:00

My friend about whom I have been writing recently, died yesterday at mid-afternoon.

Her heart finally accepted the verdict her consciousness had made a couple of days ago. So they removed her oxxygen assist, provided sufficient morphine for her to relax, not struggle, into that ecstasy we fight against our whole lives, and we waited.

For perhaps an hour her breath slowed and grew more shallow. Her daughter stroked her arm and cheek and assured her and thanked her.

In a moment too subtle to accurately record she seemed to draw a tiny breath followed almost immediately by a nearly imperceptible exhale. Then, as if to trust the very universe with her, she never took another. We all looked at each other, wept, smiled, said good bye, kissed her one last time. And left.

As we left her room her daughter said, "You know, I'm not scared to die any more."

One more huge gift to the wonderful woman to whom she gave life, and to an anxious world.

work Is Done

2006-04-24T09:17:00.000-07:00

She died yesterday afternoon.

Her husband, my doctor and longest standing friend, consulted with his colleagues and they agreed she had done all they could ask.

So they resolved to let her heart join her consciousness in whatever ecstasy it is we experience when our struggling minds release us to some state we fear and long for. We all wish we might know more about it before we are called on to do it, but this is the order in which these things come.

With a little help from morphene, her heart accepted the verdict the rest of her had embraced a couple of days earlier.

Her husband and I have been friends for 50 years, since we were 16 year old schooboys and she was his steady girlfriend.

Her daughter held her hand as she drew her final short easy breath. As we left her room her daughter said she was no longer afraid of dying.

One final glorious gift among so many she had given to so many.

Work Is Done

2006-04-24T08:42:00.000-07:00

My friend about whom I have been writing died yesterday afternoon.

Her stout heart finally accepted the verdict her consciousness had resolved a couple of days earlier, that she was finished. So her consciousness rested in whatever ecstasy a combination of morphene and floating unawareness may provide as we near our end.

She cheered on her grieving family as long as she was able, never complaining, never even seeming to mind - unless one of them said they minded - that she was going to die.

Her daughter was holding her hand when her heart finally stopped. Her daughter thanked her for being brave and wonderful. On the way out of her room her daughter said she was no longer afraid to die.

The last of countless gifts her mother gave to her.

Work Is Done

2006-04-24T07:34:00.000-07:00

My friend died at 3:36 yesterday afternoon.

Or her heart finally agreed with her consciousness which had made its decision a couple of days before so she had floated in that ecstasy we can only imagine until our time comes. She was supported by morpehe while she patiently waited for her heart to catch up with her.

I have rarely known a family more generous in giving permission, while their hearts were breaking, for someone to die. She made it easier, never complaining, never struggling, cheering them on so long as she was able. They had the hardest work. She had done hers.

Her husband and I have known each other 50 years, since we were 16 year old schoolboys and she was his girlfriend.

Her daughter held her hand as her heart finally stopped. On the way out of her room her daughter said being there had made her lose her fear of dying.

Quite a gift among the countless others this lady has given her.

Work Is Done

2006-04-24T07:19:00.001-07:00

Yesterday afternoon at 3:26 my friend finished her work. She had been doing work none of us can imagine until it is our turn. Her husband and children have rallied round her, encouraging her, acting as her cheering section even while their hearts were breaking. And, so long as she was able to communicate, she communicated only good cheer for them as if they were the ones doing all the hard work.

And I think they were.

She finished her work a couple of days ago. It took her those final two days to persuade her heart it was all right to stop. She had released her consciousness and slipped into whatever blissful state it is to be physically alive but have your mind and consciousness floating in morphene.

Brave family. Brave lady. Dear friend. Her husband and I have been friends since we were 16, 50 years ago, and she was his girlfriend even then.

I don't know when it has been more clear that the time had come. Or when a family, heartbroken, has given such grace-filled permission to accept that the time has come.

Her daughter who held her hand as her heart finally agreed, said she had lost her fear of dying. Her mother's final gift.

Work Is Done

2006-04-24T07:19:00.000-07:00

Hangin In

2006-04-21T11:26:00.000-07:00

My friend continues her heroic hold-out against whatever organism is trying to do her in. We are now in day four and she still hangs in the balance between a stout heart and sodden lungs. I know you will lend her your energy.

In the meantime two fascinating matters have caught my attention and I pass them on to you.

The first is an article in the upcoming Sunday NY Times Magazine about Google and the internet in China. It can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/23/magazine/23google.html?th&emc=th
and it raises fascinating questions about free speech and human rights as we Americans understand them and now seek to practice and model them around the world. What the article's author never mentions is that our rather self-righteous notion of how free we are is not shared by everyone around the world. The Chinese interviewed for the article insisted that the search engines understand there are limits to what they can talk about and provide access to, just as we do in this country. I commend the article as providing a window into the complexities of the global marketplace.

The other is a 50 minute video of the legendary scientist and teacher, Richard Feynman, being interviewed in 1981. I have read some of his writing and much more - since I am not a trained scientist - about him and have always wished I might have heard him at least once myself before he died. It was better than I imagined. It is worth 50 minutes of your life. Just go into a quiet room and settle down. They will be the fastest 50 minutes of your life.

Return

2006-04-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

A return to politics while we wait the outcome of my dear friend's valiant heart struggling to stay ahead of her filling lungs.

A friend who is as partisan a Republican as I am a Democrat, recently emailed me his woe that there are no statesmen (or women, but it would be unmanly of a Republican to give in to non-sexist language) on the horizon, in either party. He says that Democrats are so busy hating Bush that they are blind to the many acheivements of his tenure.

Putting aside for the moment my belief that Bush has set us back in almost every way - with the possible exception of thoughtful compassion about the vexing matter of immigration - I said that it is amazing to me that, after the treatment Bill Clinton received at the hands of his political opponents, any Republican could whine about personal attacks on George Bush.

When I lived in Washington, 1969-1973, I was surprised to see how politicians who vilified each other in public were often close personal friends. I believe the last remnant of that is the friendship of Senators Orin Hatch and Teddy Kennedy.

Deomcrats and Republicans have always attacked each other, often personally in public, but the end of cooperation and personal friendship may have come with Newt Gingrich's nasty campaign that returned the majority to the Republicans in the congressional mid-term elections during Clinton's first term.

The real issue, I believe, is money. Campaign finance money. So long as the sums of money are as astronomical as they have become, it is too tempting for ordinary humans to resist a chance to get in on the big feed.

Although it violates the Republican canon about unfettered free enterprise - a myth in practice anyway - the answer is public financing of political campaigns. I sign off on a dollar when paying my taxes, which goes into a public pot from which candidates who qualify with sufficient support can draw. Once the candidiates have equal amounts of money, instead of pandering to a few rich donors, they will be able to focus on why, besides filling their own pockets, they want to be elected.

Vigil II

2006-04-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

My friend about whom I wrote yesterday, hovering bravely on the edge of death, having been resolute about wanting sedation, not intubation, is still hanging on today. And despite the unidentified organism that has been filling her lungs and causing her breathing to be so labored, her stout heart has refused to yield.

Her husband, a doctor, and her other doctors are all amazed. They didn't expect her to last the night.

My wife, who has the same sort of grit as this woman, told me not to count her out.

Here is what is awesome about all this:

She is ready to die. Not once has she freaked out since being told she has a lethal diagnosis which only a tiny percentage of people - after awful treatment - survive.

"OK," she said, "let's get started."

I asked her early on if she was scared.

"No. I was scared when I watched my parents go through this, but I feel calm."

I have been accused, fairly, of being preoccupied with death. My friend has showed me what I have been eager to know. In order to live fully, bravely, give up fighting off death. It will find us sooner or later. Until then, live.

Vigil

2006-04-18T13:50:00.000-07:00

My longest standing friend and his wife - we have all known each other since we were 16 year old high school students - are on a vigil. Or I suppose it is more accurate to say her husband, children, friends and I are on a vigil. She was diagnosed with acute leukemia a year or so ago, has undergone massive treatments - including harvesting and reintroducing her own stem cells - and despite having responded like the brick she has always been, she now lies seemingly near death from some unidentified organism that is causing her lungs to fill with fluid.

Her husband, my doctor, called this morning to say he doubted she would last through the day. I went to the hospital to say good bye. And she rallied.

Or maybe she rallied. Mabe it is the steroids.

But maybe she will recover from this episode. It's not a relapse of her leukemia; her blood counts show she is continuing to make the necessary cells.

But can she fight off such a massive attack as this one is proving to be?

Last night the two of them had a serious conversation about whether to provide massive life support - intubate her and put her on a respirator if her lungs continue to flood. They decided no. And they told their doctor their mantra: sedation but no intubation.

Brave. And smart. The doctor told them he was relieved they had made that decision.

How to say enough when the end has come? Hard duty. But these brave people are doing it in a way I wish we could get out to this over medicated culture which spends 75% of its medical dollars in the last few weeks of life.

This morning when I went into her room, she opened her eyes and smiled and called me by name. When the nurse came to put something in her IV line she wanted to know what it was and which doctor had ordered it. This from a woman who was struggling for every breath.

It's not a pipe dream, this idea of keeping your wits about you as you near death. No, it's not open to all of us. But in many cases we can manage our end in ways that do not behave as though dying is an insult rather than the way we leave this life.

General Dismay

2006-04-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

Can there ever have been a time in our history when so many recently retired generals, some of whom had a role in the events they now deplore, have spoken out publicly against a policy? Wesley Clarke was accused of disloyalty when he spoke out against the Iraq War in his run for president, but he had not been on active duty when the Iraq invasion began.

Is it mere stubbornness that keeps the president continuing his litany of support for Rumsfeld?

Then there is the very discomforting thought that these generals may have thought the Iraq invasion was a bad idea from the outset, but concerns for their careers and misplaced sense of loyalty kept them quiet or worse, complicit.

Is it a pipe dream to think that we can ever again be bound by the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war and vote funds before a president can commit troops? The reason given for this in recent congresional votes of such vague latitude that presidents since Korea have been able to wage war without an appropriate declaration is that events move so rapidly today that a congressional debate is too slow and cumbersome a response.

But is it?

Would President Bush have had any less success in receiving a declaration of war against Al Quaida on September 12, 2001 than Franklin Roosevelt did on December 4, 1941? Of course a terrorist group without a national identity is a lot trickier than a nation that has just attacked us.

But that may be just the point. Bush asked for an open ended declaration which he has since interpreted to mean that he can take whatever measure he sees fit against whomever he deems a threat. No president should be able to exercise such unfocused hostile fire power with the might avaliable to him. Any sensible leader would not want that sort of power without specific agreement from those elected by the people.

Would Rumsfeld's removal move us in a positive direction? Insofar as he continues to send American troops into a mayhem with no plan for either success or withdrawal, yes. But not, it seems to me, as an antidote to the exercise of raw power that has turned our nation into the scourge of the world and squandered our role as a guardian of world peace.

William Sloan Coffin

2006-04-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

William Sloan Coffin died yesterday. He was a giant of American religion, a true prophet, of such stature that Doonesbury even satirized him. He joined hands with Martin Luther King, Jr. in marches in the scary south, he marched and preached against the Viet Nam War during his tenure as pastor of the largest protestant church, Riverside Church, in NYC.

When I was going through the dark days of my divorce, a young pastor myself in a parish that had never experienced anything like this with their spiritual leader (neither had their spiritual leader), I did a weeklong retreat at an Episcopal monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While I was there I read Coffin's autobiography and discovered that he, too, had been divorced (maybe twice?) and it, too, had been among his darkest days walking through the end of what he had sworn was "until death do us part." I wrote to him my gratitude for his candor that was holding me together. He responded by return mail with a letter so kind and gracious I still mark it as one of the saving moments of my life.

What follows is a prayer Coffin (a graduate of Yale and later its chaplain) prayed when president Kennedy came to receive an honorary degree. (The occasion on which Kennedy uttered his famous, "I now have the best of two worlds, a Yale degree and a Harvard education.")

"For glimpses of beauty, for hours of truth, for tastes of justice and the feel of freedom, for music and mirth, for love and laughter, Lord, we love thy world, this nation and this place.

"Because we love the world we pray now, O Father, for grace to quarrel with it, O Thou whose lover's quarrel with the world is the history of the world. Grant us grace to quarrel with the worship of success and power, with the assumption that people are less important than the jobs they hold. Grant us grace to quarrel with a mass culture that tends not to satisfy but to exploit the wants of people, to quarrel with those who pledge allegiance to one race rather than the human race; and with those who prefer to condemn communism rather than to practice Christianity. Lord, grant us grace to quarrel with all that profanes and trivializes and separates men.

"Number us, we beseech thee, in the ranks of those who went forth from this university longing only for those things for which thou dost make us long: men for whom the complexity of issues only served to renew their zeal to deal with them; men who alleviated pain by sharing it; and men who were always willing to risk something big for something good.

"So may we leave in the world a little more truth, a little more justice, a little more beauty than would have been there had we not loved the world enough to quarrel with it for what it is not but could be. O God, take our minds and think through them; take our lips and speak through them; and take our hearts and set them on fire. Amen."

Mind Messing

2006-04-11T15:08:00.000-07:00

I don't know about you, but even though I have followed the so-called Valerie Plame leak at least peripherally from its inception, I can't make heads nor tails out of what the president is trying to tell us about why he took part in it.

Maybe a president, since he decides what will be classified, has the authority to declassify anything anytime he wants in any way he wants, but that seems somewhat beside the point in this instance. We all heard him say he hates and disapproves of leaks, and this was a serious matter, and he was telling everyone on his staff to cooperate fully with the investigation, and if it turned out that anyone on his staff was involved - or was that convicted? - they would be fired.

So now he is asking us to believe this was a clever trick he used to get out information necessary for people to understand his policies? This is mind messing of the first order.

And it does nothing to boost one's confidence in the man's ability to manage our relations with a dangerous country like Iran.

Is it too early to call for impeachment to begin before this man takes us over the edge?

Not Again!

2006-04-10T15:45:00.000-07:00

Seymour Hersh has consistently uncovered more startling stories about U.S, foreign policy in the past 20 years than any other reporter. Now he is reporting that Bush is actively making plans to send air strikes against Iran's nuclear capacity, and, writes Hersh in this week's New Yorker, perhaps even invade the country with the familiar aim of regime change.

Were it not for what we now know - and frankly what we either did or should have known at the time - about our war against Iraq, we might think this is either improbable or perhaps the administration floating the idea as a kind of warning to iran.

But we would be nuts not to take it seriously.

Hersh told a TV audience yesterday that he thinks Bush may have some sort of messianic sense of himself. And now that he no longer can seek reelection he feels he has been divinely appointed to do what no Republican or Democrat will be able to do after the next election.

I have a ggod friend who was an insider in the Nixon administration and he has told me there was serious consideration being given during the run up to the 1972 election to Nixon saying the nation was in too much turmoil to hold an election and declaring martial law. My friend said he had a conversation with a senior military man in the Pentagon who told him generals were holding quiet off-the-record meetings to discuss what they would do if Nixon asked the military to take over the reins of government. Or to attack another nation in a wag-the-dog effort.

My friend said they had a plan to go to congressional leaders and ask them to begin immediate impeachment proceedings that would give the military the authority to disregard or disobey orders from the president.

If George Bush ordered an air strike on Iran now - there have even been reports he might use tactical nuclear weapons - is there a way in which the military, in conjunction with leaders of congress, could refuse?

The scariest possibility is that Bush may believe God is leading him in all this. In any other setting this would be the stuff of a hackneyed novel.

Paradox

2006-04-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

I am too old to cling to the starry-eyed idealism that once led me to believe we dreamers were going to banish war, poverty and injustice, not to mention national chauvinism, with our commitment to love as the power that overturns all other forces in human history. Perhaps it was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. that finally made it sink in that the brave talk about offering one's body was more than talk.

And now that I am financially dependent on a pension that is invested, I am that capitalist pig I once got my jollies from vilifying.

That is prelude to what I want to say about the connection between unemployment figures, interest rates and justice.

I believe the economists when they say that the Federal Reserve governors are watching the employment (and unemployment) figures even more than energy costs or the rate of growth in the economy. The reason is that if the unemployment figures get too low, that means employers have to pay higher wages to employees. And wages are the single largest factor in driving up inflation, which means that if not enough of the work force is out of work, the Fed will raise interest rates and we investors will see our portfolios shrink.

It seems that the larger the industrial economy and the more robust the rate of growth, the stronger is the leverage of management in negotiating with labor.

So, without being a pollyana, what do you suppose it would take for us to at least begin to wonder how we might seek to balance that equation which has now been in favor of the managers for a generation? While the profits of companies have risen an average of 11% - 20% the past three years, the income of middle and poor Americans has stagnated.

We have all been conditioned to watch the Dow Jones Industrial Average as if it accurately records how we are all doing. But the reality is that it is doing way better than most of us. And until we redraw our picture of how we think things ought to go, it will continue to. Because while there is plenty of support for the economy and its chieftains, there is no one any longer trumping for those in the middle and bottom.

Would a Democrat, or perhaps an independent - it would be a sacrilege for a Republican - dare to mount a platform that says its time to let the well-being of the average American worker be considered at least as important as the numbers that measure the heft of the economy? The past 25 years have proved that a rising tide does not necessarily raise all boats. You watch this week's employment figures and think about the people they are about.

Women & Freedom

2006-03-31T14:02:00.000-08:00

Jill Carroll was released from captivity in Iraq three months after she was kidnapped. Her captors released a tape soon after her capture of her sobbing, clearly fearing for her life, begging the U.S. to listen to the demands of her captors and free all Iraqi women they were holding. Shortly before her release she made another tape in which she praised her captors and said they were fighting a just war and would eventually defeat the American aggressors. And since her release she has said she was well treated by those who held her.

As one would expect, those who still support our Iraq adventure - a precious few mostly on the far religious right - have already vilified Ms. Carroll, calling her a potential suicide bomber and even suggesting that she might be carrying the child of one of her captors. Reminiscent of the language of segregationists in the American south during the civil rights movement. After Viola Liuzzo was killed by Klansmen who fired at her as she was driving people back from a demonstration, J. Edgar Hoover tried to portray her as a bad person by telling President Johnson that she appeared to be sitting very close to the negro young man in the front seat (the car was crowded), as if it was a "necking party."

It may or not be stretching the point to set this alongside the scandal that has broken this week with the Duke University lacrosse team and the young black woman who claimes to have been gang raped by several of them after she did what sounds like a strip tease dance at a party in their house.

Since I am male, and have the hormones and primitive drives of most males, I do understand this male confusion about female sexuality and the power it seems to give to women over men. Women of course see it as exactly the opposite, understandably.

In impolite company we used to refer to sexy women who would not have sex with us as prick-teasers. What we meant by that is that we thought women should either be obviously chaste, unavailable, or promiscuous. In other words we thought we had the right to dictate how woemn should affect us.

What I have learned since is that human beings have the right, under any and all circumstances, to decide when and how they wish to relate to other human beings. A woman who walks down a busy street naked may be inappropriate, but she is still not fair game for any horny man who wants to have sex with her.

I suspect the reason we men are suspicious of women is because of their mysterious power to regenerate. We have a role in that - though now they can just about eliminate us - but nothing like theirs. So when Jill Carroll seems to give aid and comfort to the enemy - even under circumstances in which most of us would do the same - we pick on her sexuality. And when a stripper is exploited by drunk men, we say she used her power to tease them.

Autonomy and freedom, issues that led people to take huge risks when founding this nation - and for which we claim to have fought every war - require guarding the integrity of everyone, whatever their gender, race or chosen identity.

Immigration

2006-03-30T14:31:00.000-08:00

I suppose I am a snob. I am a white Anglo who went to NE boarding school, an Ivy League college, seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and spent my career in four churches that were in WASP enclaves. Never mind that I always felt like an outsider, like I was there because of a series of accidents. I went to boarding school because my father had a job in the Philippines so I needed to come to this country for high school and board. I went to Penn because my friends did (this was 1959). Going to seminary and getting ordained in this days - today it is an onerous process I could never survive - was pretty easy if you were even remotely "normal." Meaning fit the old mold.

Still, at least to all outward appearances, I belonged. And I liked it that way. But I never quite got comfortable, always felt as if I was posing.

One day a woman came for pastoral counseling because she just knew she would never be in the in-group in the community. During the course of the conversation she poured her heart out about all the secret dreads and indiginities she secretly suffered mingling with those "to the manor born." As the conversation closed she told me she would give anything to be like Alice Alexander whom she envied for so comfortably and easily fitting in among the privileged few.

A half hour after she left, Alice Alexander came to talk to me about her feelings of not belonging.

The national debate we are having about immigration has focused on the economic issues. Are the illegal immigrants taking American jobs and taxing our health and education systems, impoverishing our nation while reproducing faster than us?

Important questions. But what we aren't looking at is our fear of being changed. It's an odd, off-beat concern for we Americans because none of us are more than a few generations from being immigrants ourselves. We talk about this country being a Christian nation but it turns out most of the first immigrants, though they may have been believers, were looking to form a nation in which there was no pressure to conform to any particular belief or church.

Whether it is essential that we all speak English or all aspire to backyard barbecues I doubt but don't know. For over 200 years the United States has been the place one could go when either times were tough in one's native country or one was too different to be tolerated there. We have every sort and condition here and that has been our strength.

But we are human and so we are insecure, seeking assurance that we belong. And that desperation can lead us to despise and want to exclude the stranger.

Piling On

2006-03-23T07:48:00.000-08:00

When I talk to my financial advisor about trends in the market, he is always skeptical. He goes with the notion that the market will do whatever it needs to to confound the most people. Now despite his fierce commitment to free markets and the belief - it has always seemed a little hare-brained to me - that markets left to their own devices will do better for most people than markets that are regulated, he remains doubtful that a big move by a lot of people represents wisdom.

While I do not share his confidence in the fair flow of capital if left alone - and I regard the concept as an untried myth - I do agree that trends are often more about yesterday's wisdom than about a good forecast of what lies ahead. By the time most of us catch on, the trend has run its course and is on to the next big thing.

I certainly find that in fashion. It took me decades to feel comfortable in jeans for other than working outside. Now that I wear them every day to my writing station, I am told they are passe.

I am happy to see so many people, even politicians of his own party and persuasion within his party, turning against President Bush, particularly, but not only, about Iraq. But crowds are not brave and this piling on likely indicates that he is through as the one who can set the course, and that it is now going to be incredibly difficult to figure out how best to extricate ourselves from our failed attempt to mold Iraq into our friendly base in the oil rich mideast. Unlike Viet Nam, we cannot simply leave, because we continue to have vital interests in the region so long as we continue to be the biggest guzzlers of energy on the planet. And Iran has taken advantage of both our ongoing need for that oil and our inept if not disastrous adventure, by rattling their nuclear sword knowing we must now be cautious about how we move in that region.

While I am glad to see the shift in opinion and power away from those who have believed we can use our undisputed power to intimidate the world into going our way, this seemingly massive shift among our electorate likely signals some bad decision making ahead.

What would I do if I were charged with deciding how to proceed? Aside from focusing resources - vast Marshall Plan type resources - on developing alternate energy sources and Sierra Club type ingenuity in learning new habits for conserving energy, I don't know. I would hope we could signal nations of the middle east that we have been humbled by our Iraq debacle and we're now ready to take some new tack. Could we warn Israel that we are not the undisputed power, able to do as we please nation and they need to make plans accordingly?

But I fear that may be dreaming. Now that we, the herd, has shifted, the politicians will be running for the exits from Iraq and it will be chaos, not considered.

Perspective

2006-03-17T10:45:00.000-08:00

So astronomers are very excited about being able, they think, to reconstruct from images from a satelite circling the moon, the first few seconds of time in our universe.

Yes, there seems to have been a big bang (what came before the big bang?) and in the following millisecond, a growth spurt so vast it would, in the words of one scientist, concern any child's parent. If I have even a remote notion of what they are saying, a dot too small for the naked eye to see, a dot that somehow enclosed all the matter present in our universe today, exploded and its contents flew into every corner of what we now call our universe faster than you can blink.

How did all that stuff fit in there? And where did it come from?

Apparently this is the other shoe astronomers have been waiting to see drop since the first pictures were seen from the satelite three years ago. The suspense has been nearly unbearable, while the rest of us have been focusing on earthly matters. One scientist, who was at a conference on an isalnd in the Pacific when the pictures were first distributed - over the internet I suppose - was said to be so pleased and thrilled that he was seen to be walking the beach singing happily to himself.

The earth - our tiny piece of all this - is undergoing some sort of significant climate change, some of which may well be part of some inevitable cycle, and part of which is undeniably of our own doing. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we have been poisoning our own nest, putting particulate matter and carbon dioxide into the air, and it has affected the amount of sunlight that gets through to us and the amount of heat that reflects back off our surface into the atmosphere.

Some say it is irreversible and we are headed - ironically since it is climate warming that gets all the press - for a new ice age that will last 150,000 years and make the earth uninhabitable for our species.

Now I would personally hate to see our species come to its end, even though I understand that nothing is forever and that our species, like virtually every phenomenon is transitory. And I have grandchildren whom I hope will live out their days as I nearly have mine.

But it cheers me up to think about all this in light of that instant all those billions of years ago in whcih whatever it looked like would not have caused the most optimistic among us to imagine the scene I see out my window.

We humans quite naturally read all the evidence as being focused on us, how we are doing and what our prospects are. This big old universe may well be onto the next big thing.

Not Buying It

2006-03-13T14:56:00.000-08:00

This morning I read a review of "Not Buying It; My Year Of Not Shoppin" - who knows, I might even buy the book or, imagine, read it.

A woman and her husband, tired of feeling manipulated by the consumer culture, decided to stop buying stuff, at least stuff they didn't absolutely need. They did it for a year and, apparently, with only a slip or two, which would be a good record even for a recovering alcoholic.

She writes that it was incredibly hard. The hardest part wasn't doing without what they didn't buy - that really was mostly a relief - but turning down their friends when they suggested going for a cup of coffee or dinner out or a movie. They had no idea how much of their social life revolved around spending that kind of money.

I bet most of us, if asked if we would prefer life with illusion and distraction or life without them, with only what we sometimes call nevessity and reality, would piously answer that we like life straight on, without the beer ads and promises for losing weight.

But in fact it is those illusions and distractions that not only smooth the hard edge of reality, but give us the endorphin rush that creates what we like to call optimism, good feeling. Even if it is illusion.

The trick is how to live a life of sufficient discipline so that we can choose our distractions and illusions, knowing we are choosing them, rather than be run by them so we come to think they are necessary.

There is an old theological distinction between the esse and the bene esse, what is essential and what is nice to have.

The woman who wrote the book discovered that keeping one's head clear about which is which is pretty hard in this culture which has raised creating appetites to a fine art form.

Spening time in a developing country is perhaps the fastest way to get in touch with the fatness of our land. When we lived in Zimbabwe in 1984, we left out tennis rackets behind when we left because they couldn't buy them there. When we went to the mall to buy new ones, we faced a huge wall displaying scores of different rackets. We looked at each other and then fled the store, unable to cope with such abundant choice.

Do you suppose a clever government could use the same techniques to sell us something more consequential, like a war?

Turns out very few of us have the courage and self-discipline not to buy.

Belief & Endorphins

2006-03-09T09:14:00.000-08:00

The issue of religious belief is complex. I have gone through so many different stages myself that I do understand many sides of the issue. The first thing that must be said is that we can never have a conclusive conversation about the object of belief, since, by definition, it is about something beyond empirical verification.

Recently I have read a spate of articles, by anthroplogists, neuroscientists, sociologists, some believers themselves, some not. One thing they seem to agree on is that believing in some religious dogma seems to cause one to release endorphins, and endorphins make us feel better.They assume there has to be some use for belief since it has hung on in us for so long.

But that says nothing about the willingess, tearing at us right now, of people to turn on other people who do not share their beliefs. That, I suppose, would be a study of the use of war in forwarding some piece of the human desire.

And what about the issue of the object of belief? Is it enough to believe in order to get the endorphin rush even if you feel the object of belief is a sham? Does the placebo effect work if you know you are getting a placebo?

Democrat?

2006-03-08T14:40:00.000-08:00

I have been a card carrying Democrat since Adlai Stevenson ran for President in 1952.

My father was a Republican businessman which likely had a lot to do with my first identifying myself as a Democrat.

I have believed that the Democrats, since FDR, make certain that the weakest in our country are looked after. Though I understand the Republican wish for government to get out of the way so ambitious and clever people can make money without being taxed to death or frustrated by over regulation, it seems common sense that those people will always find ways to prosper. The measure of a a great country is how it cares for those who, for whatever reason, drop off the radar screen.

So I have found it shocking, now that I live on Social Security, a pension and the proceeds of a modest portfolio, to look at the employment figures each month, and the wage numbers, worrying that if they are too strong, if workers have plenty of jobs and their wages are rising, interest rates are likely to rise, the stock market will languish and my income is likely to fall.

Bill Clinton tried, with modest success, to identify the Democratic Party with middle class America by curbing welfare and sponsoring our participation in the global market place. Many Democrats - and I was sometimes among them - felt this was where Clinton's so-called triangulation, while politically effective, dropped some of the old Democratic constituents below the safety net.

I think the global markeplace is inevitable; the Internet makes that clear. But there are still many in this country - and this now stretches into the old middle class - who are steadily falling behind. I hope I will have enough money to live out my days with a decent income, but it is high time we put our best minds to work figuring out how to include more people at the bottom of the economic ladder in the radically changed world of commerce.

There is an agenda worthy of the Democratic Party.

Impeach Bush?

2006-03-08T14:29:00.000-08:00

My home state of Vermont runs by town meeting. Every year about this time the towns convene a meeting at which they pass a budget for the coming year and discuss various other issues. So far four towns have passed resolutions asking Bernie Sanders, Vermont's sole Representative, to introduce a resolution of impeachment of the President. Sanders has responded by saying that, while this president has done terrible things, perhaps even illegal impeachable offenses, the Republican majorities in both houses makes such a thing futile.

Sanders has sponsored some even less probable efforts in the past, but this year he is running for Senate and, understandably, wishes not to offend any more voters than necessary.

Though I believe one can make a strong case for impeachment of George Bush, I have worried over the implications of impeaching two presidents in a row, of making even more bitter the partisan divide in the country and, in the unlikely possibility of actually convicting him, of finding ourselves with Dick Cheney as president.

I have since been persuade that, despite all those serious concerns, it would be good for the country if a bill of impeachment were introduced and debated. It may be our one chance left to rescue the dregs of democratic government from the clutches of the oligarchy that has effectively muffled and intimidated the entire country, citizens and elected representatives alike.

Please, Congressman Sanders, step up.

Beavers

2006-02-28T13:55:00.000-08:00

Beavers, it now seems, have been around a long time, a lot longer than we have. They swam, if you can believe recent headlines, with the dinosaur. A mammal hanging out aeons before we showed up.

For an entire summer, the wettest in memory, we tried to defeat the attempts by the beavers on our pond in Vermont - who were there long before we were - to construct a new lodge and a new dam. We were convinced it was raising the water level of the pond so it would threatent the road, and another family of beavers would hopelessly pollute the pond. Of course for more than 100 years our house had a straight pipe that emptied into the pond and I don't remember any attempts to destroy our house as a result.

We failed. The beavers could replace what we tore down before we had paddled our canoe back to the house.

We are rethinking our place in the order of things.

Income Inequality

2006-02-27T12:21:00.000-08:00

Yes, I know Paul Krugman, like the NY Times for which he writes, is a target for conservatives who believe he is a muddle-headed socialist. But in today's column he cites statistics that, even if you are a free market person - or even a libertarian like the much feted Alan Greenspan - might make your eyes roll.

The column was sparked by testimony by the new fed chair, Bernanke, saying the income discrepance in the country - which Greenspan has said is a threat to democracy - is best addressed by more investment in the education - particularly the tech education - of more Americans so we can better compete in the fast growing global technical economy.

Krugman says he is wrong, about the source of the inequality and about its remedy. Bernanke's analysis, says Krugman, comes from the long popular notion that our economy is divided between the 20% of us who manage to get a good education to make us competitive, and the 80% who do not. That assumes that, while there is undeniable inequality in the nation, it can be remedied through education, merit and hard work. And, that 20% of us enjoy growing affluence.

Krugman cites these startling statistics. He doesn't even reach down as far as the 20%, but starts with the top 10%, those who supposedly are rocking along finacially. Between 1972 and 2001, the income of the top 10% of Americans rose 34%, or about 1% a year.

The incomes of the top 1% however, rose 87%. And the top .01 - 1/10th of 1% - rose 497%.

Krugman's point is that these numbers are generated not by merit or education but by various forms of favoratism generally associated with an oligarchy that has the power to reward itself. It is a practice for which we scold dictators in Latin America and Africa.

We seem to have a lottery mentality in the United States. When we see someone flaunting great wealth, we think, "With some good luck that could be me."

But the reality is that economies which are so heavily loaded at the pinaccle are sustained by corruption and graft. They not only finally demoralize people who see they can never have access, but they dedicate vast sums to people who are not providing commensuurate value to the economy.

Strikes me that since Ronald Reagan days, we have as a nation adopted the notion that making it possible for a few to become wildly wealthy is the best way to guarantee better lives for all of us. But the numbers in Krugman's column do not support that picture.

You don't need to be a socialist or poverty stricken to think perhaps there is a better way to run an economy; just be excluded from that top 1%. If we have a semblance of democracy left is us, surely we 99% can out vote them.

Parochial Safety

2006-02-24T15:51:00.000-08:00

The uproar over the UAE company's contract to protect our ports is, as the NYTimes columnist suggested today, of President Bush's own creation. We will likely never know whether this is in fact a good or bad idea because the administration has so thorougly poisoned the waters in the matter of rational consideration of what best protects us from terrorists that, like the boy who cried wolf, we could be eaten while skeptics who have tired of the warnings stand by.

I have a friend who has a big role in private companies' contracting with the government to protect our ports. From conversation with him I have become persuaded that t is likely the number one concern we ought to be focused on, and the conventional wisdom about how best to do that is flawed.

But we will never be able to have an informed debate about it. Because the administration arbitrarily targeted Iraq and, by inference, the entire Arab world, following 9/11, it is impossible to make discerning judgments about what makes good policy sense.

How devoutly I hope we dodge this bullet. My friend has put the fear of God into me about what it would mean for a dirty bomb to be set off in a container in Long Beach. The technology exists to examine all cargo - it is being done in Hong Kong. But the combination of an inept Homeland Security agency and the administration's political avarice that keeps them creating new fears to further their ambitions, has done much to limit our ability to focus resources and energy where it could be the msot critical.

The irony is that if we suffer a major attack it will be at leas in part because this administration has failed us. But we will be told it is yet further evidence that we need these "tough realists" to protect us.

Cartoons

2006-02-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

The debate over the cartoons making fun of the prophet has become quite nuanced.

My first take was that this is an apparent difference between the level of tolerance in the two cultures. And I still believe that is a factor. Whether it is improper or chauvinistic to say that the more mature a culture the less threatened it feels by being criticized or made fun of, I'm not sure.

On a personal level that seems to be so. And it varies from day to day, depneding on how secure within one's self one is feeling. There are days when I can laugh at myself and find being teased great fun. And there are days when I want to kill anyone who looks at me cross-eyed.

And I tend to associate those different responses with how emotionally together I am feeling.

But there is another dimension raised in this week's New Republic; that of thoughtfulness and consideration. If I don't know someone very well, or don't have fairly intimate knowledge of his customs and traditions, I am cautious. I go out of my way to avoid offense. I am what has come to be called politically correct. That is, I try to observe the rules of his culture as I know them.

I read that Denmark has a long tradition of teasing and political attack. One Dane was quoted as saying everyone should relax a little and not take it all so seriously. And for a Dane to take such an attitude toward another Dane is admirable.

Strikes me that we might want to cut people we don't know well a lot of slack. I am appalled that people have died and lives have been threatened - bounties place on the heads of those who published the cartoons - and I am grateful not to live in a culture in which such violent response is triggered by political satire.

But unless we really want to escalate this into something which will require us to respond with equal violence, I don't think President Bush's response on this one is so bad. He said he deplored the violent reponse, but one of the obligations of free people is to consider what the limits of consideration might be.

LA & 2002

2006-02-09T08:53:00.000-08:00

So today the president - he must have read yesterday's blog in this space - reveals that survelliance prevented a planned attack in 2002 on the tallest building on the west coast, the library building in LA.

Putting aside for the moment the substance - the question of whether unauthorized, illegal eavesdroping is required to prevent such attacks - what galls me about this administration is their bald-faced, in-your-face adolescent sticking its tongue out at those who challenge them. You just know they're not serious strategic thinkers when their attitude is all about making their opposition look bad. Maybe it's too much to ask that our leaders behave as adults, but I still do.

Now, as to the substance. If it is true that they stopped terrorists from flying a plane into the LA building I am grateful. Wihtout knowing enough to hazard an opinion, I'd still guess that the network of global intelligence uncovers at least the intention or wish of people to make mayhem, many times a day. When the threat level is high enough to say it would have happened without some intervention and apprehension of those planning it, is also a judgment.

The fact remains that we have laws that provide for acting under the gravest and most urgent matters. I doubt this is the first president to act without legal authority, but he may be the first to claim the right.

If the president can act as he pleases, regardless of or contrary to law, then what it is we say we are defending is a sham. I am enough of a realist to understand that a president might contravene a law under dire circumstance, and if discovered, have to face the consequences. I could even consider such an action brave and laudable. But to say the Constitution provides for that, or that he has some unwritten authority, is, in its own way, as dangerous to our nation as a terrorist attack.

I am unimpressed by the Democrats use of the issue; trying to embarrass the president in order to gain votes. Where are the voices of true patriots who understand what it is about this nation and its laws that make it worth defending?

Spying & Incompetence

2006-02-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

Someone recently pointed out to me that I had given out the wrong address for finding this blog. You may make your own decision about how seriously to take a blogger who gets his own blog address wrong.

The big dust up about survelliance of our own citizens in search of terrorist plots has so far shed more heat than light. My side, liberals, shout about civil liberties, while the other side - Cheney - stare us down as pathetic wimps unable or unwilling to defend ourselves.

My guess is that this is not a new issue. For instance, I assume anything I put into cyberspace is in the public domain, whether a personal email or not. If I were assigned the duty of trying to figure out the actions and motives of potential terrorists, I would set my computers to pick up certain words, phrases, and patterns, as well as correspondence with known terrorists in other countries. I hope we do that.

But unless we are to become just like our terrorist enemies, we had better sober up about ignoring our own laws about how to go about this. While it is easy to make the case for acting percipitously when the danger is imminent - and we are still hysterical, as the Bush administration seems to want to keep us - we have provision in our laws for how to behave under those cicumstances. In fact the law seems a little silly, since the survelliance can take place before asking for a court order. But the important thing, in this nation of laws - not people - is that there is a law and everyone has to obey it or face the consequences.

During the civil rights struggles, we were advised that when we broke the law - even if it was an unjust or unconstitutional law - we should expect to face arrest, trial and jail.

The argument is being made that we musn't tip off our enemies by passing laws in public that tell them how we function. I say the opposite. Let's show them how we function right out there in the open. If the law is inadequate to the situation, change the law.

My suspicion is that this is more of the two term effort this administration is making to focus as much power in the presidency as possible. A bad idea that will come back to haunt them as well as the rest of us.

Richard Nixon believed he was acting in the bst interests of the nation when he authorized spying on the Democrats, because he believed his reelection was critical to the well being of the country. That's why we have these laws; they curb the skewed judgment the best of us have when our own power is on the line.

Super Bowl

2006-02-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

What a relief it was to have a football player and not the president toss the coin to open the Super Bowl.

I am a total fair weather fan, paying no attention all season long except to fill an occasional rainy Sunday afternoon. But for a few playoff games and then for the Super Bowl, I love the idea - much like the Final Four in NCAA basketball - that a huge part of the nation is engaged in the same thing at the same moment.

The French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, wrote what was then revolutionary suggestions about how our species was going to evolve. He wrote of a noosphere, a layer around the earth like the atmosphere, made up of mental activity and energy. As I read it now it sounds eerily like the internet and satellite communications.

Teilhard believed that the homonisation of the earth, when human though and imagination energy covered the planet, would cause us to become a single phenomenon - his best known book was titled The Phenomenon of Man - and that would lead to world peace.

Half of his prediction has been coming true. What of the other half?

God knows. But yesterday, as I drank a beer, ate guacamole and chile, I felt at one with the country - and a significant part of the world - in a way I seldom do.

Swing Vote?

2006-02-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

One response to yesterday's blog suggests that Judge Alito has cast his first vote, to stay an execution, making the responder (who is from NJ as Alito is) think perhaps all the worry about Alito shifting the court to the right may be misplaced.

There is historical precedent for justices surprising people, especially their sponsors who thought they knew how they would vote. I have not waded in against either the Roberts or the Alito nominations because they both pass the basic tests of being able legal minds with at least a semblance of reasonableness.

And one of the spoils of our system is that if you win the Presidency you get to name judges, with advise and consent from the Senate. In recent years the parameters of acceptability seem be about extremism on either end of the political spectrum. But it seems that Republican presidents (two Bushes and Reagan) were more eager to name ideological justices than Clinton was.

I am glad that Alito's first vote has been cast and that it at least confuses all of us who thought we could predict his mind.

State of the Union

2006-02-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

Something slightly sad about that speech. Except for the comic moment when the Democrats cheered the president for failing to pass his Social Security bill, there was no life in that chamber last night.

Since I deplore most of what this president would like to do -spend American power to bully other nations, dismantle the role of government in protecting the weakest, turn the decision making at the highest levels from rational to supernatural - I am not sorry to see his energy and his ability to cow the Congress disappear.

But one wonders whether he has managed to steer us on a course -with the appointment of judges and the alienation of a significant portion of the world - that will be difficult for those who come after him to alter.

A member of his cabal was famously heard to say that he hoped to shrink government to such a small size that one could drown it in the bathtub.

Having wreaked havoc in Iraq and the entire Middle East he has created a dilemma that has no simple solution, for us or for the rest of the world.

So we wish for a mid-term election of sensible people. And a step back from the swagger and bullying that has poisoned our nation's spirit.

Reality

2006-01-31T08:12:00.000-08:00

Bill Moyers is one of our truth tellers. He doesn't rant, he just points to what he sees. In fact, when people tell him he is their hero, he reminds them that journalists only pass on news, don't make it. So he regards himself as no hero.

But he points out that for the first time since perhaps the enlightenment, we now have a ruling group in our nation and beyond who regard the non-rational - if not irrational - as a proper basis for decision making. Remember James Watt, Secretary of the Interior, who said in congressional testimony that we need not spend too much energy worrying about the environment because Jesus would soon return and bring history to its close?

Remember Ronald Reagan seriously discussing the rapture - when the elect will be swept up to heaven and the rest of us will be left to face death and destruction - in the Oval Office?

Remember George Bush, when asked during his first campaign for president, when asked who his favorite philosopher was, said Jesus?

As a parish priest for 30 years I grew somewhat used to people's flights of fancy based on what they understood religion to be about - an escape from reality. But I always had confidence that when it came to making decisions, about the environment, about facing down a hostile nation, about product development, rational thinking would retake center stage. I knew smart, tough business people who left their clear thinking at the church door.

Could it be that George Bush believes that in Iraq we are fulfilling biblical prophecy about how the world ends? Is American support for Israel, which sometimes seems to ignore the fact that there are others in the region who also have just claims, based on the belief that Israel will be the site for the last great Armageddon?

I am in an ongoing conversation with a couple of friends about whether we ought to abandon religious practice and language until this madness passes. I have held that we cannot do that because our language would not only be impoverished, but there are vast areas of experience that cannot be expressed in literal, positivist language.

But this descent into superstition in the name of religion threatens to take us even deeper into disastrous foreign policy and environmental degradation than we have already gone. If it is true that more than half of all Americans believe that so-called intelligent design has some reasonable basis, and that the Bible is literally true (whatever that might mean), then we are headed for an Armageddon of our own making.

back at last

2006-01-30T15:04:00.000-08:00

Having suffered a nearly three week hospitalization of my computer, followed by a gltich in getting into my own blog, I am up and ready for action. Not to mention mad and curious. So if yu haven't given up on my, I will be back presently. Having missed being with you since the beginning of 2006.

New Year

2005-12-30T15:25:00.000-08:00

Like everyone, I wish you a healthy and prosperous 2006.

What that means will not be the same for everyone.

I am 65 and am discovering that the decade of the 60s is when whatever dormant malignant process has been crouching in your system, perhaps since your parents' egg and sperm cell met, is likely to show up and give you a run for your money. If you make it through your 60s with no major upheavels, you have a pretty good shot at an decent old age.

Now, despite longevity in our culture having reached into the late 70s, dying in one's 60s is nothing to complain about. That's something of a shock, not only because our culture treats death as an unexpected insult, but because one never seems to get quite used to being old. Most of my friends my ag refuse to call themselves old. Why, I don't understand. I think old is good, a sign of success. And it even offers the possibility - possibility, not certainty - of wisdom.

What I hope for myself in 2006 is deepend wisdom and greater tolerance. Tolerance for others, but - and this likely translates into tolerance of others - especially tolerance of myself.

What would it take for me to stop responding to my wife as I have for decades when she issues me an order? It would take my understanding that she is simply stating what she wants from me, and I have the freedom to respond as I wish. But because I have not yet - aeons beyond my childhood - resolved my feelings about being bossed around by my father, I still bristle and worse when she gives me orders. I know she does that because that's what she learned from her mother - to direct, not request - and when I see her do it with her office manager I understand.

We'll see. I have made this resolution many times.

As for wisdom, that has to do with loving reality and eschewing illusion.

When the candidates for major office emerge in the next several months, will I remember that they are people like me, filled with ambiguity and ambition that colors their behavior? Or will I rant at their bullshit and hold out for some perfect being?

That, too, depends on whether I can forgive myself for chasing illusion and coveting approval.

So first we'll see whether some malignant process shows itself. The time is, of necessity, closer. If not, perhaps I will have a chance to grow in wisdom.

Stay tuned.

Listening In

2005-12-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

What are we to make of the seemingly major dust up around President Bush’s seemingly bald-faced admission (bragging?) that he damn well had the authority and the balls to use it when he authorized wire tapping surveillance without getting court authorization?

I think those are right who say he and the Republican Party are not likely to be punished by the electorate for being too zealous – even acting illegally – when guarding the lives of Americans against terrorists.

And that is what, to me, makes this business cynical. We will likely never know whether there may have been a moment so urgent that the president acted without authorization. For reasons I give below, I doubt it. But the jaw-set statement he gave about the matter at his press conference smacks to me of yet another opportunity to show his and his party’s toughness, so tough they’ll go outside the law, like the cowboys of old who kept outlaws at bay on the frontier by taking the law into their own hands.

It seems pretty clear that the legal requirements for tapping phones is not only pretty easy to come by, but can be done swiftly. Even retroactively. If something comes up on the spot, surveillance can be started and needs only be authorized within three subsequent days.

Some say the new ways of doing this listening-in may no longer be appropriate to getting legal permission for tapping individual phones. There may be intelligence that is so vague it would require putting computers to work randomly checking millions of phones. Distasteful as this sort of fishing expedition is, the court set up for hearing these matters would certainly bend over backwards to be understanding of the need for unusual wire tapping.

My bet is that the president and his minions were arrogant enough to believe they needn’t bother with the niceties of the law, nor should they because they were conducting this war, not the courts. And, perhaps saddest of all, even though John Dean is likely correct in saying Bush is our first president to incriminate himself in an offense against his oath to defend the Constitution, Bush – and Karl Rove – are likely correct that we American people will ignore our most precious freedom when we are sufficiently frightened.

So much for give me liberty or give me death.

We get the government we ask for.

Iraq Elections

2005-12-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

Let me put al my caveats up front…

I have opposed George Bush since he first appeared as a candidate for president. Since 9/11 I have thought virtually his every move has put us further from the proper aims of this nation. Though I thought the invasion of Afghanistan perhaps necessary given what we knew of terrorist training camps and the Taliban, I thought our invasion of Iraq, without the support of most of the world, was a terrible mistake. Even so I was unprepared for the dimensions of the disaster that unfolded in Iraq following the toppling of the Saddam regime.

Since long before the recent turning of popular opinion against our continuing occupation, and for the return of our troops, I have thought we would, as we did finally in Viet Nam, have no choice but to pack up and leave.

Now, if the initial reports of a huge turnout in relatively peaceful elections turns out to mark a significant turnaround in the fortunes of Iraq and thus of the entire middle east, I will rejoice with the hardest line conservatives.

I abhor violence as a way to reach political settlement; I think it inevitably leads to more violence down the road.

But if today’s election is the beginning of the end of the insurgency and the beginning of some political compromise in Iraq, I will applaud the president for achieving a huge victory.

No doubt I will still search for Democratic candidate in two years with a radically different view of the world from that of George Bush and his cronies. Finding enemies of whom we are terrified strikes me as a terrible way to try to unify the country.

And turning the resources of the nation over to the super rich corporations seems to me a recipe for injustice, not to mention our outlaw status in the rest of the world.

But I have some hope for this administration’s Iraq policy I have never had before. I pray it may be justified.

Forgiveness

2005-12-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

Now here's a fascinating new twist: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq invasion was based on faulty intelligence and taken the blame himself for acting on it.

A few (notably Andrew Sullivan who has always been for the war and against the way it has been waged) have applauded this new turn and said all the president has to do to gain support for the war is to come clean with us because most Americans want to win the war.

Maybe.

President Bush continues to believe the war was the right thing to do even though the stated reasons for it were wrong. We all know logic is not his long suit and I could imagine circumstances under which we might grant him that the war was a good idea. I have yet to see any perusasive argument, but there might be one. If you thought, for instance, that we needed to make a strong military move in the middle east in order to persuade the Islamic world that we are not isolationist and will not try to resolve our conflict by retreating to our shores.

But all I read, and what I conclude, is that our invasion has not only stirred up more hatred for our nation in that part of the world, but has strengthened their belief that we cannot rule even a weak country like Iraq so long as they oppose us. The British learned this some time ago.

But perhaps some will find the president's mere candor enough to cut him slack and gin up support for his policies.

I remember a Rabbi once telling me he didn't understand the Christian notion of repentance being sufficient for forgiveness. Seems like all you have to do, he said, is say your sorry and no matter how henious your offense, the slate is wiped clean. In Judaism you must set the matter right, provide justice, before forgiveness can be offered. Which, he explained, is the reason for the absolute prohibition against murder. It cannot be set right.

It is not enough for the president to say he's sorry he got it wrong. Somehow the deaths of at least 30,000 Iraqis and over 2,000 Americans must be amended for. Not to mention the incalculable ravages of war on ours and the world's economy and geo-political affairs.

Stark choice: convince us the war was necessary, or withdraw in shame.

Red Cross

2005-12-10T13:38:00.000-08:00

I understand these things are never as they seem from reading about them in the newspaper...but good Lord, we, the United States of America, are denying the Red Cross its historic access to prisoners we are holding in secret?!

Was there ever a time when it was more uncomfortable to be an American in the world?

Perhaps in the Philippines during the Spanish - American War.

That was before I was born. I wonder if we denied Red Cross access (if there was such a thing then) to Filipinos we held then?

Whether we have ever done such things in the past, and I am afraid we likely have, I don't know a time when we so blatantly, outloud and in front of the entire world, held them up without shame or embarrassment.

To have become the world's sole super power, so we can seem to behave with impunity, is our everlasting shame.

When others regain their equilibrium, able, as China will one day soon, to challenege us, we will rue the day we turned our backs on international law and decency.

Condi & Hilary

2005-12-05T22:01:00.000-08:00

Today Condaleeza Rice waded in alongside our erstwhile Secretary of Defense, demeaning our Euopean allies who have said any of the EC nations who have cooperated in moving terrorist suspects to nations where they are tortured have violated international law.

Cleverly ducking the question of whether we do in fact have secret prisons where we torture, she attacked. We are taking up your slack, she chided Europe. You should be glad we are doing this aggressive interrogation because we have prevented many potential deadly attacks, including many in Europe. She is increasingly carrying this administration's most militant views as she travels the world.

At the same time Hilary Clinton is being made fun of for her wavering positions on our Iraq adventure. She has been a strong supporter of the invasion and occupation up until now. Now that support for Bush's handling of the war has slipped below the sustainable level, she is changing her tune.

I remember when the issue of ordaining women was first broached in the Episcopal Church. I was for it because I believed the church, and all institutions of our culture, were in need of a different sort of leadership, one that was more communal and less combative. When the first woman was elected a bishop I was surprised to see that she managed her office in virtually an identical manner as her male colleagues.

Power is power, whether in male or female hands. No doubt there are significant differences between the genders, some likely built into the chromosone code.

But power is power. Both Secretary Rice and Senator Clinton would like to run for president. If they square off against each other in 2008, their gender will be of historical interest, but the stakes will cause them to be just as ruthless as any man who ever ran.

Duke

2005-12-04T17:45:00.000-08:00

Duke Cunningham, the San Diego congressman and former top gun fighter pilotg who has been shot down for rife corruption, is an American tragedy.

I never have been a supporter of the swaggering Viet Nam ace (was there a credible Vietnam airforce to do combast against?) who embraced all the exaggerated virtues of the Republican right wing. And even though I loved Doonesbury's making him into a figure of fun, I suspected the Duke began by believing in his own virtue and the righteousness of his cause. I have never met him but some who have tell me they have rarely met a man who seemed more sincere.

And there was his downfall.

Because he believed himself to be a man of unquestioned virtue, while vilifying the cynical liberals who opposed him, he never considered that he might be vulnerable to the weaknesses that power always threatens. So when people with powerful interests flattered him and offered him lavish gifts, he likely thought they were on the level. And, like all of us, he enjoyed the perks of his high office. That a congressman's stipend might not provide for a two million dollar house and a Rolls Royce may have seemed to him an obstacle to be overcome with the help of his rich friends.

I bet it was not until the prosecutor piled the evidence on Duke's desk, explaining the likely conseqences, that he understood that he had betrayed his own boy scout ethics.

When I was a young pastor of a significant church, I believed myself to be of purer motive than anyone else in the church. When the first power struggle came, I believed I would prevail merely because I was pure. I got creamed by those who understood power. It took some years and some painful therapy for me to understand that I am just like everyone else and my capacity for corruption as real as anyone's.

Until we will look straight on at our dark side, at the reality that being human involves being open to being corrupted, we are likely to be brought low without warning.

Every person has their price. Duke didn't know what his was.

JFK

2005-11-22T08:35:00.000-08:00

42 years ago...

My generation's 9/11.

We all remember where we were. I was at Logan Airport in Boston waiting at the international terminal for a friend coming from the Philippines for a visit. My friend was a Mestizo, part Filipino, part Austrian, my father's best friend and doubles partner.

As I waited an oversized Irish state trooper, came to the door of customs and announced, seemingly more to his anguished self than to those of us standing there, "Some idiot in Dallas has taken a shot at the President."

"Was he hit?"

"We don't know."

Charlie cleared customs and, as we embraced, he asked me what I knew of Kennedy's well being. He was clearly as affected as I. I told him I had heard nothing. At the first traffic light, Charlie rolled down the wondow of my Nash Rambler and asked the woman stopped alongside us (I had no radio in my car) of word of the president.

"He's dead."

"Oh shit!" Charlie exclaimed (that word was only used in men's locker rooms in those days). The woman looked shocked. I always wondered whether she was more shocked by the assassination or by Charlie's profanity.

Our world changed that day, in ways we could not have imagined. And we will never know how many of those changes would have come had the young President not been shot. It was my introduction into the cruelty of reality. 9/11 came to me as confirmation.

Feminism, war and polls

2005-11-15T14:58:00.000-08:00

It looks as if the feminsit movement has matured. They are fighting it out within their own ranks, a sure sign that it is no longer in its infant stage.

Maureen Dowd is out hustling her new book which, if its not humor, is being attacked by critics for her seeming not to understand that most of the world does not hang out, as she does, with those who are brokering the world's power. I think Maureen is a very funny writer; certainly she can raise conservative vitriol with a stroke of the pen. But is she a feminist?

Who can say?

Condaleeza Rice has been holding the feet of middle east leaders to the American fire, making headlines and likely driving those male chauvinists mad. Just when the Israelis and the Palestinians were ready to back away from the table and begin their bloody feud again, Madam Secretary chained them to their places until they negotiated a new access treaty for Palestinians in Gaza.

Hilary Clinton, who took her husband to Amman last week to tromp through the rubble of the suicide bombing that challenged our strongest Arab ally, has sounded more hawkish than most Democratic Senators even while she chides the president for a failed Iraq policy.

Are we being prepared for the passing of the presidential mantle to either Secretary Rice or Senator Clinton? Perhaps.

Bucking The Tide

2005-11-04T00:20:00.000-08:00

My financial advisor believes that public opinion is almost always wrong. Or at least late. He has adopted the broker's notion that the market will do whatever it must to confound the most people.

He is also a rock ribbed Republican. And he believes that all the piling on Bush and the Republican conressionale leadership is a combination of media bias and misguided public hysteria.

But I think the taste of power is turning sour on the Republican pallet.

When the Democrats ran the country, initially, under FDR, they set up elaborate and effective systems for lifting ordinary Americans out of the financial ditch into which they had been thrown by the Great Depression. Most of those systems became permanent parts of the way we run the country, although the very conservative right wing would dearly love to dismantle most or all of them.

When the Democrats had been in power for nearly a half century, what began as smart humanitarian governing began to give way to corrpution and excesses. The Republicans, quite properly, ran successfully against that abuse of power.

Now the shoe is on the other foot. The Republicans, having reset the agenda for a generation, are using their power to retain power rather than govern sensibly.

What remains unclear is what or who will follow this latest abuse of power. But follow it will.

Secret Prisons?

2005-11-02T01:35:00.000-08:00

The CIA is rfefusing comment on reports that we are holding detainees in secret prisons.

No doubt many will say, so be it. Terrorism requires extraordinary measures.

But if we must turn our backs on everything we have stood for in order to defend ourselves, it seems to me that we have surrendered to those whose goal has been to undermine us and our institutions.

President Bush says the terrorists attack us because they hate our openness and our freedom.

That always seemed simple minded to me. But now that we are jettisoning our openness and our freedom, what is it that we are fighting to preserve?

Gloating

2005-10-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

In the 2004 elections I wanted Howard Dead as the Democratic candidate because I thought he was the only one with enough bile in him to stand up to President Bush's bile. I still think he would have made a serious run at it.

Today, with Harriet Miers withdrawal from consideration as a Supreme Court justice, the poetntial for someone close to the presidency to be indicted by a federal gran jury, our Iraq occupation continuing to bleed the blood of our young warriors, there is glaoting among partisan Democrats.

I am a partisan Democrat, but I am not gloating. In fact I think I agree with Nicholas Kristof who says that he thinks indictments of either Karl Rove or Scooter Libby for outing Valerie Plame or for dissembling about it in testimony, is going to simply ape the unconscionable partisan zeal of the Republicans in seeking to destroy Bill Clinton for White Water or for sexual indiscretion.

And as for the Supreme Court nomination, I fear the vitriol and anxiety that may now cause the President to put forward someone who will please the religious right and enrage the rest of us. Is that something I would find helpful for the nation?

I believe we are, at some point, going to have to face the reality that we cannot succeed in the mission we set for ourselves in Iraq and figure out the best way to withdraw. We have now created such a horror, for ourselves and likely for the middle east and the rest of the world, that the chances of our leaving with any honor or sense of achievement seems dim.

Much as I oppose the entire agenda of this adminstration, and hope to replace it with a progressive, compassionate one, I want it to succeed. I don't believe it can.

But I am not happy about that. Or gloating over it. I am grieving.

Rosa Parks

2005-10-25T09:29:00.000-07:00

Rosa Parks (1913-2005)
Notes From Zone 4
Occasional Writing from Blayney Colmore
October 25, 2005

She was the Black Madonna of the American soul.

The legend says she refused to give up her seat on that bus because her feet were tired. In a radio interview 25 years ago, replayed on this morning’s news, she said of course she was tired; she worked as a domestic servant. But there was nothing wrong with her feet.

She refused to get up because she knew justice demanded that she stay.

Fifty years ago. Seems an eternity. Not because justice has been served since, but because Rosa Parks now seems like a member of an extinct species.

Cindy Sheehan may be the closest we have today. The voice of an outraged conscience, railing against the abuses of power that rob human beings of their dignity and even their lives.

Rosa Parks was arrested for violating the Jim Crow laws in Montgomery. Cindy Sheehan was arrested for challenging the right of the president to spend her son’s life to prove our nation’s fragile manhood.

Something has changed in us in those fifty years, something even more than some of us having been chastened by time.

Having grown up in the segregated south, I knew what was at stake, a culture, a whole way of life. And it frightened me. But having sat in the front of the bus, watched negroes get on through the back door and stand while there were empty seats around me, feeling miserable, I understood in my deepest places it had to change. I wondered what would happen to me and my family, who were living on the largesse of that old system. But I knew it had to change. And finally, after facing down my fears, I joined the movement.

And found my own soul.

Our national soul is at stake in our occupation of Iraq and our handing over the reins of power to corporate America as surely as it was in racial injustice in 1960. The horror of being the nation that practices torture,

Al Gore spoke for me recently when he said the surest way to distance yourself from intimacy with your own soul is to feel you must dominate and destroy those who differ with you.

And yet I have not taken to the streets. Yet.

It has become a cliché to say that the whole world changed on 9/11. What changed was our surrendering to our fear and giving free rein to those who have long been eager to use American power to dominate the world.

We have stood by and watched the dismantling of American partnership with the rest of the world. We are the world’s bullies.

There is room for honest disagreement about the role of government; there is no room for disagreement about the American ideal of justice for all people everywhere.

Saturday night I was wakened by the sound of sleet on our tin roof. After an hour or so the sound stopped. In the morning I saw the sleet had changed to snow; a beautiful early winter scene. On the road in front of our house a bare spot where someone had tossed a Happy Meal© out their car window. The nearest McDonald’s is 25 miles from here.

I picked up the trash on my walk down to the post office. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the greasy French fries. By the time I walked back the crows had seen to the fries.

I wonder; will we wait for the crows to clean up after us?

© Blayney Colmore

Short Story

2005-10-24T16:04:00.000-07:00

Step-Father

As he tried to reconstruct it later he couldn’t be sure whether it was the horrifying sound of metal grinding metal with considerable force, or his head ricocheting off the truck’s side window that had wakened him.

Probably only in a video of the thing, vastly slowed down, could such a fine distinction be made. And even he hadn’t such an exaggerated view of his own importance to think the NTSB would reconstruct the moment. It struck him as odd that he even wondered. But that wondering fit neatly in with what was oddest about the whole event – how tiny, seemingly insignificant details that would have seemed irrelevant had someone else been describing it all happening to them – were etched sharply in his mind. The big issues, like death staring him down, didn’t sink in until days later.

The weekend had begun on Thursday, when Andrew drove the 2 1/2 hours to Boston to meet Leslie, his wife, who had been in Connecticut visiting her sister whose 70th birthday they celebrated, soberly, since her sister had not shaken the depression into which she had sunk sometime before her husband died. Leslie had driven the Pathfinder, so Andrew drove the red Ford pickup – his conceit that he was a Vermont farmer.

Leslie’s energy was legendary among their friends, who wondered, as Leslie and Andrew did too, how a would be monastic contemplative like Andrew could manage life at her pace. Mostly he took to his cave, a writing retreat above the barn, where he wrote and read – and cat-napped – until Leslie’s activism would not be denied and she would swing open the door leading to his studio, shouting, “There’s work to be done around this place!”

Somehow it worked. Andrew would put aside whatever he was doing. He knew she had been hustling the past two hours – weeding, planting, harvesting, making jelly – all the while running her bi-coastal design business by fax, phone, and email while he had been quietly closeted.

When they met in Boston they were on Leslie’s schedule; no time or place for retreat. In the course of the first day the drove to the Design Center in the morning where Leslie raced between floors and show rooms at her usual gallop, while Andrew pretended to read in the café. In reality he hardly ever turned the page, so distracted was he by the handsome middle-aged women, dressed for power, traveling with the speed and authority that still attracted and intimidated Andrew in Leslie.

After an hour at the Design Center, Leslie came through the café, slowing only slightly to allow Andrew to gather his book and rush after her, and set out on a series of visits to Leslie’s friends and colleagues, with a business lunch in the middle. Andrew tried to make himself invisible while Leslie and the Schumacher rep worked to solve some problem with a flawed fabric that had been used to cover a client’s sofa at considerable expense.

In the first of the two after lunch visits, Andrew became aware of being exhausted. He exercised every ounce of his will to keep from disgracing himself pitching off his chair in a dead sleep.

The onto a family party and an overnight at his sister’s. They were close, but Andrew couldn’t shake the feeling that she always wanted just a little more of him than he either could or cared to give. But, being sensitive to that, he stayed up an hour later than he would have otherwise, while they talked.

The following morning Leslie and Andrew had breakfast at a café in a town a half hour’s drive, with their daughter and son-in-law and granddaughter, who hadn’t been at the party the night before. After breakfast they all embraced and said good-bye, getting soaked in the now steady downpour, and got into their vehicles, Leslie in the Pathfinder and Andrew in the pickup, heading for Rt. 2 and the 3 hour drive home.

Later Andrew couldn’t remember passing the place where Rt. 2 narrows from a divided four lane highway to 2 lanes with no center barrier.

“But there are those raised dots in the road,” Leslie protested, “that make a big noise and vibrate the car when you drive over them; you must remember that.”

When he woke, suddenly, startled by the sharp jolt that knocked his head sideways into the window, and the sound of crunching metal, he couldn’t, for a split second, figure out where he was or what was happening.

His head snapped back lifting his chin off his chest and he saw that he was in the breakdown lane on the eastbound side of the road, his left wheels bouncing on the uneven shoulder, and he was heading west. He guessed later he must have been going 50 mph. A line of cars, their headlights diffused by the rain on his windshield - maybe 8 or 10 cars he figured – were headed right at him.

Oddly, or it seemed odd to him later – he wasn’t sure he had any thoughts at all while it was happening – he felt no panic. He remembered thinking it likely that, in just a millisecond, he and one of those oncoming cars were going to hit on at a combined speed of over 100 mph. He though he remembered this was probably his final conscious thought. It all seemed a realistic appraisal of the situation.

He thought he remembered, as the first two cars passed without a collision, regretting that he was going to kill someone else, maybe several others – people who had no fault but who would die because of his falling asleep. He knew he might have injected that noble thought later – he was suspicious of himself when he became noble.

He steered as straight as he could, hoping the collision with the guard rail hadn’t compromised his ability to steer. He felt the truck bouncing beneath him, the left wheels slightly off the pavement, somehow managing to thread his way through the narrow space between the guard rail and the oncoming traffic. Good thing, he thought – another odd thought – this is the smallest pickup Ford makes. He hoped the oncoming drivers, windshield wipers at fast speed for the heavy rain, wouldn’t panic. He wondered later that he hadn’t.

And suddenly he realized all the cars had gotten past him without hitting him. As he saw the tail light of the last one in his rear view mirror, he checked the side mirror hoping the lane going his direction might be free of traffic. He saw no one and, though knowing there was a blind spot, he steered back onto the road and across to the other side, now driving in the westbound lane from which he had drifted.

For what? Maybe 15, 20 seconds? No more. Now driving at 50 mph in the proper direction, he waited for the shaking he knew would follow. It never did. For the flood of tears as the realization hit him that he had survived what looked to be a sure disaster. The relief. They never came. He focused his attention on the truck – how was it driving? Fine. He turned the wheel a little left, then right. It responded just as it should.

Andrew felt with his left hand for the cell phone on his belt. He should call Leslie who would be a few minutes behind him. But why? It would be stupid to do yet another dangerous move, only to alarm her as she was driving through the miserable conditions. And he really didn’t want to talk with her – or anyone.

When he arrived home and hour later – he never stopped – he pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition and sat for a long moment in silence. He sighed, still wondering when the panic would give him an adrenalin rush.

As he opened the truck door and got out, Leslie pulled into the driveway. He stood quite still, taking a quick look at the side of the truck that had hit the rail. He wondered if, when he started to tell her, he might cry.

“Were you listening to that great interview Terry Gross was doing?” she called as she opened her car door.

“I had an adventure on the way here, “ Andrew said, consciously avoiding calling it a “little adventure.” He was determined to curb his tendency to drain the moment of its stature.

Leslie stood completely still while he described what had happened. “And you’re all right?” she said, emphasis on “right” as if she couldn’t quite believe it. When he assured her he was, she went straight into the house and dialed her daughter, Andrew’s step-daughter, in California. As she was telling her, Leslie burst into tears and handed the phone to Andrew.

“I’m so glad you’re alive,” she said, “we aren’t quite ready to give you up yet. I hope Mom doesn’t beat you up for falling asleep. It scared the shit out of her, I can tell. Me, too. I love you.”

She didn’t beat up on him. She was more tender and present than usual. Andrew had moments of feeling out of his body, detached from life, from everything.

Two days later there was a burial in the cemetery across the road from their house. Andrew always watched these things from their kitchen window, curious, looking to see how close the burial was to the plot that he and Leslie had given to each other as Christmas presents a few years before.

That afternoon Andrew walked across to see who had been buried, if he might have known them. The mound of fresh dirt was piled high with a dying bouquet of flowers. On the white ribbon wrapped around the flowers was w white satin ribbon. On the ribbon in gold appliqué, “Step-father.”

Hoping

2005-10-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

One wonders sometimes whether hope might not be yet another way to support illusion.

What is, is.

Hoping for something other than what is, is self-defeating.

Short Story

2005-10-24T12:44:00.001-07:00

Short Story

2005-10-24T12:44:00.000-07:00

Apocalypse Now?

2005-10-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

Much has been made, as always happens when many natural events pile up on us, of whether the flurry of hurricanes, earthquakes and torrential rains where I live in New England, are signs that the end of time is near. Careful studies show that this is by no means the most catastrophic time humans have lived through, but it is certainly wild.

I don't happen to be moved by the predictions of end time. Never have. But I do think we humans have a weird built-in sense of the finitude, not only of our own lives, but of everything else. We understand in some queasy and usually ignored part of ourselves, that nothing is forever. Everything, at least everything we know about, has a beginning and an end.

And we don't much like it. Or more particularly, we don't like it that we have an end. All the dreams of what life after death might be like are ego storms that refuse to imagine that human and geologic history might go on without us.

We can say that, just as no energy (or matter) is lost or gained in any exchange, that whatever it is that we are made of, goes on. But clearly not organized as it has been during our lifetime. We are entranced by consciousness, by knowing that we know. But who is to say that consciousness is the zenith?

I have long been attracted to the Zen notion of learning to pay attention to and trust reality. One of these storms may rearrange my reality forever. And one day this earth will either implode or explode.

In the meantime there is life to be lived.

Near Death

2005-10-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

This blog, aimed specifically at my friends and family - the rest of you are welcome to look in - is to tell you that I am full of shit. Anyone who knows he even moderately well knows how fixated I am on death, on what it means that we are limited beings who know our end. Many assume I have worked out my own issues with my death and am leading the rest of you toward the same goal for yourselves.

Yesterday I had a near death experience. I fell asleep at the wheel of my small red pickup, drifted across incoming traffic on a two lane road, in heavy rain, woke when I hit the guard rail bordering the breakdown lane on the opposite side from which I had been traveling, and now found myself, traveling 50 mph on the shoulder, going the wrong direction, with 8 or 10 cars headlights bearing down on me coming the other way. Somehow I had hit the guard rail obliquely so it did not throw me into the oncoming traffic, nor damage the truck so badly I couldn't steer. And all those oncoming cars, and I, managed to stay straight so they passed my on my right side, 2 feet away, while I bumped along on the uneven shoulder. Miraculously, when they had passed me, there was a break in traffic in both directions long enough for me to steer my way back across the road so I was now in the proper lane going in the proper direction.

I never had a discernible adrenalin rush, didn't shake or tear up when it was all over. In fact I felt so calm I almost wondered if I had dreamed the whole thing. Until I stopped and looked at the left side of the truck, that had the evidence.

It is now 24 hours later and I am only just beginning to feel the weight of my emotions. I feel depressed, even though it seems to me I might feel exhiliratedat having escaped against overwhelming odds. But what I feel is vulnerable and having to face the reality I have long posed as facing. I think I felt sleep earlier and ignored it, or denied it. I think I have been doing that about just about every piece of me that is aging. Pretending I am, by heavy exercise and clever writing, holding off the waning of powers that age inevitably brings.

I didn't see my whole life pass before me. What I am gradually seeing is my arrogance in refusing to let myself see, and hoping to hide from you, my normal decline. Yesterday I very nearly faced it finally in a 15 second adventure, and because of my refusal to attend to it, came horribly close to killing others.

I am going to write a Zone Note aboout this, likely tomorrow. Lacey is pretty angry about that, maybe because she thinks I likely will pretty it up and make it into a good story that will empty the experience of the power it ought to have, particularly for me. I'm going to try to play it straight. But I wanted to get it to you first.

God Knows

2005-10-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

I'd like to invite you to order my odyssey/novel "God Knows; It's Not About Us." You can order it from Xlibris at 888-795-4274, www.xlibris.com/bookstore, Amazon.com or any of the other major outlets, or from your local book store. It tells the story of OH (Our Hero) who wanders in search of his own holy grail. Though he never quite names it, you will, I hope recognize it and wander and wonder with him.

Are you following the fascinating journalism dust up about Judith Miller's appearances before the grand jury and how different newspapers are and are not covering it? It seems the NY Times, the paper for which she writes, has provided less coverage than almost any of the others, and the question is why? Though it seems clear to me that the paper is both being scrupulous about doing nothing to further jeapordize Ms. Miller's legal status, after she spent 84 days in jail for refusing to reveal her sources, and circling the wagons around one of their own, the Washington Post and others have suggested that she may have gone to jail to try to retrieve the credibility she lost when she seemed to be carrying the spear for the Bush administration on WMD in Iraq prior to our invasion. Stay tuned.

Interesting and tragic to hear reports from Pakistan sounding so like those from our own Gulf Coast after hurricane Katrina. The survivors are becoming angry and impatient as the government seems slow and clumsy in getting aid to them. One difference; the numbers of fatalities. Ours were in the hundreds, theirs in the scores of thousands.

Do you wonder if Harriet Miers may wish she had never let her name go forward?

Foreboding

2005-10-11T16:40:00.000-07:00

The rain began Friday night around 9. Steady, hard rain but not the sort of deluge we sometimes get in New England. I woke around 3am and realized it was still raining, hard. When I rose at 7 the rain was coming down as it had when it began. I wondered if it had stopped or at least slowed. I checked my rain gauge and it was overflowing past the 5 1/2" mark. I emptied it. The rain came down at that same steady pace until around 3am Sunday morning. At dawn I emptied another 4 1/2" from the rain gauge. 10" of rain in 30 hours!

Not since I was a kid living in the Philippines have I seen rain that hard for that long.

This is not a political argument for the truth of global climate change. But it is an admission that the weather, which climatologists tell us is overdue for a dramatic change, and about which we fill our conversation even more than about sex, will one day alter the terms of our tenure on the planet.

No doubt that is why three days without sun can cause a feeling of foreboding. Climate scientists say the earth has undergone a cycle of 150,000 year ice ages followed by 10,000 year warming, for aeons. And when the change comes it is fast, years, not centuries. Could the catastrophes we have seen this year, beginning with the Asian tsunami and ending, maybe, with the hurricanes and catastrophic storms of last weekend, portend the beginning of the coming change?

Wonderfully concentrates the mind.

Harriet Miers

2005-10-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

Nothing about Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court makes sense to me, except Bush's wish to populate the entire government, every branch, with his friends. When his father named Clarence Thomas it seemed clear to me that he was poking a stick in the eye of liberals whom he believed would be embarrassed to oppose a black person regardless pf his views. His son seems to like to do the same, but this goes way beyond that.

Now I find the Democrats pretending to approve of her, obviously to vex the already vexed right wing of Bush's party, too cynical even for these gruesome days. I have been a Democrat since Adlai Stevenson was the candidate for President, and I love it when the Republicans are in disarray. But I am more interested in putting Republicans on the defensive with creative solutions to the nation's problems. That's how the Republicans came to power in this period, by trumping the Democrats who had ruled for decades and had become complacent.

In what seems a short period since Newt Gingrich stood with his colleagues on the Capitol steps and brayed about the Contract With America that swept their party into a congressional majority. And now it seems urgent that we sweep them out before they manage to wreck the nation, its economy and relations with the rest of the world.

But surely we have ideas of how we would govern, with a more level playing field economically, a more friendly foreign policy, a more responsible choosing of people for high office, that are compelling enough that we don't need to play games with such a serious matter as the Supreme Court. Let the Republicans hang themselves.

Supreme Court

2005-10-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

Fascinating op-ed piece in today's NYTimes about why it is that pro-life conservative presidents seem to appoint people to the court who end up affirming Roe Vs. Wade. His answer is that, while the country is pretty decided on the right of a woman to choose to have an abortion (even though they may not like the idea of abortion), the hard right and religious right, the core base of the Republican Party (or at least the part that has given them such electoral success) is adamant on this issue. So they pick someone who is not eager to create a social revolution and can still appeal to their base by using the language of pro-choice. Likely the Republican Party would suffer at the polls if the Supreme Court did overturn Roe Vs. Wade. So it is a cozy game.

Appealing to a radical group to get elected and then trying to govern from the center. For many of us Bush seems far right, not center. But to his religious conservative base, he looks quite different.

Bush seems in fact to prefer to name those close to him, regardless of experience or ability, to every opening.

But Supreme Court judges have a way of growing in the job. Still waiting on Clarence Thomas.

back at last

2005-10-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

I have been lost from this blog for a couple of months, due to technical problems. Glad to be back. I will be publishing my Zone Notes here for those who want them. Most recent one after our son's wedding.

Wedding Garment
Notes From Zone 4
Occasional Writing From Blayney Colmore
October 5, 2005

Our youngest child, the male child among four sisters, was married Saturday in Seattle. Amidst the sublime events was slipped further proof of the charmed existence of boys when surrounded by loving girls. And the astonishing resourcefulness of young people in the incredible shrinking world.

At noon on the day of the wedding his mother offered to iron his shirt. He directed her to his closet. She looked but couldn’t find it. He looked and realized he had brought the wrong clothes bag when he left home in Portland, the bag with his wedding suit and shirt.

His sisters sprang into action, as they now had several times during the weekend, making place cards, cooking meals, stapling photos, clucking sympathetically over each new glitch, and now combing the yellow pages for places that wouldn’t require leaving the island, to find a shirt and suit. He faded quietly into the background, seemingly to grieve. The first new suit he had ever owned, bought for this day, costing more than he was accustomed to paying for a month’s rent, hanging in his closet three hours south.

His sisters came forward with several options, all seemingly doable by the 5pm wedding. He announced that he had it wired. He’d called friends who were 40 minutes into the three hour drive, who had agreed to turn back and go to his house where the landlord would open the door and they would drive the suit to Seattle.

It was now 1pm and there was a three hour drive and a ferry ride between the couriers and the ceremony on Bainbridge Island. His sisters fussed, he remained outwardly unruffled.

At 5 we all gathered in a native American lodge where, as a Kiana shaman blessed the four corners of the sacred space in which the vows were to be exchanged, sprinkling tobacco to mark the boundaries within which the bridal couple would stand, lightning and thunder shook the place to the rafters, announcing the solemnity of the occasion, and a deluge baptized the moment. Later the shaman told me he always calls on the three great spirits, but they rarely answer so powerfully.

And from the eaves stepped the groom, wearing, for the first time, the suit. His bride came forward on the arms of her mother and father in a dress so beautiful it took away the breath of everyone in the lodge, not one of whom must have been aware of the groom’s suit.

© 2005 Blayney Colmore

More ambiguity

2005-07-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

So here is more room for uncertainty, a quality seemingly hated by those who insist we have clear answers, and tolerated by the rest of us who feel clear only that we do not.

The labor movement, created in the 1920s to organize blue collar workers against the arbitrary excesses of big business, has suffered what seems to be a big rupture in its structure. Two of its biggest members have broken away from the umbrella AFl-CIO over the issue of how they spend their money and energy. Ostensibly, the breakaway unions want more emphasis on signing up new members rather than on using money to influence political campaigns.

In reality the issue is the huge bleeding of members from organized labor over the past generation. In the seeming growing consensus about big business' need to be unfettered, unregulated so as to better pursue the goal of lager profits, labor has been seen as an albatross, a hinderance to efficiency. And with the shift from an industrial economy to a service and tehchnology economy, the ability of large unions to speak for the working people has nearly vanished.

Now CAFTA has joined NAFTA as we join another trading region seeking to eliminate barriers between nations.

It is true that this must mean that more American jobs will go to nations with lower wages. And this will continue to whittle away at American middle class jobs. When will something come along to expose the obscenity, not to mention the drag on morale and profitability, of gargantuan salaries of those at the top of corporate America? Until it does, we should protest against the false piety of business leaders saying these trade agreements are good for everyone. The gap between CEOs and the lower end wage earners is larger in our nation than any other.

I hope the restlessness in the labor movement may begin to address some of these inequities.

Gray Areas

2005-07-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

So the man shot dead in the London underground turns out to have been a frightened Brazilian on his way to work. Terrorism works. When we begin shooting our own, even in moments that appear desperate, we have become the sort of society terrorists hope to make us. It may be that it was inevitable and could not have been avoided; the man was wearing an overcoat seemingly too heavy for summer, he panicked when challenged, fled and jumped the turnstile before jumping onto a car where he stumbled and his pursuers fired eight bullets into him while he lay on the ground. Remember when we all marveled that British Bobbies carried only night sticks, no guns? How civilized, we thought.

This is not meant to be a judgment on us; merely the observation that terrorism works. It requires us to adopt ways of functioning that we would once have thought irrational and inappropriate for a free and open society.

The debate among us now is not really about how to protect ourselves from terrorist attacks. We will surrender virtually all our freedoms if we believe we must. And we are beginning to understand all we really can do is lower the odds and make it more difficult for terrorists, because they mingle among us as we do with each other and if they are willing, as they clearly are, to sacrifice themselves, they will succeed in doing us grave harm.

And in frightening us into turning ourselves into a fascist state.

The real debate is what is feeding this terrorism. Is it as Bush and Blair have said, an ideology that will not be satisfied with anything short of bringing down the west and secular culture? If so, logic would have it, we must kill every single person who holds such a view. Both because that is estimated to be in the millions, and because every time we launch an attack we seem to make more fertile ground for recruiting terrorists, that is impossible.

If terrorism is fed by frustration and anger at western, especially American hegemony and the sort of hedonism we export in our movies and clothing, then there is at least some room for discussion about the role we play in the world. Is it possible for us to adopt a less agressive and unilateral posture without knuckling under to the Osama bib Ladens?

We hear both positions, from within our own governement. For me, the first view, since it can lead only to more war and killing, should be tempered by a more serious consideration of the second view.

Would I be willing to risk our country being diminished, or more personally, my being blown up, for a shot at a world in which mutual respect and justice make us more peaceful? I hope so.

John Roberts

2005-07-22T09:09:00.000-07:00

So far it appears that President Bush has either chosen a moderate, or someone who has craftily avoided revealing his views, or the Democrats neutered themselves with the agreement they made when facing the "nuclear option." It will wait at least until the hearings, and possibly until Roberts is actually on the bench, before we know.

Maybe it's a good thing, no matter what is going on. Imagine if we had a nominee for the Supreme Court, after all the overblown rhetoric, go through a thorough but uneventful senate review and take his place on the court without fanfare.

Does anyone else sense some exhaustion in the country over endless rancor? The issues have not gone away, but perhaps our thirst for prevailing absolutely on every issue has lost some of its power.

Likely not, but I'll take it while it lasts.

London & US

2005-07-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

Two days out the most fascinating thing about the London attacks is the recovery, and that is being led by the people of London. After WWII, a survey was done of the effects of saturation bombing of Germany and Japan. And to the chagrin of war makers the survey showed that not only had the bombing not crippled the industrial ability of those nations to manufacture war materiel, but it had stiffened, not weakened the resolve of the people.

Perhaps we could have known that by simply talking to people in London about the blitz. Forty thousand Londoners were killed by random bombing. Clearly Hitler believed he could bring the nation to its knees, demoralizing the people. And one would have thought he was right, particularly since the bombing was totally unpredictable. A buzz bomb would be heard overhead and everyone would wait until the buzzing ceased as that meant the bomb had spent its fuel and would drop and explode. It made Londoners more defiant.

We Americans have not experienced, at least not yet, enough to have developed such a hard shell. But I suspect we are tougher and more resilient than we were before the Twin Towers and Pentagon attacks. Why, in the minutes after the Pentagon attack, the passengers on the plane over Pennsylvania changed from passive to active resisters.

All that being said, we still don't seem to understand, or perhaps believe, that our Iraq policy, our whole mid-east policy, our entire foreign policy, is feeding the terrorist recruiting. Over and over President Bush has said the reason for our Iraq occupation is to fight terrorists over there so we will not have to fight them here. London makes clear the futility of such a view.

Though terrorism is a horrible reality of 21st century world politics and we must have a tough strategy for facing into the challenges it poses for every citizen of every nation, and though military and intelligence vigilance is going to require a huge part of our resources, to fail to see how this is linked to seemingly softer issues like poverty means we are dooming ourselves to making no progress in the struggle.

When our president stiffs his closest ally on global warming and addressing African poverty, it may make the plutocrats among us who are getting richer by our hoarding of the world's resources for ourselves happy, but it makes the world more dangerous for everyone.

Swing Vote?

2005-07-01T12:08:00.000-07:00

So Sandra Day O'Conner, the so-called swing vote, is retiring, putting the fat in the fire. The president issued a measured, thoughtful statement, saying he was consulting the senate about possible nominees so the nation could have a debate that was civil about her successor. That would fill me with hope had he not made statements like this over and over, during both presidential campaigns, describing himself as one who unites rather than divides. And every time he has been faced with a choice, whether for the UN of the World Bank, he has chosen someone who causes the grinding of teeth of anyone to the left of Pol Pot.

Now we'll see whether the Democrats did buy a pig in a poke in the compromise that looked to me more like capitulation and face-saving. Basically they said they would let through a couple of Bush's most retro judicial appointments in return for the Senate Republicans not killing the filibuster with a parliamentary maneuver. But left open was the possibility that the Republicans would detonate this nuclear weapon anyway if the Democrats filibustered a nominee later.

Any bets?

Private Social Security Accounts II ?

2005-06-30T10:43:00.000-07:00

Some time ago I wrote that, on reflection, I think private Social Security Accounts may be a good idea. A couple of you accused me of breaking the ranks of liberal Democrats, which I was surely guilty of doing. Much as I hate to erode any of my long held parochial boundaries (and none are longer or more fiercely held than liberal Democrat), I still hold the same view.

I was late in learning that the so-called Social Security Trust Fund is a trust fund in name only. Congress has spent the money freely so there is no fund. It is a pay as you go fund, meaning my monthly check (yes, I am on Social Security) is funded by the payroll tax (FICA) on those who are still working. Now that we retirees are growing in number and living longer, the funds to support us are coming from fewer workers and will, at some point, be insufficient.

So why doesn't it make sense, first of all, to make the Trust Fund a Trust Fund, so the money is invested, whether privately or by the government to earn money to pay future retirees? The reason it hasn't happened before, I assume, is because there was so much money pouring into the fund that it was irresistible to politicians looking for ways to fund their programs. An understandable if bad reason.

Of course, if the money were taken off the table for congressional spending, we would have an even bigger budget deficit than we now do, but it would be an honest deficit since it would not be reduced by money we owe retirees.

And if the money is made unavailable to congress, then surely it makes simple fiscal sense to let some portion of it go into individual retirement accounts. After all, money market funds have returned more, always, than the near 1% that most recipients of Social Security will realize. And there is virtually no risk to money invested in money market.

What's more, the money invested will be working for the economy.

Is the reason Bush has done such a lackluster job of explaining and promoting this idea because he fears losing that revenue for his budget-busting plans? Some fiscal conservative!

Bush's Pep Talk

2005-06-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan, who has been a supporter of the Iraq war from the beginning, thinks it was good that the President reiterated his resolve last night, because in a war resolve is a big deal and popular support is critical. Sullivan goes on to say he thought Bush's attempt to explain how we were going to prevail was weak to non-existent.

I have been against the war from the start but now believe we must find some way to at least stabilize Iraq, if we can, or we will have left ourselves in a much more vulnerable position than when we began. The military side of that seems to me to include sealing the Syrian border, which we have been reluctant to do for reasons yet to be explained. And the political side, even tougher, has to do with appearing much more willing than we have so far to let the Iraqis sort out their own political and religious issues.

Unlike Viet Nam, which we could leave and lick our wounds here at home, our Iraq adventure appears to have given new impetus to Islamic rage and recruitment of terrorists.

The worst nightmare is that this really is a quagmire, that Bush and his people have no plan other than more force to achieve something before we leave. I found last night's speech frightening because the monotone voice in which Bush read his speech, stumbling over words, halting at odd points, without significant new ideas, left me with the impression of a desperate lost man.

Stronger Or Dead

2005-06-24T10:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, after having the 12 stitches from a bike accident removed from my leg, it seemed time to go on another adventure. My two biking friends have ben bugging me for a couple of years to add a road bike to my toy collection. I have been riding my mountain bike over dirt roads and down rocky gullies, loving it, but they waxed eloquent about the pleasures that awaited long road rides between rough off-road rides.

I did spring for one and I have loved riding it, though road riding feels even more perilous than mountain biking and I am feeling the longer rides, needing at least a day's rest between rides. And I suspect it was my weariness at the end of a long beautiful ride that caused me to be lazy, not snap my foot out of the stirrup and go down hard, derailing and having the cog chew its way up my ankle. I was probably lucky to get away with those 12 stitches and no ligament or muscle damage.

Yesterday's ride was as usual wwith Conrad who, even though he is 6 months younger than I, has the strength and endurance of a man half his age. The first 10 miles were a long gradual downhill and my confidence was building. Finally we turned off the main road onto a small country road which made the ride even better. Until we started a gradual, then not so gradual climb, at the start of which Conrad said, ominously, "This is where it starts to count."

I had already been counting, but Conrad had not. When I had ratcheted down into my lowest "granny" gear, assuming we must be near the top, I asked Conrad, "Where's the crest of this #%^$ hill?"

"Just up the road," he said cheerily. Right, about five miles up the road. And by the time we reached it, my heart rate at been at maximum for longer than I can ever recall and my right knee was calling for a replacement.

Conrad subscribes to the notion that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I point out to him that there has to be a point of diminishing return in that formula. But he thinks not. He thinks allowing for age would be the beginning of the end.

And he is likely right. All my life, or at least the past 30 years or so, I have found myself among people who drive me much harder than I think I would drive myself if left to myself. What I have discovered is that I am much stronger and more resilient than I thought. But I still don't believe it, still think I hang on by a thread while I struggle to keep up with the strnger tougher people in my life.

Might describe my marriage.

Orwell Speak

2005-06-22T12:30:00.000-07:00

Secretary Of State Rice, at a meeting of nations who have largely demurred from our Iraq adventure, chided the other nations saying the people of Iraq deserve a chance to gain the freedom they seek. Sometimes the requirements of diplomatic nicety must by excruciating. What might those from the other countries have responded had they not felt the restraints of diplomacy?

"Madam Secretary, your nation has done more to destabilize the middle east than all the other nations combined. By leaning solely on your military might, like trying to swat a fly with a nuclear weapon, you have turned what remained of moderate Arabs into militant anti-west Islamists. You refused to listen to the counsel of nations; you insisted on making a case without evidence, and you bullied your way into a morass you are now asking us to bail you out of."

Smarter and clearer heads than mine, such as Thomas Friedman, still believe there is a chance to salvage something worth while from our failed war. I hope they are right. But even the long shot he hopes for depends on the Bush people listening to new voices and becoming willing to consider their errors and take a new course.

Is there anything in the tenure of this administration that makes one think that is likely?

The lone hope I have is that Bush, now a lame duck with no clear heir, hasn't the scary countenance that has caused his own, and a significant part of the opposing party, to knuckle under to his bullying.

We are at a crossing point in testing the ability of democracy in this country to turn us aside from disaster.

Conservatism vs. Libertarianism

2005-06-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

If you don't believe the Bush administration's total lack of focus on addressing our oil economy is purely self-serving, what does explain it? It is easy to say that Bush and Cheney both got rich in the oil business and are rewarding their friends and themselves. But perhaps it is their conservative convictions, their reluctance to interfere in the market place that drives their actions. Despite the evidence that conservatives are not reluctant to intervene when big business gets in trouble, as with the Chrysley bail-out, the Savings & Loan bail-out, which they would say is because it would have seriously wounded the entire economy (it's still tinkering with the market place isn't it?), suppose they really do think the market best adjusts itself.

Isn't that Ayn Rand libertarianism, not conservatism?

I am drawn to libertarianism (Vermotn comes closest, in some ways, to being a linertarian state than any I have lived in before), except that I don't trust our species to curb our own avarice even in the face of chaos and self-destruction. Lord Of The Flies is not only about adolescent behavior, it is about human behavior.

In the 70s, when the first Arab oil boycott disrupted our economy and our lives, after standing in gas lines, buying gas only on alternate days, we began looking for smaller gas-conserving cars and agreed to drop our speed limit to 55 mph. The oil rich nations saw their market shrinking, dropped prices, and we returned to our profligate ways.

You could make the case (I do) that our disastrous Iraq adventure stems from our renewed dependence on mideast oil.

So if conservatives have some interest in conserving the Unites States as a viable player in the world economy, wouldn't you think we might seriously address this matter?

Christian History

2005-06-07T04:46:00.000-07:00

George Weigel, a Roman Catholic thinker, in a speech to the Foreign Policy Institute, has offered a challenging understanding of recent events in Eurpoe and their effect on the U.S. He suggests that rampant secularism (seen most recently in wiping from the proposed EU constitution any reference to a Christian past) has so demoralized the continent that it is suffering a sort of massive ennui that leaves militant Islam with a free pass to the future.

His is the first interpretation I have seen of the startling low birth rate in countries that once worried about over-population, notably Italy, France and Spain. So low, Weigel says, that the next generation will never know siblings, aunts or uncles. It is true, I believe, that the only reason the birth rate in our nation is above replacement level is due to recent immigrants, notably Hispanics. But they are hardly secularists.

Weigel argues, and I agree, that trying to eliminate the past is not only futile but emotionally depressing. And that relying solely on the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on denying the depths of spiritual richness to reality, robs life of an essential dimension. But there is nothing new about this debate.

What he fails to address is the role of the church in all this. The recent right turn of the Roman Catholic Church, demanding right belief and forbidding the clergy to join the struggle for justice in impoverished countries, has fit neatly with right wing American evangelica narrowness and meanness.

But he raises a good point and I take his point seriously. Deprived of spiritual quest presses down the human spirit. Whether that explains Europe's low birth rate is hard to say. But if the church is to lend to the relighting of hope and excitement in the old Christian west, and to serious challenge of militant Islam, she is going to have to risk loosing the reins on what is fair game for inquiry.

Freedom and Detainees

2005-05-31T13:26:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

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?

2005-05-23T10:58:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-19T13:40:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-15T15:14:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-13T15:49:00.000-07:00

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

2005-05-09T13:44:00.000-07:00

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.