He's Back!

Ever wonder about the government printing money?

Even in those long ago days when they told us there was an ounce (was it an ounce) of gold for every dollar they printed.

The theory ( I guess) was that if you lost confidence in the value of the paper, you could turn it in for an ounce of gold. I actually don't think an ordinary citizen could do that, but just the idea of it might restore confidence.

Well, we went off the gold standard several decades ago, but we didn't stop printing paper dollars.

So what makes us think they're worth anything?

Habit.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, who has become the Democrat Republicans have chosen to focus their ire on, asked after one of the recent multi-billion dollar government bail-outs of a "too big to fail" bank, where does all that money come from?

The dicey answer is: from the august mind of the Federal Reserve.

And who is the Federal Reserve?

A bunch of bankers and economists who meet and talk - just the way I am now - about what's going on in the country and around the world, and whether we need to print (or, presumably, possible less) money.

Not surprisingly, when things were booming, only a few spoil sports raised questions about this.

But when the bottom fell out - and the Fed began printing money at an unprecedented pace - the questions began.

What is to prevent all those dollars that were printed just to get more money into a credit system that had suddenly gone totally dry, but were unrelated to any boom in the production of anything useful, to causing inflation that will lead to any even worse crisis down the road?

The answer - which not everyone finds persuasive - is that the economy was knocked back so far that it required all that extra currency to keep us from a Great Depression. And - goes this version - the resurgence sure to come to fill the void left by the collapse, will absorb that extra money.

We'll see.

Would you think it enough to sum up your life as a time of "wonder?"

I wonder.

Here's the thing: it has become pretty clear to me that every settled opinion reached by our species is not only tentaitve and temporary, but so skimming the surface as to leave the depth of reality untouched.

God?

Certainly not as described so far.

Evolution?

A happy pass at describing having noticed things keep changing.

Atoms?

20th century phlogisten.

Look, yes I am an iconoclast, but this is not about that. This is about finding something more durable to celebrate in our brief moment here than getting it right.

My nomination?

Wonder. Before I turn in tonight, Cosmos - our terrier - and I will take a walk up into the cemetery across the road from our house, where the sparse lights of this rural place don't reach and the sky is dark. And while Cosmos pees (I may join him) I will look at Kayla's grave, where her eight year old body was laid four years ago after a truck smashed into the vehicle her mother was driving, and then up to the Milky Way, and I will wonder.

I will be standing on the as yet unopened gravesite Lacey and I gave to each other several Christmases ago.

Just a few paces from the pink stone that marks Minnie Stetson's grave, who died 20 years ago. When we tell people where we live, they say, "Oh, you live in Minnie Stetson's house."

I wonder if, decades from now someone who lived where I now live, (Oh, you live in Blayney Colmore's house) will stand on my grave? And wonder?

I have no idea whether Cosmos will wonder.

But whether he does or doesn't, he's great company when you're wondering.

Of course the CIA lies.

It is, after all, a spy agency.

Should we prosecute Dick Cheney for having obviously (as we have all known for years) broken the law?

If we want to. But not because we have just discovered some astonishing piece of news that offends our sense of democratic fairness and decency.

The requirements for living in a country that dominates the world - and, measured by our budgets, spends most of her resources maintaining that dominance - should be clear to us. We, after all, are the citizens who benefit from being so rich and powerful. We are those who fear some other country (China) seriously challenging our dominance. We stood by while our president pretended to be invading Iraq to rid the world of a dangerous dictator with weapons that could threaten the entire globe. We knew full well we were protecting our access to the oil in that region we need to keep ramping up our life, way more oil than we can drill on our own land.

Perhaps one reason this is all raising such a stir right now is some combination of Democrats feeling the oats, and our unease that the economic collapse may not only be for a long time (maybe permanent), but the life we of the middle class and above have thought our inalienable right is starting to look fragile.

I think Obama knows this, but I doubt he knows any better than anyone else, how to manage it so the whole country doesn't turn on him.

Maybe a scapegoat?

The Phoebes that have built a nest atop the spotlights above our door have hatched three chicks and are now working round the clock to give them the massive nourishment they need to grow strong and fast enough to fly before they crowd each other out of their tiny nest.

Lacey noticed that the mother and father - both of whom are on 24 hour duty - employ quite different strategies.

The male arrives with a mouthful of worm or something and pops it directly into the mouth of whichever chick happens to get its beak in his face first. Then he flies off to get more.

The female divides up her spoils equally among the three, waiting patiently for each of them to arrange itself under her, then perches on the edge of the nest watching, seemingly to make sure each of them manages to ingest what she has brought. Then she spends a little more time, pecking at each of them, perhaps cleaning them, keeping them mite free, before flying off on her next hunting trip.

The photo above is blurred but maybe you can see.

Males and females have quite different ways.

I am taking the liberty (I hope not breaking any copyright issues) of copying Judith Warner's blog from the NY Times website, because it raises what I think is a major issue for the future of human kind:

Dangerous Resentment
A couple of weeks ago, Bridget Kevane, a professor of Latin American and Latino literature at Montana State University, drove her three kids and two of their friends — two 12-year-old girls, and three younger kids, age 8, 7 and 3 — to a mall near their home in Bozeman. She put the 12-year-olds in charge, and told them not to leave the younger kids alone. She ordered that the 3-year-old remain in her stroller. She told them to call her on their cell phone if they needed her.

And then she drove home for some rest.

About an hour later, she was summoned back to the mall by the police, who charged her with endangering the welfare of her children.

“Be quiet,” she was told, as she scrambled to explain herself, and a policeman threatened, as Kevane describes it in the current issue of Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, “that if I ‘went crazy’ on him, he would handcuff me right in front of the children and take me away to jail for the night.”

The children were fine — “smiling, eating candy” — or were, at least, until the police decided to make an example of their mom.

The city attorney who took on Kevane’s case decided to do the same thing. She refused to hear of slapping Kevane on the wrist or accepting a guilty plea for anything less than “violating a duty of care,” a child endangerment charge punishable by jail time.

Now, we can debate until we’re blue in the face whether or not Kevane should have left those three young children alone with the 12-year-olds. The pre-teens in question, it seems pretty clear, didn’t have the maturity to be entrusted with the care of younger kids; despite what Kevane calls their solid “experience” babysitting, they ditched their charges in the purse section by the cosmetics counter in Macy’s while they went off to try on some shirts, setting off the whole sorry adventure with law enforcement.

That still doesn’t mean that Kevane’s error in judgment adds up to anything like child endangerment.

The issue I want to take up today, however, is not that of tricky choices, or over- or under-involved parenting, questions that have already been discussed with much gusto elsewhere. What really sent my head spinning after reading Kevane’s story was the degree to which it drove home the fact that our country’s resentment, and even hatred, of well-educated, apparently affluent women, is spiraling out of control.

The prosecutor pursued her child endangerment case ultra-zealously because she “said she believed professors are incapable of seeing the real world around them because their ‘heads are always in a book,’” Kevane writes. “I just think that even individuals with major educations can commit this offense, and they should not be treated differently because they have more money or education,” the prosecutor wrote to Kevane’s lawyer.

Kevane reflects, “I now realize that her pressure — her near obsession with having me plead guilty — had less to do with what I had done and more to do with her perception of me as an outsider who thought she was above the law, who had money to pay her way out of a mistake, who thought she was smarter than the Bozeman attorney because of her ‘major education.’ This perception took hold even though I had never spoken one word to her directly. Nor did I ever speak in court; only my lawyer did. I was visible but silent, and thus unable to shake the image that the prosecutor had created of me: a rich, reckless, highly educated outsider mother who probably left her children all the time in order to read her books.”

This simmering resentment is common and pervasive in our culture right now. The idea that women with a “major education” think they’re better than everyone else, have a great sense of entitlement, feel they deserve special treatment, and are too out of touch with the lives of “normal” women to have a legitimate point of view, is a 21st-century version of the long-held belief that education makes women uppity and leads them to forget their rightful place. It’s precisely the kind of thinking that has fueled Sarah Palin’s unlikely — and continued — ability to pass herself off as the consummately “real” American woman. (And it is what has made it possible for her supporters to discredit other women’s criticism of her as elitist cat fighting.)

The idea that these women really should “be quiet” comes through loud and clear every time. Men, you may or may not have noticed, are virtually never accused of “whining” when they talk or speak out about their lives. When well-educated, affluent men write about other well-educated, affluent men — and isn’t that what most political reporting and commentary is? — they are never said to be limited by the “narrowness” of their scope and experience. Well-educated fathers are not perceived as less real, authentic or decent than less-educated fathers. Even professor-dads, as far as I can tell, don’t have to labor to prove that they’re human.

The idea that women with “major educations” are somehow suspect, the desire to smack them down and tell them “to be quiet” is hardly new. At the end of the 19th century, as increasing numbers of women began for the first time to pursue higher education, a campaign began, waged by prominent doctors, among others, against these new unnatural monsters, whose vital energies were being diverted from their wombs to their brains. In the last quarter of the 20th century, feminists were routinely delegitimized as brainy elitists ignorant of and unconcerned with the plight of ordinary women.

It made no difference how much work groups like the National Organization for Women did on behalf of battered or economically powerless women. It made no difference how much advocacy was done for legislation promoting pay equity (a particularly acute problem for women at the lower end of the economic spectrum) or for affordable child care. The media — then as now — was interested only in more educated, more affluent women, and so it was these women who came to define the women’s movement in the popular imagination. And it was these women, too, who came to be identified with social change, and who came to be despised when that change proved frightening and difficult.

This is why Palin — in her down-home aw-shucks posturing — is the 21st-century face of the backlash against women’s progress. This is why Kevane could be threatened and humiliated in front of her kids, menaced with jail time and ultimately railroaded into cutting a deal with the prosecution, once she realized she’d never be popular enough with local jurors to have a shot at making a successful not-guilty plea in court. (Paradox of paradoxes, as part of her deferred prosecution agreement, she was sentenced to even more education: in the form of a parenting class.)

The hatred of women — in all its archaic, phantasmagoric forms — is still alive and well in our society, and when directed at well-educated women, it’s socially acceptable, too. Think of this for a second the next time you’re inexplicably moved to put an “elite” woman in her place.

Now, it's me back again.

I'm sorry Judith Warner had to choose this case to make her point, because I find the woman's having left her kids alone at the Mall while she went home for some quiet time to work, a major dereliction of her duty. The blog doesn't give us information about a father, nor about whether that mother is likely ever to do such a thing again, but unless the court could have been satisfied that such a situation would never again arise, I think they had a duty to do whatever needed to get adequate supervision for those kids.

That being said, I think Warner's premise - about the fear and hatred of smart, powerful women, is real.

And I believe it is as useful a way into matters like environment, foreign policy and domestic politics as one could choose.

Once one begins to look at the western world through the lenses of domination and control, it isn't much of a stretch to see the policies that extend male domination as undergirding our long history.

I'll have lots more to say about this in future blog entries. Suffice it to say here that I am convicted of the role of male domination as a key to understanding both how we arrived at the culture we have today, and as explaining the violence we have mounted to keep from change.

I am male, wealthy, educated in elite schools, having spent my work career as Rector (from the Latin Rex, Regis - king) of an Episcopal churches. (More US presidents have been Episcopalians than of any other denomination).

So, why would I climb onto this hobby horse?

Because from as early as I can remember, I have suffered discomfort at being expected to be a part of the group that dominates and rules. For many years I assumed it was because I lack the talent and self-confidence that role requires. Then I questioned my sexual identity. My natural mating inclination became the potential source of a major life meltdown as restless, attractive women were drawn to things about me that were different from their Type A husbands.

Sometime in the past 20 years, reading Walter Wink and reflecting on our nation's seeming addiction to preserving her place in the world through economic and military domination, I began to connect my personal history with meta-history.

There are many pictures of the world that do not assume that every relationship must be between one who dominates and one who submits.

It may be that the breakdown of the financial system our nation has sponsored - and assumed the rest of the world would emulate - may mark the start of a new paradigm in relationships, micro and macro.

Looking at the role and treatment of women in the west - especially since women have begun to take their place among the pace-setters, is a pretty good place to begin.

My step-son is working on a book that looks hard at a piece of human existence that seems to me has no end to it.

He has been living in Aceh on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia for the past couple of years. His wife worked with Mercy Corps helping people devastated by the horrendous tsunami to begin rebuilding their lives.

Our son is a free lance writer. He began talking with a group of international scientists who are studying the place where they believe they can predict the next tsunami - likely bigger than the last - and likely within the next 30 years. They have been talking with people who live in the path, trying to begin thinking about preparing, maybe even moving.

He also has been talking with the local people.

His book is about the unwillingness - or inability - of people to redraw their lives in light of an impending disaster.

It would be easy for westerners to scorn Islamic fundamentalists for refusing to listen to the warnings, claiming the scientists are usurping the role of Allah, who is the author of these matters.

But I have lived the past 22 years atop the Rose Canyon fault in California, known to be active and long overdue for a major shift that could bring the entire town down the hill on which it is precariously perched, and our apartment is at sea level where the likely tsunami will hit.

All the evidence shows that we humans simply are hard wired for immediate issues, not long term. We consider disasters unusual and infrequent events, unlikely to happen in our lifetime or to us.

We're deluded, but perhaps that's a good thing.

Yesterday I was privy to an exchange between a man and a woman about her big, aggressive, scary dog.

She got the dog from a pound a couple of years ago. It frightens her friends. Her previous dog, a pit bull, once bit and punctured the tires of a friend's car when she drove up the long dirt road to their house. She had to buy two new tires for her friend.

"Why do you have this dog?" the man asked, with a big attitude in his voice. "You took the dog on a one day trial, and I remember it was a disaster. Why didn't you just take the dog back and look for a gentler, more manageable dog?"

"Look at this dog," she said. "Can you imagine anyone else going to the pound and deciding to bring him home with them? Not a chance. He'd languish in that enclosure, pacing frantically until they gave up on him and put him down."

Get it?

She has to totally rearrange her life for that dog. So do her cats, that now live closed in her green house so the dog won't eat them. And her friends who call ahead and ask her to put the dog in the house before they come.

She does this because no one else will. It is a strike for life. She brought this dog to her big spread, with woods, lake, wildlife, where the feral beast must have a happier existence than anyone would have ever predicted.

I never would, never could, make such a gesture for life.

Those two dogs in the photo are our little Norfolk terrier and our daughter and son-in-law's lab/hound mix. They have a one year old son. They rescued their dog from some place in Tennessee. Our daughter says it's sometimes like having two babies, as she tries to call her dog off the scent when she's walking her little boy through the woods near her house. When he comes to visit it's a little like having a tornado come through the house. I behave badly, and she and her husband take care to guard my fragile sensibilities. Our 10 pound terrier begins each visit as a worse host than I am, snapping at their dog whenever he goes near anything our dog regards as his. Which is everything and everyone in the house. Then they settle down and even play.

Our daughter and her husband love their dog. And he is lovable. Like their little boy. I admire their taking the dog from whatever life didn't work out, paying considerable money, and giving him more love than most of us get.

As for my friend with the scary dog. I think she's a hero(ine).