He's Back!

It may be because none of wants to deal with the outcome, but the debate over our Iraq adventure has yet to go down to the most basic level.

The premise on which it is based.

Because, as one listens to the debate, the premise is never challenged. By anyone. In fact it is almost never - with the possible exception of the fringe alternate media - even mentioned.

The premise? As the preeminent nation in the world, the lone super power for this moment in history, we must move quickly and decisively to secure a world which will be to our liking when we are again challenged for supremacy.

The only working difference between the Bush Administration and past administrations, is that this administration has been co-opted by those who not only believe that, but who persuaded this president to act on it. To build his entire legacy on it.

Many have wondered why they were so eager to invade Iraq, especially when they were far from finished with the job of rooting out the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. We now know there was strong sentiment among the so-called neo-cons for attacking Iraq even before 9/11. 9/11 provided the opportunity.

Maybe they convinced themselves Saddam had WMD, but I don't think they needed to belive that. And, while they were stil smarting from the decision made by Bush I and Colin Powell not to go to Baghdad and oust Saddam in the first Gulf War, that was not their chief motive. It is true that they would have counseled such a move had they been first rather than second level officials then, but their concern was not simply to rid the world of a tyrant.

When the Soviet Union disintegrated during Bush I, they saw it as a God-given moment. They believe our democratic, free market capitalist model is the wave of the world's future. Many even believe God has anointed this Way and provided for our hegemony so it can be accomplished.

So establishing a free market democracy in Iraq - in the heart of the oil rich Islamic middle east - looked to be a major step in what they took to be the vocation of this administration.

When George W. Bush became president, not by popular vote but by an act of the Supreme Court, they saw it as a sign. They had been anointed. The country will never support their agenda, so they would need to move, powerfully and swiftly, to establish it without popular support of the electorate. They managed, through hard-ball tactics, to cow those in their own Party who were not persuaded, to be loyal to the president.

It all sounds like a giant cabal.

Until you listen to Hilary Clinton (or Bill), Joe Biden or even Howard Dean.

They disagree with the tactics of the Bush administration, but not one of them has dared to question whether maintaining our ascendancy in the world is what we ought to be about as a nation now.

Maybe it is asking too much - of those we elect and even of ourselves - to turn aside from the incredible heights to which the events of the past century have brought us. Who doesn't like being the biggest, richest, most powerful?

Maybe only the challenge of others - China, India - will sour our intoxicating taste of world domination.

But might it be possible to begin wondering, aloud, what we might do with this power besides lord it over the rest of the world? Do we want our legacy to be that of a pariah that finally overstepped its strength?

Apparently John Kerry made a speech in Britain recently in which he called our nation an international bully. Guess he really has given up wanting to be president.

I think I am arguing against nature and biology here. The dinosaur would never have shared control of the planet had not a meteor ended their rule.

So it will be with the United States. Brought down by debt, overreach, weather, religious blindness. Hubris.

Ford posted a loss of $12.7 billion for 2006, the largest in its 103-year
history, and equivalent to the GDP of Jordan. Asked about his plans for the company, CEO Alan R. Mulally said, "At the top of the list, I would put dealing with reality."

In Leisureville, a retirement community in Florida, a registered sex offender died of heart disease while looking at pornography on his computer while naked.
Harpers Weekly
*****

Dream so deeply imprinted it must have passed through just
before waking
Prison – how many prison dreams must I endure before I
am released -
White collar crime this time, not the usual – what exactly are
the usual
prison dreams - I mean what is it my unconscious keeps accusing
me of

this time the sentence was a year, and I kept trying to determine
today’s date
so I could track when I might expect to
be released
mercifully I never was able to get it exactly even though
my family
was attentive and responsive to my anxieties as
we waited

in the reception room the warden
a woman
of course explained what I could expect and what I would
be allowed
but I was unable to make sense of her words and became more and
more restless
eager to get on with it and the more I fidgeted the more deliberate
she became

so I steeled myself to stay calm clutching under my elbow my
down pillow

Barbaro lost his battle yesterday. Since I had snuck away during a
wedding reception
last May leaving the tent to go into the living room hoping to see the
wonder horse
add another leg to the Triple Crown and instead saw him sustain a
catastrophic injury
he has carried on his noble back my dreams of beating
the odds

The house always wins.

My granddaughter will mark her third birthday in a couple
of weeks
63 years younger than I. When I was born –1940- the country was preparing
for war
when her mother my youngest daughter was born 33
years later
the country was struggling to figure out how to get out
of war
and when my granddaughter was born the president warned that without
this war

we would be terrorized

No wonder I was never able to get a fix on the date of
my release

The house always wins.

I just saw a news flash that the racehorse Barbaro, who caught the nation's fancy coming out of relative obscurity to win the Kentucky Derby, has been put down, euthanized.

Perhaps there is something deeply perverse in grieving the death of a horse on the same day that more than 10 American and uncounted Iraqis have died.

But today I feel heartbroken over the death of this valiant horse.

Why valiant? Well, not only because of his thrilling run from behind, but because we all watched him in the next race, wondering if he was the great horse he seemed, or just a good horse. It has been decades since any horse won the triple crown.

And as the race progressed, we wondered where he was. As the horses made the first turn, the cameras finally panned back to the area just ahead of the starting gate where we saw Barbaro dancing on three legs, clearly injured. I was watching the race in the living room of a house in rural Boston where a number of us had snuck out of a wedding reception in a tent pitched on the lawn to watch.

As the camera showed us the injured horse, there was a gasp which came from all of us at once. Then, "Oh, no. Oh, God, how awful."

We love great stories, romances with unexpected endings. We had come into the room hoping to see one.

In the ensuing months there were stories about Barbaro's stoicism as they went to incredible lengths to save him. The vets at Penn said it was a catastrophic injury, one that would lead most to put the animal down without further efforts. But the family who owned him said they would do whatever they could to save him. Cynically, I assumed they were saving him for stud, but they understood from the outset he likely would be unable to mount a mare, and race horses breed naturally.

That was last May. In the meantime I broke my right wrist and experienced moments in which I might have thought euthanasia was a good choice. A broken wrist, mind you, not a stroke or cancer.

But not Barbaro. Heartening stories about how well he was doing, clearly enjoying his life, able to get around.

Just a few days ago I read that there had been rot in his injured limb, a condition that could threaten his life.

Ten minutes ago I saw a news flash online that he had been put down.

So let's put this one out on the table and deal with it once and for all.

Questioning the conduct of our leaders in war - civilian and military - strengthens, not weakens our nation.

Yes, it no doubt gives heart to our enemies to know that there is strong opinion in our country to either change our tactics of quit the war. Troubling as that may be, it plays into the greatest strength we have in putting our case before the world.

We are so confident of the superiority - not necessarily the efficiency - of open exchange of views in a democracy that welcomes and values the opinion of everyone, that we will continue our debate even in wartime.

When Robert Gates solemnly tells the senate that opposition to our Iraq adventure gives heart to the enemy, he should be ashamed. And, like the administration lawyer who suggested the corporate lawyers who were representing prisoners at Guantanamo should be fired by their firms, he needs a lesson in the elementary principles and practice of life in our messy democracy. Where we assume the innocence of all until proven guilty and believe everyone - regardless of how henious the crime of which they have been accused - is entitled to a defense.

If insurgents in Iraq read in our national debate the possibility that we may withdraw, so be it.

We may.

Shortly after O.J. Simpson was charged with the murder of his wife and her lover, my wife and I had dinner with a neighbor who was a citizen of Sweden. He looked around the table of seven American citizens and asked how many of us thought Simpson was guilty.

Six of us raised our hands. My wife still doesn't believe he did it. She can't believe anyone that handsome could do such a thing.

Our Swedish neigbor looked shocked. "I am aghast," he said. "I thought in America you were innocent until proven guilty."

And that unpopular, even outrageous opinions, were guarded by the First Amendment.

Now, in my opinion it is far from outrageous to criticize the Iraq War. But even if this were WWII which we all pretty much agree was necessary and just, criticizing it would be permitted.

Because that is precisely what we go to war to protect.

Last night Lacey and I went to a screening of the Russian movie, "The Italian."

As bleak and powerful as only a Russian movie can be.

Briefly: Towards the end of the Russian winter, snow and ice melting into mud, we are introduced to an orphanage. Boys from 5 or 6 to teens, in a rundown building. The owners - and it seems they do own it - a tough, brassy woman and a scruffy man who tells us he blew his chance to be a fighter pilot. ("Do you know the name Gagarin?" he asks the boys. No, they don't. And I wondered how many people in the theater remembered Yuri Gagarin, the first Russian in space.)

Early on a woman with an air of desperation about her appears at the orphanage. She goes frantically around the building calling the name of her son, while the staff and older boys scorn and diss her. "You came too late," they tell her, "He was adopted and you can't know by whom. Maybe if you hadn't drunk yourself into this mess you might have had a son.")

Soon after, a rich Italian couple come looking for a child. The movie's protagonist, a 6 year old boy with eyes that break your heart, is trotted out for their inspection. They fall for him and set in motion his adoption, leaving a considerable down payment. We see the scene through his eyes, so when they hug him and coo over him, he keeps himself carefully in check, as we know he has had to learn to do.

He asks one of the older boys (the older boys run a prostitution ring with young teeage girls who also seem to live at the orphanage) what happens if his mother comes looking for him after he has left with his adopted parents. They tell him that once the final papers are signed, it can't be reversed.

The rest of the movie - filmed so perfectly you get lost in the grim weather and countryside - follows him after he runs away from the orphanage and, with the orphanage owners in pursuit, determined not to lose their money on him, looks for his mother.

In case you get to see the movie I won't reveal how it comes out, but in one sense that is irrelevant.

What I came away with - in addition to the admiration for Russian movie makers who will use their camera to show a slice of reality with none of the diverting tricks standard in American movie making - was the awesome, and often tragic, power of the human determination to go after what we think we want even long after every shred of evidence has shown that it will likely destroy us.

And, perhaps, that our blood instincts are every bit a strong as those of any other creature.

Everyone in the movie shows us a side that draws us to him and a side that repels us. Like real people.

Noble. Affecting. Demanding.

See it if you're up for it.

I should begin by confessing that I watched less than 5 minites of the president's speech. My blood pressure would not permit any longer exposure. And thanks to the way they leak news in advance, we all knew everything he was going to say.

And that it was not about anything he expected - or maybe even wanted - to accomplish, but about continuing to poke a sharp stick in the eyes of his opponents. Even if such an adolescent gesture cost the lives of Americans and Iraqis.

I did listen to Senator Webb's response. Because I followed the Virginia senate race, suspecting it would decide who controlled the senate, I know something about Webb. Most of what I know, except for his passionate and principled opposition to our Iraq debacle, is that he is far more conservative than I might wish a Democratic senator to be.

So I was happily surprised that he sensibly, persuasively made the case for what I consider the historic agenda of the Democratic Party. It is an agenda that has been diluted since the mid-year election in Clinton's first term, the election that cost him his congressional majority. He began to sound more and more like a Republican.

We'll see. But last night, when Senator Webb said that this country now has two separate economies, I cheered. One is the booming economy for those at the top of the heap. The gap between what ordinary workers earn and what CEOs earn has increased exponentially in the past decade.

It was a given that Webb was going to call for a radical change in our Iraq adventure. And he did. Thank God.

But to hear a national Democrat speak about the increasing gap in the incomes of rich and middle class Americans, without apparently fearing the wrath of the bullies who have controlled the conversation about the economy for so long, gave one heart.

When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized that the Lord doesn't work that way, so I stole one and asked for forgiveness. -Emo Philips (1956- )


When I ran off a back road in my pickup in Vermont last summer and hit a tree, I reached down to turn off the ignition and saw my right hand dangling uselessly. Looking back I realize my first, untutored response was relief.

Not so much because I hadn’t broken my head, but because it meant I likely would never play tennis again.

My mother took me onto a red clay tennis court in Charlotte when I was 6 or 7 years old and began my love-hate relationship with the game. She would play with me for hours – Come on, Mom, give me another lob – until I was 11 or 12 when she had debilitating colon surgery. We had moved to the Philippines by then and my tennis was passed on to my father who was fiercely competitive. I always suspected he had huge ambitions for my tennis career. Or I have made him wear my own dashed hopes.

The summer I turned 15 we were on leave back in Charlotte. In a team match I played against the boy who had just won the Charlotte 16 and under city tournament. His coach was Dick McKee, the University of Miami coach who had nurtured me through my early years in the game.

I beat him in 3 sets. Dick told me afterwards he thought I was the strongest 15 year old in the mid-south. Later that summer I took a set off my father for the first terrifying time. I believed I was on my way to stardom.

In high school I played all 4 years winning most of my matches. The summer I would turn 18 my doubles partner and I entered a regional tournament in Chattanooga. Being unknown, we drew the Mexican Davis Cup doubles team in the first round. They had just arrived on the plane from Mexico City, were jet lagged and unused to the heavy low altitude Tennessee air. We won the first three games.

It was to be as high as I would climb in tennis. We lost the next 12 games. In the consolation round we met a team from California who shamed us with their level of play.

I played for a year in college, then turned to carousing, telling myself it was a better choice. For several years after college I vegged. Around age 30 I began playing again. But, much as I liked strenuous exercise, my disappointment at my game having arrested at 16 was a constant source of torment. I embarrassed myself with my bad temper when I hit poor shots.

After my accident last summer I asked the young orthopedic surgeon whether I would ever play tennis again. She had no way of knowing it was a loaded question.

That’s going to be our goal, she replied noncommittally.

Six months of physical therapy and using my left hand, I finally could tie my shoes and pull a tee shirt over my head. I went into the garage one day and tried hitting a ball against the wall. Didn’t work.

A month later I asked Lacey if she would try hitting in the short court with me. It was awkward but I could do it.

And I loved it.

For the next couple of weeks I hit balls against the bang board. Then Lacey hit full court with me. Last week I screwed up my courage and asked a friend if he would hit with me. We played for an exhilarating hour.

I can’t grip the racket quite right and there are a few basic shots I simply no longer have. I often can only get the ball back to mid court.

Not since my mother first took me onto a court 60 years ago have I loved being out there the way I do now.

© 2007 Blayney Colmore.

Most days I blog at blogblayney.blogspot.com

Sunday morning was again cold and clear on the southern California coast. Lacey and I walked Cosmos, our Norfolk terrier down along the beach as usual, and he greeted the big dogs with his terrier fierce warnings and the smaller - his size - warmly, tail wagging, thorough sniffing.

As we reached the group of aging surfers with whom we exchange most days, we saw they had a fire burning in the fire pit. The temperature hovered in the mid 40s and coming out of the surf, that is now in the mid 50s, made the fire welcome.

We have been hoovering our apartment the past week. Something I would never do on my own and that makes me quite resentful when Lacey announces and begins it. Not only because it is a lot of work - even in our small apartment - to take every plate and piece of silver, every book and lamp, move and clean it, and take a hard look at every piece of clothing under the rule of, if you haven't worn it in the past year it is time to get rid of it. But I also get anxious about the books I have collected, and the endless little nick-nacks - matchbooks from restaurants, bookmarks, the sale catalogus from my cousin's cattle auction - that have piled up on my desk and bureau alongside the change, the sand dollars and the picture of my high school roommate who died recently, that I know I will be pressured to jettison.

But once I get into it I lke it. It is like being shriven. Painful and then exhilarating.

For 25 or 30 years I have kept a journal. I suppose I average writing in it 4 -5 days a week. That's a lot of writing over the years. A few years ago I was reading a piece in the New Yorker written by a woman who had been reading the journals of her mother who had died. She said that she thought she knew her mother pretty well until she read the journals. I thought, Well, you did know her. She was your mother and you knew her as your mother. But those journals were her private thoughts.

I think it may have been Plato who said that if we could read each others' minds there would be no friends in the world.

Six years ago last summer on my 60th birthday, I went around our house in Vermont, collected every journal I could find and threw them into the fire we had burning down by the pond. A friend who was staying with us was upset. You musn't do that, she protested, those are thoughts from years of your life.

I remember my heart rate accelerating as I tossed in the first notebook. Then the lifting of my spirits.

Saturday, as a part of clearing the bookcase in our apartment, I had taken my journals and put them on the bed in the guestroom. I wasn't sure how I was going to dispose of them since one doesn't make bonfires in southern California.

As we passed the surfers at the firepit, Lacey suggested I go get my journals.

Some of the ash floated into the air and was taken out with the receding surf. A friend took a photo. Another asked, Don't you want to preserve them for posterity?

It felt like a rehearsel for scattering my ashes into the ocean.

Though there is some confusion about just what took place, it may be that China has successfully fired a missile into space and taken down a satellite.

You have to wonder what the struggle to dominate space is going to look like. Several attempts to make space equally available to everyone and to ban weapons have failed. President Bush has made it clear that the United States intends to extend our dominance on earth to space.

Live by the sword, die...

The question that lies behind debates about how to keep space from becoming another battlefield, came up in a curious way last night at a forum in which several groups involved in providing low income housing - led by Habitat For Humanity - talked about their work.

It was mostly boilerplate, pieties we have heard before. Impressive that these people who spend their life energy in this avaricious culture focusing on housing people who are too poor and powerless to find housing for themselves. The only off-key moment was when the founder of Habitat - who apparently had an unhappy separation from them a few years ago - said he thought it unseemly for people in this line of work to make large salaries, which, so he said, the high-ups in Habitat do today.

The audience was asked to write questions. Only one did. Here was the question:

Without quarreling with the need for finding housing for poor people, how can it be done so the people who are doing the providing don't become Lady Bountiful - increasing their power over those whom they are helping? And how to keep those on the receiving end from being resentful and/or convinced they could never provide for themselves?

One of the panelists, a man who has spent much of his lawyer career in the criminal justice system, pointed out that the question was about how to change human nature. Can't be done, he insisted. He didn't say that people are no damn good but that's kind of what it sounded like. And he gave us the old evangelical charge to make Christians of people. It felt slimy and insincere.

Why would the Chinese want to become a military player in space? Because they can. And because they figure if they are to fill out their portfolio as a great power, they must be able to compete militarily everywhere. And George Bush has said we're going to put nukes in space.

So there you have it.

For me the issue has ceased to be how or whether I can make a major impact - or really any impact - on the misery and injustice that makes me so uncomfortable. The issue is where I prefer to spend my life. Not as a poor person if I can help it. But, even more, not as a plutocrat, lording it over others.

Not to get too pious, I am too lazy and insufficiently clever by half to have a shot at becoming one of the world's heavy hitters. And, by the world's standards, I am wildly rich, consuming way more than my share of the world's resources.

I am not trying to change human nature or human history. I just like being on the side of those who care and occasionally act for people who are oppressed.

Habitat builds houses. Poor people live in them.

The Chinese, we Americans, the Russians, may pollute space, spending vast sums.

We can still build houses.

One of the first oddities I noticed when I began my odyssey towards ordination and a life as a professional in the religion business, was that almost no one ever talked straight about anything.

Including me.

I get angry and frustrated at the seeming inability - or unwillingness - of people in public life, politicians, to speak in sentences like those we all use in normal intercourse.

But we religious do the same thing.

You might excuse us since our field of inquiry - God and the ineffable other - is resistant, if not unavailable to detection and description through the use of the five senses.

But would not a better strategy then be to keep quiet? If we can't express whatever it is, then don't use language, no matter how clever and purposely evasive.

Could be this is what is meant by the counsel attributed in the Bible to Jesus: When you pray, go into your closet and pray in secret.

Turns out that - good as the advice is - we mostly can't follow it.

To wit; this blog entry.

All my thirty years of ordained life - preaching, presiding at the altar, marrying, baptizing, burying - I struggled to find ways to connect the mystery to experiences of ordinary daily life. Of eating, sleeping, making love, fighting, despair and ecstasy.

I am grateful to the several writers who are attacking religion right now. Conventional, easy piety is, like political correctness, the enemy of the power that is hidden in religious mystery. Especially in western culture - more especially in the United States - we have made subscribing to some sort of theism an entrance requirement to settled society.

Akin to market capitalism and free enterprise.

I am still struggling to connect my experience to language that is understandable to reasonable people and does not have the dimension of piety that makes one feel they must sign on or consign himself to being an outcast.

Some days it seems possible, some not.

You will have seen the reports that the so-called Doomsday Clock has been moved 2 minutes closer to midnight. Stephen Hawkins, the British mathematician famous for his brilliant work on the beginning of time (and for doing his best known work after being diagnosed with ALS and confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak), is also the spokesman for the potential end of time.

A team of scientists, many of them Nobel laureates, meets each year to discuss the events of the past year and decide whether they portend hope for the long term survival of our species or despair. And they may move the hands of the clock.

This year they moved the clock from 7 minutes before midnight to 5 minutes before.

Their reasons had mainly to do with nuclear proliferation. N. Korea tested its first nuclear weapon. Iran has defied the world community to push ahead with her nuclear ambitions. The U.S. has pledged further aid to India in her nuclear capacity, which she and her bitter rival Pakistan already have. Israel has hinted she might use tactical nukes to try to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

And they made mention of climate change which, if it continues for only a few more decades, could create conditions almost as inhospitable to human habitation of earth as nuclear devastation.

While our government seems only to have exacerbated these matters, on wonders whether even an enlightened government would be able to alter what looks like our kind's lemming-like rush off the cliff of extinction.

Which raises, for me, the question of whether - from the perspective of evolution - we are a species well suited to a long tenure here.

In some ways we are remarkably adaptive. We have so cleverly gained ways to alter the conditions under which we live, that one might say we have actually taken control of change rather than merely responding to it. In my brief span - less than 7 decades - not only have I come to take global travel as routine, but the internet and cell phone have put me in instant contact with whomever I wish everywhere in the world.

If I were to try to say what has been the biggest change in my lifetime I think it would be the place of women in the world. Which was triggered by the birth control pill giving women control over when and whether to conceive. Surely this is a direct intervention in the course of human evolution.

I sometimes wonder if the dinosaur didn't have as dramatic and impressive a tenure as ours has been. And unprecedented in the planet's history. Everything about the dinosaur eclipsed the gradual evolution that preceeded it.

Now it is a mostly agreed upon fact that what did in the dinosaur was a meteorite hitting the earth, throwing up such heavy debris that the sun could not penetrate the earth's atmosphere, and the vegetation on which the dinosaur depended died out.

Some day we will get hit again. But the Doomsday Clock is not affected by that possibility. It is a combination of our competitive nature - now made more lethal with nuclear weapons - and global climate change. Some believe our profligate burning of fossil fuel has lent significantly to the change, some not. Some - on both sides of that argument - believe we could change our ways and begin to repair the problem, some not.

The end point is that we humans are a phenomenon, not the final arbiter. You need not believe in God to understand that we are a part of the process - one cell in the larger body - not the in-charge being. In fact there is no particular reason to suppose there is an in-charge anything.

I wonder if all this cheers you up the way it does me? Maybe it is akin to the feeling I remember when a critical tennis match I was scheduled to play was rained out. Relief. The outcome is not up to me, today.

So once again the issue boils down to this: knowing what we now know, was being here worth it?

What a ride!

Barak Obama announces today that he has formed a committee to look into the possibility of his running for president.

The former senator from North Carolina - can you believe this; his name escapes me; not a good sign for him or for me; I just got it, John Edwards - has announced.

Word has it that Hilary Clinton will announce any day now.

I like this. It feels like normal times. I happen to like - and have reservations about - all three. Any one of them would get my vote over John McCain, or any other Republican I know of right now. Not too shocking since I don't think I've ever voted for a Republican for president. I did once vote for a Republican for a city council seat in one of the cities I once lived in.

I feel for these poor people whose lives now become open season.

But look, they are talking about war, foreign policy, poverty, racial justice. Our dependence on foreign oil.

The rap on Democrats is that they are weak on keeping the nation secure. Republicans - notably the president - has milked that issue dry, and successfully, for more than five years. If you can believe polls, we Americans are finally getting it that we have been deceived. The Republicans have used the issue to hang onto power while in fact leading us into a far more dangerous place in the world.

So does that mean we may get a campaign in which candidates dare to talk about matters that have been poison for so long?

I'd love to think so. I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

What the statistics seem to suggest is that the middle class is losing ground in this country. We all know about the super rich being given all sorts of tax breaks. And that ever greater percentage of the national wealth being concentrated in their hands. But somehow we have given them a pass, apparently because of our lottery mentality. We think we may get our shot at those billions, so we don't want to shut down the game.

Hogwash.

Can Barak Obama use his charm and media beauty to explain to us that we need a big course correction if we are not to become a plutocracy? If we haven't already? Can Obama resist the pressures that having to raise mind-boggling sums of money put on a candidate? Or what must be the really scary threats of the Big Boys who come calling when somenone begins to look like a serious possibility?

Likely not. He's no Kennedy. He hasn't grown up with big money and influence. Neither has Hilary Clinton nor John Edwards.

So it is going to be up to us. No more being led like sheep - or lemmings - into using our resources to invade an Iraq. Or to line the pockets of the plutocrats.

Could be fun.

We are snow birds. People who flee winter.

All our lives we had lived in the northeastern U.S. Then, in 1997 I took a job in southern California. My wife, a Connecticut Yankee and an interior designer whose passion is early American furniture and architecture, hated it. She told me moving to California felt like having her esthetic soul ripped from her body.

Being an ocean freak and having spent growing up years in the Philippines, I had hardbored secret dreams of living somewhere close to the ocean where it was warm year round. I loved it from the moment we moved in.

After a decade I decided to retire and turn to writing full time. The only place we owned was the 19th century farmhouse in Vermont we had bought for a song when we lived in Massachusetts. I don't think we thought we'd ever really live there. But we sure couldn't afford to buy a house in southern California (we lived in church housing), so we thought we'd go back to Vermont - going home, we thought - fix it up a little and settle in.

Stupidly, we went back in November, after the leaves had fallen and before snow. It took only a few weeks of rainy 40º days to put me into a pretty good depression. My wife had continuing business in California so she came back often. On January 1 she left -20º in Vermont and told me she wasn't sure she would be coming back. She did, reluctantly, and a couple of months later I went with her on a trip.

I took a long swim in the ocean and that was that. We rented an apartment by the beach and have spent winters in California ever since.

We have come to love Vermont and it is our legal residence. But, despite global warming, being by the ocean in southern California during winter, suits us.

Oddly, this winter temperatures in the two places have often been about the same many days. We have used our down comforter more nights than not the past month. We didn't use it even once last year.

But every day I can swim or play tennis. And the wrist I mangled in a truck crash last summer is recovering well enough for me to do that.

I have teased that I am counter-cultural in both places. We have no TV in Vermont - the chief distraction of people in that small rural state - and I have no car in southern California where cars are second only to children in people's hierarchy of devotion.

I walk 90% of my life in California. What a luxury. Most weekdays I pack my backpack with my office, my computer and journal and an energy bar - head out over the cliffs hanging above the ocean a couple of miles to the small carrel where I do this writing. By the time I head home, and if the tide is right, the body surfers are defying the usual rules of land-based creatures at Boomers. I stop and marvel at something I used to hope I might try one day.

Our children - and grandchild - are far from where we spend winter. We try to lure them out during the winter, but they are mostly too busy and it's too far for a weekend. And we miss Vermont and our friends who are most there because they do not wish to compete in the consumer and fast-pace madness that passes for culture in most of the country.

And I fret about how it is that we became a nation seemingly bent on destroying ourselves by intimidating the rest of the world. No doubt the world - smaller and faster - requires different sorts of stances than it did when I was hustling for a living. If President Bush represents the direction we must go in, I will stand on the sidelines and do what small part I can to derail him and his minions.

From this little carrel on the western edge of the continent. Today a frigid Arctic wind is making the ocean look menacing. I love it.

My brother-in-law, a smart and fair-minded man, points out that decisions about things like Iraq - both the original decision to invade, and whether now to escalate - must of necessity be based on something less than knowing how it will come out.

That is as true of we get-out-soon liberals as it is of the escalate neocons.

I fear we often defer to experts who pose as being able to at least guess the outcome better than we can, not because we really think they can, but because it at least emotionally releases us from the burden of declaring ourselves.

So I'll go out on this limb - even knowing we may be facing horrible bloodshed and $100 a barrel oil - and say we should begin to phase out our troops now and acknowledge, at least to ourselves, that our Iraq adventure has failed and there is no way to rescue it. At the very least we will suffer a dramatic loss of prestige in the international community. Not that we haven't already.

The only clear goals with which we went into Iraq were the removal of Saddam and stabilizing the country so they could govern themselves.

The first was accomplished fairly expeditiously. The second, I fear, had no hope from the start.

We allowed ourselves to be seduced by a few Iraqi exiles and our own grandiose notions of how we could use our unparalleled power to reshape the world as we wished.

I knew nothing of Iraqi politics before our invasion, but I had read of Britain's disastrous attempt to organize and subdue the region, doomed, so I read, by ancient tribal enmities that seethed beneath the surface and that would keep our subturfuge of Iraq as a proper nation just that, a subturfuge.

No, no one can know what will happen if we escalate, nor if we withdraw. What we can know is that if we withdraw there will be fewer - and finally no - American young people dying. I hope we will do better than we did when we fled Viet Nam, in providing for Iraqis who have been identified with us. But likely we will not. Likely many Iraqis will be killed for having collaborated with us.

That will not be all that weighs on the conscience of this nation as we face whatever the consequences may be for our arrogance and folly.

So the president will tell us on Wednesday his plan to turn our Iraq adventure in the right direction.

How many times have we been here before?

It is so scary to think that the president and his advisors could be screwing things up in so serious a forum as badly as it seems. So we have - until the recent elections - gone along, assuming there must be some plan, some set of data, some strategy the administration has that we can't know or understand and that will finally carry the day.

But there are some mighty big guns who have now admitted that sending more troops is a strategic mistake that can serve only the purpose of postponing facing reality, perhaps long enough for this president to leave office.

The sanest voices are calling for recognition that we do have vital interests in the region, interests which are being seriously eroded by what we are doing now. Every day we extend our occupation the rage and paranoia of the Islamist world increases. Can we expect the world to believe we have Iraqi interests at heart? What are Iraqi interests?

And, most important, if our interest is to stabilize Iraq, how do we propose to do that? Which of the major Iraqi groups do we intend to support, and what do we expect to do about the others?

There is no way we are going to be able to escape the contempt of the world for what we have done. But to throw more troops in is to compound the contempt. The time has come to acknowledge that our attempt to force a military solution on a problem that requires at least equal diplomatic focus, has failed. The world will heave a sigh of relief that this chapter of the global nightmare may have an ending.

We must now turn to other nations - our old friends and some who have been our enemies - and begin serious talks about how we can cooperate in finding mutual interests without resorting to war.

That is why the recent election is utterly strategic. The administration can hide behind the new political reality, can even bitch and moan that their hands are now tied so they cannot pursue what they believe is the right strategy.

And the Democrats must not shrink from this moment. Yes, the Sunday talk shows will ring with the voices of the old neocons calling Democrats defeatists. The State Department must become the focus for the war against terrorism. Every nation ultimately has a stake in defeating terrorism.

Today's blog should be read against the background of my having forgotten to take my "upper" this morning.

Since I was diagnosed last year as having mild narcolepsy I have been taking an upper. Though I am usually averse to taking drugs of any kind, after several incidents of nodding off while driving - the last one resulting in my driving head on into a tree in my pickup - I was willing to do anything.

The neurologist said if the drug - Provigil - works for me, I would notice nothing except that I wouldn't get sleepy during the day as I have for as long as I can remember. And I would say that is how it affects me. I am driving again, just a little, short distances with someone else with me. But driving, like a grownup.

Can't say that I missed driving in the 6 months. Except for my wife bearing the total burden of driving.

Now, I am not so self-aware that I can say this with confidence, but I think I feel better about myself and life since I started on this drug. I asked the neurologist and a couple of others and they said that it is used not only for people with narcolepsy, but also for people who are depressed.

So it may be.

I have not felt particularly creative or productive in my writing. I am doing it, sort of, cranking out weekly Zone Notes, keeping a daily journal, but can't mount any serious interest in any of the books I have currently underway.

Which raises the old question about creativity and discontent.

Does being cranky and out of sorts feed the alternative views about life that result in creativity? And if so, would I choose to go back to dangerous sleepiness - and maybe low level depression - to keep my writing interesting?

Every responsible authority on the subject has said that is an old and false wive's tale - that discontent, depression, alcoholism, weirdness are catalysts for producing art. But they likely say this for the same reason religious leaders say religion supports social stability rather than disruptive behavior. They want to be seen as contributing to the common weal.

In fact it is hard to deny that many of the most creative people are often also the most discontent and disruptive.

In our country, mired in a disastrous war, the gap between rich and poor growing, medical care and life-expectancy dwindling, the middle class disappearing, discontent seems to me the only moral stance.

Reminds me of my old Professor of Christian Ethics, Joe Fletcher, who when called before McCarthy's Communist hunting committee in the 50s, had the balls to say, "Senator, it strikes me that the question in the terrible depression we went through is not why so many people joined the Communist Party, but why so many did not."

Getting a little far afield maybe, but you'll see the point. Can we find drugs that will keep us docile and content when we should be outraged? And is that sense of at least discontent necessary to creativity?

I intend to keep taking Provigil. And I like liking myself better. But if it seems as if I become willing to settle for what we have come to call "normal" in this country, I may have to give up driving and go back to my sleepy, cranky old self.

I just realized that as I am writing this the song being played on my iTunes making its way into my subconscious is Cheryl Wheeler's "Is it peace or is it Prozac?"

So, after years of attacking, the Democrats have control of both houses of Congress. (I find it curious that we have heard so little about the Senator from South Dakota who had brain surgery and apparently remains in a coma. If he should die or resign his seat, the Republican Governor would appoint a replacement. Assuming he appointed a Republican, the Senate would be evenly divided and Vice President Cheney would hold the tie-breaking vote.)

The issues that Democrats have been saying they want to address are many. The increasing numbers of Americans who lack health insurance. Not to mention the prohibitive and rapidly increasing cost to those who do have insurance. Fiddling with the Medicare prescription Plan D that seems universally hated would be the easiest way to go. But it wouldn't make a dent in the problem. Some plan that moves toward providing health insurance for everyone - perhaps some form of the plan that Massachusetts adopted last year - is required. Putting forth such a plan will receive a vicious attack from Republicans who not only have vested interests in the expensive plan we have now, but an ideological opposition to anything that smacks of Socialism or not so-called free market capitalism.

Minimum wage seems to be a fairly safe horse to ride. It has been stagnant for a long time at a ridiculously low rate and several states have raised their state minimum wage well above the national rate.

Ethics strikes my cynical view as a red herring. So long as we have a political system in which millions of dollars of private money decide elections, we are not going to change the ethical climate. The Supreme Court has questioned the constituionality of limiting how much a person or corporation can contribute citing the First Amendment Free Speech clause.

The war in Iraq looks to me as if it will provide the first real test of whether we have an opposition Party or just a somewhat altered version of the ruling Party. Within the next week the president is going to propose what we are calling a "surge" in American troops in Iraq. I presume the purpose of the obscure language is to suggest that, like a tide that surges and then withdraws, this is a temporary measure to try to stabilize Iraq while we prepare Iraqis to take over.

Will the Democrats - in the face of accusations of failing to spport the troops - ask the hard questions about which Iraqis we are preparing? And what we are to do with those who oppose our surrogates? Will the Democrats dare to consider refusing to authorize funding for these additional troops?

Within a short period we will see whether the Republicans have succeeded in what they set out to do; set the agenda for the foreseeable future no matter which Party is in power. Have they spent money so profligately that Democrats will be afraid to propose health and education programs so badly needed but expensive?

Will Democrats have the courage to say that we are one nation among the family of nations and not the preeminent nation that can impose its will wherever and whenever it wishes?

We'll be watching.

I had forgotten President Ford's funeral was being held, until I happened on it.

I am a hopeless ceremony and liturgy junkie. There are moments and sentiments that cannot be expressed any other way. This was one of them.

I was not a particular admirer of Gerald Ford. Friends of mine worked closely with him in the White House and they loved him. But, aside from pardoning Nixon and just being a quiet steady presence when the country was running scared after the first presidential resignation in history, they don't cite great accomplishments during his brief tenure.

But he was - by hook or by crook - President of the United States. And that alone, especially after he has long been out of office, gives him a place in my book of people who matter. (Perhaps if I live long enough I may even come to think about George W. Bush in this vein?)

And the pageantry surrounding the funeral of a president is worth a morning anytime. That this one was in the Washington Cathedral and done according to the Episcopal rule book, gave it a big boost for me. I wondered what it was like for so many of those people in the cathedral and across the country who have no history with the Episcopal Church.

Flawless and deeply moving was how I saw it.

Even President Bush's smirk couldn't put a damper on it.

And as I watched, Fox put a running banner beneath the pictures of the funeral keeping us posted on what was going on in the world of the living. I suppose they have to do that.

So I learned that the Iraq government is conducting an investigation into the shocking behavior of the guards attending the hanging of another former president, Saddam Hussein, and how it was that some had camera phones showing the event that gave the whole world a look at what looked like a lynching.

And made Saddam Hussein look like a brave martyr.

I am grateful to live in a nation in which President Ford's funeral - even though he was of one political party and turned out of office by the voters and by his successor who was at the funeral - is in every sense a national event, one about which I daresay virtually no American would be cynical.

But I fear the internecine nastiness we saw at the lynching of Hussein may come to be the world's picture of what this country stands for. To try, as our leaders are now doing, to portray it as an Iraqi event while we stood powerlessly aside, is not going to fly. We held him until just before turning him over to his tormentors just before his hanging, and he was hanged on an American military base.

The shame is painful.