He's Back!

I have several friends who have worked for the CIA, and several others whom I suspect did so under cover. Almost without fail thay have been the smartest and most interesting people I have known. I found that comforting.

So, when I read Maureen Dowd's column last week trashing George Tenet for his new book and 60 Minutes interview, I regarded it more of her bitchy inside the Beltway smarty-pants she loves to do and is so good at. "Poor George," she wrote, "picked on by mean old Condi." I find reading her a lot of fun, but she can go right over the top, especially when one of the favored old boys is going down. So I factored all that in and decided I didn't need to watch the interview.

But came 7 pm Sunday and I couldn't resist.

I figured that, even though Dowd had put all the juicy quotes in her column, I wanted to see his face when he said them and hear the timber of his voice.

So I turned it on.

From the opening teaser before the show was aired the hair on the back of my neck stood up in protest and anxiety.

I think Maureeen Dowd was gentle in her treatment of George Tenet in his tenure as Chief of the CIA.

This sniveling, self-pitying sadsack was, for seven years, running the nation's most sensitive agency? I understand - as he was at pains to remind us over and over - that these people are humans like the rest of us, with feelings. But was it totally naive to think that the reason the CIA recruited, not only the smartest and bravest young people, but also those who were grown-up enough to understand that the kind of work they would be doing was going to leave them in awkward, even treacherous spots from which their superiors not only might be unable to extricate them, but might even have to completely cut them loose? Deny having anything to do with them.

I was outraged when the White House - as the war and public support for the war eroded - began leaking conversations in which Tenet told the President that the evidence required for justifying invasion was a "slam dunk." Those bastards were looking for a scapegoat and Tenet was a good choice because, as CIA Chief, he couldn't retaliate.

And I admired Tenet for keeping his counsel.

Until last night.

I fear there are no more adults left in public life. We have known for some time that this president acts out of petulant adolescent anxieties, that he apparently really believes he has magical powers that make it possible for him to know what is right even when all evidence and opinion points the other way. And he has surrounded himself with people like him. Obstinate people who seem unable to consider that they may be wrong.

Within the constraints of their professional charge, I believe the military has conducted itself with appropriate honor. They seem to have waded in with their professional doubts about our Iraq adventure, and when overruled - as the Constitution provides - by their civilian bosses in the Pentagon and the White House, they tried to carry out their duties as best they could.

George Tenet has profoundly shaken my confidence in our government. Not only this administration, but - worrying that he may be representative - we may no longer be producing mature people who make hard decisions that may be perosnally costly. Tenet's toadying up to the president - now so believable from his toadying up to the whole countru in last night's interview - makes me wonder if we will even again find career professionals who value their integrity over being in the side of those in power.

Puts me in mind of Archibal Cox and Eliot Richardson, both of whom resigned rather than be complicit in Nixon's efforts to circumvent the law. George Tenet chose to keep his coveted job at CIA rather than do the job when it required telling the hard truth to power.

I hope the $4M advance Tenet is reported to have received for his tell-all book - as if he was writing about an affair he had with a movie star - sticks in his quivering craw.

One of the glories and curses of growing old is the enhanced ability to live contentedly with people and situations that would once have caused you to flee or fight.

This morning on my walk with Cosmos, our Norfolk terrier, we met, as usual, Ray, a transplanted Irishman and Fin, his placid Schnauzer. Ray and I had been trading insults for a while when he said, "You didn't even notice that I am growing a mustache."

It was true, I hadn't. These things take longer now, though I told him that the first time I tried to grow one I was in hospital my freshman year in college, and after three days the nurse giving me a bed bath tried to wash my upper lip saying it looked smudged.

My first successful attempt came during a month's summer vacation from a job in which I had a boss I hated. He was bossy (well, Blayney, he was the boss), fussy and judgmental. There were other reasons I didn't like him, but probably the main reason was that he was the boss and I wasn't. The job was in downtown Washington in the days when, if one was not a natural part of either the political power structure or an old Washington cliff dweller, status was hard to come by. My boss insisted that I dress a certain way, adopt patrician manners, and generally seem as if I must have come from big money and/or social prominence.

It pissed me off.

So, on vacation, I grew a mustache. That may have been the year "Hair" hit Broadway. Even if it wasn't it was certainly the era in which hair, whether long on the head or grown facially, was considered a challenge.

Which is what I intended.

It succeeded beyond my wildest hopes.

He fired me.

Some forty years later I look back on all that with bemusement. Hair, while still a symbol, can be used by a CEO to show his cool just as it can for a surfer. I still have my mustache.

But I no longer look for fights as I did then. I understand much better my own issues and that seems to make me able to look with understanding at those of others.

Yesterday on our afternoon walk, Cosmos and I were challenged by a man pulling his kayak on wheels after a day of fishing. We rounded the corner just as he came the other way. I took the inside route because Cosmos was rooting around under the bushes seeking just the right place to do his business. The kayak man wanted the inside route. We stopped in a face-off. After a moment in which he looked at me with an expression of disgust, he said "You can go that way if you'd like," motioning to the outside route.

I had a small, quick spurt of testosterone. Had it been larger and longer I might have said, "I think I'll stick to this route and let you take the outside."

Quickly the testosterone was absorbed and I considered that the man was likely weary from a long day on the water, and it was certainly easier for me to drag Cosmos to the other side than it would be for him to reroute his kayak.

I smiled, said, "My dog is my leader," and went wide around him.

I still get angry when I feel I have been dissed or treated inconsiderately.

But my anger now gives way faster to accommodation.

And I enjoy my walks with Cosmos more than I used to.

In today's news astronomers describe a planet some 20 light years away (that means one could travel there in 20 years going 186,000 miles per second) that seems it may resemble earth.

We haven't the money to either get a good look at it or send a probe. NASA not only has been a relatively low priority the past few decades, but President Bush, no doubt hoping to emulate President Kennedy's exhilarating rush to the moon in the 60s, has made yet another bone-headed move suggesting we spend what space money we have to put a man on Mars.

But this blog isn't meant simply to beat up on Bush, but to speculate about what finding an earth -like plant might mean.

The good and bad news is that, if it turned out to have an atmosphere, perhaps it could provide an escape for humans if and when our planet will no longer support oxygen breathers.

Of course that assumes there either are no creatures living there already, or if there are, they would welcome us.

What if they turned out to be more advanced than we, or smarter, with bigger brains? Do you suppose they might adopt us as pets? If they were not as smart would we regard them as pets, best suited for our entertainment?

What are the chances this could be the beginning of a war of the worlds?

Or is there any chance the discovery of a neighboring planet with its own inhabitants might be a converting event, causing us to rethink our ancient penchant for warring against any new civilization we encounter? Or is that a fatal characteristic programmed into our genetic code? Inevitable?

A passage in the biblical book of Revelation speaks of the promise of a new heaven and a new earth. What is meant by the author is a dramatic change of heart - and therefore of vision - in those whose hearts have been touched by God.

But what if such a thing were to become literally true?

What it suggests to me is that our species will never be finished - until we are finished - with hoping, exploring, imagining new realities that could lift us beyond the boundaries we now experience.

The good thing about that is the ingenuity it fosters. Dreamers sometimes put flesh on their dreams. And that can change the conditions of our life here.

The bad thing is that it can distract us from, or encourage us to deny, reality. And when we refuse to accept what is life goes dangerously askew.

Shortly before he died, Bobby Kennedy, loosely quoting Aeschylus, said, "Some see things as they are and ask why; I see things that have never been and say why not?"

Knowing whatever turns out to be true about that planet - and how I hope a new president will rearrange spending priorities so we can at least improve the exisiting space telescope and get a good look - is going to be after I have died, I still will enjoy imagining what might one day be.

In the midst of a heated email exchange about global climate change - we have stopped referring to global warming because it seems too narrow a term for what the conversation has grown into - the question that begins to gnaw on me is Who Knows? And how the hell am I to judge who knows?

A curious phenomenon that skews the matter is the different dynamic between those we once called conservatives and those we called liberals.

The entire liberal agenda is built around the idea of tolerance and respect for different views. I consider myself this type of liberal. I have opinions about almost everything - war, environment, economics, race, God, everything - but I consider myself just one limited mind. So I work hard to remember, not simply that I may be wrong, but that I am filled with prejudice and passion produced by my particular nervous system and history.

So I am always willing - or mean to be - to consider someone else's opinion. In fact I am often fascinated by how differently someone else sees the world.

But the conservative position is that there is a right answer. One correct answer.

I must acknowledge that the conservative way is far more efficient. Once the correct postion is established there need be no further agonizing. Merely focus energy on reaching the position.

I have been persuaded mostly by weight of opinion - and the limited science I understand - that global warming is really happening and that human activity is at the very least adding to it. And, so it seems to me, given the potentially drastic consequences for humans, we would do well to begin to address it.

My conservative friends cite contrary opinion from scientists who say the earth has undergone periodic - and even more drastic - climate change over the millenia, and the evidence that we are causing it, or that it is as drastic as portrayed is shaky at best. And they seem to believe that liberal scientists want to wreck the western economies by dedicating vast sums to addressing a problem they don't believe exists.

Now, just to further muddy the waters, the same dynamic in reverse animated the debate about whether we should invade Iraq. The conservative position was that, though we did not know for certain whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, we had better act as if he did rather than hope he did not and do nothing.

We liberals said we thought it a mistake to act hastily, unleashing war with its destructive and unintended consequences, when it might not be neccesary or even appropriate.

The liberal position looks to have been vindicated by subsequent events, even though the enclave in the White House stubbornly clings to its guns.

Who knows?

I feel more cautious than I did a year ago about the certainty of what we should do about global climate change. Maybe that is because I remember that almost no members of Congress were willing to voice their doubts about our stated motives for invading Iraq, even though we know many of them understood how shaky the intelligence was.

They were afraid of the tremendous pressure of public opinion. Polls showed that the nation was heavily in favor of going to war. Polls show that opinion is heavily on the side of the reality of global warming and the need to make massive intervention to try to do something about it. Is that why I believe it?

You want to know something really haunting? I regard the so-called scientific method as a chosen way to organize reality so our minds can seem to grasp it. I regard the Christian - or Jewish, Muslim, Bahai, Zen or Zoroastrian - picture of the world as the same thing.

I don't think humans have sufficient perspective or intellect to unpack the complexity of reality.

We design metaphors that serve rather nicely for our own purposes.

I happily celebrate the Holy Eucharist in the Episcopal Church because it serves as a powerful sacrament, a means of participating in a rich myth that digs deeply into the recesses of reality. When the bread - the symbol of life and of our bodily participation in this life - snaps in half, and the wine - symbol of blood, the seat of life - is poured out, and we consume them into our bodies, we signal our willingness to surrender ourselves, trusting that this willing death leads to powerful new life.

Do I think that is a definitive and exhaustive stance toward reality?

No.

Do I think global warming is real and we would do best to get going in addressing it?

Yes.

Am I sure?

No.

in Sunday's NY Times magazine an article on the Farm Bill that will soon come before the congress reveals how little politics and policy has to do sometimes with what it is supposed to be about.

The writer sets out to discover why the likelihood of obesity rises as income level drops.

He walks the aisles of grocery stores and points out that most of what we call junk foods are in the center aisles while the vegetables and fruits and dairy are on the outside.

He wonders what he can buy for a dollar that will give him the most calories, what we would once have considered his biggest bang for his buck.

You won't be surprised to learn that sodas, Twinkies, novelty cereals, all provide more calories at a lower price than non-processed foods.

Why? Because the crops associated with highest fat and processed foods - sugar, corn, soybeans - all receive massive subsidies. In other words, we pay those farmers to grow what is least nutritious. Not only are we making empt calories cheaper and more attractive, but we are dumping these crops in other countries where they are cheaper than those grown locally. So we are contributing to international obesity.

I had not known that the Farm Bill comes up for reexamination every five years, and we are nearing the next review.

Most legislators pay no attention because the farms are not in their districts and no one is making a fuss over the matter. They either vote, without reading or asking, for the bill as the farm interests have drawn it, or perhaps even cut deals with the farm state representatives to vote for their pet projects in return.

Taking back government is what I hope the 2006 by-election results were really about.

Perhaps our diastrous and bloody adventure in Iraq, mindless inaction on the environment, blatant corruption and arrogant stonewalling by an administration that clearly assumes we don't care, or maybe even admire people who swagger and brag about lining their own pockets, has finally begun to leave a sour taste in our over-stuffed mouths.

Who knew that what the Surgeon General has called a national obesity epidemic is at least in part being sponsored by our own government?

This morning I woke with this song flooding my mind. It has been haunting me all morning, playing like a record stuck in the juke box.

Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,
Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,
Gone from the earth to a better land I know,
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.

Chorus:

I'm coming, I'm coming, for my head is bending low,
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.

Why do I weep, when my heart should feel no pain,
Why do I sigh that my friends come not again?
Grieving for forms now departed long ago.
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.

Chorus:

Where are the hearts once so happy and so free?
The children so dear that I held upon my knee?
Gone to the shore where my soul has longed to go,
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.

Where did I first hear this song and from whom?

Likely my father, likely before I could talk.

Of course it is a song I haven't heard in decades and wouldn't dare sing outside a group with whom I felt pretty safe. Stephen Foster, the king of minstrel and its author isn't much noticed these days.

But why was it floating - like a free radical - in my aura this morning?

May be because this is the first anniversary of Molly's death?

Molly, whom I first met when we were young teenagers, when she was the girlfriend of my boarding school classmate, up from Phildaelphia for a dance weekend. Against seemingly insurmountable odds - how many teenage sweethearts end up marrying? - they were married.

Twenty years ago, when we moved to southern California, we renewed our friendship. Her husband was a doctor - our doctor it turned out - and she provided backup for a man who focused so fiercely on his professional life he might have forgotten to eat or acknowledge his children were it not for Molly.

She subsumed herself to him in every way except for one; she never surendered her own identity and claim on life. Remarkable. I don't know that I've ever known another person who could do that. If you knew the details of their life from reading them or being told, you would say she was subservient, even lacking identity.

But when you met her, she filled the room like a rock star.

Well, not exactly, because she had no interest in the spotlight. Perhaps a more apt metaphor than rock star is light. She was like the light and we all were like the moths who always turned to her as if we were drawn by force we couldn't resist.

Her children and her children's friends told Molly things they wouldn't tell anyone else, not even each other.

Because Molly smiled, listened, asked helpful questions, and always - always, without fail - encouraged. Not pollyana. She could see how things could turn bright. And somehow, with her care, they usually did.

Her husband and my dear friend said he had been brought up in a tough Philadelphia Main Line family that prized booze, money and being one-up. When I first knew him he was a feared member of the junior class at a school where being feared and one-up was the prize.

But Molly and her family - her pediatrician father became his mentor and the reason he went to medical school - acted on him the way the vision of Jesus acted on the Apostle Paul. It blinded him to the meanness of his history and genes and turned him into a physician who is still sought out by the rich and famous because they have never been treated like real human beings, with such gentle and sincere kindness.

A year ago today, having endured patiently and in unfailing good spirits, months of isolation and rigorous treatment for acute leukemia, Molly sighed a deep sigh and floated into oblivion.

Her daughter - her son and daughter both inherited her gentle grace - held her hand and cooed her love as she died. It was as if she was reassuring her mother that the lessons she had taight her had sunk deep into her marrow and she would carry them on in a world that hardly recognizes such caring.

Her husabnd, my friend, my doctor, has had a long year. But he also bears Molly's legacy. We all do. Somehow, with her help, we are living life as she taught us.

I hear their gentle voices calling, old black Joe.

Ringing in my ears, my head, my heart.

Molly.

From an interview of Bob Dylan by Jan Wenner in Rolling Stones 40th anniversary issue, May 3-17, 2007.

JW: What does it feel like to grow older? Do you feel wiser? Happier? More Creaky in your bones?

BD: Things begin to happen that you never considered before. You realize how fragile a human being is and how something insignificant, like what happened to your finger or your toe or something like that, may be enough to really sit you down for a while…As you go on, you realize life goes by at a very fast pace, so you’ve got to slow everything down, because it’s going by too quick. I think we all realize it’s still going down fast, and we’re not quite as agile as we used to be.

JW: Do you feel wiser?

BD: Wiser? Not necessarily.

JW: Happier?

BD: I don’t think happier…Happiness to me is just being able to breathe well.

JW: You seem happier to me, less angry and amped and pissed off.

BD: Oh. It depends on what hour of the day you catch me in, though. It’ll get better before it gets worse.

As he did forty years ago, Bob Dylan continues to say things that ring true for me.

One another subject, a couple of days ago I wrote about what I thought was the silver lining in the Supreme Court decision upholding the N. Dakota law banning late term abortion. I said the decision was narrowly drawn. And it was. Sort of. The two scariest Justices, Scalia and Thomas, wrote for the majority that it was time to go the whole way and overturn Roe V. Wade. The others in the majority did not sign that opinion. At the time I was buying the argument that this meant both that this decision was only about one specific procedure and not about the whole issue of abortion, and that there is no stomach among the saner justices for remvoing entirely a right that the majority of Americans - even those who find abortion appalling - think should be preserved.

I am feeling far more sober about it now.

First of all, the others had no need to sign the inflammatory Scalia/Thomas opinion to achieve their goal, the first clear dismantling of a woman's right to an abortion since Roe V. Wade.

I hadn't read the law in question - still haven't - but a physician friend tells me there is no provision in the law for carrying out a late term abortion to save the life of the mother. It seems she has the right - as we all do in any instance - to petition the court. But how ludicrous is it to think of a woman in extremis as she labors to deliver a fetus that is destroying her body, consulting with her lawyer who then goes before a judge?

If it is true, then this decision ranks up there alongside the recent decision that the prisoners who have been held in Guantanamo and other places around the world - without charge or trial, and, we now know, sometimes tortured - have no recourse under our laws.

If ever one needed a clear reason to fight for the election of a clear-headed Democrat in 2008, this is it.

Everyone, not only religious people, wonder how it will end. And when.

My life. The end of the world.

But when we speak of the end of the world we aren't really talking about the end of the world. We are likely talking about our own death. Or, if we are particularly large sighted, about the end of our species.

Because the planet is surely going to outlive us. As it has every species that has lived on it. On her.

When something like the massacre at Virginia Tech happens we get a glimpse of why we all think, somewhere in our unconscious, that our species is ill-adapted for long term survival.

I get that same sense when something happens to one of my children - who are all grown - or I have a fight with my wife.

In recent years I have been following what looks to me like the latest sign of how things may finish.

Honey Bees.

Albert Einstein said that if bees disappeared the human race would last four months at most.

Bees are disappearing.

A few years ago a Vermont neighbor who keeps bees and sells his honey told me there are no wild honey bees left in this country. (I don't know about other countries.) It seems a fungus began to attack them and unless the hive can be treated the bees will die. If you see a bee on a flower in your yard, it has come from a domestic hive. My neighbor said that even when he treats the hive he often loses it during the winter. He goes to elaborate lengths to protect the bees from the fungus, from the cold, but sometimes when he comes to check it in the early spring, the bees are all dead.

He then orders up a new hive which comes through the post office, carefully packaged, the queen in a separate little pouch.

Recently a new thing has been happening. The bee keeper goes out to check his hive and it is empty. No bees. Not even corpses. Totally empty. This hasn't happened to my neighbor and he is anxious wondering if and when it may.

No one seems to know why this is happening. Where do the bees go?

The latest theory focuses on the growing use of cell phones. I don't understand the science, but it seems some wonder if the electrical field, the signal, the phone creates somehow may be on a frequency close enough to the frequency - if that is the right term - the bees use to communicate and to navigate, may be getting scrambled.

And they can't find their way back to the hive, and die.

In Psychology 101 in college we studied the amazing phenomenon of the bees' communication system. A worker bee goes out from the hive in search of pollen. When he finds it he fills the pouches on his legs and flies back to the hive where he does an elaborate dance at the hive's entrance. The dance tells the others the direction, the distance and the quality and guantity of the pollen source.

So far as I know, even though there have been countless elaborate studies of the matter - all agreeing that the bees not only have a sophisticated social life, but a complex communication system - no one has been able to decipher or understand the details of their system.

But something has caused a breakdown in their ancient life. And they pollinate the vast majority of the fruits we eat.

A few years ago there was a freak hard freeze just at the critical time in the apple orchard near us in Vermont. And the bees didn't pollinate. And there were no apples in that orchard that year.

Not with a bang but without a buzz.

Today the Supreme Court upheld a state decision banning late term abortion. It has been called partial brith abortion by its opponents because it takes place in the third trimester of pregnancy, sometimes so near full term that the skull of the fetus is crushed, either to keep from doing terrible damage to the mother, or maybe sometimes to make certain the fetus will not be delivered alive.

I have not read the decision so what I write here is based on what I know of the historical arguments. I don't know whether the law provides for doing such an abortion to save the mother's life. I believe it ought to.

Many women I know believe that because a woman carries the fetus, and the fetus is so dependent on her body that it ought to be considered a part of her body (notice that I use the term fetus, not unborn child, because I believe, until the woman delivers and the umbilicus is cut and the baby is breathing on its own, it is different from a full person.), only she should be able to decide its outcome. As she would any surgical procedure on her body.

The most radical opponents of abortion have claimed - along with the Roman Catholic Church - that from the moment of conception (is that when the sperm and egg unite or when the zygote attaches to the uterus wall?) the few cells have all the rights of a full human being. Quite apart from issues about the mother who, I suppose, the church must regard as the vessel for carrying the baby.

Polls show that most Americans believe what the Episcopal Church said about abrotion some time ago - that it is a necessary tragedy.

I have no doubt that, however quietly or even unconsciously, the Justices of the Supreme Court try to reflect the sentiments of most of the country.

And I think they have done that in this case.

Third term abortions are relatively few and usually performed to save the mother's life. To put into law that such a procedure cannot be performed when the mother's life is at risk, is as gross, more gross, as crushing the skull of a fetus. It is a horrible dilemma that ought to be decided by the mother with her doctor and her family.

Scary ground here. I am a man, never to carry a baby. But I do have an opinion, have thought a lot about it. I don't think it is bad to pass a law that denies a woman an abortion of a fully formed, viable fetus in the final three months of her pregnancy if it is being done merely because the mother does not wish to have a child.

Most lawyers - pro and con abortion - believe Row V. Wade was bad law. But it finally decriminalized abortion, which was important. If today's decision is the first step toward overturning Row V. Wade, there is fire on the horizon. If it is conceding that abortion without limits is too radical, perhaps it will prove useful.

Some Democrats have hoped Row V. Wade would be overturned because they believe the women of this country would rise up and smite the self-righteous Republicans who have been using this issue cynically to beat up the Democrats about the phony Family Values issue.

Overturning Row V. Wade would not immediately and automatically make abortion criminal. It would return to the states the right to manage the issue. This would mean some states would allow it, some not. Some would place no restrictions, some would limit it in various ways. And it would mean women traveling between states as needed. Not a good way to manage this matter.

What I hope for today's decision is an acknowledgement that abortion - along with capital punishment, making war, domestic abuse, the right to die, national health insurance - has to do with what we most value, the deep mystery and sanctity of life. And we ought to put forth our most thoughtful and best effort to approach it with compassion and care.

On the morning news today I heard an in-depth report on another matter before the Supreme Court, the case of a man on death row in Texas whose lawyers say he is mentally ill and doesn't understand that he is to be executed for the murder he commited. The Texas prosecutor has countered that there are lots of mentally ill people on death row - he suggested that they likely all are in some way - and that in no way mitigates the state's interest in or right to exectute them.

The argument is arcane. If the Supreme Court is telling us that human life potentially present in a fetus is too precious to abort, must they not decide the same about a fully alive person no matter what he has done?

I am in no mood to beat up on our nation, on ourselves.

That we are a violent nation is obvious. The shooter in this case was apparently a South Korean, which seems to me irrelevant. He was a student in an American university and he had apparently easy access to deadly weapons, which is a part of our heritage.

Maybe later I will want to reflect on what, if anything, this may have to do with our use of deadly force in Iraq to try to make the world into what we think we need it to be. Not today.

There is so much to say, and it has all been said. Over and over.

The reality is that this is a part of who we are.

If we wanted to make owning guns more difficult we would have done it long ago. And it has been pointed out that Canadians have guns in the same abundance as we and yet the murder rate in Canada wouldn't even show up on our scale. So it apparently has more to do with something about us and the way we go about solving problems than it does with our easy access to guns.

Though I still think efforts to limit guns would reduce the killing. Most of those who are shot are shot by people they know, often close family members. Likely many of these shootings happen in a moment of rage. Had there been no gun, maybe the wound would have been a black eye rather than a gunshot wound.

But yesterday's carnage at Virgina Tech was not simply a moment of rage.

Who really knows what it was? If we did, we would surely have made more effective intervention in post offices and schools and malls where these dreadful shootings so often happen.

We are a fascinating, complex nation, born in a violent revolution and grown into the world's richest and militarily strongest country. Having dispatched those who were on the land when we arrived, we peopled it with immigrants from every nation and race over the two centuries. We are still a young country, realtively unformed, finding our way.

What these spasms of violent self-destruction may have to do with the unprecedented nature of the American experiment, I doubt anyone is wise enough to say.

Perhaps the growing violence in places like Britain and France - that used to look askance at our violence - that seems to have begun with a big immigration that has changed their national identity, suggests that violence happens among people contending with each other in an unsettled culture.

Theories abound. As with suicide, all the insight seems to come after the fact. No one -including those who shoot others or themselves - seem able to see in advance what is about to happen.

If I am any measure, I do not understand - nor can I usually predict - my own moments of deeply irrational and sometimes almost homicidal passion. That I have never violently attacked anyone is not because I have never wanted to.

I have lived in two other countries, The Philippines and Zimbabwe, both of which I liked very much. Though both are by most measures less developed and less sophisticated than the United States, neither has the murder rate we do. Even Zimbabwe, that has descended into a violent dictatorship in which the government is now physically attacking those who oppose it, does not have a murder rate as high as ours.

But each time I have come back to the United States from those countries, I have felt my heart leap with excitement at being home.

I oppose every way I know how our murderous foreign policy, and I believe citing the Second Amendment as providing Americans with a Constitutional right to own guns is wrong-headed and self-defeating. I will use my voice and my vote to change both of those, though a lifetime of effort has not made a dent so far.

But if that is one of the prices I pay for being an American, I suppose I must pay it.

Moments like yesterday's incredible blood-letting cause us to mourn the dark side of our national character. Perhaps if we could acknowledge that dark side, we might not need to act it out.

Why not take my turn?

Don Imus and Paul Wolfowitz.

One fired for saying ugly things on the radio about a group of young woman basketball players who had become icons of America's love of the determined underdog. The other under fire for having taken a hand in getting his lover a big financial gain when she was moved from the World Bank to the State Department after he became president of the Wolrd Bank.

I have never heard Don Imus. I assumed he was another right wing talk jock, but now I'm told that, while he is a radio talk jock, he is pretty much on the so-called liberal side. I have no prior knowledge of the sort of things he says - which may make me either the prefect person to have an opinion, or one speaking from ignorance.

I know a lot about Paul Wolfowitz and have long regarded him as one of the most dangerous people to have wormed his way into the high councils of American government during the ascendancy of the conservative power grab. While glad to see him leave his position of power in the Bush Administration - he was often portrayed as the intellectual in the group - I was sorry to see him go to the World Bank where I feared he could further advance the neo-com belief that American hegemony was the God-given way to make the world what it ought to be.

But I believe neither should have been fired. At least not for what they were said to have been fired for. (Wolfowitz, as of this writing, hangs on to his job at the World Bank and President Bush has put all the prestige and power of his office behind keeping him there. I suspect he may succeed, but if so, Wolfowitz will be significantly weakened, which may be a good thing.)

Don Imus - in what seems to have been an aside, an attempt to be funny and use the street language for which he is known - called the Rutgers women's basketball team "nappy headed hos."

In a previous entry I wrote about the racial subtext to virtually every issue like this one. And clearly that is the explosive piece of this one. "Nappy headed," refers, I assume, to kinky hair, and "Ho" is a commonly used rap term to diss a black woman, though I get the feeling it doesn't usually mean "whore," which is its derivation.

Bad taste? Without doubt. And maybe too risky for a white guy. I'd guess a black talk show jock might have gotten away with it, mostly because it would have been considered more funny than offensive.

Fire the man because you don't like his crude and offensive manner. But not because he did what he has been doing for years and listeners and advertisers have rewarded.

Let him grovel and apologize, which I suspect would do in his macho image and make him less a folk hero. But to take him down for this is bush league. As if we never imagined him saying something so crude.

Paul Wolfowtiz has made enemies at the World Bank from his first day on the job. Those who support him say that is because he has dared to challenge the rigid habits and hierarchy of an institution that has lost its effectiveness. He said his priority was going to be addressing corruption in the countries to whom the bank lends money, insisting that they be accountable for the money rather than the bank turning a blind eye when leaders grab it for themselves rather than seeing that it get to those for whom it was intended.

Wolfowitz' detractors say he is using his position at the bank - which is meant to be an international institution - to futher the hegemonic aims of the Bush administration. That his focus on corruption is in fact a way to use the Bank for pushing for regime change, the Bush Administration's method of choice for dealing with troublesome nations.

But the presenting issue in Wolfowitz' possible demise as president is his having intervened to get a lucrative deal for his lover when she left the bank. She left because the bank has a policy against couples working together, so it was arranged that she would go to work in the U.S. State Department (from which I believe she has left to enter private business.) The World Bank was to pay her salary at the State Department, and Wolfowitz intervened to get her a handsome deal. Apparently she was paid more than the President's cabinet officers.

Bad judgment? You bet. Slidy and surprising - to me - for one of these guys who like to pose as pure.

(Maybe you saw Doonesbury yesterday, a reporter asks of a Republican, pointing out that the Republican presidential frontrunners have multiple marriages while the Democratic frontrunners have one each, whether he still believes the Republicans are the party of family values. He says yes, because they believe marriage is between a man and a woman, and maybe another woman, and another...)

But clearly the issue is how he is running the bank. No one wants to take that on because it will ignite the political controversy that lies just beneath the surface of the World Bank, as it does the U.N.

One might well ask why the President of the United States gets to name the President of the World Bank? And why, when we wanted Boutris Boutris Ghali out as UN Secretary General, he went?

And if the majority of the bank's governors have lost confidence in Wolfowitz - believe he is using his position and the bank to further the power aims of the United States - then let them say so and vote him out. But so long as President Bush stonewalls them in Wolfowitz' favor, I don't see it happening.

For the past decades determined conservatives in this country have used any means they could find to achieve their agenda. That has so poisoned our political waters that liberals are afraid to portray themselves openly. If we are to regain our rightful place in the process, which I think we must and can, then instead of latching on to moments of opportunity that really have no honest connection to the issue, we need to return the debate to the issues that matter.

I don't really care whether Dom Imus regains a place on talk radio.

I would very much like to see Paul Wolfowtiz replaced by someone more representative of the world at large.

But let's do it in the open.

The issue of race is so pervasive and often shows itself in such subtle ways, that we are often unaware it is present.

In two matters currently in the news, race is a subset that likely has caused the issue to become both more complex and look very different to people of different races. Like the O.J. Simpson verdict.

The recent exoneration of the Duke lacrosse players and the firing of Don Imus.

In the first case the clash of different classes and cultures - once winked at if not encouraged as a young rich male rite of passage - has drawn headlines and angry public debate.

Putting aside a host of relevant questions - about the culture of young male college athletes, the friction between an elite university and the community that surrounds it, the entitlement of young rich people in their dealings with people of lesser means - what ignited this story was the white athletes versus the black woman.

If race were not such a volatile matter across the board in our culture - and it is not irrelevant that Duke is a southern university - no doubt this story would have been treated differently and with less national focus.

Don Imus' silly, perhaps outrageous, characterization of the Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy headed hos" might have been seen as merely in poor taste had not Imus been white and the Rutgers women black.

Again - without getting into the question of how strictly the airwaves should be monitered for language and attitude that most of us would consider gross - if Imus had been black I wonder if the uproar would have been as great.

My only point is that race lies just beneath the surface of every aspect of our national life. It is the subtext of countless matters that seem to be about something else. Anyone who thinks it isn't a serious matter worthy of focused attention by everyone, either doesn't want to deal with the reality (who would? It is such a slippery one.), or has, like most of us, been conditioned to tune it out.

Did you see that the State of North Carolina - its legislature, I presume - officially aplogized this week for its history of slavery and racism.

A beginning.

I don't honestly know if I'm up to this today, but I'm going to give it a try. At least get started.

Although I keep discovering the racism imbedded in my bones, I don't understand the malady. I suppose it's obvious on its face, that one might fear someone who looks very like one's self except for one significant difference, skin color.

We're trying to alter our Norfolk terrier's aggressive behavior toward big dogs. We have done pretty well - distracting him with treats and then rewarding him with more treats when we pass a big dog and he doesn't bark and show his teeth. But there are two dogs in the neighborhood - both chocolate labs - that, no matter what we do, arouse such terror and adreniline in him that he barks insanely, yanking against the leash.

I have wondered if a dog can be a racist. Is it the brown coat of the labs that sets him off?

I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina in the 1940s. Though I think something in me felt uneasy about it, the marks of segregation were ubiquitous. Separation of the front of buses from the rear. Bath rooms and drinking fountains in public places. Certainly neighborhoods and schools.

My father and I used to watch the Friday night boxing matches on TV and it seemed not only that there were more dark skinned fighters than light skinned, but that when boxers from the two races were pitted against each other, the darker one won.

My father explained to me that Dr. Mayer - our family physician and an icon in the community - had explained to him that negroes had thicker skulls - and thus less space for brain - and could absorb more punishment to the head. I guess I bought it. After all, the information came from our doctor via my father.

Some years ago I told my kids that when I meet a person of color that is the first thing I notice about them. They were amazed, and their amazement has cause me to hope we may be making some progress in the matter.

The first black person I knew as a peer roomed next to me my freshman year in college. We didn't talk much and I think I was afraid of him, or maybe in awe of him. He was a star basketball player and semed older, more mature. Early in the year he got busted for doing marijuana. This was 1959, before marijuana had become a staple of college life. After that I regarded him as a rock star.

Maybe a decade later he became one of America's most celebrated writers. I think back now to how thrilling it might have been to spend time with him. But it never occured to me then, and likely he would have found me, a naive preppy, dull.

So, what about structural racism in this country?

It doesn't take a sociologist nor an economist to take a tour of any of America's cities, or read the employment statistics, or the racial makeup of America's prisons, to see that being born black in America means one is significantly at risk for falling short of any shot at the great American Dream, a decent job that provides safe and comfortable housing, schooling for one's children, and a chance to live out old age in dignity.

Yes, it is true that there are many people of color in high places - Colin Powell, Condaleeza Rice, Barak Obama - and that there is a growing black middle class.

But it is undeniable that being born black greatly increases the likelihood of life failure if not early violent death.

The civil rights movement did much to at least put the official position of the government on the side of equal rights for all people regardless of color.

But the legacy of racism still haunts the soul of our nation.

Until the statistics begin to even out - employment, income levels, percentage of those with college degrees - I think there needs to be conscious efforts - programs that give a boost to people of color - made across the board in our culture.

If I were president I would make certain there were people high in the administration - people of color, naturally - with sensitivity and skills that make them especially aware of the subtle ways racism is at work among us. And I would ask them to help us figure out ways to help others see what they see and look for ways to set them right.

I will go to my grave without being able to erase from my unconscious the sense that a dark skin suggests the likelihood that someone is not as smart or perhaps more dangerous than I.

But it is not too late for my chidren. Or their children.

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday.

Guess he won't sue the American Tobacco Company after all.

In his last book, "Man Without a Country," - a book he said he had promised himself he would never write, but then he hadn't expected to live so long - he said he was going to sue because it said right on the side of the cigarette package that smoking would kill him. And he had been smoking Pall Malls since he was 12 and here he still was. False advertising was going to be his complaint.

Maybe the closest we had in Americal letters to an irreverent Zen master.

He coined one of my favorite expressions - "and so it goes."

It was what one might say as he lay his body in front of an advancing tank to try to stop oppression and injustice, any expression of the dominanting power intended to intimidate the rest of us. It means, I wll make no peace with oppression. Not because I think I have the power to stop it, or maybe even the wisdom to identify it. Nor do I set myself up as a judge or guardian of public morality.

But this is what I have to do. Wherever the opportunity presents itself to poke a finger in the eye of the powerful or the smug, I will not pass it by.

But the outcome? Well, who knows? That's in the hands of someone or something far larger than I.

So it was always a pleasure to read his sarcastic outrage. Because it somehow managed to keep from self-righteousness. To be funny, outrageous and brave, puncturing piety.

I already feel poorer knowing there will be no more treasures coming from his pithy pen.

Continuing now with the series about what I - and you - might do about various matters facing the nation if we found ourselves in the big chair in the oval office. Today we address the environment and global climate issues.

But first a word about Johnny Hart whom I just learned died at his drawing board yesterday. He drew the strip B.C. I didn't know until I just read it that he had become an evangelical Christian in his later years. I'm glad, I think, that I hadn't read him after that happened, because what drew me to his work was his iconoclasm.

The strip that will always stay with me was run shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy. It showed his cave man hero sitting on a rock looking out over the ocean. A bottle floats up - and we learn that he has been waiting for a reply to a note he floated out some time before. His note had asked, "Do you have freedom of speech?" He picks up the reply and it reads, "We're not allowed to say."

So he floats out another question: "Are your people free?" And in the next drawing he picks up the reply: "Yes, how many do you need?"

RIP, Johnny Hart.

Now, the environment.

You are the president and you are getting reports from scientists who tell you that the global climate is warming at an alarming and unprecedented rate, the ice caps are melting, raising the sea level so, already, a couple of tiny island nations in the S. Pacific have been evacuated. Those same scientists tell you that the greenhouse gasses caused largely by our burning of fossil fuels are collecting in the earth's atmosphere at an ever increasing rate causing changes in the climate that will soon alter the earth's ability to grow crops enough to feed the growing population.

Other scientists - and politicians - are telling you that this is a hype meant to divert the world's largest economy into non-productive efforts to tilt at an illusory windmill. Further, say these people, we now know that the earth has - for its several billion years of geologic history - undergone periodic shifts in climate. To the extent that we are undergoing another - and they remind you that a generation ago there was concern about the coming, not of global warming, but of a new ice age - this is part of the natural cycle of the earth and there is little or nothing we can or ought do to try to change it.

No wonder few of us seek the presidency.

if I were president I would ask my advisors -scientists and politicians - to draw up a massive plan along the lines of the plan Truman devised after WWII that came to be known as the Marshall Plan to aid the reconstruction of Europe, and Kennedy's pledge to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

This plan would pledge unprecedented U.S. resources to the effort to understand the forces that govern the earth's climate, and then to do what seems possible to affect it in ways that would lend to favorable conditions for human and other life here.

I would go before the General Assembly of the United Nations and ask all nations to join in the effort. I would use the occasion to pledge our country to immediately begin the destruction of our nuclear arsenal as a signal that we are pledging our mighty resources to enhancing life on the planet, not threatening it. I would ask the nations of the world to join in this.

Of course I have no way of knowing whether this effort is in fact tilting at windmills.

But if it is not, what a great way for this nation to retake the high ground we have surrendered in our hegemonic efforts the past many decades. And how thrilling to think we have focused our best minds on lending aid to ourt species' passion to have a future.

And if it is beyond us, we will still have given it our best effort. And, as conditions for life on the planet become increasingly difficult and the competition for what remains threatens to turn our final chapter here into a conflagration, we will have established a cooperative rather than competitive environment in our efforts that will at least give us a shot at a creative rather than self-destructive final chapter.

That's what I would do. Guess I won't get elected.

Today - called Holy Saturday on the Christian calendar - was always one of my favorite days when I was a parish priest.

One reason is because there was nothing to do. In the Jesus story, Jesus had died on Friday and all was still until Sunday when the story says his friends saw him again.

Looking back, I see that what really appeals to me about this blank day in the drama is that ir dares to put into what might otherwise easily become a fairy tale, the cold reality of death.

People love to speak of Jesus' resurrection and its impact on human history as having offered believers immortality.

But immortality is about never dying.

Resurrection - whatever one makes of it - assumes one dies.

Easter is about daring to die. Not just for a while. Not sort of. Dead.

What Easter and resurrection signal is that the scary possibility all the childhood nightmares are about, losing one's life, can be let go of. Not because the dilemma has been solved, but because it never was a dilemma.

The error the church has made - and clung to because it gives the church clout - is to claim that following Jesus exempts one from the reality of life, which is that is is a gift for a season, and that its boundaries are birth and death.

Ego/consciousness - the prize of western human - is one of the pleasures of being here. And a gift for the season we call life.

When we die, our marvelous cells - this seeming miraculous arrangement that make us somehow us - become building blocks for something brand new.

The task of life-giving religion is to teach us the disciplines of surrender. Surrender of the illusion that my ego/consciousness must be intact for the universe to remain intact. Surrender of the illusion that there is something we can or ought to do - or need to do - to escape death.

We agreed - for lack of a better word or understanding - to be born, and part of that wondrous gift is dying.

And that, too, is ineffable.

Happy Easter.

According to my own schedule, today was to be the day I played President of the United States and decided how I was going to use my bully pulpit to influence policy and action about the environment.

I am going to get to that but not today.

Today is Good Friday on the Christian liturgical calendar and as I write I am listening to Bach's St. Matthew Passion by Paul McCreesh. And I want to try to describe to you - while I explain to myself - what I think is, or ought to be, meant by this explosive day.

You may know that Good Friday (the name is not as ironic as it at first seems; it is a corruption of its original meaning, God Friday) marks the day of the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, the Hebrew prophet/rabbi whom the Christian Church later (there was no Christian Church before) claimed was "resurrected" and to whom they assigned the title "Christ" or savior and son of God.

There seems to be fairly reliable historical evidence that such a man lived and that he was executed by crucifixion by the Romans. The reason for his execution is given only in the scripture, which has its own axe to grind, and even there the description of the events (the gospels are not uniform) is mixed and confusing. The best bet is that Jesus first challenged some of the practices of his own Hebrew religion, especially having to do with the temple and animal sacrifice in Jerusalem, and having angered the elders of Judaism, was exposed to the Romans as a potential revolutionary. The Romans - like any occupying power - were constantly vigilant for trouble makers (insurgents) in the distant corners of the empire and routinely executed them both to be rid of them and to warn others.

Jesus was executed on this day, along with others. A ho hum event for the Romans and likely - at the time - of no overriding significance to the Jews.

We will never know just what caused his followers to believe and claim they encountered him beginning three days after his death, and for the next forty days until he disappeared again.

Likely we would know nothing of all this had not Paul, a Roman citizen and a Jew, not believed he had been visited by the risen Jesus - likely several years later - and written about it. And even that witness would have been lost had not the Roman Emperor Constantine decided in the 4th century that the empire might be best organized around what we now know as the Christian Church, and so it became the Holy Roman Empire.

And the rest is well known.

So what are we to make of Jesus being killed?

If he was an incarnation of the one true God, why would he have allowed himself to be treated so horribly at the hands of mere humans?

The favorite explanation of the church has been what is known as the Atonement. (At One Ment)

The world was so bad, so sin-ridden, so far from the purposes for which God had created it, that nothing we could do would set it right. Only God himself - so goes this theory - had the power to return the world to its proper purpose.

So God - in the form of Jesus - takes on flesh and willingly offers God's self as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

There are multiple problems with this theory, but it is by no means unique to Christianity. The story of a rising and dying god in human form is repeated in countless religions and myths.

The idea that his death was payment for our sins comes from ancient Jewish practice of sacrifice of animals in the temple. The Hebrews believed that blood was the seat of life (pretty sophisticated physiology for ancient times) and since only God had the power to give life, only life itself - blood - was an adequate gift in return.

Interesting aside: When the Israelis retook Jerusalem in the 1967 war, they stopped just short of taking the entire site on which the ancient temple stood. That, as a rabbi explained to me, was both because the Islamic temple dome now sits on that site, and because, by Hebrew law, if the temple were to be rebuilt, animal sacrifice would have to be resumed. And the Israelis knew that would be abhorrent to contemporary world sensibilities.

Another - and I believe, more life-affirming - way to read the story of Jesus death is as an affirmation of the puzzling reality of the death of everything and everyone.

When you read Jesus' teaching against this understanding, much of what he said makes sense.

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it cannot germinate and grow new life.

Where the church took a wrong turn was in believing the purpose of religion is to literally conquer death. So the myth/metaphor of resurrection, instead of being about the wonder of every living thing giving itself to death so that it may provide for ongoing new life, became about the infantile wish for my life to go on forever. In heaven. Or in hell.

You can see how the story - especially when it was adopted by the world's most powerful nation at the time - came to be about how to retain power.

When it was in fact about the freedom and wonder available in surrender of power. In offering one's self for what - in the composting manure of one's marvelous cells - will be nourished into new life.

Yes, I understand the reason people do not rush to embrace such an understanding of reality. Ego/consciousness, which we all quite rightly prize, protests. So when we speak of surrender, what must be surrendered is this self - which Zen rightly calls an illusion. The surprise is that once one does let go of this illusion - and most of religious discipline, meditation, prayer is in service of that surrender - the result is finally a sense of ecstasy. But first of grief. Like the grief required for letting go of anyone or anything one has cherished.

Perhaps a religion that adopted such a view would never have any disciples. But it has me.

Today I am beginning my series challenging you and myself to consider what we would do about various matters if we were sitting in the president's chair. Yes, I understand none of us knows since we can't calculate the stresses from this distance, but it seems to me a worthy exercise fopr citizens of a democracy who are called on regularly to judge how their elected leaders are doing.

Today it is foreign policy.

This would not ordinarily be first on the agenda since, as every student of Political Science 101 knows, the first responsibility of government is the protection of its people. So domestic security would be the main focus.

The reason for going first to foreign policy - to the Iraq War, Iran, N. Korea, Israel/Palestinian - is not only because it has so much to do with how safe we are in our own country, but because it presses in on us right now with such urgency.

Resisting the strong urge to condemn the Bush's administration's decision to attack Iraq, I begin with the reality of where we find ourselves today.

Mired down in an Iraq that, for reasons that not only existed before we invaded, but that predate the existence of our nation, is not really a nation at all, but a reluctant confederation of tribes that was barely held together by the tyrant we deposed.

I do not believe there is any hope of fulfilling our stated intention of establishing a freely elected democracy in Iraq. I doubt it is going to prove possible to come away with anything resembling a nation at all.

It looks to me as if the main sticking point to beginning to move toward some resolution is the hubris and false pride of the Bush administration. No president wishes to lose a war. It is embarrassing, and likely strategically costly for the United States to acknowledge that all our power is insufficient to accomplish the goal we said brought us into the conflict.

The time has come to cut our losses.

No one can argue that our pulling out - however and whenever we do - is going to result in at least as much chaos and bloodshed as that beleaguered place has experienced since we invaded. And we are going to suffer a serious loss of prestige.

But all that does not alter the reality that we have now used every means at our command and failed. Not necessarily because we have done it all worng - though it has been done ineptly - but because we set ourselves at a task that could not be done.

Without Iran and Syria, without Saudi Arabia, our inevitable withdrawal - whether it is next year or after Bush leaves office - will do even greater damage to our undeniable interests in the region.

So it is time to go - hat in hand - to Iran and Syria- through the offices of the United Nations - and declare our willingness to be a part of a true coalition that will negotiate the settlements that Sunni, Shia, Kurd, Islamist, is willing to live with. We will be required to spend vast amounts of money rebuilding what we have destroyed. And we will be asked to accept Iran and Syria as legitimate partners.

I would return our foreign policy to one of realism, of recognizing and negotiating the conflicting interests of various groups and nations that must be taken into account and, along with ours, compromised.

If there are good people and bad people - which I do not believe - we are in no position to make the god-like judgment about who is which. Time for us to gain the skill of empathy, looking through the other guy's eyes and seeing that, when looked at from their perspective, we may be the bad guys in this situation.

When we sit down for a serious conversation with the various groups in that region - not looking for ways to use our power to intimidate them into caving to our interests - they will tell us we need to make a serious run at finding some sort of resolution to the Israeli- Palestinian stalemate. Until there is some resolution to that sore, unrest will continue in the middle east.

In the world's eyes, Israel is our client and represents our interests in the region. Which is too bad for israel and for us. Because our interests are not identical. I believe we have made israel's position more dangerous in the past few years, both by our bellicose - apparently hegemenous - intentions, and by encouraging Israel to play on our obsession with terrorism, to persuade us the Palestinians are terrorists without legitimate interests. Thus we have narrowed the options of how to solve the problem of where the Palestinians may finally settle.

If I were president I would go tell Prime Minister Olmert that we will guarantee our protection of Israel from attack, so long as Israel withdraws to pre 1967 borders and recognizes a Palestinian state. I would push Israel to agree to East Jerusalem under Palestinian authority and a limited return of some agreed to number - 100,000? - of Palestinians.

Agreeing to that would bind us to a guarantee of Israel's protection.

But all that should be done through the UN, not only so there will be a multilateral force involved, but so we will back away from the position we have put ourselves in of being the world's police.

Iran's nuclear program and N. Korea's apparent success in producing at least a nuclear weapon of some sort and a missile to deliver it, are serious issues for the entire world, the UN and the International Atomic Energy Commission.

Heady as it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union to be the world's only super power, we now see the real cost of behaving as if that gave us the ability to dictate our wishes to the rest of the world.

If I were president I would make a national address in which I would tell the American people we have learned a hard lesson about the realities of power and living in a diverse world. I would then go to the UN and deliver a speech in which I said the United States wishes to reassert her historic role as a democracy hoping to use her power to unite a world with different interests and opinions.

We will pay our full assessment to the UN - now in arrears - as the first good will sign of our wish to enter into a new spirit of cooperation.

We ask the UN to sponsor a summit to which would be invited the leaders of the U.S., Britain, Iraq (various tribals leaders all included), Iran, N. Korea, Israel, Palestinians (all factions) in which the issues to be addressed would be energy, religion, world economy, refugees, mechanisms for addressing genocide more quickly, earth's climate and environment.

The summit would be to set up an ongoing body - under UN auspices - to do the long term serious work needed.

In other words turning aside from our dreams of using our muscle to bully the world - which has poisoned the conscience of our nation - we use our unparalleled power to seek ways for the legitimate interests of the world's people, even when they do not match ours, to be acknowledged and negotiated.

Guess I won't be elected.

I am postponing my first entry about what I might do were I president.

This piece may be related.

I assume, as president, one is privy every day to information that makes the hair stand up on one's neck. Not only the nation's enemies plotting unimaginable harm, but natural disaster waiting to make its mischief.

So the question is, how does one, shedding the illusions we all support to make life bearable, live beyond despair?

A mark of at least some of us who have consigned our lives to close examination of what lies beneath the daily round, is a growing awareness of the certainty of what we all already know, the end.

The end not only of my life, but of the human experiment on the planet and even of the life of the planet itself.

I remember an evening my last year in seminary, standing with a group of fellow students outside the chapel on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts on a fall evening waiting for chapel to begin. The Rev. Professor Dr. Lloyd George Patterson, Professor of Church History - maybe the keenest mind I had run across - was part of our small talk. As we stood - he was, as always, smoking a Galouse cigarette - the lights up and down the street and in the quardrangle where we stood flickered once, then flickered again, and then went out.

As we stood waiting for a moment, then a longer moment, beginning to understand this darkness was not going to be lighted soon, someone asked Dr. Patterson, "What do you think this means?"

"Oh," he said, taking another drag on his cigarette and speaking calmly, as if he had been expecting this moment, "I think the meaning is all too clear."

In order to understand his response you would have had to sit at his feet for a semester of lectures in which he explained the chief motivation and urgency of the earliest followers of Jesus, which was that human history was about to be brought to its close. Everything, he insisted, had to be looked at against the background of the common expectation that Jesus was understood to be the first sign of the beginning of the end, which the Hebrews had long anticipated.

Now, Lloyd Patterson believed that the only thing the early church got wrong was their understanding of the time frame. He believed that the Jesus event was indeed the inaugeration of the beginning of the end. And we are still in the period between the ages. So he was ever on the alert for the end.

I have come to think Lloyd Patterson had profound insight into the nature of reality - free of the usual illusions we humans provide to divert ourselves - and of the most creative posture for living in it.

If one regards death - one's own, the death of a beloved or of the human species - as a negation of our time here, then one's chief energy must be focused on denying or rationalizing our inevitable end. Denial is a noble piece of the emotional panoply, useful in diverting us from despair. But it is still denial, which means it will be trumped by reality.

Heaven, of course, is a hope no one can ever fully refute. But it, too, suggests that this life is cruel and perhaps not worth the effort.

If one looks hard at how things are, death is not only inevitable, but necessary if history is to keep moving. Everything dies so new things can be born. Since we prize ego consciousness it feels assaultive to consider that I must die so my cells can fertilize what will come after me.

If there is any design - which I am sure is a fiction the human imagination imposes - it is that we live to die.

Religious language - however unwittingly - lends to this understanding. Virtually every religion speaks of a hero's death providing for the life of his or her followers. But we make of that a heroic sacrifice.

No, not a sacrifice, but the way it is. And the hero is everyone and everything. Giving over our cells when the time comes.

The Eucharist, breaking of the stuff of life, consuming the dead hero, provides abundant life for us, and provides us with the model of surrendering our ego/consciousness lives on behalf of the ongoing creation.

Makes me feel sane and full of life.

Think about it.

What would you do?

If you were President of the United States, what would you do: about Iraq, Iran, N. Korea, Israel/Palestinians; about challenges to the enivornment; about economic issues facing the nation; about ongoing issues of racial justice; about education; about health care?

Perhaps this is an exercise in futility, or hubris. But we still at least pay lip service in this country to the notion of democracy, of ordinary citizens having informed opinions that govern their votes and elect people who will carry out the policies we signal them we want.

I know, life is so complex now, who really knows how to calculate the consequences of a decision in a world of 5 billion people and trillions of dollars?

But until we officially change our ideology and say we will now have a governing class, quite apart from the rest of us, to whom we will entrust the responsibility of deciding how best to run things, we retain the responsibility and the right to consider these matters and make our views known.

Over the next several entries in this blog I intend to write my answer to my own question. If I were president, what would I do?

Not what would I have done had I been president in 2000 or on September 11, 2001, but beginning where we are right now, what would I do from this point forward?

Or, if I were president, what would I try to persuade the congress - and the American people - to support?

I have been perusaded in the past that this is a waste of energy. What do I know about the complexities of foreign policy, or economic theory? And what makes me think I know the solution to issues like racial injustice that have been with us since before our war of independence?

I am not even sure what I think about the debate about whether the degradation of earth's atmosphere is a cyclical issue the earth has faced over the eons. Or, if we bear most of the blame - burning fossil fuels - is there some way to sustain human civilization and clean up the air enough for us to live here?

Two years ago I spent an evening watching the DVD "The Fog Of War," the shocking documentary focused on Robert McNamara reflecting on our war in Viet Nam. I spent considerable time and energy protesting that war, believing it to be a horrible mistake (not unlike our Iraq adventure). But I always secretly wondered if those who were orchestrating the war - Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara - were in possession of esoteric information they felt too sensitive to tell the rest of us.

So it was with some small satisfaction - and no little shock - that I heard McNamara say what I had accused him of at the time but wondered if I was accusing him unjustly or out of ignorance. He said he and his fellow leaders believed - quite wrongly - that because Ho Chi Minh was a communist - the whole of Southeast Asia was threatened by a reunification of Viet Nam under Ho and the North. Now, he said, everyone understands it was a war of liberation, first against the French and then against us. Ho and his cohorts were nationalists before they were communists, and had a long history - which McNamara admitted he didn't know - of resisting Chinese attempts to take them over.

As I listened I realized that those who lead us may have more information and more detail, but they have two eyes and ears and one brain with which to consider what to do. Like the rest of us.

So in these next many blog entries I will consider these matters. And I hope you will, too.

One Sunday after a particularly strenuous morning in church - passionate sermon, challenging liturgy - the music director asked me if I was aware that when a moment of tension came I held my breath.

No, I answered, I do that?

Every time, he said. I bet you're exhausted at the end of a service.

The next day I was playing a particularly tough tennis match and as I sprinted deep into the backhand corner to retrieve a hard cross court shot, I realized that I was holding my breath. No wonder I felt breathless after a big point.

Nelson, the music director, told me I was not unusual in holding my breath when things get tense. The hardest skill he said he has to teach singers is to breathe, to not stop breathing.

When Monica Seles became a world class tennis player, there was much commnenting on her loud grunting as she hit the ball. Some of her opponents complained that they found it distracting. Occasionally one of them would ask the umpire to ask her to stop or face a penalty. Since the rules said nothing about grunting or legal and illegal decibel levels, the umpires would not.

After Nelson pointed out my habit of holding my breath, and I realized I do it on the tennis court, I understood Monica Seles' coach taught her to do that heavy grunting so she would not hold her breath. Expelling a lung full of breath with a loud grunt requires one to inhale deeply immediately afterward.

When scholars began to try to discern what was meant in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures by God's spirit - the holy spirit - coming to inhabit human beings, the best translation they were able to come up with in English was breath. The Hebrew Ruach, the Greek Pneuma have been translated - roughly- as breath.

In Genesis, when God ainmates the human, God does it by breathing into the nostrils of this new being. In the event which the Christian Church marks as its beginning, Pentecost, the commission of Jesus' followers came to them in the form of a great wind, the breath of God. (And fire, which, of course, is sparked by the oxygen filled wind.)

The debate underway about the earth's atmosphere is linked closely to this mystery.

The earliest life forms on the planet could not breathe oxygen, and had there been a plethora of oxygen free in the atmosphere, the earth would have a history like Mars, of life struggling to find its way only to be consumed in fire. The remarkable treaty negotiated between life forms that breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide and the life forms that do the reverse, has provided for the rich animate history of which we are a part.

Whether because of our own prolifigate converting of fossils, and/or the natural cycle of earth's climate due to its rotation and position relative to the sun, we are considering now the possibility that this delicate balance that has sustained us might be upset enough to alter the sorts of life earth will support.

Why, in the face of this, would a sane person hold his breath at just the moment he most needs an infusion of oxygen to replenish his strength?

If you can answer that question, you may have taken the first - frustratingly elusive - step toward explaining the self-defeating habits our species continue to practice and that threaten our very existence.

How many visionaries, from Gandhi to Jesus to Andrew Carnegie (who believed business carried on around the world was going to end war), have come up with schemes for turning our species from self- destruction to cooperation, only to see their dreams collapse in horrifying carnage?

The Zen practice of sitting - breathing and watching your breath - is a way of living in peace within one's own realm.

One essential key to full living for humans on the earth is somewhere in this business of breathing. It may be that the means to insure the atmosphere for our continued existence is not within our grasp. We have - or should have - always understood that our tenure here is for a season, not forever. But while we are here, learning to breathe may provide moments that are sublime.

And if, before it all ends, we can understand what would cause us to deny ourselves breath when we most need it, we may crack a puzzle as old as we are.