He's Back!

Juan Williams, the NPR senior correspondent (have you ever heard of a junior correspopndent?) who can be enraging to me because of his toadying to people in high places, has an op-ed piece in today's NY Times in which he praises yesterday's Supreme Court decision outlawing consideration of race - even voluntarily - in deciding the makeup of school populations.

He says it is time to bury Brown Vs. Board of Education, the 1954 decision that struck down separate but equal. Although Williams is the only opinion I have read so far that believes yesterday's decision was a good one, they all agree it has effectively buried Brown. (Well, one law professor applauded Justice Kennedy's separate concurring opinion that, in his opinion, kept Brown alive.)

Williams' point is that since Brown, public schools have become more segregated than ever and far worse. He says that he talked at great length with Thurgood Marshall, who argued the original case before the High Court and who was later appointed to the Court by President Johnson. He asked him if the decision had accomplished what he intended and hoped.

Williams reports Marshall to have said that his reasoning in calling for desegregated schools was that white school boards were spending all their money on white schools, so black schools were deteriorating and withour resources. He figured that if black children went to white schools they would benefit. But, so Williams claims Marshall to have acknowledged, instead there was white flight from public schools and inner cities, leaving blacks - and some poor whites - in worse schools than before.

The problem is that the conservative majority on the court sounds very like the conservative movement in the country at large, angry at attempts to redress imbalance and injustice in the country, and contemptuous of those who fail to prosper.

Williams may have a point - who doesn't despair at the state of public education in this country - but the spirit of conservatism hardly seems to care about those who are, to coin a familiar phrase, left behind.

The Supreme Court, the Presidency, the Congress (until the most recent election, and we'll have to wait and see about that) all look to have abandoned any sense of government responsibility for those who are poor or weak.

The upcoming presidential election will be about Iraq, about health care, about the economy, the environment and the future of our life on the planet, and about which party will best manage those vexing issues. And we all should insist that they speak to them specifically, refusing to let the clever distractions of the spin doctors keep us from the specifics.

But will the Democrats regain their historic voice calling to the nation's conscience about the promise of the American dream for those who - for countless reasons - have yet to experience it?

Oh God, I hope so.

Juan Williams seemed to be saying in his op-ed piece that such concerns were of an old era and were not only outdated but have been proven ineffective, even countr-productive.

The voice of the dispossessed, by definition, is not heard until someone in power hears it and amplifies it. Franklin Roosevelt, a patrician of what was at the time unusual wealth, took that to be the vocation of the Democratic Party.

If one of the candidates picks up that theme, I will jump in with all fours to help elect that person.

In today's edition of Alternet, Ted Daley weighs in for Al Gore.

It still seems early to me to be doing all this, but I take Daley's point that Bush has so decimated the faux Republican Party that has stood since Reagan, that real Republicans, small government, budget balancing isolationists, may regain traction in that party.

And that could mean nominating Fred Thompson, a once actor and senator with virtually no track record who, because his face is known to TV watchers of Law & Order (as Reagan's was to lovers of Bedtime For Bonzo), could likely get elected against some Democrat who actually has a record to defend.

The latest rumors have the Republicans dumping Dick Cheney this summer when he goes in for replacement of his pacemaker and replacing him with Thompson, who then becomes a candidate with the clout of high office.

I like everything about Al Gore except the way he appears on the campaign stump.

I think he is smart, compassionate, has a sense of humor about the world and himself, and actually has ideas for and a commitment to addressing the problems that threaten the future of our species on the planet. As Vice President he distinguished himself by carving out a useful niche - the environment - and proved a helpful and loyal (though not fawning) advisor to Bill Clinton.

I will always believe he would have been easily elected - even in the electoral college - in 2000 had he not listened to those (and maybe his own feelings?) who persuaded him that the country was so disgusted with Clinton's sexual escapades that he needed to totally distance himself from Clinton.

All he need do was to say that, while he didn't agree with everything Clinton did - and was clearly a different sort of person - he was proud to have been a part of an administration under which the country had prospered, economic fairness had begun to be restored, and we had enjoyed a long period of relative peace.

But instead he put Joe Lieberman on his ticket, largely - maybe even only - because Lieberman was the first Democrat in the Senate to publicly deplore Clinton's sexual indiscretion. And Gore looked prissy and wooden, largely - so I have been told by some who actually know him - because he took so much advice from his pollsters and advisors that he lost his own voice.

So, what might lead me to hope he would do better this time?

Mainly that I assume, after eight years out of office - and being eight years older - his reason for running would be less his hunger to fulfill his father's ambitions for him than to gain the ability to do some of the things he obviously believes in passionately.

Ted Daley sees the Obama camp, once Gore announces, beginning to salivate about a Gore/Obama ticket, and it is the first configuration that has aroused my political nostrils so far this year.

If Gore has the inner strength to resist the temptation to rearrange himself every time a poll suggests he is slipping, he could make a formidable candidate. And an even more formidable president.

Until we get a lot closer to the election, nothing - not even what to make of Barak Obama - is more intriguing than the odyssey of Hilary Clinton.

I was always a big supporter of Bill Clinton in the White House. I got angry with him for signing the Welfare Reform Bill which I thought he should have vetoed, but he was a possibility guy and I respected him for that even when it meant he took a position I didn't like.

In retrospect he looks like Gandhi, Dr. King, Jesus and Buddah all wrapped into one.

I have been abmivalent about Hilary. I respect her intellect and, unlike many, admire whatever she had to do and whatever she decided to do, to stay married. Pretty hard to really know from this distance, but I was impressed by Joe Klein's piece about the two of them after he watched them at play on a vacation. He said those who say their marriage is a political arrangement haven't seen what he has seen.

He said they have it for each other.

No doubt two such high powered and complex people - both from problematic backgrounds - stumble and betray and just generally do things taht aren't good for nurturing a long term marriage. But somehwere along the way they figured out what I think couples do when their marriage is going to be their best chance for integrity and strong reality as they age; that hunkering down and working with this person with whom you have abuilt a history, is worth the effort.

My main negative about Hilary as a candidate for president is that she seems such a lightning rod. I remember when Colin Powell was getting pressured to run and it was reported that his decision not to was largely due to his wife's concern that the first serious black presidential candidate would be too tempting a target for some crazy person seeking fame.

I am not happy with the way she has handled questions about her vote to give Bush authority for war, though I think her saying it wasn't in fact quite that is technically correct. And there is something admirable about her not trying to explain her vote away, though she has been a little more waffling on that point recently.

I reserve judgment.

But I watch fascinated as many of her old feminist supporters turn on her.

I suspect it is still hard for women to put behind them the complex emotions tied to the advancement of their gender in the world. And to what extent we can all wade through that between now and November of 2008 is problematic.

A couple of weks ago I went to the funeral of my oldest living Aunt. (Well, living until recently) I grew up in a family in which women dominated in every way except for outward adulation. It had been a long time since I was around so many of my relatives and I hadn't experienced such attention in a long time.

My feminist sisters were alternately disgusted and amused.

I thought Hilary has taken on more than any of us can know.

Every year it comes and every year we speak of it as if it were our first encounter.

Heat and humidity.

To what extent we're talking global warming and to what extent plain old summer, is a matter for political wrangling.

But it's hot, even in Vermont. And it changes the way we spend a day.

I was going to cut grass today but I didn't. I was going to ride my bike, but I didn't.

If the heat infiltrates the upstairs bedrooms, sleeping will become an issue. That usually takes a couple of days and we always hope the weather will break before then.

Once one is past 60 years old sleeping is a sometime thing anyway. But the heat ups the ante. And the irritability quotient.

All year I look forward to summer, and begin to grieve on June 20 when the solstice means we're heading the other way. (My scientifically savvy brother-in-law explained to me after I had written here about the solstice being when the sun and the earth release their embrace and begin to disengage, that summer and winter are not about distance between sun and earth but about the change in the tilt of the earth's axis and thus its attitude toward the sun.)

I hate being cold.

And now I don't like being too hot.

Aging increases one's perversity.

Truth likely is that I am unwittingly preparing myself to leave. I notice that, as time for departure approaches, whether from a party, a job, a relationship or a city in which I have lived, I begin this contradictory process of simultaneously finding fault and prizing every tiny motion.

A friend who battles health issues told me recently that she sometimes finds herself wishing the world would come to an end so she wouldn't have to go through the hard things she is experiencing.

The weird thing is how rich all this confusion and contradiction can make a day.

Even an overbearingly hot and humid day.

In Great Barrington, Massachusetts this weekend, a small and lovely town in the Berkshires, where rich people with manorial house mingle with aging hippies, radical anti-war protestors, artists, poets, actors, I encountered an off-key moment.

In a coffee shop, pretty obviously a hang-out for the local literati, a handsome man, mid 50s, graying at the temples, dressed casually in jeans and a sweat shirt, walked in.

His sweatshirt bore a Duke Lacrosse logo with crossed sticks.

It took me a moment to figure out why that struck me as fascinating. And in your face.

Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe the guy's son plays Lacrosse for Duke. Or maybe he is a big Duke booster.

But I did wonder whether it was meant as a statement, a gesture of defiance.

But I wasn't sure just how to interpret whatever the statement might be.

He looked very self-confident. Which I would have thought he might need to be to wear that emblem in a town that is known as a hotbed of feminism.

Funny how we do these things now.

He had his coffee, spent a few minutes scanning the newspaper, and left.

I suppose everyone has known a Dick Cheney somewhere in their life.

He reminds me of the old joke about the guy who told his friend that he went up to every woman he saw on the street and asked her if she would sleep with him.

His friend said, "You must get your face slapped a lot."

"I do, but I also get laid a lot."

A proven way to get what you want is to somehow indemnify yourself against the opinions of others - and of your own conscience - and simply go for what you want. Because most of us hate conflict, and are afraid - at least for a while - of bullies, who always portray themselves as tougher than we, we often will simply give them what they want.

We rationalize that it's not that important to us, and if it's that important to them, well...

I'd say that's one way to describe the process that led up to our invasion of Iraq.

The country was traumatized by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, from that moment to now, like a primitive drum beating an incessant, destablizing warning, kept before us the possibility, nay the inevitablity, of another more terrible attack. And they cast themselves as the tough guys who were willing to set aside all the usual restraints of civilized people and ape the monsters they portrayed the terrorists as being.

In other words, in order to defeat them we needed to become like them and Cheney and his gang were willing to do that on behalf of the rest of us who were too limp wristed to face into reality.

And we gave them free rein.

Until the last by-elections. At least I hope that was one of the main messages of that election. That terrorism is a serious danger, but becoming terrorists in response pretty much removes the point of preserving our civilization.

Now the Vice President, in refusing a request for documents similar to ones the President's office has handed over, has made the almost incredible defense that, because the Vice Presidents office is not a branc of the Executive Office (What is it then?), there are no legal grounds for requiring the documents to be delivered.

This after Cheney's initial attempt to simply dissolve the department that had asked for the documents, failed.

Give the man credit. He understands - and apparently is willing to bear the consequences - that the more outrageous one's behavoir, the less likely it is to be challenged.

How to return the nation's political debate to something resembling civility, has been a hot subject for some time. It may be that Dick Cheney has finally made crystal clear what life can be like when bullies finally push us over the edge.

If so, he will have inadvertantly done the nation a great service.

Today the earth and the sun say they have had enough of their close embrace for a while and begin establishing more distance. I always feel a tinge of sadness knowing this.

But it must be.

Intimacy creates heat. And over the long haul, unless the whole business is to burn out, entropy, cooling and distance, must come.

The question must be without answer, whether this fascination I have, bordering on love, for the way we humans run down and die, is perverse or profound.

Although I do not really like a lot of the particulars - the aches and inflexibility, night cramps in my legs, chronic sciatic pain, loss of agility on the tennis court and in courting my wife - I do rejoice in being a part of the rest of the world that has a beginning and an end.

Those particulars are mostly insulting to an anxious ego.

But try to imagine - as religion and folk fantasy would often have us do - somehow being provided an exception to an existence that is bounded that way, and which didn't gradually (or sometimes percipitously) run out of steam.

No, this is a sacred process into which we have been invited. Some days it seems to move along at a stately pace. Today, as sun and earth disintwine and drift apart, it triggers pathos.

Government doctors announced that the machine controlling Dick Cheney's heart was old and should be replaced.



Global warming was linked to an upsurge of cat sex
Harper’s Index

Perhaps you can connect the dots
if you care to…

The radio weatherman, who tells me weather everywhere and why said
today there will be one minute less daylight than yesterday
I thought we had another two days

our five year old terrier has become so obsessed with the booming
red squirrel and chipmunk population this spring that he no longer takes
time from stalking to tend to his business

you’ll want to know how I know and the answer will reveal more about my
aging obsessions than about Cosmos who is merely
honoring his deepest desire

The motto on our family crest reads Semper Eadem – always the same.
Don’t we wish. I spent last weekend overcome by how things have changed
in one branch of our family – the one that saved my bacon as a boy

what remained of my Aunt Ginny was interred Saturday in the wall of
a columbarium in Mt. Kisco, NY where more than fifty years ago she and
her husband and two daughters took me into their family

94, she saw her great-grandson safely home from Iraq and the birth of her
great-great-grandson, then told the aides not to bring her solid food as she
was finished, which she was, graciously, within a fortnight

into the niche went her ashes beside her husband’s who died in 1973 and a
niche below went her younger daughter’s ashes beside her older daughter’s.
Ginny had held Margo’s ashes in her closet waiting…

one row to the right my uncle John’s ashes. He died at 49 of liver failure
after eating a bad batch of oysters at a medical convention in Atlantic City
he had been a professor of pharmacology at the U. of Oklahoma

First John, 49. Then Julie, 53, my sophisticated beautiful cousin, edited a
book by Arthur Miller and Inge Morath which she had them sign and gave
to me, plugged up her cerebral arteries

then my uncle Harry, 69, my mentor, leaving the hospital, stopped at a
light, went stiff at the wheel when his brain plugged up. His medical
partners each thought someone else was tending his high blood pressure.

Margo needed new lungs and heart, though her heart saw her through
implausible drama for her 60 years that wore her out. Ginny, stoically held
the reins through it all, hung on until her work was done

maybe you heard that Americans are no longer taller than Europeans
richer still and fatter but shorter and, except for tough women like Ginny,
we now don’t live as long so perhaps we’ve passed our apogee

I was on sabbatical during the O.J. Simpson trial, followed it avidly
loved Johnnie Cochran - If the glove don’t fit you must acquit. The verdict
struck me as a marker quite apart from its legal merit

the American Episcopal Church has long been the central player – richest at
least – in the worldwide Anglican Communion, even though we are tiny,
just over a million while some African Anglicans count in tens of millions

and now that we have ordained women and gay bishops and blessed gay
unions, some Africans have banded together with angry Americans to beat
up on the tiny American church, maybe even kick us out

when I was in Zimbabwe I once said to a courtly African friend that I
hoped Africa, as she began to prosper, would have learned from our
excesses and moderate her appetites

his eyes narrowed and he spoke in a biting tone I had never heard from
him. You Americans, now that you have helped yourselves, want us to
discipline ourselves. Well we’ve learned from you, we’ll have ours, too

if you have been following the woes of Zimbabwe, her president, hero of
their liberation, raping the nation, we westerners wonder why no African
leaders will even whisper criticism

as a young boy in the Philippines, among our bevy of servants, Melie, our
beloved cook, like a family member we said, and when Ambrosio, our
driver, showed us all she had stolen from us, we were nonplussed

Semper Eadem?

that must be what we thought when we sent the world’s finest fighting force
into a small disorganized demoralized Iraq, to enforce our intention that the
world stay always the same

the open niches in the columbarium at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Mt.
Kisco on Saturday looked like yawning chasms waiting to swallow the
compost of those I once counted on to keep my tenuous life the same

My step-son, Oakley, blogs weekly at oakleybrooks.com/blog from his unbalancing perspective on Sumatra at Banda Aceh, Indonesia

It has been more than a week since i made an entry here.

Life presses in. Especially when we're in Vermont where our old farmhouse and land requires attention irrelevant to life in our apartment on the beach in San Diego.

Over the weekend we went to my Aunt'e funeral in Mt. Kisco, New York. She was 94. She had wanted to see her great-grandson return safely fromn Iraq, and to know that her great-great grandson had been born healthy. When both were accomplished a few weeks ago she told the aides in her nursing facility (she had recently fallen and could no longer carry on the remarkably independent existence she had until then) not to bother to bring her solid food any longer.

She told them they could give her ice chips if she seemed dehydrated but she would no longer take anything else.

She was done.

It took her 12 days to die, which she did with the impressive dignity that marked her entire life.

On Saturday after the funeral the priest carried her ashes, and the ashes of her daughter, my cousin, who died a couple of years ago and whose ashes had been in her mother's closet, to the columbarium and placed them in the two niches. My aunt's went into the niche where her husband's ashes had been placed in 1973, and her daughter's were placed in the niche with her sister's who died in 1988. One row beneath them was the niche bearing my uncle John's ashes, who had died at 49 years old of liver failure after eating a bad batch of oysters at a medical convention.

I had not seen them, nor the many counsins of various sorts from the generation below mine, for decades. And what got stirred in me was the thrill of seeing my blood kin, and the sense, as I read the news of the Palestinian strife and of the ongoing violence in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe, that tribal bonds may be the fatal flaw in the human DNA.

Freeway Fruit

I once bought strawberries from a lush crop that was
growing
in the median strip between lanes of a major
freeway
leading into the city of Chula Vista in southern
California

wondering what carbon monoxide might
provide
by way of an exotic flavor

after years of knee and lumbar challenging picking at
Dutton’s
something about freeway fruit unashamedly
appealed

but when we came home and found wild
strawberries
raspberries, blueberries, rhubarb, and cherry
tomatoes
doing their in(ground) decent disorderly dance
daring
to engineer their own fate where we had

meant many years before to manage
them
regiment them so they would stand at full dutiful
attention
orderly row upon orderly row like the
obedient
servants of our appetites we intended

we figured we’d best make friends or business
partners
at least, of these liberated Vermont
groundlings
who waited on no
man

(the Chula Vista strawberries were perfect over French vanilla ice cream)

Yesterday when I took the dog out for his morning business the temperature was 38º. As I write this the temperature is 88º.

Our internal thermostats must be pretty sophisticated.

But what about our internal devices that detect other sorts of big change and adjust our bodily responses?

Chris Hedges had written a book - title escapes me at the moment - in which he suggests, from personal experience, that war is a necessary part of the human panoply because it provides the ultimate expression of meaning.

It gives us a rush we can't resist.

He stands in a long line who say this. Jimmy Carter was ridiculed for suggesting that somehow we needed to find a way to make conserving energy provide as big a buzz as war. Of course Jimmy Carter was trying to find some rational, reasonable way to seduce our kind into wanting to preserve ourselves rather than do ourselves in.

I wonder if we are the only species with a capacity for boredom? I know we project that temperment onto our dogs sometimes, but I doubt it's true. Our dog seems prefectly content to lie still and sleep until we suggest a walk. Then he is a bundle of kinetic energy. But he doesn't ever seem to need some artificial stimulus to stave off depression, or ennui.

Perhaps it is some wiring that got crossed in the evolutionary process, that we seem to need this terror/thrill experience, even when it is clearly self-defeating.

I remember a friend who spent a large portion of her adult life in Africa saying that when she is in Africa she is content, lacks for nothing. But as soon as she sets foot in this country she resents anyone who has a more expensive car than she does. She spent hours in therapy to understand and/or exorcise this, but she never managed. So instead she was careful where she spent time, knowing how she responded to different settings.

Perhaps afluence is the cancer in our species. Perhaps our avarice cannot be quelled unless we curb our standard of living, either of necessity or by choice.

The choice of violence - which every politician and every generation says it will not surrender to - is seemingly more addictive than drugs or alcohol.

Don't you wonder what happened to whatever regulating mechanism might have been built into our kind to counter this?

Cosmos, our 5 year old Norfolk terrier, has changed his bowel habits. For his entire life he has pooped twice a day, on his walks after his morning and evening meals. My wife teased me the couple of times he failed to produce on schedule - and friends whose dogs run loose in their isolated woods think I am nuts to even know his bathroom habits - but both times it turned out he had issues. Once it was Giardia that required medication.

But the real issue is my wanting the comfort of a predictable and dependable routine. I count on it for my own personal habits and I want the same for my dog.

It is true that we all change - I don't think I paid particular attention to all this until I was somewhere around 60 years old.

But I do now.

My male friends and I laugh about the subjects that occupy us now. Our bowel habits, our joint aches, tracking the prostate. Remember when we used to lie and brag about our awesome sex lives?

Well, there is something quite fun about all this once you get over embarrassment about aging and its discontents. We were in fact largely lying - at least I was - about our exploits in those days when we still harbored hopes of conquering the world. We aren't lying now, because we know it would make us look ridiculous. So we laugh and talk honestly about what our lives are like. Pretty nice. Freeing.

Remembering back to the four years I spent at a church in Wasington, D.C. across the street from the White House. Years 29 through 32 for me and sitting looking out my office window at the White House gave me goose bumps for the first six months. Then I began to be anxious about where I fit in the Washington pecking order.

It was doubly confusing because I was a liberal Democrat, had strong anti-war credentials and had marched in civil rights demonstrations. And the people across the street - Nixon's people - had set their agenda to undo everything people like me had been working for.

A friend who worked in the White House teased me years later about, despite making no bones about what I thought of the Nixon administration, never turning down an offer to have lunch in the White House mess. And rub elbows with the very people I was against. A couple of times I even played tennis on the White House tennis court. I remember changing my clothes in the locker room in the basement, and Dwight Chapin, the President's appointments secretary, watching me unsnap my clerical collar, said to my friend, "So it's come to this?"

Which - circuitously - brings me to Scooter Libby.

It's an inept comparison because Libby has been a major player in the Washington big leagues for some time. But even so, he clearly was part of that tough-guy scene, working to keep his tough-guy credentials. Whether he thought he would be protected I can't say. But he has - as the whole world knows - taken the fall for at least the Vice-President, if not the President.

Perhaps the judge gave him that harsh sentence hoping it might smoke out some of the others. Perhaps it will.

Someone - many someones - ought to be held accountable for the myriad offenses this administration has commited. Starting with the war itself and certainly going through the torture and general dismissal of international law and the rules of war.

But to let Scooter Libby bear the burden is a travesty.

Should Bush pardon him? If he has a shred of honor left in him - which I doubt - he should. We all will understand, no matter what he would say in the pardon, that he is doing it because Libby was doing the bidding of the administration.

No one has yet even addressed the bedrock issue that underlies the war and our refusal to abide by the ordinary conventions of international life like global climate change.

That issue is whether it is right - or even a good idea - for this country to use its undeniable primacy of power to bully the rest of the world into adopting our agenda? The so-called neocons clearly saw Bush's election, and then the terrorist attacks of 9/11, as their chance to turn aside all doubts about the US doing what it must to dominate the world.

Perhaps they really believe we need to kill the Muslims before they kill us. If so, human civilization is pretty certainly doomed.

We haven't had the debate yet. Likely we never will. It's too scary to talk about in any open forum.

In the meantime, putting Libby in jail is tilting at an irrelevant windmill.

While the Iraq parliament debates a bill that could take the issue of our occupation off our political agenda, the candidates of both parties are beginning to talk about what is really pressing in on daily life for Americans, health care.

An aside: The Iraq parliament is debating a bill which would require the Prime Minister to consult them before renewing the UN mandate under which we justify keeping our troops there. It seems unclear whether the Prime Minister can or will veto it, but they may have the votes to override such a veto. Wonderful irony that the people we said we were saving might kick us out.

So, if we can turn our eyes from the carnage we have caused, what about the care of Americans in this country. John Edwards and Barak Obama have both offered what they claim to be comprehensive plans for overhauling our broken system.

What are we to make of the fact that we pay more for health care as a percentage of GDP than any other so-called developed country, and have a higher infant mortality rate and lower age expentacy than most?

In part I suspect it harkens back to the days when we all had pretty cheap health insurance - usually offered through our job, often at no cost to us - and we became used to getting extravagant medical attention without any apprent consequences to our own pocket books.

The first time I became aware of the issue was when I was rector of a large parish and the vestry, the lay governing body, suggested the time had come to ask the church employees to pay for some portion of their insurance. I was outraged. How could they suggest such a thing? I took it as a matter of natural rights that people got medical care as a part of their job.

The vestry members had to educate me, pointing out that we were then - in 1988 - paying almost $10K a year for just my family's health insurance. And my salary was something like $50K a year. So my health care was equal to 20% of my salary.

With the rising cost of health care the old notion of its being an inalienable right - something we never explicitly decided but took for granted - began to slip away.

Though there are many more reasons for the American automobile manufacturers to have lost their place at the top of the world's auto producers, that GM paid out some $1500 per car for health care, had become a staggering burden.

Because Hilary Clinton still smarts from being slapped down when she tried to become health czar at the start of her husband's administration, she has been reluctant to step forward with a clear and specific plan now. Her opponents for the nomination have exploited her squeamishness by coming out with their own.

I have now been on Medicare - with a great supplement through the Church Pension Fund - for two years, and it is the best health insurance I have ever had. And it is clearly wildly expensive, to the taxpayer who foots the bill for the insurance, and to the doctors who accept a radically discounted fee for service.

Whether this model will prevail is impossible to know now. What we can know is that we will either address the issue somehow - through higher taxes, through lowering our expectations of the kind of care we can expect, through some sort of triage like the Oregon plan that was meant to limit procedures to people as they grow older - or the issue will become a greater and greater burden and the cause of our falling further behind other countries.

I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one
hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult. -E.B.
White, writer (1899-1985)

****

At daybreak this morning I heard the ominous sound of running water. We’ve had broken pipes before and I lay still trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Just before I leapt from the bed to make a frantic search, I realized it was water cascading over the dam below our house.

The amount of rain has been biblical.

Last Thursday as we pulled into our driveway a bolt of lightning, followed instantly by a clap of thunder that shook the truck, shut down power in our house. Not an unusual experience here. We were about to go out to eat with friends and I figured it would be back by the time we returned.

But no. 10pm and no lights. I pulled out the rotary phone we keep for these occasions (when that was our only phone we had a party line) and called the electric company.

The village of Jacksonville was formed in the first decade of the 20th century for the sole purpose of establishing the Jacksonville Electric Company that generated power mainly from dams like ours. I don’t know when they turned to other sources – the foundations of the mills going downstream from our house are still visible. Jacksonville Electric just sold out to Green Mountain Power whom, so I am told, has been sold to a company in California.

The answering service required prompts which a rotary phone can’t do. We also have an old Princess phone with push buttons, so I called on that. After a series of prompts I finally roused a lady who, when I gave my name, phone number and location, told me she couldn’t locate us on her grid.

Although somewhat comforted by her Yankee twang that reassured me she was in our region and not in Asia, in the past I had always known the voice on the other end. When I was finally able to explain, she said they had a crew nearby. They were working on it and she would call me when they finished to make sure we had power. She never called back.

Three phone calls later – the last at 3:30am, she promised we were next. At 5 two guys pulled up, leaned a 25 foot pole against the telephone pole, pulled down the fuse, attached a new one, and voila! Power.

I said something about wondering what it would be like if we still generated power from our dam. One of them looked at me the way I remember being looked at by rednecks during civil rights days.

You know, he said, there are actually some idiots in this Communist state who are seriously considering that? Turns out he lives in neighboring New Hampshire where there is no income tax, no helmet law, no seatbelt law, and, as the state motto boasts, you Live Free or Die.

And where Hilary Clinton, Barak Obama, John McCain, Rudy Guiliani and scores of other presidential wannabes are spinning efforts to seduce them.

Well, Cosmos has had his Vermont baptism. As we walked in the woods last week Lacey saw him scurrying back shaking his head as if he had been stung. She spotted a fat porcupine waddling off and realized that Cosmos’ mouth, nostrils and chest were decorated with scores of quills.

It was a shocking site, this canine St. Sebastian, and after vet hours. Someone told us of a vet in nearby Marlboro. We called her and, before we could finish explaining, she suggested we come right over.

Trudy’s practice, in a sugar shack, is the equivalent of generating power off our dam. In shorts and a tee, she took one look at our 11 lb terrier, smiled and said, You were a brave little guy, weren’t you? Waiting for the anesthetic to take effect she answered several calls from others with animals in distress. As she pulled over 25 quills from sleeping Cosmos – he still flinched when she pulled the darts set deep in his chest – she spoke with another person whose dog had a similar afternoon.

Cosmos skipped supper, but the next morning he was his old self, discovering on his morning rounds that the game wardens had missed a nest and one of the pairs of Canada geese has three chicks. He flushed them but didn’t follow them into the pond.

The change from California to Vermont is arresting. The phone just rang and a voice with a lilting accent from India said he was doing a survey of fast food restaurants in our area. I laughed and said there aren’t any.

None? he asked. Not within 25 miles, I explained. Well, when you travel do you eat in fast food restaurants? Never. He thanked me and hung up.

I wondered if he or the lineman who replaced our fuse might report us to whatever today’s version of the old House Unamerican Activities Committee might be.

Looks like rain; better run and take the laundry off the line.

My step-son, Oakley, is writing a wonderful weekly blog from Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where he and his wife Hayley are living and working. oakleybrooks.com/blog

I have been getting email from a reader of my weekly letter - Zone Notes - who is a physician from another country, and who is unhappy that, instead of making positive and creative suggestions about how to make the world better - like calling for building nuclear power plants and promoting his treatment for burn victims - I ruminate and equivocate.

It must be frustrating for people like him. He not only is from another culture, eastern Europe, and another generation, he is in his 80s, but he is a physician. He has given his life to intervening and improving the human lot.

Me?

I am of ther 60s, drawn to irony and contemplation. Along with free love.

My attraction to religion - the Christian religion in particular, but looking back it could have been any religion - was the radical idea of acceptance. My favorite expression of it is unconditional love.

In all its forms.

If God is love, and God is in charge, then love rules.

I was charged with preaching license by more than a few. And I pleaded guilty to the charge.

In fact, now that the particulars of religion no longer hold much fascination for me, the dynamic behind them do more than ever. Especially now that we have all seen what can be made of religion by those who wish to dominate others.

The militant atheists, while their ferocity makes them seem all too similar to the angry fundamentalists they attack, have my sympathy in their anger at the unnecessary harm religionists have caused.

How it now looks to me is that we humans have almost literally reproduced the myth of Narcissus. Becoming mesmerized by our own reflection, we see in it the purpose of the universe. So we interpret the whole sceme in terms of what most benefits our own species.

Fair enough.

The virus and the bacteria do the same. We arrive in this world with some sort of drive to reproduce and perpetuate ourselves. The smaller organisms, which have been here eons longer than we, seem to be particularly good at it. Perhaps because, to torture the metaphor, they do not cling to the way things have been. They are not only willing but seemingly eager to change and adapt. Which is why anitbiotics are eventually fruitless.

But we fall in love with our reflection and search for ways to freeze it. One literal example; surgery to remove sings of aging. Organized religion is not the only program for attempting that impossible and self-defeating proposition. But it may be the oldest and most pervasive.

Religion need not be like that. Not if you ae a child of the 60s and regard religion as the promise that all will be well. Not that we will rule the earth, or live forever. But that being here is very cool. And when the time comes we will make elegant compost for what follows.

Perhaps you can see why the good doctor keeps ragging on me to do something positive.

We were without power for 12 hours the other day. And night. Beginning at 4pm.

Lightning struck the line somewhere and speeded its way to our pole where it burned out the fuse and turned us to darkness.

Was rather nice for the first few hours. Quiet. The phone answering machine wouldn't work but we have an old rotary phone and it worked. When we first moved into this house in 1981 that was the only phone. And we were on a party line. Anyone out there remember party lines? You picked up your phone and if, instead of a dial tone you heard a voice speaking, you hung up and tried again later.

When it began to get dark and still no power we realized we were going to have an early bedtime. We wondered what it would be like if this were February when it gets dark at 4:30? We got into bed around 9. No reading ourselves to sleep that night. I dropped off, but kept waking and looking over to see if the digital dial on the bedside clock was lighted.

Then my mind began working me over. Was the food in the refrigerator going to spoil? And did I remember to unplug both computers in case there was a surge when the electricity came back on? The're both on surge protectors but I have heard many stories about computers being done-in despite protection.

So I began calling the electricity company.

Our old company had recently sold out to Green Mountain Power, and someone later told me that Green Mountain Power was recently bought by a company in California. When I followed enough prompts I actually got a live voice, a woman some say is in NH, some in Massachusetts. She didn't buoy my confidence by asking several times to repeat where we live. She said she couldn't find us on her grid. When she told me they had a crew on Gates Pond Road I told her that I was looking out on Gates Pond Road from my bedroom. That didn't seem to impress her. She promised to call me when her crew had fixed the problem, to make sure our power was back on.

Two hours later I called back and got the same lady who asked me all the same questions a second time. At least I was pretty sure she wasn't in India.

Finally, after two more calls, a truck and a SUV pulled up in front of our house at 5am. I went out and chatted with the men who told me they had learned of our plight only an hour or so earlier. When I told them how often I had called and how long we had been without power they said I should complain. I said I had and that I was again, to them.

One guy leaned a 25 foot yellow pole up against the telephone pole, unhitched something, brought it down, put a new piece of wire on, lifted in back into place, and the lights came on in our house. The whole thing took no more than five minutes.

He held up a piece of wire twisted into a triangular shape. "Here's your problem," he explained. Looked like a nonedescript piece of wire to me. He explained it was a fuse. When I said it didn't look like much of anything, he regarded me with the contempt a flatlander learns to accept here.

"Wadn't for this piece of wire," he said, "your house might be burned down by now."

As they were getting into their vehicles one of them called out, Thanks for your patience."

"I wasn't patient," I shouted back.

He stopped for a moment, poised, one foot in the truck, one still on the dashboard. "That's actually a throwaway line. I say that to everyone. Doesn't mean anything."

If you want to read some prett great writing about a great adventure, tune in to oakleybrooks.com/blog and read about my step-son and his wife's experiences in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.