Friday, August 31, 2007
Anger
I remember the first time someone told me they thought I was an angry guy.
It felt like an accusation. And I spent considerable energy denying it.
Sometime later I thought about it in a different light.
Angry?
Though I have no idea how one might measure whether a particular emotion holds a larger percentage of their emotional total than others, I think you could say I have at least my share of anger.
Much of it likely lies in early childhood events largely hidden from my best attempts to uncover them. My father never gave me enough approval. My mother was trashed for being an inward, thinking person rather than an activist. I had a hard time learning to read. I never did well in school and, because the standard tests showed I was bright, my teachers and my father assumed I was lazy.
Maybe I am.
I'm angry that I have never been able to get as good at almost anything as I thought I might. Writer, tennis player, lover, raconteur. How come I can imagine so much more than I can do?
I'm angry that we humans are turning out to be terrible at either taking good care of ourselves - fighting, polluting - or at living responsibly on the earth, having regard for other creatures and for the planet, and not only seeming to care for getting as much for ourselves as possible.
My anger is triggered by someone treating me shabbily, or even impolitely. I seem to have developed somewhere along the line the sensibilities of a 19th century southern gentleman. Even though I hate that archetype.
But you know what?
All that anger is, usually, balanced against the fun of being here.
It felt like an accusation. And I spent considerable energy denying it.
Sometime later I thought about it in a different light.
Angry?
Though I have no idea how one might measure whether a particular emotion holds a larger percentage of their emotional total than others, I think you could say I have at least my share of anger.
Much of it likely lies in early childhood events largely hidden from my best attempts to uncover them. My father never gave me enough approval. My mother was trashed for being an inward, thinking person rather than an activist. I had a hard time learning to read. I never did well in school and, because the standard tests showed I was bright, my teachers and my father assumed I was lazy.
Maybe I am.
I'm angry that I have never been able to get as good at almost anything as I thought I might. Writer, tennis player, lover, raconteur. How come I can imagine so much more than I can do?
I'm angry that we humans are turning out to be terrible at either taking good care of ourselves - fighting, polluting - or at living responsibly on the earth, having regard for other creatures and for the planet, and not only seeming to care for getting as much for ourselves as possible.
My anger is triggered by someone treating me shabbily, or even impolitely. I seem to have developed somewhere along the line the sensibilities of a 19th century southern gentleman. Even though I hate that archetype.
But you know what?
All that anger is, usually, balanced against the fun of being here.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Scandals
I can remember when a senior member of Lyndon Johnson's White House (I can almost remember his name, Walter Jenkins) was caught in a sexual encounter in a YMCA near the White House.
It scandalized the press - or the press pretended to be scandalized - and provided a lot of sicko jokes for the likes of the young me who hadn't yet stumbled publicly. (Sign on the White House lawn: Trespassers Will Be Violated).
In fact, even then, I thought it a sad witness to what happens to people who spend their best energy climbing the ladder to power and then try desperately to cling to it.
They screw up. Literally and figuratively.
I lose no love for the Republican Senator from Idaho who is looking more and more ridiculous in his efforts to explain his way out of having had the bad luck to proposition an undercover cop in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport.
When he says he isn't gay and never has been, who knows? Who cares?
Except he has advanced his career to the pinnacle of power by posing as a paragon of family values and virtue.
One could make the point that those who live by the sword die by the sword. And perhaps one might even find some satisfaction in seeing someone who has trashed others for sexual innuendo, be tarred with the same brush.
As for me, I feel for the guy and for his family. He may be a terrible husband and father. Or he may be prefectly OK.
But he has reached - overreached - and a liason in a public bathroom can be nothing other than an act of desperation.
For that I fault us all.
When the story of the George W. Bush presidency is written, long after I am dead, I suspect it will be seen to bear two distinct
marks. The first is his desperate wish to rise to the level of his father - in his father's eyes and in his own. The second is any number of what will then look like weird, if not scandalous, moments during his term, driven by his desperation and inability to become who and what he believed he ought and wanted to be.
That our Iraq adventure is the bloodiest mark is a tragedy of uninmaginable proportion.
The senator can retire and go home. George Bush must spend the rest of his days trying to wash the blood from his hands.
It scandalized the press - or the press pretended to be scandalized - and provided a lot of sicko jokes for the likes of the young me who hadn't yet stumbled publicly. (Sign on the White House lawn: Trespassers Will Be Violated).
In fact, even then, I thought it a sad witness to what happens to people who spend their best energy climbing the ladder to power and then try desperately to cling to it.
They screw up. Literally and figuratively.
I lose no love for the Republican Senator from Idaho who is looking more and more ridiculous in his efforts to explain his way out of having had the bad luck to proposition an undercover cop in a men's room in the Minneapolis airport.
When he says he isn't gay and never has been, who knows? Who cares?
Except he has advanced his career to the pinnacle of power by posing as a paragon of family values and virtue.
One could make the point that those who live by the sword die by the sword. And perhaps one might even find some satisfaction in seeing someone who has trashed others for sexual innuendo, be tarred with the same brush.
As for me, I feel for the guy and for his family. He may be a terrible husband and father. Or he may be prefectly OK.
But he has reached - overreached - and a liason in a public bathroom can be nothing other than an act of desperation.
For that I fault us all.
When the story of the George W. Bush presidency is written, long after I am dead, I suspect it will be seen to bear two distinct
marks. The first is his desperate wish to rise to the level of his father - in his father's eyes and in his own. The second is any number of what will then look like weird, if not scandalous, moments during his term, driven by his desperation and inability to become who and what he believed he ought and wanted to be.
That our Iraq adventure is the bloodiest mark is a tragedy of uninmaginable proportion.
The senator can retire and go home. George Bush must spend the rest of his days trying to wash the blood from his hands.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Lightning
We left the thrilling outdoor party with the great band and better finger food because the sky began to look ominous and a breeze came up.
We had left all the windows open in the car parked in the field down below and, even worse, all the doors and windows open in the house. When we left, only an hour earlier, the sun was shining and the temperature was in the high 80s and the humidity the same.
By the time we got to our car there were large heavy drops on the winshield, and on our heads. The size and weight drops that get your attention. By the time we got to the bottom of the road, the sky was a light show and the rain sheeted down the windhsield.
We assigned jobs as I drove - as fast as I dared under the conditions. Lacey will get the downstairs windows. Heather will get the laundry off the line. Carson will bring in the charcoal and matches off the back stoop. Brooks will get the upstairs windows. I will close the big windows on the screen porch. The dog will bark with excitement. The cat will be nowhere to be seen.
As we raced around doing all that, a simultaneous lightning bolt and crack of thunder brought us all together in the center of the house to make sure no one of us had been hit. The weird smell of oxygen having been ignited. The electricity - which has gone down several times this summer with far less provocation - flickered just long enough to cause all the digital dials to begin blinking, and then the lights came on again.
The storm came so fast. It's not as if we have never experienced this before. But our responses were those of people who - like primitive people - had no idea what was causing all this heavenly upheavel, and our fear was surely just as great.
Lilkely the reason we all talk about the weather is because - like God and one's pancreas - it goes on doing whatever it will, quite without our knowing so, until it doesn't.
Do you ever think about your pancreas? Or God?
I don't. Until one of them turns on me.
Saturday night that storm either circled back around us three times, or three different squalls came along in the space of an hour and a half. The third storm - after we had decided all was well and we had opened everything up and were beginning to enjoy the lower temperature and humidity and the breeze coming through the house front to back - arrived without any warning other than another near miss of lightning that shook the house even harder than the other one had.
I slept like a baby that night, almost without interruption. I do that only a couple of nights a year now.
I think it was because I felt totally in the arms of chance. Lightning either will or will not hit us tonight.
The next morning, bright sunshine and low humidity - I cleaned out the cat's litter box.
We had left all the windows open in the car parked in the field down below and, even worse, all the doors and windows open in the house. When we left, only an hour earlier, the sun was shining and the temperature was in the high 80s and the humidity the same.
By the time we got to our car there were large heavy drops on the winshield, and on our heads. The size and weight drops that get your attention. By the time we got to the bottom of the road, the sky was a light show and the rain sheeted down the windhsield.
We assigned jobs as I drove - as fast as I dared under the conditions. Lacey will get the downstairs windows. Heather will get the laundry off the line. Carson will bring in the charcoal and matches off the back stoop. Brooks will get the upstairs windows. I will close the big windows on the screen porch. The dog will bark with excitement. The cat will be nowhere to be seen.
As we raced around doing all that, a simultaneous lightning bolt and crack of thunder brought us all together in the center of the house to make sure no one of us had been hit. The weird smell of oxygen having been ignited. The electricity - which has gone down several times this summer with far less provocation - flickered just long enough to cause all the digital dials to begin blinking, and then the lights came on again.
The storm came so fast. It's not as if we have never experienced this before. But our responses were those of people who - like primitive people - had no idea what was causing all this heavenly upheavel, and our fear was surely just as great.
Lilkely the reason we all talk about the weather is because - like God and one's pancreas - it goes on doing whatever it will, quite without our knowing so, until it doesn't.
Do you ever think about your pancreas? Or God?
I don't. Until one of them turns on me.
Saturday night that storm either circled back around us three times, or three different squalls came along in the space of an hour and a half. The third storm - after we had decided all was well and we had opened everything up and were beginning to enjoy the lower temperature and humidity and the breeze coming through the house front to back - arrived without any warning other than another near miss of lightning that shook the house even harder than the other one had.
I slept like a baby that night, almost without interruption. I do that only a couple of nights a year now.
I think it was because I felt totally in the arms of chance. Lightning either will or will not hit us tonight.
The next morning, bright sunshine and low humidity - I cleaned out the cat's litter box.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
More Iraq
You can see it coming.
We're being set up for a report by General Petraeus and our ambassador to Iraq that says we have made significant progress since the surge - fewer American casualties, safer streets in the cities where we have concentrated our efforts - but there is a long way to go, particularly in the Iraqi political scene. And, having made the huge financial and human sacrifices, it would be a tragedy to abandon the effort now only to see the country sink back into a bloody civil war.
So, yet another "stay the course" message.
Even our own military have acknowledged that what needs to happen in Iraq cannot be accomplished through military means. We were told the purpose of the surge was to give the warring political factions the chances to work out their differences in a less dangerous and volatile setting.
Who would doubt that massive concentrations of the best trained and best equipped military in history -so long as it is in place - can quell an insurgency?
But without any sign of political progress among Iraqi factions (even President Bush wouldn't offer support to President Malaki when an American Senator called for his ouster from office), by what measure do we decide our military effort - no matter how effective at the moment - can resolve the conflicts among Iraqis?
It looks to me as if we are headed for a watershed moment in American political life, and I am not optimistic about the outcome.
The Congress will not have the stomach to shut down the war as we head into elections in which the likes of Rudy Guiliani will seek to outdo the Cheney/Bush scare tactics that worked so well until the most recent elections. One would love to think the Democrats won the election because the voters want out of Iraq. The voters want American soldiers to stop dying, and the report we will get in a couple of weeks will say those numbers look better.
The politicians fear we voters will punish anyone who makes our nation look like a loser.
The Republicans are betting that they can persuade us that they are more able and ready to face down our enemies than the Democrats. And, so far, the Democratic candidates have been very chary of looking as if they are any less bellicose. Even Barak Obama - the "new style" Democrat - felt the need to show his teeth when he said he would go into Pakistan after terrorists even if Pakistan didn't give permission.
Can an American politician open the question of whether we might change our entire stance toward the world, including how we deal with terrorism? Would anyone dare to suggest that Bush's tactic of declaring war on terrorism (no one has yet said quite how one wages war against an idea as opposed to a nation or alliance) and committing the vast amount of ther nation's human and capital resources to fighting that war, has proven itself a failure?
Likely not. But if not, the debacle this policy got us into will continue to drain our country of its once proud place in the world.
We're being set up for a report by General Petraeus and our ambassador to Iraq that says we have made significant progress since the surge - fewer American casualties, safer streets in the cities where we have concentrated our efforts - but there is a long way to go, particularly in the Iraqi political scene. And, having made the huge financial and human sacrifices, it would be a tragedy to abandon the effort now only to see the country sink back into a bloody civil war.
So, yet another "stay the course" message.
Even our own military have acknowledged that what needs to happen in Iraq cannot be accomplished through military means. We were told the purpose of the surge was to give the warring political factions the chances to work out their differences in a less dangerous and volatile setting.
Who would doubt that massive concentrations of the best trained and best equipped military in history -so long as it is in place - can quell an insurgency?
But without any sign of political progress among Iraqi factions (even President Bush wouldn't offer support to President Malaki when an American Senator called for his ouster from office), by what measure do we decide our military effort - no matter how effective at the moment - can resolve the conflicts among Iraqis?
It looks to me as if we are headed for a watershed moment in American political life, and I am not optimistic about the outcome.
The Congress will not have the stomach to shut down the war as we head into elections in which the likes of Rudy Guiliani will seek to outdo the Cheney/Bush scare tactics that worked so well until the most recent elections. One would love to think the Democrats won the election because the voters want out of Iraq. The voters want American soldiers to stop dying, and the report we will get in a couple of weeks will say those numbers look better.
The politicians fear we voters will punish anyone who makes our nation look like a loser.
The Republicans are betting that they can persuade us that they are more able and ready to face down our enemies than the Democrats. And, so far, the Democratic candidates have been very chary of looking as if they are any less bellicose. Even Barak Obama - the "new style" Democrat - felt the need to show his teeth when he said he would go into Pakistan after terrorists even if Pakistan didn't give permission.
Can an American politician open the question of whether we might change our entire stance toward the world, including how we deal with terrorism? Would anyone dare to suggest that Bush's tactic of declaring war on terrorism (no one has yet said quite how one wages war against an idea as opposed to a nation or alliance) and committing the vast amount of ther nation's human and capital resources to fighting that war, has proven itself a failure?
Likely not. But if not, the debacle this policy got us into will continue to drain our country of its once proud place in the world.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Death and Degradation
Today I received an email in response to a recent Zone Note in which the person said that if I write of dying again the writer thinks he will throw up.
I suggested that perhaps he might either bring something to throw up in before he reads my next Zone Note, or instruct his filter to refuse any messages that have the word death in them.
What he doesn't get - almost no one does - is that I don't regard the fact of death as either depressing or even bad news.
It is, rather, the opportunity to make headway in the lifelong quarrel with our ego's insistence that, unlike everything else in the universe, we are designed for immortality and don't really die.
It is this obviously wrong notion that is responsible for alienating us from our surroundings, causing us to think we are aliens here, weird and made of some substance altogether different from the trees, rocks and giraffes.
The fact that there was a time - before we were conceived, or born - when we weren't, and there will be a time when, once again, we will not be, is, once we have stared down our white-knuckled ego, the happy news that we are a part of our universe, related to everything around us. Not aliens. Here for a season.
Now, to carry the metaphor into even more uncomfortable territory, the world financial markets are undergoing what looks as if it could turn into a major meltdown.
Many of us - more than ever before in history, and more than half of all Americans - have a stake in the markets. My modest holdings are a key component - along with a pension and Social Security - of what pays my bills every month.
My fiancial advisor and several friends who work in the investment world have emailed me saying they think this correction, while painful, is long overdue and a good thing. What's more, they think it is a mistake for federal banks to be pouring money into the system to try to soften the blow.
I liken their view to my view of death being a welcome reality.
It returns us to a reality we thought too scary for us to face. Better to live with the denial until the reckoning which - as I suspect George Bush is doing with our Iraq adventure - will come, we hope, after we're gone.
As Woody Allen famously said, "I don't fear death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
The question, finally, is whether reality is preferable to some perfumed illusion that protects us from reality.
While I practice denial as much as the next person, my prejudice is that reality trumps illusion. When it comes to living fully, with the clutch out, being able to embrace reality is key.
I suggested that perhaps he might either bring something to throw up in before he reads my next Zone Note, or instruct his filter to refuse any messages that have the word death in them.
What he doesn't get - almost no one does - is that I don't regard the fact of death as either depressing or even bad news.
It is, rather, the opportunity to make headway in the lifelong quarrel with our ego's insistence that, unlike everything else in the universe, we are designed for immortality and don't really die.
It is this obviously wrong notion that is responsible for alienating us from our surroundings, causing us to think we are aliens here, weird and made of some substance altogether different from the trees, rocks and giraffes.
The fact that there was a time - before we were conceived, or born - when we weren't, and there will be a time when, once again, we will not be, is, once we have stared down our white-knuckled ego, the happy news that we are a part of our universe, related to everything around us. Not aliens. Here for a season.
Now, to carry the metaphor into even more uncomfortable territory, the world financial markets are undergoing what looks as if it could turn into a major meltdown.
Many of us - more than ever before in history, and more than half of all Americans - have a stake in the markets. My modest holdings are a key component - along with a pension and Social Security - of what pays my bills every month.
My fiancial advisor and several friends who work in the investment world have emailed me saying they think this correction, while painful, is long overdue and a good thing. What's more, they think it is a mistake for federal banks to be pouring money into the system to try to soften the blow.
I liken their view to my view of death being a welcome reality.
It returns us to a reality we thought too scary for us to face. Better to live with the denial until the reckoning which - as I suspect George Bush is doing with our Iraq adventure - will come, we hope, after we're gone.
As Woody Allen famously said, "I don't fear death, I just don't want to be there when it happens.
The question, finally, is whether reality is preferable to some perfumed illusion that protects us from reality.
While I practice denial as much as the next person, my prejudice is that reality trumps illusion. When it comes to living fully, with the clutch out, being able to embrace reality is key.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Herons
I wasn't going to get to this today, but then the great blue heron swept in front of my view and made her breathtakingly graceful landing over in the tall grass on the far side of the pond.
And I didn't want that to go unmentioned.
For the past few years the pond has been growing more and more vegetation earlier and earlier in the summer, until now it is almost covered with green. Many pond lilies with lovely pink blossoms. Tall grass growing along the edge. Some sort of algae - or maybe other types of green growth - everywhere.
We don't like it. I'm not sure why we don't like it, except that we love our water view and we don't see as much water - and reflection of the trees on the water - as we always have.
Last year Lacey called the Vermont Department of Natural Resources to consult. In Vermont when you call the Department of Natural Resources, likely as not the Commissioner of Natural Resources may answer the phone. Lacey explained our concern and he drove down a couple of days later, with an intern, and the two of them went out on the pond with Lacey, examined the pond and collected plants to take back to Montpelier to analyze.
In the meantime our daughter, a marine biologist, told us that ponds go through natural cycles, and it was likely this growth was part of that cycle.
In a couple of weeks the Commissioner called to say they had found no invasive plants and that all their samples led them to believe ours is a healthy and thriving pond. He did say that there are various ways one could go about reducing the plant material covering the pond, but no one could guarantee that wouldn't simply make room for other, more aggressive plants.
None of the animals that inhabit the pond or live around it or off it, seem affected.
Certainly the great blue herons who nest here every year still come.
But if we had our way we would do something to reduce or even eliminate the growth.
Lucky for the earth and the pond, we don't have our way.
And I didn't want that to go unmentioned.
For the past few years the pond has been growing more and more vegetation earlier and earlier in the summer, until now it is almost covered with green. Many pond lilies with lovely pink blossoms. Tall grass growing along the edge. Some sort of algae - or maybe other types of green growth - everywhere.
We don't like it. I'm not sure why we don't like it, except that we love our water view and we don't see as much water - and reflection of the trees on the water - as we always have.
Last year Lacey called the Vermont Department of Natural Resources to consult. In Vermont when you call the Department of Natural Resources, likely as not the Commissioner of Natural Resources may answer the phone. Lacey explained our concern and he drove down a couple of days later, with an intern, and the two of them went out on the pond with Lacey, examined the pond and collected plants to take back to Montpelier to analyze.
In the meantime our daughter, a marine biologist, told us that ponds go through natural cycles, and it was likely this growth was part of that cycle.
In a couple of weeks the Commissioner called to say they had found no invasive plants and that all their samples led them to believe ours is a healthy and thriving pond. He did say that there are various ways one could go about reducing the plant material covering the pond, but no one could guarantee that wouldn't simply make room for other, more aggressive plants.
None of the animals that inhabit the pond or live around it or off it, seem affected.
Certainly the great blue herons who nest here every year still come.
But if we had our way we would do something to reduce or even eliminate the growth.
Lucky for the earth and the pond, we don't have our way.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Crash
We just had a bird battle over the pond a few minutes ago.
A flurry of dive-bombing smaller birds chased a hawk that must have been threatening their nests. Although I would have thought their young would be grown and flying off on their own by now. The Canada goslings are.
But there were so many different species hounding the hawk that there must have been serious business out there.
All the while the pair of mating blue heron majestically circled the pond and settled gently down on the far side where they nest every year, seemingly unconcerned about the turmoil the rest of their kind was going through.
I watch all this, fascinated, but largely ignorant, free to imagine and project whatever I choose onto the behavior of a species I live close to but know little about.
The same could be said for the financial markets. Since I was in my late teens, when my father gave me a couple of shares of General Electric stock - hoping I might become a good investor - I have been a participant in a realm which sustains me and about which I am as ignorant as I am the life that goes on around the pond by our house.
I tried to be as candid as possible with my financial advisor as I approached retirement, knowing I was going to need that invested money to carry me from the end of my earning days to my end. He listened and I think he understood when I said I don't need to beat the market, I have no interest in getting rich, but I am hoping to be able to live decently - if simply - for whatever time remains to me.
He insisted that I make the effort to understand at least in a rudimentary form how investments work. Much as my doctor had insisted that I learn something about cholesterol when he prescribed a statin.
And I have. Or at least I have become familiar enough with the vocabulary of those disciplines to carry on what - I hope - makes me sound as if I have some sense of how it all works.
I used to go into a serious decline when a day of reckoning comes, like yesterday's, when the Dow dropped nearly 400 points.
Now that I am old and have lived through a few of these, I comfort myself that the sky is not falling.
Not because I understand what will keep it from falling. It's because I now simply choose to believe it isn't. Not this time.
Remember Archie Bunker, when something seemingly catastrophic happened, would cry out,. "This is the big one, Elizabeth!"
When I ran my truck into a tree last year I had one of those, "This is the big one, Elizabeth," moments before I realized I was likely going to survive this one. But weird kinetic memories - of the sound, the smell, the feel - of that accident come to me at odd moments, and I am visited by a full-bodied understanding that , one day, it will be the big one.
Hoping it isn't today.
A flurry of dive-bombing smaller birds chased a hawk that must have been threatening their nests. Although I would have thought their young would be grown and flying off on their own by now. The Canada goslings are.
But there were so many different species hounding the hawk that there must have been serious business out there.
All the while the pair of mating blue heron majestically circled the pond and settled gently down on the far side where they nest every year, seemingly unconcerned about the turmoil the rest of their kind was going through.
I watch all this, fascinated, but largely ignorant, free to imagine and project whatever I choose onto the behavior of a species I live close to but know little about.
The same could be said for the financial markets. Since I was in my late teens, when my father gave me a couple of shares of General Electric stock - hoping I might become a good investor - I have been a participant in a realm which sustains me and about which I am as ignorant as I am the life that goes on around the pond by our house.
I tried to be as candid as possible with my financial advisor as I approached retirement, knowing I was going to need that invested money to carry me from the end of my earning days to my end. He listened and I think he understood when I said I don't need to beat the market, I have no interest in getting rich, but I am hoping to be able to live decently - if simply - for whatever time remains to me.
He insisted that I make the effort to understand at least in a rudimentary form how investments work. Much as my doctor had insisted that I learn something about cholesterol when he prescribed a statin.
And I have. Or at least I have become familiar enough with the vocabulary of those disciplines to carry on what - I hope - makes me sound as if I have some sense of how it all works.
I used to go into a serious decline when a day of reckoning comes, like yesterday's, when the Dow dropped nearly 400 points.
Now that I am old and have lived through a few of these, I comfort myself that the sky is not falling.
Not because I understand what will keep it from falling. It's because I now simply choose to believe it isn't. Not this time.
Remember Archie Bunker, when something seemingly catastrophic happened, would cry out,. "This is the big one, Elizabeth!"
When I ran my truck into a tree last year I had one of those, "This is the big one, Elizabeth," moments before I realized I was likely going to survive this one. But weird kinetic memories - of the sound, the smell, the feel - of that accident come to me at odd moments, and I am visited by a full-bodied understanding that , one day, it will be the big one.
Hoping it isn't today.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
President Petraeus
All the news coming out of Iraq these days - at least the news from the administration that is, after all, in charge of our part in this war - is about General Petraeus.
When President Bush (it is gettin harder and harder for me to refer to him using this honorarium, even though I am commited to treating the office he holds with dignity no matter who holds it) is asked about the war he says we must wait for the report General Petraeus will make in September. The President refers to it as a "progress" report.
But do you suppose any of us will actually make a new decision about the war based on this report?
The reality looks to be that the naming of General Petraeus - like the surge - is designed to distract and buy time. How many more rabbits can the President pull out of his hat to stall the day of reckoning beyond the last day of his term?
We are starting to hear scattered reports that the surge is "working." Working seems to mean there were fewer Americans killed in July than in the past several months, and that in some places where it was unsafe for American military to go, they are now going because they have cleaned out the insurgents.
In the meantime the Admiral who has been nominated to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has publicly said what reasonable people have understood for a long time. That no amount of military strength can resolve the issues we face in Iraq, because the issue is, finally, not military, but political and social.
Forty years ago I was hooted down in a debate with Bill Ayers, the Republican Member of Congress from Summit County, Ohio, when I tried to explain my view of the futility of our efforts in Viet Nam by making an analogy to our own Civil War of 100 years earlier.
Suppose, I suggested, you lived in a town in Maryland that kept changing hands as first the southern armies and then the northern, pushed each other back. Each time the propoganda officer of either side would set up a soap box in the town square and make a speech about why the towns people should support his side and not the other. Suppose the town was rather equally divided between supporters of the two sides, and there was a spirited debate each time either side left about which side had right on its side.
One time the southern side showed up with a compliment of Chinese troops who had come to shore up their effort. And, to push the analogy, suppose, in the battle for the town this time, one of your townspeople got caught in a crossfire and was shot by a Chinese soldier. As you stood in the town square and listened to the Confederate officer make his pitch, you kept your eye on the Chinese troops circling the square.
This time, when they left your town, even those who had previously supported the Southerners, said, I'm not going with the side that brings in those foreigners to fight our own guys.
President Bush, whether out of stubbornness, inability to face reality, or ignorance, has staked himself - and thus the rest of us - to seeing this Iraq adventure through to its end. Even though no one can say what that end might be.
And because he knows the country has joined the rest of the world in seeing the thing as a disaster that has no resolution other than withdrawal, he has posed, first the surge, and now General Petraeus, as new pieces of the puzzle. As if either of them addressed the fundamental issue; our inability to resolve an ancient political and social/tribal rivalry with even the best and most sophisticated military in history.
Pity General Petraeus - who has effectively been appointed de-facto President for this war - as he faces an impossible task.
When President Bush (it is gettin harder and harder for me to refer to him using this honorarium, even though I am commited to treating the office he holds with dignity no matter who holds it) is asked about the war he says we must wait for the report General Petraeus will make in September. The President refers to it as a "progress" report.
But do you suppose any of us will actually make a new decision about the war based on this report?
The reality looks to be that the naming of General Petraeus - like the surge - is designed to distract and buy time. How many more rabbits can the President pull out of his hat to stall the day of reckoning beyond the last day of his term?
We are starting to hear scattered reports that the surge is "working." Working seems to mean there were fewer Americans killed in July than in the past several months, and that in some places where it was unsafe for American military to go, they are now going because they have cleaned out the insurgents.
In the meantime the Admiral who has been nominated to be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has publicly said what reasonable people have understood for a long time. That no amount of military strength can resolve the issues we face in Iraq, because the issue is, finally, not military, but political and social.
Forty years ago I was hooted down in a debate with Bill Ayers, the Republican Member of Congress from Summit County, Ohio, when I tried to explain my view of the futility of our efforts in Viet Nam by making an analogy to our own Civil War of 100 years earlier.
Suppose, I suggested, you lived in a town in Maryland that kept changing hands as first the southern armies and then the northern, pushed each other back. Each time the propoganda officer of either side would set up a soap box in the town square and make a speech about why the towns people should support his side and not the other. Suppose the town was rather equally divided between supporters of the two sides, and there was a spirited debate each time either side left about which side had right on its side.
One time the southern side showed up with a compliment of Chinese troops who had come to shore up their effort. And, to push the analogy, suppose, in the battle for the town this time, one of your townspeople got caught in a crossfire and was shot by a Chinese soldier. As you stood in the town square and listened to the Confederate officer make his pitch, you kept your eye on the Chinese troops circling the square.
This time, when they left your town, even those who had previously supported the Southerners, said, I'm not going with the side that brings in those foreigners to fight our own guys.
President Bush, whether out of stubbornness, inability to face reality, or ignorance, has staked himself - and thus the rest of us - to seeing this Iraq adventure through to its end. Even though no one can say what that end might be.
And because he knows the country has joined the rest of the world in seeing the thing as a disaster that has no resolution other than withdrawal, he has posed, first the surge, and now General Petraeus, as new pieces of the puzzle. As if either of them addressed the fundamental issue; our inability to resolve an ancient political and social/tribal rivalry with even the best and most sophisticated military in history.
Pity General Petraeus - who has effectively been appointed de-facto President for this war - as he faces an impossible task.
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
The Fed
Do you follow the stock market?
Well, no, no one can follow this market. Its swings of nearly 300 - if you calcualte ups and downs the swing is 600 - points on consecutive days belies the old notion that the market predicts the economy six months ahead.
My father was one of those who - literally - put his pennies into the market, beginning when he was a young man just starting out in business. Though he never made a big salary, he accumulated wealth by investing in what we now call blue chip companies and then never touching the investments over the decades.
I remember interviewing for a job as pastor of a church in Cincinnati (I didn't get the job), and the head of the search committee who met me at the airport, said we needed to divert briefly to a retirement party for a man who had been a stock boy in his department at Procter & Gamble for 40 years. He had never made over $10,000 a year. But because he was a hard working and loyal employee, the company had granted him stock options over the years, all of which he had exercised and left to split and appreciate. He was retiring with 3/4 of a million dollars.
So, what are we to make of the market today? As I remember it was around the year 2000 that over half of all Americans had some investment in the market. Of course that included all the 401Ks and mutual funds, but it still meant that the majority of Americans were invested in the market.
Ironically it was also the first year since records were kept in which the average holding of an individual lost money over the course of the year.
Then everyone leveraged themselves into expensive houses, since the real estate market had proved a great investment. (I nearly wrote "bet.") I believe more Americans than ever are invested in the market today, and we know the blood bath the real estate market has become, particularly for people who chanced no interest or sub-prime or variable rate loans.
Today the market swung 100 or more points in both directions as it first waited and then responded to the announcement by the Federal Reserve that it was going to leave interest rates unchanged.
One has to sympathize with traders and brokers and money managers, as one must with national and international leaders. The flow of information is so instant that the news of the closing of an airport in a remote part of China will, within seconds be flashed around the globe on the internet and you can watch the world markets react. Ten minutes later, when word comes that the closing was due to a plane on the main runway that had a flat tire, the markets shift back.
In one form or another, everything I ow,n except for my house, is invested in financial markets.
Rather like counting on my heart carrying on beating while I take some sleep tonight.
I do understand that one night it won't.
But, surely, not tonight.
Well, no, no one can follow this market. Its swings of nearly 300 - if you calcualte ups and downs the swing is 600 - points on consecutive days belies the old notion that the market predicts the economy six months ahead.
My father was one of those who - literally - put his pennies into the market, beginning when he was a young man just starting out in business. Though he never made a big salary, he accumulated wealth by investing in what we now call blue chip companies and then never touching the investments over the decades.
I remember interviewing for a job as pastor of a church in Cincinnati (I didn't get the job), and the head of the search committee who met me at the airport, said we needed to divert briefly to a retirement party for a man who had been a stock boy in his department at Procter & Gamble for 40 years. He had never made over $10,000 a year. But because he was a hard working and loyal employee, the company had granted him stock options over the years, all of which he had exercised and left to split and appreciate. He was retiring with 3/4 of a million dollars.
So, what are we to make of the market today? As I remember it was around the year 2000 that over half of all Americans had some investment in the market. Of course that included all the 401Ks and mutual funds, but it still meant that the majority of Americans were invested in the market.
Ironically it was also the first year since records were kept in which the average holding of an individual lost money over the course of the year.
Then everyone leveraged themselves into expensive houses, since the real estate market had proved a great investment. (I nearly wrote "bet.") I believe more Americans than ever are invested in the market today, and we know the blood bath the real estate market has become, particularly for people who chanced no interest or sub-prime or variable rate loans.
Today the market swung 100 or more points in both directions as it first waited and then responded to the announcement by the Federal Reserve that it was going to leave interest rates unchanged.
One has to sympathize with traders and brokers and money managers, as one must with national and international leaders. The flow of information is so instant that the news of the closing of an airport in a remote part of China will, within seconds be flashed around the globe on the internet and you can watch the world markets react. Ten minutes later, when word comes that the closing was due to a plane on the main runway that had a flat tire, the markets shift back.
In one form or another, everything I ow,n except for my house, is invested in financial markets.
Rather like counting on my heart carrying on beating while I take some sleep tonight.
I do understand that one night it won't.
But, surely, not tonight.
Monday, August 06, 2007
Erratum
In the Zone Note I sent out today to something over 600 people, I cited a fact that turned out to be wrong. Not merely wrong, but one that has been circulating on the internet for 4 years. In fact it was true 4 years ago - when Mars was closer to the earth than it has been for hundreds of years - but it isn't this year.
What's more, after a reader emailed me about my error, I remembered having known this before.
This morning a friend sent me an email attaching a review of a play by Margaret Atwood being staged in Britain. I know a little of Margaret Atwood, and know that my friend knows a lot, but I didn't know why he had sent me this. I replied with thanks and a vague reference to my limited knowledge of her work.
He replied to my reply by saying he had sent the email to someone else and hadn't the foggiest notion how it made its way to me. And he is a man who has been involved in some pretty fancy cyber footwork with Google.
This in fact is one of the things I enjoy about cyber space.
Weird stuff happens. Maybe there's an explanation, maybe not.
With all the recriminations among Washington pooh baahs that end up as emails offered in evidence in congressional hearings and in court, one would think we might have all learned by now to assume anything we put into cyber space is in the public domain.
But who is that careful?
What's more, after a reader emailed me about my error, I remembered having known this before.
This morning a friend sent me an email attaching a review of a play by Margaret Atwood being staged in Britain. I know a little of Margaret Atwood, and know that my friend knows a lot, but I didn't know why he had sent me this. I replied with thanks and a vague reference to my limited knowledge of her work.
He replied to my reply by saying he had sent the email to someone else and hadn't the foggiest notion how it made its way to me. And he is a man who has been involved in some pretty fancy cyber footwork with Google.
This in fact is one of the things I enjoy about cyber space.
Weird stuff happens. Maybe there's an explanation, maybe not.
With all the recriminations among Washington pooh baahs that end up as emails offered in evidence in congressional hearings and in court, one would think we might have all learned by now to assume anything we put into cyber space is in the public domain.
But who is that careful?
Sunday, August 05, 2007
La Mancha
The amateur theater group in our valley in rural Vermont put on Man of La Mancha over the past two weeks.
I first read Don Quixote in Spanish II in college. At the time I found it funny, tragic.
The pivotal scene towards the end of the play when the doctor - costumed as the black knight so as to trick Don Quixote into jousting with him - holds up mirrors so Quixote is forced to look at himself as he really is, seemed quite different to me this time than it has the previous two or three times I have seen the play.
Quixote - whether because he suffered delusion or simply chose to play a noble role life never offered - makes the phrase "tilting at windmills" literal. He is a seemingly deluded old man playing a part from centuries before.
And most poignant, his encounter with a bar whore whom he sees as the princess he wishes to rescue. As he treats her with royal deference she keeps trying to make him see her for who she really is. He will not, or cannot.
Perhaps the big difference between seeing this play - done with remarkable skill and power by Vermont neighbors - as a 67 year old is that I see so much of my own life as heving been framed by choosing roles I hope would make me look more noble than I felt. Instead of finding Quixote ridiculous, I found him sympathetic.
And when his ruse - if that's what it was - was uncovered, I felt sad.
When he died - after having his illusions restored - in the arms of Dulcinea, his princess, I choked up.
Illusion and reality seem to merge as I get older. I hope I can still know when I am choosing, helping create my own illusion, so I am not suckered into believing my own press notices.
Last week I won third prize in a poetry contest sponsored by the Brattelboro Co-Op. A $25 gift certificate. So it isn't the Pulitzer. It will buy me more than a pound of those chocolate covered almonds that rival anything else I can imagine coveting.
My dreams of writing prose and poetry that touch people and provide an avenue into their (and my) mostly hidden psyches, that I may have once hoped might bring fame and fortune, have taken on their own reality. Albeit a reality of more modest scale.
And, God willing, I still hope to die in the arms of my princess.
I first read Don Quixote in Spanish II in college. At the time I found it funny, tragic.
The pivotal scene towards the end of the play when the doctor - costumed as the black knight so as to trick Don Quixote into jousting with him - holds up mirrors so Quixote is forced to look at himself as he really is, seemed quite different to me this time than it has the previous two or three times I have seen the play.
Quixote - whether because he suffered delusion or simply chose to play a noble role life never offered - makes the phrase "tilting at windmills" literal. He is a seemingly deluded old man playing a part from centuries before.
And most poignant, his encounter with a bar whore whom he sees as the princess he wishes to rescue. As he treats her with royal deference she keeps trying to make him see her for who she really is. He will not, or cannot.
Perhaps the big difference between seeing this play - done with remarkable skill and power by Vermont neighbors - as a 67 year old is that I see so much of my own life as heving been framed by choosing roles I hope would make me look more noble than I felt. Instead of finding Quixote ridiculous, I found him sympathetic.
And when his ruse - if that's what it was - was uncovered, I felt sad.
When he died - after having his illusions restored - in the arms of Dulcinea, his princess, I choked up.
Illusion and reality seem to merge as I get older. I hope I can still know when I am choosing, helping create my own illusion, so I am not suckered into believing my own press notices.
Last week I won third prize in a poetry contest sponsored by the Brattelboro Co-Op. A $25 gift certificate. So it isn't the Pulitzer. It will buy me more than a pound of those chocolate covered almonds that rival anything else I can imagine coveting.
My dreams of writing prose and poetry that touch people and provide an avenue into their (and my) mostly hidden psyches, that I may have once hoped might bring fame and fortune, have taken on their own reality. Albeit a reality of more modest scale.
And, God willing, I still hope to die in the arms of my princess.
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Collapse
Although I have crossed - what? Perhaps 10,000 - bridges in my life, I understand nothing about the physics, the stresses and strains that tug at them as I go from one place to the next.
And though a signficant piece of my living depends on income from investments - between my retirement investments and a few I have managed to build over the years - I honestly don't understand what makes them prosper or falter.
Several years ago Scripps Oceanographic Institute built a beautiful footbridge over the road so one can now walk down toward the shore from the aquarium without having to negotiate traffic. One of the best things about walking across it is feeling it give and sway with your own weight. I like that because I am confident - not because I know - that the engineers have figured the stresses properly and it is designed to swing, not unly under my weight, but when the earth rocks and rolls with the earthquakes we have in southern California.
But Lacey always asks me not to jump up and down. She doesn't like feeling the bridge move.
When the market drops nearly 300 points in an afternoon, as it did yesterday, I usually (note the word "usually") choose to believe my financial advisor when he tells me that this is a necessary shakeout of people who don't belong in this market, the economy is chugging along OK as it has been, and the market will rebound once it has shaken out the fortune seekers.
My heart seems to be pumping sufficient blood to sustain what I had planned so far for today, though I really don't know if there may be plaque or spasm waiting to bring its action to a sudden halt. I do understand that the heart is not a perpetual motion machine.
The recriminations about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis will be loud and long. Understandably.
If the market crashes and we have a worldwide depression - as some are predicting - the finger pointing will go on and on.
If my heart stops before dinner tonight it is going to disrupt more than the plans we have to eat with friends.
What seems most remarkable to me is that I have walked and driven over thousands of bridges (including one just below our house that, before it was replaced, was, literally, held together by guy wires) and made it safely to the other side for 67 years.
And, beginning with my father, who went to work out of college in 1935 at the height of the derpession as a stock boy in a grocery store in the south Bronx, and invested pennies in the stock options Procter & Gamble granted in place of high salaries, who passed along some of that stock to me beginning around 1965, despite all the intervening wars and recessions and market plunges, gas crises and random catastrophes, I still have enough left to live.
If you could follow that, you know what comes next; that my heart has now contracted some 2/3rds of the billion beats allotted to most hearts in a lifetime (without a hitch that I have noticed.).
No, nothing is forever. And most reliable systems, when they fail, call anguished recriminations from those of us who have grown so used to their working prefectly.
In a perfect world I suppose engineers would intervene to repair or replace every bridge before it failed. I'm not sure there is an equivalent for human hearts, though one day soon I fear they may be.
It is a good thing that we raise such a fuss when things on which we have depended collapse. It shows that denial is a merciful and useful weapon in the human defense against more reality than we can bear.
And though a signficant piece of my living depends on income from investments - between my retirement investments and a few I have managed to build over the years - I honestly don't understand what makes them prosper or falter.
Several years ago Scripps Oceanographic Institute built a beautiful footbridge over the road so one can now walk down toward the shore from the aquarium without having to negotiate traffic. One of the best things about walking across it is feeling it give and sway with your own weight. I like that because I am confident - not because I know - that the engineers have figured the stresses properly and it is designed to swing, not unly under my weight, but when the earth rocks and rolls with the earthquakes we have in southern California.
But Lacey always asks me not to jump up and down. She doesn't like feeling the bridge move.
When the market drops nearly 300 points in an afternoon, as it did yesterday, I usually (note the word "usually") choose to believe my financial advisor when he tells me that this is a necessary shakeout of people who don't belong in this market, the economy is chugging along OK as it has been, and the market will rebound once it has shaken out the fortune seekers.
My heart seems to be pumping sufficient blood to sustain what I had planned so far for today, though I really don't know if there may be plaque or spasm waiting to bring its action to a sudden halt. I do understand that the heart is not a perpetual motion machine.
The recriminations about the bridge collapse in Minneapolis will be loud and long. Understandably.
If the market crashes and we have a worldwide depression - as some are predicting - the finger pointing will go on and on.
If my heart stops before dinner tonight it is going to disrupt more than the plans we have to eat with friends.
What seems most remarkable to me is that I have walked and driven over thousands of bridges (including one just below our house that, before it was replaced, was, literally, held together by guy wires) and made it safely to the other side for 67 years.
And, beginning with my father, who went to work out of college in 1935 at the height of the derpession as a stock boy in a grocery store in the south Bronx, and invested pennies in the stock options Procter & Gamble granted in place of high salaries, who passed along some of that stock to me beginning around 1965, despite all the intervening wars and recessions and market plunges, gas crises and random catastrophes, I still have enough left to live.
If you could follow that, you know what comes next; that my heart has now contracted some 2/3rds of the billion beats allotted to most hearts in a lifetime (without a hitch that I have noticed.).
No, nothing is forever. And most reliable systems, when they fail, call anguished recriminations from those of us who have grown so used to their working prefectly.
In a perfect world I suppose engineers would intervene to repair or replace every bridge before it failed. I'm not sure there is an equivalent for human hearts, though one day soon I fear they may be.
It is a good thing that we raise such a fuss when things on which we have depended collapse. It shows that denial is a merciful and useful weapon in the human defense against more reality than we can bear.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Vacation
Perhaps you noticed that today's NY Times op-ed page carried not a single column by any of the paper's string of regulars.
It's August 1.
When I lived in Washington, D.C. people used to say the ideal time for the Russians to attack (dates my time there, but maybe more relevant again than it has been for a couple of decades) would be in August. Not because all the high government officials were on vacation - which they were - but because their therapists, to whom they turned weekly for solace and counsel, were on vacation.
If there is a month when most Americans take vacation it must be August. I used to when I had a day job.
Having been in New England for the major portion of my career as a parish pastor, I knew a lot of the parishioners were away during August, so it seemed a good time to do the same. And I took the whole month.
When I took a job in California and announced that I would be away during August, they were horrified that I would take that much time consecutively. I was caught flat-footed - as I was by so many things that contradicted my presumptions about life at the end of the American rainbow - because I thought Californians regarded all work as a necessary evil.
What I hadn't yet learned was the sensitivity Californians feel about their reputation as laid back, if not slackers.
A long time ago I learned that we Americans take less time off than any other of the world's people, with the possible exception of the Japanese. I know an architect who married a Japanese woman and moved to Japan where he was hired by a local firm. He told me that many of the architects actually sleep many nights under their desk. He didn't last long.
But friends in the beat-em-up financial world tell me - their voices dripping with scorn - that the Europeans will never be able to compete with us because they won't work hard enough. My wife, who is an interior designer, says all the fabric companies in France and Italy simply shut their doors during August.
I had been a parish pastor for maybe two decades before I would let myself think of it as a job rather than the definition of who I am. Likely that was in part because being a shill for God - whom no one has ever seen - required sleight of hand as subtle as that required of a hedge fund manager. So we were supposed to be both convicted of what others at best wondered about, and so zealous in presenting our case, that we would never rest.
It was a job. I rather liked it, but I also liked having time to choose for myself. And that is what I have been doing in the years since stepping down. And loving it. Writing to you.
Do we Americans work so hard because we love to work? Or because it distracts us from the really hard work of doing intimacy? Or because we hope it will make us rich enough that we won't have to work so hard? Or is is a habit, simply what we expect our life to be organized around?
In Washington, where business and life was conducted at dinner parties, there was a weird dynamic around who arrived latest. I remember a couple of nights when a member of Henry Kissinger's National Security Agency staff arrived after dessert. Dressed in business, not party clothes, he would rush in breathlessly in time for brandy and cigars in the drawing room. (Man, this really is dating me; I bet Condileeza Rice doesn't do brandy and cigars) We all understood this was because he worked the hardest and therefore was the most important person at the party.
Work is our measure of worth.
Alas.
It's August 1.
When I lived in Washington, D.C. people used to say the ideal time for the Russians to attack (dates my time there, but maybe more relevant again than it has been for a couple of decades) would be in August. Not because all the high government officials were on vacation - which they were - but because their therapists, to whom they turned weekly for solace and counsel, were on vacation.
If there is a month when most Americans take vacation it must be August. I used to when I had a day job.
Having been in New England for the major portion of my career as a parish pastor, I knew a lot of the parishioners were away during August, so it seemed a good time to do the same. And I took the whole month.
When I took a job in California and announced that I would be away during August, they were horrified that I would take that much time consecutively. I was caught flat-footed - as I was by so many things that contradicted my presumptions about life at the end of the American rainbow - because I thought Californians regarded all work as a necessary evil.
What I hadn't yet learned was the sensitivity Californians feel about their reputation as laid back, if not slackers.
A long time ago I learned that we Americans take less time off than any other of the world's people, with the possible exception of the Japanese. I know an architect who married a Japanese woman and moved to Japan where he was hired by a local firm. He told me that many of the architects actually sleep many nights under their desk. He didn't last long.
But friends in the beat-em-up financial world tell me - their voices dripping with scorn - that the Europeans will never be able to compete with us because they won't work hard enough. My wife, who is an interior designer, says all the fabric companies in France and Italy simply shut their doors during August.
I had been a parish pastor for maybe two decades before I would let myself think of it as a job rather than the definition of who I am. Likely that was in part because being a shill for God - whom no one has ever seen - required sleight of hand as subtle as that required of a hedge fund manager. So we were supposed to be both convicted of what others at best wondered about, and so zealous in presenting our case, that we would never rest.
It was a job. I rather liked it, but I also liked having time to choose for myself. And that is what I have been doing in the years since stepping down. And loving it. Writing to you.
Do we Americans work so hard because we love to work? Or because it distracts us from the really hard work of doing intimacy? Or because we hope it will make us rich enough that we won't have to work so hard? Or is is a habit, simply what we expect our life to be organized around?
In Washington, where business and life was conducted at dinner parties, there was a weird dynamic around who arrived latest. I remember a couple of nights when a member of Henry Kissinger's National Security Agency staff arrived after dessert. Dressed in business, not party clothes, he would rush in breathlessly in time for brandy and cigars in the drawing room. (Man, this really is dating me; I bet Condileeza Rice doesn't do brandy and cigars) We all understood this was because he worked the hardest and therefore was the most important person at the party.
Work is our measure of worth.
Alas.
