He's Back!

I am too old to be a purist.

As a young man I was active in the anti-Viet Nam War movement and in the struggle for civil rights. I often dropped support for politicians who had been allies when they modified their positions in ways I thought sold out their principles.

I have since faced my own share of compromises and know life is not clean nor pure.

Once, shortly after I moved from a church in Akron - where I had been President of the Summit County Committee for Peace in Viet Nam - to a church in Washington, D.C. across Lafayette Park from the White House, a group of Akron friends who had come to Washington for the March on the Pentagon were with me after a candlelight vigil in front of the White House.

As we were breaking up to leave late at night, I went around and blew out the candles that had been stuck between the columns on the front porch of the church.

One of my friends was aghast. "Look at that; just a few months in Washington and he already cares more about property than principle."

I have been waiting for Barack Obama to begin signaling that he is not the radical liberal John McCain and the Republicans will certainly try to paint him between now and the election.

But I hv been unsettled by three moves since he gained the nomination, that leave me shaken about just how able or willing he is going to be to hang onto just the basic differences many of us are so profoundly hoping he represents.

His decision to support the exonerating of any possibility for lawsuits against telecom companies who allowed government to listen in on their customers' conversations, without the legal authority to do so, is troubling, not only because of the systematic ignoring of law and civil rights by the Bush administration, but because, in supporting the bill, Obama used some of the same language Bush has used. "To protect against terrorists."

We al understand the first duty of government is protection of the citizenry. But Bush has made this the cornerstone for riding roughshod over the liberties that are the hallmark of America's boasts to the world.

The day after he secured the nomination Obama went before AIPAIC, the lobby for Israel that regards anything less than full support for virtually any Israeli move as heresy, and that has lobbied hard against a separate state for Palestinians, and gave a speech that was red meat for the most conservative backers of Israel. In the past Obama has shown empathy for the plight of Palestinians driven from their homes by the creation of Israel, and for a more nuanced stance toward the conflict without which there will never be any peace in the region.

And then, when the Supreme Court -, in a 5-4 decision, ruled against the death penalty for child rape, saying only a crime resulting in the death f the victim should receive the sentence of death, Obama came out in support for the death penalty for rape, saying he disagreed with the decision.

Not only was his statement gratuitous - he needn't have commented at all - but support for the death penalty for any crime has long been one of the signature issues for the most conservative Americans.

It may be that he was speaking his own true feelings about al these, which would be troubling in itself. But somehow it smacks of staff meetings in which his handlers - having polled the issues at hand - have told him what he must say.

If so, nothing will have changed in our sad political slide into cynicism.

geneticists were developing bugs that eat woodchips and
excrete petroleum. Harper’s List

My friend came over with his chain saw - I just never trusted myself with a chain saw – to help cut down the dead tree by the pond that has been an eyesore for several years. I would have hired someone – as I did to bring down the giant sugar maple by the road – but this cherry(?) looked of a size we could manage. So Louis came over. We surveyed the job, walked around, considered where we wanted to drop the tree – best along the bank, better move the canoe – though it leaned pretty much toward the pond. I marveled at how expertly Louis cut a notch on the side we hoped it might fall on, then set about the main task.

There she goes! Into the pond with a mighty splash, of a magnitude larger than she seemed standing up, thicker and heavier, too heavy for us to pull ashore with the rope we had tied around her girth for just this eventuality.

So Louis waded in and cut the first section, coating himself with sodden chips. I waded in to heave the heavy piece onto the bank.

For the next hour and a half he cut and I heaved, until the eyesore was a stack of cord wood and brush. Louis left. I hauled the brush to the burn pile, finishing at dusk. The logs are still down there. I spent the emergency reserve of energy to strip off my sopping clothes and leave them in the barn, eat a banana and drink a beer, stand under the shower long enough to clear the debris, stagger upstairs and fall into bed where I slept the sleep of the dead.




Flying I was flying really more like floating like

a blimp lighter than air drifting through doorways over moors

effortlessly

dream junkies will tell you flying dreams are about

control

if you are steering you are in

control

if not not

Which was I? neither merely drifting drifting without apparent

purpose

drone aircraft purpose? perhaps (unwittingly) seeking someone’s

sinister secret ?

perhaps

I was way weary so enjoyed

the view

The political turmoil in Zimbabwe has reached the boiling point.

Having suffered several arrests since he returned - after delaying his return because of credible threats of assassination - Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition candidate who defeated Mugabe in the previous election, and had his chef deputy arrested and charged with treason for daring to oppose Mugabe... having had scores of his followers beaten, tortured and killed... having had his most recent political rally invaded by ruling party thugs who beat up several people...Mugabe having boasted that a gun is mightier than a pen, so a simple ballot can never unseat him, and having said that God had put him in power and only God can remove him...Tsvanigrai finally decided last night that the ruling party wants not an election but war.

He has said he will not risk the lives of his followers any longer and withdrew from Friday's vote, and has taken refuge in the Dutch embassy.

Now what?

Clearly Morgan hopes at long last to arouse the conscience of the rest of the world. The Souther Africa Development Consortium appointed Thambo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, as the mediator in the matter, and he has fluctuate between doing nothing and claiming there is no crisis in Zimbabwe.

This is a post-colonial chicken coming home to roost. The only nation that has hinted at having the resolve to do anything is Australia, and their PM has candidly admitted that for a largely white nation associated with Britain, to intervene in an African nation, is impossible.

The Zimbabwean people, weary, beaten-down by poverty, starvation, abuse over the past decade as Mugabe has dedicated himself to the sole task of staying in power, show few signs of having the energy to foment a revolution. It took al the courage and moral fiber imaginable for them to show up and vote for the opposition.

Now what happens? The UN Security Council may have it on their agenda, but so far South Africa, that has one of the revolving seats at the moment, has blocked every attempt to bring it there.

And what are the options for the Security Council?

And I thought I was in despair over a president who chooses to ignore our laws to prosecute a war in Iraq as he pleases.

I must have written here before that I spent a sabbatical in Zimbabwe in 1984. My wife, and her daughter and son were with us the whole time (they attended the local government school, one in 1st grade, one in 3rd) and my three daughters came when school ended and spent the final six weeks.

There can be no doubt that it marked each of us in different ways for the rest of our lives.

As we watch the country go through its horrible times now, our hearts break and we fear for our old friends, many of whom we have keep in touch with over the years.

By any standard the Mugabe regime is criminal. If ever it is appropriate for the rest of the world to step in and rescue a people from the perfidy of their own government, this would seem a candidate.

But, aside from the usual diplomatic expressions of regret and anger, nothing. When one considers the billions (trillions?) spent since our invasion of Iraq, the gross unbalance of world attention and resources becomes monstrous.

Yet there is this vexing matter of those closest - notably South Africa - not merely standing aside as Mugabe and his henchmen wreak havoc in Zimbabwe, havoc so devastating that it is affecting the whole of southern Africa. Australia is the only country that has publicly hinted that it might physically intervene, and its PM said it would be impossible for a largely white nation to do that without the support of neighboring black African countries.

The only explanation for this is that Mugabe is the only surviving black leader who came to power by driving out a white colonial government. And the other black leaders do not wish to move against such an iconic figure. Let alone that everything points to Mugabe having lost the support of everyone in the country except those who are feeding at the same corrupt trough that has made him among the continent's richest people.

The solution seems equally as remote as the solution to the energy crisis that is not only threatening the globe's climate, but has now driven the cost of fuel beyond the reach of even middle and lower income groups in the USA, supposedly the world's richest nation.

In both cases the consequences of venial and short-sighted leadership have become unwelcome chickens come home to roost. In the case of Africa, the white west found it all too convenient to exploit people until the people rose up and expelled them (us) and everything that carried our scent. Now we are helpless even to help those who are being exploited at least as ruthlessly as they were under western colonialism.

Much like the so-called developed world that saw fit to consume energy all out of proportion to our place in the world, until such living could no longer be sustained.

Perhaps the optimism we have always had in times like these, that we humans are inventive and tough, will once again prove enough to bail us out.

Perhaps no.

I suppose any human being becomes obstinate - and maybe delusional, in denial - when something that person has carried on for a lifetime - as well as have others for many generations before - is threatened.

But what are we to make of our response to what we like to call the oil crisis?

1973 was the first time I had ever seriously thought about the fact that we had built an entire civilization on a substance that was not going to last forever.

Remember 1973? Gas lines, alternate days to buy gas? Fist fights at gas stations.

Yes, it was the beginning of the oil cartel, and they were manipulating the price. But that was because they were beginning to face the reality that the source of their fabulous wealth was not their own ingenuity, but the lucky fact that they happened to live atop the world's largest source of oil. And it wasn't going to last forever. So they were getting their money while they could.

American car manufacturers began making smaller, more efficient cars. Jimmy Carter went before the nation in a cardigan sweater, saying he had turned down the thermostat in the White House.

In the face of political pressure, and the inability to hold the cartel together, oil prices declined. And we went back to driving behemoths.

Ronald Reagan's first move the day he entered the People's House was to remove the solar panels Jimmy Carter had put up.

For billions of years living matter has died, rotted and been compressed deep into the earth's core. The sunlight absorbed by that matter is what we have been spending since the beginning of the industrial revolution. No one knows how much was down there, and no one knows how much is left.

What we do know is that we are depleting it and some day it will be gone.

President Bush and Senator McCain have called for beginning drilling in places previously considered too environmentally fragile, Anwar in Alaska, off the coasts of California and Florida.

I suppose we will do all sorts f things we otherwise would not have when our very existence is threatened.

But is a principled leader one who calls for a band aid to stanch a burst artery?

If John Kennedy could go before the congress and the nation and pledge the country's best resources, and call on every citizen to prepare to make a sacrifice, one behalf of putting a man on the moon in that decade, what's to keep a president from doing the same on behalf of discovering and developing renewable sources of energy?

Kennedy was motivated by the Russians putting Sputnik into orbit, threatening our primacy in world science (and perhaps military technology) in the Cold War.

We are talking scarcity that will erupt in unparalleled conflagration and perhaps extinction of our race.

Am I crazy?

From the first day of school you are cut off from life to make theories.
Taisen Deshimaru – Zen Master (1914 – 1982)

It is reported that John Foster Dulles, American Secretary of State, at a peace conference in Paris in 1954 to resolve the French war in Indo China, asked Chou en Lai, China’s Vice-Premier, what he made of the French Revolution.
Chou considered the question briefly before saying, “Well, it’s really too soon to know.”

A friend told me a Talmudic legend known as The 39 Just Men. No one knows who they are until, after their deaths, their lives are examined and it is determined that they shouldered so much grief in life that they were indeed among the 39.
Their role is to help God spread the travail that would have fallen to him alone to bear. If He had to do it by Himself He would have cried so much another flood would have occurred.

The day after Tim Russert died I came on a You Tube video of an interview Andrea Mitchell did with Russert’s doctor. She had a hard time asking the questions and the doctor, clearly a close friend as well as his doctor, struggled to keep his composure.
She asked him if there was anything that might have been done to prevent Russert’s sudden death. The doctor gave a lengthy description of his medical history and treatment, which included coronary-artery disease he said, using that smooth medical term, was well-managed. He told of Russert having been so pleased and proud of having gone over the top on a treadmill stress test in late April.
“I’d bet he would have passed a stress test with flying colors and hour before he died,” the doctor said. Then he paused, his eyes filled, he looked off into space. “One thing we have learned from this: life is fragile.”

On our way through Brattleboro to visit friends in Concord, NH, maybe a 180 mile drive, round trip, I filled up at the 7-11 where gas is almost always the cheapest. $4.04.9 that day. On the way back the price had, miraculously (and momentarily) dropped to $3.99.9 and, driven by mountains of irrationality, I stopped and filled up again.
So it was that for the first time ever, I knew exactly how much fuel we burned to see our friends and how much it cost.
7.278 gallons, $29.10. Another piece of futile information.
Lacey has discovered that Jasmine, who is eating and moving at half speed as she rounds the final turn, will take tiny pieces of pork loin from Lacey’s fingers. Before we turn in each night Lacey spreads a potassium paste on Jasmine’s front paw which the dignified old Siamese then spends the next several minutes licking clean. The idea is that this may give her failing kidneys a boost.
Last night, my first alone with Jasmine while Lacey is in California for a week of work, I consulted my instructions. Jasmine and I enjoyed pork loin (Cosmos settled for kibble, though I did drop a couple of pieces of pork), and I managed to get hold of her as she hunkered down inside the old porcelain sink in our bathroom - where she spends a good part of her day waiting for the faucet to drip - and slather her paw with the potassium.
In her prime she would have bitten me.

There may be something profoundly amiss in me – as a few of you have suggested over the years – that this inexorable odyssey provokes a kind of reverie in me.

For a lot of years I struggled to learn as much as I could about our comings and goings, hoping to catch a glimpse of what it all might mean. I’m not sure just when watching, wondering, became so rich it was enough.

When the Supreme Court decided the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush, I was bitterly disappointed and believed it was a terrible decision based, not on law, but on panic and expediency.

And I was rather relieved. I can imagine - had I been a member of the court - I might, with a heavy heart, have joined with the narrow majority.

And I thought the court above my particular concerns and point of view.

Now that the court has - by a one vote majority - upheld the Habeus Corpus rights of the prisoners who have been held for several years at Guantanamo Prison, conservatives - including John McCain - see fit to attack the court as dangerous to the safety of we Americans.

In what surely must be one of the most inflammatory dissents in the court's history, Justice Scalia has written that the decision will "almost certainly cost more American lives."

This is throwing red meat to those who hate the independence of the court.

I will forever regret the court's decision that cut short the count in the 2000 election, but I am glad there is a tradition that has held so far, that once the court has decided, no politician dare defy it. Al Gore refused to do anything more than say that he disagreed with and regretted the decision, but as an American he was bond by it.

The recent decision to grant those held in Guantanamo the right to a hearing in our courts confirms the most sacred notion that no one is above or exempt from the law. That means not only that President Nixon (and perhaps President Bush if Dennis Kucinich gains some purchase) cannot use even the vast authority of his office to do what the law forbids.

If the government can persuade a court to indict, and then jury to convict someone of doing potentially terrible harm, they may be punished s severely as the law provides. If not, not.

For as long as there has been an America, that has been true and perhaps our most distinctive birthmark. If it should ever cease to be so, America would cease to be America.

This morning, when one report said that Senator Clinton is going to "suspend" he campaign on Saturday, but keep much of her staff intact to preserve her "options," I nearly lost it.

What options?

I began to wonder if perhaps the exhaustion and bitter disappointment of having her initial inevitability turn into a close second place finish, had proven too much, and she had lost touch with reality.

It makes me very sad because I have always admired her and, until he signed the so-called welfare reform bill, considered her husband as the Democrat who gave us back our place at the table we had lost with the election of Ronald Reagan.

But - and I do recognize my limits as an aging white liberal - I take issue with those who seem angry that Obama's campaign somehow used latent misogyny to pull perhaps the biggest political upset in a generation.

I have never been enthusiastic about her being the Democratic standard bearer, largely because her high negatives have never come down. Yes, her supporters are true- believers, nearly a cult, but something about her, and I don't believe it is only her gender, pushes too many people's hot buttons.

But a year ago I couldn't see how anyone was going to unseat her. And I was prepared not only to vote for her, but to send money and make noise in her support.

What has happened is more generational than it is gender or race or even political.

She ran a great campaign up to the point at which she realized that she was going to be seriously challenged. Then she and her handlers, perhaps seeing Obama as this year's Howard Dean, made a series of strategic errors (errors in retrospect; when measured against the old rules they look like sound moves) that, incredibly, gave him the opening to squeak out just a few enough more delegates than she won, to win the nomination.

There were moments, especially after New Hampshire and then again in the past two months, when it looked as if he was going to fall short.

And there is no doubt that, at any moment he looked to have stalled shy of the numbers he needed, the Super Delegates were poised to give her their votes. Even those who were dazzled by this new young man, likely felt more comfortable with her as the candidate. They know her. They have worked with her. Even for those who may not like her, she is the devil they know.

Obama was born in 1961, the year Jack Kennedy was inaugurated. I'm still working to wrap my 68 year old mind around that. Now I know how my father felt when Jack Kennedy was elected. (But JFK was much closer to his age than Obama is to mine)

Obama is not only of a new generation, he is, like my children who are scattered around the globe, a citizen of the world.

It's a shame that she - or some other woman - couldn't have been the candidate four years ago. But this nomination is not about gender. It is about generation and whether we are ready to make that next step - whatever shape it may take - into the place our country has never been before.

When Barack Obama speaks of competing in a global economy it is not rhetoric it jibes with his view and experience of the world. Obama has raised eyebrows by saying he will talk face t face with our enemies. But for Barack Obama, sitting down with the Chinese premier or the Iranian or North Korean leader is of a whole other order than for George Bush or John McCain.

Or Blayney Colmore.

Lacey and I spent Christmas this year in Hanoi with our son and daughter-in-law who wanted a break from their strenuous life in Banda Aceh on the tip of Sumatra in Indonesia. For them Hanoi was a fun place for R&R. For me it was surreal.

They were more fascinated with my open-mouthed astonishment at walking the streets of that city that so recently symbolized our nation's primal struggles than they were at what we were all seeing in that remarkable city. 80% of the Vietnamese were born after what they call the "American War." Their booming economy - mom and pop operations dotting every street in the teeming city, and industrial parks sprouting in rice paddies - seemed normal to our kids and to the young Vietnamese running them.

When I asked our young guide how all these individual businesses fit with what is still called a Communist government and a managed economy, he smiled. "If I try to start a business before 1986," he said, "they would have cut off my head. Today they would give me a low-interest loan."

I must be a bitter disappointment for Hilary Clinton. But timing is everything in this life. And she had the bad luck to have timed out through no fault of her own.

There will be a woman president. Just not this year.

Of course it's a pipe dream. But bring on the pipe.

Before we descend into the inevitable gutter that characterizes the race for the White House, may we take a moment, Republican, Democrat, Independent, even Ralph Nader, and make a big fuss over the nomination of the embodiment of the American Dream?

Maybe you hate his politics and/or policies. Maybe you think he will get creamed by the old war horse.

But just for this moment, how about a big cheer for the evidence that the story we keep telling the world about the possibilites for even the least of these in this country to reach for the very top, has taken on flesh.

To echo his wife - sort of - today I am so proud to be an American.

Recently I was at a meting of retired clergy and mentioned having lived much of the first year or two after quitting, in a habitual state of panic.

A man I hadn't met before stopped me later and told me that is what his life is like. I didn't ask him how long he had been retired, but I did tell him that my panic had turned to a combination of creative energy and anger.

Creative energy that had been under wraps because it felt both unfair and dangerous to expose the depth of my uncertainty - which is the source of my creativity - when I was pastor of a congregation of people who signed on in hopes of having someone in authority reassure them that their panic and rage were unfounded. That I - the God person - had it on good information that the universe is dependable, orderly and fair.

And rage at my colluding with them in perpetrating such a bald faced lie, one we all knew was a lie, but agreed never to acknowledge.

This afternoon an email from a friend - about the trickster in 16th century Spanish literature - reminded me of an incident the year before I quit that has served as my model for what it means to claim one's own identity.

I was in Charleston, then still a shabby chic city, isolated on a peninsula, a faded and impoverished aristocracy hanging on to status that lost its power 100 years ago.

One day I read in the paper about a woman who had written a book about her life who was going to be speaking and signing her book at a local bookstore.

Born a hermaphrodite in Britain where, at that time, such a person was legally male, she had been raised as a boy. Te family moved to Charleston when the child was just shy of puberty. Though never having much money, their English background and accent gave them cache in Charleston where they lived in a big falling down house with a couple of servants. He read about the gender clinic at Johns Hopkins and, when e was of sufficient age, presented himself.

They examined him, told him he was biologically a more complete female than male, and offered him the chance to undergo the long, painful, rigorous process of becoming a complete woman.

She did that and, after completing the process, returned to Charleston where she married the old (black) family chauffeur and conceived and gave birth to a daughter.

Now she had written a book and I went to see and hear her.

She was old and worn out, bent over with osteoporosis, sitting behind a stack of her books. Her drop-dead beautiful daughter, maybe 30, was by her side.

I went up to her and said, "You must be the bravest, most determined person I have ever heard of, not only going through what you did to claim what you knew to be your true identity, but coming back to this deeply stratified city having violated every boundary it insists on."

She looked up at me, smiling an ice-melting smile and said, "I only hope your life may be half as exciting as mine has been.

I suspect she had no panic attacks.

The Democratic race for the nomination has now become as complex as it used to be in the days when I watched the conventions as if they were murder mysteries.

One never knew who the nominee would be until the delegates began to be polled on the next to last day of the convention.

1960, the Kennedy supporters were handing out tie clips with a mock-up of Lyndon Johnson's latest electrocardiogram imprinted on it. Not that any of the delegates knew how to read one, but the Kennedy people claimed that it clearly showed potentially fatal damage to the Texas senator's heart from his most recent heart attack. And the Johnson people whispered rumors that the young Massachusetts senator had Addison's disease and an adrenalin insufficiency (turns out to have been true) that could be fatal.

As the delegations were being polled, Bobby Kennedy was huddled in the back of the hall with several of the campaign staff trying to figure how the vote was going and whether his brother might get enough delegate votes on that ballot to go over the top. The collected wisdom among that group was that if he did not, he likely would begin to lose support on ensuing ballots.

A reporter with a hand held camera caught Bobby leaping over the backs of chairs as he rushed to reach the Wyoming delegation before the clerk called for their votes.

He had figured out that if they went unanimously for JFK they would put him over the top. He delivered that news - that they stood a chance to write history - and they quickly caucused just in time to reach a conclusion as the clerk called for their votes. The delegation leader cried out that the State if Wyoming cast its votes unanimously for the Junior Senator from Massachusetts and the next President of United States.

And he was.

I am what has been called a Yellow Dog Democrat, which means someone who would vote for a yellow dog before he would vote for a Republican. I believe in the historic role of the Democratic Party in fighting for fairness and equality and seeing to the well being of every citizen. I think there is an important role for a Republican Party that sponsors business and trying to keep government from either impeding those who have the drive to succeed and get rich, and that is a watchdog against government's inevitable tendency to grow fat and lazy.

An important role for a minority party, but a dangerous and potentially cruel role for the majority party.

But I have lost my emotions to the possibility of the Junior Senator from Illinois becoming the next President of the United States. Perhaps it is the thought of this man becoming our face to the world after the incredible debacle the incumbent has created for our once fine role among nations.

Whatever it is, it is. And if the Junior Senator from New York should manage, through Rove-like tactics - to wrest the nomination from him, I will join the ranks of those whom I deplored in 200 and 2004, voting for Ralph Nader.