Friday, January 30, 2009
Stimulus
You may have noticed that the "economic "stimulus" bill passed the House without a single Republican vote.
Depending on who you read, this was either the final suicidal gesture in a political party that has been working at self-annihilation for some time, or the first heroic sign that they are sticking to their principles as they prepare to retake the high road taken from them by an inept leader.
A third possibility - which reviews in Sunday's NY Times Book Review might support - is that, while both parties can't resist using whatever the moment offers for its own ends, neither, no anyone else, really knows what may best address an economic disruption unlike any seen before.
The only analogy I can come up with that might throw light on why this moment is unprecedented, might be if the entire internet were to collapse tonight.
You wake in the morning, turn on your computer, go to the internet. Nothing. Not so much as an error message.
Nothing. A blank screen.
I have just enough Luddite in me, and am almost old enough, to say good riddance. Let's go back to the much more manageable days of telephones, letters and waiting.
But not enough to seriously wish fr such a thing.
Because, just in the 13 years since I stepped down from my day job, the world - and virtually every piece of it - has become not only connected and interconnected, but has now put every system - financial, medical, personal, political, commercial - under the management of that system.
We used the term "global" before all this happened, because air travel, fax machines, satellites, had caused us to be more aware than ever of our sharing a single planet.
But the internet was instantly such a marvelous and magical instrument, that we gave ourselves to it without reservation.
What is taking place in Washington (you have heard the laments that the world economy is no longer centered in NYC, but in Washington) is a version of "step back four paces and punt."
In Sunday's Times several books on FDR were reviewed. Whichever side you are on of the current debate about whether the New Deal finally reversed the Great Depression, or prolonged it until the massive make work WWII became, all agree that when he began - bank holidays, multi-lettered public works programs, FDR was flying blind. He had no overarching economic theory on which he was building.
He even said, out loud, that he would try something and if it didn't work, he would abandon it and try something else.
Financial markets don't like this sort of uncertainty. At least they don't like it being so visible to the whole world.
As a lifelong Democrat and admirer of FDR and the New Deal, I hope whatever is done addresses some of the inequality and injustice that the past generation of plutocratic plundering has caused. I don't believe it is a good idea for the government to be the chief engine of commerce, just the employer and sustainer of last resort. But the playing field has been tilted toward financial people, and this may be a chance to redraw some of that.
But don't put too much money on any one plan or strategy right now, because an awful lot has yet to go down.
Depending on who you read, this was either the final suicidal gesture in a political party that has been working at self-annihilation for some time, or the first heroic sign that they are sticking to their principles as they prepare to retake the high road taken from them by an inept leader.
A third possibility - which reviews in Sunday's NY Times Book Review might support - is that, while both parties can't resist using whatever the moment offers for its own ends, neither, no anyone else, really knows what may best address an economic disruption unlike any seen before.
The only analogy I can come up with that might throw light on why this moment is unprecedented, might be if the entire internet were to collapse tonight.
You wake in the morning, turn on your computer, go to the internet. Nothing. Not so much as an error message.
Nothing. A blank screen.
I have just enough Luddite in me, and am almost old enough, to say good riddance. Let's go back to the much more manageable days of telephones, letters and waiting.
But not enough to seriously wish fr such a thing.
Because, just in the 13 years since I stepped down from my day job, the world - and virtually every piece of it - has become not only connected and interconnected, but has now put every system - financial, medical, personal, political, commercial - under the management of that system.
We used the term "global" before all this happened, because air travel, fax machines, satellites, had caused us to be more aware than ever of our sharing a single planet.
But the internet was instantly such a marvelous and magical instrument, that we gave ourselves to it without reservation.
What is taking place in Washington (you have heard the laments that the world economy is no longer centered in NYC, but in Washington) is a version of "step back four paces and punt."
In Sunday's Times several books on FDR were reviewed. Whichever side you are on of the current debate about whether the New Deal finally reversed the Great Depression, or prolonged it until the massive make work WWII became, all agree that when he began - bank holidays, multi-lettered public works programs, FDR was flying blind. He had no overarching economic theory on which he was building.
He even said, out loud, that he would try something and if it didn't work, he would abandon it and try something else.
Financial markets don't like this sort of uncertainty. At least they don't like it being so visible to the whole world.
As a lifelong Democrat and admirer of FDR and the New Deal, I hope whatever is done addresses some of the inequality and injustice that the past generation of plutocratic plundering has caused. I don't believe it is a good idea for the government to be the chief engine of commerce, just the employer and sustainer of last resort. But the playing field has been tilted toward financial people, and this may be a chance to redraw some of that.
But don't put too much money on any one plan or strategy right now, because an awful lot has yet to go down.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Certainty
A young woman who works near where I write has a broken kneecap, done in riding tandem on a motorcycle. She has a cast that goes from her ankle to her thigh and moves around on crutches.
The past couple of days I notice she has been taking some of the shorter trips - bathroom, water - leaving the crutches behind. When I asked about it she looked sheepish and said it was because it was such a nuisance to have to deal with them, even though the doctor insists she use them al the time fr another several weeks.
"I am just a bad patient," she said.
Which sent my into a flight of fancy about these professionals to whom we give obeisance.
Some of you may remember Bernie Siegal, a doctor (oncologist?) at Yale/New Haven hospital who became famous for a couple of years for writing several inspiring books about how best to survive serious illness. He became a favorite on the lecture circuit and i encountered him a few times when he spoke to adoring audiences who would stand in long lines to get him to sign copies of one of his books they had bought.
I quoted him to the woman who said she is a bad patient. "You want the hospital staff to love you, think you're a model patient, go home and tell their family about this wonderful person in room 312? Prepare to die. You want to survive, even thrive? Be a pain in the ass to the staff."
I got to thinking about the meeting I am going to have this afternoon with the people who help me manage my money. I might better describe them as the people who manage my money, leaving out the "help me", part, but try as I may, they won't let me get away with that. So I sit in these meetings, listening to investment talk, shaking my head in agreement, asking an occasional question to seem as if I am engaged, when in fact I decided long ago to pretend to myself they have esoteric knowledge that makes them more able to make smart decisions about what to do with my money.
And I do the same with my doctor.
It's true that, in both cases, they have training, education, information, experience in those fields I do not have. It's not true that all that gives them access to the unknown.
What the markets are going to do, when there is going to be a breakdown in some major process in my body, are questions susceptible to odds, like all information. That is, someone who has lived with and studied long term data, will make a guess with better odds than I will. But those are merely odds, meaning it's what we call and educated guess.
In somewhat the same vein, I studied historical theology, biblical studies, church history for three years following college, had thirty years years as a parish priest, read everything I can by people who find speculating about the nature of reality captivating, think about these things for some part of every day. So I can provide a more learned reflection on what people have thought, and what I have come to think, than many. But I know no more about how reality is held together than my five year old granddaughter.
Nonetheless, for the sake of sanity, I have decided to grant to my financial advisor, my doctor, authority. I'd like to believe that if something they tell me seems utterly wrong, I might call them on it. But, having just suffered through the same catastrophic disappearance of nearly half my paper worth, passively, and watching my body lose ground every day without challenging any of the remedies my doctor suggests, I wonder.
Not to worry.
Having surrendered the dream of certainty years ago, and settled for relationships with professionals I respect and like, I - so far - am willing to live with the outcome.
Which I am certain would be no better had I been more involved.
Bernie Siegal was a hero of mine, but that was thirty years ago when I still had that wonderful confidence and arrogance that believes certainty is just one resolve away.
The past couple of days I notice she has been taking some of the shorter trips - bathroom, water - leaving the crutches behind. When I asked about it she looked sheepish and said it was because it was such a nuisance to have to deal with them, even though the doctor insists she use them al the time fr another several weeks.
"I am just a bad patient," she said.
Which sent my into a flight of fancy about these professionals to whom we give obeisance.
Some of you may remember Bernie Siegal, a doctor (oncologist?) at Yale/New Haven hospital who became famous for a couple of years for writing several inspiring books about how best to survive serious illness. He became a favorite on the lecture circuit and i encountered him a few times when he spoke to adoring audiences who would stand in long lines to get him to sign copies of one of his books they had bought.
I quoted him to the woman who said she is a bad patient. "You want the hospital staff to love you, think you're a model patient, go home and tell their family about this wonderful person in room 312? Prepare to die. You want to survive, even thrive? Be a pain in the ass to the staff."
I got to thinking about the meeting I am going to have this afternoon with the people who help me manage my money. I might better describe them as the people who manage my money, leaving out the "help me", part, but try as I may, they won't let me get away with that. So I sit in these meetings, listening to investment talk, shaking my head in agreement, asking an occasional question to seem as if I am engaged, when in fact I decided long ago to pretend to myself they have esoteric knowledge that makes them more able to make smart decisions about what to do with my money.
And I do the same with my doctor.
It's true that, in both cases, they have training, education, information, experience in those fields I do not have. It's not true that all that gives them access to the unknown.
What the markets are going to do, when there is going to be a breakdown in some major process in my body, are questions susceptible to odds, like all information. That is, someone who has lived with and studied long term data, will make a guess with better odds than I will. But those are merely odds, meaning it's what we call and educated guess.
In somewhat the same vein, I studied historical theology, biblical studies, church history for three years following college, had thirty years years as a parish priest, read everything I can by people who find speculating about the nature of reality captivating, think about these things for some part of every day. So I can provide a more learned reflection on what people have thought, and what I have come to think, than many. But I know no more about how reality is held together than my five year old granddaughter.
Nonetheless, for the sake of sanity, I have decided to grant to my financial advisor, my doctor, authority. I'd like to believe that if something they tell me seems utterly wrong, I might call them on it. But, having just suffered through the same catastrophic disappearance of nearly half my paper worth, passively, and watching my body lose ground every day without challenging any of the remedies my doctor suggests, I wonder.
Not to worry.
Having surrendered the dream of certainty years ago, and settled for relationships with professionals I respect and like, I - so far - am willing to live with the outcome.
Which I am certain would be no better had I been more involved.
Bernie Siegal was a hero of mine, but that was thirty years ago when I still had that wonderful confidence and arrogance that believes certainty is just one resolve away.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Time
My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference. - (Harry Truman 1884 – 1972)
Carrying my Casio atomic watch to the Post Office to send to NJ so they can put on a new band – which will end up costing about the same as the watch – I considered my obsession with time.
And with time pieces that mark its procession.
There is that small carriage clock that sits on my bureau in California, given to Lacey and me by the church vestry when we were married nearly 30 years ago.
And the larger carriage clock, a 19th century French repeater (strikes the pervious hour when you push down the lever) I bought from a parishioner when we were moving to California. I was feeling falsely flush, and figured there would be nothing in California older than I was. It went on the fritz. 5 years at the repair shop, and Son, Cambodian clockmaker, pronounced it as sound as it could ever be. It chimes the previous hour on the half hour rather than a customary single strike. We agreed to regard that as charming.
The brass Chelsea ship’s clock (from Tiffany, no less), on a table by the fireplace in Vermont, came to me from my mother who either received it as a wedding present or inherited it from her father who lived in NYC. It did what the song about the grandfather clock said. I took it to the Scotsman in Newfane who examines a timepiece before agreeing to work on it, accepted mine, and returned it to me a year later, in perfect working order, now among my rare belongings worth what I once paid for cars.
Upstairs in my writing studio over the barn the early 20th century American pendulum clock I bought at an antique store, finally keeps time after a repair that doubled my investment. I love its strong, mellifluous strike, but when people are sleeping up there they stop the pendulum because they can’t sleep through the twice an hour alert.
Then there are the three watches. The nicest, - a self-winder in a gold case - my father bought me on a visit to Hong Kong in 1958. Lacey gave me the Casio atomic clock to sate my fascination with its capacity to pick up a signal from Colorado and keep perfect time. Mine doesn’t seem to do that – I have to reset it when we change coasts - but many days it displays the curious little icon that indicates its reading the signal. Alas, the strap is all but welded to the watch, is frayed from ocean swims, and the only way I can get a new strap is to send it to NJ. The third watch, a $5 Timex I bought 20 years ago because you can swim with it. (Why do I want to know time it is when I’m in the ocean? Because I can.) It soldiers on without incident.
Of course my cell phone has a clock. And the stove and microwave. Oh yes, and the illuminated alarm clocks by our bed, in Vermont and in California. I forgot to put on a watch this morning, so I’m keeping track by the computer clock as I write. The tower chimes across the street at St. James, where I was once employed, sound each half hour.
My fixation on time passing was put into fresh perspective last week when Lacey told me she took a call from a woman who wants to redo some furniture she had done some time ago through Ross Thiele, the design firm Lacey has been with nearly 20 years.
They were so nicely done, she told Lacey, but it’s been a long time and they really need to be refurbished. She said she was driving over to La Jolla in a couple of days and would come in to look at fabrics.
John Thiele did them then, she explained. And how is John? she asked.
He’s not doing much design work any more, Lacey explained, but he’s in remarkably good shape. He’s 88 years old, you know.
I’m 99, the woman announced.
Carrying my Casio atomic watch to the Post Office to send to NJ so they can put on a new band – which will end up costing about the same as the watch – I considered my obsession with time.
And with time pieces that mark its procession.
There is that small carriage clock that sits on my bureau in California, given to Lacey and me by the church vestry when we were married nearly 30 years ago.
And the larger carriage clock, a 19th century French repeater (strikes the pervious hour when you push down the lever) I bought from a parishioner when we were moving to California. I was feeling falsely flush, and figured there would be nothing in California older than I was. It went on the fritz. 5 years at the repair shop, and Son, Cambodian clockmaker, pronounced it as sound as it could ever be. It chimes the previous hour on the half hour rather than a customary single strike. We agreed to regard that as charming.
The brass Chelsea ship’s clock (from Tiffany, no less), on a table by the fireplace in Vermont, came to me from my mother who either received it as a wedding present or inherited it from her father who lived in NYC. It did what the song about the grandfather clock said. I took it to the Scotsman in Newfane who examines a timepiece before agreeing to work on it, accepted mine, and returned it to me a year later, in perfect working order, now among my rare belongings worth what I once paid for cars.
Upstairs in my writing studio over the barn the early 20th century American pendulum clock I bought at an antique store, finally keeps time after a repair that doubled my investment. I love its strong, mellifluous strike, but when people are sleeping up there they stop the pendulum because they can’t sleep through the twice an hour alert.
Then there are the three watches. The nicest, - a self-winder in a gold case - my father bought me on a visit to Hong Kong in 1958. Lacey gave me the Casio atomic clock to sate my fascination with its capacity to pick up a signal from Colorado and keep perfect time. Mine doesn’t seem to do that – I have to reset it when we change coasts - but many days it displays the curious little icon that indicates its reading the signal. Alas, the strap is all but welded to the watch, is frayed from ocean swims, and the only way I can get a new strap is to send it to NJ. The third watch, a $5 Timex I bought 20 years ago because you can swim with it. (Why do I want to know time it is when I’m in the ocean? Because I can.) It soldiers on without incident.
Of course my cell phone has a clock. And the stove and microwave. Oh yes, and the illuminated alarm clocks by our bed, in Vermont and in California. I forgot to put on a watch this morning, so I’m keeping track by the computer clock as I write. The tower chimes across the street at St. James, where I was once employed, sound each half hour.
My fixation on time passing was put into fresh perspective last week when Lacey told me she took a call from a woman who wants to redo some furniture she had done some time ago through Ross Thiele, the design firm Lacey has been with nearly 20 years.
They were so nicely done, she told Lacey, but it’s been a long time and they really need to be refurbished. She said she was driving over to La Jolla in a couple of days and would come in to look at fabrics.
John Thiele did them then, she explained. And how is John? she asked.
He’s not doing much design work any more, Lacey explained, but he’s in remarkably good shape. He’s 88 years old, you know.
I’m 99, the woman announced.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Perspective
Why should it be so hard?
So simple in conceiving. So hard in execution.
Perspective. Where we (I) fit in the scheme of things.
Over years of an exercise which I really love: imagining I am standing outside our universe and having a look at things.
It's beautiful. Colorful, at least where it isn't black.
And wild. Violent. Explosions, Light screaming across huge spaces.
Remember, we're not only standing at a huge distance from our usual platform, but we're watching eons pass by in what we here experience in nano seconds.
So, I'm squinting to get a glimpse of us, humans, on this little planet out here on the edge of this solar system. Sqiunting not only because what I'm looking for is so tiny, miniscule in the order of things, but also because you have to catch it quickly, like a flash from a camera, before it disappears. In cosmic terms we're talking less than an instant.
Some find this view demeaning, belittling.
It is belittling all right. But for me it is also exhilarating. Maybe even ennobling.
To have been invited into this drama, even for this blink of any eye, is for sure more than we could have imagined. Or hoped. The question of why, which seems so compelling to so many, seems silly to me. Like a May fly trying to figure out the purpose of its moment in the air.
The thrill of being here is way too large to care about why? And how arrogant to think we might be able to understand. If understanding is even a category beyond our anxious psyche.
The markets crash. A tsunami hits. I approach the end of my tenure.
All in the order of things. One can lament and spend energy trying to reverse reality.
Or stay fully invested in the wonder.
So simple in conceiving. So hard in execution.
Perspective. Where we (I) fit in the scheme of things.
Over years of an exercise which I really love: imagining I am standing outside our universe and having a look at things.
It's beautiful. Colorful, at least where it isn't black.
And wild. Violent. Explosions, Light screaming across huge spaces.
Remember, we're not only standing at a huge distance from our usual platform, but we're watching eons pass by in what we here experience in nano seconds.
So, I'm squinting to get a glimpse of us, humans, on this little planet out here on the edge of this solar system. Sqiunting not only because what I'm looking for is so tiny, miniscule in the order of things, but also because you have to catch it quickly, like a flash from a camera, before it disappears. In cosmic terms we're talking less than an instant.
Some find this view demeaning, belittling.
It is belittling all right. But for me it is also exhilarating. Maybe even ennobling.
To have been invited into this drama, even for this blink of any eye, is for sure more than we could have imagined. Or hoped. The question of why, which seems so compelling to so many, seems silly to me. Like a May fly trying to figure out the purpose of its moment in the air.
The thrill of being here is way too large to care about why? And how arrogant to think we might be able to understand. If understanding is even a category beyond our anxious psyche.
The markets crash. A tsunami hits. I approach the end of my tenure.
All in the order of things. One can lament and spend energy trying to reverse reality.
Or stay fully invested in the wonder.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Self-confidence
I have been wondering where that self-confidence that President Obama seems to exude in every public appearance, comes from.
It was never hard to figure out where President Bush's came from, even though it seemed largely without foundation, and came across more as arrogance and unawareness of anything beyond himself. He was to the Manor born as much as anyone in this young nation could have been. His grandfather - Senior Senator from Connecticut - handed me my diploma when I graduated from a boy's boarding school in Rhode Island. His father, elected to Congress from Texas (he went to Texas to make money in oil) was a parishioner at the Episcopal Church in Washington where I spent four years during the Nixon administration.
All of which is meant as disclosure that I, too, have roots in the old WASP world, though not nearly so deep as Bush's.
Although I haven't an iota the self-confidence former President Bush evidently had, I do remember feeling confident that the doors to an Ivy league college and ordination in the Episcopal Church would likely be open to me in ways they would not for those less well-connected.
Bur Barak Obama?
Why, my spell-check still doesn't recognize his name.
But you watch him come through a doorway, or step to the microphone, or dance with his wife. The man has the poise and self-assurance one is used to seeing among royalty, people trained from birth to instill awe and respect in those they meet.
So this son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya seems somehow to have assimilated in his bones the American promise that anyone with great talent, willing to work hard, will be granted access into the elite.
That would be the elite of talent, not birth.
For a generation the term elite has been used as a pejorative, to ridicule those said to be different from the rest of us.
President Obama seems to have earned the confidence that has now placed him at the pinnacle of the power elite.
Let's hope he is as wise as he is self-assured. And that we are wise enough to recognize his wisdom.
It was never hard to figure out where President Bush's came from, even though it seemed largely without foundation, and came across more as arrogance and unawareness of anything beyond himself. He was to the Manor born as much as anyone in this young nation could have been. His grandfather - Senior Senator from Connecticut - handed me my diploma when I graduated from a boy's boarding school in Rhode Island. His father, elected to Congress from Texas (he went to Texas to make money in oil) was a parishioner at the Episcopal Church in Washington where I spent four years during the Nixon administration.
All of which is meant as disclosure that I, too, have roots in the old WASP world, though not nearly so deep as Bush's.
Although I haven't an iota the self-confidence former President Bush evidently had, I do remember feeling confident that the doors to an Ivy league college and ordination in the Episcopal Church would likely be open to me in ways they would not for those less well-connected.
Bur Barak Obama?
Why, my spell-check still doesn't recognize his name.
But you watch him come through a doorway, or step to the microphone, or dance with his wife. The man has the poise and self-assurance one is used to seeing among royalty, people trained from birth to instill awe and respect in those they meet.
So this son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya seems somehow to have assimilated in his bones the American promise that anyone with great talent, willing to work hard, will be granted access into the elite.
That would be the elite of talent, not birth.
For a generation the term elite has been used as a pejorative, to ridicule those said to be different from the rest of us.
President Obama seems to have earned the confidence that has now placed him at the pinnacle of the power elite.
Let's hope he is as wise as he is self-assured. And that we are wise enough to recognize his wisdom.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Day Two
Barak asked us - maybe even scolded us - to put away childish things and begin to behave like adults.
Some of the Bush people were reported to have been insulted. After the lengths to which they had gone to make the transition a smooth one, that Obama would speak unkindly of their tenure seemed to them to show a lack of consideration.
In fact I was more aware of how the new president seemed to me to go out of his way to make clear that he considered the dire straits we are in as he assumes office are the result of a systemic lack of maturity in the whole culture, not merely in the actions of his predecessor.
Whatever you make of it, it seems unmistakable that his intention is to face us - as he is facing himself - with the reality that we have been living a fantasy for at least a generation, a fantasy in which, as the world's lone super power, we could have whatever we want, and expect the rest of the world to accept that as reality.
That sort of thinking seems to have led the Bush administration to believe we could invade Iraq and, because we would rid them of their nasty dictator, persuade them to make common cause with our wish to make them our strong ally and adopt a government (and oil policy) that suited our needs.
It led our captains of finance to believe they could package potentially worthless mortgages and loans into other types of investments, get their rating agencies to call them AAA, and peddle them around the world, making themselves as rich as the kings and princes from whom our forebears fled to this continent.
It led all of us to think our houses - after all, everyone needs a place to live, and it is everyone's dream to own her own house - would appreciate in value for eternity - or at least for the rest of our lives - so we could use them as ATM machines, borrowing against them indefinitely in hopes of joining those captains of finance in becoming richer than we had ever dared dream.
It's not fun to be the one who blows the whistle, and maybe it will turn out to have been President Obama's luck that the whistle was already blowing with ear-splitting decibels by the time he took the oath of office.
We'll never know what sort of inaugural address he might have given had the global financial system not hit the wall before he took office. Maybe there would have been sound bites and ringing phrases, the sort of rhetoric we love even though we have no idea where it might lead.
But we do know now what he thinks, and intends, faced with the new reality.
And it is not a promise to rescue us from this disaster so we can go back to life as the indemnified 800 Lb global gorilla.
I'd guess there is going to be plenty of tearing of garments as all this unfolds. If he has the courage and can gain the needed votes to take us on the path he painted in his speech on Tuesday, the White House staff is not the only group that is going to feel the immediate pinch of less money for harder work.
The day after 9/11 I waited for President Bush to call us to sacrifices - burn less fuel, spend less, pressure Detroit to make smaller more fuel efficient cars. He had, after all, declared a war on terror (a poor name for what was needed) and Americans had shown themselves willing, even eager, to do their share in a crisis.
Instead he poured more fuel on the winnowing fire that was already consuming our sense of responsibility, telling us to go shopping, live life as usual, even while warning us their was a terrorist behind every tree wanting to kill us.
Whether we yet understand our situation as even more drastic than 9/11, Obama has not squandered the moment. The problems are hard and deep. They will not be solved easily or quickly. It is time to roll up our sleeves and get back to work. The party's over.
I think the country may take to it.
Some of the Bush people were reported to have been insulted. After the lengths to which they had gone to make the transition a smooth one, that Obama would speak unkindly of their tenure seemed to them to show a lack of consideration.
In fact I was more aware of how the new president seemed to me to go out of his way to make clear that he considered the dire straits we are in as he assumes office are the result of a systemic lack of maturity in the whole culture, not merely in the actions of his predecessor.
Whatever you make of it, it seems unmistakable that his intention is to face us - as he is facing himself - with the reality that we have been living a fantasy for at least a generation, a fantasy in which, as the world's lone super power, we could have whatever we want, and expect the rest of the world to accept that as reality.
That sort of thinking seems to have led the Bush administration to believe we could invade Iraq and, because we would rid them of their nasty dictator, persuade them to make common cause with our wish to make them our strong ally and adopt a government (and oil policy) that suited our needs.
It led our captains of finance to believe they could package potentially worthless mortgages and loans into other types of investments, get their rating agencies to call them AAA, and peddle them around the world, making themselves as rich as the kings and princes from whom our forebears fled to this continent.
It led all of us to think our houses - after all, everyone needs a place to live, and it is everyone's dream to own her own house - would appreciate in value for eternity - or at least for the rest of our lives - so we could use them as ATM machines, borrowing against them indefinitely in hopes of joining those captains of finance in becoming richer than we had ever dared dream.
It's not fun to be the one who blows the whistle, and maybe it will turn out to have been President Obama's luck that the whistle was already blowing with ear-splitting decibels by the time he took the oath of office.
We'll never know what sort of inaugural address he might have given had the global financial system not hit the wall before he took office. Maybe there would have been sound bites and ringing phrases, the sort of rhetoric we love even though we have no idea where it might lead.
But we do know now what he thinks, and intends, faced with the new reality.
And it is not a promise to rescue us from this disaster so we can go back to life as the indemnified 800 Lb global gorilla.
I'd guess there is going to be plenty of tearing of garments as all this unfolds. If he has the courage and can gain the needed votes to take us on the path he painted in his speech on Tuesday, the White House staff is not the only group that is going to feel the immediate pinch of less money for harder work.
The day after 9/11 I waited for President Bush to call us to sacrifices - burn less fuel, spend less, pressure Detroit to make smaller more fuel efficient cars. He had, after all, declared a war on terror (a poor name for what was needed) and Americans had shown themselves willing, even eager, to do their share in a crisis.
Instead he poured more fuel on the winnowing fire that was already consuming our sense of responsibility, telling us to go shopping, live life as usual, even while warning us their was a terrorist behind every tree wanting to kill us.
Whether we yet understand our situation as even more drastic than 9/11, Obama has not squandered the moment. The problems are hard and deep. They will not be solved easily or quickly. It is time to roll up our sleeves and get back to work. The party's over.
I think the country may take to it.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Barak
If you are one who was untouched by this day, or weren’t distressed to see Teddy Kennedy taken out of the lunch with a seizure, this might be the right time to press that delete button.
I’ve been protecting myself against those old emotions ever since I first laid eyes on Barak Obama. First because I never thought he had a snowball in hell’s chance of being nominated or elected. Second because he is now the 12th president in my lifetime (that’s more than ¼ of the total) and I’ve given my heart away to more presidents than girls.
Last night, at a concert by Byron Smith and the Los Angeles Spirit Chorale, marking Martin Luther King, Jr. those belly-wrenching sobs I have been keeping at bay, thinking old age had finally indemnified me against such disruptive passion, had their way with me.
And has, again and again, through today.
You know by now that he only spoke the word “I” three times in the inaugural address. That he rejected as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. That he called our patchwork past our strength. Quoted George Washington who spoke from the banks of the frozen Chesapeake, surrounded by starving, freezing soldiers after having abandoned the capital, told the nation, “We are still here.”
And Joe Lowrey – a hero of mine going back decades – closed his benediction: Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.
Those kids in the elementary school he went to in Jakarta, watching TV from their desks – at midnight their time. (Our son and his wife have been living in Indonesia). From Kenya where his father was from. (We lived in Zimbabwe in 1984 and reading the Harare Herald made me think Jesse Jackson was going to be elected) The people watching in Selma, Alabama - tears in their eyes. (My seminary classmate, Jon Daniels, was living in Selma, registering black voters, when he was gunned down).
“Say it plain,” the President said, “many have died for this day.”
When Teddy Kennedy was taken away by ambulance, after he had braved the cold to be on the podium for the swearing in, I thought of Simeon, the character in the Bible who ascends the temple steps as the baby Jesus is brought for consecration, looks at him in his mother’s arms and sings the Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
Yes, I saw the markets’ steep descent even as the new president spoke. I am too old to harbor illusions about what this young man faces. Nothing about all this trumps reality. President Obama went in to have lunch with the people who will help and vex him, people about whom he and his wife will gossip, laugh and complain in their precious private moments.
While he had lunch I did the laundry.
How precious those soaring few glimpses of a vision that lifts us about the petty pace.
I’ve been protecting myself against those old emotions ever since I first laid eyes on Barak Obama. First because I never thought he had a snowball in hell’s chance of being nominated or elected. Second because he is now the 12th president in my lifetime (that’s more than ¼ of the total) and I’ve given my heart away to more presidents than girls.
Last night, at a concert by Byron Smith and the Los Angeles Spirit Chorale, marking Martin Luther King, Jr. those belly-wrenching sobs I have been keeping at bay, thinking old age had finally indemnified me against such disruptive passion, had their way with me.
And has, again and again, through today.
You know by now that he only spoke the word “I” three times in the inaugural address. That he rejected as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. That he called our patchwork past our strength. Quoted George Washington who spoke from the banks of the frozen Chesapeake, surrounded by starving, freezing soldiers after having abandoned the capital, told the nation, “We are still here.”
And Joe Lowrey – a hero of mine going back decades – closed his benediction: Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around ... when yellow will be mellow ... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen.
Those kids in the elementary school he went to in Jakarta, watching TV from their desks – at midnight their time. (Our son and his wife have been living in Indonesia). From Kenya where his father was from. (We lived in Zimbabwe in 1984 and reading the Harare Herald made me think Jesse Jackson was going to be elected) The people watching in Selma, Alabama - tears in their eyes. (My seminary classmate, Jon Daniels, was living in Selma, registering black voters, when he was gunned down).
“Say it plain,” the President said, “many have died for this day.”
When Teddy Kennedy was taken away by ambulance, after he had braved the cold to be on the podium for the swearing in, I thought of Simeon, the character in the Bible who ascends the temple steps as the baby Jesus is brought for consecration, looks at him in his mother’s arms and sings the Nunc Dimittis: “Lord, now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
Yes, I saw the markets’ steep descent even as the new president spoke. I am too old to harbor illusions about what this young man faces. Nothing about all this trumps reality. President Obama went in to have lunch with the people who will help and vex him, people about whom he and his wife will gossip, laugh and complain in their precious private moments.
While he had lunch I did the laundry.
How precious those soaring few glimpses of a vision that lifts us about the petty pace.
Monday, January 19, 2009
911 Compassion
Last night just as the sun went down, emergency vehicles, sirens blaring, began streaming by our apartment.
We live just a block from the beach in San Diego and we are used to sirens headed that way. Usually a surfer has been hurt or a diver drowned.
But the vehicles, of every sort, kept coming. So, after a few minutes I slipped on my shoes and went down to see what was up. I have in me a mixture of voyeurism and lingering priest, that makes me want to go, and makes me think I have an obligation. More than once I have approached as lifeguards bring a drowned body in, told them I am a priest, and knelt by the body and commended the person. I stopped berating myself long ago for being grandiose or acting as if I knew (or believed) that a prayer would affect what happens next. I was ordained a priest more than 40 years ago, and this is one of the things that indelible mark requires of me.
When I reached the beach - full darkness having descended - more rescue equipment than I have ever seen in one place was in full action.
A helicopter circled and trained a strong spotlight on the water. A rescue boat, blue lights flashing, streamed parallel to the beach, also shining a strong light on the water. A fire engine - all lights revolving - was parked at the edge of the boardwalk. Sour lifeguard trucks were pulled up at the edge of the surf. Too many lifeguards to be able to count were on surf boards a 100 feet off shore. As I watched, three lifeguards put on scuba gear and went out through the surf to look below the surface.
It was like a scene from a TV show and there were many of us standing up on the walk watching, speculating.
At one point all the rescuers seemed to converge on a single point and I thought perhaps they had located the body. (By this time it was clearly an effort to recover a body rather than hoping to rescue someone). I poised on the sea wall, ready to go down to meet the body. But they all quickly dispersed and went back as before.
I watched for another few minutes, knew the likelihood of their finding the body after this length of time was small, and walked back where Lacey was waiting as we were about to entertain friends for dinner.
This morning on our walk with Cosmos I asked the lifeguards if they had found the body.
They looked at me with strange expressions, as if they'd rather not talk about it, then told me it had been a false alarm. Someone had come up to the lifeguards just at dusk and seen a diver struggling, thrashing around, and then disappear beneath the water.
"Probably saw a seal."
On the strength of that, just about every piece of rescue equipment the city owned was put into service.
"Man," I said, currying favor, "that's one hell of a lot of expense and effort for a city that's bankrupt."
During the presidential campaign, when some of us were still worried that McCain might defeat Obama, there was a report that McCain's brother had called 911 when he was driving from one campaign event to another, to bitch about the traffic. We jumped on this as one more piece of evidence that McCain was somehow tainted.
"That's not the way we look at it," the lifeguard responded to me, gently, but firmly. "We are grateful that we have all this so we can respond when someone is in trouble. And we're happy no one had drowned.
Am I stretching the matter to think perhaps this is going to become the Obama way of responding to emergency and need? Rather than with posturing or bullying or bravado, simply putting to work the resources that have been set aside for this, and being grateful when things turn out well.
We live just a block from the beach in San Diego and we are used to sirens headed that way. Usually a surfer has been hurt or a diver drowned.
But the vehicles, of every sort, kept coming. So, after a few minutes I slipped on my shoes and went down to see what was up. I have in me a mixture of voyeurism and lingering priest, that makes me want to go, and makes me think I have an obligation. More than once I have approached as lifeguards bring a drowned body in, told them I am a priest, and knelt by the body and commended the person. I stopped berating myself long ago for being grandiose or acting as if I knew (or believed) that a prayer would affect what happens next. I was ordained a priest more than 40 years ago, and this is one of the things that indelible mark requires of me.
When I reached the beach - full darkness having descended - more rescue equipment than I have ever seen in one place was in full action.
A helicopter circled and trained a strong spotlight on the water. A rescue boat, blue lights flashing, streamed parallel to the beach, also shining a strong light on the water. A fire engine - all lights revolving - was parked at the edge of the boardwalk. Sour lifeguard trucks were pulled up at the edge of the surf. Too many lifeguards to be able to count were on surf boards a 100 feet off shore. As I watched, three lifeguards put on scuba gear and went out through the surf to look below the surface.
It was like a scene from a TV show and there were many of us standing up on the walk watching, speculating.
At one point all the rescuers seemed to converge on a single point and I thought perhaps they had located the body. (By this time it was clearly an effort to recover a body rather than hoping to rescue someone). I poised on the sea wall, ready to go down to meet the body. But they all quickly dispersed and went back as before.
I watched for another few minutes, knew the likelihood of their finding the body after this length of time was small, and walked back where Lacey was waiting as we were about to entertain friends for dinner.
This morning on our walk with Cosmos I asked the lifeguards if they had found the body.
They looked at me with strange expressions, as if they'd rather not talk about it, then told me it had been a false alarm. Someone had come up to the lifeguards just at dusk and seen a diver struggling, thrashing around, and then disappear beneath the water.
"Probably saw a seal."
On the strength of that, just about every piece of rescue equipment the city owned was put into service.
"Man," I said, currying favor, "that's one hell of a lot of expense and effort for a city that's bankrupt."
During the presidential campaign, when some of us were still worried that McCain might defeat Obama, there was a report that McCain's brother had called 911 when he was driving from one campaign event to another, to bitch about the traffic. We jumped on this as one more piece of evidence that McCain was somehow tainted.
"That's not the way we look at it," the lifeguard responded to me, gently, but firmly. "We are grateful that we have all this so we can respond when someone is in trouble. And we're happy no one had drowned.
Am I stretching the matter to think perhaps this is going to become the Obama way of responding to emergency and need? Rather than with posturing or bullying or bravado, simply putting to work the resources that have been set aside for this, and being grateful when things turn out well.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Gadfly
I recently accepted the job of correspondent for my high school class. I collect fascinating information about their amazing lives and pass it on the the editor of the school's magazine.
I have long wondered why the little I have seen reported in the past seemed so pedestrian. Weddings, funerals, grandchildren.
Anyone out there invested with Madoff?
So I wrote them and asked them to send me some juicy stuff that wouldn't make them vulnerable to law suits. I said, "The school loves to hear the ways in which you are rearranging the world, making us of the talents planted in you in school. It helps justify the tuition that now exceeds my highest annual salary."
One of our classmates, who never passes up a chance to tweak me, responded, "Oh, i feel sorry for you in your poverty-stricken life on your spread in Vermont and your place in La Jolla by the Pacific."
I remember a friend who graduated from seminary a few years ahead of me and whose first job was chaplain at a school that had just built a sumptuous new house for the chaplain. He wrote me, "I set out to do good, and I did well."
He was embarrassed.
I have been embarrassed in much the same way.
First post in Akron at what was sometimes called St. Harvey's-in-the-Polo Field because the church was in fact built on land donated by Harvey Firestone that had once been his family polo field.
Second post in Washington, D.C., a church across Lafayette Square from the White House, known as "The Church of the Presidents" because every president since James Madison had gone there at least once.
Third post a rather more modest church in Dedham, Massachusetts, modest because the wealthy lawyers and magnates, some of whom had lived there for several generations, found any outward display of wealth unseemly.
Fourth and final post St. James by-the-Sea in La Jolla, California.
By the time I got to La Jolla I had stopped pretending I didn't enjoy the perks of living well in a nice place.
To the extent to which I felt the need to justify my existence, I offered my leftist liberal views, plaguing the conscience of rich parishioners about the poverty under all of our noses.
And I was privy to the old adage about money not buying happiness.
But then, neither does poverty, unless you are Mahatma Gandhi.
My modesty finally has to do with an honest assessment of my own abilities, and with the understanding that our species is a sometime visitor on this planet, not its author, nor its manager.
Come to think of it, I may, in spite of myself, have ended up in just the right places. Not only did the perks fail to curb my own uneasiness and restlessness, but my projecting onto parishioners my sense of the unfair unevenness one needn't look far to find, may have contributed to their finding it harder to relax in the face of injustice.
A gadfly. Isn't that what you call someone who buzzes around annoying without actually doing much? I was an ecclesiastical gadfly.
Still am.
I have long wondered why the little I have seen reported in the past seemed so pedestrian. Weddings, funerals, grandchildren.
Anyone out there invested with Madoff?
So I wrote them and asked them to send me some juicy stuff that wouldn't make them vulnerable to law suits. I said, "The school loves to hear the ways in which you are rearranging the world, making us of the talents planted in you in school. It helps justify the tuition that now exceeds my highest annual salary."
One of our classmates, who never passes up a chance to tweak me, responded, "Oh, i feel sorry for you in your poverty-stricken life on your spread in Vermont and your place in La Jolla by the Pacific."
I remember a friend who graduated from seminary a few years ahead of me and whose first job was chaplain at a school that had just built a sumptuous new house for the chaplain. He wrote me, "I set out to do good, and I did well."
He was embarrassed.
I have been embarrassed in much the same way.
First post in Akron at what was sometimes called St. Harvey's-in-the-Polo Field because the church was in fact built on land donated by Harvey Firestone that had once been his family polo field.
Second post in Washington, D.C., a church across Lafayette Square from the White House, known as "The Church of the Presidents" because every president since James Madison had gone there at least once.
Third post a rather more modest church in Dedham, Massachusetts, modest because the wealthy lawyers and magnates, some of whom had lived there for several generations, found any outward display of wealth unseemly.
Fourth and final post St. James by-the-Sea in La Jolla, California.
By the time I got to La Jolla I had stopped pretending I didn't enjoy the perks of living well in a nice place.
To the extent to which I felt the need to justify my existence, I offered my leftist liberal views, plaguing the conscience of rich parishioners about the poverty under all of our noses.
And I was privy to the old adage about money not buying happiness.
But then, neither does poverty, unless you are Mahatma Gandhi.
My modesty finally has to do with an honest assessment of my own abilities, and with the understanding that our species is a sometime visitor on this planet, not its author, nor its manager.
Come to think of it, I may, in spite of myself, have ended up in just the right places. Not only did the perks fail to curb my own uneasiness and restlessness, but my projecting onto parishioners my sense of the unfair unevenness one needn't look far to find, may have contributed to their finding it harder to relax in the face of injustice.
A gadfly. Isn't that what you call someone who buzzes around annoying without actually doing much? I was an ecclesiastical gadfly.
Still am.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Companionship
In yesterday's entry I mentioned companionship as perhaps the one consolation religion honestly has to offer.
And, I fear, made companionship seem like something insignificant. A weakness to which we succumb at our worst moments.
When, in fact, when it provides those rare moments of true intimacy - of knowing and being known by another person - it may be the apogee of our experience.
When I was courting the woman who finally succumbed and married me, I told her that I suspected my relationship to her would turn out to be the most I would ever know of God in my life.
At the time I suspect she thought it was a ploy to break down her defenses, a great line coming from a cleric. And, always suspicious of my own motives, especially when they sound too noble, she wasn't all wrong. Lucky for both of us, she somehow saw through me right from the start and never fell for what seemed inauthentic to her.
But it was also true.
Two pieces of the Jewish/Christian tradition from which I come speak to this. The first is the translation of the Hebrew word for sexual congress into English as "to know." Abraham "knew" Sarah and she bore a son.
The use of the verb in this way seems odd to us at first. But consider it. A colleague of mine, searching for how to describe judgment - the tearing away of all illusion so one knows without question just from unjust - is never more clear than at the moment of sexual climax. As he said, when you have used someone for your own desires, as opposed to a mutual joining of the flesh of two people who have discovered some part of their own soul in the other, the moment following ejaculation is terrible self-incrimination.
The most demanding piece of my life has been staying in a marriage with someone who knows me as I never imagined anyone would. And - had someone been able to describe and offer me the choice in advance - I likely would have demurred.
The fear of The Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Anyone who doesn't experience this fear in their closest relationship, likely has embraced ways to anesthetize against the experience.
The second piece comes in the opening prayer in the Christian Eucharist, the sacrament/ceremony that anchors the life of the Christian Church.
Almighty God, unto who all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid...
Suppose someone were to approach you tomorrow and tell you they wanted to introduce you to someone, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid?
Most sane people would say no thank you.
The reason lifelong marriage, and a precious few friendships, are our most prized and most feared - avoided - experiences, is because they are, as I suggested to my wife all those years ago, the chief way in which we decide either to embrace the reality of who we are, or forever decide to hide behind our illusions.
And, I fear, made companionship seem like something insignificant. A weakness to which we succumb at our worst moments.
When, in fact, when it provides those rare moments of true intimacy - of knowing and being known by another person - it may be the apogee of our experience.
When I was courting the woman who finally succumbed and married me, I told her that I suspected my relationship to her would turn out to be the most I would ever know of God in my life.
At the time I suspect she thought it was a ploy to break down her defenses, a great line coming from a cleric. And, always suspicious of my own motives, especially when they sound too noble, she wasn't all wrong. Lucky for both of us, she somehow saw through me right from the start and never fell for what seemed inauthentic to her.
But it was also true.
Two pieces of the Jewish/Christian tradition from which I come speak to this. The first is the translation of the Hebrew word for sexual congress into English as "to know." Abraham "knew" Sarah and she bore a son.
The use of the verb in this way seems odd to us at first. But consider it. A colleague of mine, searching for how to describe judgment - the tearing away of all illusion so one knows without question just from unjust - is never more clear than at the moment of sexual climax. As he said, when you have used someone for your own desires, as opposed to a mutual joining of the flesh of two people who have discovered some part of their own soul in the other, the moment following ejaculation is terrible self-incrimination.
The most demanding piece of my life has been staying in a marriage with someone who knows me as I never imagined anyone would. And - had someone been able to describe and offer me the choice in advance - I likely would have demurred.
The fear of The Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Anyone who doesn't experience this fear in their closest relationship, likely has embraced ways to anesthetize against the experience.
The second piece comes in the opening prayer in the Christian Eucharist, the sacrament/ceremony that anchors the life of the Christian Church.
Almighty God, unto who all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid...
Suppose someone were to approach you tomorrow and tell you they wanted to introduce you to someone, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid?
Most sane people would say no thank you.
The reason lifelong marriage, and a precious few friendships, are our most prized and most feared - avoided - experiences, is because they are, as I suggested to my wife all those years ago, the chief way in which we decide either to embrace the reality of who we are, or forever decide to hide behind our illusions.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Vocation?
Here's my variation of the old torch song sung by a woman who worked in a Dime-A-Dance place in which she dances with whomever pays a dime. She sings, "Sometimes I think I've found my hero, but it's a strange romance. All that you need is a ticket. Cone on, big boy, ten cents a dance."
Sometimes I think I've found my vocation, but it's a strange romance.
Because it comes out of my tiny consciousness and pretends to embrace the totality of existence. So after a period of euphoria, it wilts and I move on.
All this was stirring in me this morning as I walked up to my writing post.
A friend is laid open on the operating table as I write, surgeons working to excise a tumor from his lung before it excises him.
And the headline on several morning papers was about George Bush's final news conference (which one report said was packed with White House interns because not enough news people were interested enough to attend.) What they all latched onto was his saying that, after eight years, he insisted that the number one focus of the government must be on the nation's security. And he warned - as if any of us needed a warning - there are still "bad people" out there would would like to hurt us.
Every elementary theory of government agrees that the first obligation of a government is the protection of its citizens. And the budgets of virtually every nation reflect that.
But - while that may be necessary and ongoing - it not only doesn't therefore define the vocation of a nation, but it eclipses any possibility of the nation embracing a more interesting or ennobling vocation. Like going to the moon, or reducing poverty and injustice. Or learning to live on our mother earth without wrecking the very environment on which our own ongoing tenure here depends.
And, by definition, it is self-defeating.
Earthquake, meteors, hurricanes, volcanoes, blizzards alone are enough to wake us to the reality that safety - while welcome and worth making an effort for - is not ultimately in our hands.
Not to mention the havoc our own species has shown itself addicted to: war, greed, hubris.
What my friend undergoing surgery today has understood since he was diagnosed (and before) is that, just as we as beings are limited, with a beginning and an end, our ability to control what is going to happen to us in between, is sketchy at best.
How much we humans long for something that will release us from this reality. Everything from religion promising immortality, to gyms claiming that an exercise regime is going to provide our lives with the richness we crave.
And while religion can provide us with the comfort of companionship, and exercise can give us euphoria from well oxygenated blood, when we look hard and honestly we see these worthwhile choices do not have the power to deliver us from reality.
So my vocation of the month is inviting people (and myself, every preacher preacher first and sometimes most, to himself) to dare to embrace this vale of tears, these brief decades between birth and death, as an unearned invitation to look with wonder and awe at the ways in which the countless cells that have been thrown up on our shores over the eons, have come together to form this unlikely, incredible arrangement of which we are each and odds-against part.
And to embrace as much of it as we can along the way. Even occasionally saying yes to a chance to help up someone who has stumbled.
If that seems too small a calling, I say we are the gluttons the earth sometimes has accused us of, and we will suffer the fate of all who wish for more than they have been given, and end up devouring themselves.
Sometimes I think I've found my vocation, but it's a strange romance.
Because it comes out of my tiny consciousness and pretends to embrace the totality of existence. So after a period of euphoria, it wilts and I move on.
All this was stirring in me this morning as I walked up to my writing post.
A friend is laid open on the operating table as I write, surgeons working to excise a tumor from his lung before it excises him.
And the headline on several morning papers was about George Bush's final news conference (which one report said was packed with White House interns because not enough news people were interested enough to attend.) What they all latched onto was his saying that, after eight years, he insisted that the number one focus of the government must be on the nation's security. And he warned - as if any of us needed a warning - there are still "bad people" out there would would like to hurt us.
Every elementary theory of government agrees that the first obligation of a government is the protection of its citizens. And the budgets of virtually every nation reflect that.
But - while that may be necessary and ongoing - it not only doesn't therefore define the vocation of a nation, but it eclipses any possibility of the nation embracing a more interesting or ennobling vocation. Like going to the moon, or reducing poverty and injustice. Or learning to live on our mother earth without wrecking the very environment on which our own ongoing tenure here depends.
And, by definition, it is self-defeating.
Earthquake, meteors, hurricanes, volcanoes, blizzards alone are enough to wake us to the reality that safety - while welcome and worth making an effort for - is not ultimately in our hands.
Not to mention the havoc our own species has shown itself addicted to: war, greed, hubris.
What my friend undergoing surgery today has understood since he was diagnosed (and before) is that, just as we as beings are limited, with a beginning and an end, our ability to control what is going to happen to us in between, is sketchy at best.
How much we humans long for something that will release us from this reality. Everything from religion promising immortality, to gyms claiming that an exercise regime is going to provide our lives with the richness we crave.
And while religion can provide us with the comfort of companionship, and exercise can give us euphoria from well oxygenated blood, when we look hard and honestly we see these worthwhile choices do not have the power to deliver us from reality.
So my vocation of the month is inviting people (and myself, every preacher preacher first and sometimes most, to himself) to dare to embrace this vale of tears, these brief decades between birth and death, as an unearned invitation to look with wonder and awe at the ways in which the countless cells that have been thrown up on our shores over the eons, have come together to form this unlikely, incredible arrangement of which we are each and odds-against part.
And to embrace as much of it as we can along the way. Even occasionally saying yes to a chance to help up someone who has stumbled.
If that seems too small a calling, I say we are the gluttons the earth sometimes has accused us of, and we will suffer the fate of all who wish for more than they have been given, and end up devouring themselves.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Heads I Win
This train don't carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don't carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don't carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,
This train is bound for glory, this train. (Woody Guthrie 1912-1967)
A very common response when it comes to risk is the statement that "we took a calculated risk." Whenever this phrase came up in our project we had a prepared question. "Can you show us the calculations, please?" In not one single case did anyone do so. In fact, this question irritated several officials. – (From a paper by Paul Bracken entitled Intelligence and Risk Management delivered to the Foreign Policy Research Institute.)
Scientists discovered the "magnetosphere," a layer of ions and electrons surrounding the earth described by one physicist as a "warm plasma cloak," and a study suggested that the Milky Way is traveling through space 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, meaning it will collide with the galaxy Andromeda far sooner than predicted. "The galaxies will be dramatically stirred up," said Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, "but they are very squidgy, so they will stick together and eventually all the stars will die out, and it will become one huge, dead galaxy. (Harper’s Index)
**********
We could start with the gigantic odds – that
wiggly-tail sperm -
out-swimming several million others and all that extraneous DNA
flushed
Or how about the collisions - lesser big bangs - in our part of
the galaxy
those little pieces thrown off – moon - and just the
right stuff
boiling around in the protein soup for a few
100s of million of years cooking up
us
remember the doomsday clock it’s still ticking
calculating the odds we’re gonna reconstitute the
nuclear soup
for another try
then there’s the reverse mortgage – or - long term health insurance betting
you’ll die
before all the
equity evaporates
and whether to take Social Security – the lesser amount – at 62
instead of waiting until 65 when you get more
they’ve figured out when you’re going
to die
so it’s heads they win tails you
lose
what were the chances your portfolio would evaporate say
40%
two years ago we figured the odds – based on historical data -
at maybe 10%
today - based on historical data -
100%
like the death rate
so once you figure the odds being a
gambler and carefully craftily calculating
how’s the risk look now
yeah well whatever still wouldn’t have missed it
for anything
This train don't carry no gamblers, this train;
This train don't carry no gamblers,
Liars, thieves, nor big shot ramblers,
This train is bound for glory, this train. (Woody Guthrie 1912-1967)
A very common response when it comes to risk is the statement that "we took a calculated risk." Whenever this phrase came up in our project we had a prepared question. "Can you show us the calculations, please?" In not one single case did anyone do so. In fact, this question irritated several officials. – (From a paper by Paul Bracken entitled Intelligence and Risk Management delivered to the Foreign Policy Research Institute.)
Scientists discovered the "magnetosphere," a layer of ions and electrons surrounding the earth described by one physicist as a "warm plasma cloak," and a study suggested that the Milky Way is traveling through space 100,000 miles per hour faster than previously thought, meaning it will collide with the galaxy Andromeda far sooner than predicted. "The galaxies will be dramatically stirred up," said Gerry Gilmore of the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University, "but they are very squidgy, so they will stick together and eventually all the stars will die out, and it will become one huge, dead galaxy. (Harper’s Index)
**********
We could start with the gigantic odds – that
wiggly-tail sperm -
out-swimming several million others and all that extraneous DNA
flushed
Or how about the collisions - lesser big bangs - in our part of
the galaxy
those little pieces thrown off – moon - and just the
right stuff
boiling around in the protein soup for a few
100s of million of years cooking up
us
remember the doomsday clock it’s still ticking
calculating the odds we’re gonna reconstitute the
nuclear soup
for another try
then there’s the reverse mortgage – or - long term health insurance betting
you’ll die
before all the
equity evaporates
and whether to take Social Security – the lesser amount – at 62
instead of waiting until 65 when you get more
they’ve figured out when you’re going
to die
so it’s heads they win tails you
lose
what were the chances your portfolio would evaporate say
40%
two years ago we figured the odds – based on historical data -
at maybe 10%
today - based on historical data -
100%
like the death rate
so once you figure the odds being a
gambler and carefully craftily calculating
how’s the risk look now
yeah well whatever still wouldn’t have missed it
for anything
Monday, January 12, 2009
Vagaries
What is philosophy but a continual battle against custom? -Thomas Carlyle, historian and essayist (1795-1881)
Watching the San Diego Chargers finally run out of magic yesterday in Pittsburgh was not as painful for me as I know it was for many here, in what someone co-opted the title "America's Finest City" some years ago.
I am a fair-weather fan, paying little to no attention until late in the season, when I either feel free to trash the team or join in the locker room hype about a possible trip to the Super Bowl. This year - in what I would love to think might be a precursor to he life of the planet - I was onto trash talking before Thanksgiving when the Chargers, who many had touted as the most talented team in the league, lost four of its first twelve games and looked to be on the fast track to oblivion.
That they won their next four regular season games was exciting for local fans, and enraging to New England Patriot fans (with whom we spend most of the year), who then went apoplectic when the Chargers made the playoffs with an 8 -8 record, and the Patriots, with an 11 - 5 record didn't.
Such is the unfairness of life and of the NFL and just about every other sport, since the Patriots clearly had a much tougher division than the Chargers. But then, the Chargers did beat New England in their one regular season game...
But it struck me that yesterday's game - in freezing, snowy Pittsburgh - was a kind of morality drama. The playboys from the southern California surf go into wintry steel city to face the toughies from the coal mines.
Never mind that none of the Chargers are from California, and not one of the Steelers has ever seen either a steel mill or a coal mine. The gladiator battles in the Roman forum were fought by slaves won in battle against far away foes, and the fortunes of the warring cities were still thought to be tied to the outcome of the battles.
So when the Steelers began to beat up on the Chargers - never mind that there were some unlucky breaks and maybe a couple of questionable calls - it felt like the triumph of gritty hard labor over New Age trickiness.
I watched the game with a friend who is here infrequently from New England because his wife got a job here while he continues to travel the country and focus in Boston. He and I both rooted for the Chargers, because we have some connection, and because we secretly hope the counter culture might beat up on the old work ethic at least once in a while. If it happened consistently we would begin to get nervous. But every once in a while.
Neither of us would dare admit out loud that we depend on serendipity and luck , even while we pose as work-ethic junkies.
Watching the San Diego Chargers finally run out of magic yesterday in Pittsburgh was not as painful for me as I know it was for many here, in what someone co-opted the title "America's Finest City" some years ago.
I am a fair-weather fan, paying little to no attention until late in the season, when I either feel free to trash the team or join in the locker room hype about a possible trip to the Super Bowl. This year - in what I would love to think might be a precursor to he life of the planet - I was onto trash talking before Thanksgiving when the Chargers, who many had touted as the most talented team in the league, lost four of its first twelve games and looked to be on the fast track to oblivion.
That they won their next four regular season games was exciting for local fans, and enraging to New England Patriot fans (with whom we spend most of the year), who then went apoplectic when the Chargers made the playoffs with an 8 -8 record, and the Patriots, with an 11 - 5 record didn't.
Such is the unfairness of life and of the NFL and just about every other sport, since the Patriots clearly had a much tougher division than the Chargers. But then, the Chargers did beat New England in their one regular season game...
But it struck me that yesterday's game - in freezing, snowy Pittsburgh - was a kind of morality drama. The playboys from the southern California surf go into wintry steel city to face the toughies from the coal mines.
Never mind that none of the Chargers are from California, and not one of the Steelers has ever seen either a steel mill or a coal mine. The gladiator battles in the Roman forum were fought by slaves won in battle against far away foes, and the fortunes of the warring cities were still thought to be tied to the outcome of the battles.
So when the Steelers began to beat up on the Chargers - never mind that there were some unlucky breaks and maybe a couple of questionable calls - it felt like the triumph of gritty hard labor over New Age trickiness.
I watched the game with a friend who is here infrequently from New England because his wife got a job here while he continues to travel the country and focus in Boston. He and I both rooted for the Chargers, because we have some connection, and because we secretly hope the counter culture might beat up on the old work ethic at least once in a while. If it happened consistently we would begin to get nervous. But every once in a while.
Neither of us would dare admit out loud that we depend on serendipity and luck , even while we pose as work-ethic junkies.
Friday, January 09, 2009
Bummy
We were wakened yesterday morning by a phone call from Vermont, the wife of our caretaker, Bummy, calling to say Bummy had fallen on the ice and broken his neck.
Bummy (his real name is Richard, but I think I am one of the few who ever calls him that) is a few years older than I am, and has been our caretaker since the first week we owned our 1830 farmhouse in 1980. It got broken into and we were told we would do well to get Bummy to look after us.
That began a long friendship and one of the most dependable relationships I have ever known. Bummy not only has kept our driveway plowed, intervened when a frozen pipe wrecked the mud room, pulled snow off the roof before it turned to ice and caused leaks, kept us in Grade A Vermont maple syrup, kept me in the best Vermont back country risque jokes, but he has run interference for us - flatlanders - in the complex mix of local rural Vermonters with those of us who will always be outsiders.
Bummy has had many accidents over the years. His hard life made them inevitable. Falls from roofs are not uncommon. He's about my height (5'8"), or he was when we first knew him nearly 30 years ago. But now he must be a good two inches shorter than I am, the force of gravity and hellish hard work having pulled him closer to the ground. We watched him get out of his truck in front of the house Monday, to say good bye before we flew back to California, and Lacey and I marveled at how those legs, so bowed he had tp sway side to side to get one leg in front of the other, could still keep him upright.
The morning after we arrived to spend Christmas, I was out shoveling when he came by with his snow blower. It was in the back of his van, running, because it is hellish hard to start, and "helps keep the van warm." When I asked about carbon monoxide, Bummy laughed and said the old van was so leaky it didn't matter.
He's not paralyzed but he's not doing at all well. His wife was wakened this morning at 5:30 by a call from the hospital saying they had moved him to intensive care to try to clear his lungs because he was having trouble breathing. They need to do surgery to repair the damage he did to his neck in the fall, but he needs to be in much better shape before they dare do any surgery.
Everyone in town knows and loves him. We are heartbroken. Despite having broken more than half the bones in his body over the years, he has kept going. And always unfailingly cheerfully.
I write this in hopes that it will somehow magically put some power into the ether to set right this cosmic misstep.
But in truth it feels like the end of one of the longest and happiest chapters of my life.
This morning Lacey and I talked of how this is what we know things are like now. 20 years ago we would have been shocked, maybe even angry that such a nasty thing had happened to one of us. Now it is sad, but hardly unexpected.
Bummy (his real name is Richard, but I think I am one of the few who ever calls him that) is a few years older than I am, and has been our caretaker since the first week we owned our 1830 farmhouse in 1980. It got broken into and we were told we would do well to get Bummy to look after us.
That began a long friendship and one of the most dependable relationships I have ever known. Bummy not only has kept our driveway plowed, intervened when a frozen pipe wrecked the mud room, pulled snow off the roof before it turned to ice and caused leaks, kept us in Grade A Vermont maple syrup, kept me in the best Vermont back country risque jokes, but he has run interference for us - flatlanders - in the complex mix of local rural Vermonters with those of us who will always be outsiders.
Bummy has had many accidents over the years. His hard life made them inevitable. Falls from roofs are not uncommon. He's about my height (5'8"), or he was when we first knew him nearly 30 years ago. But now he must be a good two inches shorter than I am, the force of gravity and hellish hard work having pulled him closer to the ground. We watched him get out of his truck in front of the house Monday, to say good bye before we flew back to California, and Lacey and I marveled at how those legs, so bowed he had tp sway side to side to get one leg in front of the other, could still keep him upright.
The morning after we arrived to spend Christmas, I was out shoveling when he came by with his snow blower. It was in the back of his van, running, because it is hellish hard to start, and "helps keep the van warm." When I asked about carbon monoxide, Bummy laughed and said the old van was so leaky it didn't matter.
He's not paralyzed but he's not doing at all well. His wife was wakened this morning at 5:30 by a call from the hospital saying they had moved him to intensive care to try to clear his lungs because he was having trouble breathing. They need to do surgery to repair the damage he did to his neck in the fall, but he needs to be in much better shape before they dare do any surgery.
Everyone in town knows and loves him. We are heartbroken. Despite having broken more than half the bones in his body over the years, he has kept going. And always unfailingly cheerfully.
I write this in hopes that it will somehow magically put some power into the ether to set right this cosmic misstep.
But in truth it feels like the end of one of the longest and happiest chapters of my life.
This morning Lacey and I talked of how this is what we know things are like now. 20 years ago we would have been shocked, maybe even angry that such a nasty thing had happened to one of us. Now it is sad, but hardly unexpected.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
3 Conversations
Yesterday I had three conversations that may summarize where we are as Obama sets out his agenda and asks the congress to vote it, and the rest of us to support it. Since it looks to lead to record deficits for perhaps as long as he is president - record not only in sheer numbers, nut in percentage of GDP - it, quite properly, makes everyone nervous. And thus gives those who wish him ill an opening.
All three conversations were with longtime friends who are unrepentant Republicans. (For my sins, it has fallen my lot to have many more Republican than Democratic friends).
The first gave me a good look at the density of the detritus Obama is going to have the make his way through under the best of circumstances. My friend, who loves to bait me (and who is feeling lousy and looking for a fight, as he classically does when under the weather) started right out: "How long has Obama been president now? (chafing at how the press seems to be treating him as already sworn in) Isn't it time to begin impeachment proceedings? Richardson. The indicted governor of his home state. Didn't I remember his railing against the Bush deficits during the campaign? Seems last I heard, his spending plans lead to record deficits in the trillions."
Reminds me of the tiresome joke about any public figure who is getting vilified by the press:
Obama was out fishing with friends when their boat began to take on water. There was no time to swim to safety, so Obama stepped out of the boat and ran across the water to get help. The next day's headline read: OBAMA CAN'T SWIM!
But the other two conversations caused me to wonder if the perils we face could make some of his natural foes take a different tack.
The first was with a classic Wall Street type who has long been what we now call a Reagan Republican, which means supply side economics and cutting taxes - which are considered money stolen from hard working Americans - to the bone. No amount of evidence of disastrous deficits during the Reagan years, nor of surpluses during the final Bush I year and the 8 Clinton years when taxes were not cut, have any impact on their certainty that making it possible for rich people to get richer is the surest way to prosper the nation and the world.
When I said it looks to me as if Obama is preparing us for some pretty scary numbers and for a prolonged period of deep economic downturn, he said he thought Obama, in his handling of the economy and in his appointments, was doing a really good job.
When I asked him what I thought Obama was going to propose, he told me that he suspects and hopes is that Obama is going to raise taxes on every income level just enough to be able to say we will pay off this massive debt we are incurring to pull the economy out of the ditch, in five years.
"Did I hear you say, 'Raise taxes?' After a generation of portraying taxes as the hole in the economic boat?"
"So long as he does it across the board, not trying to get it all from the richest and make class warfare."
I have longed for the day," I said to him, "when, instead of snarling at having to pay taxes, our national leaders might begin to speak of taxes as the right and duty of responsible citizenship."
"If he asks it of all of us," he agreed, "then I think it will spark a huge rally in the financial markets and give the dollar its place at the zenith of world currencies."
"Assuming it is graduated and seems fair, I buy it."
The third conversation was with a retired Navy officer who had become a successful businessman and taught at a business school. As if those aren't credential enough for a hard core Republican, he was a classmate of John McCain's at the Naval Academy, and held a fund raiser for him at his home in California during the primaries.
"I sent Obama some money," he told me.
"You did? How come?"
"I believe he has a vision. I'm not able to fully articulate it, but something about the man makes me think he is authentic and should be given a chance to lead us. No other politician in a generation has affected me like that."
George H.W. Bush once called Reagan's supply side views "voodoo economics."
One day the vision we all sensed in Obama may be looked back on as chimera.
Or it may look like the seemingly amorphous agenda that saved the day.
All three conversations were with longtime friends who are unrepentant Republicans. (For my sins, it has fallen my lot to have many more Republican than Democratic friends).
The first gave me a good look at the density of the detritus Obama is going to have the make his way through under the best of circumstances. My friend, who loves to bait me (and who is feeling lousy and looking for a fight, as he classically does when under the weather) started right out: "How long has Obama been president now? (chafing at how the press seems to be treating him as already sworn in) Isn't it time to begin impeachment proceedings? Richardson. The indicted governor of his home state. Didn't I remember his railing against the Bush deficits during the campaign? Seems last I heard, his spending plans lead to record deficits in the trillions."
Reminds me of the tiresome joke about any public figure who is getting vilified by the press:
Obama was out fishing with friends when their boat began to take on water. There was no time to swim to safety, so Obama stepped out of the boat and ran across the water to get help. The next day's headline read: OBAMA CAN'T SWIM!
But the other two conversations caused me to wonder if the perils we face could make some of his natural foes take a different tack.
The first was with a classic Wall Street type who has long been what we now call a Reagan Republican, which means supply side economics and cutting taxes - which are considered money stolen from hard working Americans - to the bone. No amount of evidence of disastrous deficits during the Reagan years, nor of surpluses during the final Bush I year and the 8 Clinton years when taxes were not cut, have any impact on their certainty that making it possible for rich people to get richer is the surest way to prosper the nation and the world.
When I said it looks to me as if Obama is preparing us for some pretty scary numbers and for a prolonged period of deep economic downturn, he said he thought Obama, in his handling of the economy and in his appointments, was doing a really good job.
When I asked him what I thought Obama was going to propose, he told me that he suspects and hopes is that Obama is going to raise taxes on every income level just enough to be able to say we will pay off this massive debt we are incurring to pull the economy out of the ditch, in five years.
"Did I hear you say, 'Raise taxes?' After a generation of portraying taxes as the hole in the economic boat?"
"So long as he does it across the board, not trying to get it all from the richest and make class warfare."
I have longed for the day," I said to him, "when, instead of snarling at having to pay taxes, our national leaders might begin to speak of taxes as the right and duty of responsible citizenship."
"If he asks it of all of us," he agreed, "then I think it will spark a huge rally in the financial markets and give the dollar its place at the zenith of world currencies."
"Assuming it is graduated and seems fair, I buy it."
The third conversation was with a retired Navy officer who had become a successful businessman and taught at a business school. As if those aren't credential enough for a hard core Republican, he was a classmate of John McCain's at the Naval Academy, and held a fund raiser for him at his home in California during the primaries.
"I sent Obama some money," he told me.
"You did? How come?"
"I believe he has a vision. I'm not able to fully articulate it, but something about the man makes me think he is authentic and should be given a chance to lead us. No other politician in a generation has affected me like that."
George H.W. Bush once called Reagan's supply side views "voodoo economics."
One day the vision we all sensed in Obama may be looked back on as chimera.
Or it may look like the seemingly amorphous agenda that saved the day.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
Senators
Someone has pointed out in the fluff about whether Caroline Kennedy should be appointed to the vacant senate seat held until now by Hilary Clinton. that the senate hasn't exactly been a treasure trove of serious talent over the years.
Who knows whether Ms. Kennedy would make a good senator? But when John Warner was elected to the senate from Virginia more than 30 years ago, he was something between a joke about being part of Elizabeth Taylor's harem (he was her 6th husband, briefly) and a playboy with little between his ears. He is retiring as one of the very respected elders of that body.
Seems to me the question that is never addressed is not about the disgrace of money deciding who will be elected (or, in the case of the so-far unseated appointee to Obama's recently vacated seat, appointed), or the seeming impossibility of unseating someone once they reach that body (as in the case of Byrd of W. Virginia, or the late Strom Thurmond who nearly celebrtaed his 100th birthday while still a member), but what we think makes an effective senator, and how in the world would be find out whether a potential member has those qualities?
I am drawn to the possibility of Caroline Kennedy serving in the senate. Probably first because she is a Kennedy and I still can be moved by memories of her father. But not only that. If what one can know of her from her public persona - and what we saw when she went public for nearly the first time to endorse Obama's candidacy - she is reflective, bright and not driven by ego.
When I lived in Washington from 1969-1973 the senate was a body in which deliberations were carried out with rather archaic style (as is still the case with the likes of Byrd), by rather eccentric people who, no matter how vigorously they opposed each other on the floor of the senate, likely hung out with each other off the floor more than with any other group.
In those days - before internet or huge corporate lobbyists having come to dominate the life of the city (and nation) the senators knew they had at least four years to do their business before they would need to begin focusing all their energy on raising money for their next campaign.
That may be mere nostalgia - and I have no desire nor expectation of returning anything to its historic identity - but if Obama is speaking anything other than PR, he intends to govern in ways not seen in Washington in a long time.
Inviting the pastor of a mega church who opposes gay rights and abortion - but calls on other evangelicals to fight against poverty around the world - is going to either truly change the atmosphere or invite the kind of disaster Clinton's ill-fated don't-ask-don't-tell plan for gays in the military did.
I think we need some Caroline Kennedys in the senate to put Obama's agenda to the test.
If he has the strength of character and sense of himself that seems to have come through up until now, he will be mightily challenged by those who have made their way through retail politics in which they have chosen a wedge issue or two, and driven people apart so they can be elected by a minority who share their prejudices.
To top off this wandering piece, I wonder how much spending the congress will dare sign on for - quite apart from the pork barrel particulars every member will want for their own district - to put people back to work and to begin to rebuild the nation's aging infrastructure? Trillion dollar deficits are pretty scary. Scarier than a 10 year depression worldwide?
We'll see. Caroline Kennedy, because she has been on the edge of, but not in the midst of, international life all of her life, may be more immune than most to the fear of presiding over the decline of the United States' hegemony. Jimmy Carter was sacrificed on that altar to the Hollywood illusion of a new morning in America.
Barak Obama will need plenty of self-aware grownups - not in long supply in national leadership recently - to follow an agenda that the old neo-cons will claim is just that.
God love us all.
Who knows whether Ms. Kennedy would make a good senator? But when John Warner was elected to the senate from Virginia more than 30 years ago, he was something between a joke about being part of Elizabeth Taylor's harem (he was her 6th husband, briefly) and a playboy with little between his ears. He is retiring as one of the very respected elders of that body.
Seems to me the question that is never addressed is not about the disgrace of money deciding who will be elected (or, in the case of the so-far unseated appointee to Obama's recently vacated seat, appointed), or the seeming impossibility of unseating someone once they reach that body (as in the case of Byrd of W. Virginia, or the late Strom Thurmond who nearly celebrtaed his 100th birthday while still a member), but what we think makes an effective senator, and how in the world would be find out whether a potential member has those qualities?
I am drawn to the possibility of Caroline Kennedy serving in the senate. Probably first because she is a Kennedy and I still can be moved by memories of her father. But not only that. If what one can know of her from her public persona - and what we saw when she went public for nearly the first time to endorse Obama's candidacy - she is reflective, bright and not driven by ego.
When I lived in Washington from 1969-1973 the senate was a body in which deliberations were carried out with rather archaic style (as is still the case with the likes of Byrd), by rather eccentric people who, no matter how vigorously they opposed each other on the floor of the senate, likely hung out with each other off the floor more than with any other group.
In those days - before internet or huge corporate lobbyists having come to dominate the life of the city (and nation) the senators knew they had at least four years to do their business before they would need to begin focusing all their energy on raising money for their next campaign.
That may be mere nostalgia - and I have no desire nor expectation of returning anything to its historic identity - but if Obama is speaking anything other than PR, he intends to govern in ways not seen in Washington in a long time.
Inviting the pastor of a mega church who opposes gay rights and abortion - but calls on other evangelicals to fight against poverty around the world - is going to either truly change the atmosphere or invite the kind of disaster Clinton's ill-fated don't-ask-don't-tell plan for gays in the military did.
I think we need some Caroline Kennedys in the senate to put Obama's agenda to the test.
If he has the strength of character and sense of himself that seems to have come through up until now, he will be mightily challenged by those who have made their way through retail politics in which they have chosen a wedge issue or two, and driven people apart so they can be elected by a minority who share their prejudices.
To top off this wandering piece, I wonder how much spending the congress will dare sign on for - quite apart from the pork barrel particulars every member will want for their own district - to put people back to work and to begin to rebuild the nation's aging infrastructure? Trillion dollar deficits are pretty scary. Scarier than a 10 year depression worldwide?
We'll see. Caroline Kennedy, because she has been on the edge of, but not in the midst of, international life all of her life, may be more immune than most to the fear of presiding over the decline of the United States' hegemony. Jimmy Carter was sacrificed on that altar to the Hollywood illusion of a new morning in America.
Barak Obama will need plenty of self-aware grownups - not in long supply in national leadership recently - to follow an agenda that the old neo-cons will claim is just that.
God love us all.
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Tree Repair
A friend just pointed out that on the web site next to the article I wrote for Vision Magazine about hitting a tree with my truck, there are several ads for people who do work on trees.
tree repair
A friend just pointed out that in the article in Vision Magazine I wrote about hitting the tree in my truck, there is a series of ads alongside on the web site advertising tree work.
Managing
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there -- lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. -Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)
When I wonder how we’ll manage through this collapse, I consider Richard and Mo, our most prized friends who live in Zimbabwe, where we spent a sublime sabbatical in 1984, just 4 years after the country had finished a bloody war in which it won its independence from the Ian Smith government that had declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence rather than submit to the humiliations they perceived the British Commonwealth wanted to require of them in yielding power to the black majority.
Our friends, who are white, were born there. We were typical American liberal do-gooders, come to have an adventure in a small rural town down by the Mozambique border where I was pastor of several congregations – whites, coloreds and black African – spread across a wide region of bush and semi-desert.
They saw how little we understood what we had gotten ourselves into and, despite their incredibly demanding life – he was a surgeon, managing a clinic for 10,000 people who came from elsewhere to work in the cane fields and farms, and she a nurse, with three children, one a infant – they took us in hand and made themselves available for our every need, a full-time job in itself.
Since we left there nearly 25 years ago, two of our children have been back and spent extended periods with them. Our son and his friend Chad spent half a year following high school, teaching and adventuring. Were they in my care it would have curled my hair.
Richard and Mo – equally at home in black village poverty and with lion and elephant in untracked bush – thought, during a period of unrest, it would be sensible for Chad - blond and blue-eyed - who had been playing on the local soccer team, to sit out that week’s match.
Though Chad never could persuade them that the people in town thought he was an African albino, they didn’t stop him from playing.
Richard and Mo welcomed the new millennium with us in rural Vermont. Before they went back they warned us that life in Zimbabwe, which we thought already disastrous , was about to crash and burn.
Since then we have watched with horror, reading emails they send when they have power, worrying about how they manage in a country with several million percent inflation, random political violence, epidemic cholera, one of the world’s highest rates of AIDS (Richard told me he in 2000 he no longer tests but simply assumes they’re infected), starvation among a people who once grew food for all of southern Africa.
The double puzzle for us to understand what is happening and why – how surrounding countries, especially S. Africa, can not intervene – and how Richard and Mo continue to live, with just about none of what we consider daily necessities, seemingly not merely content, but with the joie de vive that makes us love hanging with them every chance we get.
The solution to the first is beyond white western wisdom. I get a daily news briefing on the country, assembled from clandestine sources in the country and sent from London. The more I learn the less I understand. I felt that when I was there when the country was relatively prosperous, and many times more now from my distant perch.
The second – how Mo and Richard fill their emails with rocking accounts of bush encounters with lion, hyena, baboon, leopard, and the boggling inanities of life in a below subsistence country – has folded into it the mystery of immunity to the scary vagaries of economic collapse and social chaos. Not that they are oblivious, but that they are grounded in ways that disastrous outside event hasn’t the power to dislodge.
This morning we got a Christmas package from them which they had given to friends who were leaving the country and could mail from a dependable post – some of Mo’s beautiful water colors of African bush, and a newsy letter about how they are managing against the increasing bedlam and anarchy. The letter closed:
We are very concerned about you in the midst of the international financial collapse. We so hope it isn’t proving too heavy a burden or hardship. Know you have our love and prayers to sustain you.
When I wonder how we’ll manage through this collapse, I consider Richard and Mo, our most prized friends who live in Zimbabwe, where we spent a sublime sabbatical in 1984, just 4 years after the country had finished a bloody war in which it won its independence from the Ian Smith government that had declared a Unilateral Declaration of Independence rather than submit to the humiliations they perceived the British Commonwealth wanted to require of them in yielding power to the black majority.
Our friends, who are white, were born there. We were typical American liberal do-gooders, come to have an adventure in a small rural town down by the Mozambique border where I was pastor of several congregations – whites, coloreds and black African – spread across a wide region of bush and semi-desert.
They saw how little we understood what we had gotten ourselves into and, despite their incredibly demanding life – he was a surgeon, managing a clinic for 10,000 people who came from elsewhere to work in the cane fields and farms, and she a nurse, with three children, one a infant – they took us in hand and made themselves available for our every need, a full-time job in itself.
Since we left there nearly 25 years ago, two of our children have been back and spent extended periods with them. Our son and his friend Chad spent half a year following high school, teaching and adventuring. Were they in my care it would have curled my hair.
Richard and Mo – equally at home in black village poverty and with lion and elephant in untracked bush – thought, during a period of unrest, it would be sensible for Chad - blond and blue-eyed - who had been playing on the local soccer team, to sit out that week’s match.
Though Chad never could persuade them that the people in town thought he was an African albino, they didn’t stop him from playing.
Richard and Mo welcomed the new millennium with us in rural Vermont. Before they went back they warned us that life in Zimbabwe, which we thought already disastrous , was about to crash and burn.
Since then we have watched with horror, reading emails they send when they have power, worrying about how they manage in a country with several million percent inflation, random political violence, epidemic cholera, one of the world’s highest rates of AIDS (Richard told me he in 2000 he no longer tests but simply assumes they’re infected), starvation among a people who once grew food for all of southern Africa.
The double puzzle for us to understand what is happening and why – how surrounding countries, especially S. Africa, can not intervene – and how Richard and Mo continue to live, with just about none of what we consider daily necessities, seemingly not merely content, but with the joie de vive that makes us love hanging with them every chance we get.
The solution to the first is beyond white western wisdom. I get a daily news briefing on the country, assembled from clandestine sources in the country and sent from London. The more I learn the less I understand. I felt that when I was there when the country was relatively prosperous, and many times more now from my distant perch.
The second – how Mo and Richard fill their emails with rocking accounts of bush encounters with lion, hyena, baboon, leopard, and the boggling inanities of life in a below subsistence country – has folded into it the mystery of immunity to the scary vagaries of economic collapse and social chaos. Not that they are oblivious, but that they are grounded in ways that disastrous outside event hasn’t the power to dislodge.
This morning we got a Christmas package from them which they had given to friends who were leaving the country and could mail from a dependable post – some of Mo’s beautiful water colors of African bush, and a newsy letter about how they are managing against the increasing bedlam and anarchy. The letter closed:
We are very concerned about you in the midst of the international financial collapse. We so hope it isn’t proving too heavy a burden or hardship. Know you have our love and prayers to sustain you.
Sunday, January 04, 2009
Vision Magazine
Vision Magazine has my latest take on things at:
http://visionmagazine.com/archives/0901/feature_Truck.html
http://visionmagazine.com/archives/0901/feature_Truck.html
Friday, January 02, 2009
One Minute To Midnight
Lacey went away for 24 hours and I picked up One Minute To Midnight, a book a friend gave me for Christmas.
I am taking my first break in 325 pages to go to the bathroom and make this entry.
It is about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember standing around the student common at Penn - it was my junior year - drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, joking and pretending to feel mostly ironic about whether the world was going to explode in a nuclear conflagration in the next few minutes.
We listened to the radio as the Soviet ships were reportedly heading for a confrontation with American ships that were blockading Cuba so no more nuclear weapons could be transported to that island 90 miles from Florida.
I think I remember the first reports that the Soviet ships were turning back.
Reading this book makes me realize some things I don't think I knew or understood before.
The most important one is that those who were supposedly managing the crisis we in fact as terrified as we were, and probably more, because while we assumed they knew what they were doing and the likely outcome, they didn't.
Many of the details I have believed he past 47 years turn out to be wrong.
But why I can't put this book down is because it confirms my worst fears about who is running the world.
No one.
How one could think otherwise this year, when even the oligarchs watched their trillions disappear into thin air, is hard to understand.
I guess we can't take too strong a does of reality.
You want to read a book that will hold your attention until you bladder bursts? Try One Minute...
You want to maintain your illusions about how the world works, about the smart, rational people making decisions that determine the course of events, maybe stick with some lighter stuff. Maybe some Cormac McCarthy fiction.
Oh, by the way, some geologists think they may have found evidence for why a period of global warming suddenly reversed course a few thousand years ago, and why a dramatic period of extinction, and maybe the extinction of humans on the North American continent occurred. It's long been a mystery.
They think a meteor may have hit us. Not a really big one like the one that hit the Yucatan, just a moderate sized one, just enough to throw up sufficient debris to block sunlight.
Hard to know who to blame for that one.
I am taking my first break in 325 pages to go to the bathroom and make this entry.
It is about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember standing around the student common at Penn - it was my junior year - drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, joking and pretending to feel mostly ironic about whether the world was going to explode in a nuclear conflagration in the next few minutes.
We listened to the radio as the Soviet ships were reportedly heading for a confrontation with American ships that were blockading Cuba so no more nuclear weapons could be transported to that island 90 miles from Florida.
I think I remember the first reports that the Soviet ships were turning back.
Reading this book makes me realize some things I don't think I knew or understood before.
The most important one is that those who were supposedly managing the crisis we in fact as terrified as we were, and probably more, because while we assumed they knew what they were doing and the likely outcome, they didn't.
Many of the details I have believed he past 47 years turn out to be wrong.
But why I can't put this book down is because it confirms my worst fears about who is running the world.
No one.
How one could think otherwise this year, when even the oligarchs watched their trillions disappear into thin air, is hard to understand.
I guess we can't take too strong a does of reality.
You want to read a book that will hold your attention until you bladder bursts? Try One Minute...
You want to maintain your illusions about how the world works, about the smart, rational people making decisions that determine the course of events, maybe stick with some lighter stuff. Maybe some Cormac McCarthy fiction.
Oh, by the way, some geologists think they may have found evidence for why a period of global warming suddenly reversed course a few thousand years ago, and why a dramatic period of extinction, and maybe the extinction of humans on the North American continent occurred. It's long been a mystery.
They think a meteor may have hit us. Not a really big one like the one that hit the Yucatan, just a moderate sized one, just enough to throw up sufficient debris to block sunlight.
Hard to know who to blame for that one.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
New Year?
These arbitrary marks we make to mark would-be beginnings and endings, do seem to focus some things.
I read that some fraction of a second was being added to our time last night to make up for some fluctuation in some sort of waves in the universe that make even our atomic clocks need resetting periodically.
My atomic watch has never been able to pick up the signal from wherever it is in Colorado, strong enough to change time zones, so I have to do it the old fashioned way. Well, not really the old fashioned way, because I have to push a bunch of buttons on the sides of the watch. In fact I have to consult the little booklet that came with the watch because I can never remember which buttons to push in which order. Which my children find laughable.
My inner clock has a better fix on reality. It set my immune system for holiday around Christmas and the New Year, as it always has, and pulled my sense of well being into the winter darkness.
It's OK. I've lived through it for nearly 70 years, and may for a few more.
The point is - I think - it's not about us. Never has been. Never will be.
We divide minutes, hours, years, days and nights, black and white (though none of us is really either), Christians and Muslims, fat and thin, male and female, as though this might give us a handle on what's going on.
You've indulged my favorite fantasy before: be the visitor from another galaxy, and try to notice all those distinctions.
Ever watched an ant hill for an extended period, trying to figure out which ones are workers, which drones (ants are like bees that way, aren't they?), all those ants, thousands milling around in some way that is presumably full of purpose? Stand there all day and then tell me you can tell the different ants apart.
All these distinctions to which we give so much meaning - especially on the first day of the last year of the first decade of the new millennium - are to an outside observer, as the differences among the ants in an anthill.
Not to say they don't matter. They do, especially to the ants.
But they don't define the universe.
In fact, if pressed, I would bet on their being no definition to the universe.
Nonetheless, being here is a pretty wicked adventure. Would have hated to have missed it.
I read that some fraction of a second was being added to our time last night to make up for some fluctuation in some sort of waves in the universe that make even our atomic clocks need resetting periodically.
My atomic watch has never been able to pick up the signal from wherever it is in Colorado, strong enough to change time zones, so I have to do it the old fashioned way. Well, not really the old fashioned way, because I have to push a bunch of buttons on the sides of the watch. In fact I have to consult the little booklet that came with the watch because I can never remember which buttons to push in which order. Which my children find laughable.
My inner clock has a better fix on reality. It set my immune system for holiday around Christmas and the New Year, as it always has, and pulled my sense of well being into the winter darkness.
It's OK. I've lived through it for nearly 70 years, and may for a few more.
The point is - I think - it's not about us. Never has been. Never will be.
We divide minutes, hours, years, days and nights, black and white (though none of us is really either), Christians and Muslims, fat and thin, male and female, as though this might give us a handle on what's going on.
You've indulged my favorite fantasy before: be the visitor from another galaxy, and try to notice all those distinctions.
Ever watched an ant hill for an extended period, trying to figure out which ones are workers, which drones (ants are like bees that way, aren't they?), all those ants, thousands milling around in some way that is presumably full of purpose? Stand there all day and then tell me you can tell the different ants apart.
All these distinctions to which we give so much meaning - especially on the first day of the last year of the first decade of the new millennium - are to an outside observer, as the differences among the ants in an anthill.
Not to say they don't matter. They do, especially to the ants.
But they don't define the universe.
In fact, if pressed, I would bet on their being no definition to the universe.
Nonetheless, being here is a pretty wicked adventure. Would have hated to have missed it.
