He's Back!

I missed President Obama's press conference last night.

I don't follow news as closely - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "the same way" - as I used to. I used to tune in NPR every time I was anywhere near a radio.

Whether NPR - or I - have changed more, is hard to say.

Now I click into the internet two or three times a day, take a look at what Google has put on their new page, scan a couple of favorite bloggers (Andrew Sullivan's Atlantic blog, Talking Points Memo). When I see something I think I might care about, I take a look. Sometimes read or listen or watch something at length, often not.

So, I confess, I was unaware our splendid young president was holding a press conference.

Instead I was having dinner with friends, one a historian, and he and I agreed we have a mature adult in the White House. And are so glad of it.

Like most of the nation, we have different ideas of how various of the incredibly large number of scary issues ought to be managed. And we don't agree with the president's handling of all of them.

But we have the sense that this smart, thoughtful man listens to opinions - especially contrary opinions (seems he goes out of his way to solicit opinions from those who have been silent during the discussion), considers all sides, and then makes a clear decision.

A grownup doing the job we hired him to do.

I received an email from a"conservative" grumbling about the Chrysler bankruptcy, saying this proves that Obama doesn't tell the truth, because it is the opposite of what he said last night he wanted.

I responded that what he in fact said was that he didn't want to run car companies, nor banks; that he has two wars, among other things requiring his best efforts, and he would dearly love to shrink his portfolio. But he has to play the hand he was dealt.

So, after Chrysler's bond holders turned down the deal that would have kept the company out of bankruptcy, the president and his advisors decided a quick and surgical bankruptcy was preferable to protracted and perhaps unsuccessful ongoing negotiations.

So far, though none of us can predict the future and know which of his many bold decisions will prove out, those who carp about him do so simply because he is working to unravel - and then reknit - the disastrous economy he inherited. They surely remember the drastic efforts of his predecessor - sinking what were then unparalleled amounts of government money into efforts to unfreeze credit markets.

I am not claiming they are wrong, though I devoutly hope they are. Or even that this scary and massive intervention of government into business was the only way, though I have yet to hear a clear alternative.

I believe this young president is acting in the most sensible, hopeful, helpful way in the face of realities none of us has ever faced before. Likely I will be underground before the decisive judgment about this is made.

But I'd bet my unsanforized portfolio that Barak Obama is going to be portrayed 100 years from now as at least as effective and saving the republic as Franklin Roosevelt, the last president to come into office facing anything like this. And even perhaps as decisively effective as Abraham Lincoln.

A conversation this morning at breakfast:

That reading list you sent out yesterday is vintage Blayney. (Compliment? Insult?)

Four books on death. You're a case. I know when you come face to face with it you're going to be every bit as scared as anyone, maybe more.

What's your stake in my having a panicky death?

None. I just sometimes find your posturing about it unconvincing.

Now, it's not the first time we have had this conversation. And I am in no position to argue, since I, no more than anyone else, know how it's going to be. (I have been ambivalent about whether I would rather drop dead or have some notice, but, increasingly I hope for the latter.)

And, while I hope I won't panic and turn my focus from people and things I love to clutching the remnants of life, my interest is not so much in taming death.

Increasingly it has seemed to me that, until one embraces death - in much the same way we embrace the necessities of everyday life (digestion, sex, respiration, elimination) our primal survival drive will cause us to embrace the countless seductive illusions our culture has raised up to persuade us we are forever young, virile, immortal.

She went on to speak disparagingly of the increase use of the term "passing" as opposed to "die."

Which, so it seemed to me, a perfect illustration of what I had been talking about.

Having done my share of therapy and group encounter, I suspect there is plenty of denial and bravado in my continuing to focus on death. And some contrariness, meaning to stand against a culture that values only the first third of life.

I confess I have lately become obsessed by David Foster Wallace's suicide last October. I have read all the accounts of his family and friends who tell of his lifelong battle with depression. And his changing - and then going off - medication. Who can ever know the extent to which brain chemistry contributed, and the extent to which his life circumstance?

But I do wonder whether - having produced Infinite Jest, considered by many to be the signal work for the next generation - he felt he had climaxed his power before he was thirty? And despaired of meeting the huge expectations of the literary world about what he would write in the future?

Next year I turn 70. I am grateful I didn't try to make my living as a writer. I think I might have been a good writer. That's almost irrelevant. Someone once said, "Writing is easy; just sit down, get a paper and pencil, and open a vein."

That's how I understand writing. When I was preaching, I agonized over the weekly sermon. Not because the writing was so hard - though it often was - but because I had to decide every week whether to do something pro forma - that sounded like religious talk - or open that vein in front of those people.

I almost always chose the latter, though I'm not sure more than a few ever knew that. And when I had done that, not only did I find facing those people scary, but the seemingly casual way they heard it (Nice sermon, Reverend), and the thought that I was expected to do it all over again next Sunday, felt like carrying an 800 pound weight around. (I had an assistant who said he felt so naked after preaching that he imagined what people would say if they dared was, "Michael, what's that thing that looks like a penis, only smaller?")

Finally I have reached the point at which I am writing mostly (not altogether) for myself, eager to see what emerges. And If my heart were to stop before I reach the end of this sentence, I would not feel short-changed. I honestly feel enough.

Maybe even looking forward to respite.

April 28, 2009

This winter has been an odd reading season. Prompted by David Foster Wallace’s suicide, I finally decided to take on Infinite Jest. It deepened my sadness that we won’t have more of his work. I have projected onto him anxiety that he had produced the signal piece of writing for the next generation before he was 30.

You will see why I describe it as odd in the first few books I mention. None of them – including Infinite Jest – have I finished. Each of them has a marker inserted where I left off, and when I go back, I may or may not pick up there. None of them even resembles literature as I learned it in school. Though they may have in them a discernible thread (more likely several), it appears and disappears, seemingly at random, leaving the reader to work out, if he pleases, how they may connect.

Foster’s favorite conceit – 100 pages of footnotes – turns out to be no conceit at all, but the only device that would make possible even a semblance of narrative uninterrupted by the Vesuvius of fascinating detritus that erupts in his mind with every sentence he writes.

Am I recommending that you read these huge, heavy books? I guess this Zone Note is the answer. I hesitate because, maybe even more than my political views, these books will provoke a screed in you classics lovers that I have no wish to fend off.

Here’s how they work on me: the sensations – sounds, fear, tastes, prickly skin - the writing lights off in me, the gorgeous cadences and surprising word combinations; the fearless portrayal of poignant failure and self-defeat, word pictures that can make me laugh out loud even when the book has fallen onto my lap several times as I doze; the astonishing catholic knowledge, complex understanding of technical contemporary subjects – physics, biology, sex, addiction, psychology, religion, tennis – Many times I have looked forward all day to spending an hour or more with Infinite Jest, only to fall into exhausted sleep after three exhilarating pages.

Proceed at your own risk. The management bears no responsibility…

Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace. Back Bay Books. 1996

2666. Roberto Bolaño. FSG. Translation 2008. When Bolaño knew he was going to die (2003, age 50) he left instructions for the 5 sections of this work of over 1000 pages to be published independently, apparently thinking it would bring more money to his wife and children. His heirs and publishers believed they should be published as one work. Bolaño, a revolutionary from Chile, left a huge legacy of brilliant, challenging work that eloquently portrays the poet he considered himself.

Sometimes a Great Notion. Ken Kesey. Penguin. 1963. You remember Kesey as the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. This one is what has made him a cult figure. Who could imagine a writer so gifted he might make an American version of The Odyssey writing of a poverty-stricken lumbering family in rural Oregon? Keysey’s drug experimenting and vagabond existence likely contributed to his death at 66; it also led to writing that puts him among our finest authors.

Omega Minor. Paul Verhaeghen. Dalkey Archive. Translation. 2007. Verhaeghen – Belgian by birth (he translated this work into English himself) is a cognitive psychologist, interested in the edges of conscious and fancy, which led him to write this challenging tome in which an old physics professor returns to Potsdam to try to atone for his sins, and an Italian postdoc designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe.

OK, those are the fat ones. The rest can be balanced on your lap in a plane.

A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again. David Foster Wallace. Back Bay. 1997.
Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown. 1999. So, if you get hooked on Wallace – and you don’t mind having your heart broken by the thought that you could read all he will ever write – you may as well read these. And if you’re into tennis (Wallace was a ranked junior) there is a piece he did on Roger Federer in the August 20, 2006 Sunday NY Times sports supplement, that is the most elegant piece of tennis writing likely ever.

One Nation Under Dog. Michael Schaffer. Henry Holt. 2009. I thought my increasing suckerhood for dogs was another sign of my softening with age. Schaffer says it’s because I’m an American.

The Science of Fear. Daniel Gardner. Dutton. 2008. Popular wisdom attributes our unrealistic fears to media exploitation. Gardner cites odds and science to try to persuade us that 9/11 type anxiety, while understandable, ought not to be a preoccupation in our actuarially quite safe existence.

Mating. Norman Rush. Vintage. 1991. This politically driven novel, written in the voice of an American woman anthropologist who pursues a South African man to the remote bush community he has founded to be a matriarchy, is wonderfully counter-intuitive and provocative, raising issues of how corporatism and western development corrupt the world.

Four Great Death Books… Each, in different, clever ways, strengthening my prejudice that an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with the certain reality of one’s own death, is required for living a rich life.

Death With Interruptions. Jose Saramago. Harcourt. 2008. On the first day of the new year no one dies in this country. When they realize people have stopped dying altogether, people at first celebrate their victory over “the final enemy,” then the vexing starts. The Roman Catholic Cardinal demands the Prime Minister do something, because without death, the Church is out of business.

Sum; Forty Tales From The Afterlife. David Eagleman. Pantheon. 2009. Eagleman, a young (37) neuro-scientist, has contrived these clever, brief fantasies of afterlife that expose the silliness of our imaginings of eternity.

The Book of Dead Philosophers. Simon Critchley. Vintage. 2008. It was Lewis Lapham’s description: “…looks death in the face and draws from the encounter the breath of life…In a prose style that is as deft as his intelligence.” that drew me to this wonderful book.

Nothing To Be Frightened Of. Julian Barnes. Knopf. 2008. Those of you who find all this talk of making friends with death annoying, will love Barnes’ literary, unrelenting dread and unsuccessful attempts to purge it.

The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder. Edited by Robin G. Wilder & Jackson R. Bryer. Harper. 2008. Wilder’s nephew, Tappan, his uncle’s literary executor, is a friend of a friend. Wilder was a prolific correspondent and gossip who knew most important people of the past century. Fun read.

A Little History of The World. E.H. Gombrich. Yale. 2008. Imagine! In under 300 pages and in less than six weeks, Gombrich wrote a history of the world from pre-history to the atom bomb. (The first version was printed in 1936, later revised and translated into English.) This lively, widely read book is perfect for people like me who have trouble keeping history straight.

Three books Lacey wanted mentioned from her Vermont book group…

Loving Frank. Nancy Horan. Ballantine. 2008. Novel of Frank Lloyd Wright and his loves. Lacey said it was great.

Birds In Fall. Brad Kessler. Scribner. 2006. Search for survivors of a plane crash off Nova Scotia forms a fascinating community.

One Drop. Bliss Broyard. Back Bay. 2007. Two months before he died, Anatole Broyard told his children he had passed for white. Bliss, his daughter, set out to learn all she could, and so does the reader.

Finally, two wonderful books you won’t be able to download to your Kindle, sent to me by a kind friend who said my writing made him think I would like them. I love them.

Those Days; An American Album. Richard Critchfield. Anchor/Doubleday. 1986. Critchfield tells the story of his semi-rural Midwestern family 1880-1940. Surrounded by accelerated 21st century change, this lovely reminder of where we came from is so welcome.

One Man’s Montana. John K. Hutchens. Lipincott. 1964. Hutchens, writer for the New Yorker among others, was there when Montana was Montana. I just stopped to read chapter 3 again, The Night They Hanged The Sheriff. Great read.

There is a marvelous video (45 minutes long) of James Carroll speaking at St. Paul's Episcopal Cathedral in San Diego as a part of his tour to promote his new book, "Practicing Catholic."

http://sermon.net/stpaulscathedral

He takes an eloquent and moving tour of western history since the reformation, combining big issues (Christian anti-Judaism) with homely personal ones (his conflict with his father, a Pentagon general, during Viet Nam).

It caused me to go back and look again at what has become my skepticism about the suitability of our species for life on this planet. Increasingly I se our species as a brief, fascinating evolutionary experiment that went wrong in building an intellect large and complex enough to tempt us into thinking we understand and can manage the environment on which we are a part.

Carroll has a vision of our species taking on compassion as our destiny and embracing the oneness of everything and recognizing the limits of our power.

Today I read a description of the unfolding of nuclear weapons since the dropping of Fat Boy on the desert of Alamgordo , NM in 1945.

My 8th grade history teacher in the American School in Manila, Mrs. Bush, was an air traffic controller at the site. She knew nothing of the bomb. She had a squadron of B-29s in the air, and when the sky lit up as if the sun had descended to the earth, and an explosion beyond anything every before experienced rocked the tower, she assumed there had been a collision in the squadron followed by a spontaneous destroying of the whole squadron.

She frantically tried to rouse someone on her radio, but there was no response for several minutes.

Finally the squadron commander came on and reassured her all was well. She somehow knew not to ask what had happened. It wasn't until after the annihilation of Hiroshima that she found out.

I somehow doubt we will do ourselves in in a nuclear holocaust.

But there seem to me to be countless other ways we have devised to make the planet no longer suitable for our stay.

I hope I'm wrong and James Carroll is right.

I suspect life - at least human perception of daily existence - is colored largely by our glands.

Maybe that's what religious writers have so long been calling "soul."

Therapy, diet, exercise, work, sex, sleep, illness, wellness all the bedrocks of existence, all the shapers of glandular activity.

I know four sisters - ranging in age from mid 60s to mid 70s - who have each had thyroid issues. Trying to keep up with them has worn out a few husbands, and raised up some overachieving children.

As for me, I am committed to watching.

Great theater.

Just don't try to make it come out as you wish or think it ought to.

No, not the endless debate about what we did and what should be done about it now (though that is worth having)...

But torture watching the determined effort of the political opposition to destroy Obama and his administration.

Nothing new about fierce political opposition, which I counted myself among the past eight years.

This opposition - at least the visible, vocal segment - seems to make no attempt to separate opposition on political and/or philosophical grounds, from simply wanting to wreak havoc.

In some ways I am happy about this, because I think it makes the opposition position weaker. Fascinating to read poll numbers that suggest that, while there remains serious doubt about whether Obama's many expensive plans for extricating us from this disaster - and to address other issues - can succeed, the same people express surprisingly strong support for the man and his efforts.

This suggests that the loud opposition is not attracting great numbers of supporters.

Whether we will ever again see the days of a "loyal opposition" in American politics seems hard to know.

I continue to think we got lucky in this young senator emerging when he did.

Tectonic Shake

Anselm April 21, 2009


We are all of us more or less echoes, repeating involuntarily the virtues, the defects, the movements, and the characters of those among whom we live. -Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)

[this is a photo of an ad. I can't seem to import photos...]


I hope this reproduces in your Zone Note. It’s an ad run by Lord & Taylor in the Sunday NY Times. The copy – which may be too faint to read:
It’s Not About The Time In Our Life…It’s About The Life In Our Time.

The strategic placement of the fair, blue-eyed baby in the arms of the stunning bronze woman, leaves to our fancy whether her watch – which is what the ad turns out to be promoting – is her entire wardrobe.

Jumping (I’ll be back): banner headlines in today’s Wall St. Journal about a cyber spy hacking into the specs for the F-35 fighter jet, the most expensive weapons system in US history.

Puts me in mind of a friend, a career undercover CIA agent who risked - and nearly lost - his life stealing secrets from our enemies. Soviet double agents provided information that kept our planes from being shot down over Hanoi for many months until Aldrich Ames , a double agent in our CIA, revealed to the Soviets who was giving us their information.

A few years ago my Mac froze solid. I was in California. I called the young man in Vermont who has been my computer savior since he was a student in our local high school. (He now owns the premier Mac store in southern New England). When his suggestions produced no cure, he told me to sit still. Soon I saw the cursor begin to move, an array of seemingly random numbers appeared on my screen, and after a 15 minute mystifying display, Patrick said I was good to go.

That was the last moment I believed anything in cyberspace can be assumed to be private. If Patrick can run my computer in California from Brattleboro, Vermont, surely someone in Beijing can read the stats on a designer’s computer in Langley, Virginia.

So, what, do you suppose, it means if there is no way to shield any information?

Back to the NY Times ad.

1964, the Public Accommodations Bill has passed the House and is being filibustered in the Senate by southern Democrats. For you born in the past 30 or so years, the Bill said no restaurant or hotel could refuse someone on the basis of their color. I know it seems incredible such a bill was needed, but not only did it face the same argument we hear today about government intrusion into business, but turning away blacks was still standard practice in much of the nation 100 years after the Civil War.

A student from Jewish Theological Seminary in NYC organized a vigil, asking seminaries all over the nation to send people to stand watch at the Lincoln Memorial 24 hours a day until the filibuster was broken and the bill was voted up or down.

I went with a group from our seminary in Cambridge. We stayed in an Augustinian monastery in NE Washington and got up before dawn on a chilly April morning to stand our watch from 4-8AM.

A rabbinical student picked us up and drove us to the Memorial. At the next bench was a teenager in a Nazi uniform standing vigil in opposition to the bill. We had a thermos of coffee. He was alone, shivering. I said I was going to take him a cup of coffee.

Over my dead body, the Jewish student said.

Sunday, when I came upon that ad for that watch, I not only wondered how many and what messages its designer intended to imbed in it, but whether that American Nazi – who would now be around 60 – may have seen it, too.

Strikes me that a world in which secrets are all up for grabs, one of the primordial pieces of human civilization has been breached, causing disruption as great as the shifting of the earth’s tectonic plates. Did you feel the earth shake when President Obama released the CIA torture tapes?

And when an elegant woman of color, holding an comely Anglo baby in her naked arms, can seduce us into wanting the watch on her well-turned wrist, only a fool or a knave would predict where we go from here.

©2009 Blayney Colmore

Yesterday - just the one day - I forgot an appointment, long on my calendar, to meet with a young couple at whose wedding I will officiate in the fall, forgot to put my atomic watch in the window so it could pick up the nightly correction signal from that mountain in Colorado, forgot my promise to cut the grass at the church, forgot to rinse my beer glass and return it to the freezer for tonight's drink, and forgot to put water in the dog's dish after feeding him.

I chalk it all up to the day suddenly turning to mid-summer, 80º, cloudless sky, perfect beach day, and a long languid swim in the ocean. I even was so relaxed I turned over on my back, stretched out my arms and legs the way I marveled at my mother doing when I was a skinny little boy who sank like a stone, and nearly fell asleep in forty feet of water as kayakers had to make detours around me.

It had nothing to do with losing brain cells as I approach the biblical life-limit of three score and ten.

We sat and talked with friends. The father of one of them is exactly 20 years older than I am. Ever since his wife of over 60 years died last year he has steadily lost ground. Moved from his house into a health care place, taken on a helper, acknowledged he has increasing trouble remembering the day and what he's meant to be doing in it.

For the more than twenty years I have known him I have told him he is my canary in the mine, telling me what's ahead.

And it has been reassuring, because he is a fun, smart, adventuresome dude.

Yesterday he and I sat together on the beach, not talking much, but loving being baked by the sun, watching the ocean sparkle like a precious diamond.

And not giving a damn if we were supposed to be somewhere else doing something more important.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George Akerlof.

I just read a review of the book.

The thesis seems to borrow from a notion John Maynard Keynes sponsored. Though we all know about Keyne's theories about government needing to invest heavily in the economy when it falters, I had not heard about animal spirits.

If I understand from the review what it means, it is that the way we feel about life may have more to do with how an economy fares than the mathematical models beloved by professional economists.

Animal spirits refers to the exuberance with which we live - and spend - when we feel times are good, and the sadness - and hoarding - when we feel times are bad.

The reason for massive government intervention is to revive that spirit even more than to stimulate the economy, thought they are, of course, tightly woven into a single fabric.

My exchanges with people on all sides (but, I fear more on the right side) of the political spectrum, have resulted in exhausted refrains of all the same arguments we have been making all along.

Now I hosey for animal spirits as the basis for fixing or wrecking the economy.

I feel bullish.

Do you think whatever we call this nasty economic period - recession, depression - is going to result in a revolution?

Or do you think we are trying to put it back together in as close to the same shape as we perceive it to have been when it was flying high?

My guess is that too many things have gone too badly wrong to be able to put it back.

But that none of us can yet imagine what that is going to mean.

When Rosa Parks was too weary and pissed to get up and move to the back of the bus that afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama, who could have known the spark would ignite a revolution that would result in an overturning of life in this country so radical that a man who would have been sent to the back of that bus is now in the White House?

The fat's in the fire.

Tueday in Easter Week April 14, 2009


God, who hast knit together thine elect in one communion and fellowship, in the mystical body… Prayer for All Saints Day

58 Years ago next Sunday – Thursday, April 19, 1951 – marks my earliest inkling of what television might make of us. We got one about then – a Philco console, the largest piece of furniture in the den. Charlotte had one channel, all but a couple of hours the screen a flickering test pattern.

I was in the 6th grade in Eastover School. Mrs. Thompson – the scariest person I have ever known – met us that morning with a stern warning. It was not to be a normal day. We were to be especially attentive and orderly.

Next her large desk in the front of the room was a television. The first two hours of the morning she explained to us details of the Korean War, Communism, and the nature of military command in our nation.

Though I can’t call back Mrs. Thompson’s politics, that being the south, our losing scores of Marines every day on that far off peninsula, and Senator McCarthy’s vocation - ridding the State Department and Hollywood of communist sympathizers - it’s not hard to imagine.

Mrs. Thompson turned on the television in time for us to see part of the parade honoring General Douglas MacArthur, who had just been fired by President Truman. We continued to watch through the morning as the general addressed a joint session of congress (65% of Americans took MacArthur’s side against Truman) which he concluded:

I am closing my 52 years of military service. When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barrack ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that "old soldiers never die: they just fade away."
And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty.
Good Bye.

My first moment of national consciousness. Feelings I couldn’t name.

12 years later I barely left the television to sleep that bitter November weekend as we all watched President Kennedy’s body brought back to Washington. Along with all the nation I witnessed - live – Lee Harvey Oswald, handcuffed to a detective in the basement of the Dallas Police Department, murdered by Jack Ruby.

5 years later Dr. King, Bobby Kennedy. December of that year we saw an actual photo (in color?) of our planet – blue-green – surrounded by dark, apparently empty space.

In 1975, in what was – likely accurately – described as the first moment in which the entire world could experience a single phenomenon televised simultaneously, Mohammed Ali outlasted Joe Frazier in The Thrilla in Manila to retain the world heavyweight boxing championship.

At the beginning of Lent in 1970, I went to a talk given by a colleague who was headmaster of an elementary school on Beacon Hill in Boston. He spoke about his concern for what he saw as results of children watching television from their earliest days.

His talk was so persuasive that I came home that night and put our television in the closet, saying our Lenten discipline would be 40 days without it. Lacey had begun the process earlier, breaking my addiction to falling asleep most nights watching Johnnie Carson.

We never took it out of the closet. We didn’t throw it out because no one would babysit for us if we had no TV. Our kids laugh today when we say they grew up without television.

We didn’t have it in our house, but we our friends did. Thank God.

We have no television in Vermont, but as of last summer we do have high speed internet. So on Tuesday, November 4, Lacey and I huddled over a computer at our kitchen table and watched with billions around the world as the Obamas came onto that stage in Grant Park in Chicago. We wept with crusty old Jesse Jackson who only recently had been overheard wanting to emasculate the young senator.

It’s hard to imagine anything sweeping across the planet with the speed of this economic collapse without our knowing instantly in Vermont a plane taking off in Nairobi has a flat tire that might have been caused by foul play.

Teilhard de Chardin, the prescient French Jesuit – he died on Easter Day 1955 - predicted the human race, interconnected by a mega-nervous system he named noosphere , would be, no longer several billion separate egos, but a single phenomenon, each of us a cell in a single larger organism.

I vaguely recall that day at Eastover School in 1951, sensing that watching the fired general was more like actually being in the chamber of the House of Representatives than like watching a movie.

The debate about whether this is a good or bad thing is eclipsed by its irreversible reality. Pretty clearly our consciousness has yet to catch up.

When that prayer for All Saints was composed, the author certainly meant by thine elect, true believers. Teilhard saw the elect, the mystical body, as all of us, knit together, not by what we believe, but by connections – evolved ganglia - we never voted for.

More then forty years after being ordained a priest (and that after 26 years of going to church), I actually heard a new thought in the Easter sermon delivered yesterday by the terrific rector of St. James Church in La Jolla.

He speculated about why it was that, in the Easter Gospel story, the women who went to the tomb to anoint Jesus' body - only to be met by an angel who said he had risen and had gone to Galilee - should have been scared rather than excited.

I have always the reason to be how weird it all was - both a resurrection and an angel - forgetting that such things were not so weird in a pre-Enlightenment world.

No, the preacher said, the reason they were frightened was because Jesus had gone to Galilee rather than Jerusalem.

Had he gone to Jerusalem, where - as the preacher put it, "where the action was" - it would have confirmed his followers' assumption that he was now prepared to challenge the Roman occupiers as well as the rigid ruling establishment who ran the temple.

But Galilee - where Jesus was from, troubling enough - meant he was going back to life as he and they all knew it.

With all the disappointments and failures, boredom and corruption.

The preacher pointed out that these nasty times we have been living through may make it possible for us to understand this story and this resurrection in ways we could not during the go-go days most of us thought would last forever.

Suppose the salvation we long for is not to be found in some magical overturning of the realities we find sometimes tedious and overbearing? Suppose our salvation lies within our own grasp?

The preacher offered the daring notion that God means not to save us from the tasks and hardships of our lives, but instead to be our companion through them so we can discover we are living the miracle we have been praying for.

Yes, life is hard. Yes, we die.

And buried in those seemingly bitter realities lies the wonder of being here at all.

The Easter promise is that, no matter what happens, we are in the company of one who loves and sustains us.

Not something to look forward to, but to embrace now.

I never expected this blog to focus on economics.

Mainly because I find economics much like theology; providing a forum for restless minds - like mine - to speculate about matters that provide no certainty, speculations that are rarely revisited or challenged when the future reveals their shortsightedness.

But here we are. Like President Obama, who must have believed when he first considered his unlikely run for the big chair some years ago, that he would be dealing with social issues, foreign policy and union politics, while the economy bumped along as it has for a generation, I started this blog while our economy was in what will be looked back on as our salad days.

Being old surely has its influence, and the seemingly total collapse of the global economy adds to the sense that we humans are no more able to predict the economic future than we are the weather.

Which makes ever more clear the significance of the softer measures of leadership.

Like confidence. And honesty, Integrity. Flexibility. Commitment to reality over ideology. Humor. Charisma, the quality that causes people to be attracted to and trust you.

George W. Bush never had those sorts of qualities. And I suspected that helped rather than hurt him in the 200 election (even though he wasn't elected).

Because Bill Clinton - bless his pointed head - did have those qualities. But for reasons of character flaw (lack of impulse control), and the ascendency of Republicans in the country, he was deeply discredited. I suspect - and polls seemed to support - that our affection for him remained through his period of disgrace.

But t became untenable to publicly approve of him. And maybe it made us nervous to think of someone so potentially vulnerable to exposure, if not blackmail, to hold the reins of such awesome power. (Wag the dog)

So George Bush, a patently old boy, oil man, child of influence, pretend cowboy, was preferable to the sort of person more fun to vote for. (Not that Al Gore was fun to vote for)

At any rate, Obama seems to have all those qualities in abundance, and if there is substance to his public persona, he doesn't have the foibles that were so troubling about Clinton.

Which, I suspect, is the reason for the seemingly puzzling polls that show that a majority of those asked doubt he has a firm handle on how to fix the economy, but they support and approve of his presidency.

I only hope the economy - which we ought to know by now responds to forces beyond our ken - begins to cheer us up before the young president owns the misery people have been cast into.

Because, if anything is certain, it is that we are a fickle bunch. And we will turn on anyone when we feel uneasy.

An old saying: the higher the money climbs, the more he shows his ass.

Last night I went with a friend to hear Richard Dawkins, the leading light in the scientific community's battle against religion, speak about what he considers the odd human tendency to assign meaning to everything.

I have read some Dawkins and, while I acknowledge his powerful intellect and the contribution he has without question made to our understanding of the ways in which evolution has shaped the world we live in, and us, I find his views on other matters as rigid and unsustainable as those of the fundamentalists he hates.

At one point last night he said that he has no doubt that one day some form of physics will be able to come up with an answer to every question we now have about the universe in which we live.

I wonder if it has occurred to him that he has posed a version of the old Zen paradox of trying to take out your eyeballs and stare at yourself?

Although I would never want to defend the god Dawkins has devoted his life to denying, to suggest that human intellect has the capacity to enclose the universe in some system of its own making is a form of idolatry I find less offensive than naive.

We are, after all, one of the products of evolution, not its owner.

Where Dawkins "scientism" goes wrong is in failing to consider the likelihood that our intellect - the quality we regard as the highest achievement of evolution - is itself limited, and will eventually prove incapable of gaining a perspective on the whole of which it is one part.

(He himself made one fascinating speculation about why our species may have evolved the intellect as our specialization for long term survival. He thought it might be for outsmarting each other. Fun idea, but seems to me to run counter to the usual survival schemes that emphasize cooperation.)

Because he has the sort of mind he does, Dawkins can't appreciate the power of symbol and belief in human commerce.

Bear with me as I try to transfer this notion to the situation our most recent iteration of genius - the world's economists and corporate leaders - have led us into.

A lot of the criticism I read of President Obama's efforts to extract us, focus on his seeming to turn aside from the wisdom that has held sway for a generation, that free markets and minimal government intervention have proved to be the surest ways to creating prosperity.

The criticism, of course, comes from the very people who have led us to this point. Because they have been revered as brilliant - and because for a decade or more vast wealth seemed to have been created through their schemes - we seem not quite ready to tell them to take a seat.

President Obama - at least in their view - has come closer than any public figure since the election of Ronald Reagan. But he, too, seems - understandably - reluctant to attack the icons of the salad days too directly.

I find the whining of financial people much like Dawkins' complaints about fundamentalist believers.

Without question, the financial Nobel Laureates know more, and understand more, about the history and dynamics of world markets than the rest of us.

And Richard Dawkins knows more about the history and dynamics of the evolution of our planet than the rest of us.

But what they don't know - and don't acknowledge - in the inimitable words of a recent Secretary of Defense (Offense?), is what they don't know about what they don't know.

And what the economists don't know - and neither does the president - is how things are going to play out in the future.

And even more important, what they don't know is the part that will be played by the belief of people - like me - that President Obama has the courage and the opportunity, to change the flow and direction of global commerce in a time when doing that is more important than any of the particulars.

The scariest thought - and what we have long been told is what causes financial markets to fall even more than bad news - is uncertainty. And the wisest leader is one who understands that every decision he makes, he makes without knowing how it will play out.

If we climb out of this ditch, it will be not because someone smarter than the guys who drove us into it find the "right" solution, but because we all begin to believe that a smart, trustworthy leader has begun to change the course that turned bad.

Tuesday in Holy Week/Passover April 7, 2009

"Oxford University mooted the idea of establishing a business school six years ago, prompting 500 black-gowned dons to storm into the 17th-century Sheldonian Theatre in protest. Harvard's business school dates from 1908. Cambridge succumbed in 1990. But outraged Oxonians unleashed volleys of Ciceronian oratory, arguing that the groves of academe should be out of bounds to commerce." Tara Pepper; Oxford's Business Blues; Newsweek (New York); Sep 2, 2002.

******

The heavily tinted glass in the impressive new gray Mercedes sedan executing a tight U turn in the intersection I had just stepped into made it hard to identify the culprit at the wheel. Until I defied her determination to usurp my right of way, walked in front of the car and could see the handsome California blonde – 40ish – glaring at me. Waiting just long enough for me to cross her bow, she completed her turn. I read her vanity plate: THIN2WIN.

Overturning one of the most sensible survival strategies in the evolutionary arsenal – carrying extra fat for the inevitable lean times – might have served as an early warning that we were going off track.

Sunday’s NY Times Business section centerfold was a table showing the 2008 compensation and accumulated wealth of 200 chief executives for large public companies. The average total compensation (base salary, cash bonus, perks, stock and option awards) was $10,792,777, 5% lower than a year ago. On the following page they matched the compensation of the 30 highest with their companies performance. They ranged from Sanjay Jha’s $104M at Motorola (total return down 71% from 2007) all the way down to Jay Fishman at Travelers who made a mere $16.8M while Travelers total return dropped only 14%.

What were we thinking?

Several years ago Lacey and I took an ill-fated trip deep into Baja California for a week’s camping on the beach and kayaking with migrating whales. Ill-fated because I didn’t even know how to pitch a tent, let along cope with cold rain (it sleeted one night), no flush toilet or running water, nor the off-roading that destroyed the shocks on our aging Volvo.

Only one other person in our group even close to my age, a much more experienced camper, whose deeply creased face and gray pony tail marked him as a fellow survivor of the 60s.

The best part of the trip was sitting around a huge roaring fire at night – the closest to warm we experienced all week – drinking quantities of Corona with a dozen very cool men and women in their 20s and 30s.

One night as they lighted up their tokes the talk turned to the “old days.” One of them asked the other old guy, Tell us about the 60s.

In the flickering light of the fire you saw his eyes disappear into his head as if he was having an ecstatic experience. No one spoke. You just shoulda’ been there, he said. The longest silence of the week, maybe five minutes, everyone staring into the fire, before talk of whales and weather resumed.

Surely we all knew that a culture of free sex and drugs was unsustainable, even though it was fun and helped melt the killing frost of rigid religion, racism and male business domination.

I was stunned by the speed and fierceness with which it was dismantled following assassinations, a failed war , race riots and 17% interest rates. In 1965 I could nor more have imagined Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich in the seats then occupied by Lyndon Johnson and Tom Foley, than I could have predicted 9/11 or the election of Barack Obama in 2004.

Yesterday at the Urth Café on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood enjoying an oatmeal raisin cookie and an iced mocha ($9), I eavesdropped on the guy at the next table on his cell phone (It must be really late in Paris right now… OK, we can talk about that when we see each other tomorrow in Pittsburgh.).

I was imagining the young man I met the other day, 50 years from now talking with his grandson. He got one of those multi-million dollar bonuses a year ago. He’s looking for a job, trying to sell his house before it forecloses.

Grandpa, what was it like back around the turn of the century?

His eyes roll up in his head as he remembers.

Oh, Sammy, you just should’a been there.

So the Dow finished above 8000 today.

Phew!

Or something.

Today unemployment went above 8.5%, the largest number in 25 years.

Now the stock market historically has been portrayed as a forecaster. Let's hope that's what it is this time.

Hard to say what is looking so good down the road. Except maybe - since the common wisdom is that uncertainty rattles the financial markets even more than uncertainty, the certainty that we are going to have to slog our way through at least anopther several months -we hope not years - is something specific for traders to consider how to exploit.

My awe of Obama grows by the day. Not so much because he seems to have found the handle on the endless issues he faces, but because, for the first time in memory, our president has clearly signaled that he intends to face them.

Not duck them.

So, if the markets are signaling that they know facing all this is going to be nasty, but better than kicking it all down the road some more. bravo!

I listen to and read President Obama with an increasing sense of awe and unease.

Awe at what he clearly means to take on, after a generation of our self-deception. and unease both at what it likely will cost us, and fear that we will find it so onerous that we will turn on him and return to Reagan style self-delusion. I think the moment has come when we either face the music or dance into the abyss. And it looks to me as if Obama - even while he is working hard to make it palatable to those of us who vote - intends to get us to face the music.

The one piece of his rhetoric I hope is for our consumption rather than at the heart of his plans, is the need to put the global economy back on the path to the kind of growth we have experienced over the past generation.

Or the apparent growth we have experienced.

Because, while it would be hard to argue that - by any of the usual measures - vast wealth has been created over the past generation, surely we are beginning to understand that the usual measures leave out a couple of metrics that are so critical to ongoing realities, as to be seriously misleading.

The first is the seriously uneven distribution of that wealth. Uneven among individuals; even in our country, usually regarded as the world's most prosperous, the percent of wealth owned by the top 1% has grown exponentially, while the middle and lower income groups have stagnated or fallen back. And still dangerously uneven among nations. China and India have served notice that the economic hegemony we take for granted is not going to stand in the future. But we still take pride that, while growing far faster, China's economy will not overtake ours in a long time.

Every war even fought has had in it somewhere the issue of uneven access to wealth. It is in ours and the whole world's interests, not to bend our will to staying the riches nation, but to learning how to take our place alongside the nations of the world as an economic partner. We have trashed the UN because we have felt we didn't need to curb our national interests; other nations needed to adjust theirs to our wants.

That's over. Obama is likely too good a politician to say so outright. He may have taken the first step yesterday in warning the G20 not to expect us to resume our role as the bottomless pit of consuming everything the rest of the world produces. He said we now understand we cannot sustain our trade and budget deficits. He hasn't said this in so many words, but imagine what it's likely to mean for us to adjust our economy in which consumer spending has been upwards of 70% of GDP, to one like Germany's, in which consumer spending is 50%.

The other scary change required has to do with human infatuation with growth as the measure of success.

Once we understand that we are dependent on the planet's resources - clean air and water - for our continued tenure here, we can't avoid the fact that continuing to grow our population and the labor saving devices that can make life easier and easier, place a strain on those resources that is self-defeating.

That one is much harder. I can't imagine how a president addresses it without committing political suicide. Jimmy Carter tried and was ridiculed and defeated by a Hollywood illusionist.

But address it we will. Because we have exported the "good life" as our great gift to the world, and seduced much of the rest of the world into embracing it for themselves, we are going to have to lead the world in weaning ourselves from it.

That will be some political platform!

Maybe it was President Obama stepping up and firing the president of GM, maybe it was his telling the Russuan President he is ready to negotiate a new nuclear arms reduction treaty, maybe it was the photo of his wife and him stepping off the plane in England.

Whatever it was, I finally got it that this man intends to be a catalyst for acknowledging that a new day has arrived.

This doesn't have the appearance of some new trend, like a lowering of hemlines. Nor of an ideological shift, like adding or subtracting rules for investing and taxing business.

Though he may have no clearer notion (though I hope he does) than you or I about exactly how to proceed in this new day, he will no longer simply try to shore up what has been in hopes that everything will return to some stasis.

As if there was a stasis.

He may - as his detractors are saying he surely will - lead us into a conflagration of unintended consequences that will throw the world into chaos.

My sense is that he is not so much trying to manage the change, nor rewrite the rules, as he is openly acknowledging that we have driven ourselves into a ditch by pretending that ephemeral economic schemes, - so clever and so lacking in substance - that looked as if they had repealed reality, were self-deception.

And the ditch we have driven into turns out to have been a blessing because we can no longer continue the deception.

Whether it is actually counting the cost of our profligacy to the environment on which we depend for existence, or acknowledging that salaries of one group being a thousand times those of another, create a dynamic that will bring a nation down, or that depending on our voracious consuming appetites for 70% of GDP, it is simply about getting real.

I suspect it's going to be incredibly bloody. And whether we will support the blood-letting remains to be seen.

But what a relief to be living in reality.