He's Back!

I am emotionally and psychologically unfit for the cyber world.

But I love it.

I have a Garmin for my car. Because I am directionally challenged, having a woman's voice speak to me when I am nearing a decision point, is enough to make me change my will in her favor. If only they had these things when I was a parish priest making calls on people at home. I must have spent at least as much time searching for those people as I did with them after finally finding them. That is, if I didn't give up first and go home.

So when I got an email saying it was time to update the maps, I never hesitated. Put down my money and ordered them up.

They didn't mention that the money - transferred with a single deft keystroke - was the simple part.

Dodo that I am, I assumed that was all there was to it. But whatever magical means I can send email to our kids in Indonesia and see our friends in Africa as we speak to them through Skype, surely the maps would make it into my computer.

No. They had to be downloaded. Eight different screens later I was flummoxed. Oh, great, and 800 number for technical assistance. I waited over an hour on the phone for someone to come on. That person led me through a series of steps, until, exasperated with my ineptness, he somehow took control of my computer and did remotely what needed doing.

If he could run my computer from Madras, why the hell couldn't he just send the new maps into my Garmin?

I was then free to download the new maps. I began, got the message that the download would take over 2 hours. So I left, went for a bike ride. Came back, woke up my Mac, and was told the download failed Error 2475.

I wasn't in the mood to spend another hour trying to reach them, so I gave up. But I had paid $70 for those new maps.

I asked my beloved Mac guy what might have happened. He told me that sometimes if the computer sleeps while you're downloading, the download stops.

This morning I set myself up - this is now day 3 of this process - with plenty to do at my desk, to make sure the computer didn't sleep while downloading.

Success!

Ah, but it turns out the download was to my computer, not to Garmin. That's yet another step that now seemed beyond reach of my computer and my know how.

2 hours waiting for someone to answer. When he finally answers and begins leading me, I realize after a couple of minutes that he is issuing instructions for a PC, not a MAC.

"I've got a Mac," I admit.

"Oh, I'm going to put you on hold for a Mac specialist."

You don't need to hear any more of this.

I yelled at my wife. I answered the phone - someone who had been trying to get through all morning (we don't have Call Waiting, never could figure out how to manage two phone calls simultaneously) and I barked at that person so nastily that whoever it was hung up without speaking.

I'm going to spend some time relaxing, reading on my Kindle.

I must have heard him sing.

How could you live in the USA and not have? But I have never been aware of hearing him.

Of course I know what he looked like, because the photos were all over the place, showing his bizarre surgical adventures.

I finally saw a You Tube of his sister's performance at the Super Bowl that - before their current spate of scandals - the Republicans pretended to be outraged by. And took up a lot of government time and money to investigate and fine CBS (overturned later). For the life of me, even when they stopped at the critical moment, I could not make out the offending breast.

So I can't say I am a part of the national grief and voyeurism clogging the world's air space today.

But it does occur to me that - whatever may have been true about him, or whatever his life outside the spotlight (if he had one) may have been like - he seems to have read the culture and the time with uncanny accuracy.

That photo at the top is a full page ad from the NY Times magazine a few weeks ago, place, if memory serves, by Saks Fifth Avenue. Take a good look.

Then think about Barack Obama being President of the United States.

Michael Jackson nor we will ever be able to measure how much his totally nuts messing around with our national preoccupation with race - making it virtually unclassifiable - may have helped grease the skids for our electing this elegant young man. But if you take a close look at that expensive ad, aimed at those who would so recently have found it shocking, you have to wonder.

Which likely cut his life short.

I wonder if you have read - at least excerpts from - President Obama's speech in Egypt to the Arab and Islamic world?

In the current New York Review of Books there is an article about that speech that makes clear this president is like none we have seen before.

His precise and careful, thoughtful use of language to acknowledge realities that the world has kept under cover of obfuscating diplomatic language, was astonishing.

In 50 packed minutes he described the history of east - west relationships that have brought us to this moment in which we stare at each other over mote of prejudice and anger.

Then he declared it is time to cross the mote and embrace the reality that we are mutually dependent, worship the same God and share the same fragile planet.

Those who argue with me about this president say that those of us who like and support him have fallen in love with his public persona and have become irrational, overlooking the serious flaws in how he is governing.

I understand their frustration. But, despite the fact that almost everything President Obama has said and done since he took office is what I would hope I would have had I been in his spot, it is not about him.

It is about this extraordinary moment in which all the issues - not only the treacherous middle east - that we have been talking about facing for a generation, while they continue to get worse, are actually being addressed.

No wonder the old bugaboo of big government is being raised. The government is actually doing its job of seeking solutions to the problems we face.

What I wonder - and I suspect Obama and his minions must wonder this every night before they go to sleep - is whether the country will tolerate a face to face meeting with reality? After all these years of reassuring us that we are so strong and wonderful, so much God's chosen, that all we need do is keep living the good life, and the rest of the world will eventually see that choosing to go along with is is their best bet, will we turn on this brave man when he keeps telling us there is hard work ahead, requiring sacrifice?

The only president in my lifetime to try that was Jimmy Carter. I admired President Carter and thought he was on the right track. But his Southern Baptist way led him to sound self-righteous, and we chose sunny, happy actor turned politician Reagan to promise a new morning in America.

We'll see.

My step-mother died last night.

She was 96 and outlived my father by 18 years. They were married when i was middle-aged and I didn't spend a lot of time with her or really know her all that well.

I fact I had - somewhat petulantly - begun to wonder if she might outlive me and keep me from ever seeing the other half of my father's estate that he quite properly left intact for her use for the rest of her life.

But this morning when my step-brother, her son, called to say she had died, I was - it was ever thus - surprised to find that my knees gave way a little and I have felt a little shaky ever since.

I liked her.

She was as feisty a woman as I've ever known, as opposite to my withdrawn mother whom my father left to marry her when they were 60 years old, as could be imagined. I resented his leaving my mother for a spell. But, reflecting on it later, I really think it was a courageous and life-affirming move. He had another many years of exciting, challenging life with Greta. And my mother, who had lived under the thumb of her father and then my father, actually perked up for a couple of years and claimed some life of her own. That it didn't last wasn't my father's fault. Nor hers. And that brief period before she climbed back into her shell may have been the best of her life.

Greta loved to eat and drink, party, socialize, eat chocolates. There was a very fancy chocolatier near her house in Baltimore where they would create special fancy candies - at outrageous prices - and she almost never missed a day of dropping by and dropping big bucks.

That's not Greta in the picture. She was quite a handsome woman. I chose it because the woman in the picture looks defiant, lighting a cigarette with the candles on her 102nd birthday cake. I don't know that Greta managed to continue smoking all the way to 96. But it's for damn sure she would have if she wanted.

My father not only had grown up poor, but he was a moralist, believing there are rules written into the universe, and how one obeys or disobeys them determine one's fate. The chief one was that one never indulge in luxury. It was so imbedded in him that it eventually slopped over into not even doing something if it promised too much fun or pleasure.

You can imagine what Greta's showing up with $40 worth of chocolates did to him.

He tried during their early years together to shame her about it, desperately wanting to break her of such self-serving habit.

She was not simply unrepentant, she was joyfully defiant.

It must have been a few years into their marriage when I was visiting and noticed my father chowing down on some of those hand-dipped extravagances. I wish I could remember what I said, because what he said in response was, "Yeah, these are the best chocolates you've ever tasted. Want one?"

Indulgence and generosity in one seemingly casual moment. That I had never experienced either from my father, was my earliest clue that, in this marriage - as opposed to his former one - he was the one being re-shaped.

So, now that I think about it, I owe Greta way more than whatever part of my father's fortune she may have spent before I could get my hands on it. She unearthed dimensions in him I never suspected he had in him.

When he was dying I got to spend time with him. Greta provided her usual hospitality as my sisters and I took over most of her house in our death watch. Greta came and went, spoke kindly to him, but clearly understood that their life together was over, and she saw no need to dwell on it or become maudlin.

Days before he died I asked him how he felt about his time with Greta. They fought like newlyweds working out their turf issues. I thought maybe he had been frustrated at not prevailing as he had with my mother. He always seemed to me more interested in control than any other part of a relationship.

He smiled through his Morphene dried lips. "Best, most exciting chapter of my life," he said with the most energy I had heard from him, maybe ever. Or ever would again.

Nativity of John The Baptist June 24, 2009

******

The serious problems in life…are never fully solved. If ever they should appear to be so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seems to lie not in its solution but in our working at it incessantly. - Carl Jung (1865-1961)

******

One of those nights when you realize you’re not going
to sleep 3:15am
I rise and walk to the window to see if the weeks long
monsoon might have abated
stars
so happy to see stars
bright blinking stars blinking not twinkling
fireflies not stars

fireflies happily marvelously blinking in the
drizzle and fog

time to recalibrate the celebration

recently I have found myself considering that if I can figure my way round the belief business
I may have another run at religion in my old age

no one enjoyed riding his old age and religion - like newly discovered conveyances - more than John Updike who wrote in

Tucson Birthday – 2004

They come, the retirees, to bake away
their juicy lifetime jobs, their fertile
primes
no longer potent jism. And I scratch
this inconclusive ode to old age. It feels
immortal, the sun’s dark kiss. The prickly
pear
has ears like Mickey Mouse, my first love (Endpoint & Other Poems)


we can know only that poetry our own minds may compose

we may call it science. Or Myth Imagination Speculation Religion.

when we recognize it as a piece of complexity - in a state of continuous
unimaginably rapid flux, - defying observation, description, impossible to
catalogue and we ourselves of a piece with that complexity
our cells altering at that pace
we are on the road to acknowledging the reality of our
circumstance

when we stand in awe of delighted at finding ourselves
invited
to swim for a moment in these class V rapids the name for that awe
religion

when we celebrate our moment – enchanted even while being carried
somewhere unknown or scarier well known the name for that
celebration
worship

worship feel too nutty making obeisance to ??? there’s another
WAY

student to professor: OK, Professor, I buy the Big Bang. What was going on before the Big Bang?
professor to student: Turns out the question is meaningless, because the dimension of time begins with the Big Bang. There was no before.
student: Oh, OK, thanks very much.

our conceit that we have finally answered any serious question resolved any serious vexations
is what gets us into some serious mischief

secretly knowing our answers are tautologies revealing our
own busy minds covering our uncertainty with ferociousness
we dig in to defend and

BOOM!


Want to muck around in some fun reading that will stir ever more perplexity? I’m not sure how much reading them on my new Kindle may have riched up the reading.

Endpoint And Other Poems. John Updike

The Age Of The Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It. Joshua Cooper Ramo

Biocentrism: How Life And Consciousness Are Keys To Understanding The Universe. Robert Lanza

The Forever War. Dexter Filkins

Traffic. Tom Vanderbilt

What Really Matters: Searching For Wisdom In America. Tony Schwartz

We're all wondering up here in New England if it's time to build an ark.

I'm looking out at our pond that looks about to swallow the fields.

Listening to weather reports is like the 180º opposite of the weather reports we hear all winter in southern California. There, it's morning fog burning off to warn afternoon sun. Eventually, you'd think, they might save themselves a little effort by simply saying, "Today's going to be a lot like tomorrow. And the next day pretty much, too."

Here the only suspense is provided by the percentage chance of rain. We get our hopes up on the rare days the chance drop below 50%.

But unlike our carping about it, everything else simply adjusts. Yes, tomatoes eventually begin to get black spots and rot. But check out the beavers, the swallows, bluebirds, not to mention the mosquitoes that just thrive.

I'm looking for things to dry out enough for me to try my new mower. Good thing I got it because my old one would never make it through the thick grass this rain has produced.

The phoebes that have built a nest in the cross piece that holds the outside spots over the back door, have been so busy I wonder if they may have hatched young. I read a piece in Harper's by a guy who described phoebes doing the same thing over his door every year. He said a cowbird had taken to laying her huge egg in their nest and leaving the rest to the phoebes to hatch and raise it. The problem is that the baby cowbird is almost the size of the adult phoebe, and the phoebe spent all their efforts feeding it, so their own babies - if they weren't crushed to death by the cowbird - starved.

It's a compelling story ("Eclogue" by Mark Slouka in the July 2009 Harpher's), basically reiterating the fecklessness of our trying to manage, let alone understand, nature.

My pineal gland has become addicted to the bright southern California sun, and my moods are profoundly subject to its being sated.

Mark Slouka finally surrendered his efforts to referee the perplexing dilemma of the phoebes and the cowbirds.

I guess I'll do the same with the weather.

I've written about this before: the need for a good friend/neighbor with a lot of savvy if you are going to make it living in a rural area.

I have been using a mower for the last decade that I thought was state of the art when I first bought it. That was because it had a (sort of) clutch that engaged the front wheels so you got some assist in pushing it up the hills.

The past couple of years I have nearly killed myself mowing a couple of inclines. The clutch still (sort of) works, but it either doesn't do as much work as it used to, or I can't. I did notice the other day that the left front wheel doesn't seem to engage any more, so I am only getting half the pull I used to.

Yesterday Conrad - my Vermont indian guide - told me he saw a mower in front of another neighbor's house for sale for $600. I expressed horror at the price. (I think I paid $400 for mine all those years ago, so what was I thinking?) He thought he might take a little less, and that it might save me from a heart attack or just letting the grass around my place go to field.

He went with me to check it out. He started it up, put it through its paces, and pronounced it an incredible bargain.

I offered the guy a little less, he asked for a little more than I offered and we settled.

I said I'd bring a check over and he looked skeptical and asked that I bring cash.

I don't do cash except for small transactions. So Conrad allowed as how he thought he could come up with the cash. And he did.

Then he put a pair of boards from his barn into the back of my truck, went with me did the precarious balancing drive up into the truck, came to my house and unloaded it.

That's Conrad leaning against the door frame.

I told him I thought I'd need a tutorial before I took the thing on its first road test.

He suggested I pick up the manual for my bedtime reading.

How do people without a friend like Conrad manage their lives?

Maybe you've seen the Harper's magazine that arrived in my mailbox today.

With the picture of President Obama and they have given him the high stiff collar that was a trademark of Herbert Hoover. Behind him a collage of photos of Hoover.

The title of the article: The Best And The Brightest Blow It Again.

This is a tough attack on Obama from the left, suggesting that his failure to push for more radical changes is going to result in a disaster down the road much worse than the mess we hope we may be climbing out of now.

Polls show that the president's popularity is as high as ever, but confidence that he can extricate us from the economic malaise is slipping.

The old guard financial guys are attacking him for doing too much. For calling for too much regulation, which will quell the innovative entrepreneurs who have taken our country to its heights. Too much spending on problems like health care and energy while we are still in the economic ditch. Running up deficits that will bankrupt the country, leaving our grandchildren with a burden that will keep them from any hope of prosperity even approaching what we have enjoyed.

Those on the other side of the aisle attack him for caving in to the very people described in the paragraph above. The Harper's piece says that he understands what has happened to us and why better than any other politician of our time. But he is so eager to do what he can without the rancor that has marked American politics for a generation (in fact forever) that he has refused to follow through on what must be done.

Do you ever wonder why anyone wants the job?

In the photo you will see Senator Bernie Sanders, the Junior Senator from Vermont, marching in the strolling of the heifers in Brattleboro last Saturday. He is a supporter of Obama, but he, too, is having his innings, criticizing him for being too timid.

June has showed up only on the calendar so far in Vermont this year.

I'm not complaining, though several days in a row of rain - and several more predicted - can begin to wear thin on a body addicted to southern California's 360+ days of sun a year. The pineal gland - of that's what absorbs the light - starts to ask some ugly questions.

But it's been cool, never yet making it into the 80s, and there have been enough breaks in the rain to make it possible for Conrad and me to get in a bike ride pretty much every other day, which is about as much as two guys pushing 70 need.

Since we don't come back to Vermont from southern California until May, we don't mind the slow arriving summer the way those who have been beaten up by nearly half a year of nasty winter do.

Watching the weather the way we do, understanding that we not only can't affect it, but we can't even predict it with as much accuracy as one would think all the latest high tech gear would make possible, causes me to wonder that we harbor any serious illusions about having much control over things that happen in this world.

But we do.

We try to keep the Canada geese off our fields. We try to keep paint on the north side of the house. We try to guess what the financial markets may do next week. We buy more books than we can reasonably expect to read in the time left.

Now someone has sent me a book suggestion that makes the case that our consciousness (maybe not only ours; are there other creatures here with consciousness? Did Teilhard suggest rocks have a sort of consciousness?) creates the universe, not the other way around.

Why not?

I just read a piece by a man who described going to the movies on Saturday afternoons when he was a kid. I had forgotten about what he described and I now remember. He and his friends never paid any attention to what was playing, or what time the two features started. They just went when they went. And would go in at midway point in one of the two playing that day. Then they would stay until the end, see the previews, cartoons, newsreel and the other movie from beginning to end.

When they movie they had seen the second half of came on, they would discover how much of what they had made of the second half second was confirmed by the first half. As he wrote, it was an introduction to what we now call post-modernism, in which the linear world is trumped by reality in bits that may not be sequential or even fit with the others.

I like that. I think that's a pretty good description of what it's like to pay honest attention to reality as it filters through our wish to make it conform to our preconceptions.

It doesn't.

Joseph Butler June 16, 2009

Congestion is people with the economic means to act on their social and economic interests getting in the way of other people with the means to act on theirs. - Alan Pisarski, Traffic Engineer

*******

The 1/10th scale ivory skull replica sits on the sill of my writing studio above the barn, resting in the coil of an iron snake given to me by a kind friend hoping to rescue me from having preached about snake handling at Lacey’s niece’s wedding. Reminders.

I remember the skull on the top of my grandfather’s mahogany chifforobe in his bedroom. He graduated from college in 1900, at 16, too young for medical school, so his father booked him in a tramp steamer. The skull, which he kept on his desk in his doctor’s office in NYC until he retired and came to live with us, was among his most prized possessions. He told me he bought it in China from the man who carved it. I have the skull, and his wood trunk with the sticker from the old Ruffles Hotel in Singapore, artifacts from the year he spent on that boat.

Watching our fascinating young president struggle to persuade us to lean in new directions has renewed my fascination for the place our species belongs in the order of things. Our fatal attraction for increasing the very traffic that strangles us, suggests that we may not be able to adapt for the long haul.

I am drawn to the suggestion that our complex and impressive brains could be a diversion from our chief use here. Which is to host the billions of bacteria that live in our gut, on our skin, our eyelids and armpits. Bacteria that do the heavy lifting, reorganizing by the hour, as conditions evolve.

While we put our beloved brains to work trying to outwit change.

Wondering what the life of a gracious host might look like, a man popped into my memory about whom I hadn’t thought for decades.

I knew John Purnell as Rector of All Saints, Ashmont in Dorchester/Boston, an ethnic, working-class parish you would be hard pressed to guess was an Episcopal, not a Roman Catholic parish. The strongest clues would be the ornate, medieval liturgy and vestments that have largely disappeared from the RC Church since Vatican II.

John was supersized. In his shiny black suit and high step clerical collar, his Irish head looked to be propped onto his 250 pound body as a sentinel. He carried an aura of authority in bad repute in 1973 when I first knew him. And had I not been at a meeting with him on Beacon Hill, and we not taken the long walk through the Boston Garden, I might never have discovered a man who lingers in memory, nearly 40 years later, as a model host.

Before coming to Boston, John – Fr. Purnell – was vicar of an impoverished congregation in the South Bronx. One frigid New Year’s morning he was wakened by a frantic parishioner who told him that the gas company had turned off gas to all those more than 30 days delinquent in paying, just about all of whom were John’s parishioners.

He phoned Con Ed, got the recording and called the emergency number. Those meters aren’t broken, right? The Con Ed guy asked. No. Just not delivering gas to the freezing people. John said he managed to control his voice volume. Sorry, Father, nothing we can do until the business office opens. John Knew the futility of trying to weave through that bureaucracy.

Instead he called the city desk at the NY Times. You guys want a good story for the front page of tomorrow’s paper? The Times guy was only slightly more interested than the Con Ed guy. We’re operating with a skeleton crew here. John explained what was going to happen. And you might want to bring along a photographer.

John dressed in his most elegant, eye-catching Eucharistic regalia. Brocade, painstakingly created by altar guild ladies, vestments fit for the Pope. He walked the mile and a half in the bitter cold (the vestments were designed for beauty, not warmth) swinging the weapon of his choice as he strode.

By the time he reached the shed with the meters, word had spread and there was a small crowd, mainly parishioners, to greet him. He exchanged the kiss of peace with several as they waited for the Times reporter. When he and the photographer arrived, John raised his arms in the gesture a priest assumes to consecrate the blessed elements.

If Our Lord Jesus were here, he began, - and, thanks be to God, our Lord is always here - he would do whatever needed to protect and comfort his friends.

Therefore, by the authority invested in me by the Holy Spirit – here John lifted the sledge hammer he had carried on his walk – in the name of the Father – the sledge slammed into the lock on the first meter, shattering it – and of the Son – another blow, another meter – and of the Holy Ghost. He down the row until every meter’s lock was broken and the gas turned on.

The afternoon some years later John and my two closest colleague friends and I took that long walk through Boston Common, another cold, damp day. John, dressed as always, in shiny black suit, high step collar. My friends and I were in our accustomed tweeds, khakis, neckties, freed from medieval constraints.

All of us spotted the disheveled man on the bench 50 feet before we passed him. The three of us began teasing John, having made himself a target with his clerical getup. John seemed mellow. Sure enough, as we drew alongside the bench, the man rose, passed by my friends and me, and spoke to John.

Say Father, you spare a couple of bucks for something to eat? Without hesitation John reached into his pocket and pulled our a $5 bill. I guess I could spring for that. And handed the man the money.

After we had gone a ways beyond we began ragging on John. You think that old drunk is going to buy food with that money? John, seemingly with no rancor, responded, Well, maybe he needs a drink worse than he needs food.

Radical hospitality is what we unwittingly offer those bacteria. When we choose the same for each other, our survival chances look better.

The dilemma presented by the election in Iran is multi-faceted.

As a western liberal I am prone to believe there was massive fraud. The terrifying footage of protesters being shot deepens that sense.

And all our news sources prior to the election spoke of huge crowds supporting the opposition.

Now comes word from two Washington Post reporters who actually did some polling in Iran in the days just prior to the election, that their results showed the ruling cleric with an even larger lead than the results being reported. They suggest that the results may in fact be accurate, legitimate.

So what are we to believe?

That we aren't likely to know. And that it might be worth keeping our counsel for the moment rather than giving vent to what we so wish to believe.

And that our prejudices about Iran and the whole middle east are just that, prejudices. Prejudices are far harder to impact than views based on reality, because we know what we believe before we are given the facts. Thus the facts likely won't dent our prejudices.

At dinner last night with friends we all had a run at reading the tea leaves - guessing the course of events, politics, financial, natural - a favorite dinner table game, especially after a few pops.

I have mentioned before that I am reading a fascinating book right now, title: The Age Of The Unthinkable.

Reviewers have been less entranced by the book than I am. That may be because they are of the school that the author believes is of a world that no longer exists.

And who could blame them?

Because his basic thesis is that the linear way of making sense of the world no longer does. (In fact never did). The idea that there is a solution for every problem, that smart, hard work can be counted on to yield a desired result, that cause and effect describes the way the world works, that leaders must be better versed than the rest of us, all notions on which physics, politics and personal relationships were based, are simplistic and not useful.

So, how are we to navigate, without the certainties?

Humbly.

It was likely always so. No longer are those with the best ability to describe and parse events considered the most successful.

Now we understand it is those who are flexible and able to change as their realities change. Adaptability will prove the most helpful skill.

The fun of posing as savants at dinner will never be diminished for me.

Just the illusion that it is more than a parlor game, reading the tea leaves.

Yesterday I realized that a year ago at this time I was doing some major league fretting about the state of the world's economy.

As well as about my own.

In the meantime - thanks to a combination of getting used to being poorer, and getting a little richer than I was at the trough (or what I hope was the trough) I am no longer preoccupied with money.

Yesterday I read a column by Pat Buchanan (can you believe I actually read a column by Pat Buchanan?!) that was so nasty I was taken aback, even though Buchanan's trademark is nasty.

He said Obama is nothing more than the latest version of Woodrow Wilson and Jimmy Carter, a narcissistic self-righteous prig who is so sure he's right and has the prescription for fixing the world, that he thinks he can make a whole new rold through the force of his personality and rhetoric.

Whew!

So why was it that I felt sweat out out on my forehead as I read?

First, because brutal ad hominem attacks always feel to me like near physical attacks. That man who shot a guard in the Holocaust Museum yesterday was well known as a trasher of Jews.

I don't subscribe to the belief that Rush Limbaugh is responsible for the murder of the doctor who performed third term abortions, but I do believe he has contributed to building an atmosphere in which some might feel righteous in doing that.

I know it is a staple of American (and all other) politics. But it still makes my legs feel weak and wobbly.

The other reason is that there likely is an element of truth in what Buchanan wrote.

How else would a scrawny mixed race kid from such a humble background have the cojones to take on the angry conservatives who have been running things for the past eight years?

He clearly doesn't doubt himself the way I do. I find myself a little breathless at how he has systematically taken on issue after issue he said he would in his campaign.

He reads the papers and listens to the news. He knows what people are saying about trying to deal with medical care, energy, the environment, education, while having to spend terrifying sums of money just to keep the banks open. He knows the Republicans are salivating as they lick their chops reading the polls that show we Americans getting nervous about the deficits.

Not to mention his people weighing in on executive compensation, owning 70% of GM, a company long synonymous with the fortunes of the nation itself.

I don't know the man, except what I have been able to discern from public sources.

Is he a narcissist? Does he think he's right? Is he by-passing many of the traditional institutions that make policy because he thinks he can do it better alone?

And how does he propose to begin facing the realities (if they are realities) of a national debt that could require the largest portion of our annual budget just to pay the debt?

OK, I've laid out my anxieties. Now I'll tell you that I am in awe of the guy making maybe the first serious run in my lifetime at the issues I have heard for that length of time as those that will have to be faced one day.

Now, let's get back to work.

Columba of Iona June 9, 2009

St. Francis of Assisi was hoeing his garden when someone asked what he would do if he were suddenly to learn that he would die before sunset that very day. "I would finish hoeing my garden," he replied.

********

See if you can stick with me on this. Or if I can stick with me.

When I was 29 I took a job in a church across the park from the White House. Looking back I’d say that was pretty much the reason I took the job. I had an office that looked across Lafayette Park to the President’s front portico. You wouldn’t be totally wrong to think I liked that because it made me feel important.

But there was an even bigger reason. I hoped hanging around with the people who ran the country (and those were the early days of thinking, ran the whole world), might rub off on me, cut into the vexing ambiguity that plagued me from as far back as I can remember.

Even though Richard Nixon was president, I never passed up a chance to eat in the White House mess or play tennis on the White House court. Some of his aides were my first close friends to end up doing jail time.

But – even with Watergate about to tear the wheels off - they had an assurance about them that I envied. While I felt blown this way and that by every new direction the cultural winds blew, they were steady as you go.

In one of those conversations you remember from childhood (they could strike you mute with your own children) my father, hoping to teach me a life lesson, said, Son, when it comes to the big decisions you’ll face – choosing a major in college, taking a job, buying cars, houses – you’re going to need to learn to give your rational mind power over your emotions. Never make a big decision based on emotion.

The subtext – I knew – was his worry that I, his only son, was wired up like my mother rather than like him. I worried about that, too. As a high school teacher used to ask me, What’s to become of you, boy?

A colleague once told me that he and his spouse of more than twenty years had only ever made love with each other. During an afternoon tryst she looked at him and asked, How do we know we haven’t been doing this wrong all these years? Though hardly scientific, they accepted their two teenage children as sufficient evidence.

As the financial markets began their astonishing descent, I remember that old thought recurring: These people have way more knowledge, not to mention stake, in all this than I do. They’re not going to let this thing get out of hand.

Soon after that Alan Greenspan testified before a congressional committee that he had discovered an unexpected flaw in his economic theory, a theory for which he had been lionized through the fat years.

I believed people would always behave rationally in their own self-interest.

I am halfway through The Age Of The Unthinkable :Why The New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us And What We Can Do About It, by Joshua Cooper Ramo. Nothing about his piercing look into our world is reassuring – at least for those who still hope classic economists or world leaders have a wand to wave and restore life as it was. It confirms the only certainty of my old age: The dream of certainty is a relic.

On a warm September day in 1972 Jeb Magruder, Deputy Director of the Committee to Reelect The President (CRP – sound it out) called midday to ask if I would like to play tennis on the White House Court. I kept my gear in my car for just such a moment.

After we played we were getting dressed in the small gym in the basement, when Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s feared enforcer, walked through. Hard as it is to imagine in retrospect, Nixon’s people were worried about facing George McGovern with the Viet Nam War still claiming young American lives. Haldeman came abreast of Jeb and me just as I snapped on my clergy collar.

He looked at me, he looked at Jeb, then back again at me.

My God, Jeb, it’s come to this?!

Haldeman died in 1993. If I could I would like to tell him what an unwitting prophet he was.

Yes, Bob, at long last, it’s come to this.

I used to fantasize that when I finally retired from my day job I would at last have the chance to do all the reading and writing I had long wanted to do.

But I knew that fantasies are often just that. And I had watched several friends retire, hang out on the golf course, drink a lot, and sink into depression.

So the year before I was going to pack it in, I went on sabbatical for four months (thanks to the Episcopal Church for an aggressive sabbatical policy) and went to Charleston where Lacey immersed herself in the unprecedented historic restoration that city was undergoing after Hurricane Hugo, and I spent most of the mornings and part of the afternoons reading and writing.

Late in the afternoon I knocked off to watch the O.J. Simpson trial. (fell in love with Marcia ???, the prosecutor, even though I could smell acquittal from the outset)

When we returned to San Diego and I met with the vestry, the lay leaders of the church, one of them looked into my eyes and said, "You're done here, aren't you?"

Though it would have been unseemly to say so - they had just provided me a four month paid leave - he read me right.

And in the thirteen years since, I have published two books, countless articles, send out an email piece fo over 600 people once a week, do this blog, and read more than a dozen periodicals of various stripe.

Happiest chapter of my life, so far.

And just yesterday in the mail my latest fantasy - the Kindle - arrived.

Though I am a gadget junkie, I am a little intimidated by new technology. I think it arouses my lifelong fear of failure. What if I open the thing and can't figure out how to make it go? Or - thanks to my phobia against reading manuals - jump right in and wreck it?

I brought it home from the post office and took care of a bunch of other stuff, leaving it in its box. I passed it on the kitchen counter several times, eyeing it, wondering, until finally, unable to bear the suspense, opened it and took it out of its box.

Now, the reason I was attracted to it in the first place - aside from the usual seduction of a shiny new tech toy - was because I always have several books scattered about the house, and am part way through each of them. I pick them up when I am in that room, read for a while, put it down, go do something, settle later in another room with a different book.

Imagine having them all loaded into one easily accessible electronic gadget?

Lacey has said I am polluting the world, destroying forests, bankrupting us, and crowding us out of our house with all the books I buy.

Voila! Kindle.

I have now had it almost 24 hours, and it already exceeds my hopes.

My chief purpose in buying it - to download books inexpensively and have them stored in one easy to carry place, and on a screen that provides an easy read, are all fulfilled.

Now, like my brain, the Kindle has myriad other functions that fascinate me but I may never discover or use.

I hope all those unused brain cells will go to a good home when they are no longer trapped in my skull.

During the campaign we heard many rumors that Barack Obama was going to make a major address somewhere in the Middle East shortly after he was inaugurated.

For people like me that was hopeful news. For most of those on the other side it sounded ominous.

Now he's going to Cairo and, as Thomas Friedman says in today's NY Times, he doesn't think his speech is going to cause lions and lambs to lie down together (recalling Woody Allen's famous observation: the lamb won't get much sleep), but he hopes it may open some doors for serious new possibilities for mind-meeting in that region.

And how does he propose to do that?

He says by speaking to reality rather than in the usual diplomatic jargon that is mostly intended to disguise reality.

He knows lots of Palestinians know that the rhetoric of relentless refusal to recognize Israel, and determination to exterminate Her, has gotten them nothing but a generation of misery. But no one has the courage to say that.

He points out that many Israelis understand that continuing settling the West Bank will never gain any hope of peace for that small country. But it is dangerous for an Israeli to say so.

He insists that many Arab nations are more afraid of a nuclear Iran than of Israeli military strength. But it would be so politically incorrect for one of them to say so out loud.

What I wonder - and my wonder is deepened by conversations with an old friend who spent his career under cover for the CIA - is whether it is indeed possible - or maybe even desirable -for the leader of a nation to stand before the world and speak "realities" that have long become pariah ideas in many places?

I wonder, not only because one nation's reality is another nation's illusion (when did you ever hear a national leader say his troops were fighting a war of aggression?), but because of the subtle, nuanced back-channel conversations that go one between allies and enemies about matters that they could never carry on in the open.

Now, one can make a strong case - and maybe Obama is doing this - for so many intractable conflicts having gone on for so long, whatever back-channel conversations having failed to dent them, that it is worth overturning the traditional ways of handling these things.

But I can imagine the discomfort and anxiety abroad as the American President proposes to go over the heads of all the other leaders of governments, and appeal to the people of their nations. It could result in political pressure that alters the leaders' behavior. Or it could result in a new wave of anger at American arrogance, ironically, for the opposite reason that Bush caused such anger.

We always in these matters need to reverse the situation and imagine how we would respond. Suppose Kim il Jong, N. Korea's leader, were to find a forum in which to appeal to us to pressure our government to stop imposing sanctions that are causing starvation among his people? Or to ask by what divine right does the President of the United States - the only country to use a nuclear weapon in war - presume to tell another nation it cannot have such weapons.

I hope President Obama - the president who has raised my hopes higher than anyone since JFK - has got this one right.

Blandina & Her Companions June 2, 2009

Learn to fear the automobile. It is not the trillion-dollar deficit that will finally destroy America. It is the automobile. Congressional studies of future highway needs are terrifying. A typical projection shows that when your generation is middle-aged, Interstate 95 between Miami and Fort Lauderdale will have to be 22 lanes wide to avert total paralysis of south Florida. Imagine an entire country covered with asphalt. My grandfather's generation shot horses. Yours had better learn to shoot automobiles.
- Russell Baker, University of Connecticut, 1995

317 AM EDT SUN MAY 31 2009

...FREEZE WARNING IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 7 AM EDT MONDAY...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN ALBANY HAS ISSUED A FREEZE
WARNING FOR THE WESTERN ADIRONDACKS...WARREN COUNTY...AND
SOUTHERN VERMONT...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM MIDNIGHT TONIGHT TO 7AM EDT MONDAY.

TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO DROP BELOW FREEZING LATE TONIGHT INTO EARLY MONDAY MORNING...WHICH WILL RESULT IN WIDESPREAD FROST. TEMPERATURES WILL BOTTOM OUT IN THE UPPER 20S TO LOWER 30S

*******

Did you see the date? Right, May 31 into early morning June 1.

The year we moved back to Vermont from Southern California, Lacey was planting in vegetables in her garden on June 1. A neighbor stopped her car on the way up the hill and warned: Kinda risky.

Risky? Lacey asked, incredulous. On June 1st?

Until a full the moon or the 15th, can’t be sure you won’t get a killing frost.

Seems like we may be facing up to shooting automobiles, but growing our own food – becoming even remotely self-sufficient – still largely eludes me.

We regard ourselves as heroic for washing our own vehicles. (Lacey even Simonizes and details them). If people in Vermont see you washing your car – or more especially your truck – they figure you must be trying to sell it.

In California they guess you’d been wiped out in the financial collapse.

After some dreamy, near summer, days, Vermont gave notice that she wasn’t done yet. An inch and a half of rain on a 40º day was the teaser before the freeze warning yesterday, June 1st.

I’ve been dragging limbs, torn off the fifty foot pine by December’s most destructive ice storm in decades, from the edge of the pond to the burn pile. The pile grew so high you couldn’t see over the top. When NOHA radio said the next day would be cold and damp with no wind, I went down to the local garage where the fire warden works, and got a permit to burn.

The pile was huge, pine burns hot, and the pile is pretty close to the wood box that shrouds the gas escape for our septic system. I asked Conrad – my friend, biking companion and rural advisor – if he might come over and give me some counsel to get it going, and keep from burning down my house.

If you’re ever considering moving to some remote rural place, you’d do well to check if there is a Conrad – one of those guys who can build a 1952 Jaguar in his barn, repair a storm door, predict weather or make you laugh at your own ineptness – living nearby. If not, best stick with city services.

Next morning it was cold all right, and driving rain. I went right upstairs to my writing studio, figuring I had a reprieve from the exhausting, dirty job. Settled in front of the computer, the phone rang. Conrad: Be right over.

Have you looked out the window? It’s pouring. And freezing.

Right. Perfect day to burn.

He showed up a few minutes later, in heavy coveralls and oilskin, carrying a gallon and a half of some fire accelerant from his vehicle shop. (He’s building a street rod from an old International diaper truck he found in a junkyard) In past years I have spent hours getting the fire going, then had to tend it all day, often into the night.

I expressed concern over the size of the pile and the closeness of the wood septic cover. Conrad laughed – as he generally does at my fretting – drenched the pile in the accelerant, fired a torch at it, and we instantly had Dante’s inferno drying us out so fast it felt like our eyebrows would singe.

I jumped back, startled, and must have stepped on a mouse that had been nesting in the pile. Conrad looked down: Well, look at that, scooped up the squished mouse, tossing it onto the fire, a dignified Gandhi-type sendoff.

Over the next hour, drenched, soot covered, we watched the pile reduce to knee-level, furnace hot ash. Looks like you won’t be needing me any more, Conrad said. This thing likely will smolder right through the night, no matter how hard the rain.

Lacey came back from running errands a while later. Guess it was just too wet to burn, she said. Take a look. I gestured toward the kitchen window overlooking the pond and the pile.

Wow! I haven’t been gone two hours. How’d you manage, not only to burn in this weather, but get it done so fast? My sheepish grin gave it away.

Conrad, she said.

The next morning, rain still falling, a spiral of smoke rose 10 feet into the air.

Attached a Photo of Conrad burning.

GM CEO Charlie Wilson famously said before a congressional committee some years ago, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."

And, alas, today he may be proved right.

As that once icon of American business files for Chapter 11 protection today, the future of the nation looks to be on the same footing.

The Secretary of the Treasury is in China today trying to reassure our biggest creditors that their money is safe with us. Imagine! The CFO of the United States kissing the business end of China in hopes of being protected from their deciding to call in their debt, which would be the end of us.

In at least a symbolic sense, Secretary Geithner is today representing us as we file for Chapter 11 protection while we reorganize and try to get back on our feet.

In Paul Krugman's op-ed piece in today's NY Times, he points out that when Ronald Reagan (whom he cites as the main culprit in our present predicament) took office, American's household debt was 60% of their income. In 2007 it was 119%.

In the 1970s Americans saved 10% of their income. When the economy collapsed our savings rate was below zero.

Now, our favorite trick in a moment like this is to point fingers and wag tongues. But the reality is that we behaved like rational human beings in getting here. We persuaded ourselves that our assets - houses and portfolios - had shown themselves to be so resilient and endlessly increasing, that we could continue to take on more debt to finance incredible levels of living most of us never imagined.

The dicey part is that the financial big hitters, who manipulate vast amounts of money and take risks that would make most of us swoon, can do that. At least until things go sour. Then they take huge hits, get bankruptcy protection, regroup, and usually reappear in the not so distant future in a new venture that will again lift them to the heights.

What happened during the past generation is that way of life became the dream of even the middle class.

The year before the housing market collapsed over 40% of housing sales in San Diego were to people who were not going to live in the house they just bought.

After the stock market crash of 1929, one investor who cashed out ahead of it, when asked what led him to bail, said, when he heard the shoe shine boy who shined the wing tips of the Exchange traders, giving tips on stocks, he knew the end was near.

There will always be high rollers.

But most of us are worker bees. We need a job that challenges us and pays us a living wage, so we can buy a house and a car, send our kids to school (and maybe even college), retire when we're old.

When the likes of us begin buying second and third houses, Hummers and $300 shoes, you could have bet the end was near.

Alas, for Engine Charlie Wilson and other Masters of the Universe, they became so pleased to be the object of our worship that they didn't see that our wanting to emulate them was going to bring them down too.

I asked a friend more savvy than I in these matters what he thought a sustainable percentage of GDP consumer spending might be in a healthy economy. He thought around 50%. The most recent figure was 70%.