+++++
On Jun 26, 2007, at 5:45 PM, a friend forwarded this, which is making the rounds:
Subject: FW: Alien rights???
***
Here is the transcript of an INTERVIEW with an illegal Mexican at a
protest march in Texas.
Trying to reason with an Illegal Mexican, a good example of a discussion with a master
of circular logic who makes a new case when the previous argument gets too difficult to defend
On the streets of downtown Houston, May 1, 2007 -- Jim Moore reporting for a Houston TV station:
-Jim: Juan, I see that you and thousands of other protesters are
marching in the streets to demonstrate for your cause. Exactly what
is your cause and what do you expect to accomplish by this protest?
-Juan: We want our rights. We will show you how powerful we are. We
will bring Houston to its knees!
-Jim: What rights?
-Juan: Our right to live here..legally. Our right to get all the benefits you get.
-Jim: When did you come to the United States?
-
Juan: Six years ago. I crossed over the border at night with seven other friends.
-
Jim: Why did you come?
-
Juan: For work. I can earn as much in a month as I could in a year
in Mexico. Besides, I get free health care, our Mexican children can
go to school free, if I lose my job I will get Welfare, and someday
I will have the Social Security. Nothing like that in Mexico!
-
Jim: Did you feel badly about breaking our immigration laws when you came?
-Juan: No! Why should I feel bad? I have a right to be here. I have a
right to amnesty. I paid lots of money for my Social Security and Green Cards.
-Jim: How did you acquire those documents?
-
Juan: From a guy in Dallas. He charged me a lot of money too.
-
Jim: Did you know that those documents were forged?
-
Juan: It is of no matter. I have a right to be here and to work.
-
Jim: What is the "right" you speak of?
-
Juan: The right of all Aliens. It is found in your Constitution. Read it!
-Jim: I have read it, but I do not remember it saying anything about rights for Aliens.
-
Juan: It is in that part where it says that all men have Alien rights, like the right to pursue happiness. I wasn't happy in Mexico, so I came here.
-Jim: I think you are referring to the Declaration of Independence
and that document speaks to unalienable rights .. Not Alien rights.
-Juan: Whatever.
-
Jim: Since you are demanding to become an American citizen, why then are you
carrying a Mexican Flag?
-
Juan: Because I am Mexican.
-
Jim: But you said you want to be given amnesty ... to become a US citizen.
-Juan: No. This is not what we want. This is our country, a part of
Mexico that you Gringos stole from us. We want it returned to its rightful owner.
-
Jim: Juan, you are standing in Texas. After wining the war with Mexico,
Texas became a Republic, and later Texans voted to join the USA.
It was not stolen from Mexico.
-
Juan: That is a Gringo lie. Texas was stolen. So was California, New Mexico
and Arizona. It is just like all the other stuff you Gringos
steal, like oil and babies. You are a country of thieves.
-
Jim: Babies? You think we steal babies?
-Juan: Sure. Like from Korea and Vietnam and China. I see them all
over the place. You let all these foreigners in, but try to keep us
Mexicans out. How is this fair?
-Jim: So, you really don't want to become an American citizen then.
-
Juan: I just want my rights! Everyone has a right to live & work, and
speak their native language wherever and whenever they please.
That's another thing we demand. All signs and official documents
should be in Spanish. Teachers must teach in Spanish. Soon, more
people here in Houston will speak Spanish than English. It is our right!
-
Jim: If I were to cross over the border into Mexico without proper
documentation, what rights would I have there?
-Juan: None. You would probably go to jail, but that's different.
-
Jim: How is it different? You said everyone has the right to live
wherever they please.
-
Juan: You Gringos are a bunch of land grabbing thieves. Now you want
Mexico too? Mexico has its rights. You Gringos have no rights in
Mexico. Why would you want to go there anyway? There is no free
medical service, schools, or welfare there for foreigners such as
you. You cannot even own land in my country. Stay in the country of your birth.
-
Jim: I can see that there is no way that we can agree on this issue.
Thank you for your comments.
-
Juan: Viva Mexico!
Pass this along to every American citizen in your address books and to every
representative in the state and federal government. If you choose to remain
uninvolved, do not be amazed when you no longer have a nation to call your
own nor anything you have worked for left since it will be "redistributed" to the
activists while you are so peacefully staying out of the "fray".
Check history, it is full of nations/empires that disappeared when
their citizens no longer held their core beliefs and values. One person
CAN make a difference. One plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one.......
The battle for our secure borders and immigration laws that actually
mean something, however, hasn't even begun.
If this ticks YOU off...PASS IT ON!
***
I replied:
Thanks, Barb, for including me in your forward. My feeling about illegal immigrants is sort of like my feeling about those of our kind who are out there still suffering instead of in our fellowship: "BUT FOR THE GRACE OF GOD THERE GO I."
Here is another point of view about illegal immigrants.
Oh, by the way, this is what snopes.com, which investigates "urban legends," had to say on the authenticity of the "interview."
[Editor's Note: I questioned the authenticity of this "transcript" because it sounded about as authentic as a sendup skit starring Carlos Mencia posing as "Juan" and Steven Colbert posing as Bill O'Reilly posing as Charlie Rose posing as "Jim." So I looked it up. As for "Juan," I would have caught on a nanosecond sooner if Juan had referred to himself not as a Mexican but as a "beaner." Looks like it falls in the category of an immigrant-basher who is making shit up.]
Continuing with my reply:
"Oh," as Lieutenant Columbo says, "just one more thing": I'm more concerned about the "redistribution" of our wealth not by brown, Spanish-speaking people but by white, English-speaking men who pay themselves billions to export our jobs to poor countries for dirt-cheap labor.
+++++
Postscript: In reality, I replied to my friend only with a link to the Snopes urban legend site. I hoped I might at least disabuse her of the phoniness of what she was no doubt unwittingly passing on. I hope that we will remain on good terms. This is a small town and I am not Eudora Welty.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Bad News, Good News: Unrestrained Power and Small-Town Courage
I've been reading in the Washington Post about the Dick (you know, as in "the" Donald), our vice president, who really runs the country, and it made me sick. Whatever jokes Cheney affords entertainers such as Jon Stewart ("Waa!") and Keith Olbermann ("Thanks a lot, Dick"), Almighty Number Two Dick is, lamentably, the most powerful man in the world. He does have a brain, like it or not, and he is extremely effective at getting the America he wants. And, like it or not, he is not encumbered by a heart that considers what Americans (the tired, poor, defenseless) really need as well as want.
The good news: I liked this story about a small town newspaper's exposing a pedophile scandal in a Boy Scout troop. I'd like to see it made into a movie.
The good news: I liked this story about a small town newspaper's exposing a pedophile scandal in a Boy Scout troop. I'd like to see it made into a movie.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Kill Your TV: Airings of a BOOF
Listening to "Exploring Music" with Bill McGlaughlin, on WUOL. Bill is the heir of the Karl Haas "Adventures in Good Music" legacy, which ended when Karl died and classical music stations finally retired the reruns. McGlaughlin originates from the same station as Peter Van De Graaff in Chicago, whom I've mentioned earlier.
Rarely do I listen to non-commercial radio in lieu of watching TV and I am not proud to admit it. I have a friend who stated once that she did not watch TV and she and her husband, both Ph.D. faculty members at the University of Utah, did not own a TV. (That was before they had a son. I wonder if they gave in and let the boy watch Sesame Street, etc., who then "progressed" to TV Land and finally MTV.)
In any case, Frances and Joel had computers long before I did and used them as tools and, I bet, as toys. I know I certainly envied Frances because she had a word processor to write with while I still struggled with a typewriter. I am a wretched typist but a good proofreader, and upon becoming able to amend, cut, and paste text with ease because of technology, I thought I had (as Chance the bulldog pup did when he spied the chickens) "died and gone to Kentucky!"
Which brings us to Wendell Berry, the renowned poet-essayist-fiction writer who lives near me, who does not own a TV. Neither does he own a computer, and he wrote a manifesto declaring that he has no intention of ever owning a computer.
Now I would never have the character to forgo the modern "amenities." I proved that to be the case long ago when I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. I was an idealist who was very hard on himself because he did not live up to his ideals, and I rued that I did not live under true hardship as I imagined most PCVs did. I now wish I had sought an assignment in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, which was the closest facsimile there to a community in a developed nation, with a proper water and sewage system and heck, even things like movies, and unabashedly stated that I wanted the cushiest assignment I could land.
But that's the old man in me talking. At 23, I thought I should, as Jack Kennedy had said in his inaugural, "pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe..." So I didn't dare let anyone know I was a closet wuss who loved creature comforts. What does it say about me that one of the happiest recollections of my teens was visiting my sister in Indianapolis and Memphis during summers, where she and I would stay in the air-conditioning and lie on sofas, read books, drink cola, eat ice cream, smoke cigarettes, and talk about ideals and ha-ha funny things in politics and society? What the deuce was wrong with that? the old man in me asks.
But the idealist in me kept trying to emerge and in any case I was always a sucker for pretty sermons and vaunted ideals.
I decided in my twenties that I wanted to be a writer of some kind and started reading what writers wrote about their writing, as well as a good deal of their writing. Two people I became highly interested in were Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Hoosier, and Wendell Berry, nearby in Kentucky.
Wendell is an ardent advocate of his causes, chief of which is saving the physical environment by preserving, actually returning to a way of life he finds superior, physically and spiritually, to the current one. Wendell sounds very much like a Luddite to me, one who opposes technological progress, favoring reversing it by destroying or otherwise doing away with the latest advances.
I first read the term in Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano, in which Luddites smash -- the author ruefully notes -- flush-toilets. Other than his concern for reasonable -- as in not stupidly self-defeating -- measures, Vonnegut's views are somewhat like Wendell's, as both are somewhat like the views of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984. (For a liberal, I have read a slew of books denouncing "progress.")
The question might occur: "Mr. Berry, in your zeal to turn back the clock, would you be willing to do away with flush-toilets?" The answer to that is yep. Wendell has written -- nay, published -- that he has equipped his residence with a "compost-privy" -- not merely a ghost-of-the-past outdoor biffy but a repository the contents of which he periodically opens and mixes with straw and puts on the compost-heap for his organic farming. (He stated, in his description of that procedure, that it is not pleasant -- I'll take his word for that -- but that he does it for a higher cause.)
So this guy -- perhaps I should not say, "puts his money where his mouth is," especially in this case -- but this chap practices what he preaches; he takes heroic measures to prove, among other things, that he is not a hypocrite. (I have wondered what Wendell's family have thought of that sanitary arrangement, but he would be angry with me if I wondered it aloud to him, I'm pretty sure.)
Ergo, I wasn't surprised when Wendell wrote in literary magazines of his scorn for computers. He is a fine writer -- did I say that I revere him for his ability? -- and he has stated his case far better than I ever could, so I urge you to read him in his own words. If you do not agree wholeheartedly with him, you will have nonetheless read some exemplary writing.
He said that he writes with pencil (or pen) and paper, and his wife types his work on a 1956 typewriter, adding comments in the margins. There being no use of electric power because the two work in daylight, he does not patronize companies that depend on strip-mined coal to fuel them. He finds the companies, with their ad campaigns to get people to buy things they don't need and can't afford, to be odious. He wrote this in 1987, so I wonder what he would think of cell phones in the ears of odious SUV-drivers now.
He writes, "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." Well told!
Wendell's "standards for technological innovation" are admirable: a new tool that replaces an older one should be cheaper and smaller; it should do better work using less energy, preferably solar energy; it should be repairable by a person of normal intelligence, offered by a small store close to home, and "should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
Admirable.
But please go on to read the comments by people at the same link who do write with computers (and probably use modern plumbing too, dagnab it, not having the character -- or insane, dogged fanaticism! -- to employ a compost privy). Then read Wendell's last words to them. I was disappointed. I thought I detected a good-natured charity -- and not taking oneself too seriously -- in at least some of the remarks to him. Gibes. You know, raillery. But Wendell did not see them in that spirit. He was in high dudgeon. I thought he might actually be amused by some of the teasing about using his wife in lieu of a computer. But that was what he was the most offended about.
He was painstaking -- for he is painstaking about everything, it seems -- in rebutting every last one of the remarks. And Jee-zus! was he ever righteous. I've been wanting to say this for a long time, about him, whom I once idealized and with whom I am now disillusioned. His conceding not one iota of merit to any of his critics makes me now think of -- God help us! -- the commander guy, who to this day can find not one fault in himself.
My disenchantment began with my one encounter of Wendell, at a lecture he gave at Hanover College. A kid was trying to get a picture of him for the school's coverage of his visit. Wendell stopped talking and after a tense moment of silence, bawled the young man out. The young man, not being a dumb farm animal, and being red-faced in the center of the audience's attention, verbally defended himself as merely doing his assigned job. "Well, you're keeping me from doing my job. So have at it and get it over with," Wendell snapped. Then he went on with his lecture. Gracious and eloquent and good-humored, mind you. He said some very good things on behalf of the environment and good government and God and recited a poem about a man standing by an outdoor bonfire that was awesome.
But I did not forget how he treated the youngster.
Afterwards at a reception I was still carried by the momentum of my erstwhile starstruck attitude toward him and chatted with him. I wanted to talk with him about his writing and he steered away from that. He told me he taught writing at UK, and I was surprised at his saying it was not aimed at aspiring writers (His "Oh no" was an "Of course not") but instead a course in more or less remedial English for secretaries?
He still piques my interest and I admire him, in the same way I admire Frank Sinatra only for his surreal pipes and the Duke only for his enormous ouvre of harmless fluff consisting of oaters with Elmer Bernstein scores. I read or heard Wendell confess, in comparing himself to Ed McClanahan -- read Ed's killingly funny The Natural Man -- that he (Wendell) has no sense of humor. He's right. Prophets are not funny. The only laugh I can recall in all of Wendell's fiction is Burley Coulter's observation at a funeral that Big Ellis's wife, Annie May, has a "voice on her like a bitch hound." That was in about a thousand pages.
Just before my 4-way CABG, I was attending a creative writing course taught by Gary Devon, a published novelist, and when I mentioned Wendell Berry, Gary said that the guy must bear a burden, being known as such a saint in these parts.
OK. I got that off my chest. It was a digression of sorts but something I wanted very much to say: Wendell Berry, like other idols, has feet of clay.
Oh. What is a BOOF, you ask? (Rhymes with "oof!") Stands for Burned Out Old Fart.
Say Good Night, Dick.
Rarely do I listen to non-commercial radio in lieu of watching TV and I am not proud to admit it. I have a friend who stated once that she did not watch TV and she and her husband, both Ph.D. faculty members at the University of Utah, did not own a TV. (That was before they had a son. I wonder if they gave in and let the boy watch Sesame Street, etc., who then "progressed" to TV Land and finally MTV.)
In any case, Frances and Joel had computers long before I did and used them as tools and, I bet, as toys. I know I certainly envied Frances because she had a word processor to write with while I still struggled with a typewriter. I am a wretched typist but a good proofreader, and upon becoming able to amend, cut, and paste text with ease because of technology, I thought I had (as Chance the bulldog pup did when he spied the chickens) "died and gone to Kentucky!"
Which brings us to Wendell Berry, the renowned poet-essayist-fiction writer who lives near me, who does not own a TV. Neither does he own a computer, and he wrote a manifesto declaring that he has no intention of ever owning a computer.
Now I would never have the character to forgo the modern "amenities." I proved that to be the case long ago when I was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria. I was an idealist who was very hard on himself because he did not live up to his ideals, and I rued that I did not live under true hardship as I imagined most PCVs did. I now wish I had sought an assignment in Lagos, then the capital of Nigeria, which was the closest facsimile there to a community in a developed nation, with a proper water and sewage system and heck, even things like movies, and unabashedly stated that I wanted the cushiest assignment I could land.
But that's the old man in me talking. At 23, I thought I should, as Jack Kennedy had said in his inaugural, "pay any price, bear any burden, oppose any foe..." So I didn't dare let anyone know I was a closet wuss who loved creature comforts. What does it say about me that one of the happiest recollections of my teens was visiting my sister in Indianapolis and Memphis during summers, where she and I would stay in the air-conditioning and lie on sofas, read books, drink cola, eat ice cream, smoke cigarettes, and talk about ideals and ha-ha funny things in politics and society? What the deuce was wrong with that? the old man in me asks.
But the idealist in me kept trying to emerge and in any case I was always a sucker for pretty sermons and vaunted ideals.
I decided in my twenties that I wanted to be a writer of some kind and started reading what writers wrote about their writing, as well as a good deal of their writing. Two people I became highly interested in were Kurt Vonnegut, a fellow Hoosier, and Wendell Berry, nearby in Kentucky.
Wendell is an ardent advocate of his causes, chief of which is saving the physical environment by preserving, actually returning to a way of life he finds superior, physically and spiritually, to the current one. Wendell sounds very much like a Luddite to me, one who opposes technological progress, favoring reversing it by destroying or otherwise doing away with the latest advances.
I first read the term in Vonnegut's 1952 novel, Player Piano, in which Luddites smash -- the author ruefully notes -- flush-toilets. Other than his concern for reasonable -- as in not stupidly self-defeating -- measures, Vonnegut's views are somewhat like Wendell's, as both are somewhat like the views of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World and George Orwell in 1984. (For a liberal, I have read a slew of books denouncing "progress.")
The question might occur: "Mr. Berry, in your zeal to turn back the clock, would you be willing to do away with flush-toilets?" The answer to that is yep. Wendell has written -- nay, published -- that he has equipped his residence with a "compost-privy" -- not merely a ghost-of-the-past outdoor biffy but a repository the contents of which he periodically opens and mixes with straw and puts on the compost-heap for his organic farming. (He stated, in his description of that procedure, that it is not pleasant -- I'll take his word for that -- but that he does it for a higher cause.)
So this guy -- perhaps I should not say, "puts his money where his mouth is," especially in this case -- but this chap practices what he preaches; he takes heroic measures to prove, among other things, that he is not a hypocrite. (I have wondered what Wendell's family have thought of that sanitary arrangement, but he would be angry with me if I wondered it aloud to him, I'm pretty sure.)
Ergo, I wasn't surprised when Wendell wrote in literary magazines of his scorn for computers. He is a fine writer -- did I say that I revere him for his ability? -- and he has stated his case far better than I ever could, so I urge you to read him in his own words. If you do not agree wholeheartedly with him, you will have nonetheless read some exemplary writing.
He said that he writes with pencil (or pen) and paper, and his wife types his work on a 1956 typewriter, adding comments in the margins. There being no use of electric power because the two work in daylight, he does not patronize companies that depend on strip-mined coal to fuel them. He finds the companies, with their ad campaigns to get people to buy things they don't need and can't afford, to be odious. He wrote this in 1987, so I wonder what he would think of cell phones in the ears of odious SUV-drivers now.
He writes, "I do not see that computers are bringing us one step nearer to anything that does matter to me: peace, economic justice, ecological health, political honesty, family and community stability, good work." Well told!
Wendell's "standards for technological innovation" are admirable: a new tool that replaces an older one should be cheaper and smaller; it should do better work using less energy, preferably solar energy; it should be repairable by a person of normal intelligence, offered by a small store close to home, and "should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists, and this includes family and community relationships."
Admirable.
But please go on to read the comments by people at the same link who do write with computers (and probably use modern plumbing too, dagnab it, not having the character -- or insane, dogged fanaticism! -- to employ a compost privy). Then read Wendell's last words to them. I was disappointed. I thought I detected a good-natured charity -- and not taking oneself too seriously -- in at least some of the remarks to him. Gibes. You know, raillery. But Wendell did not see them in that spirit. He was in high dudgeon. I thought he might actually be amused by some of the teasing about using his wife in lieu of a computer. But that was what he was the most offended about.
He was painstaking -- for he is painstaking about everything, it seems -- in rebutting every last one of the remarks. And Jee-zus! was he ever righteous. I've been wanting to say this for a long time, about him, whom I once idealized and with whom I am now disillusioned. His conceding not one iota of merit to any of his critics makes me now think of -- God help us! -- the commander guy, who to this day can find not one fault in himself.
My disenchantment began with my one encounter of Wendell, at a lecture he gave at Hanover College. A kid was trying to get a picture of him for the school's coverage of his visit. Wendell stopped talking and after a tense moment of silence, bawled the young man out. The young man, not being a dumb farm animal, and being red-faced in the center of the audience's attention, verbally defended himself as merely doing his assigned job. "Well, you're keeping me from doing my job. So have at it and get it over with," Wendell snapped. Then he went on with his lecture. Gracious and eloquent and good-humored, mind you. He said some very good things on behalf of the environment and good government and God and recited a poem about a man standing by an outdoor bonfire that was awesome.
But I did not forget how he treated the youngster.
Afterwards at a reception I was still carried by the momentum of my erstwhile starstruck attitude toward him and chatted with him. I wanted to talk with him about his writing and he steered away from that. He told me he taught writing at UK, and I was surprised at his saying it was not aimed at aspiring writers (His "Oh no" was an "Of course not") but instead a course in more or less remedial English for secretaries?
He still piques my interest and I admire him, in the same way I admire Frank Sinatra only for his surreal pipes and the Duke only for his enormous ouvre of harmless fluff consisting of oaters with Elmer Bernstein scores. I read or heard Wendell confess, in comparing himself to Ed McClanahan -- read Ed's killingly funny The Natural Man -- that he (Wendell) has no sense of humor. He's right. Prophets are not funny. The only laugh I can recall in all of Wendell's fiction is Burley Coulter's observation at a funeral that Big Ellis's wife, Annie May, has a "voice on her like a bitch hound." That was in about a thousand pages.
Just before my 4-way CABG, I was attending a creative writing course taught by Gary Devon, a published novelist, and when I mentioned Wendell Berry, Gary said that the guy must bear a burden, being known as such a saint in these parts.
OK. I got that off my chest. It was a digression of sorts but something I wanted very much to say: Wendell Berry, like other idols, has feet of clay.
Oh. What is a BOOF, you ask? (Rhymes with "oof!") Stands for Burned Out Old Fart.
Say Good Night, Dick.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Monday, June 11, 2007
The Calf Path
A wise friend sent me this poem. It was on the NPR Writer's Almanac, which is featured daily by G. Keillor.
Poem: "The Calf-Path" by Sam Walter Foss. Public Domain
The Calf-Path
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell–wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell–wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed – do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf,
And though this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand route
Followed this zigzag calf about
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way.
And lost one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.
"Insanity is doing the same thing the same way over and over and every time expecting different results." -- Saying
Moo.
Poem: "The Calf-Path" by Sam Walter Foss. Public Domain
The Calf-Path
One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home as good calves should;
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked trail as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer the calf is dead.
But still he left behind his trail,
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way;
And then a wise bell–wether sheep
Pursued the trail o'er vale and steep,
And drew the flock behind him, too,
As good bell–wethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And dodged and turned and bent about,
And uttered words of righteous wrath
Because 'twas such a crooked path;
But still they followed – do not laugh -
The first migrations of that calf,
And though this winding wood-way stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane
That bent and turned and turned again;
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And thus a century and a half
They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet,
The road became a village street;
And this, before men were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this
Of a renowned metropolis;
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand route
Followed this zigzag calf about
And o'er his crooked journey went
The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way.
And lost one hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent
To well-established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach
Were I ordained and called to preach;
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move;
But how the wise old wood-gods laugh,
Who saw the first primeval calf.
Ah, many things this tale might teach —
But I am not ordained to preach.
"Insanity is doing the same thing the same way over and over and every time expecting different results." -- Saying
Moo.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
See the New Post on Johnstown (April 25, 2007)
See the new post on Johnstown, Indiana, "Memoir of Uncle Bill."
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Ties That Bind
Family Reunion today: my very excellent sister and I and not more than ten other first cousins on my mother's side are now the oldest generation. Some of us older ones swapped memories of our elders and some of our departed siblings and cousins. Gail, from Tucson, recalled a tour of Madison conducted by the late Bud. Sherry, from Henryville, produced a list of our parents and aunts and uncles and that was grist for the mill.
Freeman recalled going with Uncle Mac for a couple of beers in a Seymour tavern and extricated the old World War I ambulance driver (he and Ernest Hemingway, I recall, although I don't believe anyone ever said they were acquainted, Uncle Sarge being a Yank and Ernest having driven for the Italians -- oh wait, I get confused, Uncle Mac was a doughboy and later on drove an ambulance for the Marion VA hospital -- whatever) from an altercation with a man much younger and larger than Mac. Of course there were the excursions to Circle K for six-packs ("Pull in here, Billy.") Norma Clarine said she still lives on Uncle Link and Auntie's old homestead and i asked her if the 24-bottle wooden Coke-cases were still there on the backporch and she said Yep and I went into my routine of Auntie greeting us from her game of cards, sipping her brew, chewing her Juicy Fruit, and toking on her Camel (one of the short ones that knock you on your ass when you inhale).
Gail wanted to know how close together the births of the offspring of Grand-dad John and Grand-Mom Sarah (m. 4/2/1895) were: Eli Harvey ("Mac, Sarge"), b. 7/6/1896; Milton Sales, 1/25/1898; Viola, 4/15/1901; Phillip Naper, 9/21/1903; Clara Virginia, 10/15/1905; Bertha Agnes, 7/21/1908; Harry Thomas (fr. Jim K.), 2/4/1918. Gail said, Well, they were pretty well spread out. This caused us to wonder about birth control in those days before drugs, IUDs, etc., since the births seemed sensibly spaced.
I had an impulse to crack wise and so I prefaced it with, "Well, now Bill would have probably said," so it made it all right to say what I did: "I suppose back then, what they relied on was the birth control drug, Noacitol." Gail laughed merrily.
It's a good family. We keep on keeping on, dying off but reproducing (two of the young women were PG, showing, at this reunion) and meeting every year at the reunion, which has been in continuous existence since 1950. Not bad, Hulio, not bad.
Freeman recalled going with Uncle Mac for a couple of beers in a Seymour tavern and extricated the old World War I ambulance driver (he and Ernest Hemingway, I recall, although I don't believe anyone ever said they were acquainted, Uncle Sarge being a Yank and Ernest having driven for the Italians -- oh wait, I get confused, Uncle Mac was a doughboy and later on drove an ambulance for the Marion VA hospital -- whatever) from an altercation with a man much younger and larger than Mac. Of course there were the excursions to Circle K for six-packs ("Pull in here, Billy.") Norma Clarine said she still lives on Uncle Link and Auntie's old homestead and i asked her if the 24-bottle wooden Coke-cases were still there on the backporch and she said Yep and I went into my routine of Auntie greeting us from her game of cards, sipping her brew, chewing her Juicy Fruit, and toking on her Camel (one of the short ones that knock you on your ass when you inhale).
Gail wanted to know how close together the births of the offspring of Grand-dad John and Grand-Mom Sarah (m. 4/2/1895) were: Eli Harvey ("Mac, Sarge"), b. 7/6/1896; Milton Sales, 1/25/1898; Viola, 4/15/1901; Phillip Naper, 9/21/1903; Clara Virginia, 10/15/1905; Bertha Agnes, 7/21/1908; Harry Thomas (fr. Jim K.), 2/4/1918. Gail said, Well, they were pretty well spread out. This caused us to wonder about birth control in those days before drugs, IUDs, etc., since the births seemed sensibly spaced.
I had an impulse to crack wise and so I prefaced it with, "Well, now Bill would have probably said," so it made it all right to say what I did: "I suppose back then, what they relied on was the birth control drug, Noacitol." Gail laughed merrily.
It's a good family. We keep on keeping on, dying off but reproducing (two of the young women were PG, showing, at this reunion) and meeting every year at the reunion, which has been in continuous existence since 1950. Not bad, Hulio, not bad.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Ah, That Politics and Religion
I love my doctor.
This afternoon I took the book I'm reading to the doctor's visit. It's Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. I wasn't trying to make a statement, it's just that I was in the middle of an excellent book and I knew I'd have time to kill before seeing the doctor. Although making a statement doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Anyhow, I had a chance to make one, wasted as it was on a -- you guessed it -- total fucking moron. I wasn't expecting to be confronted about my choice of author by the nurse who took my BP, etc. She said, "He's running for president, isn't he?"
"Yes," I said.
"People who are running for president always have to write a book, don't they?"
I started to say that he wrote the book ten years before he became a candidate for president, but before I got it out her next question was, "He's a Muslim, isn't he?"
"No he isn't," I said, emphatically. This chick wants to pick a fight. "If you got your information from Fox News --"
"He doesn't have much qualifications for president."
"Could he be any worse than what we've got?" I said softly.
She said, "Well, I support Bush. He stands up for what is right. He's --"
"A born-again Christian?"
"Well, he's against things that are wrong."
"Abortion?"
"Yes, abortion and other things."
"Gay marriage?"
"Yes, gay marriage."
"Prayer in schools?"
"Yes."
I said, "Is there any consideration you would make about a candidate other than where he stands on one or two issues? Would you vote for Hitler if he was against abortion and his opponent was for it?"
"Bush is not Hitler." She went out the door and closed it.
And Barack Obama is not a Muslim. There is so much outright fucking lying that never even gets challenged. The likes of John Gibson and Britt Hume and Sean Hannity and those "Fox and Friends" twits (Teutonic or otherwise) on Fox "News" were chatting it up that Barack attended a Muslim school as a child in which, of course, he was taught to hate and kill the infidel. Right?
Wrong. Just for the record, since I'm reading his book, this is a little bit he wrote about the elementary schools he attended:
"In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn't overly concerned. 'Be respectful,' she'd said." (Chapter 8, "Chicago") Little Barack was equally indifferent, some would say irreverent, in the Catholic school he also went to in Djakarta. As an adult in Chicago, he still didn't know what a "catechism" was, he said.
Probably still doesn't! He finally ended up joining a United Church of Christ (cf. Presbyterian) congregation in Chicago. He is not a fundamentalist (thank God! neither Muslim nor Christian!). He said he didn't experience an "epiphany" when he decided to join the church but made a conscious, rational decision with all his doubts about himself and the universe we live in.
Please read his Chapter Six, "Faith," in The Audacity of Hope. It's the only kind of discussion of religion that I can take seriously: honest-to-God honest, and thoughtful. He says that he "must be continually open to new revelations." Then: "This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace."
From there he goes right into discussing the 1963 racist bombing of a church in Alabama in which four little girls were killed -- while they were attending Sunday school. He thought, "How could [the parents] endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children's murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss?" Although that tragedy caused revulsion in many Americans even in Alabama, that "friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain -- that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam that allowed justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage -- unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better place?"
I'm sorry, I can't stop, this is so vital to me. Barack then reflects on his mother's death to cancer and his knowledge that because of her atheism she is alone and afraid. Then, while putting his own daughter to bed, she tells him she doesn't want to die and he says, "You've got a long, long way before you have to worry about that," and she seems satisfied.
But he says then, "I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn't sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for -- that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits."
Oh by the way, to finally get around to why I love the doctor. He came into the examining room a few minutes later and I told him that his nurse had expressed her adoration of Bush because of his stands on her pet issues and didn't seem to know jack about anything else. The doctor said, "Bush is an idiot." He added, "A six-year-old child could stand up before an audience and say he is opposed to abortion and gay marriage." He paused and then smiled. "Of course that's what Bush is!"
Too old. I'd say more like about 18 months (I'll hold my breath until I get my way). "How annoying to find out that I'm not the center of the universe" is a thought and feeling that hasn't occurred to him yet. I remember reading in the hagiography, The Faith of George W. Bush (yeah, I read it), that the author said W wasn't narcissistic. Right. And I'm Donald Duck.
This afternoon I took the book I'm reading to the doctor's visit. It's Dreams from My Father, by Barack Obama. I wasn't trying to make a statement, it's just that I was in the middle of an excellent book and I knew I'd have time to kill before seeing the doctor. Although making a statement doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Anyhow, I had a chance to make one, wasted as it was on a -- you guessed it -- total fucking moron. I wasn't expecting to be confronted about my choice of author by the nurse who took my BP, etc. She said, "He's running for president, isn't he?"
"Yes," I said.
"People who are running for president always have to write a book, don't they?"
I started to say that he wrote the book ten years before he became a candidate for president, but before I got it out her next question was, "He's a Muslim, isn't he?"
"No he isn't," I said, emphatically. This chick wants to pick a fight. "If you got your information from Fox News --"
"He doesn't have much qualifications for president."
"Could he be any worse than what we've got?" I said softly.
She said, "Well, I support Bush. He stands up for what is right. He's --"
"A born-again Christian?"
"Well, he's against things that are wrong."
"Abortion?"
"Yes, abortion and other things."
"Gay marriage?"
"Yes, gay marriage."
"Prayer in schools?"
"Yes."
I said, "Is there any consideration you would make about a candidate other than where he stands on one or two issues? Would you vote for Hitler if he was against abortion and his opponent was for it?"
"Bush is not Hitler." She went out the door and closed it.
And Barack Obama is not a Muslim. There is so much outright fucking lying that never even gets challenged. The likes of John Gibson and Britt Hume and Sean Hannity and those "Fox and Friends" twits (Teutonic or otherwise) on Fox "News" were chatting it up that Barack attended a Muslim school as a child in which, of course, he was taught to hate and kill the infidel. Right?
Wrong. Just for the record, since I'm reading his book, this is a little bit he wrote about the elementary schools he attended:
"In Indonesia, I had spent two years at a Muslim school, two years at a Catholic school. In the Muslim school, the teacher wrote to tell my mother that I made faces during Koranic studies. My mother wasn't overly concerned. 'Be respectful,' she'd said." (Chapter 8, "Chicago") Little Barack was equally indifferent, some would say irreverent, in the Catholic school he also went to in Djakarta. As an adult in Chicago, he still didn't know what a "catechism" was, he said.
Probably still doesn't! He finally ended up joining a United Church of Christ (cf. Presbyterian) congregation in Chicago. He is not a fundamentalist (thank God! neither Muslim nor Christian!). He said he didn't experience an "epiphany" when he decided to join the church but made a conscious, rational decision with all his doubts about himself and the universe we live in.
Please read his Chapter Six, "Faith," in The Audacity of Hope. It's the only kind of discussion of religion that I can take seriously: honest-to-God honest, and thoughtful. He says that he "must be continually open to new revelations." Then: "This is not to say that I'm unanchored in my faith. There are some things that I'm absolutely sure about -- the Golden Rule, the need to battle cruelty in all its forms, the value of love and charity, humility and grace."
From there he goes right into discussing the 1963 racist bombing of a church in Alabama in which four little girls were killed -- while they were attending Sunday school. He thought, "How could [the parents] endure the anguish unless they were certain that some purpose lay behind their children's murders, that some meaning could be found in immeasurable loss?" Although that tragedy caused revulsion in many Americans even in Alabama, that "friends and strangers alike would have assured them that their daughters had not died in vain -- that they had awakened the conscience of a nation and helped liberate a people; that the bomb had burst a dam that allowed justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. And yet would even that knowledge be enough to console your grief, to keep you from madness and eternal rage -- unless you also knew that your child had gone on to a better place?"
I'm sorry, I can't stop, this is so vital to me. Barack then reflects on his mother's death to cancer and his knowledge that because of her atheism she is alone and afraid. Then, while putting his own daughter to bed, she tells him she doesn't want to die and he says, "You've got a long, long way before you have to worry about that," and she seems satisfied.
But he says then, "I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn't sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang. Walking up the stairs, though, I knew what I hoped for -- that my mother was together in some way with those four little girls, capable in some fashion of embracing them, of finding joy in their spirits."
Oh by the way, to finally get around to why I love the doctor. He came into the examining room a few minutes later and I told him that his nurse had expressed her adoration of Bush because of his stands on her pet issues and didn't seem to know jack about anything else. The doctor said, "Bush is an idiot." He added, "A six-year-old child could stand up before an audience and say he is opposed to abortion and gay marriage." He paused and then smiled. "Of course that's what Bush is!"
Too old. I'd say more like about 18 months (I'll hold my breath until I get my way). "How annoying to find out that I'm not the center of the universe" is a thought and feeling that hasn't occurred to him yet. I remember reading in the hagiography, The Faith of George W. Bush (yeah, I read it), that the author said W wasn't narcissistic. Right. And I'm Donald Duck.
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