Love Changes Everything

Our friend Tracy gave me a really nice Xmas gift: a boxed set of 3 CDs of music by Andrew Lloyd Weber. It contains the song "Love Changes Everything" from the show Aspects of Love (1989). The lyrics are by Don Black and Charles Hart and can be found at this link. I listened to the song yesterday while I was reading Dr. Bob and the Good Oldtimers, a biography of one of the two co-founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. This wonderful man, Dr. Bob Smith, after his salvation from alcoholism, lived what he said AA was about: "love and service." I thought that the song, just as it is, would make an excellent one for any Christian (or other religious) worship service: "Nothing in the world can ever be the same." Once again, too, I've been captured by the eloquence and charm of the writing of Frederick Buechner in his book of daily meditations, Listening to Your Life. I recall a story by Mary Flannery O'Connor titled "Everything That Rises Must Converge," and things lately have been rising and converging and it's been a good day, a good autumn and beginning of winter. Happy Holidays and God bless.

Snow, Sort Of

Was going to the jail in New Albany this morning to visit a guy who got himself on the TV news for trying to snatch a purse. Won't go into that, but headed out on the road this morning, being assured by the weathercasters that the snow would change to rain and roads wouldn't be slick. The roads were slick. There was ice on 62. I didn't feel safe doing more than 35, and of course the TFMs were fishtailing and sliding around to my front, rear, and side, so I said hell with it and came back home. The roads did clear later in the day. We're supposed to have more snow/sleet/rain/whatever I think they call it a "wintry mix" tonight. Was able to get out tonight for a while. That lovely effect of ice on tree branches pervaded and I hope there'll be maybe a little sun tomorrow or Monday to give us some winter wonderland. (Nostalgia for the music of Leroy Anderson led me recently to purchase an album with "Sleighride," "Blue Tango," "Buglers' Holiday," and all those wonderful, lighthearted instrumental works that prefigured my love of classical music in its present form.)

Nick Robinson, one of those kids I played baseball under the bridge with over half a century ago, died. He was 67. He was a nice kid and grew up to be a good man who spent all his life in this town. A lot of my childhood pals have passed: Hambone Handlon, Butch Stoner, Hubie (Chuck) Linville ... I hope it's OK to mention their names here. I honor their memory.

And Rosie just informed me that her cousin Orville died this afternoon. And just as she said it, Rudy jumped up on the footrest beside me and snuggled against me, as he did with Orville the day he was last here. In memoriam.

Muddling Through

Late to bed tonight because of two naps today: feeling punk from the third week of a cold. One of those that's mild enough not to be laid up but strong enough to make you drag around more than usual. Have a shoulder muscle that's tensed up, so going to physical therapy in the morning to get it unknotted. We've had two weather reports of late: (1) cloudy and (2) rain. It's raining tonight. Winter solstice is on Saturday December 22 at 1:38 a.m. Short days. I've been too busy to give in to my SAD. Way it ought to be every winter! Busy helping friends Sam and Mike and David and they're helping me. Leo and Bernie and Tom and Howard and Dennis and Irene -- yes, a woman! -- are helping me with my lifelong malady -- and I think I'm helping them. Irene is a dear, dear girl who doesn't know how helpful she has been because she thinks she's a beginner but her humility is that of a saint. Afraid we lost Earl. He was going to his hometown and I hope he got there. He didn't answer or return my call. I took him to task for always taking and never giving. I should have said that doing just that has been my failing too. I made it sound too much like preaching. My pal Van De Graaf is on in the next room and I can't hear what he's saying but I can barely hear the music, which is good. This evening, went to the little town of New Marion and after the meeting drove to Versailles because I was afraid I'd run out of gas before I got back home; filled up the tank and paid for it with a credit card. Buying things on credit is entirely too easy. Have the fan on in the bedroom. Rudy is in his bed and shifts from time to time and the wicker squeaks. That and the susurrus of the fan and the music in the next room. And the sash of the window has started to bump in the wind that has come up. Now there's Pete's baritone voice again. It's a nice time of darkness and calm. Goodnight.

Writer's Block?

My passion when I started this blog was the interface between religion and politics. I am still passionate about the subject but I don't feel that I have much to offer readers. The likelihood of influencing anybody one way or the other is minuscule. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. A clause about courage follows and then another about wisdom in that petition. Don't feel all that courageous or wise these days but I'll settle for serene.

Because of activities every night which I refer to with the shorthand "90/90," I haven't watched Countdown with Keith Olbermann for many nights. I taped one recently showing the mendacity and hypocrisy of a certain official and watched it later but my heart wasn't much in it. Pointing out the mendacity and hypocrisy of said official doesn't change anything. We're enmired in the dung until -- when? I don't want to think about it. And nobody else does either.

We've had a plethora of fatuous Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel. Here's one called Meet the Santas, starring, among others, Armin Shimerman, not in his "Quark the Ferengi" getup but with his semi-baldness reminding me of someone I used to go to lunch with at my last job.

Goodnight.

Paul K., 1942-2007

Lost a good and dear friend this past Saturday. We had a memorial service for him tonight. He might have said, "It's not about Paul," because he was one to always place himself in the background. It's strikingly apropos that our devotional for this very day was about not placing ourselves in the "limelight" as we try to serve others. But it was truly about Paul tonight: I hope it was all right with him just this once, if he were -- or in fact was -- observing us from the other side. He helped me more than I or perhaps he could have imagined with his simple words, "I don't have any answers" combined with "I'm here."

I miss him. I'm going to try to carry on the way he has carried on ever since I've known him. He was a mensch.

Ad Hoc Genealogy

Visiting casually with a man this morning who belongs to my club. He's from Kentucky, is almost 78, is a retired farmer and works with, of all things, mules, for amusement. Belongs to some kind of association that raises them, trains them to work, for show, etc.

"What is your last name?" I asked.

"Evans," he said.

"Well, what was your father's name?"

"Perry," he said.

"Was your mother's name Gladys?"

"Yep."

"Well, I'll be danged! We're cousins, then."

I told him Perry came to my dad's funeral in 1968. Perry died at age 92, Charles (that's his proper name, although he has the nickname "Sug" as in sugar) told me. Charles -- "Sug" -- has a brother we called "Pee Wee." I'd incorrectly recalled that Perry and Gladys (and Sug and Pee Wee and Toad -- love those nicknames -- Toad was merely a play on Theodore -- and a sister whose name I've forgotten) lived near Crestwood, Kentucky, but the nearest town was actually Smithfield, where there is a wonderful restaurant called "Our Best." Sug told me that Pee Wee lives close to the original family farm, which was sold when Perry and Gladys died.

I also told him that in the early 1970s, my son John, his MaMa, and I visited Perry and Gladys at their farm, c. 200 acres. Perry took John and me for a tractor ride across his land and we visited the cattle herd. I saw that one of the Charolais cows was a bull, and I said, "Do you think it's safe to get off the tractor?"

Perry laughed and said that he'd never had a mean bull and this one was no exception. Indeed, the big fellow looked up at us for a moment and continued grazing, obviously wishing us no harm. We did keep our distance. Sug laughed and said they'd had no troubles with bulls but there was one mean cow they'd had and she had charged Sug when he was dealing with her calf. They sold her.

Sug invited me to come visit Pee Wee with him and I think I will do just that. We will have fun.

Sug also told me that he had a female relative who married a man named Bowyer, and that is another lost name of interest in my genealogical quest, so I may be able to get some more information about my roots.

I told Sug that our common (?) great-great grandfather was also named Charles and that he'd been born in 1791, had married Lena Palmer (b. 1791) in Cynthiana, Kentucky, and had then moved to the Providence District of Trimble County, Kentucky. Charles ended his days, apparently, living with his son and my great-grandfather James T. Evans (the CSA Orphan Brigade corporal) there, and that was where my grandfather, Tom (John Thomas) Evans, grew up.

It's kind of like detective work and it's pretty exciting.

More Potpourri...

"Cats are natural enemies of reptiles" (overheard on boob tube)...Reminds me of autumn last year when Miss Graypussy was boxing (with her declawed paws) at a blacksnake in the neighbor's yard and the blacksnake was taking it personally, coiled and striking back (not defanged, I surmise)...Ally Sheedy looks a little ate-up -- but she's not wearing makeup (courageous) and it's been a while since The Breakfast Club, when she was 23 (she's 45 now)...On Thanksgiving Day when I was about 15 I hunted birds one cold, clear morning with cousin/friend Johnny Henry on his grandfather's farm, i.e. I went with him, not shooting a gun as he did...A few years later at Fort Leonard Wood he won a sharpshooter medal in basic training, I "boloed" (didn't qualify) because I fired too many "Maggie's drawers" (missed the target altogether)...But I hit a water-snake in the head twice with BBs from Greg Peddie's gun from his dad's boat as we trolled up the Flat Rock River...Damn thing just flinched and kept on swimming parallel to us, like a little dragon...I heard the BB hit Snakey's leathery head both times...Got some holiday home-made pimiento cheese spread and we ate some of it tonight -- yummy! now that's "rushing the season" I don't mind...saw a house and grounds with glaring, garish Xmas lights on US 31 Thursday...not ready for it yet...breakfast meeting tomorrow -- will take some doughnuts...after a hiatus from Netflix we resumed with a revisit to Hill Street Blues...had forgotten how chaotic and over-the-top and absurd it was! loved it!...NYPD Blue was much slicker...A Vevay man, an Army sergeant, was killed this week in Iraq...oh yeah, between the no-draft and the mercenaries, we forgot about that atrocity for a little while, didn't we?...just add another yellow magnet to your car...

On Probation as a Daily Columnist?

Seems like the best I've been able to do is about every other day...My favorite character in The Asphalt Jungle is Sam Jaffe as the German mastermind criminal who makes daring robberies but never carries a gun...Had a good day Friday, putting up a Venetian blind and curtain rod, reading further in You Can't Make Me Angry by Dr. Paul O., attending a rehab meeting in which I complimented Irene for her talk and her marvelous turnaround from her sickness as of two years ago, and having a nice phone visit with the Bebe...Joined an online discussion group moderated by a newfound friend who lives in Richmond, Indiana...Also found an old friend who lives in Richmond; met him in California in 1967 and he has now been continuously sober for over 50 years!...Friend Kevin got a promotion and raise at his work...Leaves have mostly fallen and in the morning must begin to mulch them...Recently watched first four episodes of Hill Street Blues on DVD...Got the theme-song from iTunes and we've been listening to it...Still savoring the great brief visit with Ed Begley Jr., who is a Democrat, vegan, and teetotaler, and a mensch...Glad I stayed in town tonight instead of going to Columbus, otherwise wouldn't have heard Irene...Bach harpsichord sonata on Beethoven Satellite Network right now -- Van De Graaff, my friend...Must get to bed goodnight...

Dropping Names

Ed Begley Jr.

He lectured at Hanover College tonight on saving the environment. Asked what he thought about nuclear power he said, "We have the best nuclear reactor in the world. It's 93 million miles away. It's called the sun." (Applause.)

He worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger on an environmental issue and did the best impression of the Govinator I've heard when he re-created a session that Arnold had with Orrin Hatch. (Applause for that too.)

I got to visit with Ed for a couple of minutes afterward. He said he's making a movie about the Florida recount of 2000. I said "Ooh! That'll be great!" Then I whispered, "I'm a Democrat too."

"Good man," he said.

He is too.

"Why Do We Have to Keep Killing One Another?"

Just watched Bill Moyers' Journal, which featured author Thomas Cahill. Bill interviewed him about capital punishment, in particular. Cahill talked about our cruelty to one another over the centuries, citing public executions for sport, among other things. The three biggest offending nations in the world are China, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. Think about that.

Once again I was reminded of the gruesome place that is Huntsville, Texas -- the capital punishment capital of the United States. Once again I say that my first and foremost reason for opposing George W. Bush was his cruelty in presiding over that state's practice, never granting clemency to anyone. And I have heard over and over the uttered belief of people that Bush is a good Christian. Some of those people sport bumper stickers with the words, "Christians aren't perfect -- just forgiven." ("Forgive us our debts AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS." -- from The Lord's Prayer)

Once Cahill said, "Why do we have to keep killing one another?" Our differences are so petty. Protestants and Catholics? Shiites and Sunnis? Pakistanis and Indians? Muslims and Jews? Why can't we accept differences, tolerate them, overlook faults, take the log out of our own eye before taking the mote out of another's, help one another to make it through the world without starving and suffering? Why can't we forgive one another?

Comment On -- Well, God. OK?

Yesterday I requested a book I'd seen discussed in the New York Times blog, Think Again, by Stanley Fish. The post was "Suffering, Evil, and the Existence of God." This morning I withdrew the request of the library to obtain Antony Flew's There Is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind. I did so because it appears that Flew suffers from senile dementia and was exploited by his co-author, Roy Abraham Varghese, the ghost-writer of much of the text that, when interviewed, Flew was not able to recognize or recall. I didn't want to ask the library to obtain a book that is, as far as I am concerned, a hoax, in the same way that I would have not asked for the book by James Frey about his treatment for drug dependence at Hazelden, which was shown to be a pack of lies and did more harm than good to people who are seeking the truth about escaping the evil of alcoholism.

In the same way, I think tricking an addled old man into signing off on little more than a tendentious rather than a purportedly rational argument for the existence of a First Cause is unscrupulous and, whereas I don't want books burned or otherwise suppressed, I'll leave it up to somebody else to request the book.

This is really hard work, trying to puzzle out what I believe about God, as we call "Him." First, define your terms, JT. What do I mean when I say "God"? I mean the creator of the material universe: the macrocosm and the microcosm that we are aware of, as well as all that we are unaware of: the force or entity that caused the Big Bang or whatever started it all and the one that was there before the Big Bang. "Before" and "after" being constructs of our mortal understanding of "time."

It can be neither disproved nor proved, but I believe -- and this is my article of faith, part of my personal catechism -- that this ineffable vastness and complexity and orderliness did not occur by "accident." I believe in a "first cause." We pipsqueaks don't even have the wherewithal to "prove" that. It's just my notion, my inclination -- my hunch. And I'll never know one way or the other. I guess.

It is all such a mystery.

Cerulean Sky, Luminous Pearly Clouds, Russet Leaves

I love autumn once again. Today was an exemplary day. Sunny, crisp, vigorous. Voted and -- hot diggety damn! -- Tim Armstrong won! Madison has a Democratic mayor for the first time in a long, long while. The guy has absolutely no experience. But it was time for a change. After voting, in the gym of Anderson Elementary School, went to the library and got books and DVDs.

Also requested a book that I learned about on the New York Times blog by Stanley Fish, this post with the title, "Suffering, Evil, and the Existence of God." The book of interest is There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, by Antony Flew.

I also wanted to obtain another book (Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer) wrestling with the conundrum of God's attributed benevolence and omnipotence in the face of evil. Epicurus wrote: “Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent. Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence, then, evil.” I learned a new word: "theodicy," meaning "the defense of God’s omnipotence and goodness in view of the existence of evil." I can see why they call defenders of the faith "apologists." Ehrman's book will be available in February 2008.

Made two CDs from new music I recently imported. I especially love the organ toccatas by Jongen, Widor, and J.S. Bach. (Psst! It's too easy to buy music from iTunes!)

No new comedy shows tonight because of the writers' strike, so will watch some of Countdown, which I taped.

Eight Minutes to Deadline

Beating the clock to get my story in print: I actually did that for newspapers in Franklin, LaPorte, and Madison, Indiana! I kept getting interrupted, but I could have been an honest-to-god reporter for a living. So my blog post will be on time. Piece o' cake.

30 Posts in 30 Days, By Gum

This blogging thing is a piece o' cake! I can write something, some drivel daily, I who wanted to be a newspaper columnist? (Along with all my other pipe dreams?) Does a cat have a meow?

At just after six, EST (we returned to slow time), the sun was down, but amber light at the western horizon graduated into light blue as I raised my eyes toward the zenith, viewing it here from the bay window. Now the mini-blinds are closed, soft lights are on, and we're watching Shark, which doesn't take a lot of effort. I liked the sundown, of course, and I like being on the same time as the adjacent counties in Kentucky, Jeffersonville, Vevay, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. Before DST, the only one of those we were on the same time with was Indianapolis. Which utterly ignores us. Southern Indiana! Onward and upward!

OK, I accept the challenge!

Blog a day for a month, huh? Hmm. Words, that's about all I have to offer. Fair enough. So here goes. It sure is good to see some posts again from the family.

Just finished rereading Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous by Nan Robertson, first published in 1988. I'll let the book speak for itself, should anyone care to read it. I will comment on the edition of the book, namely an Authors Guild backinprint.com edition. It's a paperback, excellently bound and printed. I'm also rereading Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous by Ernest Kurtz, and for the first time, You Can't Make Me Angry, by Dr. Paul O. The latter, although aimed at members of AA and Al-Anon, is of general interest, and enlightening as well as good-humored.

I'm also finishing reading A Woman in Charge, a biography of Hillary Clinton, by Carl Bernstein. I believe she stands a good chance of being the woman in charge starting in 2009, and although I cringe at her continuing to make pacts with the devil in order to tread lightly on that part of the electorate she needs to get to the Oval Office, I have high hopes that she will make a decent president, which, it goes without saying, this country sorely needs.

I'm Just Sayin'

Beautiful morning, which started with frost. Rosie had turned on the ceiling heat and I turned it off and opened the door and turned on the table fan until my face and ears cooled off.

I slept until after nine, having gone to bed soon after twelve last night, and I’m still tired. I think I’m getting caught up on some long needed rest.

Listening to WUOL, Bach piece that is getting a little monotonous. I’m sure if I had brain-one about the composition of music I’d appreciate the variations and crap he went through with this. Actually I do have an intuitive feeling for what he’s doing but I don’t care to be as exhaustive as he is.

Then there’s Carol Larson, a lovely woman who announces, who (or as she would be sure to say, whom) I have met in person to affirm her loveliness, but sometimes she gets to me because she is so smarmy and prissy, prim and proper. She has had piano lessons and knows music inside and out and assumes her listeners have the same level of knowledge as she does and it ain’t so, Carol. And when she announces a work by a French composer and/or performer, she blows you away with her correct, non-native French. Piss off, Carol, you dear, sweet, phony woman. And God bless you.

Thanks be to God, anyway, today, that I am well again and I hope once more on the right road to recovery.

All three devotionals I'm reading right now were good this morning. The Upper Room is about "new life" (eternal life), which I speculate will be something much, much better than any of us expects. From Daily Reflections, wise counsel not to try to change others, only myself: "live and let live." And Buechner the ecclesiastic poet, in Listening to Your Life, describes the shopworn Christian word, "grace," and reminds us that it's a gift. He says its meaning is something like:

"Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you."

I guess those last two sentences are no more fantastic than the glib belief that the Big Bang occurred, something from nothing, without Somebody to light the cosmic fuse.

I'm just sayin'.

That Old Clown Is Back

Sunshine is back today after a protracted absence and it is particularly welcome, even as a good, slow, soaking rain over a number of days was welcome earlier in the week.

The New York Times today contains two stories on the declining influence of the religious right in politics: one is in the column of Frank Rich and the other is in the magazine and is written by David D. Kirkpatrick. I found both to be instructive in what is going on in religion and politics in the United States today.

I am still an advocate of the position of Jim Wallis and the Sojourners, which is that there is more to the teachings of Christ than an opposition to abortion, gay marriage, and evolution. And that there is a conflict in the crusade to preserve life when it applies only to the unborn and not to opposing war, capital punishment, and being indifferent to the health care of children, the struggle of people in this nation and the world to be free from want when there is plenty for all. I could go on about the inconsistencies of the personal-piety wing of Christianity.

In the NYT Magazine's story, "The Evangelical Crackup," these remarks by the Rev. Gene Carlson, a well-credentialed conservative of Wichita, Kansas spoke to me:

“ 'There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,' Carlson said, 'and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.' He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. 'Now it is a growing phenomenon,' he said."

God, I hope so. How I hope so. The death grip of the neocons and the Roves on the religious "right" has nearly killed us all and may do so yet. I pray not.

This Is More Like It!

Beautiful October morning in Madi-tucky, Indiana. The kind that James Whitcomb Riley wrote his doggerels about. Frost not quite on the punkin, but it might have been this time of year before Al Gore's inconvenient truth. Frost, anyway, though a better poet than Riley, is dead too, so we move on.

Anyhow, "that old clown sunshine" (Updike) is barely over the horizon and is letting its light fall on the wall, with shadows of the slats of the mini-blind and dancing leaves. Dancing shadows in sunshine make me happy. Night before last we had a tornado scare but for all the promises of the weather boys that we were going to have a perfect storm it didn't happen and we're still here. :-)

Rosie and family and I are readying stuff for an estate sale of sorts, moving some of the old folks' belonging out and hoping to get a few liquid assets to defray the expense of Howard's stay at Thornton Terrace.

It is too easy to buy music from iTunes. Little and often makes plenty for Steve Jobs.

Since I've been out of the hospital I've been to at least one and sometimes two rehab sessions every day. It's a good life. I like the fellowship and I'm trying to help others in the same boat, which gets my mind off me, me, me. And I've felt better every day.

Only 11 more shopping days until Hallowe'en! Tune up your brooms, have a dental checkup of your fangs, ...

Good Gray October Afternoon: It's Good to Be Home

I recently was in hospital for seven days for a life-long malady of mine, and am now home and glad to be here. Just wanted the handful of family and friends who have an RSS to this blog or just check it from time to time know that I'm back and things are OK for now. Thanks, love, and blessings to all who were concerned. Onward and upward.

George McGovern, 1972: "Reorder Our Priorities"

"Does anybody really believe the problem with the war in Iraq is too much questioning of those in authority, too much bluntness, and not enough deference to those who have been in charge of the war for the last four years?

"That's apparently the feeling of all the conservative talk-show hosts and GOP presidential candidates who came down with the vapors over the MoveOn ad that had the temerity to question Gen. David Petraeus. Tens of thousands of dead civilians, nearly 4,000 dead American soldiers, half a billion dollars spent, and the squandering of America's moral authority -- none of that seems to have ruffled their feathers very much. But the ad? Now that has got them royally steamed."

-- Arianna Huffington

2 Down, 2 to Go

Alberto Gonzales resigned today. Karl Rove resigned recently. Now (of course it's a Hail Mary prayer) if we could just have the resignations of Lord Voldemort and Howdy Doody. (Amen.)

One of My Favorite Months: Not So Hot, Figuratively Speaking

We've had many days this month when the heat index or just the damn temperature has exceeded 100, and it has called for staying indoors. August has always been the month when we've had a taste of Hoosier autumn, with cool mornings, dry and blue as Nevada at its best. But it hasn't happened this month. Maybe it will in the next five days but it doesn't look promising.

I've been thinking about Erik Erikson and his theory of the stages of adult development, the next to last being "generativity versus stagnation," and how I'm in that phase and in my case it looks like stagnation is the winner. As my buddy Kurt put it, "So it goes." And as my grudgingly admired cohort, Al Ellis, would put it, "Tough shit." (That means the same thing in New York as it does in Madison, Indiana.)

Watching "In Harm's Way" this afternoon. Stars the Duke and Kirk Douglas and one of my favorites, Stanley Holloway (Alf Doolittle of "My Fair Lady.") The score is by one of my main men, Jerry Goldsmith, who passed away about the time of Elmer Bernstein and David Raksin ("Laura"). So it goes.

Rudy is sacked out in the next chair. He is the soul of serenity. I contemplate him and when I do all is well, in spite of whatever shit is happening. I grieve, but tough shit. So it goes. What else can I say?

The tulip poplars have had a few leaves turn yellow. Autumn's a-comin'.

Mawwiage ... And Wove, Twue Wove ...

Hooray! My son and his lovely bride got married today! They have my richest blessings! Hooray! Yippee! Hallelujah!

Sent This One to My Sponsor

Two men are drinking in a bar at the top of the Empire State Building.

One turns to the other and says: "You know last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building - by the time you fall to the 10th floor, the winds around the building are so intense that they carry you around the building and back into the window."

The bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.

The 2nd Man says: "What are you a nut? There is no way in hell that could happen."

1st Man: "No it's true let me prove it to you." So he gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and careens to the street below. When he passes the 10th floor, the high wind whips him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.

The 2nd Man tells him: "You know I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke."

1st Man: "No, I'll prove it again" and again he jumps and hurtles toward the street where the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.

2nd Man: "Well what the hell, it works, I'll try it." So he jumps over the balcony, plunges downward, passes the 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th floors...and hits the sidewalk with a 'splat.'

Back upstairs the bartender turns to the other drinker: "You know, Superman, you're a real asshole when you're drunk."

Rudy on Duty

Excuse the sentimentality of this. It has all the makings of a Guideposts story. I'll just try to tell it simply and directly. Rosalie's cousin Orville has prostate cancer. He has been told he has two months to live. He came today expecting this visit to be his last. He behaved as he always has: cheerfully, upbeat, without self-pity, with hope and faith. I am really fond of this man and have been honored and delighted to get to know him.

When Orville came in today with his wife Ruth, he sat in the recliner and asked to put his feet up, so I lifted the footrest for him. Rudy was very attentive to him and was well-behaved. I urged him to lie down on the footrest next to Orville and he complied. Soon he laid his muzzle across the shin of Orville's leg as he has only done with me to date. He bonded with Orville in a way I have never seen him do, serene and relaxed with this gentleman he has seen only one other time, fitting in his company just like an old shoe. (Thence the nickname, one of course many I've given him.)

Orville said that Rudy gave him great comfort and intimated that it would be nice to have Rudy's company from now on. I said that I would like to send Rudy home with him but he goes crazy when he travels. I could not let him go, of course. He comforts me too much to let him go. I was right there as Rudy lay beside Orville. He would grieve for me if he were gone away from here, as Rosie observes. He grieved for his original master for a long, long time.

Anyhow, it is awfully good that Rudy was good to Orville today, for whatever reason. Thanks, Old Shoe.

Mundane Musings

Listening to cowboy music (Lonesome Dove Suite by Basil Pouledoris) with earphones. Boob tube is off. Rosie is visiting on the phone or working on her genealogy or both. Rudy is in the chair opposite me, muzzle on paws.

We got a break from the fiercest of the heat today with a high merely in the mid-nineties and less humidity. I leaped (well, slouched) to the opportunity to mow grass. After cutting about a fifth of the yard, I bent the mower's blade, or rather a tree root bent it. Tragic error! David counsels that I'll have to go to Sears and get a new blade. Manana, muchachos y muchachas. Till then, !fiesta y siesta!

Rosie lay down and slept like the dead this afternoon for a full hour and a half and afterwards remonstrated about being so lazy. She has been in a dead run in the service of her family all week in this infernal heat and I reminded her of that.

Rosie is back in her chair and Rudy has moved to the back of this recliner behind me. It's comforting for both of us for him to be back there.

TCM had some Edgar Allan Poe movies on today, which reminded me of Poe's "tales of ratiocination," as he called them, i.e. detective stories in which the mystery solver uses logic to untangle the mystery. Poe invented a Parisian sleuth named August Dupin, on whom Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is said to have been modeled. The two Dupin stories are "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter." The one I like best is "The Gold Bug," in which the protagonist finds buried treasure by solving a cryptogram, in which the letters of a message are substituted for by other letters, e.g. c stands for y, g for a, etc. Various newspapers have such puzzles and I think they're on the internet, of course. The Merriam-Webster dictionary site has word games, although M-W is not as generous in making a variety of games available as they used to be.

Alison Stewart has subbed for Keith the last two nights and has done a wonderful job as usual. She is fun and I think it would be nice if she and Keith would partner all the time with him doing the political news up front and her doing the "Oddball" etc. She did the banter with Michael Musto last night and was great. I think those things are somewhat scripted with the straight host setting Michael up to do his comic remarks. The buffoons of choice last night were Britney and "K-Fed."

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are not seen on Fridays. I think it is a wise choice not to overexpose. Jon has been going after Mitt Romney a lot lately. The guy is pompous, and he is inserting his foot in his mouth more and more with increasing public exposure. I love the latest remark about how his five sons were serving their country best by (instead of serving in Iraq) campaigning for him. John liked it too and went after it with his usual brilliant satire. I wish satire would save our country. I suppose sometimes it does, but its wheels grind exceedingly slow and, I fear, exceedingly coarse.

Well, enough of that. Last night we also watched La Ley de Herodes (Herod's Law), a Mexican film. It was gallows-humor and a morality tale about political corruption in Mexico, set in 1949, and it prompted me to reflect that los Estados Unidos has turned into a banana republic, with a vote, and rhetoric about "freedom" and opposition to "evil," but with everybody on the take and brutal repression of dissent, and every peasant humping along trying to keep from going under and pretending that it's the best it can be.

I've pretty much stopped using this as a forum for criticizing the government, or rather the people who have hijacked our government, an institution that I believe can be good and useful to its citizens, from the decent people who once ran it. In 1949, the president was Harry Truman, who was a good and honorable public servant and, it so happened, a man of the people. He was followed in office by a good and honorable public servant, Ike Eisenhower, an excellent military commander and not so bad as a president. Both of these men, a Democrat and a Republican, believed in the potential of government as a force for good and saw themselves as servants of the people, all of the people.

After Watergate and the resignation of Nixon, the journalists were crowing about how our government had survived a constitutional crisis, some saying they knew all along that it would. Will we survive this one? I think we've been weakened and corrupted to perhaps that "tipping point" that they speak of, one of their buzz phrases. I guess we'll see. I think we've tipped for sure and we're sliding and not many perceive our slide into the abyss.

Maybe it will become more evident when we're over the edge and in free fall.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Rosie has gone to Suzy's. Keith had a good Countdown tonight. This evening John Gibson of Fixed News Network was awarded the dishonor of being the Worst Person in the World. Joe Biden was a guest and would make a good president but he's not in the running now and probably won't be between now and the 2008 Democratic convention. Now The Best Years of Our Lives is on TCM, this being Dana Andrews day. I've seen it two hundred and six times but I'll have to stay with it until Al (Frederic March) gives his speech to the annual dinner of the Corn Belt Savings and Loan Association. Right now Sticky Merkel is having his say in the drugstore. Come to think of it, he kind of reminds me of John Gibson.

Marilyn in Your White Dress, We Need You Now!

We're having the scorchiest heat wave we've had in a long time. Senator James Inhofe, the Senator from Exxon, assures us we need not worry that this is related to man-made global warming. Thanks, Jim. Louisville had a record high of 101 degrees Fahrenheit today. (Temp is way in hell higher than Inhofe's IQ. Let's see. Shall we wait 'til -- January?)

Mammaries -- excuse me, I meant memories -- of Marilyn in The Seven Year Itch arise -- come to mind. It was hooter -- excuse me, hotter -- than blazes in New York, almost as hot as Joltin' Joe DiMaggio was under the collar when they kept filming takes of Marilyn's skirt blowing up as she stood over the subway grating while bystanders -- New Yorkers, past masters of baiting, versed in the art of heckling and cracking wise -- stood watching and making a hot air commentary of the (ob)scene.

The reality was sad for both Joe and Marilyn, as everyone knows, not to mention Tom Ewell, who became alcoholic and had a long interruption in a brilliant career of comic acting. His last gig was as the sidekick of Baretta, played by Little Beaver Perry Smith Bobby Blake, on television. MaMa liked Baretta. Even the music (I love the scene of Tom's fantasy of seducing Marilyn to Rachmaninoff's piano concerto) was by a brilliant man now known to have suffered from manic-depression.

But the movie was wonderful. Somebody said the movies should be more like real life. A wise man said, on the contrary: real life should be more like the movies.

Anyhow, as I've said thousands of times, thank god for a-c.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

That's the title of a book by Milan Kundera, which I tried to get interested in, as I tried to get interested in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Don't know much about the writings but I love his titles, especially the title The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

I'm laughing and trying to forget certain things. I succeeded in making myself laugh a little while ago when Rosie got up and left the room. There was a reason for her departure: a new CD I have was about ten minutes into the First Symphony of Darius Milhaud. He was French, one of Les Six (Groupe des Six). Everybody I know hates them but me: I love the music of Milhaud (I do not know the rules of pronunciation of French, but the jocks all pronounce his name "Me-YO" -- not MILL-howd, as I read it the first time, and as I'm sure it would be pronounced in Millhousen, Indiana). I also love the music of Francis Poulenc, one of the others who somehow got designated Les Six.

I was listening to this work on the radio the other day and looked it up in iTunes. They didn't have it so I went to Amazon.com and found all his symphonies. I clicked the wrong prompt (the right one really, heh, heh, heh) and bought a boxed set of all the symphonies of Milhaud, twelve in all. This will be a solitary pleasure, as I say, because everybody hates him, including present company. Rudy hasn't moved a muscle, didn't when I started the music and didn't when I was asked to turn it off and thanked for turning it off.

But I will go into my soundproof closet and listen, heh heh heh, laughing and forgetting the while.

Keep cool, my babies.

A Woman in Charge

I'm reading A Woman in Charge, a biography of Hillary Clinton by Carl Bernstein, one of the duo of Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate scandal. His bio of her is not puffery. Bernstein is a good journalist, a real one, who doesn't worship or demonize anybody. (He doesn't work for Rupert Murdoch.) I'm enjoying the bio very much. I think a good ticket would be Hillary for president and Barack Obama for v-p. Or vice versa.

On Hearing Elgar's "London Town" (Cockaigne Overture)

From: evansjt@
Subject: Cockaigne (sp? Oh Well, London Town) Overture!
Date: July 26, 2007 4:50:34 PM EDT
To: studio@wuol.org

Daniel,

I just have listened on iTunes (with earphones) and I have been moved to tears by this beautiful Elgar work. It is indeed emotional! I've heard it many times but I was never before aware of what beautiful orchestration it contains or how much Elgar must have loved London. (Then of course there was "Pomp and Circumstance" when my firstborn daughter graduated from medical school. But I don't think I can handle that too!)

Thanks for playing "London Town." And here comes Bach! Oh God, now hear that counterpoint between the oboe and bassoon ... I wish I could translate my love of all this great music into composition as you do. Oh well. Thanks, friend. Keep up the good work. I'm a little embarrassed by my outburst. Forgive me.

JT Evans

No Satire or Cuteness, just Sanity and Eminent Sensibleness -- God Help Us -- Amen

New York Times Editorial
The Road Home

Published: July 8, 2007

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The political leaders Washington has backed are incapable of putting national interests ahead of sectarian score settling. The security forces Washington has trained behave more like partisan militias. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.

Continuing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of American soldiers is wrong. The war is sapping the strength of the nation’s alliances and its military forces. It is a dangerous diversion from the life-and-death struggle against terrorists. It is an increasing burden on American taxpayers, and it is a betrayal of a world that needs the wise application of American power and principles.

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise.

The Mechanics of Withdrawal

The United States has about 160,000 troops and millions of tons of military gear inside Iraq. Getting that force out safely will be a formidable challenge. The main road south to Kuwait is notoriously vulnerable to roadside bomb attacks. Soldiers, weapons and vehicles will need to be deployed to secure bases while airlift and sealift operations are organized. Withdrawal routes will have to be guarded. The exit must be everything the invasion was not: based on reality and backed by adequate resources.

The United States should explore using Kurdish territory in the north of Iraq as a secure staging area. Being able to use bases and ports in Turkey would also make withdrawal faster and safer. Turkey has been an inconsistent ally in this war, but like other nations, it should realize that shouldering part of the burden of the aftermath is in its own interest.

Accomplishing all of this in less than six months is probably unrealistic. The political decision should be made, and the target date set, now.

The Fight Against Terrorists

Despite President Bush’s repeated claims, Al Qaeda had no significant foothold in Iraq before the invasion, which gave it new base camps, new recruits and new prestige.

This war diverted Pentagon resources from Afghanistan, where the military had a real chance to hunt down Al Qaeda’s leaders. It alienated essential allies in the war against terrorism. It drained the strength and readiness of American troops.

And it created a new front where the United States will have to continue to battle terrorist forces and enlist local allies who reject the idea of an Iraq hijacked by international terrorists. The military will need resources and bases to stanch this self- inflicted wound for the foreseeable future.

The Question of Bases

The United States could strike an agreement with the Kurds to create those bases in northeastern Iraq. Or, the Pentagon could use its bases in countries like Kuwait and Qatar, and its large naval presence in the Persian Gulf, as staging points.

There are arguments for, and against, both options. Leaving troops in Iraq might make it too easy — and too tempting — to get drawn back into the civil war and confirm suspicions that Washington’s real goal was to secure permanent bases in Iraq. Mounting attacks from other countries could endanger those nations’ governments.

The White House should make this choice after consultation with Congress and the other countries in the region, whose opinions the Bush administration has essentially ignored. The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

The Civil War

One of Mr. Bush’s arguments against withdrawal is that it would lead to civil war. That war is raging, right now, and it may take years to burn out. Iraq may fragment into separate Kurdish, Sunni and Shiite republics, and American troops are not going to stop that from happening.

It is possible, we suppose, that announcing a firm withdrawal date might finally focus Iraq’s political leaders and neighboring governments on reality. Ideally, it could spur Iraqi politicians to take the steps toward national reconciliation that they have endlessly discussed but refused to act on.

But it is foolish to count on that, as some Democratic proponents of withdrawal have done. The administration should use whatever leverage it gains from withdrawing to press its allies and Iraq’s neighbors to help achieve a negotiated solution.

Iraq’s leaders — knowing that they can no longer rely on the Americans to guarantee their survival — might be more open to compromise, perhaps to a Bosnian-style partition, with economic resources fairly shared but with millions of Iraqis forced to relocate. That would be better than the slow-motion ethnic and religious cleansing that has contributed to driving one in seven Iraqis from their homes.

The United States military cannot solve the problem. Congress and the White House must lead an international attempt at a negotiated outcome. To start, Washington must turn to the United Nations, which Mr. Bush spurned and ridiculed as a preface to war.

The Human Crisis

There are already nearly two million Iraqi refugees, mostly in Syria and Jordan, and nearly two million more Iraqis who have been displaced within their country. Without the active cooperation of all six countries bordering Iraq — Turkey, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria — and the help of other nations, this disaster could get worse. Beyond the suffering, massive flows of refugees — some with ethnic and political resentments — could spread Iraq’s conflict far beyond Iraq’s borders.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia must share the burden of hosting refugees. Jordan and Syria, now nearly overwhelmed with refugees, need more international help. That, of course, means money. The nations of Europe and Asia have a stake and should contribute. The United States will have to pay a large share of the costs, but should also lead international efforts, perhaps a donors’ conference, to raise money for the refugee crisis.

Washington also has to mend fences with allies. There are new governments in Britain, France and Germany that did not participate in the fight over starting this war and are eager to get beyond it. But that will still require a measure of humility and a commitment to multilateral action that this administration has never shown. And, however angry they were with President Bush for creating this mess, those nations should see that they cannot walk away from the consequences. To put it baldly, terrorism and oil make it impossible to ignore.

The United States has the greatest responsibilities, including the admission of many more refugees for permanent resettlement. The most compelling obligation is to the tens of thousands of Iraqis of courage and good will — translators, embassy employees, reconstruction workers — whose lives will be in danger because they believed the promises and cooperated with the Americans.

The Neighbors

One of the trickiest tasks will be avoiding excessive meddling in Iraq by its neighbors — America’s friends as well as its adversaries.

Just as Iran should come under international pressure to allow Shiites in southern Iraq to develop their own independent future, Washington must help persuade Sunni powers like Syria not to intervene on behalf of Sunni Iraqis. Turkey must be kept from sending troops into Kurdish territories.

For this effort to have any remote chance, Mr. Bush must drop his resistance to talking with both Iran and Syria. Britain, France, Russia, China and other nations with influence have a responsibility to help. Civil war in Iraq is a threat to everyone, especially if it spills across Iraq’s borders.

•

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

***

I know that this eminently sensible solution will be trashed by Faux News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and Tony Snow. Among others. But here it is. By editorial writers, not government employees. I pray God these people who are holding us hostage will read this and heed the wisdom it contains. although I have no hope whatever they will.

The answer to this nightmare, I believe, is in partition: three new states based on ethnic divisions: Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds. We need to help them get on with it. Whoever is the next president will have to do it, of course. Bush-Cheney & Co. will just continue to do what they have done until they are out of office. It will be up to the next president, whoever that might be, to get us and the world out of this mess. God help us do it. Amen.

Bashing Illegal Immigrants

+++++
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.

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.

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.

Must See E.G.

I love this post by my pal Jerry (E.G.)!

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.

See the New Post on Johnstown (April 25, 2007)

See the new post on Johnstown, Indiana, "Memoir of Uncle Bill."

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.

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.

His Eye Is On the Sparrow

ABC News Item this afternoon:

An outdoor news conference in perfect spring weather, with birds chirping loudly in the magnolia trees, is not without its hazards.

As President Bush took a question Thursday in the White House Rose Garden about scandals involving his Attorney General, he remarked, "I've got confidence in Al Gonzales doin' the job."

Simultaneously, a sparrow flew overhead and left a splash on the President's sleeve, which Bush tried several times to wipe off.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Dana Perino promptly put the incident through the proper spin cycle, telling ABC News, "It was his lucky day...everyone knows that's a sign of good luck."

***

"Can you not buy two sparrows for a penny? And yet not one falls to the ground without your Father knowing."

(Mt. 10:29)


"The gypsies say, and I know why,
A falling blossom only touches lips that lie."

("A Blossom Fell," 1955, popular song by Barnes, Cornelius, and John, sung by Nat King Cole)

Beautiful Weather, Rachel McAdams, and Barack Obama

We've had a run of sunny, dry (not humid) days: cloudless blue skies and clear air such that you can see the features of the terrain from a distance without the blue haze we are accustomed to in these parts.

I remember a letter from one brother's friend (who was a gun-totin' cowboy in Arizona -- an editor for some kind of NRA organ) in which he said that the summer weather here was "sticky, foggy..." (He'd been born and raised here and loved to lord it over us Easterners that he'd escaped from. Hoosiers transplanted to Arizona can be obnoxious.)

I think that was before my family and I moved to the West (Utah) for an eight-year sojourn where it was usually not sticky or foggy. I remember the time I was amazed when it started to rain there, complete with lightning and thunder, amazed because the air seemed so dry. I remarked to myself that the air between the raindrops was dry.

And I loved the dry air. It was marvelous. When the air is not saturated with water vapor, it can dry the sweat on you more quickly than wet air can. Sweat drying on your skin cools your body. One summer I worked in a junkyard and the temperature reached 95 one day. When somebody told me I said, "Really?" When the air is not so humid it heats up in the sun but is markedly cooler in the shade and especially at night. Our kids were sleeping in winter pajamas in June, I noted.

If Indiana had not been sticky and foggy as it is, as a rule, we might have been overrun by transplanted Arizonans and Utahans here. Indiana could be Californicated -- what the Oregonians don't want. We are infested, to a small degree. People come to Indiana and particularly to bucolic little towns like Madison as "urban refugees." Even the Hoosier capital, Nap Town, has freeways in and around it that are easy to travel on in contrast with the likes of the Santa Ana Freeway. In recent years the immigrants have been able to live luxuriously here because of the difference in real estate prices, trading a modest ranch somewhere for a "historic" house on tree-lined streets here.

I concluded long ago that Indiana, especially rural southern Indiana, is a kinder, gentler place to live. When we came back here from Utah several people said, "Welcome back to God's country." I don't know about that, but I recall that I liked some things: we didn't have a sales tax on food; righteous people drank coffee and thought nothing of it; and although a lot of people thought their religion was the one true one, their belief was contested by others (who of course thought their religion as the true one) and, most important, it did not have the force of law. And a lot of us liked David Letterman, worldly and irreverent as he was, because he was, like us, a Hoosier. It was a good life, and we soon enough acclimated once again to the humidity. And, the first summer back, the fleas! At least Amanda and I did (!) -- poor old Sophie, our dog, suffered terribly. And people here, I concluded were friendlier and not just plain mean, as too many of them are out West.

Saw a thriller the other night, Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams. I hope I'm not being a spoiler by saying that the thing I liked about it best is that Rachel turns out not to be too big a wuss in dealing with the villain.

I'm reading The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama. As you know, Senator Obama is running for president. At first I thought that wasn't a good idea because he has so little experience. I thought he should wait until he is more seasoned. But why? Being "unqualified" didn't stop a number of people. It certainly didn't stop the commander guy who a little over half of us glibly reelected even though the disaster under his command had already happened.

Anyhow, I'm learning from the book, because this guy knows what is going on and has a way of communicating it so that reading him, I think I know what is going on a little better. I'll vote for him if he's nominated. I trust him. As it stands right now, I wish we could have a triumvirate consisting of Barack, Hillary, and John Edwards. I think all three of them are presidential material. Compare these top three on the Democratic side to the top three contenders on the Republican side: Giuliani (give me a break!), Mitt Romney ("I think we should double Guantanamo"), and John McCain the Iraq shopper. But you never know what you're getting until the inauguration and the first days of celebration are over: every time we elect a president it's like buying a pig in a poke.

Anyhow, I like Barack. From his knowledge, intelligence, and ability to communicate, I think he would make a good president. So be it.

God Is Reconciliation?

This post by Stacy Parker Aab, titled "Obama's Way," caught my attention and I would like to pass it on to those who might care to read it. It seems to be about reconciliation, about resolving our differences and first trying to understand what is vital to the other person and looking for ways of connecting with him or her.

I want to quote the whole thing here, and I will quote liberally (Forgive me, conservatives!). For example, this:

"Every time I've heard the Senator speak, or have read his work, there seems to be food for everyone. I read Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope back-to-back, and I noticed a certain pattern emerge. [Senator Obama] would take a tough subject, such as immigration (as he does in the "Race" chapter in The Audacity of Hope), and allow all parties to sit at the table. He states one case, tells us why they have a point, moves on to the next party, tells us why they have a point, until he gets all the way around the table, without taking a stand that excludes or shames anyone seated.

"He does not say everybody is right. He lays out their arguments, giving validation in the process, so that hotheads can cool down and common ground can be sought.

...

"For those of us who feel passionately about one principle over the other, this can be maddening. We want someone to say that we're right and they're wrong. This may be soothing for the ego. But is this good for progress?

"Sen. Obama's way is how conflict gets diffused and consensus gets built. Sen. Obama was clear to say this morning on This Week that he is not naïve to think that he's going to get the whole country to hold hands and sing 'Kumbaya'. Instead, these are the skills he needs if and when he brings warring DC parties to the table -- a table that, as things stand now, is practically burnt to the ground.

"I would argue that Sen. Obama's desire to damp-down difference is part of the peacemaker's way. The leader who brings adversaries to the negotiation table is smart to validate points of each argument, to give confidence that she or he knows opposing concerns are legitimate and worthy of discussion. The leader instills confidence that everyone will get a fair hearing. We've had six years of my-way-or-the-highway. A strong peacemaker stands the best chance of creating progress at home and salvaging what's left of our good name abroad."

Then I was caught unawares when I read these very personal disclosures:

"I am from Detroit, a northerner by birth. I remember my first trip to Mississippi two years ago. I spent a weekend in Jackson, often at tables of people I've never met before, people of deep religious faith and conservative belief. We told personal stories. The workings of God's love and spirit came into conversation often. I felt common ground, for I believe in a loving God and a sweetly responsive universe. When we talked like that, the best of our hearts was in communion. But the minute someone asked us to define our politics -- "yes, I'm a Democrat...yes, I'm a Catholic" -- then poof, there it went. I became "this" and they became "that" and suddenly our differences loomed larger than our commonalities and inside I could feel us retreating to our corners. (my italics)

"I've experienced this in my churchgoing as well. I think of myself as deeply spiritual, but I am not committed to any organized religion. I was raised Catholic, and I sometimes go to Mass. But if given the choice, I'd often prefer to spend Sunday in a loving Baptist or Pentecostal service, because among those worshipers I feel the Holy Spirit in a vibrant, passionate way that I don't often do at Mass. Now, if the pastor decided to use the sermon to go political, chances are I would grow anxious or angry. And I know if I sat down and talked belief structures with the worshipers, and we started talking about "I believe this but I don't believe that," -- well, the "don't believe that" is going to get us in trouble. But for that hour+ we were focused on love, on cooperation, on opening our hearts to something greater than ourselves, we were all connected. (my italics) We were all capable of working in concert. It is in that space -- the space a great leader can summon -- that we can make great changes in our own life and in the lives of others."

Two years ago, when Ken and I co-founded a group to discuss God's Politics by Jim Wallis of Sojourners, I had that "space" -- common ground, higher ground -- in mind. Although we ended up with a group of folks with common views who were a lot of fun, I was disappointed that we were not truly diverse, that the other end of the spectrum was not represented. (I give us credit for "going out into the highways and hedges and compelling them to come in," but they were not willing. They were afraid, I think.)

I am still disappointed. The forces of division are still reigning. Some might say that Satan is reigning. Have I allowed my opponents to drive me away, or have they retreated to their corners too? I know it's both. Bitterness and acrimony (I used that word a long time ago on this blog) prevail. May God dispel it. (If God is not "the booger man," as some of my ancestors seemed by their actions to believe.)

I've never remotely been able to practice what the dearest and best of the preachers (Bill Laws, David Smook et al.) have preached, but I know that the ideal still hangs there. Nancy Pelosi, our first "Madam Speaker," quoted the Sunday school song, "Let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me." Francis of Assisi's prayer:

"Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred -- let me sow love,
Where there is injury -- pardon,
Where there is doubt -- faith,
Where there is despair -- hope,
Where there is darkness -- light,
Where there is sadness -- joy.

"Divine Master,
grant that i may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." -- Mt.5:9

Amen.