More on David Kuo's Book, "Tempting Faith"

People who are looking for the confessions of an outright defector from the religious right in this book will be disappointed. I would deem it less valuable in exposing the Bush administration if Mr. Kuo had renounced his beliefs entirely and went into a Kitty Kelly type of smear from a newly adopted "liberal" viewpoint. But this guy worked for Bill Bennett and John Ashcroft and thought Chuck Colson was the cat's meow at one time. All three of those folks have an emetic effect on this observer, but that is beside the point -- which is, I have inferred thus far, that you cannot serve God and Caesar any more than you can serve God and Mammon. He quotes from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters, in which "Screwtape" tells his subordinate tempter (whose goal is, of course, to lure the Christian into hell) the following (the quotation comes directly from Kuo's book):

"Let him begin by treating patriotism ... as part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. [My italics] Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely a part of the 'cause,' in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce ... [O]nce he's made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."

Seems that Jesus put this point more succinctly with the words: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?"

More to come. I haven't read all of the book. It's quite thought-provoking. And enlightening.

More on the Peace Corps

We did a lot of partying when we were training for the Peace Corps and after we arrived in Nigeria. This was before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and during the continuing hateful resistance of whites to integration, particularly in the South, but also in states like Indiana -- especially Indiana. Martin Luther King Jr. was leading the movement, and his approach was modeled on the non-violent resistance of Ghandi. When demonstrators sat in at lunch counters and so forth, they would often sing. I regret that I was not one of the Freedom Riders of the early 1960s. One of the songs they sang was "We Shall Overcome." We sang it in the Peace Corps, though. I am very fond of that song and believe fervently in what it stands for. We still need that song and our non-violent resistance that the song symbolizes, resistance to the hatred and bigotry which is dying but still resides in the hearts of cowards who hide their identity. "Black and white together, black and white together / For deep in my heart / I do believe / that we shall overcome some day..."

See, Sah! I Tink You Are One of de Peace Corpse

A pleasant interlude this evening: I had a date with a Hanover coed! Her name is Casey, and she is writing a paper on the Peace Corps for her senior sociology class. She is from a small northern Indiana town, where her father is an elected public official. Casey has brown hair and green eyes, and yes, for the record, she is quite cute. She was attentive to her personal appearance but not fixy -- which I guess is my way of saying that her shoulder-length hair was squeaky-clean and combed but not fussed with, she wore casual but not slouchy clothes, and if she used makeup it was not detectable. She rode off on a bicycle after our interview. I didn't ask her if she has a Greek affiliation. I hope she doesn't. (Natalie will appreciate my sentiment on that.)

I met Casey at the library and she asked me lots of questions about my experience as a PCV in Nigeria and took down more than a page of densely written notes. One of her motives is to find out if she might like to volunteer herself. She majors in sociology and minors in Spanish, and she obviously has poise and sociability, so she might be a very good candidate indeed for one of the Central or South America countries.

She had met Emeka K. and Julie B., two other returned PCVs in our area. Emeka (pronounced Eh-MEK-ah: he was given an Ibo name by his RPCV parents, whose tour of duty in Nigeria overlapped mine a little) went to Guinea, and Julie served in Panama. Casey also interviewed a Hanover professor, Daryl K., who was a member in, I believe, a sub-Saharan African country. She asked me for names of other RPCVs in the area and I promised her I would try to get them to her. She is going to have more than enough material for her paper.

I told her that I am very proud and grateful to have been one of the earliest Peace Corps Volunteers. And so I am. I wear a cap from UCLA, the place where I had my training in 1962. I taught physics and math at a girls' secondary school in what was then the Western Region of Nigeria, and which is still the land of the great Yoruba people. When I went out of the school "compound," I would hear calls of "Oyibo!" (European) and bold young men who would walk up to me and say, "See, Sah! I tink you are one of the Peace Corpse." Then we would have a conversation about world politics, in which they were disappointed when they found out I was no expert. (I was never asked if I was a CIA agent, although some of my colleagues got that question from time to time.)

Let's just say that events that occurred there led to my life vocation. Casey asked me if I was glad I joined the Peace Corps and if I thought that the Peace Corps was a good thing. My answers to both were an unqualified "Yes."

Bumper sticker to be read by Bush and the Bushies

BISPARTISAN THIS!

THIS JUST IN!

Baron Hill recaptured his seat in Indiana's 9th District! John Yarmuth defeated Ann Northrup! The Democrats have taken back the House of Representatives! After six years of unopposed power leading us into the horrible mess we are in, the executive branch is for the first time at the least going to have some checks on it. Thank God for that. Amen.

Die-Hard Yellow Dog, Yours Truly

This morning I went to the home of my good friend John Collins, who is running for the Madison school board, to get another yard sign. Then I went to Democratic headquarters and got a slew more of signs for my candidates. Then I went to the library and got two books, Hostile Takeover: How Big Money and Corruption Conquered Our Government--and How We Can Take It Back, by David Sirota, and Conservatives Without Conscience, by John Dean. Then I went home and put my signs out in the yard. There are more than there were before. Brian, here to get his firefighter's uniform pants that his mother had hemmed, asked me how it was going as he left. I said, "I'm just exercising my right as a United States citizen to campaign for the people I believe should be in office." I didn't have to defend my action to Brian, but I was feeling paranoid at the moment. That saying about defending to the death my right to say what my opponents don't want to hear seems kind of remote in the current political climate. I think we're going to win a few this time. I feel it.

Southpaw Stew

An old whiskered sidekick in a B-oater of yesteryear (think Gabby, Hayes or Johnson, or Fuzzy St. John -- he was the sidekick of Lash LaRue) was cooking a pot of something in one of the comic relief scenes where Roy or Bart or Lash wasn't chasing or shooting or fistfighting. Roy-Lash asked him what he was cooking. He said, "Southpaw stew." (Why do you call it that?) "Cause it's made of whatever's left." (Yuk yuk yuk!)

Which is my way of segueing into a potpourri, olio, olla podrida, slumgullion of this and that about everything and nothing. Mostly nothing. This week we visited friends at their home in Bay Village, Ohio, which is on Lake Erie. They are dear people and three of the four of us go back to MHS Class of '56 so we had plenty to reminisce about. They lost an adult daughter to cancer earlier this year and we talked about it and it was good and I hoped it helped them -- it helped us. We took a walk in a beautiful little park beside the lake and other than freezing our asses loved it. We went to Kohl's, which had a sale of 50% off on some items and 15% more off for seniors and we didn't buy a thing. (We can get the same thing at a much lesser "full" price elsewhere with no "discounts," way I see it.) We went to an Italian restaurant and had delicious chicken entrees. We dipped real bread in herbed olive oil, etc. The music was Sinatra, Dean Martin, etc. I expected Al Pacino to pop in. The atmosphere and service were great. It was an honest-to-god restaurant, for a change. We wandered through Ohio and Indiana on the way home.

I'd started to write a couple of other things for the blog and decided not to finish or post them. I wanted to comment on The Grapes of Wrath, which we finished reading and followed up by watching the 1941 movie with Henry Fonda, and I was writing a treatise on economics,which I know nothing about. It is a beautiful, elegiac book and I think its views of socioeconomics are still essentially true today. I also started to discuss an article by Paul Krugman in which he urged Democrats "not to make nice" with the opposition, as the Dixie Chicks sang in their first album after they'd been accused of treason for simply saying they are ashamed of the man who happens to be the president and then being subjected to a Krystallnacht of burning their CDs (incited by rightwing media owners, for the most part).

When we got back from Ohio we discovered that our candidates' yard signs were gone. I did a little Sipowicz work this morning and have some of the Franks Drive Irregulars on my short list of suspects. Nobody will 'fess up even though I don't want to get any kids in trouble. Yet I don't approve of that kind of vandalism. Bottom line: I'd rather it would be the kids with no political agenda than a Republican dirty trick.

Rosie's son, Brian, who is a volunteer firefighter, had a close friend die in a fire this past week. Firefighters from all around are going to attend the young man's funeral and Brian will be among them on Sunday. He obtained a pair of black firefighter's uniform trousers for the occasion and Rosie hemmed them for him.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have campaigns in which the candidates seriously debated the issues and didn't have multimillion-dollar TV ads that distort the truth and smear their opponents -- because the big bucks were truly forbidden to pay for them?

Campaign finance reform, anyone?

Film Music Revisited

This evening Turner Classic Movies is showing The Heiress, directed by Willie Wyler, starring Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift, with the musical score by Aaron Copland. I wish I had learned enough about music -- wish I hadn't run away from Laura Bach (her real name) and Becky King, piano teachers, when I was a spoiled little brat (as opposed to the big spoiled brat I am now) -- so I knew and could talk intelligently about keys and scales and arpeggios and diminished chords and stuff. And "bitonality" (the characteristic of the music of Bernard Herrmann, I read, as used in, among other movies, North by Northwest). I sort of remembered that Copland was the composer for The Heiress but I knew he was after two minutes of listening. (I've never seen this 1949 film and happen to be taping the rest of it at this moment so I can watch The Colbert Report). But I don't know how to describe intelligently what I am hearing to pedants, who will be listening to my show (it's comin', folks, it's comin', soon's I can figure out all this iPod stuff). But I listened to an Adventures in Good Music show in which Karl Haas featured film music, and I was not a bit intimidated at the prospect of having a show along the lines of this one episode by the master of the genre of music shows. And who knew enough about music that he could play piano. No, what I will have to bring to such a show is my enthusiasm and love and listening ear, however untrained, and my willingness to learn and share what I've learned with others and perhaps open up a new world to them.

(1) Kuo on Xns and GOP; (2) Sweeney on Clean Campaigns

(1) Except from Richard Wolffe's Newsweek interview with former Bush White House aide David Kuo, who has written a book critiquing the Bush administration's emphasis on faith-based initiatives. The book is called Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.

Wolffe: Are Christian leaders being naïve in their dealings with the White House or do they understand the nature of the exchange?

Kuo: It's a little bit of both. In some ways White House power is like [J.R.R.] Tolkien's ring of power. When you put it on, it feels good and it's dazzling. But after a while it begins to consume you in ways you don't realize. That's the nature of White House power. I have no doubt that Christian political leaders have gotten involved for all the right reasons. I just think over time it becomes harder and harder to stand up against that ring of power and the White House, to say no and walk away.

The Christian political leaders have been seduced. If you look at their comments that they know what they're doing, I'm not quite sure how to read that--is it wonderful or a little troubling? That's one of the reasons I call for this fast from politics. I'm not saying that Christians shouldn't vote, which is going around on Christian talk radio. But for a period--I personally think it should take two years from after this election to the presidential election--evangelical Christians should take a fast from giving their money to political causes and from giving much of their time as well. Take that money that is currently fueling all those wonderful hate-filled ads, the hundreds of millions being spent, and spend that money on the poor and inner-city kids. Instead of spending time lobbying, spend your time with your neighbor, saying love your neighbor as yourself.

(2) "Running with Blinders" by Kevin Sweeney about abstinence from negative campaigning is worth a look:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/16/opinion/16sweeney

More Politickin'

Posting an email from fellow Bridgebuilders:

Dear Friends,

Somehow I sense we made a difference yesterday at the library. A pretty good showing of folk for the documentary. Thanks, J.T., for arranging the film and for the newspaper notice. While Ken and I both came away with a sense that there was definitely hyperbole involved in the way the points were presented, it gave me a new appreciation of how the desire for profit can cloud over completely why and how you do your work. I've been thinking about encouraging everyone to withhold $5 from their federal income taxes for 2006 in protest.

Have you heard of the ONE campaign? We heard about it through church today. At www.ONE.org you can learn about how you as ONE person can help support the Millenium Goals of 9/2000. (Remember, we looked at these while reading Wallis' God's Politics.) A related movement is STAND UP. I only know of the Episcopal Church's connection with this campaign but it's a worldwide effort. The cool thing is you can buy white ONE bracelets to show your support. I got one today understand they are available at the ONE website.

SEE YOU ALL ON NOV. 14. and GOOD LUCK TO JOHN!

Best, Dianne & Ken

And before November 14th, get out the vote on November 7th. Let's take the nation back!

Politickin' etc.

Today at the Madison library our discussion group showed the film, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. After it, Baron Hill, the Democratic candidate for Congress for the Indiana Ninth District, joined us and we had a nice little love-in. (Spence Schnaitter, the Speaker of the Indiana General Assembly in the seventies, was there and livened the discussion. Spence and I go way back. He was the center for the 1950 Madison state champs in basketball and Main Street neighbors, the year I was in sixth grade and had a season ticket in a great seat. He went to Yale Law School, was in state politics, and has been a Madison lawyer for decades.)

Baron is a "Blue Dog Democrat," whose forte is fiscal responsibility, that concern having devolved to Democrats, the old balanced-budget folks on the other side of the aisle having abandoned their frugality for the "deficits don't matter", trillions-for-war and tax-cuts-for-the-rich GOP. Baron's platform makes a lot of sense following upon our viewing of the film that exposed the billion dollars in no-bid contracts to KBR/Halliburton and the partisan defeats of amendments to oversee private contractors in Iraq.

I said it was a love-in. Everybody present, pretty much, felt warmly toward Baron and plans on voting for him in November. Nevertheless, no one was at the door screening people to ensure they were all loyal, as is the case with you-know-who's public appearances.

It was a gorgeous October Saturday and besides our modest little gathering the town had an event called "Soup, Stew, Chili and Brew." Rosie picked up sandwiches from the Milton Elementary School Fish Fry for us, which we ate hungrily after the meeting.

Installed Norton antivirus software on both computers. It's serving them well.

We're watching the pilots of 21 Jump Street. I didn't know Johnny Depp was in that! Also this evening watched In the Heat of the Night for the fifteenth (thirtieth?) time. I can see it about every six months and enjoy it. I remember the first time I saw it, in southern California in 1967. When Larry Gates slaps Sidney Poitier and "Mister Tibbs" slaps him right back, the kids in the theater cheered.

Another exciting Saturday night in Madison, Indiana. Where all the kids are above average ... zzzzz

How Firm a Foundation

Watching Countdown. It just gets better and better (worse and worse). A tell-all book, Tempting Faith, is coming out exposing the Bushies’ covert contempt for the RELIGIOUS RIGHT, referring to them as “nuts” and “goofy,” fawning over them in public, laughing at them behind their back, and giving them nothing -- zilch, zip, squat, nada -- for their fanatical loyalty. Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman are bashed. (Thank You, Lord!) The author professes to be a Christian himself. As we say, I’m not making this up.

The show is now over and I’ve had enough of politics and switched to KET, hoping to get Mystery! starring Helen Mirren as "Inspector Jane Tennyson," or that guy who looks every bit the part of a hard-boiled Yank cop until he starts spouting his musical Cockney, as "Inspector Lewis," who has moved into the job of inspector Morse and whose gravitas has increased for his new job (as the Senator from Pendergast did when the moon and stars fell on him in 1945).

I got instead the show, Jubilee, a KET production, which tonight features "The Lonesome Pine," a bluegrass group, singing “Look What the Lord Has Done.” It has blown away the stink of politics for the moment, leaving a windswept, rain-washed, star-filled landscape of music and holiness, which I think are related in some way we have yet to learn to appreciate. Good music is eloquent in a way that no preachers can be. Hymns are the strength of Protestant Christianity. Just hearing Virgil Thomson’s use of the old hymns in his symphonic works evokes a reverence in me that no sermon or Bible study has ever been able to do.

Hot damn! And now they're playing a breakdown, the kind that John and Natalie danced to when they were tots. Praise God!

Oh, By the Way, Clinton Got Us In This Mess. Everybody Knows That.

On Joe Scarborough's 10/4/06 show, Al Franken and David Bossie. (Whoever the latter is. A conservative Republican spokesman. That about says it all. Speaking for the Right, not to be confused with speaking for the right).

Al: “Republicans are no longer conservative. They’re radical. Democrats are the true conservatives."

Bossie: (Disagrees.)

Al: We left you with a budget surplus --

Bossie: You left us with a war on terror.

(Joe cuts them off. Had to cut to commercial.)

“YOU LEFT US WITH A WAR ON TERROR.” That is an outrageous lie!

We would say on one of these talk shows for entertainment (not for saving the republic), in our mindless stringing together of cliches, “This is a page right out of the Hitler playbook.” * What I mean by that is that the Nazi technique is to repeat the biggest lie you can, over and over, no matter how many times others debunk it with facts and logic, just keep repeating it, and it will prevail.

* [There really was a playbook. It was titled Mein Kampf. Would to God the Germans had read it before they let the monster who wrote it come to power.]

The “war on terror,” of course, is a "comma" named by the Nitwit-in-Chief and concocted by the neocons and chicken hawks -- vicious Cheney; condescending Condi; squinty, squirty, mouthy, homicidal Rummy; you know the cabal.

They are parroted by Bush, who is their Dupe-become-Dictator. Oh, a dupe, all right, but entirely and utterly responsible for all the slaughter and waste and grand larceny of these hoodlums. These people are making me insane with rage, to be explicit, in case I've been too subtle. I wish them in the prisons they have made for their enemies.

But no -- they are mostly rich white Republican males who will never see the inside of a jail or prison cell, not for one minute, not even one of them. The next war criminal in the White House -- who will be another white Republican male -- will pardon them all -- if indeed they are ever even remotely considered to be guilty of anything, anything at all.

It’s more likely that he’ll give them all Medals of Freedom.

Chicken hawks, every last one of them, sissies who let others do their fighting for them. And LIARS. All of them LIARS. You got that? LIARS.

And their so-called "War on Terror" was left to them by the Clinton administration!

Fox News planted this monstrous lie with Chris Wallace in his interview with Bill Clinton. And they have played the interview over and over. And spun it to their advantage, saying that Clinton was “out of control with rage” because he called their game and had the temerity to comment aloud on Chris’s smirk. (You would like to smack it off his face, wouldn't you?)

Of course, not a minute was devoted to investigating the content of Clinton's words, which were the truth. He wasn't talking about Monica Lewinski. He was talking about being a responsible, honest, humble Commander-in-Chief.

And already they’ve got it down to a sound bite, a bumper sticker. This disaster we are in (1,252 days now since the declaration of Mission Accomplished) is because of Bill Clinton!

Right. And the pedophile who actually headed a congressional committee to protect children, and the connivance of the so-called leadership, is the fault of the Democrats.

God help us. We are a sorry lot.

They Went Thataway! C'm'on, Boys! We'll Head 'em Off at the Pass!

The breaking-news boys and girls are screaming, "Could Foley's follies hurt the GOP?"

Nah. Nothing will hurt the GOP.

Certainly not a sex scandal generated by a pipsqueak who happens to be a Republican as low on the food chain as Mark Foley. Why would the peccadilloes of a pipsqueak hurt the GOP when the felonies and war crimes of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld -- pipsqueaks too but in places of power where giants once were -- e.g., Harry Truman, FDR, General George Marshall -- don't even raise an eyebrow?

Yep, the breaking news posse has jumped on Old Paint and galloped off to Foley. What morons.

Hell, it pleases Rove that they're focusing on Foley rather than the real scoundrels.

Good Movie

Por Sie No Te Vuelvo a Ver (If I Never See You Again). Five geezers run away from a nursing home and play in a band for a cantina dancer. Poignant. Funny. Mexican -- they really make a great movie.

Othello

We watched Othello, Moor of Venice today. Lawrence Fishburn plays Othello and Kenneth Branagh plays Iago, the villain. Then we read the preface to Othello from the Complete Works in one volume from a dusty old book left at 510 Jefferson Street by Jill Woodburn. The film was mentioned by Jon Smith, the Hanover College professor of Shakespeare.

We loved it. Rozz was struck by the dramatic qualities of Larry Fishburn in an action-adventure movie we saw recently and so I decided to get the movie.

The performances of Fishburn and Branagh knocked my socks off. I think Fishburn surely must be one of the most powerful and underrated actors in movies today.

I've been aware of Branagh's talent for a good while. (He, of course, proved he was a fool by letting his bride Emma Thompson go, but you can't win 'em all and what do I know?) Now I want to see Branagh's Hamlet, which Jon also uses in his HC course.

I recently revisited an American classic of the fifties, The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever, by reading it aloud to Rosie. It has humor, an upbeat look at life, and beautiful prose-poetry about seaside New England. We both liked it and tonight we started The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Rosie fell asleep on the first chapter, which describes the Dust Bowl in almost King James language, with the cadences of the Creation stories in Genesis. My hypnotic voice and her weariness did her in.

Today got a phone call from my M.D. (medical daughter). She's like the Wyoming Gov -- Work! Work! Work! Also got a call from Warnie. He and I, we house-hubbies, will make one of our field trips to a greasy spoon about next week, I hope.

Fixed the toilet yesterday. Couldn't thread a nut on a bolt and found out it was threaded in reverse (counterclockwise to tighten). Took a trip back to Lowe's to find it out in a chance meeting with a competent and very amiable plumber there in the store. Came back home and promptly assembled the mechanism and soon we were flush in proper plumbing. Look what I did, Daddy!

Donated the twelve CDs of Mozart symphonies to the library. Those were the ones Shane sold me many years ago. Made copies for myself, so it's not the kind of giving that hurts. But I do love that library and am willing to make sacrifices for it.

Love to all and to all a good night.

Olio

“I have seen the very bottom of life,” she said. “I was so afraid I wouldn’t be funny anymore. I just knew that I would lose my zaniness and my sense of humor. But I didn’t. Recovery turned out to be a wonderful thing.”

Ann Richards was a recovering alcoholic from 1980 on.

She died Wednesday, September 13, at the age of 73, of esophageal cancer.

“Poor George, he can’t help it,” Ms. Richards said at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, speaking about the current president’s father. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

Them was the days.

"We support Sojourners and have read Jim Wallis (and not James Dobson) for many years. In terms of a national movement of spiritual progressives, I am most optimistic about TIkkun, the grassroots interfaith group headed by Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God. My own experience from working with motivational interviewing is that direct argumentation with the likes of Dobson only tends to reinforce and publicize their extremism. What is badly needed, and sorely lacking in the Democratic party at present, is an alternative vision of how we should be together. Perhaps God will find a way to use us both in that regard."

-- Private communciation with a distinguished fellow psychologist

"Courage"

"Courage," Dan Rather used to say.

Sometimes it takes courage just to write a post for a blog. I have a small readership but a vital one. "I love you guys," as Coach Norman Dale says to the Hickory Huskers just before the Indiana high school basketball final game in Hoosiers.

I'm grateful for The Daily Show, "Tonight's Word" on The Colbert Report, and the "Worst Person in the World" on Keith Olbermann's Countdown. It takes a village of comedians and people with a wry outlook on this bunch in charge.

My wife justifiably told me to quit ranting last night and I went for a walk in downtown Madison to give her a break. I recalled the time when the University of Utah was favored to win the NCAA and was upset by UK. (Ugh! Sheesh, with all the odium residing in Washington and Crawford these days I'd forgotten all about the fanatics of Lexington and everything within a 100-mile radius, including of course and more's the pity Madison, Indiana.)

I took a long, sad, lonely walk that night. The occasion of "9/11" and the way it has been bungled and the likelihood that the bums in charge then will continue to be in charge for God knows how long but probably until the River Styx is a solid ribbon of ice.

Lord deliver us. Take care. Courage.

Flix

Enjoyed Hardball, in which Keanu Reeves plays a ne'er-do-well down-on-his-luck gambler who coaches a team of baseball kids from the Cabrini Green project. For all you Siskel and Ebert types out there, it's a formula movie with no surprises in particular, and of course it's sentimental. We loved it. Another movie we enjoyed was Elling, a Norwegian movie about two ex-mental patients who rehabilitate themselves in Oslo. We loved it.

Is Anybody Out There?

Hello, readers of my blog. Are you there? Just checkin'.

HP* Rules

Went to a meeting (not at liberty to disclose what kind, of course, or for that matter, where -- don't worry, Alberto, if you're reading this, it's not a terrorist cell) this evening, the first I'd attended since receipt of my 25-year token. It was held at an inpatient treatment facility and there were many people, all younger than I, except for the manager of one of the halfway houses who has forty years. He passed out tokens after the lead (that's pronounced like the present tense of the verb "to lead", not the noun for the metallic element that has the symbol Pb -- I suppose we should spell it "leed," in California in 1967 they called it a "pitch") and there was one person who took a 24-hour token and two who took 30-day tokens. I went to the meeting to meet my young cousin, who is doing very well in the fellowship. I went to bolster his morale and of course mine. I think the objective was achieved. I keep encountering HP through one happenstance or another -- the most recent was the viewing of The Scarlet and the Black, about Monsignor Hugh O'Flaherty of the Vatican during World War II. He smuggled people, including Jews and escaped prisoners, out of Rome when it was occupied by the Nazis; the commanding Colonel tried to thwart him and failed. The end titles stated that Monsignor was the only one to visit the colonel after the fall of Rome, while he was in life imprisonment for war crimes. Visiting people in prison keeps coming up in my conscience because of Jesus' words in Matthew 25: "I was in prison and you visited me..." My cousin is on probation, so going to the meeting with him was the same sort of thing, I hope. I'm going to pursue this thing, with HP's help.

*Higher Power

The Ebert of Forlorn River

I’ve just watched Match Point, written and directed by Woody Allen. I've been less than lukewarm about Woody Allen in my time and I suspect it’s because I’m stupid. I've missed the hilarity in most of his humor and I think he is a snob. It’s Dostoyevsky and Strindberg and La Traviata and of course Freud (whose technique of psychotherapy has been all but discredited and whose theories of "mind" have been hotly disputed by the majority of practitioners for decades except, of course, in Manhattan) and many esoteric allusions we unwashed don’t get.

As for this movie, (here I go again -- I did cross my fingers when I promised in the last post) I’m put off by the cigarette-smoking of Scarlet Johansson (I assume that the blonde who is obviously supposed to be the hot one is she), which is occurring in
scenes with the frequency it did with those containing Humphrey Bogart.*

*(One of my favorite actors, and Americans, ever, died of throat cancer in 1957, two years after the first Surgeon General's report on cigarette smoking and health. Bogie winced a lot on camera from another ailment but he never coughed because of the one ailment that claimed him, to my knowledge. He should have. As for the SG's report, the cig companies claimed for many years afterwards that a "causal relationship between smoking and cancer" (translate: cigarette smoking causes cancer) had never been proved, and we weren't even talking about emphysema then, but scientists have long since trounced the cig companies and put the lie to them.)

As for Scarlet Johansson, you only have to be a male, even an old decrepit one like me, to grant she is good-looking, sexy, and all that jazz. As for her smoking in all those scenes, I recall what it is to kiss and caress a girl whose hair and clothing smell of tobacco smoke, who tastes like an ashtray, who just plain stinks. Sorry, the sexiness goes up in smoke. I too smoked at the time I smooched it up with smoking chicks so I didn't mind as much. (Smoking kills your sense of smell generally before it kills you.)

I had a particularly hard time with the first scene in which she, "Nola," meets "Chris." He is obviously taken with her. But as they stand close she exhales smoke from her nostrils like an old veteran police detective of yesteryear. Is he turned on by that? (Perhaps Woody is.) As for acting, the fewer props the better.

All right. Bloody hell! Bugguh! This bloke is daft on the topic of smoking, eh what? (That little display of Brittania is by way of segueing back to the movie, which is set in London.)

Woody does not act in the movie and, for once, does an admirable job of not insinuating himself into it. (Did I say that in my opinon he has a big ego? But he's of course no worse than John Wayne. Being a narcissist goes with being the hero of your own movies, and if you are talented enough to make movies, I suppose you've a perfect right to make yourself a demigod.)

Allen has written a fine screenplay. It has what the writer and teacher of fiction, John Gardner, called "profluence," which means it's presented in such a way that you want to know what happens next. It's a "page-turner."

I read the review by Roger Ebert and he said that "everybody in it is rotten," and I think that's a little harsh, but I do agree that there aren't too many likable characters in it. What keeps your interest is your hope that the ones who indeed deserve retribution do get their just deserts. Dostoyevsky is invoked and Crime and Punishment definitely comes to mind, if you've read it. I read it decades ago and I still remember the wretch,
"Raskolnikov," and my sympathizing with him and loathing him at once. People are betrayed and crimes are committed in Match Point, and there are twists and turns such that you stick with it to see what finally happens.

One thing that occurred to me after seeing the movie was that there was little humor or attempt at it, and I for one was relieved, because I haven't cared for most of Allen's humor, which I've found to be extremely low-grade ore with few nuggets that evoke even a smile, much less laughter. Psychoanalysis and existentialism are good subjects for irony and spoofing hypocrisy, but Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have far surpassed Woody in irony and spoofing hypocrisy, and they provide belly laughs four nights a week.

Anyhow, I liked the movie and found it to be very entertaining. I still prefer Columbo and Sipowicz for crime drama, and for that matter even Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes -- philistine that I am -- but, Woody, ya done good.

It's worth a looksee, folks.

My LAST Word on Smoking (crossed fingers)

My friend's "serious response to a fun post..." (Thanks, mate, for calling the post "fun." I'm truly complimented. I'm not sure about my ability to satirize.)

"In general I've always believed that a person should have the freedom to drink, smoke or use other substances so long as you're not hurting someone else. For example, go out and get drunk, just don't get in a car or get rowdy and punch someone out.

"Unfortunately, many of these practices cannot be kept to the body that indulges.

"I think of my wife who, when she gets in the vicinity of cigarette smoke, gets awful migraines. At that point you might as well have punched my poor girl in the face and she'd have been in equal pain.

"So where does a smoker's freedom end and my wife's begin? How do you balance a smoker's right to smoke versus the health of those around?

"I think of this today because I made the mistake of telling the clerk at the Sunoco how much nicer it was to be in a smoke-free gas station and she growled 'have a nice day' at me. I should have guessed. My joy at her lack of freedom?"

My response:

Mate, you are just awash in schadenfreude! -- gloating over the suffering of nonsmokers in Madison right there in Fast Max's? How could you be so cruel?

Seriously: I get my gas at Wal-Mart (not because they pay fair wages but because it's nearest to home) and I've noticed that, since the enactment of the ordinance, the small space inside the building continues to reek with tobacco smoke.

I smell civil disobedience. (And insubordination toward the employer, if anyone cares about that. I'd like to see a strike myself.)

Perhaps I should say (with a straight face) to the Wal-Mart clerk the same thing that you said at the Sunoco. I suspect that she would accept the remark without knowing it is tongue-in-cheek, because, as a smoker, she doesn't know how loudly stinky cigarette smoke is. It amazes me how unaware smokers are of the stink it creates.

This lucky (in her value system, not mine) soul, however, has not suffered the fate of the other smoking employees: they must go outside now. Yet the employer -- who is party to a corporation that is notorious for its low wages and strategems for employing people "part-time" (35 hours a week and never two consecutive days off) in order to bilk them out of health insurance -- has provided them with two picnic tables and a shelter overhead.

I noticed a friend huddled in that small space with the other miserables, and I happen to know that this lovely woman has recently been stricken with breast cancer. She is a die-hard smoker -- who is neither stupid nor militantly and stridently against a common-sense law (as our letter-writing friends seem to be).

This noble lady happens to be a life-long practitioner of a merciful health-giving profession and knows the dangers of smoking. She is a die-hard because she is addicted. And in this absurd world, we severely punish anyone who is addicted to pot, cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, etc. Not only do we punish the "undesirables" of our society because of addictions to these substances, but we even take the licenses away of medical doctors if they recklessly prescribe suspect substances such as Xanax and Vicodin.

Yet we do this while we are hard-put to keep poison out of the air we breathe -- our infants breathe -- because it is expelled into that air by a minority (well, maybe not here) of curiously excepted and emboldened addicts.

I'm sure my family members, who are probably sick and tired of seeing still another blog-post on the evils of smoking, will glance at this without comment. Thank God, none of them now smoke tobacco, so far as I know. They'd better not, since they have so many smokers in their ancestry who suffered and died of emphysema or lung cancer or both.

But I am so passionate about this because, for one thing, I, who have succeeded at so few things in this world, managed to succeed at escaping from the addiction of smoking. And believe me, I was addicted. I couldn't go twenty waking minutes between cigarettes. I of all people wouldn't have been able to live with smoking
restrictions. I started and stopped and started again, hell though it was even to start as well as to stop.

I am passionate about this because, as a once-upon-a-time counselor of addicts and a recovering addict myself, I invested a lot of energy in trying to help others quit smoking. Most of the quit-smoking work I did was pro bono publico, when I was getting paid very well for my other work. I am as greedy as the next person but I was truly committed to helping people quit smoking.

Yet here in backwater Forlorn River (cf. Lake Wobegon) -- I speak of Madi-Tucky -- Madison, Indiana -- the city and state that I came back to against my will and the city and region that I at last love and will die and be buried in-- these privileged addicts continue to have the temerity to scream their abused lungs out that their rights are being violated. Enough!

Chit-Chat

I have two new diversions: cooking and sudoku. I read in Wikipedia that sudoku as it is done in the USA today was introduced in Indianapolis in 1976. Ha! Well, we are now manufacturing Japanese cars in Indiana. I've learned to do the "easy" puzzles. The first one took me a couple of days, off and on, but then my learning curve kicked in and now I do them in about a half-hour. The easy ones. Like the bunny runs in skiing, I'll probably be satisfied to stay with the easy ones for quite some time.

My cooking is pretty rudimentary: I concoct a mean vegetable soup without a recipe, and I assiduously follow the recipes in the American Heart Association cookbooks, which are great for anybody. I'm learning this and that by watching the Food Channel. "Good Eats" with Alton Brown is enlightening and the guy is funny.

One other thing: ta-daaa! I graduated from the first phase of rehab on Friday. I'd say overall I kicked ass. I lost 21 pounds, 2.1% body fat (they say that's good because it takes a long time), and my strength and stamina as measured by a treadmill test has improved by 106%. Not bad for a couch tater.

Enough for now. His Rudeness requires attention. Cheerio, lads and lasses.

Oh. And I guess you aforenamed lads and lasses weren't too impressed with my idee fixe on smoking. I thought the doc might put on her copy editor's green eyeshade and blue-pencil the Courier cub's letter to me, but God knows she has enough to read. As for the rest of you, been there done that, I guess. But I digress. His Rudeness awaits. Later.

Saint Herbert

Yes, dear friends and gentle readers, Herb Parker is a hero and a patriot. Not only that, he is a saint. We ought to submit him for canonization to Pope Benedict right away. And we should elect him Mayor of Madison. And boss of the City Council. We should also bestow upon him the honorifics of Sagamore of the Wabash and Kentucky Colonel.

Not only is Herb Parker a saint, he is a martyr. He has been sacrificed on the altar of greed – the greed of nonsmokers for every bit of unpolluted air they can possibly suck down in their lungs. Why do they want clean air so bad?

There is just no limit to what these inconsiderate nonsmokers will do! Why don’t they appreciate the truth? Which is, that the air – God’s plentiful air - belongs to everyone, and that those who choose to poison their fair share with carcinogens have the perfect right to do so. (And that God will not change his laws of physics: gases will still expand to fill the spaces in which they are enclosed and thus nonsmokers too will just have to breathe the smoke of smokers. Tough, you sissies. Get over it.)

Where will the nonsmokers’ greed for clean air end? Next, people will not be able to smoke in their cars. (Little children in them or not.) There will be roadblocks set up everywhere. Police will search for and seize tobacco. They will get smokers out of their cars and rough them up, and molest the women, and then throw the people in jail, where they will be held without bail until they suffer a terrible jones from nicotine withdrawal. Without patches! The corrupt Mayor and City Council will authorize it and enforce it, you just wait and see.

Next, smoking will not be allowed in our very homes. Mark my word, jackbooted city government thugs will crash our doors down and throw firebombs inside and we and our beloved cigarettes and our poor old emphysematous lungs will go up in smoke. (We will not get the joy of living out our lives gasping for breath and having everyone feel sorry for us.)

You think the people at Waco had it bad, wait till you see what Huntington and those traitors who voted for this unconstitutional, Communistic, terrorist no-smoking ordinance have up their sleeves next.

The next thing they will do, they will interfere with freedom of the press. That’s right, the guarantee of the First Amendment. They will force the Courier to print all this goody-two-shoes stuff put out by the American Cancer Society and the American Lung Association and the United States Surgeon General and even the turncoat Philip Morris that secondhand smoke is harmful and the only way to protect nonsmokers in enclosed spaces is to make those spaces smoke-free. Period.

In other words, they will force the Courier to become a tool of the pinko city government. (Instead of the tobacco farmers.)

So, smokers of Madison, unite. You have nothing to lose but your butts.

More Blowing Smoke, and More Objection to It

Here's a letter to the Courier:

Upset with smoking ban

Thursday, August 03, 2006


To the editor:

I commend Herb Parker on standing up for his customers. As a smoker, I will not patronize any non-smoking restaurants. I will not vote for any of the current council members that voted to make smokers law breakers in their own hometown.

This town was founded on their tobacco crops, and the taxes that have been levied on the smokers of Jefferson County are sure supporting a lot of roadwork for this county.Tobacco money from Milton, Carrollton, etc, surely augments the local groceries and stores.

How sad is it that Madison has chosen to abide by a tobacco study that even the World Health Organization says was severely flawed? Their basis for second-hand smoke is not correct and they can't show any evidence that smoking bans make any difference in the communities that have enacted them.

Yet smokers are persecuted and made to feel like second-class citizens or criminals. They are subjected to the stress of trying to work all day without being allowed a release through smoking in a job where smoking has been allowed since the beginning. The workers didn't vote for this ban, but they are the ones suffering.

Have you ever tried to keep a patch on in 100 degree weather? Simple answer is...you can't as the guys in our factories are learning.

I urge all smokers (or non-smokers who agree with this view for freedom of choice) to write their local government and complain. Withhold your patronage of businesses that ban smokers like criminals. I'll go to Carrollton, Milton and other close towns that will welcome my smoker's business.

Withhold your vote for the people that voted this smoking ban in, that limits the freedom of everyone, businesses and individuals alike. Today it's smoking, what will it be next time?

Sandi Pennington

Madison

(In speculating about the last question: masturbation? Doh! It is against the law --when done in public. Just like smoking, now. At last. (You can still pleasure yourself and poison yourself in private And the WHO -- part of the UN? -- dissing a study? Oh never mind. The assertion that there is no evidence that second-hand smoke is harmful is arrant poppycock.)

And another letter to the editor:

He's No Hometown Hero

Friday, August 04, 2006


To the editor:

I would like to respond to the article "Supporting Smokers" from the Wednesday, August 2 edition of The Madison Courier and my own personal experience at Frisch's Restaurant.

First I would like to state that I was disappointed in the bias of the article itself. While Mr. Parker was doing nothing but breaking the law, he was made out to be some sort of "hometown hero" who caters to smokers.

Also, I don't see how Mr. Parker expected his "employees to focus on their job and not breaking the law." He stated "I did this for them (employees)." It's more like you did this to them. I was a patron of Frisch's on Tuesday and was very disappointed to find smoking still in place. If it were not for the tight schedule of others in my party, I would have gone elsewhere for lunch. I approached the manager upon my departure. I was told that Mr. Parker was not there or I would have spoken to him directly.

I voiced my disappointment and concluded by stating I would not be back until it was a smoke-free environment.

Whether you agree with it or not, as of Tuesday Aug. 1, it is illegal to smoke indoors in a public building in Madison. The City Council voted on this months ago. I honestly think that this will help our community, not hinder.

Melissa K. Enstrom

Hanover

Thanks, Melissa. I needed that.

More on T'backer

I sent a copy of my recent post ("Die Hard in Burley T'backer Country") to the Madison Courier reporter who wrote the story about Frisch's civil disobedience. He replied to me and gave me permission to post his reply.

Our email exchange:

On Aug 3, 2006, at 1:20 PM, JT Evans wrote:

Mr. Estridge:

I put the following on my blog site. As you may deduce from this, my opinion of your coverage of the smoking ordinance is that you have been overly sympathetic with smokers' rights and neglectful of the rights of non-smokers. In your own poll, 46% of readers who responded disagree with the militant tactics Of Herb Parker as opposed to 27% who agree, whereas 25% endorse "More businesses should take a stand." That could be taken to mean that more should take a stand against smoking in public gatherings.

If you disagree, you are welcome to add your comment to the blog and rebut what I have to say. I don't try to get letters into the Courier anymore; the last one was ignored and the one before that was, worse, edited (partially censored). I have been friends with most of the Courier reporters, having been one myself in antiquity, and I wish you well.

Sincerely,
John T. Evans

Here's my blog link: (etc.)

***

Mr. Estridge's reply:

Thanks for your comments. On the issue of my coverage, I understand everyone has an opinion and is entitled to his or her own opinion but it bothers me when people accuse me of being overly sympathetic to one cause. Nothing can be farther from the truth. If you were to read my articles more closely you will see that I made organizers of the smokers march look dysfunctional and disorganized. There have been numerous publications where I have talked to the mayor and city council leaders who have refuted the claim that this is detromental to the economy. People who are blasting me now tend to forget those stories.
I don't make up comments from people. I just write them. People are so polarized on this issue and everyone has an opinion.
But to say that I am sympathetic towards the smokers is false, wrong and ignorant. The items that I wrote about have been strictly news items. You have the Broadway that is no longer the oldest family restaurant in the state. I am not making Ryan Shaw out to be a hero, I am merely talking about his business. Then on Herb Parker, I wasn't going to do a story, but when there is a restaurant that is in defiance, then it should be reported.
There are things that happen in news that we don't always agree with or want to write about but we have too. I have no problem with people saying that I am one way or another, at least they are reading what I write. On this issue, I have my opinions, but those don't matter in the public eye. I can never come forward because of items like this. I assure you that I go to great strides to be fair and balanced. Feel free to post this on your blog. Thanks again for the email.

***

My reply to Mr. Estridge's reply. (I get to have the last word. It's my blog.)

Donovan:

Thank you for your reply. I think you have defended yourself quite well, and I commend you for that. I will post your letter on my blog. That blog, by the way, is read by perhaps all of ten people: I say this to assure you that our exchange is a tempest in a teapot and you will not get your reputation sullied (or I should say neither of us will get our reputations sullied). I assure you that Elliott and Jane will never know that this sole reader has criticized your coverage! Nor, for that matter, Herb Parker. I do not want to hurt anybody who is trying to earn his living and get along with the people around and above him.

I am assured that you don't "make up comments by people" -- that you "just write them." I accept your beliefs that for someone to say you are "sympathetic towards the smokers is false, wrong, and ignorant" and that you "go to great strides to be fair and balanced." You have a lot more firsthand experience with the smokers of this area than I do -- I avoid them, partly because I am afraid I will commit the unpardonable gaffe, in this culture, of saying, "Yes, I do mind your smoking in the air I must breathe" -- but I concede that you are far more in touch with the people of this issue than I am. And I further confess that I have not read all of your coverage of the issue. And did not have all of them at hand to vet when I responded. Journalists have noted that we bloggers as a lot are loose cannons and that such is the dreadful state of affairs in these days of the internet. May I become more careful and thorough. May all of us become so.

Having made that mea culpa, I will say in my defense, and perhaps yours, that what I have seen missing in the Courier's coverage of tobacco are the inconvenient truths about smoking, and what those truths might portend for this town and the Kentucky counties nearby. The gist of the current blog post is by and large a lament that those truths seem to be missing in coverage anywhere in the Courier. I might be paranoid, but I suspect that offstage characters are the tobacco farmers of these parts who might be offended if they thought the Courier was not defending them with great vigor. Here's another blog post I made about the issue.

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Keep FDA* Off the Farm

(*Freaking Dumb Asses)

Forlorn River (aka Madison, Indiana, USA) had a public hearing the other night on a proposed non-smoking ordinance. I didn't attend because I no longer have a dog in the fight: I quit smoking and drinking almost 25 years ago. I don't frequent bars or locally owned greasy spoons, and there is now a public transport service on which no smoking is allowed.

Well, there is one lunch counter where I occasionally eat, and often some inconsiderate person there lights up, poisoning others' air with second-hand smoke. I hate it but say nothing. No one says anything because we non-smokers don't want to have the effrontery to tell the smoker that his -- or her -- behavior is obnoxious. Our silence gives smokers the notion that we tolerate their smoking.

We put up with it but we don't welcome it. In this town, nobody who has the gall to smoke in an enclosed area such as a restaurant or a retail store or a taxicab says, "Mind if I light up?" But if they did, there'd be few who would say, "Matter of fact, I do." It wouldn't be nice. It would make a scene. It wouldn't be Christian. It wouldn't be patriotic. (The smoker might be a vet. Or a Republican.) So (sigh -- cough! cough!) -- live and let live. It's about "freedom," right?

There were people at this protest who objected to a smoking ban on libertarian grounds, i.e. governmental intervention is generally bad and we should have as little of it as possible. A lawyer said that the proposed ordinance would be "government interference in property rights," and added, "I will decide for myself whether I will ban smoking in my business." (I detected a militant tone there: will we see civil disobedience from the counselor? Perhaps a class action suit? Will she be joined by the owners of bars and pool halls, who appeared to be, along with their patrons, the chief protesters the other night?)

I remember a Madison teacher once saying, "My freedom to swing my fist ends where the other person's nose begins." Fair enough. And my freedom to poison my lungs ends where someone else's lungs begin. The analogy of restricting people's right to eat junk food, from Hinkle's or elsewhere, does not hold -- unless in doing so they throw it up on others.

Tobacco smoke is dangerous: "Public health officials have concluded that secondhand smoke from cigarettes causes disease, including lung cancer and heart disease, in non-smoking adults, as well as causes conditions in children such as asthma, respiratory infections, cough, wheeze, otitis media (middle ear infection) and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." Source: www.philipmorrisusa.com/en/health_issues

And -- just in case you decide that discretion is the better part of valor and therefore to fight your own tobacco addiction instead of the rights of non-smokers to breathe clean air in public places, I quote from the same source:

"Philip Morris USA agrees with the overwhelming medical and scientific consensus that cigarette smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease, emphysema and other serious diseases in smokers. Smokers are far more likely to develop serious diseases, like lung cancer, than non-smokers."

Since (1) smoking is the leading preventable cause of ill health in the United States, claiming 400,000 premature deaths every year, and (2) ours is the only wealthy country in the world without affordable health care for all, then (3) it would make sense in terms of both health and wealth to quit smoking.

***

OK, Donovan. I'll leave you alone now. Good luck and have a good life.

JT

Die Hard in Burley T'backer Country

TEXT See "Supporting Smokers"

What is it with this Donovan Estridge and the no-smoking ordinance? The Madison City Council passed the ordinance some time back and it went into effect two days ago. Mr. Estridge has come up with at least three stories that I can recall since then featuring people who are outraged about it. Not only has he featured such people but he has in fact made them into heroes. He has, to the best of my knowledge, ignored or brushed off those who approve of the ordinance: their comments are buried in or excluded from each story.

All right, forgive my rudeness, but Donovan's Heroes (Was there a movie with that title?) who champion the cause of smokers look more like fools to me. Tobacco smoke kills, and it kills innocent people who do not willingly ingest it into their lungs as well as those who foolishly do. Having non-smoking sections in restaurants is like having non-chlorinated sections of swimming pools.

"Chutzpah," a Yiddish word, has been defined as that quality in a person who kills his parents and then at his murder trial, begs for mercy because he is an orphan.
I am nauseated by this absurd tirade of tobacco addicts -- who know damned well that smoking is bad for everybody, including them, and who have tried to quit time after time and rue the fact they ever started -- and who ought to be ashamed of having their photographs on the front page of the paper -- that their "constitutional rights" have been taken away, that the people who have promoted these laws are "Communists," and such moronic swill. When they give two seconds' thought to their plight, they know they are hooked on tobacco and must obey their habit. And therefore they have about as much "freedom" as prisoners at Guantanamo -- yet they brazen out their diatribe that their "freedom" has been taken away -- and a reporter prints their inanities and -- it sure as hell appears to me -- glorifies them.

Of course smokers have constitutional rights. They just don't include spewing poison into the air that others breathe. Endangering others' health is against the common law, just as physical assault and reckless driving are. There is nothing in the constitution guaranteeing any group of citizens the right to hurt other citizens. It is an absurdity that we Americans fill our prisons with addicts to practically every other drug in existence but tobacco; but smokers -- at least in this ignorant backwater -- rail about not only their "rights" to enslave and injure themselves but also to injure others in public places.

Has anyone considered the child abuse -- endangerment -- involved in smoking in an enclosed car in which their children must be passengers? The child must inhale the addictive substance. We would be outraged if parents put cocaine or heroin in children's baby bottles, but say nothing when we see parents smoking in their cars with small children. That "right" has not been taken away by the ordinance. Why not? Why do we let tobacco rule? Why do we put up with inanity and insanity over an issue that is so clear-cut?

New Endeavor -- Yum, I Hope

Rosie has suggested that I take over cooking for us. During the day she runs a lot, virtually managing a senior assisted-living program for two 90-year-olds who happen to be her parents. She helps a dysfunctional family or two, also related. Considering that she taught herself to cook with her nurse's uniform still on from the day's work and a baby on her hip, I guess it's not too much to ask for me to help out with the meal preparation as often as possible in our senior years.

Also I have a lot more invested in proper eating now that the old ticker has given me a message. No more dashing over to Wendy's for Junior Bacon cheeseburgers or snacking on peanuts and Cheez-its. No more Krispy-Kreme doughnuts. No more quarts of Breyer's butter pecan with hot fudge topping. Paigey (my rehab counselor) said an indulgence once in a while -- a great while -- is OK. My buddy Warnie and I made an excursion to the Brick Tavern in Jonesville two months ago where we had one of their legendary cheeseburgers apiece. Two months since my last cheeseburger: that's about right. No doughnuts yet, although I am weakening.

So I went to the store last evening and shopped for our supper. Before that, I'd stopped in our most excellent library and checked out a good cookbook from the American Heart Association and sat down and studied it. I brought the groceries home and prepared supper, with just a little prepping assistance from Rosie. The two dishes were butternut squash soup and tuna bean salad. I worked with things like canellini (sp?) beans and garlic and basil and dill weed. I had to rinse foods to remove salt and measure with spoons and cups. (I'm a holdover from my college chemistry days, carefully measuring, reading liquid levels from the bottom of the meniscus, etc.) I was busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest doing everything that needed to be done to get both dishes to come out at the same time.

The dishes were satifying and tasty enough. The soup was best, even though I used yellow squash in pinwheels instead of butternut squash pureed like pumpkin. The flavor was good and even the texture wasn't bad, with a little flour to thicken it. We agreed that the tuna-bean concoction could have stood a little mayo: instead it had balsam vinegar.

Tonight we had beef-barley-vegetable soup. Didn't need a recipe; easy and delicious. We ate it with whole-grain bread and heart-smart spread.

We are in the dog days and today was the most dogged yet. I think the heat index was about 105. I didn't walk outdoors. Thank God for a-c. And electric fans.

The Passion of the Drunk

That is a smart-aleck title. I do not now nor have I ever liked Mel Gibson.

Mr. Gibson was recently arrested for drunk driving and behaved rather badly. Having in my lifetime been arrested for drunk driving and behaved badly, and recalling that Mr. Gibson made a movie, however flawed, about the Lord, who -- before His passion -- said to some men getting ready to stone a woman caught in adultery, "Let him who is without sin cast the first stone" (Jn 7:53-8:11), I have nothing to add to the following:

"http://www.tmz.com">

I give Mr. Gibson credit for renouncing his loathsome behavior, for owning that it was "despicable." If he is indeed anti-Semitic, as some discerning people seem to think, may he ask his Redeemer to remove that defect of his character from him. If he is, as he confesses, alcoholic, may he seek help. There is lots of it available. If he follows the Twelve-Step program, I hope the Jews are on his list of people he intends to make amends to.

Visit from Keith and Other Observations

I went walking a while ago in the beastly humidity. We have Basic Instinct on TV now, on a commercial channel -- an obnoxious movie with many obnoxious interruptions. Earlier, watched part of a taped Conan O'Brien, a show I haven't seen for perhaps a year. I suppose it was a rerun. At the beginning he did a satirical "State of the Show" address, and at the end a comic had a cartoon of a superhero called "Paleman," and both of those were pretty funny. I'd also taped Friday's Countdown, which showed a Letterman blurb (a tape of a tape, I guess) in which David commented on Ann Coulter's recent assertion that Bill Clinton is gay. Letterman showed Clinton's "rebuttal": Clinton had merely told Coulter he was gay so he wouldn't have to hit on her "bony ass." A caption below Ann's picture reads: "Clinton is gay only around evil crazy bitches." Keith Olbermann always shows the picture of Ann with her black eye-patch. Aarrgh!

Another Keith I like is my friend from northern Indiana, Keith McW. Keith graced us with a visit this afternoon, on his way home from Tennessee, where he'd been visiting with his parents and his "redneck brother." (He likes his brother very much and I think I would too.) Keith is so much the consummate gentleman that it is well nigh impossible to believe he has a redneck brother. (Keith was not too refined to send me the email about the poll of "total fucking morons.") We had lunch, caught up a little bit, and watched Uncommon Valor (1983). Keith said that Randall "Tex" Cobb, a Nam vet who kicks the crap out of Patrick Swayzee in this movie (some might like that) and then buys it in the raid on a Laos prison camp (Cobb was memorable as "Ben Dover" in a jail scene with Chevy Chase in Fletch), reminded him a great deal of his redneck brother.

Keith's older daughter Emily has come down with a chronic illness and I am sad for her and Keith's family. She is coping well and has in fact changed recently to a new, better job. Of course she cannot be discriminated against because of her illness and I know she is capable and a tough kid. Keith's wife, Mary Ann, has gotten a good job as an accountant at a liberal arts college. I look forward to our going to church with Keith and Mary Ann in the country again to hear Phil Gulley, the iconoclastic Christian clergyman who believes that God's grace doesn't exclude anybody. At all. And after church I hope we go back to that excellent cafeteria in Mooresville for Sunday dinner, and maybe their younger daughter, Molly, who works nearby, can join us. I'll save up for that meal. (Butterscotch pie!)

I will take a moment to rail against Las Vegas, which has passed an ordinance forbidding the feeding of the homeless in public parks there. I'll just say that our Christian nation might base its jurisprudence on the Ten Commandments, or brag that it does, but sure as hell not on the Sermon on the Mount. I wonder if the casinos might be taxed 1/20 of 1 percent to pay for feeding the homeless. Meanwhile, drug companies provide sumptuous lunches for doctors to entice them to prescribe their drugs. The House passed a law to raise the minimum wage by $2.10 (by 2009 -- don't want to wreck the economy by drastic upheavals!) with the proviso, of course, that the estate tax be reduced for the ultra-rich. Of course. And right away, right?

Saturday night, at almost the end of July. Beastly humidity, but the sun came out toward dusk. And thank God for a-c. We're having tomatoes and corn and green beans and peaches and other wonderful things for this time of year in good old Indiana. Ain't God good to Indianny? Ain't he though? (We have more than one kind of corn, sorry.)

We Will Win!

This morning on the way home from rehab I heard one of the authors of One Party Country: The Republican Plan for Dominance in the 21st Century by Peter Wallsten and Tom Hamburger being interviewed on NPR. From the publisher: "... the Bush administration's primary governing focus is cementing GOP dominance for decades to come and eviscerating the Democrats' New Deal coalition. ... Guiding this quest is Karl Rove, a man who exercises unprecedented power as he marshals all branches of government in service of the ultimate goal. This book shows Rove manipulating the most obscure federal activities and reveals how his actions shape local races and help the GOP lure the Democrats' most loyal supporters: Jews, African Americans, and Latinos. The authors detail how Republicans have turned corporate America into a wing of the party, and how their audacious, carefully crafted plan may yet unravel in a swirl of scandal in the nation's capital."

I guess I was feeling vulnerable at the moment for one reason or another and I just really felt depressed for a while. Indefinite dominance by the Republican Party means we will never have universal health care, decent wages for workers, equitable distribution of the tax burden, honest people running the government instead of the likes of Rove, Mehlman, Cheney, Gonzales, DeLay, James Dobson, and Abramoff.

Well, hell, as I read in this review just a few minutes ago, their "plan may yet unravel in a swirl of scandal." Sometimes I half-heartedly believe that a loving, merciful God will at last liberate us from these cynical, merciless thugs who have hijacked what was once an honorable government and hoodwinked so many good people and taken all the spoils.

Many of us want to believe in an apocalypse in which a just God will vanquish our oppressors. I think that what will eventually happen is the Rovers and Mehlmanians et al will "fall of their own weight," that they carry the seeds of their own destruction within them, that their greed and graft and conceit will bring them down with a great crash.

I don't know what God has to do with that, actually, but I pray that He will bring them down. I know that we suffered through the Third Reich and that hideous cabal eventually destroyed itself. (I add the footnote that our mongrel draftee dogfaces whipped the Kraut's asses fair and square, bitching all the while, no matter how committed and smart and tough and purebred the Krauts thought they were.) I still want to believe that God had a plan for the good forces in the world to prevail, and that God still does.

Amen.

Great Weekend; Magic Moments

Early Sunday evening, back home in quiet little Madison. Spent part of yesterday and today in Chicago with my three kids, Amanda, Natalie, and John, and John's girlfriend, Cheryl. Our time together was of great quality. We had only a few moments together but moments are what my life is made up of and what I remember. We talked about the Tank, the fantastic car we got for $600, put 150,000 miles on, and then traded in for $1,500 for a new Toyota. I reminisced about the moment when we were driving down Burlington Avenue in Logansport with Natalie, a newly licensed driver, at the wheel of the Tank and her parents, sister, and twin brother riding with her. It was deep dusk and all cars should have had their headlights on by then. Sure enough, one car we met was without lights. Natalie said, "Oh, here comes some asshole without his headlights on." After an interval of exactly one third of a second, the other four of us, in perfect unison, cried out, "TURN ON YOUR LIGHTS, ASSHOLE!" That is a moment I will always remember. I hope I will remember some moments from this weekend: Amanda deftly (and swiftly!) driving us in and out of the city; meeting Cheryl for the first time and hugging her as we left; John and I watching Pride and Prejudice together after the women fell asleep or otherwise lost interest, and then John really kicking ass and taking names in helping me work my New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles; Natalie cooking us fantastic Belgian waffles; Monty from the other end of the apartment bringing me a bag of Ricola cough drops in his mouth and sitting there bonding with me as I praised him; Natalie talking with Jerry on her cell phone on the darkened neighborhood street as we walked and as the CTA el passed by and above it a jet flew into O'Hare; a lady in the common across the street preaching a sermon with a megaphone while the kids were downtown; brunching at Cafe Lula and eating Mexican at nine o'clock that night. It was a good weekend, a great weekend. Thanks to family and HP.

All That Jazz

Which is the title of a song in Chicago. I would have loved to have seen the Broadway version, which had Bebe Neuwerth ("Lilith," ex- of "Dr. Frazier Crane."), who, for some strange reason, really dings my bell. Anyhow, looking forward to going to Chicago tomorrow to be with all three of my kids and Cheryl. Amanda and I are driving. It's been two years since I've seen Johnnie!

Do You Know the Lord?

With regard to my state of grace, or anybody else's, I would like to refer readers of this blog to words attributed to Jesus in Matthew 7:1. Look it up. And if the shoe fits, wear it. And while you're at it, read all of the Sermon on the Mount. It's a pretty good synopsis of Christianity. If we'd all put it into practice, what a wonderful world this would be. Seems I recall there's a lot in there about not judging others, not making a public show of your religion, and forgiving others. And having compassion for the poor, by the way. (What minimum wage would Jesus pay?)

We went to a visitation of a family member back in about February, in North Vernon. We had to park on the side of the street opposite the funeral parlor, and an amiable gentleman with a hand-held stop sign of the kind held by school-crossing guards saw us across. I hope the kind man didn't mug the old lady crossing-guard down the street for the sign, because he said the crossing was dangerous but he wasn't worried for himself because, he said, "I know the Lord."

What is it about such comments that piss me off? I wanted to say to him, "Yes, but does the Lord know you?" (I didn't, and I didn't confront the preacher who gave the two sermons promising damnation the other day.) It's that certainty that leads to judgment of others' grace, I believe, and if you're the Present Occupant in the Oval Office with all that power, judgment of others'right to live (fetuses excepted, of course). Never was there somebody so certain who is so wrong.

As for anonymous comments on my blog: all comments are welcome -- well, acceptable. I defend your right to speak your mind. I refer you to the First Amendment to the Constitution, which we are all experts on, of course. I do prefer that you identify yourself, especially if you are going to take an accusatory tone. That notion comes from the Constitution too, to wit, the Sixth Amendment, in which the right of the accused to face the accuser is guaranteed. Seems that people who hide -- whether they are wearing a black ski mask and carrying an Uzi, or concealing themselves behind white sheets as they burn crosses -- are all too often terrorists.

Hell: Hot or Cold?

We're havin' a heatwave right now. Heat index is >100 right now. Always makes me think of The Seven-Year Itch starring Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell. I love that movie, with Marilyn standing over the subway grating (no need to describe all -- every redblooded male in America knows it well) and Tom's fantasies of her (he in a housecoat and ascot) while Rachmaninoff's piano concerto thunders on the soundtrack. I remember an old friend, Al St. Paul, ex-master sergeant from WWII days. He is one of those whose association I wished had extended back to the days when we were both practicing drunks so we could have drunk together. (Right now, watching The World's Fastest Indian --thanks, son, for a great recommend -- I recall that Anthony Hopkins is a recovering alcoholic and I would have loved to drink with him but I digress.) Anyhow, Al speculated that, if Eskimos had written the Bible rather than the people of the hot Holy Land, then we would have the depiction of hell as cold rather than hot.

Call from Johnnie

John called on his cell phone from Georgia, en route to Augusta to see Adam. J's on vacation. Looking forward to seeing him (and Nat Sue and Mandy) next weekend. John woke me from a nap. We went to a funeral in Seymour on this hot, humid day (and I froze in the church's a-c). It was Rozz's cousin Bekki, who was 41, killed in a car accident in Colorado last week. Uncle Eddie and his family are good people and their girl's death broke their hearts. I recall Bekki coming to visit Rosie's dad at the Columbus hospital twice and I thought she didn't have to do that. But she was a sweet, thoughtful girl. We went in a funeral procession from Seymour to Vernon and there wasn't room enough under that tent they put up for graveside ceremonies and I stood in the blazing sun while the preacher delivered his second sermon telling us that if we didn't have Jesus in our lives we wouldn't spend eternity with Bekki in heaven. When he finally shut up Rosie and I got away and drove on a county road out of Vernon, trying to bypass North Vernon. We were going to go back to a dinner at the church. I made a wrong turn or two but we had fun. Then I was really so lost that we ended up back in Seymour too late for the dinner. We were both very hungry so we ate at Cracker Barrel -- chicken and rice, and Rosie had raspberry iced tea, which she loves. I said it was a good thing I didn't make it back to the church because I might have told the preacher that I think his theology is a bunch of cruel horse shit and if anybody is right about grace, it would be Phil Gulley and Jim Mulholland, co-authors of If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person. Rosie said, Well, today wouldn't be a good day to tangle with him and I agreed.

Chicken Hawks, Fight This

From 07.12.2006 www.sojo.net

America’s Hammer Habit
by Jim Wallis

The best line I heard in the period leading up to the war in Iraq was, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." It was quoted by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, when we were on a panel together in England about the best response to terrorism.

The premise of the panel was that the threat of terrorism is real, that there are real dangers prowling about in our world, and that the problem of evil is a very serious one. The question we were addressing was what the best response to real threats should be.

I now call this the American hammer habit. If we don't know how to solve a problem, we just fight. Diplomacy has become a weak word to those who run our foreign policy and, in the House debate on Iraq in June, Republicans made numerous references to those who are "afraid to fight." Right on cue, Fox News Sunday's Brit Hume accused Democrats of being a party that just doesn't like to fight. And according to the neo-conservatives masquerading as journalists, such as Hume and William Kristol, continuous fighting is the only foreign policy that makes any sense.

Even more frightening is how much their friends such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have the same strong preference for fighting over talking. If they had their way, we would have fought or would still be fighting several wars by now - all at the same time - in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Iran at least, and probably against North Korea, too, if they thought we could win the war. They act as if talking and negotiating with potential adversaries is just a waste of time. It is truly astonishing and even shocking how people who simply question the efficacy and morality of the continuing American occupation in Iraq - including long-time military supporters such as Rep. John Murtha - are so quickly and viciously accused of "cutting and running" or not having the "courage" to fight.

This spring, the hostile rhetoric toward our adversaries that we heard before the war against Iraq turned toward Iran. I was in Australia during the war of words in March between Washington and Tehran, and I was interviewed on one of Australia's top political shows. I was asked whether a stand-off between the "two fundamentalists" (meaning Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and U.S. President George Bush), with nuclear weapons in the balance, should concern the world. I said yes.

Again, there was a real threat: The possibility of the Iranian regime obtaining usable nuclear weapons is a very reasonable concern for the region and for the whole world. Yet again, the question becomes what the most appropriate and effective response should be.

Cheney and others quickly raised the prospect of military action - even nuclear attack - against Iran, threatening "meaningful consequences" and saying that "the United States is keeping all options on the table." (In April, The Washington Post reported that "Pentagon planners are studying how to penetrate eight-foot-deep targets and are contemplating tactical nuclear devices.") A bipartisan list of retired generals and other military experts pointed out that mere air strikes would be relatively ineffective in removing Iran's nuclear threat, and that only a full scale war, invasion, and occupation could guarantee an end to Iran's nuclear program - a solution almost nobody thinks is realistic or prudent. At the same time, the potential disastrous consequences for the region and the world of a U.S. or Israeli military strike against Iran were reiterated by both military and foreign policy elites outside the Bush administration.

Since the early spring saber-rattling, a more reasonable course has emerged, backed by the Europeans, the Russians, and others who are concerned about Iran's nuclear threat but who are also opposed to a military response. And to its credit, the Bush administration is, at least for the moment, supporting this approach which combines incentives with the threat of sanctions. That is good news indeed.

I hope this is a sincere effort, and not one intended to simply expose the "unreasonableness" of the Iranians and then use that to justify a military response, or even to manipulate a national security issue in hopes of discrediting Democrats and helping Republicans avoid a devastating mid-term election defeat. It would not be the first time such things were done in U.S. politics.

Three groups of Americans are now making strong statements against military action in Iran and lifting up instead the better alternatives of incentives, pressures, and sanctions. They are religious leaders, former military leaders, and former foreign policy and national security officials.

If America can resist its hammer habit with Iran, the world may be spared a nuclearized Iran and the disastrous consequences of another misguided military confrontation. The clear witness of America's religious community and our wisest military and foreign policy leaders may be essential to prevent those twin disasters.

Vive le France!

Today is Bastille Day, July 14, the French National Holiday. It commemorates Parisians storming the Bastille, which had been turned into a political prison. I think I'll go over to McDonald's and order some FRENCH fries -- not "freedom fries." Today at noon on WUOL Carol honored the French in her noon-hour program and started with the Marsellaise, the French national anthem. I happened to be at the courthouse corner downtown and I turned the radio up nice and loud. (Nobody noticed -- they had their air-conditioners turned up full blast in their SUVs -- but I felt better.) I get teary when they sing the Marsellaise in Rick's Cafe in Casablanca, drowning out the Nazis. Vive le France! I am a Francophile. If the Bushies had heeded their opposition to going to Iraq we wouldn't be in the mess we are in today. Ben Franklin had sense enough to charm the French, our first allies, but we don't have Ben Franklin anymore, do we?

Rehab: World of Its Own

Rehab at King's Daughters' Hospital has become an important part of my life. Three times a week I drive down the hill to have my weight and blood pressure recorded, have electrodes pasted on my chest, and do exercises, which include riding a stationary bike, walking a treadmill, and working out on a "recumbent stepper" (recumbent means lying down, especially in a position of comfort or rest; reclining) -- which means I sit on a bicycle seat and pull and push handlebars while pedaling at the same time, I guess, which is what I do. (The position reminds me a little bit of Hot Wheels or perhaps a Harley chopper.)

In fact the recumbent stepper is the most taxing of the three: Rita told me to slow down this morning because my heart rate was too high. Come to think of it, I dove into it like a black lab into a pond on a hot day. I slowed down and the rate was soon cool.

The room is windowless, which I usually don't like, although today it was fine because it's one of those dreary, drippy days we sometimes have in the summer; it rains a lot but you can hardly tell because it's so humid. The a-c was deeply appreciated today. We have fans too to help us stay cool. I work up a pretty good sweat. The room is cheery enough, with lots of fluorescent lights. The social atmosphere is great most of the time, with lots of joking and laughing. Rita likes to tease and she's fun.

Paige, who is on vacation right now, is a little more businesslike -- less mischievous, I suppose -- but she's not above a laugh and Rita catalyzes her. Paige also happens to be a looker. She was telling somebody that she didn't mind turning thirty and I had to say to her, "It's not so bad to turn thirty when you're a ten." She liked that and I don't think she thought I was an old lech for saying it.

The TV is a bit of a bane -- it's either Fox News or The Price Is Right. I'd rather watch the Hallmark Channel --the a.m. fare is either the Waltons or Little House on the Prairie. Fortunately, Brit Hume and John Gibson (Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter) are not on in the a.m. and often as not there's some "alert" in which they show footage of the same site of some adverse event over and over and keep trying and seldom succeeding to make genuine news of it. Bob Barker and the old dolls who compete for prizes are much more to my liking. If Bob has a political axe to grind you'd never know it. I think the old boy has charisma.

I'm about as entertained by the commercials as anything -- the Geico Gecko is about my favorite, with his Cockney accent talking of "pie and chips" (I suppose that's steak and kidney pie -- maybe a little mutton). I liked the one where the Taco Bell chihuahua, trotting by, sees the gecko and says, "Oh no! A talking gecko!" but that one was whisked away because Gidget had already been condemned for being p.i. (That was before "The Mind of Mencia.")

Anyhow, we work out and sweat and watch the boob tube and joke and shoot the breeze and laugh. Opal is 85, cute as a wink, and Rita teases her and Opal gives as good as she gets, coming back with some semi-ribald ripostes. Caroline is the wife of Don, who was on the Madison High 1949 runner-ups for state basketball champs, and I was surprised to learn she was the daughter of a man my dad worked with as a fireman at Jefferson Proving Ground in WWII. She is therefore a half-sister of my first sweetheart (we were about six, and I couldn't cross the street to visit her). A pleasant chap from Vevay, a retired banker, is good company. Paige told me I was an "overachiever" one day and that made me feel good.

I feel really exhilarated when I complete the exercises. I cool down a bit and have a cup of cold cranberry juice. It's not a bad routine three times a week.

Le Petit Riens

That was the title of music by Mozart. It means "the little nothings," I think. The lovely wife is still abed at half-past nine. It's raining gently and I have the front door ajar and can hear the mercy dropping down. Rudy is in the other chair, white socks extended, muzzle on them, eyes closed, breathing heavily in sleep, the soul of serenity. It's 9:39 and all's well.

Senior Dream Team 2008

My slate for 2008, on a Democratic or Independent ticket: President, George McGovern; Vice President, Birch Bayh SENIOR. (Not Evan, his turncoat plastic son who has the conceit that he will run for president. Hmpfh.) McGovern should appoint Jimmy Carter as Secretary of State and Lee Hamilton as Ambassador to the UN. Secretary of Defense, Wesley Clark. Attorney General, Ramsey Clark. Secretary of the Treasury, Paul Krugman (he's pretty young, I guess). These people would be better than anybody serving in government right now. Excellence and integrity.

A Wedding and a Funeral

Sad news for Rosalie's Uncle Eddie and Aunt Rose: they lost their daughter, Bekki, in a car accident in eastern Colorado on July 6. Bekki's daughter Amanda was in the car but survived. Eddie and Rose, and Bekki's two daughters, Amanda and Elise, live in Indiana (Columbus and Seymour). The family had gathered in Denver where the oldest daughter (of four) was just married. Amanda graduated from high school and will be going away to college, but Elise, who is eight, will need a home, and they are praying it won't be with her father, who is said to be mentally unstable. Ed is the most likely prospect of the fathering person but he is now 70. They are all anxious and of course sad. Then there are the details, like transporting Bekki back to Indiana, planning and paying for her burial, etc. It's a mess, and a big loss for them.

They Always Manage Somehow

Ken Lay -- Bush’s buddy, Ken-Boy -- crooked CEO of Enron -- died last night of a heart attack. He was 64. He had been convicted of fraud or whatever and had yet to be sentenced. I am reminded of Hermann Goering's cheating the hangman with a cyanide capsule after conviction at the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

I doubt if Lay ever saw the inside of a jail. I guess I wouldn’t care if the man never went to jail if he would only have made restitution to all the people he deprived of a livelihood. I’m sure his family will have a rich inheritance. Nobody will touch that fortune, be assured. And Ken-Boy can go to his grave with the world knowing he screwed everybody but himself.

Happy Fourth

Outside last night people were shooting off firecrackers. This is the eve of the Fourth, the holiday celebrating this nation’s declaration of independence from Britain in 1776. The founding of what became the United States of America is truly a wonderful and remarkable achievement, and a blessing on its citizens. We are far from perfect. What a lot of our detractors say is true, and I have been one of our most vituperative critics.

I guess what has put me off about patriotism is that it has been hijacked by a bunch of simplistic, my-country-right-or-wrong, America-love it-or-leave-it, gunboat diplomacy, greedy, grabby men. Patriotism means love of country, and loving your country means wanting what’s best for it, and fighting for that -- fighting for your country to do the right thing, the noble, the charitable, the honorable thing.

We are not supposed to be bullies, ruling by might and force and violence. We are supposed to be internationalists, humbly recognizing our place as just one of the sovereign countries on this planet. We certainly should not be saying, "the UN is irrelevant." That's O'Reilly talk.

We are supposed to share our wealth with those less fortunate than we are. We are supposed to address the problems of the world, like poverty, and famine, and disease. We are supposed to make our own country a utopia as much as we can for all of our people so that no one is hungry or sick or poor or uneducated. We are supposed to believe in and fight fiercely for our freedom of speech and the press and religion.

When I think lovingly of the wonderful United States of America, I think of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin -- not George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. I think of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights -- not the Patriot Act and executive branch secrecy and government eavesdropping, and officially condemning the press (whatever in hell that means). I think of the Peace Corps -- not the Marine Corps. I think of diplomacy that includes diplomats who even speak the language of the country -- not freedom fries and laws making English the official language.

In writing this and posting it on the worldwide web, I am fighting for my country. I am a patriot. God bless the USA and all the people of the world. God have mercy on the USA and all the people of the world.

Regatta Tragedy, 2 July 2006

Most people know by now that a youngster drove a car down to the river at a high speed, crashed through the barricade set up for the Madison Regatta, and injured a dozen people. Mirabile dictu, only a dozen or so people were injured and no one was killed, although several people were hurt badly. At least that is the word so far. The car became airborne and landed in the river. The police are quite interested in obtaining the results of blood tests from the driver of the car. When I first heard of the event, I speculated that this might be the nihilistic behavior of the likes of the boys who shot up Columbine. I'll be interested to hear about further developments.

The Land of Heart's Desire

I'm wandering into the smarmy world of nostalgic musings typically reserved for George Miller and Phil Cole (Madison Courier columnists) when I bring this up, but it came up when Rosie heard me saying, "This is the land of heart's desire. One may do as one wishes." She asked me where the saying originated.

"Doc" Rothert, the Madison schools music teacher, used to give "tea parties" after school, to detain us when we misbehaved in his classes. He was being sarcastic when he would say that, over and over, as part of a performance he would do for us. Kid that I was, I was kind of amused by it, but the more mature girls in our class hated it, quickly concluding that it was tiresome and not making the mistake of repeating an infraction of class deportment that would result in an "invitation" to a tea party. I would actually forgive him and hang around after a tea party to get him to play classical music (Ravel's Bolero comes to mind) on a nifty phonograph he had. The records were 78's in those days.

Doc was kind of a dandy for Madison, having a couple of music degrees, and, it is said, having studied some in a Paris conservatory. He was single all the years I had dealings with him (I was in the high school choir), but late in life he married the French teacher at Hanover College. This dispelled certain suspicions about his practice of taking us young bucks skinny-dipping at night in the crik up at Manville.

For choral pronunciation he taught us what he called "general American diction" and, having somewhat of a flair and a keen interest in language and elocution and having a horror of being regarded as a hillbilly or hick, I paid close attention to his instruction, forever after changed my speech, and as a result I have people still ask me, "Are you from around here?"

This is an installment of my memoirs, I guess. I have a lot more to say about Doc and will some day.