SmokeSound

Something normal happens to people who are elected to Congress: they start talking to each other. They sift through the residue of unemployed office staffs, and hire the people who seem to know Washington, DC, best. They sit on the left, or the right, facing the podium, and talk to themselves. "Well," they say, "what do the Blue Dogs say?" The Blue Dogs listen to their Red Dog constituents and say they cannot remember whether they are Red or Blue, and that things are moving too quickly. Barack Obama wants to be a healer, not a divider, which is what George W. said, and that Barack said, too, and if he he pays hopeless attention to the people who admit they are going to cut him off at the knees, he will end his presidency praising his inability to walk. It is time for Obama, and all the other Democrats whom we elected last November, to remember what we said. We said we wanted a complete overhaul of our health care systems.  We voted for people we ...

I have been thinking about Ted Kennedy--a lot--as all of us have done. I have been thinking about the way he held his private and public lives together. His private life remained as private as the public would allow. Much of his public life has almost escaped us, in spite of the fact that we know he has been one of our most accomplished Senators. Only two Senators in the history of the nation served longer than he, and neither of those approached his record of accomplishment. There have been others as important--let us say, perhaps, ten-- in the whole history of the nation, who have marked us as deeply as Ted Kennedy has done. His name is on our honorable decisions.  It is impossible, at a time like this, not to think about our own deaths. Perhaps, in my case, it is absolutely inescapable. I was born only a few months before him, and I am sitting here, at the computer, sharing the same age as he when he died. I, too, am seventy-seven. Both of us came from large fa...

"The Kennedys are not in public service to make money. We have paid too high a price." Ted Kennedy said that. Joe Kennedy: killed while in military service. John Kennedy: shot while President. Bobby Kennedy: shot while running for President. Idiots are carrying guns to political meetings; some concealed, some openly, some assault weapons. Timothy McVeigh, who blew up a building in Oklahoma, when arrested was wearing a T-shirt that quoted Thomas Jefferson, as if to spit in the face of democracy: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." These savage idiots, misusing the same quote from Jefferson, pretending to be concerned about health care, chanting their mantras about the right to bear arms, probably not so much concerned about either health care or the right of States to maintain a militia, but afraid that a white America that never really was white now has African and Hispanic and Asian citizens, an...

When John Kennedy was elected to the Presidency, it seemed that the nation and maybe the world had turned from the ancients to a newer generation, as surely we must have done before, but in our time. Robert Kennedy burned like an acetylene torch, with courage and a commitment to justice, and he, too, was shot down for his passion. Ted Kennedy, like his brothers and sisters, came from a family ambiguous in its history; their father, perhaps, as ruthless a man as any who ever wanted wealth and power. These later generations of Kennedys have baffled us, coming from privilege, and denying it; none more than the youngest son, now dead. Ted Kennedy, like all of us, came flawed, but fiercely to become champion for all who had less; for children, for health care, for honest work and decency. He carried his broken family forward toward what all his brothers had died for, to carry the whole burden of becoming a better nation. He was no shining knight, but he was as strong and determined as...

"A Libertarian is just a Republican who wants to smoke dope and get laid." (Overheard on Air America)

There is a red squirrel--perhaps there are several of him-- who is small enough to squeeze through the mesh surrounding one of our bird feeders. He--perhaps he is a she-- sits in there, satisfied that there is a Bird Seed God, stuffing himself until, when shooed away, he can barely make it back out through the somehow-smaller mesh. I am half-hearted in my shooing-away. The little critter does me no harm, so far. I have never understood squirrel hunters, unless they provide food for someone, or maybe just to discourage them from opening a condominium in the attic. "Red squirrel, run!" Joseph Langland wrote. "The fixed ideas are coming to hunt you down!" It is the fixed ideas that worry me. Listening to the current noise about providing health care makes it plain that the fixed ideas are hunting us down. Take, for instance, the fixed idea that anything socialist is bad. By any rational or sensible understanding of what it means, our Medicare and Medicaid programs ar...

We have a Blue Dog Cat. You have heard about Blue Dog Democrats. They are the people who would rather, almost, instead-of-being Republican, be Democrats, and their constituency elected them. Now, in Congress, they know that, back home, their voters are on the edge of being Republican, so they dare not be the Democrats they say they were. That is how Orphan, our cat is. She is a Blue Dog Cat. She says she likes me. She sleeps on our bed. She snuggles up, and purrs, and then, suddenly, she remembers that she comes from a long line of killer cats, so she bites me! She does that every time she becomes afraid! Sometimes I just yelp, and put on a bandage. The last time, I had to go to the emergency room for a shot, and a bottle of pills, and a lecture. But I trust her. She is on my side. She purrs and snuggles. It is just that she might kill me. I know what the option is: I might get to her first! I cannot bring myself to do it. My name is not Barack Obama, but I do think of him, and those...

Ah, those darned Republicans! They steal all the good ideas! Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a series of about a dozen Fireside Chats in which he addressed his fellow citizens, trying to convince them that they had nothing to fear but fear itself. Now the Loyal Opposition Party has instituted Firearms Chats in which they take aim at their fellow citizens, trying to convince them that they have nothing to fear but a loaded semi-automatic. That, and that Black S.O.B. who is destroying our freedoms. One can never have too many armed patriots, just in case Obama wants to kill your Grandma and Sarah's kids. They are clever, aren't they? Saving the Union, and all?

While some of us are trying to talk about health care, some of our fellow Americans are shouting things such as, "Heil Hitler!", "Obama is Nazi, or maybe a Communist!", that we have lost our country (I did not notice that it had gone), that providing options to insurance-company-run health care systems is subversion, or a loss of liberty, or equivalent to circumcision, or maybe treason, or not playing football. People are bringing loaded semi-automatic guns to town hall meetings, and arguing that it is their right, and necessary to preserve liberty and bloodshed for all. We did have an armed revolution, once, even before I was born. We have fought in good and bad wars. But we are not talking about the Boston Tea Party here! We are talking about trying to design a better health care plan; one which will provide for all of us, at a decent price, instead of the system we now have, in which perhaps a third of us are not covered, in which insurance companies skim off m...

When an attendee at a political gathering asked Barnie Frank why he continued to support what she called Barack Obama's Nazi policies, Frank asked her, in return: "On what planet do you spend most of your time?" He added: "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table." Evangelical Lutherans are meeting in Minneapolis, trying to figure out what to say and do about gay and lesbians, especially those who want to be ordained to the clergy. Like a lot of other people, some Lutherans want to call homosexuality a sin. That is precisely like calling heterosexuality a sin. It is like calling being tall, or short, a sin. Maybe being born a Caucasian is a sin. We must ponder these truths! Anyway, some of the Lutheran delegates know sin when they see it, and they know what truth is when they hear it, and they know just exactly what God thinks about ordination in the 21st century. Curtis Norbo, from North Dakota, explained the p...

Have we gone completely mad? It is completely legal for people who have a permit to carry either a concealed or an open weapon to attend a Presidential rally. And they are doing just that! We shoot Presidents in this country! Idiots--idiots!--are chanting slogans such as a line from Thomas Jefferson, that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants," and carrying loaded weapons to where the President is addressing a crowd. The clearly-intended inference is that the President is a tyrant. The same lame-brains--No, that is too kind--the same idiots call the President a Nazi or a Communist. How can a civilized nation sit on its hands, thumbs up, and not be outraged at what we have come to? Of course those people have a legal right to carry, not just handguns, but rifles and shotguns in public places, because we passed laws that allow them to. We have pretended that allowing people to carry concealed or open weaponry make...

Dumb, dumb, dumb! People are debating whether Michelle Obama should wear shorts while hiking at the Grand Canyon. Is that the biggest problem our nation faces? Of course, she should be allowed to wear shorts, just as many, less-aesthetically pleasing women do, so long as they come down at least to her ankles! Sheesh!

Birthers. Obama born in Kenya. A plot to kill old people. That private enterprise is always more efficient that government. That we have the best health care system in the world. Insurance companies are interested in our health more than they are interested in profits. The more guns we carry, the safer we are, especially if the President is Black. Lies. Just lies. We all know people who seem unable not to lie. If they tell us about the fish they almost caught, it becomes larger than the whale that chewed Jonah. They cannot say, "I forgot" or "I overslept" or "I really don't want to!" They have to lie. They lie about everything, even little unimportant things. Lying becomes a way of life. If they are our friends, and if we like them, anyway, we just concede they are lying, and pretend we do not know that they have corrupted themselves. It is especially painful when we hear our elected representatives lie about things. We watch them try not ...

"You get what you pay for!" How is that for selective wisdom? If there is a grain of truth there, it may be that really well-crafted things and services cannot be had for the price of junk. Sometimes--just sometimes-- the best things cost the most, but more often, the things with the highest prices are just most desired, not the best to be had. And how often have we not all paid good prices for things and discovered they were junk? Consider our health care system: we pay approximately twice as much for health care as any other developed nation, and our health outcomes are well below what those other nations receive. We really do not get what we pay for! We die earlier. Our child mortality rates are higher. We have more people without health care, at all. Insurance companies skim off 30% for themselves. Top insurance and medical plan executives pay themselves salaries and stock options and bonuses at a rate that would lead us to believe that they had found the fountain of ...

While I am thinking about outdated notions, some of which always were a bad idea, let me suggest that the local funding and determination of curricula for public schools is a bad idea; one might say, a bad idea what has went. All right, I will make a few concessions to the history of the idea. In a static society in which one could expect to stay close to home all of one's life, allowing the local population to set the curriculum might work reasonably well. A remnant of that idea is conceding that special conditions might exist locally that the schools ought to address. But in a national and international society, in which young people have to compete with people from all over the world, it is foolish to rely on a scatterbrained educational system. On that level, our schools are a disgrace. Performance scores are embarrassing. As for funding, the only school districts that benefitted from local funding are the very wealthy school districts. Having the good luck to live in a wea...

Here is a notion we should get rid of: the notion that our employer should take care of us. The idea may be very old; perhaps as old as kings and their servants. Even there, one might question how well kings cared for their serfs. In our own history, prime examples of how the idea used to work can be found in the automotive industry, or in steel mills. Jobs were often life-long, if the work did not kill you. Sometimes the company even owned the town and the houses its employees lived in. As unions gained strength, employers established pension programs, the unions bargained for job security and, later, for health care programs partially of fully funded by the employer. Fathers schemed to get their kids jobs at the steel mill, or at the automotive plant, because it was for life. There were even death benefits, and paid funeral expenses. The steel mills closed. The clothing mills closed. The automobile companies went bankrupt. The basis for the economy shifted from manufacturing t...

Is it not astonishing to listen to otherwise full-grown politicians talk about how incompetent government is at governing, and how smart and competent private enterprise is? In today's paper, Tim Pawlenty, outgoing Governor of our fine State, who has made a career for himself by opposing taxes, and who has limped along bragging about that--his virtue-- by borrowing money from our children and grandchildren, and by imposing "user fees", which look amazingly like taxes, although he assures us they aren't, is opening his run for President. He says that Medicaid is broke, Medicare is broke, and Social Security is broke, and he wonders why we would want a government-sponsored option for health care. Does Mr. Pawlenty not recall that private enterprise almost brought our nation, and the world economy, for that matter, to its knees, just a few months ago, and that the government has had to come to the rescue and bail them out for their greed and incompetence? Sometimes priv...

Once upon a time, about fifty years ago, I was a parish pastor in California. Once upon a time, I was religious. It worked that way. Just before finishing my studies, I was appointed to be a kind of unordained interim pastor of a congregation in San Jose. The Church Council members--all male-- would not allow me to go up to the altar during the services because I was not yet ordained. That is how it worked. A couple of years later, at my own parish in Fremont, our Church Council--not all male--appointed a very fine man to be our Deacon; that is to say, to be my assistant during church services. I will call him Ted. Ted was gay. He assisted, as a Deacon, for several years, until he and his partner moved to San Francisco. I have been thinking about Ted, lately, amazed at how slow and stupid society can be; even California society, most of it, at least. A large branch of the Lutheran Church is about to meet here in Minneapolis and debate whether they will ordain gay and lesbians to th...

After twelve years, I traded in my trusty pickup for a newer, used pickup. (I missed making payments!) When we first moved to this address, I bought a used mower. After three years, it was time for a less tired, used mower. The first week I had the newer pickup, a kind lady backed into it, resulting in a new left door, and things. The first time I used my fine, newer, used mower, I nudged it up toward a power pole and smashed the lower part of the front part of the whateveritis. It wasn't really my fault. I was not used to the foot pedals. The mower rather just leaped forward toward the pole. The kind lady who backed into my pickup agreed. "Those kinds of things happen," she said, "when you are not paying attention to the real world." I am willing to pay attention to the real world, but there seems to be less and less of it. You know: Obama is a foreign-born fascist communist; Sarah Palin is a fighter, not a quitter; She thinks about things; We have the ...

There is a document now that proves that Barack Obama was born in the Republic of Kenya, complete with stamps and everything from the Republic of Kenya, issued before there ever was a Republic of Kenya. Obama was born in 1961, and the Republic of Kenya was born in December of 1964. The birth certificate shows that Obama was born three years after he was born in Hawaii, and one year before Kenya was born. That man is amazing! He planned all of this before he was born, so far as I can tell. He planned all of this before he knew that he would be Black, and before he knew he would be President. He planned all of this before God created the universe in 1973, or whenever it was that Adam met Eve in Indiana. I don't want to suggest that the Birthers are stupid, but it might be . . . Oh ...! . . . a good idea to look into the idea that not all politicians are created equal, but that some are deficient. You will forgive me, I am confident, for wondering whether all those alien space shi...

Sarah Palin is one amazing woman! She, personally, has performed two miracles in just the last two weeks. First, she espied a "Death Panel" in proposed health care legislation. There was no Death Panel in the legislation. There never was. There was only the proposal to pay doctors to spend time with people who wanted to prepare living wills, something even Sarah Palin has endorsed in the past. But her eyesight is amazing, able to see things in the thickest darkness that exist nowhere. Sarah is not a normal human being! Second, having announced that she saw Death Panels, she declared that her opposition to killing kids and grandparents resulted in Congress removing the non-existent Death Panels from where they had never been. That is some power she has there! But, then, Sarah is used to miracles like that. After all, she has personally seen her pastor in Wasilla cast the most terrifying demons out of witch-women! It is sobering, is it not, to recognize that witches most ...

"Oh, you can walk up to the Rose Garden!", Daniel said, with all the confidence of a stout young Christian holding four aces. We walked up to the Rose Garden. It didn't seem so bad until we ran out of breath and our muscles cramped and a nice man named Tensing Norgay asked if he could help us. All right! I exaggerate! We had to ask him. The Medical Center in Portland is situated at the top of Mt. Everest as a way of controlling medical costs by controlling access: anyone who can climb that high does not need medical care. The Rose Garden is one of the camps on the way to the top. It is a magnificent Rose Garden, but in my thorny opinion, in spite of all its color and romance, it pales compared to the Japanese Garden just up the hill. Every turn in the Japanese Garden opened another sculpted world. Maybe it was that I had been reminded how much of the Pacific Northwest has been scorned by yards full of old cars and broken machinery. It is not just there, where I was b...

When people get scared, they do stupid things. They scream, run like mindless rabbits in circles, lash out like lizards, stop listening to common sense, hit someone or something, run over their own kids, say the craziest things, and shit in their pants. What could possibly scare Americans like that? How about realizing that, while we are a curiously religious nation, we are not necessarily a Christian one? We used to pretend we were a nation of Episcopalians and Presbyterians, even while there were Baptists and Lutherans and Methodists and heathens and Jews and Catholics in almost every town. Once we thought we were an European nation, rather like the scorned and most ambitious son who left home, went to America, and made good. We were the third or fourth sons, following the inheritor of the property, the son in the military, and the priest in the family. We came here with nothing, and made good, sweating and saving. We were a white nation, even if we did not belong to the Ku Klux Kl...

We are on our way north, and shall be passing by St. Joseph's Hospital in Tacoma, where I was born and sent home uncircumcised, and where, later, when I was old enough to know what they were doing, they recalled me to trim the mast. We had a fine time in Portland, and are delighted to know what a great job you are doing, although your mother still thinks you were a bit hasty in deciding not to become a lawyer and sue the bastards for malpractice. See you soon!

God made an exception for us: the weather was ideal. I kept thinking about Lewis and Clark, and their description of the weather, there where the Columbia River does a futile battle with Poseidon. The sea will swallow the river, and all the rivers, but not before punishing them for having left home. There is a reason for moss. The Museum itself is magnificent! It is an example of what can be done when we invest in each other, and in each other's well-being. Astoria is a small town, but an historic one. It deserves--we deserve--such a maritime museum where history, the sea, and the rivers still meet. Daniel learned to tie a bowline, just steps from where a coast guard boat stood up on a wave, as if slugged by the sea, something like the river itself. Fine, old, wooden seiners made art of shrewd design. The lighthouse ship at the pier neglected art entirely on behalf of survival and brutal functionality. The bridge across the Columbia was spidery in its reach and tenacity. O...

It takes a certain, minimal amount of uranium or plutonium for a sustained nuclear reaction. Short of that amount, the reaction fizzles out. With a critical mass, it sustains itself. We visited Daniel, in medical school in Portland, Oregon. I kept thinking about the stands at the University of Chicago, under which scientists first succeeded in creating an artificial sustained reaction. The stands are gone, now. Portland, Oregon, has achieved another kind of critical mass. The city is, like some other great urban areas, a great restaurant town. You need a lot of critical components to sustain such restaurants. You need deteriorating houses on narrow streets capable of being divided into seventeen rentals each. You need timing. You have to get there and subdivide the houses before they fall to the ground and rot, or before the gentrifiers-- young professionals with too much money and no kids-- discover how close they are to the city center, and rehab them. You need a porous immi...

In the fine and fantastic logic of the medieval church, the term invincible ignorance referred to circumstances beyond the control of people that left them hopelessly ignorant, and that, in some cases, was a fine thing! For instance, if a person, never in his life, had ever heard that Jesus was available to save his ordinary, miserable arse, then God could not hold him responsible for not being a Christian. See? Hopelessly ignorant; not to be held responsible! The doctrine of invincible ignorance is being put to new use. Here! Let me count a few of the ways: A Daily Kos/Research poll found that 28% of Republicans do not believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States. Another 30% are "not sure". That his birth certificate is on file, and that a Hawaiian newspaper, at the time of his birth, noted it is entirely beside the point. They don't believe it! Charles M. Blow, in a N.Y. Times op ed tells more: Last summer, a Gallup poll said that six of every ten R...

A mixture of three! Ah, those French! That is such a delicate way of speaking of three people living together in a sexual relationship! But let us, here, speak more generally of three people simply being together for whatever reason. Mari and I have just returned from the States of Washington and Oregon. We visited Becky and Stan somewhere up a creek in Washington, and Daniel on a hill and bottomed out in Portland, Oregon. Stan is my brother, and Daniel is my step-son. We rented a car in Seattle, and drove up into the Cascades, and then down to Portland and back. While in Portland, I took up residence in the back seat of our god-awful, little Dodge Caliber. It is a damned noisy little bugger, but that drawback is offset by its impossible sight-lines. Daniel either drove, or sat in the front passenger seat because he knew, often, sometimes, where we were going. And--I say this entirely seriously--he and his mother needed every moment to trade anecdotes and information: it had b...