SmokeSound

Someone should introduce Joe "You lie!" Wilson to Alan "Quick and Easy!" Grayson. It won't be an easy introduction.  Joe is a Republican, and Alan is a Democrat. Generally speaking, Republicans and Democrats don't even speak the same language. Joe and Alan do, however.  Both are members of Congress. Alan Grayson says that, judging by their lack of health care proposals, all the Republicans want is for old people to stay healthy, or die quickly, and Joe, you know, called the President a liar. Those are a couple of sweethearts!   I will bet that if we could get them to talk to each other, they could sit down with people like Michele Bachmann, and even an ordinary guy such as Andy "Moon River" Williams and come up, not only with a health care proposal, but maybe even a rough draft of an ethics and civility code.

Andy "Moon River" Williams, whose voice enchanted Ronald Reagan, thinks Barack Obama is terrible; that Obama want the Republic to fail, and to become a Marxist country, instead. Andy "Moon River" Williams, is out of his 81-year-old mind! Ah, who cares about Andy Williams? If it were not the case that opinions like his are the red meat of the Republican Party, sane people would just laugh and say something about how good Andy's face lifts are. I know something about getting old. I know that about sixty years ago, Joe McCarthy (who could have used a face lift) scared all of us by charging that there were communists all over our government.  John Birchers believed that even that Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspiracy. In quieter times, we recognized, not only what nonsense that was, but what hysteria it was. The same kind of baloney is being sold now by ultra-conservative political and religious fanatics. It is ...

A miserably long time ago, when I had a completely different set of in-laws, we drove to Texas to visit a brother-in-law.  I heard myself imitating his way of talking, and staggered back, inside, hoping that he did not think I was making fun of him. It happened without intention. All of us have friends who have lived overseas for ten or twelve days, and come home talking about the telly, or the loo, Ciao-ing us, and getting everything spot on. They tell us they had not realized they had suddenly become cos-mo-pol-itan!, that their diction had changed forever. Imitation is the sincerest form of conformity. An article in Natural History magazine-- ( Bodies in Sync ) explains how out cousins, chimpanzees, imitate each other, yawning together, laughing together, in a kind of contagion of imitation. We human beings do the same, helpless to stop yawning, laughing together at the sound of laughter. We "go along".  It is how children learn to become satisfact...

We drove for three hours, south through No Man's Land, which the occupants have tried to glamorize by calling it, "Rochester".  Rochester, home to Mayo Clinic, IBM, and quite a large number of Canada geese that refuse to go south for the winter, is a colorful city only in comparison to the insides of the refrigerator display at Home Depot. Rochester is populated with doctors, lawyers, computer programmers, and geese that freeze solid. Mari brought a book to read, and I had the big, ugly trailer stuffed with lawn mowers, tools, and dry wall. I was going to finish sheet-rocking the Electric Outhouse, and if there was time, to saw down a forest of weeds growing in the field along the driveway. We drove through thunderstorms, a weather front backing toward the northwest, from where it had come, angry that its intentions had been denied.  I was ready, prepared to cut the drywall in the covered trailer, and rubber-boot it into the two-story outhouse. The ...

Tiny Tim Pawlenty, the lame-duck Governor of our fair and limping State--the same Tiny Tim who did so dearly want John McCain to choose him as a running mate, but whose evangelical religion did not allow him to wink at another male, a stricture that did not apply to Sarah winking at John, because Sarah and John are both of the opposite sex-- that Tiny Tim! has become presidential.  That is to say, he now drives only in the very-rightest lane, and says the rightest things.  For instance, our fair lad has always hated taxes.  He has vowed never to raise taxes.  He never has raised taxes.  He has raised user fees, but that doesn't count.  He once tried to build a huge freeway project here by asking the contractors to lend the money to the State, because the State was broke. Nobody bid on the job.  Our Tim should have asked them to front construction user fees, maybe.  Cutting taxes on those who earn most, and refusing to fi...

Whoever predicted that books would die in the age of electronics certainly got it all wrong!  The information age sells books. Right-wing preachers get rich selling books. An amazing number of people buy the latest keys to unlocking the secrets of the universe, a phantasmagoric new way to read the Bible, or how to hold your tongue just right so that Attila the Hun or Jesus or maybe even God can slip the latest hallucinogen down your throat. What did we used to have in there before that egomaniac out west somewhere filled our empty lives with purposeful purpose? Now it is Glenn Beck who has discovered a book. Another religious screwball, of course!  His name is (was) W. Cleon Skousen.  He was a Mormon, but even the Mormons finally disowned him.  Not Glenn Beck. He wrote several books, one of which is The Five Thousand Year Leap.  He supported the John Birch Society, and thought Dwight Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the communist conspir...

Football announcers love to say that! "Look't his eyes!" The eyes, of course, belong to the quarterback, who is 100 yards away from the announcer, and thirty yards away from the eye-looker-to-be. They are talking about a guy who is wearing a helmet with a steel-bar face mask, whose eyes are in there, somewhere. But it wouldn't do to say his helmet is turned to the left, or to the right, or is upside-down.  They talk about his eyes, pretending that a defensive player, thirty yards away, can see that although the helmet is turned to the left, the quarterback is really looking to the right, and that is plain to anyone who will track his pupils.  Or his irises. Or his macula.  In there.  Inside that helmet, and that face mask, and that deceitful, bloodshot eyeball. A few years ago, the same announcers were telling us how good quarterbacks are at "looking the defender away", which sound like a beginning German lesson:  "Throw me off the...

There is a cleavage in our public life that is not enjoyable to look at.  It is the division between people who believe that government is how we do things together, and those who believe that government is almost always a blood-sucking leech. There is racism, too.  There are the cautious who abhor change, and the eager who affirm it.  We are still a sexist nation. We are under terrible stress, not just from a recession brought on by unfettered greed, but caught up in a societal revolution changing from an industrial to an information-based society.  Millions have no health care plan. Millions have no real prospect of a good job. Our educational system is a wandering, ineffectually, without a clear sense of direction, or an agreement about how to fund it. But a whole lot of the animosity we see and feel is expressed in a hatred for "government", on one hand, and a frustration for reluctance to apply government effectively, on the other. ...

The Family Research Council, meeting way over on the right-hand side of the Nation, took a straw poll to show whom the delegates preferred as a candidate for the Presidency. Mike Huckabee got more than 28% of the vote. Way back, in a virtual tie for second place, came Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Tiny Tim Pawlenty, Mike Pence, and (I think it was) Archie Bunker. A representative of the family-values-laden Family Research Council was interviewed, later. "I am surprised," the interviewer said, "that Sarah Palin did not do better in the straw poll.  I suppose the problems she is having with her own family hurt her." "Oh, no!" the representative of the family-values-laden Family Research Council said.  "They love Sarah Palin here!"

Once upon a braver and riskier time, Minnesota elected Jesse Ventura Governor. Our present Governor is no Jesse Ventura. That is good.  That is bad. Tim Pawlenty is our Governor now. He had hoped that John McCain would pick him to run for the Vice Presidency, but Sarah Palin winked at John, promising more than she intended to deliver, and John just stood there, twirling his wedding ring, thinking about how much Sarah could help him. Tim tried winking, too, but by then John had given his credit card to Sarah. Our good Governor, Mr. Pawlenty, is a fine and decent man.  Everyone who goes to that big megachurch with him says so. Mr. Pawlenty is opposed to paying for anything, so he has refused to raise taxes.  Without enough income, the State has had to slash services, borrow massive amounts of money against the future, and has discovered that while taxes are evil--nigh unto satanic--user fees are not. We have soaring user fees, stunted services, and...

Gerry Schwarz listened to the two guys ahead of her in the grocery store line: "How's work going?" "It's OK when it doesn't rain.  I only worked for two days last week, so I only got paid for two days." "Yeah, I know how that goes:  no work, no pay." "I tell ya, if they don't impeach that Obama pretty quick, he's gonna spend us right into the poor house! He's gonna bankrupt us!" Then to the checkout girl he said: "Gimme a couple of them Powerballs!"

Imagine that there are people who do not trust their own reason, who cannot stop thinking, but who do not necessarily believe what they see, or the conclusions they come to.  The earth and the universe might, indeed, seem to be very old, but they stoutly maintain that it is just a few thousand years old, and not only that, but that it will all soon vanish, anyway. Imagine that there are people who do not trust their own ability to figure out what is good, and what is bad, because life is complicated, and who settle for golden rules handed down by a guru somewhere, who says those rules are absolutely definitive because he got them from invisible gods, or from passing angels, or from a mushroom. Imagine what it is like to live in a world which seems to have evolved over billions of years, which the smartest people you have ever heard of say is a time so long it scarcely can be imagined.  Imagine that life just happened, that all of us are really ju...

In the best of all possible worlds no one would shout to our President that he is a liar, while he is addressing Congress. In the next-to-best of all possible worlds the grown-ups would scorn the boor, and tell him so. Ours is the third- or fourth-best.  Maybe fifth. Our President is Black, and it has become plain that a fiercely angry opposition is not really talking about an economics crisis, or either of two wars, or whether every one of us ought to have health care. Lunatics and racists have been showing up at Obama appearances with guns; real guns, complete with permits and an abused Second Amendment. "You lie!" Congressman Joe Wilson shouted.  "You lie!" Everybody knew Joe Wilson wasn't talking about health care. The proposed language of the health care bill was explicit: illegal aliens could not join the program, even though no one pretends that a sick person coming to an emergency room should be thrown out onto the street. There a...

William (we call him "Bill") McGuire's compensation from United Health Group (owner of United Health Care) was 1.7 billion dollars over a ten-year period. Let us assume that Ol' Bill never took a day off. Over that ten-year period, Ol' Bill earned almost half a million dollars a day.  He was paid $1,000,000. one thousand seven hundred times.  Now, these numbers may be off just a tad, but they help explain what is going on. We are the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide universal health care.  Millions of our citizens are not covered by health care. Some of them get emergency medical care, and the people who do pay for health insurance have to pick up that cost.  It is stupid, but it is a system that has made a lot of money for Ol' Bill and lots of other people hawking health insurance.  (Health insurance is not the same as health care.  Health insurance is the way we ration health care.  Bill understood t...

A protester at Saturday's Tea Party on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. made clear that she was afraid, saying "We are losing our country, we think the Muslims are moving in and taking over." Well, let's be honest.  I have been worried, too. I have heard a lot about these Muslims, as you have, every since our hopelessly religious Black Christian President was elected.  Honestly, I have tried not to make a case that he was dangerous because he had a God-compass. I have handled that pretty well, I think.  He gets to pray to whomever he thinks will help him tame that Portuguese Water Dog, and maybe for strength to get through the next Cabinet Meeting or chat with Chuck Grassley without telling Chuck how he really feels, because we all need our own secret resources. And Barack Obama's Daddy was a Muslim! Had he not been a Muslim, we might very well have asked whether he was born in a Muslim country, as he was. But I don't want to bring up ...

I love politics because I love common endeavor. The most important things we do to form civilization are the things we have hammered out together. A good heart is a fine thing to have, but some things, such as health care, defense, education, caring for the aging, require common endeavor.  I wear out the news channels on our television. We subscribe to cable, not because we want 742 channels, but because some of those we do want come with higher numbers.  Today, however, I turned to one of the Sunday Morning Panels on Ponderous Punditry, featuring people who have never once in their whole, long, arid lives ever gone outside the Beltway in Washington except to give a speech on what people think in Washington. I could not take it!  President Obama gives too many speeches! He should have been speaking all summer long! The public option for health care is dead! The public option is a very bad, good idea! Some of those Panelists of Ponderous Punditry h...

Once upon a kinder time, there was a Republican Party. Where I came from, they were a mysterious lot because they were wealthy, Northeastern conservatives who wore suits. Out in the part of the Pacific Northwest where I came from, suits were uncomfortable requirements for graduations, weddings, and your own funeral.  Some Republicans were small-town Methodists, but we didn't know them, either. Then the Republican Party got religion: not the kind of civil religion we use on the Fourth of July and inaugurations, but real religion!  Or maybe the Religious fundamentalists just became Republicans; not the kind of Republicans who wore suits and paid cash, but I-have-been-talking- to-God-and-you-better-listen-to-the-Bible Republicans! Suspenders-wearing Republicans started wearing Bible Belts.  In recent years, while anthropologists and archeologists have been looking for hidden pockets of the Grand in the Grand Old Party, the Party has found convict...

All you have to do to believe there is a god, or many of them, is to imagine something unlike everything else you know for sure. We  know there is matter and energy. We can trace their evolution back about 14 billion years; something like that: a monstrous explosion of matter and energy. Everything else follows:  Radiation.  Stars. Galaxies.  Dark matter.  Planets. Here and there, complex atoms and molecules, some so complex we call it life:  self-replicating organisms.  Earth.  Life.  Morning Glories.  Death. Beyond things like that, we know nothing much. One can imaging a Council of Eternal Elders, beyond detection, beyond matter and energy, beyond time and space and things we can know, but of such things there is absolutely no evidence. It is just imagination.  A game of Let's Pretend. If there were evidence for a Council of Eternal Elders-- perhaps something seen by the Hubbel telescope, or a message writte...

Outside our front door, a basket hangs from the limb of a locust tree on a slight ten-foot chain.  Patti gave Mari the Morning Glory seeds, which germinated in the kitchen before we planted them in the basket. All summer long, the Morning Glories, seeking glory, have been climbing up the chain and into the tree. Once or twice, the leaves wilted, before I remembered to soak the wind-dried basket.  They recovered. Late summer, they clambered onto the tree. Now there are three georgeous purple blooms way up in the tree, doing what Morning Glories do; climbing trees and making them blossom. It is hard not to cheer, and to find cheer, in vines that climb season long, finally to find a kind of fulfillment--small arid times aside-- by reaching a beautiful place in their autumns. I should like, myself, to climb a tree, again, as I have not done now for long, without a ladder or a chore--without having to explain why-- just to r...

Sture said he had come to our door twice, and it was only by accident that we saw him the second time he came.  Our doorbell is of the wireless sort, dependent on batteries that apparently only last a year or two. Five new batteries fixed the problem! The sound of a doorbell can be heard at our house, again!  In retrospect, we realized that we have not heard that sound for a very long time!  It is a nice sound! Now we know where all the friends have gone.            Long time passing.

Drubac--he's one of the guys I walk with-- says his wife sometimes asks him what we say when we walk together.  He always says, "Oh, you know:  we talk about our feelings!" It is a myth that men cannot talk about feelings. Just this morning, I overheard just two sentences from a couple of men as I went by: "One things I don't have to worry about," the first guy said,  "is cleaning gutters." His friend replied, "Tha't a nice feeling."

So you think Michelle Obama's arms are a bit risque, do you? And you aren't sure whether Malia's hair is straight enough to travel overseas? Maybe you even remember that Nancy Reagan channeled old silent motion picture movies, or whatever it was. How about Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of the new Japanese Prime Minister? While her body slept, she flew on a triangular UFO to Venus. She came back and said it was green and extremely beautiful. She also said she knew Tom Cruise in a previous life, when he was Japanese, but no one is surprised about that. We knew he had one.  He is still having it.  In Samuel Beckett's play, Endgame, Clov asked: "Do you believe in the life to come?", and Hamm replied, "Mine was always that". I have been having an out-of-the-body experience, myself. I keep thinking that aliens arriving in stone-age UFOs, wearing hair, mostly, have been landing everywhere and giving free Kool-Aid to lots of people, who ask f...

His name was Jack Roosevelt Robinson. He played baseball. Jackie Robinson was good, but he wasn't White. He was good even at ping pong, winning the Pasadena city championship while he was in high school. His brother, Mack, finished second in the 200 to Jesse Owens at  the Berlin Olympics in the 1930s. Mack wasn't White, either. When Jackie got to UCLA, he was the first athlete to win a varsity letter in four sports. He couldn't afford to stay and graduate from UCLA-- he had only his mother to help support him-- so he went to Hawaii where he played professional football for the Honolulu Bears. Then the nation entered World War II. Jack Roosevelt Robinson became a second lieutenant, but there was a problem:  he was arrested and court-martialled during boot training because he declined to sit in the back of the bus.  You know, the Not-White thing! Later, they decided he was probably right. Still, he wanted to play baseball, so he did in the only pl...

"The Local" is an Irish restaurant and bar in downtown Minneapolis. In any Irish city, "the Local" is the the preferred local gathering place.  It is the honor of The Local on Nicolet Mall  in downtown Minneapolis that it serves more Jameson whiskey than any other bar in the world. When Ted Kennedy died, Mari and I agreed that we should repair to the Local, and hoist a Guiness and a Jameson to Ted Kennedy. Today, after a short day at work, Mari drove from St. Paul, and I took the light rail; a kind of Irish pilgrimage.  Today, for a few moments, we two Norwegians were Irish, if not in the tangled snarl of our genes, then in our appreciation. It has been a grand day to remember Ted Kennedy.  We sat outside, on the walking mall which runs drunkenly north-south, or east-west, on the lopsided Minneapolis downtown streets, paralleling the river, not the pole star. They were Swedes who did that, but I will wager they had been drinking Irish whiskey...