SmokeSound

I will tell you what retired old geezers do: I have just spent half an hour tieing a knot in a string. You know what the little gadgets are like: they unscrew, where a nylon washer keeps a simple little knot in three strings from slipping out of the knob, except that the factory knot slipped out.  "I can fix that!", I said:  "Piece of cake!"  I used every tool I own, except for one of my snow shovels, and I used that to scoop up the waste pieces I created.  The State of the Union address last night was easy, in comparison.  All Barack Obama had to do was to tell us the truth:  He almost did that, except for telling us that we have two wars we don't need, and never did, and that we cannot have all the things we want and need if we are not willing to pay for them.  The most bone-headed idea in decades is that if we simply cut taxes on the people with most of the money, everything will be fine.  We tax working people pretty heavily, although we pretend that

When he heard that allowing gays to marry would destroy the institution of marriage, Dale thought he would say something absurd, so he asked whether that meant he would have to get a divorce.  A cartoon once ran in the New Yorker (as I recall) that pictured a grumpy old geezer commenting to his wife as he read the newspaper: "It says here that gays want to get married. Don't they have enough problems as it is?" In California, opponents of gay marriage are testifying that, although there is no evidence for it, allowing gays to marry will probably result in Dale having to get a divorce, or something. "Traditional marriage" has not done so well. Half of all marriages end in divorce.  Half of mine have.  I don't think I got smarter, so I must have gotten luckier the second time. In the hazy past, when I taught ethics in a college founded by church people, where it was easy to say things like "til death do us part", I used to op

Sarah Palin is being paid $100,000. to show up at a Tea Party. That is a hell of a lot of money to show how angry you are. I am constantly amazed at how angry people get when they drive a car. Sensible people honk, shout, blink their lights, and finger-salute what ought to be ignored. It has something to do with driving an attack tank. Politics is being reduced to a traffic jam: birds flipping everywhere. $100,000. birds.

Minnesota is a remarkably sunny place, even in the winter.  However, these last few days, we have had foggy weather, as if we had caught a cold.  In fact, I, if not the whole state, have had a cold.  I think I caught it in Arizona, on a recent visit.  I have become acutely aware of what a sore diaphagm is, and have taken to hugging myself as I cough.  It does not work. Minnesota and I are fog-bound.  I was born fog-bound.  I was born in Tacoma.  We lived twenty miles south of Puget Sound, so a visit to Tacoma required a drive, and a descent on Pacific Avenue to the level of the Sound, which caused one to realize, even without having read it, that Dante was wrong about the descent into Hades.  It is not through fire, down to ice:  it is fog all the way!  I remember walking in front of a car, with a flashlight, trying to find lane markers.  (I can also recall packing our whole neighborhood basketball team into a Ford coupe, and driving down Pacific Avenue to play games in Tacoma;

Has there ever been a more obscene idea than trickle-down economics: that, if we make the rich very rich, the wealth will trickle-down to the rest of us? There has been a more obscene idea: that if you say that, the rest of us will believe it. It rests on the assumption that the problem is that someone has plugged the pipe, and if we can just unplug it, and let the rich get rich, there will be so much wealth that all of us will walk on streets of gold, and have our very own harps and pearls. What the trickle-down theory does prove is that there are smart people, and stupid ones. Throwing the whole hog to the lion does not make the scavenger fat. The scavenger hopes for scraps. 

We have to begin somewhere.  Let us begin here:  We spend twice as much as any other developed nation while trying to provide health care to our citizens.  At the same time, every one of those other developed nations has a longer life expectancy than we do, and a lower rate of death at birth.  Ouch!  Let us put the waste argument aside.  Every system has some waste and fraud.  The job is to step on it when we see it.  Hard!  Government is what people devise to organize their affairs as they increase in size.  Even small, wandering bands develop customs and mores and rules about what must, and what must not, be done.  Large societies necessarily require large governing systems.  Even Libertarians call the police, and expect city water, and for someone else to train the doctors they think they provide for themselves.  Most Libertarians would rather not educate their own children:  they are too undisciplined.  Our economic system is heavily weighted toward mass capitalism.  Econ

Twice I took a quiz appearing in Dagbladet, a Norwegian newspaper.  It proposed to reveal what kind of a fish I would be, were I a fish.  Each time it said I was a salmon.  More specifically it said:  "A bit of a discipline problem!  You are an active little fish which splashes around.  You are very sociable and make friends easily.  For the most part, you don't eat so much, but you manage to stuff yourself now and then, too." That last line was so accurate that I almost imagined that I had been caught shirtless.  That Sagittarius business has never made sense to me.  Scandinavians aren't archers!  But fish is fish!  In my case, old fish.  To tell the truth, I was relieved to discover that I was not a cod, even though cod is a superb fish, but because, sooner or later, someone was bound to recall that cod--dried, salted, stacked like cordwood, and eventually lye-soaked and diluted and reconstituted; a gelatinous mass called "lutefisk", savored by tho

A needless war in Iraq. Squandering a huge surplus, and creating a huge deficit. Turning banking institutions loose to gamble our wealth away. Holding our noses and condoning torture. Alienating almost every nation on earth. Driving ourselves into a horrible recession. Republicans did all those things.  It doesn't matter. People are angry.  We need jobs.  Our houses are not worth what we paid for them, or owe on them. Government has been careful to save the assets and asses of huge financial institutions, to let them get filthy rich, again. The war in Afghanistan seems to be going nowhere. It doesn't matter that it takes time to climb up out of debt, or that jobs cannot be created overnight. It doesn't matter that Republicans have not cooperated with anything designed to fix what they, and we, ruined. In an election such as the one we just witnessed in Massachusetts, people will vote for almost anyone who is angry and outside. The Democrats are an inco

Until a few days ago, there were about nine million people in Haiti.  Then the earth heaved the whole nation, as if it were a rag in the mouth of a dog until buildings collapsed everywhere.  Now it appears that possibly 200,000 people died when almost everything fell down.  That is to say, two of every hundred people died almost instantly, and most of the rest of them have no place to stay. There are about two-and-a-half million people in the Twin Cities Metropolitan area.  Had the earth shook here as it did in Haiti, with similar consequences, there would be 55,000 bodies in the streets, and most of us would be homeless.  But Haiti's disaster was a national disaster.  Had the heaving of the earth done to our nation what it did to Haiti, we would have 6,500,000 people dead, with no where to go.  Mostly Saudi terrorists brought down the Twin Tower in New York City, killing about 3000. people.  To match the scale of what has happened in Haiti, we would have to imagine that thou

This posting is a bit too personal for me, and it is about me. I was encouraged, early, by a little semi-fundamentalist community of good people, to think about becoming a parish pastor. I was one of the kids who could read pretty well, so I was appointed to teach Sunday School classes to kids just a bit younger than I was.  Mostly I remember putting my feet up on the wood stove, because they were wet and cold, and causing the soles to crack across the bottom, ruining the shoes for Jesus. And for me.  And for my parents. I became the parish pastor they wanted me to be. I was a good one, increasingly haunted by the questions of what I mean when I said the words I had learned.  I finally went to the University of Chicago to get a Ph.D., and to try to discover what it was I did think and believe. Some of the finest people I have ever known were members of that parish in California.  If ever there was a better man than George Miller, I salute him now!  He is in the com

"Rights" always change.  What was a "right to privacy" yesterday is not necessarily the same thing today.  God-given rights aren't:  they come accidentally. Mari and I have just come home from a week-long visit to Tucson. Each of us checked a bag, unlocked, fully expecting, and accepting, that someone might go through the contents of the bag.  The events of the last few years, and even of the last few weeks, convince us that it is better to be searched than to be blown up in an airplane. We have a box full of small keys and luggage locks. After the Underwear Bomber set fire to his apparatus, recently-- in a suicide attempt that only a hopeless religious zealot might contemplate, it appears all of us wanting to take a plane trip might have to be X-rayed right down to our privates, just to make sure we have not stuffed our bloomers with explosives. No one likes the idea, but if the option is personal modesty of a public explosion, most of us ar

"What are you going to do when you retire?", I asked the head librarian.  He said he didn't know.  He didn't have any hobbies, and he had not thought much about it. He played golf for about six months.  Then he got a job as a city building inspector.  Maybe he read lots of city inspector books, or maybe the city didn't really care.  Another friend, equally clueless about what he might do, finally simply told everyone that he was going to become a greeter at Mal-Wart.  Pity made them leave it at that.  Out in the garage, I have a set of golf clubs, passé now because they do not have grapefruit-sized heads, and are a reminder of how once I used to drink beer at the public course, too.  I have golfed about three times (too many) in the last fifteen years.  I keep the clubs just to provide something that cannot be stored.  They are always in the way.  I think I will haul them out to the curb.  Like Biblical Martha--or was it Mary?--I have chosen the better

We have beaten back the glacier of global warming! This morning, early, the tip of the new ice age had reached into our bedroom.  I leaped from bed like an arctic ice worm, wrapped myself in swaddling cloths, and set into motion our daily-updated plan on how to deal with the side-effects of global warming, which is to say, the threat of residential freezing. The furnace was out.  We had visions of last winter's frozen pipe and the guyser that graced our lower floor. I built a wood fire with the rotten firewood bought ill-advisedly up from warmer southern lands-- that is to say, from Iowa--where it had matured for twenty worm- and rot-ridden years.  Both garages have space heaters, which I turned on, together with fans to push the air into the house. Shawn came, from the gas company, said he had a new igniter in his truck, and just like that the ice cracked, the glacier began to retreat, and Al Gore began to weep at the glory of it all! We are good now. We

Oh, glory!  Sarah Palin is going to join Fox News! She is not going to get her own program, but like Oliver North before her, she will tell the truth, as only she knows it, whenever she happens to run upon it. Won't that be fine?  We will have a whole new history of things to consider!  That quitter just never quits! I would call it a marriage made in heaven, but Sarah is already happily married to a guy who wants to secede from the Union--No, the other Union--and Fox News is more into the prostitution of facts than it is into marriage. Even so, it should be a happy marriage, however short it falls of heaven, since both Fox and Sarah will make lots of money together. A prenuptial agreement should take care of whatever might be messy if she quits, which she does not do, except for being Governor. I will bet it is God's Plan for Her, in which case we will have no one but the Almighty to blame for whatever fun Fox and the Fox do together.

You and I are reasonable people. Both of us are willing to concede that. So let us assume, just for fun and sanity, that a law against drunken driving, and a fine for drunken driving, is to make drunks think twice about driving around drunk, killing people. Suppose we suggest that such a fine, for a third offense, should be $10,000.  That might follow after a $1000. and a $5000. fine for first and second offenses. And, if you cannot pay the fine, you might have to spend 30 or 90 days, or a year in jail, as the habit continues. Fair enough!  Change the numbers!  It doesn't matter. If you are relatively poor, you are either going to pay a lot of money, or spend a fair amount of time in jail. The money alone might represent half of your annual salary, and the time in jail would affect your life even more drastically. However, if you are relatively rich, it is no big deal. You pay the fine each time.  You never go to jail. You play the old college drinking game:

It is a terrible thing to become as old as I am, and to have to admit how stupid I am.  I have been walking around on the earth, and going up and down on it, assuming that banks were places where fiscal ignoramuses like me could put their paychecks, and pay bills with almost all of it, where we could borrow money to build a house or buy a car, and where the sober, grown-up Republicans who run the banks could manage to reward such little savings as I might accidentally accumulate with a little bonus for letting the bank use my pittances for the common good.  Nah!  Banks are demonstrating that they are complex financial institutions, using our money to invent assets that vaguely rest upon bad investments in hopeless projects, in a system that shuffles ownership of those lets-pretend investments like peas under cups on a circus scam-artists come-on.  Banks are really designed to be profit-making schemes for the owners and executives of the banks.  Nothing more.  Absolutely nothing mor

When John McCain chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate for the Presidency, Steve Schmidt asked her how she felt about being chosen for such a prestigious position.  She was not surprised.  Schmidt said he asked Palin about her serenity in the face of becoming "one of the most famous people in the world." He quoted her as saying, "It's God's plan." Let us, for one brief shining moment, try to put ourselves into that frame of mind.  God, as Sarah Palin and whole busloads of other people believe, is the absolutely powerful, unimaginably wise, incredibly mysterious power behind quarks and Big Bangs and Lutherans and Sarah Palin.  God is the creator of the universe, of Satan, of Heaven and Hell, and of Sarah Palin, and God planned for Sarah Palin to become the Vice Presidential nominee under John McCain.  Sarah Palin said so.  "It is God's plan." There is no use in blaming John McCain or Sarah Palin.  What could they do?  Is that utter madn

Mari and I visited friends and relatives in Tucson just a few days ago.  It was during their frigid winter month:  January, or course!  Seventy degrees.  Mari was too warm. During last night, I awoke thinking that she and I have to find a middle ground; perhaps Nebraska.  I was cold.  The reason I was cold, I discovered when I got up, was that our boiler--the contraption that heats water for our faucets and for room heating--was not working.  It was 54 degrees in the house.  Fortunately, we are in the midst of a heat wave:  it is 15 F. above, not below, zero, as it was a day or two ago.  The view above is out the window over where I sit and type this.  Penguins are flolicking in the neighbors yard.  Whoops!  I think they ducked down behind the broken igloo!  We have gas space heaters in both garages, up and down, so I turned them on, and put fans in the doors to the living quarters.  I fired up the wood stove in the living room.  We are gaining on the dark side of global warmin

We used to say that there was no downtown in Downtown Tucson.  The Old Pueblo is spread out all over a valley floor, bumping up against the Santa Catalina and the Rincon and Tucson mountains, but that in the center of town, there seemed only to be a bank, and a semi-forgotten old theater, a Greyhound Station, and the rattiest music store west of the Pecos.  Something like that.  It may be the slowest and last hope of the Arizona Territories that downtown Tucson is showing faint signs of survival and recovery.  Their only water, of course, comes from a dry river up north, and the politics of the city is controlled by what must be John Dillinger's illigitimate offspring:  Dillinger once stayed at a hotel in downtown Tucson, next to the railroad station. It was at the restored railroad station that we met Kathy and Ivy, our former neighbors, and Nancy, whose house we bought, for lunch at Maynard's.  It is a fine place, perfectly complementing three of the best and most inter

About forty-five years ago, Margaret and I drove up to Washington State to introduce Margaret to my family.  My grandfather, Jonas Jacobson, took me aside and assured me that it was all right that I was married to a woman of German descent; that it had happened once before to our ancestors in Norway.  As it turned out, Grandad my have overestimated the capacity of the family to absorb Teutons.  We eventually divorced.  I mention that because Grandad could not have imagined how gloriously we have changed, as a family.  On the day we left Tucson to fly back to Minnesota, Mari and I drove out to see Mari's son, Michael, and Susan, again.  Michael is Asian.  Susan is Hispanic.  Elsewhere in our immediate family, we have an adopted Black daughter, and fine prospects of even more human diversity in the future.  It is glorious.  Michael has found new office space for his business, and has reasons to believe that, short of another economic disaster, things will work back to better ti

Years ago, Stan helped Mari and me, and Marty and Gail, by offering to buy, subdivide, and sell us magnificent "horse acre lots"--(big enough to keep a horse on, if your horse can eat rock and cactus).  Our plan, at the time, was to build three homes there.  As it has happened, none of us plan, and most of us cannot afford to do that.  So far, we cannot sell them, either.  Are you interested in a million dollar house?  If so, we can help you find a splendid lot.  Mari and I have lived in Tucson twice; once during graduate school, about 25 years ago, and later, after I retired, when Mari took a job at the University.  Each time we moved, we packed up our sixteen foot trailer, and drove it multiple times across the country, loaded not only with our belongings, but with tender, little souvenirs, such as cacti.  I went out to the property, one day, and hiked up the hillside to see how the Golden Barrel and the Saguaro were doing, whose lives began in Tucson, and that have t

We scraped up the edge of the glacier before we left for Tucson, arranged for Ashlee to take care of our cats and plants, and shivered off to the airport.  We sat there quite a while, as the small scheduled maintenance turned into an unscheduled computer problem, but we made it:  from zero to seventy degrees! We stayed with Michael and Susan and the kids for two nights, just before Phonz and Lucy and Nate had to resume school schedules, and then drove clear across town to Stan and Becky's home.  God, we had a good time!  Stan and Becky, having wondered for some time whether it was time to trade in their pickup, decided to do so by rolling their old one over in an icy ditch in Oregon.  No scars; no more pickup!  Poor Stan!  He is going through a change of life crisis, wondering whether to buy a Ford.  It is hard to know what to say to a man whose certainties are under review, like that.  As I see it, he may very well end up in the priesthood if he cannot come to some peace of m