SmokeSound

. There is a madness that comes when you are surrounded by madness.  So far this year, ten people have been shot to death in Minneapolis.  In the most recent, a young girl, at a teen party, went outside and somehow got between two gangs who started shooting at each other.  She was killed.  The newspaper reports that her sister said:  "Oh my goodness, it doesn't matter who did it. I just wish that God gives them a second chance and they just change their lives. I don't want anybody to go to jail. I don't think it was her they were intentionally trying to hit. I think it was an accident and that they shouldn't keep shooting over this." They weren't intentionally trying to kill her.  They shouldn't go to jail.  They didn't mean to kill her.  They were trying to kill each other.  God should give them a second chance.  Guns.  God.  It is madness, all those guns!  Those arguments about how we need guns to keep ourselves ...

. While they were being coy with their Democratic counterparts, Republican members of Congress proposed dozens of amendments to health plan proposals.  Then, when it came time to vote, they voted against everything.  That had been their intention, anyway. Finally, Barack Obama convened a roomfull of legislators and tried to pry from them some agreement about health care. In effect, he kept asking, "What do you want?  Tell us!" So they did.  They said they wanted to throw out everything that had been done so far, and start over by enacting those things both sides agreed on.  And what would that be?   Oh, things! You know:  things.   Things like saving money by not spending any of it on a health care overhaul.  Getting government out. What they really mean is, "Let's do almost nothing." "Get serious," the President said.  "What do you propose to do about health care for the 30,000,000 who do not have it, and how do ...

. Twice now, in very public ways, Barack Obama has invited the Republican members of the House and the Senate to meet, publicly, and debate the issues of the nation. Twice, we have seen what it means to have a President who can think and speak intelligently.  It is almost too much to have hoped for.  .

. What a tangled web the Web weaves! I read an article in Dagbladet , a Norwegian newspaper, on how Christianity became a success in the Roman Empire.  The author is Dag Øistein Endsjø.  As it happens, his book, "Greek Resurrection Beliefs and the Success of Christianity", is published in English (at a very high price!  Religion is not cheap!).  His argument is that, although it took some military persuasion to convert the western part of the Roman Empire--the Italian part--the eastern end of the Empire, which was culturally Greek, was entranced with the idea of a physical resurrection.  Physical resurrection was not a Jewish idea.  In Judaism, one's bones are gathered to his ancestors, and the person lives so long as a memory survives.   St. Paul, our earliest reporter of New Testament events, was basically a Jew.  He said the resurrection was not physical.  The Gospels gradually move toward a physical resurrection:  flesh...

. Joel is not a patient man. He is a good man, but he is not patient. I don't know how old he is--maybe forty, maybe sixty-five--but so far in life he has never walked anywhere. He runs, somewhat under control. Television commercials drive him crazy, or crazier, but he has a solution:  he has a TiVo. He records everything, and equipped with the quickest thumb in the west, he fast-forwards through commercials, time-outs, trivial stuff such as slow-rising floods, and sumo wrestling.  He says he has perfected the timing of commercials, able to jump precisely to the real stuff, again. He has found the perfect sport for a man of his impatience: he loves curling.  In itself, curling is a bit slow, with granite rocks sliding like molasses toward a slight depression, but with the fastest finger flick in the west, Joel can catch a rock at three frozen moments in its majestic move toward the bullseye, and skip all the sweeping, measuring, lining up, deba...

. Something there is that makes equating human beings--persons--with corporations absurd. A corporation is legal definition that is intended to protect the people who work for a corporation generally not liable for corporate actions.  Without that buffer, debts incurred by the legal entity would be the responsibility of the people who work for the corporation.  A bad investment, a terrible accelerator problem, or a financial depression could ruin a lot of innocent people (together with a lot of guilty ones).  If you invested your life savings in Chrysler Corporation, and the corporation goes bankrupt, you will lose your life savings because you turned them over to the corporation, but you will not lose anything else except your reputation as an investment genius.  So, in some limited sense, a corporation is defined as a person, legally.  It is responsible for its own actions.  It can go broke.  You can sue it.  The corporation can contribute to...

. I have been thinking about the panda bear who screamed at us at the bank drive-in.  "Obama is stupid!", she shouted:  "There is no global warming!"  I suppose drive-in rage is a form of road rage, except that the road had nothing to do with it.  It was entirely political:  political rage.  When the screaming pink panda was sure we had heard her, she charged off, inside her assault vehicle. Political rallies, such as the Tea Baggers are having, are something like people in cars.  Rallies are a safe place to scream at people, to curse them and flip them a bird.  I used to worry about drivers who screamed and honked and exhibited their middle fingers.  I always let them go.  I knew that some of them had guns in their cars or trucks.  Now we know that some people bring guns to political rallies, too.  Isn't that comforting!  It isn't Obama who is trying to take our country and consititution away from us:  it is...

. Mari drove up to the ATM window at her bank. It is her favorite Republican-Right-Wing-God-is-Good Bank. She rolled down her window and punched bottons in order to make a deposit. "What was that?" Mari turned to ask me.  "Did someone say, 'Obama is stupid!'?" I had heard a voice, too, but my window was closed.  I looked around.  There was only one other car in the drive-through lanes. "It must have been that ugly woman over there in the Suburban Assault Vehicle," I said.  She looked like a pink panda bear without facial hair.  Then she drove forward, shouting about the postcard sized bumper sticker on Mari's car, which says something about supporting Barack Obama. "Stupid!" she shouted.  "Obama is stupid!  There is no global warming!" "Roll up your window, and don't make eye contact!" I said to Mari.  "Things are getting hot!"

. After an early morning walk at the Mall, I drove toward the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe where six or eight of us meet to tell lies. Just as I approached an intersection, a small car came from the right, intending to turn left, toward me, but drove up onto a three-foot-high wall of snow, leaving its front wheels hanging free. "A cell phone!" I thought. I stopped, and backed up to the car. The driver, having discovered that revving the engine did very little to get him back off the ice pack, climbed down and said, "Cell phone!" "I will pull you off," I said, "if you will hook this tow line to your own car." (I didn't want to be responsible for ripping the plastic bumper off his car.) "Try to find a place on the frame!" He tried.  He got up and said he would hook it to his bumper.  He was willing to take a chance. "No," I replied.  "Let me look." I found a place on the frame.  He turned ...

. I began to wonder what people mean when they say they are spiritual, but not religious. "I don't go to church, but I am spiritual." I think it has become a weasel-word.  We used to think that people had souls, or we used to be taught that people had souls.  Souls are rather difficult to catch.  I recall, from perhaps the mid-twentieth century, reading how perfectly serious people did things such as weighing people just before and just after they died to see if they could detect what the weight of a soul would be. No luck!  Apparently, souls are exceedingly light. Another experiment was to try to capture whatever it was a dying person exhaled, on the grounds that souls were the breath of life.  No luck there, either! But spiritual things are not tangible or material.  They are . . . well . . . spiritual , something like God and angels. And souls.  They are there , or course, but they cannot be detected, because only crass...

NBC does not want to broadcast the Olympic events when they happen.  They save them until prime time, when it will be better for their ratings.  Once upon a very long time ago, perhaps when there was only one channel, we didn't know what happened anywhere except in the neighborhood, until the evening news.  That time, like the day when the Tooth Fairy was born, never was, but it was easier to pretend.  NBC pretends that if they don't show us what happened until it gets dark in New York that nobody will know, and that all of us will have held our breath since breakfast in Vancouver.  In other parts of the world, avid sports fans stay up, or get up in the middle of the night, to see how their symbolic selves are doing. It doesn't have to do with broadcast capability, or with available time.  I saw daytime television once!  The best program in daytime television is less exciting than watching sweepers during a curling match.  NBC is doing o...

. The city and I are in dispute about where to put the snow; a dispute we contend without words.  God and I spread the snow equitably--enough for everybody, enough for both the street and our driveway.  The city, less concerned for our driveways than for the street, tumble furrows of snow, like the wake of city street boats, onto our lawns.  I blow it back, always into the wind, and the wind sides with the city.  I wear a stocking cap and a frozen smile.  On sunny days in winter, I explore electronic flower seed catalogs, imagining a stream of color down through our back yard, there where neither the city nor I disturb the snow where it lies, before it runs to the river, and New Orleans.  You will understand. 

. Minneapolis rises above the trees like a city forgotten in farmland.  It doesn't belong there, straddling a lazy river, no longer paying much attention to it, treating it like a summer road for barge traffic bound for St. Louis and New Orleans.  Minneapolis is a lake town, not a river town.  Where the creeks filled marshes, Minneapolis made lakes.  Only the odd want a river house in Minnesota.  Minnesotans rim every water-filled glacial depression with summer homes, leaving the rivers to barges and big shots with big boats.  It is farmland yet, even when the fields have gone and left behind tall buildings at the side of the tamed river.  St. Paul, where the big tow boats from New Orleans and St. Louis come and turn back with grain and coal, is a river town, a commerce town when commerce came on trains and barges, before money became commerce and big money built banks and big government above lock and dam #1, by the Ford Plant, i...

"Why did they decide we should all walk at the same time?"

. Tea Party people and the Texas Board of Education are hell-bent on convincing us that this is supposed to be a Christian nation.  That is just another way of saying that they are hell-bent on convincing us that if you are not a Christian, you had damned-well better get used to the idea that this is not your kind of place! And not just Christian, but a Protestant Christian, not Catholic Christian nation!  Christians with anti-abortion billboards in the front yard, and with no evolutionists in the back yard!  Fundamentalist Christians, who believe the earth is very old--about six thousand years old--and that God arranged for Caucasians to sail from the British Isles and establish a God-fearing nation of people peculiarly like a congregation of gun-toting Baptists!  "Well," they ask, "were not the Pilgrims hell-bent on following God to this Promised Land, and did they not intend to found a religious nation, just as soon as they could beat back the people who alre...

I awaken early, stumble into the bathroom, wrap myself in a goofy bathrobe large enough to keep the pickup warm, and set about turning myself into a semblance of humanity. It is almost always dark. I walk before the sun comes up. Sometimes one of our cats wanders in, assuming I can see what they can; cat-eyed. This morning I saw Annie, vaguely, scarcely a shadow on the bridge outside our bedroom door, as she often is at that hour. "Come on, Annie!" I said, quietly, not wanting to awaken Mari. "Puss, puss!"  "Come on, Annie!" She ignored me, as she often does.  The light was better when I came out.  I could see what had been only a shadow. I had been talking to a watering can.

One of our oddest beliefs is that the minority should go along with the majority.  It lies at the heart of democracy.  It is probably a commitment to long-term pragmatism.  Without that agreement, a rule of law would be impossible.  The minority could refuse to pay taxes, or get driver's or marriage licences, on the grounds that they did not agree.  We elect representatives to government offices, and they debate and vote and agree that they will all go along with the majority, at least until they can form a different majority.  Republicans have apparently decided that they will not go along with a majority.  Either they demand more than a majority, or they have decided to cripple the efforts to get anything done.  It seems to be their plan to stall the whole governing process until they have a majority, in which case they will then demand the minority will have to go along with them.  And the Democrats apparently agree with them....

The checks and balances of our form of government are something like the balances of my own checkbook:  there are so many checks that there is no balance.  It was the intention that the Senate be less volatile than the House of Representatives, and perhaps that it be a bit less democratic, too.  The State with the smallest population gets two Senators, just as the State with the largest population.  The Senate is designed to represent political entities--States--equally, undoubtedly as a check on a national government:  States rights! Even though the number of Representatives in the House is proportional to population, they are not purely democratic, either.  California could be argued to have a more directly democratic system, with its common use of initiatives, in which a majority of voters can fix into law decisions that must be implemented--for instance, that property taxes be limited, or gay marriages be outlawed, or whatever the public thinks...

"How's that hop-ey, chang-ey thing workin' out for ya?" My god, I try to ignore her!  It doesn't work. It really isn't even Sarah who is driving me nuts.  The perky little dear is just making a buck to support her family, and trying to do what is best for Alaska by resigning as Governor.  Deep insight and self-perception like that are her credentials for goosing the Tea Baggers, and for flirting with the Presidency in 2012 if it looks best for her family and the nation and global warming and the whole universe. It is all those Tea Baggers that are driving me goofy.  They like Sarah.  She is just what they admire:  she winks at them, and says, "ya" and scorns those in-te-llek-ya-alls who use teleprompters and talk pretty.  The Tea Baggers welcome neo-Nazis, and god-awful racists like Tom Tancredo, who advocates good, ol' Southern literacy tests to keep immigrants and you-know-the-types out of the voting booth, because they are the peopl...

Sister Sarah scolds Rahm Emanuel for using the term, "retarded".  She was right. Sister Sarah used the term herself with regard to her son. Her son-in-law said so. Sister Sarah heard Rush Limbaugh use the term. She said he is a comedian, and that is OK. Sister Sarah is a fraud.

Sometimes, when life hardly seems worth living, I almost wish I were an economist.  I am not often so depressed.  There is a reason:  one of our political slogans is driving me nuts.  It goes something like this:  "If we managed our personal budgets the way the government does, we would go broke."  Or, "Anyone who has ever had to pay bills knows that you cannot spend more than you take in".  That kind of thing. The fact is that personal household budgeting is not like a governmental budget.  Period!  It is not the same thing, writ large! Personal budgets, and for that matter, State budgets, too, have to be balanced, if not in the short run, certainly in the slightly longer run.  Here in Minnesota, for instance, the State is allowed to be out of balance for a couple of years, but it has to pony up before the next couple of years has ended.  The major difference is that the federal government creates the currency that all of us ...

Carola Häggkvist is her real name.  She is usually just called, "Carola".  (I suppose there is an obvious reason for that.)  She is beautiful, and is a very popular singer in Scandinavia.  Carola is also a religious nut.  She says she was not at all surprised by the earthquake in Haita where 200,000 people were killed.  It says, right in the Bible, that such things are a sign that the end of the world is near.  That is what Carola (not to be confused with a Toyota) believes. It makes sense, doesn't it?  As our very own religious nut, Pat Robertson, said, the people of Haiti brought it on themselves when they made a pact with the devil, and threw off French colonial slavery, and became the first nation in the hemisphere to free itself of slavery.  That is what happens if you hate being a slave, and throw out the French, and live on top of an earthquake.  God, who was remarkably patient during the slave trade, finally had enough of Hai...

There is madness.  Simple, incurable madness. The polls show that huge numbers of people on the political right think that Barack Obama is a Muslim, born in Kenya, to an unmarried mother, not a U.S. citizen, who is plotting to steer our country into a Stalinistic state.  Apparently, even before he was conceived, he had arranged to become President some day so he could drag us all down to ruin.  A majority of right wing people in some southern states think he ought to be impeached or, at least, that it is likely that he ought to be impeached.  It is of no importance, whatsoever, to those same people, that Todd Palin, Our Little Sarah's husband, was for years a member of a political movement to have Alaska secede from the Union.  The Governor of Texas could not bring himself to say that Texas should not secede.  Libertarians argue for a vastly reduced scope for government, and health care, public education, food safety, public highways, universal health...

Daniel just called from Portland, Oregon, where he is in a rotation for plastic surgery, at a Veterans Hospital.  It has nothing to do with Botox or silicon or sandpapering skin to give you a healthy glow.  He said that he noticed the office of a veterinarian, nearby, who specialized in surgery on birds; presumably not plastic. Mari and I once shared a table at Chanhassan dinner theater with a veterinarian whose specialty was acupuncture for horses. He said that it was amazing how much new vigor horses showed once you poked them with needles.  "How much business is there for a veterinarian who specializes in operating on birds?", Mari asked. "All of it," I suggested. There is a great kindness in repairing what a damnable war does, or what wandering genes or an earthquake does to ordinary people who wish they were ordinary, again. There is a great madness in sculpting already beautiful people to neurotic and plastic hopes for self-worth; in pu...

It is not that Minnesota winters are so brutal.  It is that Minnesota winters shape us to be as they are: winter becomes part of who we are, expected, accepted; the careful time before the earth greens, again. There is no record of a seventy degree day in February in the Twin Cities.  There have been at least two seventy degree days in Minnesota. This is not one of them. This day reminded me of a winter in Oslo, Norway, when the sun did not shine for more than thirty days, and I watched the sun, when it did show again, climb tangled up through the spars of a sailing ship lying in harbor just south of the City Hall.  Today is gray, unlike many winter days in Minnesota, where sun on snow is common, lending to an attitude, making finger-frost easy and depression a chore. We all know the sun is on our side; that we will win. So even when it is gray, there is something beautiful; a flash of green, a good dog, an attitude, an expectation.

"You just write in to the Ministry, and I will send you, at no cost to you, a free book of my detailed plan of salvation!"  No, that is not Rush Limbaugh!  It is just about every radio evangelist you have ever heard. It works this way:  The Reverend Glorious B. Praiseworthy publishes a book of his Sunday sermons, for which he gets a royalty.  If he does his own publishing, he gets an even bigger royalty for every book sold.  When you write in to the Ministry, the Ministry buys a book from the Rev. Glorious B. Praiseworthy, and sends it to you.  The Reverend pockets the royalty, and pretty soon you will be asked to contribute to the Ministry which, of course, does many other worthy deeds, too.  Probably.  Things such as paying the Reverend G. B. Praiseworthy a salary for his participation in the Ministry. I don't know what brought that to mind.  It has been drifting around in my head for about sixty years.  It might have been--...