SmokeSound

Lord, it do rain!  The Twin Cities is on the eastern edge of Minnesota-- the Mississippi, not the Missouri River side--and we are not far north, but what is south of us, in the State, has received about ten inches of rain. Even so, we have not hesitated to take our share of water. We noticed a little puddle of water on a lower floor window sill. (Isn't that always a heartwarming sight?)  A wet-foot and umbrella inspection showed that the gutter two stories up was running over. I made a guess:  leaves.  Autumn leaves.  The kind that drift by the window, red and gold, since you went away, when I miss you most of all, when autumn leaves start to fall.  Soon:  old winter's song! Nothing for it!  I put on my rain jacket, got out the ladder, uncoiled a long rope as if I were a mountain climber, armed myself with a narrow-bladed hoe, and went up onto the roof.  In the rain. There is something completely absurd about a 78-year-old wi...

John T. sent me an article from The Onion--easily the most factual newspaper in the country--reporting that a fifth of all Americans believe that Barack Obama is a cactus. "The poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center, found a sharp rise in the number of Americans who say they firmly believe Obama was either born a cactus, became a cactus during his youth, or has questionable links to the Cactaceae family." "We asked people of varying races, ages, and backgrounds the same question: 'What is President Barack Obama?'" Pew spokeswoman Jodi Miller told reporters. "And a fifth of them responded, 'A cactus.'" "A number of polled Americans identified [this (r.)] as a photo of President Obama."  I don't know about you, but it seems to me that this latest shift in the opinion of the electorate--or at least that part of the electorate that has, to its credit, raised very interesting question regarding the relationship of Presid...

If everything were reasonable, everything would happen for a reason. Everything isn't reasonable. There are causes, but some of them elude reason.  They just happen. My right eye isn't reasonable.  It just occasionally tears itself up, like an out-of-control groundskeeper might tear up sod. When that happens, the doctor sighs, and tries to put the sod back. I am walking around with gas in my right eye to keep pressure on the part of the retina patched into place. Gradually, the gas is absorbed, and ordinary liquid returns. Yesterday, going into the grocery, I closed the other eye and could see the line, about halfway up, between the two. It jiggled, something like a lake with small, choppy waves. Water everywhere. We awoke during the night to the sound of thunder, not immediate, but over the Cities.  The rain sounded heavy. There are no yellow lawns in the Cities this September. When I picked up the morning newspapers at the door, the wet prints of ...

1.  Which political party is opposed to raising the tax rate       on the top 3% of income takers because "that will hurt small business"? 2.  Which political party is opposed to extending unemployment benefits       on the grounds that it will hurt people with real money? 3.  Which political party wants to cut back health care to former levels       because people should put money aside to pay their own bills? 4.  Which political party want to privatize Social Security       to allow people who are smarter than Wall Street       to build a solid future for themselves in the stock market? (Please note:  If it will make it easier, the answers may be written in very tiny letters, or easier yet, by writing the answer only once.)

The espresso machine at the Café Comes from a family of basement boilers Torturing water to a soprano scream We speak incompletely, punctuated With pressure-cooker protests Only Gentle Tom, in the corner Ringed by an electronic fence Rides the wave of the espresso boiler Like a neighborhood Pavarotti Sailing solo above the cappuccino Like a tenor in Milan Joel roams the late summer room Fly swatting a squadron of open-door Attackers, making Dennis wince At his food-inspection fiasco While we politely and gently Hit ourselves on our balding heads Like Norwegians finding truth Mari hasn't seen such happy flies Since she rode a pony to country school After milking time was done Wondering if our barnyard humor Is the common element John, who cannot forget a friend Or Henry's English wives by name Frowns at how the whistling blast Turns trivia to temporary rubble Building quickly back again To an orderly acrostic memory Recalling the brand name  Of the fly...

His Special Holiness, Benedict XVI, is visiting Britain, and scolding them for allowing people not to believe in God.  (Like most people, he calls it "atheism", which really only means, "not a theist"--the belief that God is a person--but which, among most people, suggests something nasty and negative.)  Not believing in God, he said, was at the root of the Nazi purge of the Jews. There are a couple of problems with that simple analysis.  First, Catholics in Germany are not entirely innocent of the German scorn of Judaism and, second, getting their hands on Jewish money and property might have had something to do with the Holocaust.  His Grandeur went on to apologize for the continuing evidence of child sexual abuse and coverup,  by Catholic clergy. I shall not be surprised if someone in Rome does not discover that it is only the priest and bishops and nuns who have sexually abused children are all secret secularists in street-length skirts; that not being r...

The Tea Party people are doing well in elections. Even when they lose, they do not lose by much. Democrats are celebrating too early. The common wisdom is that the far right has taken over the Republican Party, and that in the general election, those idiots will not have a chance. (I am not disputing the "idiot" part; just the conclusion.) What fuels the Tea Party is a fear, and a hatred, of government, taxes, the sad state of the economy, tied together with thinly disguised fear and animosity toward Blacks, immigrants, intellectuals, and chablis. So far, the most vocal of those right-wing insurrectionists have come from the right-wing of the Republican Party, so they vote there. Are we supposed to believe that animosity toward government, incumbents, taxes, Blacks, immigrants, and people who hold their wine glasses by the base are all Republicans?  Are all of the people who are scared shitless about their own futures Republican?  Are all of the unempl...

It is that most difficult time of year-- mid-September in Minnesota--when the sky has grown gray, before the leaves turn, when friends who cannot bear bright day turn their gentle depression to ambibuous praise for how much they like having seasons. The best view from our hillside house is from the top floor, overlooking the valley where the Minnesota River joins the Mississippi. For variety, I faced the ironing board west and north, and watched the gray line at the horizon spread, not so much by moving as by oozing over the Twin Cities, as if the air were water, and the water became gray.  Somewhere in the gray, gentle thunder growled, scaring raindrops down. The shirts are hot from the iron; damp from steam. They are seasonal shirts, short-sleeved, summer-colored, and I hang them on thicker hangers, thinking they shall have to hibernate three-seasons, while I try to call up ambiguous praise for having four seasons, somewhere at the horizon.

We confuse economics and politics. Our political system is a representative form of democracy. Pure democracy means that every person votes on every issue. We elect representatives, which has two advantages: it does not require that all of us vote on every issue, and it buffers the angers and enthusiasms of the moment from being put into place without the benefit of reflection. Economically, we are a mixed system.  No state can do without some government-run systems. Who wants the police, fire, military, park, utility, education, highway, retirement, or even health systems to be entirely private enterprises?  A few.  Not most. Much of our economic activity is privately owned: shops, restaurants, factories, road paving, hardware stores, banks, farming, and most of what we do is private. When we talk, we slip easily from political shorthand-- "democracy"--to economic shorthand--"capitalism", or "free enterprise".  They are not the same t...

Almost, I convince myself that we are a normal nation. Among western nations--that is to say, among most nations sharing a European descent-- Americans are an amazingly religious people. Incredible numbers of Americans are convinced that this is not a religiously tolerant democracy, but a Christian nation, hell-bent on becoming a Kingdom of God; virgin births, resurrections, miracles, Chosen People, and Armageddon. Even so, it is not often that our political life gets so far into religious conviction that we hear the kind of things that some of the Tea Party people say.  For example, Christine O'Donnell, in Delaware, running for Congress says, as part of her campaign spiel:   "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery.  So  you can't masturbate without lust." Sister Sarah Palin is supporting Ms. O'Donnell! the Tea Party Express has given her $250,000.! She is running for Congress talking about masturbating! It appears tha...

Before you read this, please read the preceding entry, "Fear and Hate". The hatred in our society is scary, right now. Republican politicians have deliberately tolerated-- in the worse cases, encouraged--an animosity toward Barack Obama that is almost mindless: he is a Muslim, a foreigner, a communist, Black, anti-American, hell-bent on the destruction of our nation, and other, insane charges. If Cyril Connolly is right--"We hate what we fear"-- then the charlatans among us have made Barack Obama the symbol for what we fear:  Muslims, foreigners, communists, Blacks, etc.  The people who are lashing out against Obama are afraid, for their liberty, privacy, income, popularity, vanity, dreams, and plans. It is not Barack Obama. It is our own fear. When we are able to see that, we can stop hating.

"There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear, and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity,  our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate  we may be able to cease from hating."                                         --Cyril Connolly (1903-1974)                                            British Critic

We decided to have lunch somewhere interesting, just because autumn is in the air.  We settled on a German restaurant in Uptown:  Let us call it, "The Schwarzwald Inn"; something like that; something close enough to that. Mari said that years and a marriage ago she had eaten there, and the Black Forest  Schwarzwald Inn has been on a list of places we should go to, sometime.  Today was sometime. The door was unlocked.  Over in a corner, a Lonesome Soul was sitting alone, imitating a Lonesome Dűrer. The patio was unpopulated, but pleasant, with a fountain, so we sat there until the Black Forest fountain spilled over and started to flood the brickwork.  "The Rhine is flooding!", we told the waitress, and moved inside. We weren't there for the Oktoberfest; just a nice lunch. While in Portland, Oregon, we had gone to the Berlin Inn and had splendid food in a converted house.  I wanted more Vienerschnitzel, and Mari ordered pork shank...

Was ever there a worse excuse for doing some damned thing than saying that other people do worse things? When the Most Reverend Terry Jones proposes to burn Korans, misguided patriots rush to his defense by saying that foreign idiots do worse things:  they burn flags, and flog women, and eat dogs. How about that for a spirited defense for being a home-grown idiot? Or, to prevent a Muslim community center with a gym, culinary school, and prayer room two blocks from where the Twin Towers used to stand, where 300 Muslims died when they were destroyed, some genius reminds us that you cannot build a Baptist Church in Saudi Arabia, or perhaps that is a Jewish Synagogue in Iran or Kentucky. When we lost our sense of decency, we search instead for an example of really, rotten behavior, and argue that we are better than that. It is rancidly similar to agreeing that you abuse your spouse, but that you do so with an open hand, not a frying pan.

One of the wages of getting old is getting up early, even when too many hours of the night have been spent lying awake, stirring about in the detritus of the day. I see my doctor this morning, for a semi-annual checkup. He will say I am in great shape for someone in such shambles as I am.  He always says I should see some of my cohorts; that I should be glad that I can pay my bill.  What does he know? "The nurses will roll up my sleeves", I thought.   "I think I will wear a short-sleeved shirt!" I am, if nothing, an anticipater.   I am nothing. Hanging there in the closet is a shirt I was given 65 years ago. My father bought it in Canada during World War II,  when it was difficult to buy high quality wool shirts in the U.S.   It is blue-black, with patches on the sleeves.  It is a veteran. "Maybe I should wear it," I thought,  and those old bib overalls, once owned by Jan Heikes' father, and given to me.   "I could slip them up and down...

To talk about God and science in the same sentence is odd. Science is a way of learning:  posit a hypothesis--a possibility-- for how things work, and then test the idea.  If it seems to work, call it a theory, perhaps, and test it again.  And again. "Where did the universe come from?  I don't know, really, but it seems to have exploded somehow about 14 billion years ago. A Big Bang!  That sort of thing."  So you collect data, test it, and think about it some more.  The process is never done. To say that God caused the universe to be (as an example) is to say that you are stumped for any other explanation, and that there must have been a very intelligent mind at work, somewhere else.  Not us.  Out there.  No evidence.  Just an affirmation.  "How else?", we say.  "How else?" In some ways, it is comical for Stephen Hawking to engage people who simply telling us what they believe:  that there is a non-m...

The Rev. Terry Jones is giving stupid people a bad name. There he is, stamping around in Gainesville, Florida, preaching to a congregation of thirty people, wearing a handgun on his hip, and proposing to burn 1000 copies of the Koran on September 11, just to demonstrate to the world that Islam is evil, and that we aren't going to take it anymore! I do not really think it would be appropriate, but I wonder what would happen if thirty or forty Muslims got together and burned the King James Bible to protest the presence of people like Terry Jones having a church in Gainesville, just a block or two away from whatever there is in Gainesville that ought to be kept pure and unstained from hate speech. There are a lot of things worse than burning each other's books, although the level of ignorance it requires is staggering.  Hate speech isn't quite so trivial.  Neither is ignoring the guaranties of our Constitution about the Freedom of Religion. Would a decent pe...

We never used to have shag carpets, but we have two hair-producing cats. Going barefoot in our house results in hairy, Hobbit feet. We never used to have Boeing wind-tunnel vacuum cleaners, either. They don't really pick up the cat fur: they pick up the throw rugs and place mats. The cats, Orphan and Annie, hate the hurricane-season, fur-sucking, Storm-Tempest vacuum cleaners, fearing that too-near a pass will strip them of last winter's left-over insulation and leave them Hairless Chihuahua naked. So far, no luck!  One shorter tail.   The people who do energy scans of houses stopped by and asked how we manage to project the image of a 100% energy efficient home, as measured by their drive-by, spy scanners. I unbraided the door, and let them look. The sniveley, sniffy one is lying on the lawn, yet, his eyes running, scratching himself. For weeks, we worried about Orphan, who had tumors hanging from her hide, afraid to take her to the Veterinarian ...

"What do you call people who practice the rhythm method of birth control?" "Parents." Tim Pawlenty, Governor of the Great and Sovereign State of Minnesota, who has mercifully almost abandoned attention to the State while he is running unannounced to become the next President of The United States, is an advocate of the rhythm method of cutting taxes. The rhythm method of birth control is a deliberate plan for people to have sex precisely when, as the theory goes, the woman's ovulation cycle makes it impossible for her to conceive.  Tiny Tim is a serious Christian, not of the Catholic type, but like Catholics, of the sort that believes that God invented marriage and sex for the purpose of making babies, and that if you aren't married and don't want babies, you shouldn't have sex.  Contraception is considered to be a sin, whether it be of the B. F. Goodrich variety, or of the Dow Chemical variety. And, much worse, there is no legitimate purpose ...

"All you need is love, all you need is love, All you need is love, love, love is all you need." That's what the Beatles sang. Stephen Hawking says that all you need is gravity, and you will get a whole universe; maybe a lot of them. You don't need a god. I suppose that if I were religious, I would ask where gravity came from, and I would smile like a Cheshire cat and say that only God can explain gravity. That might be partly right, at least the part that suggests that explanations are a bit of a mystery. It has long been the case that, when people walked down to the end of the cul-du-sac that is their understanding, they gave up and said that only God knew where the cul-du-sac came from. God is our name for what we don't (yet) understand. We gradually come to understand. I like the earlier answers for the cul-du-sac, or more appropriately, where the mountains and the sea and coyote and turtle came from: "It is a mystery!" ...

It appears that the economy is starting to show some activity, although it, in all likelihood, will be too late for affect the elections. The news is that job demand is not where it was before all hell broke loose two or three years ago, and every since. The demand for employees is at two levels:  the highly skilled and educated sector, and low-paying service jobs.  The people being left out are the great middle class, the manufacturing jobs. What that means is that we are living through a structural shift in our economy, from an industrial, heavy manufacturing base to a much more technological economy.  And that was inevitable. Heavy manufacturing jobs are where former agricultural people go for work.  That happened first in England, America, and Europe. As agriculture learned to take advantage of industrial processes, making large families and swarms of farm workers unnecessary-- a shift from muscle to steam, electrical, and hydrocarbon power, the...

It is obvious that the Republican Party has decided that it is in their short-term interest to make Democrats look very bad, for the purposes of electing Republicans in the November elections.  To do that, they have systematically opposed almost everything the Democrats have proposed, creating the impression that Barack Obama simply won't cooperate with them.  What is the alternative? Elect Republicans!  Or maybe even Tea Baggers. A sensible person can recognize that turning the economy into a shambles simply cannot be a good long-term strategy, even if, as might be the case, a long, slow, painful rebuilding of the nation eventually results.  There will have been too many deaths in war, too much money spent on them, too many unemployed people, lost homes, deteriorating roads, aimless educational goals, with a crumbling middle class. The top 2% are gettiung filthy rich, and the rest are scared. However, if it is precisely the intention of the Republi...

A lawyer once told me that what lawyers do is to watch where the money is going, and then go stand in front of it. It is not just lawyers.  It is our entire financial community. People used to make money by producing goods and services. Rumor has it that some people still do.  People still grow food, build computers and sew clothing, make cars, build houses, staff schools, provide fire and police protection, or play baseball or golf so that we can amuse ourselves over a beer someone brewed. But the real wealth is made by people who watch where the money is going, and then go stand in front of it, skimming, scamming, and scraping as much of it off as they can get away with. We pay insurance companies billions of dollars to facilitate health care. Enormous amounts of that money never provide health care for anyone except for the executives who run the companies for the benefit of the people who run the company.  One of our local health insurance pirates p...

"Simple Gifts" was written by Elder Joseph while he was at the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine in 1848. These are the lyrics to his one-verse song: 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain'd, To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd, To turn, turn will be our delight, Till by turning, turning we come round right.                                      (Source:  Wikipedia) Sister Sarah, up there in Wasilla, Alaska, the former Half-Governor of Alaska, has a gift for simplicity.  As a Vice-Presidential candidate, she was an embarrassment.  She seemed to know only the simplest things: Russia was  not very far away.  Government was bad.  Drilling for oil was good.  Shooting ...

Our log house is 150 miles away; a bit over three hours if you measure that way. Once it was just twenty minutes away. In between, it was about 1500 miles east. The log house has not moved.  We have. "Cabins"--as all getaway homes are called, here in Minnesota;  here in Minnesota, it is not a "cabin" if there is not a lake nearby;  there is no lake near our log house, so it is not a "cabin"-- but I digress, cabins should not be more than twenty minutes away.  Else they are sinkholes. Sinkholes are places where uncaring people tossed things:  old refrigerators, filth, brush, rocks, the broken wagon, that rusty Chrysler K-car.  And labor.  If you own a getaway sinkhole, you toss a lot of labor in there, too. It is impossible to find enough time to contemplate all the tools and ladders and materials one needs to go to the cabin--read, "sinkhole"--together with the six or seven hours it takes simply to drive there and back.  D...

President Obama came into office right after the stock market crashed, brought about by a criminally runaway financial sector interested only in lining the pockets of the traders themselves; certainly not the public, and caused by conducting wars that have cost us more then $700. billion dollars, so far.  Not paid for!  Borrowed money! He initiated bailouts to save banks from a complete meltdown, auto companies from bankruptcy and annihialation, increased unemployment benefits for millions of suddenly out-of-work families, fashioned a massive, partial overhaul of the whole medical insurance system, passed legislation to better the lot of women, sent billions to strapped states to hire teachers and police- and fire- workers, established decent and courteous and respectful relations with nations all over the world, opened dialog with Muslim nations, brought an end to combat missions in Iraq, proposes sweeping regulations of the whole financial system in the U.S. ...

"Oh, I dunno.  It comes when you say, 'Here, kitty, kitty!", and its about this long. . . ."