SmokeSound

The Pope says that if scientists muck around long enough they will find there is a Reason behind things, and that Reason is the mind of God. Reason, the Pope believes, is the order in nature, and another name for that Reason is God. It shouldn't be too difficult to find Reason. It is what human beings do:  they make assumptions or premises, and generate conclusions. Rocks are part of the natural order of things, but I don't think rocks reason.  I do suspect that there is something like Reason, in a much simpler way, in chimpanzees, or dolphins, or maybe octopi. Once brains become complex enough, they are capable of Reason, so if critters with complex brains look for Reason, they will probably find it.  First you say what Reason is, then you look around for it, and there it is!  You are doing it! Human beings are capable of positing premises, making assumptions, and thinking about whether their assumptions hold water.  That isn't God. That is just what

It is our experience, it is our fate and our doom-- those of us who live with inevitable winter-- to watch the end of summer crumble down to ice. Autumn is a shuddering and shivering, a turning through red and yellow to brown. Autumn is not a season. It is a witch dressed in pumpkin colored rags. Autumn is a reminder that the sun is fickle, and that there is ice beyond. Autumn came screaming, ripping at the arrogance of trees and at thin-layered roofs, blowing out the last campfires and bending easy backs to Minnesota hunches. We rush back into our houses as if for the first time cold, staccato-chattering what we will say for half a year in wind and snow, remembering our coats and wondering at gloves. It is a test, we know, of whether we are alive and have a will to thrive. Let the wicked witch wear white, and come back around, again! We'll wear our wool resolve, and start a winter fire! The birds will need new seed.

"Great minds discuss ideas.   Average minds discuss events.   Small minds discuss people." --Eleanor Roosevelt I cringe when I see two people lean in toward each other and say, "Did you hear about Phyllis?" There is a proportionality between the size of the group we live in, and what we talk about.  When all of us lived in our own cave, or community house, we knew almost everything about each other.  In large cities, we interact daily with people whose names we might never know.   Martin Buber wrote a book titled, "I and Thou".  It was an argument for finding real humanity in tight, face-to-face relationships:  not "You and me", but something once caught by having pronouns for tight relationships.  Buber was religious.  He was actually arguing that God is really personal with us.   The fact is that most of our relationships are not tight and personal.  Most of our relationships are casual, informal, and transitory.  It needs to be that way.  

The phrase, "a wall of separation between church and state" does not appear in the Constitution.  What is in the First Amendment to the Constitution is a crystal clear declaration that the government may not establish a religion, nor prohibit people from being religious if they want to.  To establish a religion is to make some particular religious group the official religion of the country.  It is to establish a theocracy; a religiously defined state.  That, the Founders said, may not happen.  But if you want to be religious, go ahead! We are not a Christian nation. We are not a Jewish nation. We certainly are not a Muslim nation, or a giant coven of witches and warlocks. We aren't Protestant, or Catholic. The Founders had had enough of the religious wars in Europe. Huge numbers of the immigrants to this "New World" came here precisely because they had been persecuted by the Catholic or the Protestant nations they had come from.  In effect they said

I love the term, "invincible ignorance". I think it should be pronounced as Conan the Barbarian might say it:  "inwincible ignorance". Invincible ignorance is ignorance beyond repair, almost. (Yes, there is a vincible ignorance, too, medievally speaking.) When it comes to matters of ethics, many of us are invincibly ignorant. That is to say, we think that our way of understanding what is good is the only way to be good. Why do we do that? We do that because nothing is simple, and we wish it were. Is killing another person always wrong? Is there a right way to rear children? Can stealing food ever be justified? Is divorce always a bad thing? Is infidelity ever a good thing? Can a person be too rich? Is health care a privilege or a right? Is it OK to lie sometimes? Is it always right to tell the awful truth? There are no universal codes of ethics. King David, in the Old Testament, and Abraham, and many Mormons, think that polygamy is all ri

Sophie, having inherited profound theatrical talent, just as all grandchildren do, was co-starring with thirty other kids in a musical adaptation of something having to do with molasses and a small town. Mari and I drove to Decorah separately, to allow me to go directly to our cabin and do all those things that cabin owners do before winter.  mow down weeds, curse and clean up after mice, scrub counters and floors, and remove what will not be improved by a season of frost. Mari had to finish her Friday work at the University. The long row of old-fashioned spirea bushes, once transplanted from Wilma Slaughter's yard, needed to be mowed around.  "Mowing" scarcely describes what it is to attack head-high weeds, brown after having seeded next year's assault on civilization. My hair was crumbly with dust and tiny seeds, but I had forgotten my comb somewhere. I drove to a little country store, well on its way to becoming the last resting place for garag

No, we don't want government regulation! We want chicken eggs that kill us, and catfish full of poison. Do you know what it costs to regulate egg producers? It costs a lot!  Do you know how many people would have to die every year to equal the cost of making sure the eggs we buy are safe?  A lot! Of course the catfish farmers in Mississippi are losing money! They are paying minimum wages to the people who work for them, while the farmers in China can hire people for a fraction of that! The catfish farmers in Mississippi have to feed their fish safe and tested corn and soybean meal, while in China their catfish eat a lot of what just comes down the river from the pipe at the edge of the town, upriver.  Chinese river water is filled with nutrients, and things. Do you think the eggs produced in Iowa are bad? You can thank your lucky stars that the government does not regulate overseas egg producers the way we do, or eggs would cost a whole lot more.  And, as you kn

About five years ago, when in my early seventies, I decided to build a boat.  I know, now, that at the time, I needed to decide whether I was too old. Not too old to build a boat:  just too old. Somewhere there are human critters that seem to go on forever, but I am not one of them. I creak, and leak oil, and keep dropping parts in the street. "Well," the body mechanic says, "that part just wore out. We will have to see if we can fix it with glue and baling wire." "Build the damned boat!", I thought. "You aren't dead yet." Today I cam back from a visit to a heart specialist. Something had been wrong.  My Internist thought it was probably my heart, and advised me to leave well enough alone. "Nonsense!", I thought.  "The doctor doesn't look too good himself." I have been stress-tested, and heart monitored while I tried to exhaust myself.  The cardiologist ran my blood through an old hand-cranked sepa

I have been listening. More often, people say, "stupid". "Are people really that stupid?" "Is she really that stupid?" "Don't people know anything?" It sounds arrogant just to say it. But how can Christine O'Donnell not know that the nation was founded on the principle of religious freedom; that centuries of religious wars, and intolerance, and persecution and death was not what our founders wanted; that they wanted a nation in which no religion had the inside track, and in which people could not be denied the right to be religious or not, as they chose? Barack Obama's birth certificate is on file in Hawaii, and a local newspaper even reported his birth at the time, but people still think he was born in Kenya, or on Krypton.  All his adult life he has been an active Christian, and people wonder whether he is a Muslim. People who have no health care oppose attempts to provide health care, or almost worse, propose insurance

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." There you are!  That is what the first amendment to the Constitution says:  Congress may not establish a state religion, nor, on the other hand,  prohibit people from being religious, if they choose to. Christine "I'm not a witch!" O'Donnell thought her Democratic opponent in Delaware had gone too far.  Chris Coons had said that teaching creationism (God made it all, piece by piece, as it is) would violate the first amendment because the government was not supposed to promote any particular religious group.  Coons said that private and parochial schools could teach it if they wanted to, but the government couldn't.  "Religious doctrine," he said, "does not belong in

To tell the truth, I really don't know how to deal with this! The Olympics National Park is a huge area in the northwest quadrant of Washington State where I was born, and where I became the soggy, drizzled-thinking, mossy critter that I am. There are a few mountain goats out in the Olympics. There are a lot more loggers and pickups than goats. You know the routine:  people love wild animals, wild animals love to be left alone, people say, "There is a wild goat!  Let's go take a look at . . . oh, I don't know . . . a goat .  The goat says, "What in hell is this?", and then. . . . There isn't much salt on the Olympics Peninsula. Sometimes the goats, needing salt, go where people have been because people hiking out in the woods on the Olympic Peninsula need to pee, so they do, and . . . well, a little salt is a little salt. Maybe that is why some goats are aggressive. Maybe some goats are like some people. Anyway, while most of the hiker

The town of Jericho, as in "Joshua fit the battle of . . ."-- that Jericho--is thought to be about 10,000 years old. In Palestine, the people of Jericho thought it might be nice to make Jericho a focal point for their own cause, but the celebration is just barely fizzling along. For one thing, there is no sewer system in one of the oldest cities human beings ever settled into. At the same time that Jericho is thought to have been founded, or settled, or perhaps just happened to come into being, wooly mammoths with 18 foot tusks were living in what is now Snowmass, Colorado.  More bones were discovered there. The first North American peoples were wandering in, probably from Siberia, over Alaska, through Wasilla. Villages, or towns--really just settlements made possible because human beings were learning how to change from being a nomadic people to an agricultural people. The knowledge of how to domesticate crops and animals meant  that people did not have to

Nut cases we have with us always. Normal human behavior is a social construct. The fact is that individual human behavior is a hornet's nest of buzzing madness. Had there been a creator, with even a vague notion of what it was human life was intended to be, we might all be more-or-less normal.  We aren't. We always have some very bright people, and some who are lucky to be able to hold a job.  Tall, short, nervous, happy, weird, psychotic, depressed, ambitious, lazy, reasonable, nut-cases, and prophets. When things are fairly stable, we adjust to what we are and find work, form schools, elect representatives, and invite our friends over to watch the football game. It is when we are afraid and anxious that the semblance of normalcy comes undone.  We are in such a time. We have been in times like this before, not long since. For instance, after World War II, having emerged scarred from holocausts and fire bombings and death in the mud both west and east, h

Be still, my heart! I was walking, relaxed, across the lawn to the curb to put a last kitchen bag into the trash can before the big green truck came to claim what we refused. She nudged me from the side:  an Alaskan husky! Not a sound, just a nudge and a bump on my leg, expecting that I would be as happy to see her  as she was to see me, knowing I wanted to pet her. I bent, and she nuzzled my ear,  while I tried not to let surprise and first fear interfere with two strangers meeting.   "Enough!" she said, and charged down and around, intent on bringing life to a quiet neighborhood.  

I vaguely recall speaking Norwegian to my Great Grandmother, who never learned much more than "Hallo!" in English. Before I could spell "Hello", I had forgotten more Norwegian than my Great Grandmother had learned of English. Later, when I went to college, I took a semester of Norwegian, and that stuck to me like everything else academic did:  it didn't. It was not until I was a college teacher that I asked to sit in on Norwegian language courses, where I began to understand some of the rhythms of my own peculiar English speech. Then I lived in Norway a couple of times, and even taught in a college in Lillehammer, in lame Norwegian, but in Norwegian. As a child of an immigrant, and a grandchild of other immigrants-- my mother having been born in Washington State--I heard about Lutheran churches that still, or very recently, conducted church services in Norwegian, sometimes regularly, sometimes as reminders of what they used to do regularly.  Lat

I really don't know what to make of it: I took a quiz in Dagbladet --a Norwegian newspaper-- which proposed to show me what kind of ape I am related to. As it turns out, I am more or less a chimpanzee. I guess I should have known that. I am not sure I wanted to know that, although I should have been prepared:  Motor Vehicles took my picture this morning, which will remind me every time I show my driver's license. The academic geniuses of the Far Right, who inhabit the primeval forests of throwback religion and politics-- people like Christine O'Donnell and Sister Sarah and God's Angle, Sharron, stoutly deny that we are related to apes, at all. I think it was the former self-admitted witch, who now denies that she said what she said, who offered a clinching argument: If evolution is happening, why aren't apes producing more human beings?  (Our educational system is in a shambles!) No scientist says that humans descended from apes: apes and human be

"He was a bold man that first eat an oyster."                                               --Jonathan Swift There is an ice cave on Ice Cave Road in Decorah, Iowa. That means that water seeps into the chamber in the winter and freezes.  When spring comes, the outside earth and air warm up, and the ice remains in the cave for months before it melts. It is something like an old-fashioned ice chest, made of dirt and rock rather than wood and tin and sawdust. While out running one summer, I thought to crawl into the ice cave. I never made it all the way in.  The cave, far better called a hole, very soon shrank to an opening about the size of my body, and it seemed to my rational and frightened mind, that only a fool would squeeze into a place like that.  I backed out. Those miners in Chile took elevators down into the earth, and blasted tunnels off to the sides, following minerals. Two thousand feet of rock hovered above them, not icy, but hot with the pressur

Years ago (it just seems like aeons ago!), Mari abandoned me (according to plan) in El Paso, from where I intended to take a train to Mexico City to study Spanish for a month.  Eventually, although not by train, nor by plane, either, I made it there, and found a small room near the subway line. Mari phoned one day, and one of a group of four men who shared rooms next door, called me to the phone. After we talked, one of the guys asked me, "Es la otra?" (Is she "the other one"?)  No, I assured them,  she is the only one.  They all had an "other one",  in "the little house", when they were away from home. In Chili, reports say that there is some hostile unrest  among the people gathered to wait for those 33 miners who have been trapped underground for months. Not all of the loved ones are the only one.  Some  of them are "the others".  One report suggests that one minor alone had four or five women arm-wrestling each

" WATCH: Rand Paul Promises  To Cut Federal Workforce,  Salaries During Heated Debate "  Aye, there's the rub! Here we are, trying desperately to recover from  a confluence of genuine problems and disasters! Under the Bush administration, we were attacked  by Muslim extremists, mostly from Saudi Arabia, but whose leader--Osama bin Laden--apparently was hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan.  Bin Laden is one of the leaders of the movement that believes that Saudi Arabia--Mecca--for instance, is a Holy Land. We have heard that before, haven't we? Jerusalem?  Der Vaterland?  The New Jerusalem (right here, as it used to be called).  We declared war on him and his followers, in Afghanistan. That proved to be a very difficult job, so the Bush  administration decided it could establish, in the region, a democratic regime that would be such a shining  example of democracy that it would divide the  extremists from more moderate Muslims and, at the  same time, give us acce

Carl Paladino, the Republican senatorial nominee from New York, says he has difficulty deciding whether being gay is a choice. That shouldn't be too  tough. When did Carl Paladino decide to become a heterosexual? Probably about the same time he decided to become of Italian descent.  Back when God handed out brains.  And urges. Why am I fussing about that? I am trying to decide when I chose not to be tall, dark, and handsome. (Oh, I know better than that! Being tall, dark, and handsome is inherited:  you catch it from your kids. And I was inoculated, early on.)

I really don't know who Peter Diamond is. Neither do the Republicans in the Senate. They do say, though, that they are opposed  to him becoming a member of the Federal Reserve  because he has limited experience in dissecting  the inner workings of the national economy. I am not sure, but I think that it is more important for them to add Sharron God's Angle and Christine I-ain't-a-witch O'Donnell to the Senate before they make any final decisions  on how to staff the Federal Reserve with experts.   All of this frustrates Barack Obama, of course,  who nominated Peter Diamond to the Reserve.   It probably frustrates Ben Bernanke, too,  who credits Diamond with being generous in helping him when Bernanke was getting his own degree. It might even frustrate the Massachusetts Institute  of Technology, where Diamond is considered an expert on Social Security, pensions, and taxation. It does not seem to bother the Nobel Prize committee. They named Peter Diamond as one of th

The hard-hitting, fair-and-balanced, solid news gathering organization, The Onion, reports that the American people have hired a lobbyist to represent their interests in Congress.  It was the only way. "His daily presence in the Capital will ensure that the American people finally get a seat at the table. . . . Americans deserve to be represented in Washington," a statement offered.  "Lawmakers are going to ask me, 'Why should I care about the American people?'   'What's in it for me?' And it will be up to me and my team to find some reason why they should consider putting poverty and medical care for children on the legislative docket," the new lobbyist said. A headhunter for the lobbying organization agreed, saying:  "The next time Congress passes a bill dealing with civil rights or taxes, I wouldn't be surprised if the U.S. populace is mentioned somewhere in the final language." The lobbyist for the American peop

The group of p eople who call themselves independents are at least as large people who call themselves Republicans or Democrats. Some of them are, in fact, Republicans or Democrats, but they want to be regarded as independent from that. The other fast-growing segment of politics is the Tea Party. Independents sided with Democrats in the last general election and put Barack Obama and many others into office.  Right now, the Independents appear to be determined to do what they did the last time:  put the incumbents out of office.  The Tea Party agrees.  Throw the bums out! Old-time politicians are trying to line us up to take sides with one or the other of them.  They howl about taxes and deficits and health care federal spending and the Constitution. The electorate throws out whoever is in power. What is going on? Matt Bei, in the New York Times, says that an interesting study is going on in New Jersey.  Focus groups are being asked, not whether they agree with Dem

There is a most remarkable house in our old neighborhood in South Minneapolis whose owners love to decorate for the holidays.  The decorations are always inflatable.  This is early October, but they are pumped up and ready for Halloween, V-Day, Hindenberg Holiday, and just about any political convention you have ever attended. There are at least ten animated critters and creations, every one of them beautiful and spellbinding enough to take one's breath away, and use it. And now you know why we no longer live in our old neighborhood. .

"I'm not a witch, " Christine O'Donnell says in a political ad.  "I'm nothing you've heard. I'm you." Oh, no you aren't!  Here, where I am, there are no witches, and there is no one who believes in witches, nor anyone who could even take  a denial of witches  seriously, not because there might be witches, but because it is not sane to believe in witchcraft, miracles, evil spells, walking on water, or swooping off into the sky on the Festival of Armageddon.   Christine O'Donnell once said on TV that she once was a witch,  and considered  becoming a Hari Krishma but she liked eating meat. She is tiptoing through a cemetery of ghosties and ghoulies! She just looks like an ordinary human being.  She sees things in the thickest darkness that exist nowhere.  Bonkers!  Bonkers! She wants to be the U. S. Senator from Delaware.   I am not a boshabendu!  I am just like you! What's a boshabendu?   Never mind!  I am a

Firemen in Obion County, Tennessee,  watched a house burn down last week.   The owner forgot to pay the $75. fee. They were able to save the farm field next door. The farmer had paid for fire protection. Fire protection. Police protection. An education. Health care. National defense. Safe medicines. Safe food. Parks to play in. Roads to drive on. Coordinated air flight. Water for our homes. Sewage disposal. Electrical grids. Communication services. Well, what do you think?  Do you think you should contract individually  for those services (and many more), or do you think they should be available to everyone?  Do you believe people should be on their own, if they can afford it, or remember to pay the fee, and if they aren't, let the house burn down? Is that Ronald Reagan I hear, encouraging us to stand on our own?  To be strong?  Rebuild the house? Maybe pay the $75. next time, if you have it? He advised us once, to dig a hole in the back yard

Danger!  Danger! Christine O'Donnell--she be the woman from Delaware, trying to become a U.S. Senator; the woman who says that thinking about masturbation is the same as committing adultery (Or is it the same as polygamy?  I forget which!)-- said in 2006 that she has classified, secret, awfully important information that China was plotting to take over the U.S. Her opponent at the time had said that he thought our China policy had to be handled very carefully because we could make either a friend or an enemy of China. Not possible, Ms. O'Donnell said.  They are plotting to take us over.  Secret information!  She just could not dare to say where it came from, but she did hint that it might have come from some missionaries in China. I suppose that if a billion or more Chinese came marching across the Pacific in a column ten thousand soldiers wide and a hundred thousand deep, she might have said who told her, but the Chinese cannot walk on water the way Jesus

We are witnessing the death of an illusion. It is not a pretty sight, nor a quick end. For most of our American history, we have pretended that this is a White, Protestant, male country, a new Jerusalem to replace the Old Jerusalem, a promised land. For a long while, only white males voted, and held office. The long list of our presidents has no women, no Blacks, no Native Americans, no Asians; just Protestant males until John Kennedy became our first Catholic president. That did not happen until the myth of Protestant supremacy became as foolish as the myth of Catholic domination. Only Barack Obama is non-White, and he is not female, or non-Christian, although his crime--not being White has caused imbeciles to suggest that he is not really Christian, or not really American. The illusion is hard to let go of. The Tea Party is the hard edge of our illusion, ugly in its thrashing about as the illusion dies. Women finally gained the right to vote less than a hundre