SmokeSound

From Decorah, Iowa newspapers For a long time, I was an Iowan.  Not a native Iowan.  An accidental tourist, as Anne Tyler might have said, and did.  When I took the job in Iowa, friends asked, first, where Iowa was, and next, where Decorah was in Iowa. I told them that if you drew a triangle from Burr Oak, down to Little Turkey, and over to Ludlow, Decorah would be right in the middle.   Even after 29 years--a longer time than I had ever lived anywhere--I never felt like an Iowan.  We still have a log house in Iowa, where Mari and I were married, and where many of our warmest memories are rooted, but I was always accidentally in Iowa.   Something said at coffee this morning caused me to think about Iowa; about the nature of the state.  Later in the day, I read an article sent to me by Marius, describing the new President of Grinnell College in (of all places!) Grinnell, Iowa.  Raynard Kington is Black.  He is gay, too.  And married ...

Serious polling shows that about three people of every ten call themselves Tea Party backers.  That is to say, about seven of every ten do not.  About two of those three are Republican. In our recent election, four of every ten voters said they supported the Tea Party.  So Tea Party people turned out better than non-Tea Party voters.  Of the votes Republicans received in the recent election, two out of every three votes came from Tea Party supporters. Eighty-six percent of Tea Party voters said they wanted less government intrusion on people and business.  Only thirty-five percent of other voters said that.  Five times as many Tea Party supporters as other voters blamed Obama for our country's problems. Tea Party backers say our most important problems are taxes and a budget deficit.  They are less interested in education and the environment.  The seven in ten voters who do not call themselves Tea Party supporters have a far less negative vi...

I see that a local private university is taking up the subject of whether souls have gender.  I assume the alternative is that souls might be genderless, something like angels.  And ashes.   I wish I could attend the disputation, but I believe that, at that time, I have an appointment with my dentist to have a tooth fairy removed.  A genderless tooth fairy.   The dentist is gendered.  I assume.   .

When Jesus was young, there were people like John the Baptizer who hated the corruption of the religious establishment, and of the people themselves, who called for people to repent of their own evils, and be baptized as a sign of their new intentions.  Jesus was one of those people.  That is to say, the first Christians were a reform movement of Judaism. Before long, they were attracting non-Jews to the movement, and the success of the reformers resulted in their becoming what we today would call more European than Middle-Eastern. The character of Christianity was shaped in those first few centuries.  The documents they left behind reflect that time, those struggles, those ideas and ideals. That was almost two thousand years ago.  None of us live there.  We live in Europe, or Africa, the Americas, and other places far, far from Jerusalem and Ephesus.  In those places where Christianity is alive and important, there are divisions between those who try...

I don't know who Michael Brea is. I don't know what "Ugly Betty" is, either, but Michael Brea had a bit part in "Ugly Betty". "Ugly Betty" cannot be as ugly as Michael Brea. Brea killed his mother with a sword, and said he was doing God's work.   "I didn't kill her," he said.  "I killed the demon inside her." He heard voices.   "No one could stop me," he said.  "I was doing the work of God." Michael Brea is a nice man.  His family says so: "All who have ever come in contact with Michael know that he is a compassionate, gentle, intelligent, spiritual and loving man.  His brother, father and friends stand by him and will aid with his recovery in every possible way. . . .  His family and friends know, without a question, that Michael was not well in the moments leading to (his mother's) death." Maybe so.  It certainly is the case that a lot of people  become convinced that God is tel...

Rush Limbaugh is in a dither about the President's Thanksgiving proclamation.  The President referred to the "contributions of Native Americans, whose skill in agriculture helped the early colonists survive, and whose rich culture continues to add to our Nation's heritage". Well, you can understand how that got Rush all lathered up! Rush apparently doesn't think those early European settlers owe much of anything to Native Americans.  They even scammed the immigrants by selling them Manhattan, which belonged, Rush said, to someone else.  About all Rush can find that Native Americans contributed to the European immigrants was tobacco, and lung cancer, and all that. (Rush Limbaugh is a champion cigar smoker, himself.  But no mind!  This isn't about making sense!) No, Rush says, we immigrants don't owe Native Americans much of anything, not even survival!  What really happened, Rush says, is that the immigrants (I don't think Rush calls ...

This is Thanksgiving Day. Mari and I have just finished demolishing a very small turkey and its appurtenances. We decided to have thanksgiving together, alone. As a consequence, we got up when we felt like it, made coffee, read three newspapers, and agreed on a very general plan about when to eat. "Oh, maybe about two", we said. That is not how larger dinners go. Usually, we wonder who to invite, fuss about a time, find out from them who can come, and then arrange our lives according to the logic of the industrial revolution. That is to say, we work our way through the logistics of how to build a car on an assembly line, making sure that each part is ready, and in the right place, so that everything fits together. We had minor assembly questions--we two-- a half dozen ingredients (a minor festival, you know), that should be done at about the same time. Today, the turkey--a very small turkey-- finished early, but that didn't matter: we let it re...

The Pope opined--that is to say, he said what he thought; and was not speaking as Christ's Vicar, when what he says is infallible, if it has to do with faith and morals, and if he doesn't have his fingers crossed--that maybe using a condom wasn't such an awful sin, if it was worn in order not to transmit a terrible disease, for instance. According to all the news reports, the hierarchy of the church is in a dither, trying to explain how Benedict XVI could say that, and what he must have meant when he said what he meant. I guess that is a hopeful sign:  all those clerics thinking. Maybe we can build on the momentum!  Here are a few more things they can think about: Is the earth flat? Does the sun revolve around the moon? What does Jesus think about Brett Favre? Is it all right for priests to think about . . . oh, you know:   that? Is it all right to smoke while you pray? Is it all right to pray while you smoke? When, exactly, was Jesus born, if not on ...

An analysis of the last election by Project Vote, a nonpartisan,  nonprofit group, says that the people who put the Republicans back into office were old, white, rich and Republican.  That is to say, old people, white people, rich people, and Republican people did not do what young, colored, paycheck-to-poverty, and female Democrats did:  stay home and say, "What happened?". Lord, love a duck!  You may think of young, colored, lower  income Democrats, and women as ducks, if you wish.   That is what they are going to be doing:  ducking. One of the people at coffee, this week, said he had seen a poll that showed how many people were not even aware that  there had been an election.  Or that the moon was made of cheese. How, he wondered, can you run a nation like that?   I am tempted to a trivial, short-term answer.   Rather, you have to have a really long-term view. Human beings are a resourceful lot.  ...

The easiest way for the Republicans to win in 2012 is to make sure the economy does not get better. Already, they have blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. At the same time, they want to give tax breaks to the wealthiest, increasing the disparity between the wealthy and most other citizens, adding to crankiness, fear, and a desire to vote out whomever is in. Under the guise of opposing anything governmental, they will try to cut back on funding programs they do not like, at the same time increasing unemployment.  If you lose your job when Obama is President, why not blame him, even if he opposes the very reason for losing your job in the first place.  There are programs that ought to be cut back, or eliminated, but there are a whole lot more that need to be invested in. During a recession, a government should invest in the economy, not starve it, but the Republicans argue that during a downturn public expenditures should be cut back, making the dow...

         Migration They come like smudges of light Sieved through ragged bar codes             landing lights Lurching down an invisible slide Toward Jerusalem or St. Paul             winter landing To the airport at river level Ground lights racing like lightning down the runway In morning they come over the hill Flying aluminum sausages   invisibly linked Winter sausages from factories In Seattle and France             nose to tail Funneling swarms of flyers Into concave regularity             rowed and columned Stuffed like marbles On Chinese checker boards sausage stuffing Tumbling loose At the ant-hill terminal             runaway agates Jets screaming at each other Leapin...

We are a rich country. There are other rich countries, and we may not be best, but we certainly belong among the rich ones. We have a problem. Some Americans are very poor, trying to survive on minimum wages, or no wages, at all. According to the Republicans, all the way back to Ronald Reagan, the solution is to make the rich richer because, if the rich get richer, there will be money trickling down to the poor. How is that for an insane theory? The problem is that some people have a shitload of money, and other people don't have enough, so we should help the rich get richer because the rich have holes in their pockets. Even Warren Buffett says that is stupid. There are no holes in his pockets. He threw those pants away as soon as he could afford to. He says he should be paying more taxes.

I wonder what Sarah Palin thinks about our educational system.  I wonder is she is concerned that almost twenty other nations seem to be doing a better job teaching kids to read, and do math, and think critically.  What does she think our schools really need to do? I wonder what she thinks about industrialization; whether she has ever tried to understand what happened to the automobile and steel industries.  What does she think we might do about Detroit, or Cleveland, or Gary, Indiana? Does Sarah Palin think that war in Iraq was a good idea?  What did it accomplish?  What does she think the end result of war in Afghanistan will be?  What does she hope it will be? Is she in favor of a graduated income tax?  A value-added tax?  Unemployment insurance? What does she think about Social Security?  Are there ways in which it should be changed?   When she needed medical care, she and her family went to Whitehorse, to take advantage of...

National Public Radio is one of the gems of our society, offering a broad spectrum of cultural, scientific, artistic music, social observation, news and commentary. It offers intelligent, moderate, and interesting points of view. Recently, Juan Williams, who was a commentator for the network, said on the network that he understood the fear many people have when they see people in what seems to be typical Islamic garb boarding an airplane, for instance.  Whatever Juan Williams intended with his remarks, it did nothing to calm the obvious Islaamophobia all around us.  NPR decided to fire Williams. Fifteen percent of the funds needed to keep NPR on the air come from government subsidies.  Years ago, it was decided that the nation needed a public network like NPR as a moderate, non-partisan voice of reason and culture.  Most of the funding for the network comes from what seems to most of us to be all-too-frequent private pleas for support.  It has t...

It is becoming easier not to be a Texan. People like Leo Berman, a Republican state Representative, is easing the way for the rest of us to be proud to be from Hawaii or some other place.   Leo, who calls Barack Obama, "God's punishment on us", has introduced a bill that would require future U. S. Presidents and Vice Presidents to produce their "original birth certificates" to the Texas Secretary of State.  Leo has not explained what would happen if the original were lost.  Leo is an original, and does not hold much stock in certified copies of anything, except perhaps the notion that Obama was born in Kenya.   "This bill is necessary because we have a president whom the American people don't know whether he was born in Kenya or some other place, " Berman said. Who is going to tell Leo that Obama was, without doubt, born in Kenya or some other place;  Hawaii, actually, according to the birth certificate they have on record? Peo...

Well, after all, it had been 385 years since the Vatican last put out a set of guidelines for driving out demons, and you know as well as I do that the little buggers have been looking for loopholes the whole time.  It was catch-up time. There is, as you probably have heard, a shortage of Catholic priests who are well-trained in the delicate art of knowing when and how to cast out demons, so about a week ago, they held a conference in Baltimore to catch up on techniques, and all that. It is a fine art, apparently, knowing just when the problem is really demon-possession.  There is no point in casting out demons if the problem is just plain, old, paranoia or political opinion.  The Baltimore conference might be thought of as Continuing Education, with the credits counting toward a Master's Degree.  More than 50 bishops and 60 priests signed up to attend. Pope John Paul performed an exorcism on what was affirmed to be a case of possession by the devil.  Ther...

Daniel Patrick Moynihan "You are entitled to your own opinion,  but you are not entitled to your own facts." Daniel Patrick Moynihan is often credited with saying that.   We have just had an election in which the results demonstrated  that opinion wins elections.   Hendrik Herzberg, writing in the New Yorker (Nov. 15),  cites a poll taken a week before the election which showed  that the opinion of two-thirds of the people is that 1) middle  class taxes  have gone up, 2) the economy has shrunk, 3) billions  lent  to the banks were lost forever, 4) illegal immigration was  skyrocketing, and 5) the health care law would drive  the deficit higher.   The facts are that 1) for 95% of us our taxes are lower,  2)  the economy has been growing,  slowly, for five straight  quarters, 3) most of the TARP funds  have already been repaid,  and the rest soon will be, with  a modest prof...

Moses says it was God. Stephen Hawking says it is gravity. One of the two is damnably determined to bring the seven slabs of granite marking our grass-covered driveway to their backs in the grass. I guess one could do worse. About every five years, I have to put a chain around them, and pickup-persuaded them to stand tall, aiding the posture lesson with gravel tamped into the downhill cavity.  I did that last week, just in time!  God and gravity scarcely let me get home before dumping about a foot of snow on us; really wet snow!  Had it been any wetter, it would have been rain. It is one thing to dump heavy snow on a granite pillar, and quite another to plop it down on a dwarf tree with pretensions of altitude.  The summer table on our deck sympathized.  Having mowed the lawn just last week, the snow blower is still in storage, waiting for me to spend a day on my back in the garage, installing it.  With the confidence of a Christian holding four ...

I am beginning to wonder whether our President is a gutless wonder. He was swept into office two years ago with large majorities in both houses of congress.  Even though he did manage to accomplish some major legislation--minor health care reform, for instance:  it is minor because neither he nor members of Congress could bring themselves to press for a single-payer system-- now he is tip-toeing around almost apologetically for what he did. It appears the banks and financial institutions are wheedling and maneuvering themselves right back into the business of screwing small investors with phantom financial "instruments", endless fees, and rewarding themselves with huge bonuses. Obama said, plainly and unambiguously, that he wanted to end "Don't Ask & Don't Tell" for people in military service, and he acts as if there really is nothing he can do about it. Even when his own military leaders say it should be ended, Obama mumbles something ...

American Catholics have a program to combat poverty.   There is some tension between the bishops, who rule the Church, and the people actually working in the poverty programs. A certain amount of scolding is going on.  Michael  Hichborn,  speaking for the attempt to reform the program, says the anti-poverty program was flawed, right from the beginning: "It never addresses sin as the root cause of poverty,  which means it never addresses Christ as a remedy," he said. There you are!  You are poor because you are a sinner, and you stay poor because you don't understand that  Christ is the way to get out of poverty. O.K. In the first place, according to that logic, everyone is poor, because everyone is a sinner.   In the second place, if you aren't poor  it is because Christ  got you out of it.  That probably comes as  bittersweet news  to those poor Christians who thought they  were Christian,...

Style!  Either you have it, or you don't.  I don't. I tried to look up "bracelets for men" online, and the answers made it plain that I am out of it, and probably always have been.  Arm kandi? My bracelet is green, and it says that if you give me the wrong anesthetic, or let me onto an airplane, my right eye will detonate and cause the plane to go down. Something like that.  Maybe not the detonation part. The doctor told me the bubble in my eye was slow-acting, by which he meant that it would be slow to go away, but I am satisfied.  In return, my eye will return to its preoperative state, which is as a daylight detector. The bubble has outlasted the plastic arm band, so now I sport a homemade wool yarn segment on my charm bracelet, which mystifies all those people who assume I am supporting a cause, or maybe am announcing some kind of a hunk proclivity. I'm not.  I'm just an ordinary old guy with an air bubble in his head.  Not ju...

I like to cook, but I am no chef! Even if "chef" just means, "a good cook", I am no chef.  I let others do the work. I have come to realize, by reading and by anecdote, that there are people who cook some of the same things regularly, who come to be recognized, in their families, for having cooked those things.  I can say, without hesitation, that no one in my family would ever say that I was the guy who cooked anything: venison antlers, or rabbit ears, or anything else memorable.  I follow recipes. I have probably found several hundred recipes that I followed to their lairs, that turned out wonderfully, that I never cooked again.  Always, I run across something new that deserves a try; often successfully. It is successful because the originator was successful, and I can read, and add a pepper or two, or an herb. But the plain fact is, I am no chef.  I am barely a cook. Tonight, for instance, as was the case last night, too, Mari and I said...

I-35 is the great north-south highway running from Duluth to Mexico, not missing a single tornado along the way.  In the Twin Cities, it divides, going through both downtowns Minneapolis and St. Paul before reconnecting again on the other side. On the Minneapolis side, 35-W makes a snaky double-curve, quite like a country road to a section corner needing to adjust for putting square road grids down on a global surface.  Right there, at the double-S, Highway 62 has been wandering through the spaghetti patch.  It made for a perfect traffic mess. Politicians and traffic engineers, though, just what to do:  rebuild it. Governor Pawlenty had a splendid idea!  Tiny Tim does not believe in big government spending--he believes in borrowing the money and letting somebody else figure it out, later--so he proposed that the private contractors who wanted to bid on the huge job should put up their own money to finance the job, and get paid later....

In the last presidential primary season, religious evangelicals were huffing and snorting about restoring our Christian honor and stopping all abortions and praying to God that he would require King James English as a first language.  It was something like that. The Republican Party cozied up to Iowa and Mike Huckabee and it seemed likely that a Republican vote was the only way to restore the nation to its fundamentalist, God-is-an-Old-Man roots. Try, now, as hard as you can, to explain how the last Republican Congressional delegation changed after it swallowed all those religious evangelical principles:  restrict health care, fight against financial regulation of banks and investment houses, defend Abu Graib, cut public spending on education, public services, and so on. I saw a report about Mike Huckabee, recently.  He looked like something the Republicans had forgotten to swallow.  "So there you are!", I thought. During this mid-term election, it was not th...

I woke, thinking of Richard's holsteins, at the time I was rebuilding Dean's log house, watching as they came up through the woods to the small clearings where the grass grew sweet. The woods, and the steep hillside, was argyle-patterned with paths made by critters with feet and hooves, finding the most effective way to get from there to here; around downed trees, easy up the hillside, allowing chance and success to choose the usual way. Our cities are like that. People walked to those places where there was water, and food, following the paths other hungry and thirsty critters had made, first tentatively, then regularly. When the horses came, they walked there, too, and so did the wagons.  The paths were widened. Drainage ditches lined the widened paths and, later, sewer lines were laid.  The houses were built. The mice, the rabbits and the deer laid out the town. The cattle carved the paths deeper and wider. Then the wagons and the trains and the truc...

A THOUSAND WRONG WAYS Richard's good-humored holsteins flyswat their way through the summer trees down into the dry run and up again following the residual logic of a thousand wrong           ways green-grinding up the clovered hill pretending not to see the log house window-framed and redwood-skirted right before their placidly amused           eyes trying the tender Kentucky bluegrass where the house stood for a century tending summer cuds and ignoring history curious instead how men will slice wood and set it           sideways Once, along the same way up the hill there beside the shag bark hickory the last Oneota saw the first white man hew oak logs, fitted like fingers           crossed and turned and went down through the trees again south and west up the small draw pursued by...

Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Humankind is a few million years old. For most of that time, people hunted and gathered. Agriculture is about 10,000 years old, and for all but the last two or three hundred years, has been fueled by muscle power:  man and beast. When humans learned how to substitute steam for muscle, first by burning coal, and later other fossil fuels, this nation was just being settled.  The industrial revolution happened just as we spread out on this rich continent, and soon our tractors and combines made us rich. Making tractors and combines and cars and trains, making steel and machinery made us rich, too. We rode both the agricultural and industrial revolutions. During all that time, we sang the praises of competition; good, old Yankee competition!  "You can be anything!", we said.  "Use your head, work hard, be smarter, and you will become rich!"  We all wanted to become rich. We pretended we were all becoming rich. ...

Our cat, Orphan, is training to be a deathwatch cat. We have inherited her, so as far as I know, that is how she got her name. At any rate, when it became obvious that I had a terrible cold, combined with an experiment to discontinue using a decongestant, with the result that I had coughed up both lungs and was working on the diaphragm, Orphan came snuggling to me in bed. She has been a comfort, sitting there, eyes glowing green with the faint flicker of eternal flames in the background, but finally I appealed to my doctor to prescribe something other than a cat for my cough.  It seems to be working, but it has turned the cat against me.  Truth be told, this is the cat that occasionally bites me.  It is nothing personal. It might not even be intentional.  You know, a nip gone bad! Mari moved away, gradually; first to the far side of the bed, then downstairs, and then down another set of stairs, from where she occasionally climbed up to report that ...

The New York Giants moved to San Francisco in 1958. I moved to Berkeley, across the Bay in 1958. In all of those years since, neither one of us won a World Series. I saw Willie Mays play in Seals Stadium that first year. About all I remember is seeing Willie make a "basket catch", letting the fly ball come down to waist level, palm up. It was grand!  Before long, the Giants moved to a new park-- Candlestick Park--down the Bay a little, downwind from a landfill, and downwind from every other wind, too.  A small hill took every breeze and twisted it into an invisible corkscrew. Long after I left California, the Giants built a new ball park, closer to downtown.  Still, in all these years, no World Series winner. I gradually let the Giants go.  In Chicago, there were the Cubs, a sadder, more intimate, story.  Then the Diamondbacks, when they were new, and now we make nice noises about the Twins. Almost, I am convinced to become a Giants fan, agai...