SmokeSound

Michele Bachmann wants to be President of the Last Tribulation.  I think making her President would be  the Last Tribulation.   We know we are in the throes of the Last Tribulation because there will be seven last plagues:  Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Paul, Romney, and Santorum.   Not all of the Republican candidates are quite so earnest as Bachmann, and Cain, and Perry, and Santorum, but they comprise a pretty good majority.  But of the whole earnest lot, Michele seems to have the best hearing.  She is hearing the Last Call from the Bar of Eternal Justice, and is rushing to get her order in before the Lord Jehovah Jesus closes down the bar.  She hears the bell, and sees the flashing light, and hears the Final Call.  And she says so! What are those people thinking?   How could anyone who really thinks that the world is about to come to a crashing halt give a diddly-damn about politics, or the future of Social Security or he...

Cleaning up after the fight They have this really good idea at The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem:  "If you clean it, you own it!"  As a consequence, the Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic priests clean as much of the floor as they can, every year.   Actually, each of the three groups think they own it, but they have worked out a rough, but contested, agreement about who cleans what part of the floor.  They have also worked out rough, and contested, attempts to clean a little bit more of the floor, each year.  The result is not pretty. They get into broom fights.  And fist fights.  And they say damnable things to each other.   This year, again, the police had to get into the church through that little door of humility to break up the fight.  The police said they didn't arrest anyone because all of the participants were priests.   The roof leaks, too, and has done so for a long time, but the priests ...

Igor Volsky has a problem.  He has been listening to what Michele Bachmann says.  She said: “One man stood up, he was over 7-feet tall. He was a physician in the community. And he said,   ‘I had a little lady in my office and because of Obamacare, I had to call the IRS and I had to get a number to put on a form before I could see her .’” (About that Ivan Stravinsky Skavar nonsense:  you are too young to remember.  However, you might think twice about believing a seven-foot-tall physician, or a five-foot two-inch tall politician.)

Well, you see, the angora goat got to reading the Old Testament--especially those parts in Leviticus and Deutronomy and such--which called for the sacrifice of a shaggy goat, and that made him nervous, so he took off. The trick had been telling the goat it was just a Christmas pageant in the front yard of Bethlehem Church in Fergus Falls, but it didn't take a High Priest to figure out that somebody was going to end up on the table. The runaway first thought to find a vegetarian religion, but it is tough to ask catechetical questions when you are running at top speed.  Jim Aakre, the owner of the almost-sacrificial goat, chased the critter for two hours before giving up.  He says the lack of snow made it difficult to track the beast. It is a little difficult to know what the good people of Bethlehem Church were thinking.  Jim says he also provided a llama and two puppies for the event.  Bethlehem probably is using one of those new translations of the Bible. Ma...

Mari and Conrad December in Minnesota is not what you might think it would be, if you stay inside the Conservatory in St. Paul.  Even there,  blossoms are at a premium, during the season here described (when we do not have snow) as "brown". Mari and Michael At our home, the colors are warmer, mostly because Mari is. The Poinsettias, referred to by the male members of the family as "lilies", are Mari's home version of what the Conservatory does in red. The Coat, Daniel and Conrad Daniel, from Portland, Oregon, is used to weather, almost entirely in its liquid state, so when we comes to St. Paul, he asks to borrow a coat, no so much because he wants to stay warm, but because he is too young to die. I lend him "The Coat", given to me by Stan, because of its unblemished record of never having lost a pilgrim to passing cold.

At Year's End, 2011:  Hello! Mari and I went to Lake Mills, Iowa, this summer, to gather around the stone where Peder Heltne lies.  The family came to remember how they had scattered, or taken new names, and to compare variations of the same story.  They stood and talked to each other, and realized that everyone was as much family as everyone else; that wherever the wind had or had not taken them, they had come from this place.  They were dandelion seeds. Outside of town, huge wind generators gathered on the ridges, like fields of dandelions, catching the wind. We tell family stories.  Almost always, they are about parents, and grandparents, children and grandchildren.  They are about what we always ate on holidays, and the uncles on the Fourth of July.  They are about aprons, and buggies, and car trips, and how we all came to blow in the wind. But families are not just about cousins and aunts and potato salad.  Families are also where str...

It is so easy to forget how essentially kind people are, especially during the holiday seasons.  For instance, a man in New York who might have been concentrating on the holidays a little too much, ran into a deer, somehow, unexpectedly, probably to the surprise of both of them.  Well, actually to the surprise of all five of them.  There were four guys in the car, not really in the best condition to make medical decisions. At first, they did not agree what to do about the deer, who had been hurt, but Mr. Caswell finally did the decent thing, and proposed to drive the deer to the hospital emergency room.  They never made it.  A policeman pulled them over. The deer no longer needed medical care, as it turned out.  Mr. Caswell did, as it turned out.  His alcohol level was about twice what was legally permissible, but we should remember that even in that altered condition, Mr. Caswell wanted to do what was right for the deer. The emergency room mi...

Lord, love a duck, I lived in Iowa for about thirty years!  Even so, I am stunned, every few years, by how much religion shapes Evangelical Republican politics in that state.  A prominent religious/political figure-- Bob Vander Plaats, CEO of Christian conservative group The Family Leader, has asked Michele Bachmann to drop out of the race to make room for Rick Santorum, who plays ultra-right-field (as the ball game goes).  She says she isn't going to because lots of clergymen like her.  I suppose.  Reality is fantasy! Then there is Rick Parry.  His bus is inscribed, "Faith, Jobs, and Freedom".  What does faith have to do with choosing a political leader?  We aren't electing a Deacon!  This is supposed to be a place where religion is not  a prerequisite for either holding, or voting, for office.  "Separation", not the conjoining of church and state! Newt has found religion, or a new religion.  He used to be a Baptist, ...

In the book, Hurtigruten Minutt for Minutt, there is a photo on page 43 of Einar Johan Jakobsen and his wife, Hild Anne Aas, who rowed out to meet the Hurtigrute ship, Nordnorge, as it made its way north, outside of Bessaker, Norway, in June of 2011. More than a hundred years ago, my grandfather, Jonas Jakobson, who became John Jacobson, came from Bessaker, Norway, to settle outside of Tacoma, Washington. I wonder. . . .

I suppose it happened when the Good Lord, trying to think of a way to make a woman, decided to use one of Adam's ribs.  Adam and Eve have ben arguing about that rib ever since.  I don't know where the in-laws came from for that first holiday dinner, but my guess is that they had a beef with each other.   (I have been overhearing conversations, again!) It is notable how often religious commitment lies at the heart of family differences and, I suppose, at many other disagreements, too.  Whether the topic of conversation (or contention) is the President, the status of women, war, sexual orientation, the Tea Party or the Republican primary, someone quotes Jesus or St. Paul, more or less.  Muslims are trying to take over our kindergartens, or Jews control the local bank.  Or maybe it is the Catholics and that business with little boys.  Or Newt's religious conversion to Tea and Callista.  The suggestion of evolution will aggravate a division of t...

From there, north of the Arctic Circle, not far from The Fisherwife herself, Jorun and Audun sent us a book reminding Mari and me of the trip we took on the coastal ships that tie Norway together, reminding even Norwegians that they are a coastal nation, a nation shaped by the sea.   The Lofotens are an archipelago north of the Arctic Circle, and Svolvaer, today, is a town of about 4000 people; 4000 very tough people.   Norwegian public television broadcast a non-stop trip of one of the coastal ships for almost six days as it made its way from Bergen, stopping everywhere, to Kirkenes.  Bjørn Tore Pedersen, in Hurtigruten, Minutt for Minutt , wrote: On the starboard side, when sailing into Svolvaer, Per Ung's statue, "The Fisherwife", stands as a memorial to all the women who had husbands and sons at sea, and never knew whether they would come home alive.   During a storm in 1848, more than 500 fishermen died on the Westfjord in the course of one night. ...

Christopher Hitchens died, as we used to say, "without benefit of clergy".  Cancer does not care whether there be clergy.  Mr. Hitchins did care.  He preferred not.  Decidedly not.   Like many of us, Mr. Hitchens did not find any evidence for God.  Unlike most of us, Mr. Hitchens articulated that opinion with eloquence and zeal.   I do not know how Christopher Hitchens preferred to describe himself, but the news media are littered with terms like, "atheist", "non-believer", and "non-religious".  He is a "non".  They might just as well say that he was a non-Catholic, or a non-Buddhist, or a non-Seventh Day Adventist.  It is a way of description that assumes that to be a real something, or a real somebody, you have to be a Catholic, or a Buddhist, or a Seventh Day Adventist.  If you aren't one of those (or a Lutheran or a Baptist or a Cargo Cultist), you have no real identity:  you are "non".   Personally, I am not ...

How is it possible for the whole nation to hold its breath wondering who the Evangelical Republican Tea Party in Iowa is going to choose to be the Next Loser?   The Republican caucuses in Iowa have not chosen a successful Presidential nominee in years! But here we are, going down through the list again:  Bachmann?  Santorum?  Parry?  Paul?  Romney?  Cain?  Gingrich?  Somebody?   Anybody!  Help! Gingrich?  How is it possible for earnest, church-going, tea drinkers to prefer Gingrich?  Does he not represent almost everything they scorn?  Newt's marriage record alone might seem to cause a Dutch Reformed Deacon's moral commitments to scrunch up into a knot.  Newt was thrown out of office by his own party the last time he held office.  He is a mean-spirited son-of-a-gun who oozes mean comments.  He advocates arresting politicians he disagrees with, and says he would refuse to follow laws he does not li...

When I was a boy, dodging dinosaurs and playing tag with Neanderthals, it was not unusual to have to holes in our pants pockets.  I cannot recall when last I had a hole in a pocket.  Perhaps the cloth is better now, or perhaps we don't wear the pants forever. Now--today--only the rich have holes in their pockets.  It is a very common belief that the best way to get money to the poor is to give it to the rich, who will put the money in their pockets, from where it will trickle down to the poor.  The rich put on their pants just as we all do--one leg at a time--but unlike the rest of us, they have holes in their pockets. We call those people, "job creators".  The money trickles down, and the job of the poor is to pick up the change which, as we all know, leads to the good life. Analyzing all of this politically, it is clear that Congress will not change its defense of tax cuts for the rich until the rich get better pants. *I don't get the connecti...

"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'"   --from Through a Looking Glass Darkly The Catholic Church, Katherine Thomas writes in the Star-Tribune, "does not manufacture what is true, but looks at the way things are,  the way God has given them to us."  Then the Church tell us what is true; neither more nor less. The Church says that Christ did not allow women to be ordained.  Women are not ordained in the Bible.  The Apostles, all, were men.  There you are!  The Church cannot allow the ordination of women to the priesthood, because it didn't do it before.  That is the way things are! About forty years ago, in Fremont, California, I went from door to door to find people who might be interested in going to church.  "No," a woman told me, she wasn't interested.  Her family drove up to Oakland to attend church.  Just to make c...

I grew up with Scandinavian Lutherans.  They were not hasty. Lutherans want to get their theology right.  Getting it right means that it cannot be too Catholic, which is not easy because Lutheranism is thoroughly Catholic in its Germanic and Scandinavian roots.  For instance, having inherited the Mass, Lutherans are both suspicious of it and determined to get it right.  Most Lutheran church services were the Mass without Holy Communion:  stop before you get that far! It was not unusual to meet determined, old Lutherans who rarely, if ever, had participated in Holy Communion.  They were waiting until the last minute.   Then they were going to confess their sins, and eat the bread and drink the wine, and die!  Forgiven!   They didn't want to get forgiven, live for five more years, accumulate five years worth of overt and covert sins, and have to stand before St. Peter with five years of tarnish. You know how the Catholics were!  They...

"Pressure," one of our raspy-voiced sports commentators said, "is betting $20. on a pickup game of basketball with two gang members, and not having the twenty bucks." Mitt Romney has never been under pressure.  He offered to bet Rick Parry ten thousand dollars during a Republican debate, and Mitt had the twenty bucks in his pocket, and twenty million more of them in the bank. "Oh," Mitt said, "I haven't lost touch with ordinary people!  You know how ordinary people say, 'I will bet you a million dollars!'" I often say that.  I play golf once every ten years or so, and I have been known, without perceptible hesitation, to bet a beer on the outcome.  I do that almost fearlessly because, once, in 1983, I won the round on the first playoff hole:  twenty-eight over par!  It is not so much because I am a great golfer, but because I only bet with people I like, and nobody I like is good at golf. Mitt knows how to buy a company with m...

They looked like Chris Christie wannabes.  They didn't have shoulders.  They were an A-frame from their ears to their hips.  The two men knew each other, but they weren't good friends.  They laughed too loud at each other's inanities, and tried to hard to show they were winners. They were a little like some of the chefs on "Chopped" who announce, "I'm gonna win this one!  There's no way these guys can beat me!"  It is always so nice when they lose. A recent high school poll showed that 80% of the students thought they were exceptional.  I thought of the grading curve used when I was in college:  5% As, 15% Bs, 60% Cs, 15% Ds, and 5% Fs.  A Bell Curve.  I knew I wasn't exceptional.  95% of us were not exceptional. The two guys having lunch were exceptional.  They exuded self-confidence, and they had examples to tell. "B.S.!", I thought.  "Why don't they relax, and enjoy their burgers and fries?  Why don't they ...

The President of the United States earns $400,000. a year.   The Anaheim Angels baseball club is going to pay Albert Pujols 25 million dollars a year, for the next ten years. The replacement bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis cost about $350 million dollars.   Let me see if I can get this right:  President Obama could pay for that bridge in 800 or 900 years.  (He could live off his book royalties until he gets the bridge paid for.)  Ol' Albert, on the other hand, could pay for the bridge in . . . let's see . . . about 14 years.  Except that Albert's contract is only for ten years.  He would come up a bit short.  Maybe A-Rod, with the Yankees, could pitch in.  He earns even more than Albert.   In Minnesota, our legislature debated fiercely about raising the gasoline tax--as I recall--about a cent and a half a gallon to pay for road and bridge repair.  Oh, Lord, that was hard work!  The public howled.  Oil ...

Seventy years ago, today, when I was ten years and two days old, my mother called out to me,  as I was walking home from Sunday School, that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor.  I knew who the Japanese were, but had no idea at all where Pearl Harbor was.   My first thought was that I was going to die in a war. I have no idea what else I ever thought when I was ten years old.   Now I am eighty years and two days old, and I did not die in that war, nor in the Korean War, the Vietnam War, nor in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Our wars, ever since December 7, 1941, have gotten shabbier and sorrier, and so have I.  But there is a good reason for what has happened to me.   Eleven years earlier, my mother had graduated from Eatonville High School, in Washington State, and some of her classmates had Japanese names.  The first Japanese came, probably in 1904, before my father had been born in Norway.  They worked in the sawmill, mostly, and for a...

She lives in Afghanistan. She was raped by a relative, so she has humiliated her family, and deserves to die.   i She has agreed to marry the guy who raped her, so they are going to let her live. It's a man's world where men, created in the image of God, own their women.   It isn't about Afghanistan, and Sharia law.  It is about Michele Bachmann, too, and the head of her Biblical household--Marcus--who told her to go to law school.  She hated the idea, but Michele believes, too, that men are the heads of their households.  Michele isn't a Muslim.  She blames Jesus. She is wrong about that.  It isn't about Muhammed or Jesus.  It is about men and women.  Do you think women invented a god who made them servants?  Which of the female authors of the holy books wrote that women should keep their heads covered, and shut up, in church? Quick!  Who was our first female president?   In what year did women first hold a ma...

I drive a pickup with adequate side-view mirrors.  "Adequate" means that with both mirrors extended, I cannot drive into my garage, so I have to reach out, grab the mirror on the driver's side, and haul it back.  I can handle that.  I have long arms.   It is worse when I want to drive through a car wash.  Then I have to get out, and walk around, first to fold back the other mirror, too,  and then, later, to put it out again.  I do not handle that well.   As a result, I suffer from retractable, electric mirror envy.   That is to say, I envy my brother, who has buttons.  That is to say, I do not like my brother anymore.  Until just lately. Because I have had a recent hip replacement--which my brother has not had--I also have had to buy one of those generic, extensible, aluminum canes.  Because I have one of those extensible aluminum canes, I no longer dislike my brother.  With the standard window button in my pickup...

It was odd to walk there, knowing that once, it had been a railway bed.  The rail lines were gone, and the "road", which was really only an almost straight way through the trees, was indicated mostly by the fact that no trees grew there; not yet.  That came gradually, later.   We knew who probably once had owned the trees.  Our three-room, eight grade school, was "Weyerhaeuser No. 303".  We assumed that Frederick Weyerhaeuser--see how easily I still can spell it?--once had owned the old timber where we lived.  Only a few "snags"--old trees not worth cutting down, now dead, hinted at what once had been everywhere.  We grew up wondering when the brown snags, peppered with woodpecker holes, would fall, and hoped we would not be near.  There was hardly a chance! Once the railroads had run there where we walked, in the middle of what seemed nowhere, because the old growth timber, after ten thousand years of crowded competition and easy cooperatio...

Herman Cain says the Democrats are plotting to destroy him by accusing him of unsavory sexual activities so that they can get to Newt Gingrich and accuse him of unsavory sexual activities.   I guess.  Unless Herman has been taking Gary Hart lessons.  It was Gary Hart who put to rest charges that he was unfaithful to his wife by saying something like, "Prove it!  Follow me!"  They did.  He was.   Clearly, this is not a Democratic scheme to discredit Republican candidates.  Democrats are not complex enough to have arranged Herman and Newt's lives the way they have done, or even to figure out how to tell the story.   Is there anything sadder than hearing about the sex lives of celebrities?  If you do not know the answer to that, read about Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries:  what is a seventy-day marriage like between a seven-foot basketball player and a plastic woman? It is as if the news media just discovered that people ...

Our uncle, Hans, died.  He was 91. Now only his older brother, Harold, lives to represent our mother's siblings. He is 95.  I wish him a long life. It must have been nearly a hundred years ago that our Norwegian immigrant grandparents created a farm middle in the forested lands that are western Washington.  I do not know exactly when they built the house that seems to me to have been there forever, although it cannot have been; the house that Hans almost never left; and never far.  I remember how electricity came to that house. Carl Larson tore up the floorboards in the rooms where the family slept, and ran wires through ceramic tubes, and anchored them taut with nailed insulators.  I suppose, if the house is still there, and if the floors are still there, that the wiring and the insulators are there, too.  Carl Larson let me squat and watch, and tried to explain to me what electricity was.  I still do not know. Later, when...

There is something awful about an old man with a limp shuffling out into a tree farm, saw in hand, intent on cutting down a young tree. There is something particularly awful about being that old man. I grew up in a small clearing where once there had been almost nothing but fir trees.  Western Washington is a temperate jungle of evergreens.  It wasn't a tree farm.  It was a forest.  The timber companies, and the hard-scrabble farmers who followed them, did not steal the land from the First People; from the Native Americans who came first thousands of years ago.  The land was stolen from the forests of trees; the real natives on those rocky slopes. All my long life I have cleared small patches of land, usually just to beat back the trees that edged forward to where they used to be, more at home on those graveled fields than any apple tree or oat patch.  The fields just survived:  the trees thrived.   Never have I cut down a tree without sad...