SmokeSound

It has almost become a national obsession to live in two universes at the same time.   One of them, of course, is the ordinary world where we were born, grew up, work, grow old, and die.  The other one is usually religious; a remarkable variety of gods, spirits, value systems, and supernatural real estate:  heavens, hells, animal spirits, ghosts, gremlins, and goblins.   The natural world has been here for a very long time.  The supernatural worlds are the inventions of primitive human beings, trying to make sense of things they did not understand.  Maybe there were spirits in the trees.  Maybe the sea was angry.  Who knew what a great power the sun was, or why, sometimes, it went dark during the day?   Being born was a mystery, and dying was fearful.  Sometimes they sent tools with the dead for use in the next life, and sometimes they killed horses and servants and young girls to accompany and comfort the dead.  It was awf...

We live jun a time warp!  Sometimes it looks just like the 21st century and, at other times, it is the tenth century B.C.! One of our presidential candidates belongs to a religion that says, right out loud, although they would prefer that not too many people are listening, that an angel came down to the ground in Palmyra, New York, and dictated holy books in Reformed Egyptian.  Another skips up and down the eastern half of the country explaining that God sent an earthquake to Virginia as a message about sin and degradation and our budget deficit.  The President regularly asks, publicly, for God to bless America, presumably a little more than he blesses Albania and Iran, and certainly more than France.  Candidates, by the bushel, scold anyone who does not think that this is, first and foremost, a Christian nation, and not a secular nor perhaps vaguely deistic one, as our Founding Fathers thought.   It is like having to speak Latin in Rome, and English durin...

I will tell you a joke.   No, I will let Michele Bachmann tell it.  She is really funny.  You will really laugh!   "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians.  We've had an earthquake, we've had a hurricane.  He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'  Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now.  They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." Get it?   Well, it goes something like this:  God sends messages to us.  God sends earthquakes, causing a lot of damage, and hurricanes, too.  The last one--which could have been a lot worse--killed about three dozen people, and did an enormous amount of flooding damage, especially in Vermont.  Millions of people without electricity.  That sort of thing.  It is just God's way of trying to get our attention.  Sort of like a train wrec...

Not our chair.  Don't know her! We have a hanging chair that has spent most of its life lying down.  I brought it home from the log house when we put the property up for sale, but the hanging chair has been lying down in the garage ever since.  Until today. Today I decided to hang the chair from a tree in our front yard. The 16' ladder wasn't tall enough, so I dragged up the big one.  It is so long that the bottom end has to be propped up against something to keep it from kicking out when I try to "walk it up".  The "something" was a tree.  It kicked out, anyway, and clanked back down to earth.   Just as I was about to persist, I saw Tom come out of his house, across the street.  "Oh, God!", I thought. "He heard the ladder, felt the earth shake, and looked out the window, and now he is going to help me!  I am going to kill Tom, and even if it is accidental, which it surely will be, they will put me in jail, and there won...

Some of my best friends are white.   Most whites are not my best friends.   Here is how you can tell who is white:  you ask. If they say something like, "I'm mostly English, I think, but my mother was part Irish, and my Dad was European." Or, like me, you can say, "All Norwegian".   (Well, my Grandfather admitted that once there was a German in the family, but that was a long time ago.) White!  Maybe a mongrel, but white! I guess you can be partly white, and partly Cherokee, or partly white and partly Chinese, or partly Chinese and partly Thai.  Most of us are partly. Barack Obama isn't partly.  He is black. His mother was white--mostly English, I think, but part Scotch and Irish and German:  you know.  White. Obama's father was African, so Barack Obama is black. The One-Drop Rule applies.  Under Jim Crow laws (beginning in 1910) all it takes is one drop of black blood, and--Wahoo!--you are black.  Not half...

Jesus would not like the minimum wage. Rick Perry says so, and that is nice to know. We might not have known that, except for Rick. "What would Jesus do?"  WWJD? Lord, I hope you don't have one of those bumper stickers! What would Jesus do about Social Security? What would Jesus do about stem cell research? I will tell you would Jesus did not do! Nothing in the Holy Gospels suggests that Jesus did anything because--two thousand years later--Congress would vote. Jesus did not walk on water because, ten thousand years earlier, Norway and Minnesota were under a layer of ice. Jesus didn't know anything about Libya, or the U.N. He never answered his cell phone, or walked on water, either. He did  believe that the religious establishment was corrupt, and that people needed to repent of their sins, and that the days of judgment were coming very soon.  Not now.  Then. He was wrong about that, of course. Everyone has been wrong about that. It is an o...

This is--more or less--a Toucan.  It is a Central American bird.   This, on the other hand, is the logo of The Maya Archeology Initiative.  It only looks like a bird. This is a box of Froot Loops, more or less.  The more-or-less bird is Toucan Sam. Kellogg wants the Maya Archeology Initiative to quit using its Toucan logo, because the logo looks too much like Toucan Sam.   Don't you think it would just be easier if they got rid of the real bird?

It took one visit, on my first day in Chicago, to a liquor store on South Stony Island, late at night, to convince me that I was a White, liberal, do-good honkie. I had moved from California, where I had worked to integrate a White city.  I understood racism, but I didn't know what it felt like until that night on South Stony Island Avenue.  It made me scared.  Angry.  To want to piss in my pants.   Rick Perry knows just how I felt.  Rick is the Governor of Texas.  He wants to be President of these United States in order to make everything a little bit more like Texas.   They don't have buses in Texas--at least not for real Texans--but Rick has heard about sitting the back of them, and about separate drinking fountains, and slavery and Jim Crow laws and all of that.  And they have a lot of happy immigrants from Mexico--some of whom were there first--who are as happy as larks to work for minimum wages.  Rick knows all about Mar...

About the time God was creating dirt, I enrolled in a church college, and commuted to school, where the President--a man of no uncertain opinions--often spoke in daily chapel, molding our young minds as the Creator himself had once molded Adam from clay.  There was too much organic matter in the dirt that I was, so I failed creative pottery.   The chapel was new during those years, and we heard often about the rose window at the east end, behind us, up in the balcony where dutiful student monitors noted which assigned seats were empty, and reported us to somebody.  Nobody reported which assigned seats were occupied.  It was the sinners who were important.   The College alumni magazine recently reported that the rose window has been refurbished; hauled off to California, and back again, to reclaim its glory.  The article did not note that I  had gone to California, too, years earlier, without achieving glory.  Nowhere in the article does it s...

"It's all about jobs!  Let's lay off some more government workers!" .

There are things we learn in school:  how to count, and read, and write.   Sometimes we learn how to sing, and to read music, and how to tie our shoes.  We learn the earth is a sphere with lots of water, and that the sun is almost a hundred million miles away, which is a larger number than we can think, except abstractly. But how in God's name is it possible to go to school and not learn that the earth is billions of years old, and that it has evolved; that everything has evolved?  As my Mom used to ask:  were you standing behind the door when the brains were passed out? Apparently, you cannot be a Republican candidate for public office if you actually believe what they taught all of us in school!  "No, well," you have to say, "evolution is just a theory that is out there, but you know, no theory has answers for everything, and who do you think created scientists and theories in the first place, anyway?  Tha's right!  God!  About 6,000 ye...

Here we are, right in the middle of the 19th century, still arguing about evolution!  I had thought that was pretty much settled even before Darwin published, On the Origin of Species, just in time to get there before everyone else did, but I was wrong! It isn't the middle of the 19th century.  It just seems like it.  With the recent exception of Jon Huntsman, all the Republican candidates for the Presidency try to avoid admitting that absolutely everything has evolved, or even specifically denying it.  Huntsman says, "Call me crazy!", not because he believes he is crazy, but because he knows his party believes it is crazy. How is it possible for anyone living in the 21st century to be blind to evolution?  Do they not take new antibiotics because the bacteria evolve fast enough to produce strains resistant to the old medications?  Do they not understand that the weeds in their gardens evolve, producing plants that are resistant to the old herbicides? ...

As it turns out, Michele Bachmann, who previously said that she studied tax law because her husband, Marcus, who is like Christ in their household, had told her to.  But now she says that is not the real reason. The real reason is the first law of warfare:  know your enemy!   To defeat your enemy, you have to know him, so she studied tax law, and worked, off and on, in a tax office in St. Paul. And now you know the rest of the story!   Now  she is infiltrating the Presidency.  Just getting to know her enemy! It all comes together, doesn't it?  She hates government, hates taxes, and is uncommonly interested in gays. I wonder if Hardware Hank carries infiltrators for this sort of thing.

"Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. . . .  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."   (Ephesians 5) Paul did not say, just to be even-handed, that husbands should submit to their wives in everything.  Nope!  Before push comes to shove, wives should submit to their husbands! Michele Bachmann believes that, and says so.  She said, for instance, that her husband, Marcus, told her that she should study tax law.  "Why should I go and do something like that?", Michele told a campaign audience.  "But the Lord says, be submissive wives.  You are to be submissive to your husbands." She studied tax law. Now she wants to become the President of the United States.  Marcus isn't running for the office:  Michele is.  Does that mean that she is going to do what Marcus tells her to do? Oh, no, no!, Michele says.  "What submission means to us...

. . . He wept that he was ever born, and he had reasons. . . . Ron Paul represents a legitimate political philosophy:  Libertarianism.  He doesn't hate government.  He just wants it to be spare and lean, like him.  Liberty, for a Libertarian, is maximum personal responsibility, and a minimal government.  Government should be only what people cannot do for themselves, even if people are stupid or unlucky. Logically, Libertarians represent the right wing urge of the Republican Party.  The other side of Republicanism wants a government that supports a more generous, but conservative government that supports business and social necessities. The Tea Party pretends that it is Libertarian when it scorns big government but, at the same time, they want government to control marriage, and abortion, and what women can decide about their own bodies.  There is a mindless fundamentalist religious urge in the Tea Party.  There is, in other words, a very ac...

"Bricka, bracka, fi'a-cracka, siss, boom, bah!   Bugs Bunny, Bugs Bunny, rah, rah, rah! Mindless crap!  It doesn't make sense.  It doesn't have to.  It is a way to make enthusiastic noise.  Fire up the crowd!   "Offense!  Defense!  It really doesn't matter! All we really want to do is get 'em in a lather!" George W. was a cheerleader.  At Yale.  So is Michele Bachmann.  And Mitch McConnell. The whole Tea Party.   "Evel Knievel!  Land on his butt! Gubbament is evil!  Cut!  Cut!  Cut!" It is like a high school game with middle-aged cheerleaders.  "Cut!  Cut!  Cut!" It is all about jobs!  Right?  Everybody says so.  In a mixed economy, such as ours, jobs are provided partly by private investment, and party by government investment.  Boeing makes airplanes.  Apple makes computers and phones.   Government provides teachers and fire fighters and foo...

Once upon a sensible time we could tell the difference between people and corporations.  People diddled around and fell in love and married each other and had kids, sometimes.  Corporations diddled around and fell in love with profits and merged with each other and spun off entities.  We were reluctant to give legal identities to gay marriages, but we we happy to give legal identities to corporations. It was a simpler, happier time. For a lot of very sensible reasons, we gave corporations legal status:  they could own things, be regulated (sometimes), be sued if they fouled up, and so on.  In order to hold corporations responsible for corporate activity, and to protect people who simply invested in them, but did not control them directly, we said that a corporation was a kind of legal person:  it had an identity, and could itself be held legally responsible.  We did not say it was a person, but that it could be treated as if it were, in some ways. ...

If you ask, you will learn that there are four generations  in between the brown stone over at the left, and the girl in the sun.   It is an immigrant story.  It is the story of our nation.  

Lake Mills, Iowa, is what you might imagine a Mid-western small town to be.  It used to be a thriving small-farm center, but when the farms consolidated, the number of farmers shrank, and the schools shrank. The schools consolidated, and the towns stopped growing.  The stores emptied. The small industries are moving away.  There are more store buildings than stores.  There is one grocery--a nice one--and a casino out by the interstate.  The coffee shop is busy.  It has a kind of monopoly.  They still sell hamburgers without all that fru-fru stuff; you know:  lettuce, tomatoes, onions, avadadoes, peppers, sauces.  California burgers!  Sheesh! Instead, they feature Made-Rites, but they cannot call them Made-Rites, so they call them, "Crumble Burgers".  Crumble Burgers skip all that green garden decorative stuff, too, and the meat is crumbled, and looks and tastes as if it had been boiled to death for its sins.   It comes wrap...

Lutherans define themselves doctrinally, which results in an invitation for Lutherans to argue with each other endlessly over doctrine. Other churches define themselves, too, in their own ways.  Catholics are bound together by a focus on hierarchy.  They easily become authoritarian.  Methodists have their roots in achieving "holiness", which meant sobriety, hard work, and owning hardware stores.  Baptists are big into repentance and instant turnarounds.  They testify about how awful they were, and how they love the Lord Jesus so very much, now that they are sinners on their knees. You get the idea! We noted, on our recent family tour of ancesterdom, that a lot of the Lutheran churches in rural Iowa had fallen upon hard times.  Many of them were out in the countryside, alongside cemeteries, where the settlers had gathered on Sundays to sing and pray, to marry and baptize their children, catechize them in enduring truths and, when the time came, to bury...

There may not be any balm in Gilead, but there is a casino to comfort the afflicted--or to afflict the comfortable--in North Central Iowa.  We stayed there while attending the Heltne Family Reunion.  The adjacent Visitor's Center has a row of mail boxes with helpful materials.

That's a Heltne.  Mari Heltne.  There are quite a few Heltnes, as it turns out, all descended from immigrants from Luster, far up the Sognefjord, in Norway, and off a bit to the west, on Lustrafjord.  If you enter, "Luster, Norway" into Google Earth, you will find it; a small place, deep into the heart of Norway.  It was from there that their name-bearers came by boat, down the Luster fjord, out into Sognefjord, and to the sea.  Eventually, they found Lake Mills, Iowa, deep into the heart of America.  They lie there, now. The great-grandchildren, and their children met--some for the first time--in Lake Mills, and walked among the markers of their common bonding.  They went into the musty churches, struggling now with time and the consolidation of their parents and grandparents farms into endless rows of huge farms; farms with fewer homes, fewer schools, fewer towns. Paul and Jean Heltne--Jean, like many of us, having married into their story--did m...

Fragile and cranky, they come to the plastic flowers Filled with the sweet syrup that fuels their zealotry Humming birds, tiny as thimbles or dandelion fuzz Here for the summer before they go south with the wind Fighting like families with each other Allowing diversity reluctantly, as we Getting gradually used to us, the syrup providers Who, if we stand still, like maple trees, are neutral friends We, learning to look without lumbering, eye-watch As they flit like lightning fire-flies, colored in the sun Remembering Robert Frost, glad for a speck on a page Moving, knowing it is a bit of mind:  a mirrored thing I pretend I am immobile, interested in mental horizons And we come together, briefly, beautifully, kind

I don't recall exactly how much the Minnesota Twins pay Joe Mauer to play baseball.  I think it is aobut $20 million a year.  Joe is our favorite son:  born, bred, and endowed right here in the Twin Cities.   Our Mauer also sings.  In a commercial.  As a singer, Joe is easily worth seventeen or sixteen dollars a gig.  He can't sing.  If hearing musical pitch were anything like seeing a slider, he would be hitting .013, or .012, all singles to the off-field.   His diction is pretty good, or as Bert Blyleven might say, "pretty well".  Like everyone else in the jingle, he can be heard saying, ". . . in Minne-soda". Soda!  It is an old Indian name:  "Minne-soda".  It means, "small can of soda".  In some peculiar places, people don't call it "soda".  "Minne-pop", they say.  "Gimme some fries and a Minne-pop!", they say.   Nobody had to pay those people $20 million to say that.  It is just th...