SmokeSound

Michele Bachmann said that our founders fought tirelessly against slavery.   The problem is that many of our founders owned slaves.   Slavery was not abolished until the time of the Civil War.   Most of our presidential aspirants talk as if our founders intended to establish a Christian nation.  The genius of the people who wrote our Constitution was not that they intended a church-state, but that they were religious of a sort that used common religious language, and might or might not have believed in a god of some sort, but that knew that if there were a god, it was a god who had created brains, and intended people to use them; intended them to be rational.   Thomas Jefferson did say this: "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."                              ...

They were discussing Joe Paterno's funeral, or memorial service.  One of the guys said his friends were tweeting about the experience:  the statue, the flowers, the angry people, and the admirers.  "So this," he said, "is how religions get started!" John said that his church's book discussion group was going to talk about a book about Tim Tebow's football religion:  John 3:16 and a knee down.   At coffee this morning, I was reminded of the Southern Baptist pastor I knew in California who said that when he decided to become a clergyman, he drove to Indiana where he had a friend who was a church pastor, and his friend ordained him.  Dumber than a post!  Giving people religious advice.   No one sat there this morning, but some mornings a half dozen very angry men sit in the coffee shop affirming completely absurd assertions about what the Bibles they all hold mean.  Handkerchiefs that heal diseases?   Joel wonders what Rick Sant...

S he is not going to leave us!  Michele Bachmann is going to run for a House seat, again!  Oh, thank God, thank God!  What would we have done?  Who would have kept up the Good Fight against gay things:  gay marriage, The Gay Philosopher, Marvin Gaye, and her own step-sister?   She almost left to become President of the United States, but almost everybody preferred somebody else; anybody else.  As Adlai Stevenson said, "America is a country where anybody can become President.  It is just a chance we have to take."   The speculation was that Michele might challenge Amy Klobuchar for her Senate seat, but her chances of winning that were worse than that she might become President, or Pope.   Stillwater.  Stillwater on the St. Croix.  Or Stillwater Prison, which is actually next door in Bayport, also on the St. Croix River.  Michele lives in Stillwater, the town.   Minnesota's 6th Congressional district, which ...

It is amazing what an arsehole can do for the economy.   No, I am not talking about politics.  I am talking about Christmas card thieves. I sent Judith a check to pay for some books.  The check never arrived, apparently having been stolen from her mailbox, along with the rest of her mail, one day.  The bank said it would cost $29. to stop payment, but then they said the real problem was that a thief apparently had our account information, and if he was smart enough, that could cause even bigger problems, so I should just close out the accounts and open new ones, with new numbers.   I had no idea how long that would take, and how much paper would be required, since direct depositors had to be notified, and Mari had to co-sign and, somehow, we ought to try to get it to stop snowing, since--going out the door from home--I had taken one step on the walk and fallen flat on my back.  That may have affected how lucidly I described the problem.   B...

Thinking to check the mail box, I shoveled the walk out to the street.  No mail.   Not much snow, either.  It has not been a brutal winter, so far, just a damnably irritating one.   We have, perhaps, three inches of snow.  Last winter, we received seven feet of snow, in all.  I know about Cordova, Alaska:  15 feet since November!  But we do not live in Alaska.  We live here, just a plane ride north of the temperate zone.  We cannot even get to Alaska from here because of the shale oil spills and tar sand strip mining between here and there, which make for heavy sledding.  If Nome needs serum, and it has to be delivered by dog sled, it isn't coming from Minnesota.  We might find a way to airlift corn cobs.   It took me half an hour to drive two miles, this morning, on my way to the coffee shop.  It was a tad slippery because a bit of rain had fallen and frozen before it began to small-snow, but it ought not to ha...

Tim had time, before the cancer finally got him, to think about his obituary.  In the place--surely invented by a mortician--where it almost always lists which of the deceased's relatives have already died, Tim wrote:  "Tim was preceded in death by Ghengis Khan, and grandparents. . . ." Loyal wrote the eulogy.  Loyal has a keen eye for seeing what it is that makes us what we are, and he nailed it, again.  Loyal will be preceded in death by everyone he knows who is capable of saying for him what he is able to say for others, and it is a damned shame.  Not his eventual death; but that he needs someone as inciteful and eloguent as he.   Another Tim reminded me that he was one of the people responsible for bringing Jesus to me--not me to Jesus:  that was beyond his considerable imagination.  Once he hauled a plaster-of-paris Jesus to my house, in the dead of night, and stood him up so Jesus could look into the kitchen window.  Because I kne...

Lordy, Lordy!  All my parts are failing me! Some guy down I-35 replaced my hip joint without telling me that it involved taking apart all my leg muscles and braiding them together in a creative new way.  A dentist over on Penn jackhammered an old bridge, pretty much filling the channel with the debris.  Then the cruise control in my pickup disappeared, probably on vacation with my eye doctor who has made my right eye into a career, and an Italian cruise.  While they were explaining to me why my truck needed a computer capable of controlling protons aimed at God particles, they also casually mentioned that the truck battery cranking power was down to one crank, so I cranked to Costco for a new battery.  Costco doesn't install batteries, so I did battle with the acid and corrosion in the garage.   As you recognize, a man and his pickup are not easily separated, or distinguished.  I still do not have a new computer, nor a cruise control mode, since ...

Half a lifetime ago, a very good dentist in Chicago decided to make my dental disasters a project.  As a result, I have dental repairs that are much more enduring than the teeth they rest on.   One of his magic repairs was a bridge over the River Kwai.  He melted down a ring from a disaster of another sort, and tied two teeth together, at the same time hanging a phony denture over the intervening gorge.  Twice in the intervening years, a piece of taffy or caramel has suctioned his handiwork up from its foundations, and that bridge has meandered through my digestive tract.  Today it came off, again--more under control--and I am glad to see it go.  It will be replaced, with two extra lanes and a cantilevered arch, at an indecent price.   The gold will be sold, probably to cement another marriage together, permanently, until a dentist do them part.   Meanwhile, I am wearing temporary caps, which my numb mouth suggests are somewhat like mile ...

I recall listening to someone who had lived in Guatemala when ordinary people were being shot and tossed into wells for protesting their poverty and for resisting power:  our power.  In later years, I talked to some of the widows and survivors, in Guatemala.  The speaker said that it had been a thicket of complex problems, but that finally he had decided to stand with those who had to work all day for a loaf of bread.   Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthdate.  We know that because there is no mail delivery, and a street bears his name.  If that were all--and sometimes it seems to--it would be a pathetic legacy.   That is not all. Forty-four years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot to death, I was one of those sad but necessary people in California trying to make it possible for the black people who worked in our town to be able to buy houses in our town.  Our town was a white town.   At the time, wha we were doing wa...

Dorothy Hodgkin worked out the structure of penicillin, insulin and vitamin B12. But when, after 31 years of work, she won the Nobel Prize for science in 1964 the Daily Mail chose to run the story under the headline "Oxford housewife wins Nobel" You figure it out!  There is no way Jon Huntsman could gain the Evangelical Republican selection as a nominee for the Presidency!  Huntsman believed scientists knew what they were talking about.  He accepted the fact that the earth was billions of years old.  He knew that something was happening to our climate, and that the most likely cause was carbon emissions.  In other words, Jon Huntsman was a loon.  He did not get all his facts from the Bible, or a fundamentalist seminary.   The people who have hijacked the Republican Party do not live in the 21st century.  They live in a three-story universe populated with demons and angels and imps and leprechauns.  They think God car...

Stan sent the message that God had posted somewhere, after the New England Patriots almost humiliated Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos:  "Tim Tebow is completely on his own", although Ben says that God either does not like football, or maybe just isn't good at it. At the same time, a battalion of right-wing preachers gathered on a ranch just south of God, and announced that they were swinging their supporters at Rick Santorum in their fight against godless communism and godly Mormons.  So we know, in a secondhand way, that God likes politics more than he likes football, and that is troubling. I should not be so hasty.   The primary in South Carolina is nearly a week away, and the Evangelical Republican support for anyone but Mitt and Newt might not work any better than Tim Tebow's long-armed passing attack.  And if swinging God to the side of Rick Santorum does not work, I suppose we will need to wonder what does work in football and in politics. ...

The Duluth Trading Company advertises its Buck Naked men's underwear with the slogan, "No pinch, no stink, no sweat!" Maybe it is the cold weather that encourages such plain-spoken, almost-poetic language.  Maybe it is the lack of interest in polishing the veneer, when the insulation is more important. It is reported that Newt Gingrich has been given $5 million to support his campaign, and that a half hour commercial describing Mitt Romney as a corporate raider is the result.  Rick Perry says Romney's business firm specializes in devouring the carcasses of failing corporations.  Ron Paul has his own attack ads. Wouldn't it be a pleasure if politicians could be as plain, as promising, and as socially desirable as Duluth Trading Company's Buck Naked underwear ads?  No pinch.  No stink.  No sweat.

It cannot possibly be true, but I have read, repeatedly, that it is against the law to enter Wisconsin while wearing a chicken on one's head.  It cannot possibly be true, because thousands of people in Wisconsin wear cheese on their heads.  People in Wisconsin are not super-sensitive about what happens to their heads. Anyway, this excursion into laws and mores did not begin with chicken-heads, or cheese-heads.  I was meditating on the oft-repeated claim that people have passed laws specifying that sex is legal only in the "missionary position", which I assume to be somewhat "face-to-face", which is, itself, somewhat of an anatomical evasion. Moreover, the issue is not really even about presumed missionary-defined sex.  It has to do with crotch politics in general.  That is to say, to the extent that people's personal and private behavior ought to be regulated by law. It cannot be, as so many of us say, that what goes on in the bedroom is nobody else...

It was a most remarkable phone call!   The pleasant young woman next to us, between flights in Denver, held a long, animated, conversation with herself.  It had to have been with herself:  she never stopped talking long enough for anyone else to have said anything.   She laughed.  She gestured, corrected herself, and went into great detail, endless detail, fascinating detail.   She did not need replies to prompt her, so I tried to imaging what she might be talking about, endlessly, without pause, without hesitation.  Maybe, I thought, she is describing every detail of every meal she has eaten since October.  Maybe she had a job interview as a tour guide for a ferris wheel, and is telling her mother just how it went.   She was asian, and an asian man eventually arrived and sat at her right.  He was occupied with carefully and precisely demolishing the largest sandwich I have ever seen.  He brutally tore it into halves bef...

When we lived in Tucson in the mid-1980s, and made periodic trips to Iowa and back, our WonderDog, Felix, could smell when we were nearing Pima County.  He pushed his nose at the air vent in the pickup, and began to show excitement.   Mari and I visited Tucson for a few days this month--a kind of belated family holiday trip.  Twice, we have lived in Tucson for a few years each time, so our visit was something like Felix, smelling familiar and unusual things.   We drove up Silverbell, wide in its newer neighborhoods, in bright and clear light, framed by the purple mountains rising from the desert floor like islands.   Together with family members, we (of european and asian descent) breathed in the wonderful smells and rainbow sights of Teresa's Mosaic Cafe, a woman making corn tortillas on one side of us, and the Santa Catalinas beyond the windows on the other.  We tipped our margaritas in gratitude, and sipped them to show how fine it is to be in a...

Michele Bachmann is not going to be our next President.  After finishing dismally in the Iowa caucuses, she has dropped out of the race, vowing to fight the good fight from her House seat. She did get more votes than Herman Cain, Buddy Roehmer, Jon Huntsman, No Preference and Other, but well behind everyone else. We spoke to a former colleague in the Minnesota House this morning, and in answer to Mari's persistent question--"What made her think she was smart enough to become President?"--he said she wasn't; that her colleagues regularly rated her intelligence at or near the bottom.  She did, though, he said confidently, always dress splendidly, and that she always knew where the camera was. The answer to Mari's question is, "God".  God convinced Michele that she should run for the presidency.  So now, I suppose,  the question is about God. In the large view of things, it might not matter whether Michele is very bright.  Not so long as we have Ric...

A non-representative group of right wing Iowans met last night to choose a new leader for the nation.  There was the flip-flopper who invented Obama care and disavowed it, the guy who wants to bomb Iran, the guy who wrote racist newsletters and said he didn't, a frequently married lobbyist, a woman who cannot figure out what a fact is, and a guy from Texas who sounded like he was running for a church council.   The people of Iowa chose almost all of them.  It was embarrassing.  Half of the candidates and all of the voters seemed to think that they were in church, and that a government of, by, and for the people was a very bad idea.  It was like trying to decide whether the next Pope should be a Republican or an auto Mechanic.   I recalled that once, in California, I rang a doorbell and asked the woman who came to the door if they attended the church down the street.  "Oh, no!", she replied.  "We are Republicans!"  The Iowa Republican ca...

It is a honking big wrist watch!  "Big Ben", we call it.  I don't think it actually bongs every fifteen minutes, but it ought to.  John says men tease him about it, but women like it.  I didn't know that John would even recognize that, so now we know more about John than we used to.   The watch does not slip easily under his shirt cuff, for the same reason that a frying pan does not.  It is like being across the Thames from Parliament.  John's new wrist watch commands attention, if not admiration.   "Bong!"  Quarter after!   He lives close enough to Minnehaha Creek so that pressure waves are created whenever the watch bongs.  You can see them crossing Lake Hiawatha before they escape downstream.  On the other side of the Mississippi, the pressure waves follow the railroad tracks that run parallel to the river.  What began as a quarter-past Bong! , somehow gets converted to electro-magnetic signals picked up by the freig...

"Jesus is my quarterback!" the coach said to Paul, who was interviewing for the Presidency of the college. "I have got to see that game!", Paul said, later. I don't know how God keeps track of all the football games and presidential candidates.  He could probably pretty much ignore the presidential candidates, since most of them don't matter, anyway, but football matters!  Tim Tebow paints "John 3:16" on his face, where everyone can see it, but not even Rick Santorum does that.  Maybe he paints it somewhere else. I suppose God does care about Texas high school football games, but if he cares about Texas politicians it doesn't show, or if it does show, it shows that big and strong is more important than brains.  If Tim Tebow is God's quarterback, then clearly God doesn't require good form.  And if Michele and Rick and Newt are God's candidates, then God has a great sense of humor, and doesn't care about fumbles. If I were...