SmokeSound

"The Job Creators." "Let us give most of our money to 'The Job Creators' and they will create jobs, and life will be good, again." BS!  That is what it is:  BS.  Most of the people who have most of the money do not create jobs with it.  They sock it away somewhere safe.  It is like watching a British TV series in which a few people have lots of money and dress for dinner, and dress for breakfast, and dress for lunch.  They dress for hunting, and dress for strolling, and dress for letchery.  They have suits and dresses for driving in a car, and someone to help them put their clothes on and take them off.  They have cooks and gardeners and hat boxes.   This is what makes jobs:  when the middle class and the working class have a little money, they create jobs.  They eat better, and the butcher and the green grocer hire extra help.  When ordinary people feel safe in their houses, and do not worry themselves sick about see...

This is not him! The dumbest man in the world needed dental work, so he went to the clinic of his ex-wife.   Marek Olszewski had decided to leave her for another woman, but a toothache is a toothache. Anna Mackowiak had decided to be a grownup about the separation, but she says that when she saw her recent husband in the dental chair, she thought, "What a sack of shit!"  So she gave him a little extra anesthetic, and pulled out all of his teeth.  Then she bandaged he mouth shut, and told him that he needed to see a specialist. And this is not the dentist, either! Then his new girl friend told him that she was not interested in a toothless man. His old love is in danger of spending three years in prison.  She has a very nice smile. It could have been worse.  She could have been an andrologist.

What happens after you gain independence?  (The Revolutionary War.) You have to figure out who you are. We figured out that we were black and white, male and female, ever since Eden. What happens after you achieve national coherence?  (The Civil War.) You have to figure out how to live with your differences. We figured out how to stack the cards in new ways:  call it segregation instead of slavery. What happens after you establish a New Deal?  (Social Fairness.) You have to figure out. . . .   What is it we are trying to figure out? That is where we are today.  We are trying to figure out what comes after FDR. Social Security.  A need to have a job.  A need for health care. The necessity of an education.  Access to the beach, and the mountains. How do we pay for those things?  How do newer immigrants figure in? When birth rates fall, we need immigration to fill the jobs, to pay taxes. When "Detroit" does not mean "cuttin...

It was 101 degrees F. in Tucson. I chose the route, before driving there and back, to avoid the possibility of storms with tornados. Here in St. Paul, I mowed the lawn today. Tomorrow, the National Weather forecast suggests, we may have some snow. It used to be said, by people who wanted to believe, that there were no atheists in foxholes.  There were. It is often said, by people who want to believe, that they could not live where there were not seasons. I have been wondering whether we really need four.

It is a fine, old mesquite door, aged to gray by relentless sun, as solid and heavy as it ever was.  The hand-crafted spikes dot the surface.  The hinges are still there, as is the post the hinges are attached to.  Even the lock remains, hammered down into place with another hand-made nail I salvaged from our log house in Iowa. It rests horizontally, now, on two dish pack boxes; just testing how it might be to make a credenza with the old door as the top.  Just to make sure that it will be able to do the job, I placed a Dean Schwarz plate, with a running horse, on top.  It might not be the first horse the old door has seen, or supported. I wonder, sometimes, why it is that I do not want ordinary furniture, but am drawn, instead, to using something that once was something else.  For decades, I have looked at things and thought, "That could be used for. . . ."  It has nothing to do with being frugal, or saving the resources of the planet, or a Green ...

Memory Lame.   I had not intended to write "Lame", but it is more appropriate than "Lane".  I wanted to let our trusty old trailer see the scene of the crime:  Belle Plaine (or some such thing, on the Kansas Turnpike). At least ten years ago, while doing almost exactly what I was doing again--that is to say, pulling the empty trailer back to the Midwest after hauling furniture to Tucson--when a woman from Texas, cell phone in hand, rear-ended the trailer just as I started to exit to a service area, and almost caused me to become religious, ripping the trailer off the pickup hitch, and sending it, like a chariot bound for glory, up past the pickup and into a Kansas Turnpike light pole, taking the pole down, and giving the trailer a permanent front-end wrinkle.   Keeping a keen eye for Texas license plates, I eased into the same exit ramp.   The years have not been kind to the replacement light pole.  It is mottled with rust.  The trailer is ...

The Supreme Court had so much fun  appointing George W. to the Presidency, even though Dubya clearly lost the vote, that they have decided to go into medicine. Who--I say, Who-- among us would not agree that if you want to play God, it is better to be a doctor than a politician?  Life and death decisions, opiates, circumcisions and procedures  that end in "ectomy" are closer to God than writing laws about birth control, and vaginal scans, and creating Death Panels for Aunt Mildred. (Well, the differences were clearer  when I began than when I ended that paragraph.) Everything hinges on the provision that  everyone has to buy into the health care system, one way or another.  "Foul!", cry the conservatives. "Let 'em live with their decisions!",  cry the Libertarians.   "Give me liberty or give me gout!", I cry.  (I have gout.) It is a rare bird, indeed, who never needs health care, and it is a rarer bird, still, who ...

Sometimes a moral choice is between the lesser of two evils.  Sometimes a moral choice is between the greater of two goods.  This time, I chose the lesser evil and the greater good.  I just gave away two pairs for cowboy boots, and I kept my favorite pair to take back to Tucson. Not only that, I am wearing them!  I am a man of considerable courage and determination, but I have not had enough of either to wear a pair of cowboy boots here in Minnesota. I know that there are cowboy boots here in the Upper Midwest, but most of them have big, flat, entirely useless heels, and they are to be seen--sometimes near cows, but never near horses--getting up into the cab of a semi-truck, or up into the cab of a honking big farm tractor. For people like me, cowboy boots are costume.  The last horse I rode was a cranky gelding in Iowa.  He had two reasons for being cranky:  the second was that he was in Iowa.  "Any of you ever rode before?" the stable owne...

There he is:  Nathaniel Jao Hubbard! The little tad got to Tucson before we did.   I don't want to boast--and Lord knows I have little enough reason to-- but do you not think there is a certain, rather pleasing resemblance to me? Give or take a generation or two, with allowance for alleles and genetic drift? We have been keenly aware  these past few days, of friends, and of deaths in their families, so along comes Nathaniel Jao to bring us back to our senses and remind us that life is a glorious thing, and never more so than in a birth! Welcome to the family, kid! You will have to learn to deal with us later, but right now you are making us look good! Thank you, Ericka and Michael!

"I yam what I yam, and that's all I yam." Those are the somewhat immortal words of the Comics Philosopher, Popeye. (I am sorry to say it reminds me of what might be the most mindless chiche of our time:  "It is what it is."  To which I nearly alway resist replying, "Well I will be damned!  So it is!") This is a terribly obtuse way of saying that I have been trying to remember the name of the philosopher whose argument, as I fragmentarily recall it, is that our reasons for doing what we do, ethically, can be reduced to this:  we do things because we are who we are.  What I might erroneously recall is that he used the example of what we might be reduced to answering if asked why we jumped off a diving board.  Not because it is hot:  other people, in hot weather, do not do that.  Sometimes we don't dive in hot weather.  Sometimes we do.  We do it, he said, because "I am I."  We are like that. Out training for becoming moral per...

Alan West is a Republican congressman from Florida.  I want to tell you how happy I am that he is from Florida.  Up here in Minnesota, we already have Michele Bachmann, and we can take only so much. Alan West says he has heard that about 80 of his fellow members of Congress are communists, and that all of them are Democrats.  Alan West obviously has a hearing problem.  He is also out of his simple mind.  The last time I recall anybody saying crap like that was when Joseph McCarthy represented Wisconsin, about the time I was graduating from college, almost sixty years ago.  Joseph McCarthy was a national disgrace, and a charlatan.  Alan West is a Republican from Florida. I do not believe that the Cold War is starting all over again, with charges of communists under everyone's beds, and infiltrating Congress.  I suspect that what is going on has much more to do with the fact that we have elected a Black President than it does with communism, whi...

Carol Isaac's own photo, I think.  I lost my checkbook, but Carol Isaac found Jesus on a potato chip. "Oh, my god, Vern!" she said, "Look at this!"  Vern looked, and he said, "It looks like Jesus on the cross!"  Carol chipped in, again:  "I think so, too.  It seemed like a sign or something.  I got all fuzzy and warm." Sure enough:  it was a sign or something.  Maybe a potato chip. Carol decided not to eat Jesus on the cross.  She just took pictures of it, instead, and put Jesus on the chip into the china closet.  She didn't want to take a chance bringing it to church to show the minister because he has a history of breaking things, or something. Richard Chin, who reported the story in the Pioneer Press, also reported that Jesus had been sighted recently in Bakersfield, CA, and in St. Petersburg, FL, and even in Shippensburg, PA.  And, he says, you can find Jesus on Cheetos on YouTube.  A spokesperson for the Potato ...

Be kind! Tell the truth! Respect people's marriages! Don't steal from each other! Protect children! Show care for old people! Almost all religious groups say things like that. Almost everybody says things like that, whether religious or not. You don't have to climb up Mt. Sinai in a thunderstorm to know that we shouldn't kill each other, because a community of people like that cannot survive, or if it does that it will be a hateful place.  You don't have to go to Sunday School to discover that lying is a bad idea.  You momma can tell you that.  Experience will tell you that. Religions don't invent honesty and respect and kindness to small animals.  Religions just affirm and teach those kinds of things.  Decent people everywhere, whether they are religious or not, teach those things. Sometimes we speak as if we would be barbarians if people were not religious, but that isn't true.  A religion is just a certain set of mores and morals and ethic...

Well, I found my checkbook. That's all.  No tortillas.  No bananas.  No nothing else.

"Things fly apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . . ." William Butler Yeats wrote that, more than ninety years ago. The smell of the first world war was still in the air. "Surely the Second Coming is at hand . . ." , he said. "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Things are still flying apart. The center is not holding. The Second Coming is not coming. It never has been coming. And if there is a "rough beast" slouching, it surely will not go to Jerusalem, or to Mecca, or Rome, or Salt Lake City. It is those things that are flying apart. The rough beast does not wear vestments and silly shoes and hats. That is the center that cannot hold. There is anarchy at the center. Once, there was a Holy Roman Empire, and it stretched across Europe, into Asia.  It rose and fell, but its aspirations held.  It sailed with Cortez, and followed Pilgrims e...

Jesus on a tortilla. Jesus on a drainpipe. Jesus in a knot of wood. Jesus on a paper towel. Jesus on the sole of a sock. Jesus on a sting ray. Jesus inside an orange. Jesus on a Wal-Mart receipt. Jesus on a clothes iron. Jesus on a banana. Jesus on a piece of toast. People are finding Jesus everywhere, but I can't find my checkbook. .

We live in a transition, a shifting time, a changeover time.  There is no way to go back.  We have to go forward, and make the best of it.  The "best of it" can be very good, indeed, or we can blow the opportunity.   In the long, long history of the human race--millions of years long--we began as hunters and gatherers.  The way we look, physically, and the things we can see, and smell, and eat, and notice, are the result of a long history of hunting and gathering.  The human critters whom we are, are the descendents of those who were good at hunting and gathering.   It was not until about 10,000 years ago that the first enormous change in the basic condition of human life happened:  agriculture.  People discovered that instead of chasing wild game all over the savannah, they could tame some of the animals, and have them right next door when they needed food.  At the same time, they discovered that they could grow some of the plants...

Why all the junk around the farm? Because Dad always said, of everything: "That will be worth money, someday!" It was.  To the guy who picked up junk and drove it to the landfill.  Someday, a million years from now, someone will drill that odd hill for gas, or trace elements, and Dad will be right. For so long as we have owned a TV, we have used the darned thing for years until we decided that it was time for the next-to-the-latest technology. A new TV replaced the original, and the original found a new career in some other room.  It was like those steel balls that executives play with: swing one, let it slam, and watch one at the other end jump away. Swing two, and two jump! About every ten years, we have played TV dominoes: bump, bump, bump, toss! Yesterday we unhooked two old TVs, and sent both of them to TV heaven. Both of them were old cathode ray tubes. Their average weight was about that of a sea manatee: same size, shape, and lo...

I painted the master bathroom.  I used to say that the worst part about painting was the preparation; removing things, taking off the switch covers, taping off what had to be protected, patching the little nicks and dents, washing the walls with TSP, and so forth.  I don't say that, anymore. I missed a little spot up in a skylight opening, so I climbed up there with the paint I had saved, and started painting the wrong color.  Darn!  Wrong can! But life is good!  I have a lot of other things I need to do, while the wrong color paint dries.

From the Book of Deuteronomy Chapter 22: 13  If a man takes a wife and, after lying with her , dislikes her  14  and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, "I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,"  15  then the girl's father and mother shall bring proof that she was a virgin to the town elders at the gate.   16  The girl's father will say to the elders, "I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her.  17  Now he has slandered her and said, 'I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.' But here is the proof of my daughter's virginity." Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town,  18  and the elders  shall take the man and punish him.  19 They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver  and give them to the girl's father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife...

The Bishop called me, once, and said that our new little California parish was doing very well, and that he had decided to put another parish into the area.  "Wonderful!", I thought, but did not say, "He wants me to cheer for the competition."  Instead, I said something like, "I see." The Bishop had a little favor he wanted to ask of me:  Would I be so kind as to find a house for the guy who was coming from New Mexico?  He gave me a budget.  "All right," I thought, "I will find him the best house in town for the money."  And I did.  I even persuaded the Bishop to raise the allowance. The new guy from New Mexico told me he hated the house.  How, sharper than a preacher's tooth, was Adam's bite, moving into what was not exactly the Garden of Eden, but which compared rather well with what he had come from, Somewhat Southeast of Eden. We are selling our home here in Minnesota.  Our realtor, who is a very nice, very competent p...

My Lord, we were crude where I grew up!  For example, we did not say things like:  "There are liars, damned liars, and statistics".  We just said someone was a damned liar, or when we wanted to speak poetically or politely-- that he or she was lying through his teeth.   People like Paul Ryan may or may not have been lying himself when he said, recently, that our military leaders did not support President Obama's Pentagon budget.   "We don't think the generals are giving us their true advice," Ryan had said. "We don't think the generals believe their budget is really the right budget." When Candy Crowley suggested that the generals were a little bit offended at the suggestion that they were lying, Paul Ryan said he had "misspoke".    He did not suggest that the generals had been misspokeing.  He, Ryan, had misspoke.   Then Ryan went on explain that what was wrong was that the President had come up with a budget number, and that...