SmokeSound

In 1755, a very powerful earthquake triggered the destruction of the city of Lisbon, Portugal.  Slippage along an underwater fault caused the water to be shoved out to sea.  Reports said that the wrecks of old ships could be seen on the bottom of the bay.  But then the massive wave--we now call them tsunamis--after being heaved out to sea, came roaring back, inundating great parts of the city.  It happened three times.    The physical destruction was enormous.  Perhaps as many as 50,000 people died, in Lisbon, and in other places where the tsunami roared in.  The psychological damage was probably greater.  For centuries, the church had taught people that God was in charge of everything, but that human sin--that so-called "apple" in the Garden of Eden, and lust and lasciviousness resulted in God's punishment.   But what human perversities cold have caused the Lisbon earthquake?  What had the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve do...

They are like old tom turkeys Strutting from memory Big-chested old tom turkeys Short of tail feathers But long in the wattle Measuring themselves against each other On stiff legs and small steps Until a blond female, child in tow Sits next to Clarence Fieber's plaque Outside their wired cage Pretending not to see, they peek As once they stared in propriety And do a remembered dance around The imaginary on-deck circle Shouting unnecessary encouragement To establish preening territory Mating seasons are dim memories Like towering fly balls and stolen bases And bone-crushing fast balls down low But memory is not the first to go Nor fantasy the last

"American exceptionalism". Ouch! What is it that causes, not just our politicians, but ordinary Americans, to speak of American exceptionalism? I don't want to spend the time to rehearse the history of Israel--"God's chosen people"--and of the relationship of Christianity to Judaism, when Christians spoke of themselves as "the new Israel", nor of the arrogance of all those Europeans who inherited the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire, nor the battered and religiously desperate early settlers who came to this country to escape their own persecution in Europe, and who almost immediately assumed the role of religious arrogance they were fleeing from. But here we are, touting our "exceptionalism" as if it were a virtue, or even a fact! We--that is to say, everyone who stumbled here, poorer than church mice, together with a few who had memorized the rituals of the churches where those mice lived--happened upon a huge, resource-ric...

First it was "legitimate rape" versus . . . what?  Now it is Richard Mourdock, a Republican candidate for the Senate, from Indiana. "I think that even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that it is something that God intended to happen," Richard Mourdock said in his Tuesday night debate against a Libertarian candidate.   Let us establish a general rule:  when anyone starts to talk about god while running for the Senate, something stupid is going to be said.   It isn't about running for the Senate.  It is running with god on your side.  By logical definition, if you say you have god on your side, you are asserting something like absolute truth.  And absolute truth?  Good luck!  It is in short supply.   The idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful, absolute god is a hopeless idea.  You will end up blathering about the difference between legitimate and illegitimate rapes.  You will hear yourself consoling...

"Hello, my friend!" It was my friend, Teresa.   The chairs are all burnt orange, and every table-top  is a whimsical mosaic nursery rhyme, a barely-controlled story from  Gabriel García Márquez ,  not a hundred years of solitude, but of a gathering.   Once, in Iowa, I visited from town-to-town-- of English and German and Norwegian and Irish heritages-- watching related genes imitate themselves.   Whole small towns of people all looked alike, not necessarily to their mutual benefit. There was a blond woman in the Mosaic  Café: in Minnesota that might have suggested  that there was only one customer, but at the Mosaic it meant that America was a Mosaic, and that blond is a sometime color. There were women with genuine gray hair overlaid with a sun-bleach of blond, and men with beards as white as the tablecloths Teresa does not have. At an adjacent table, a chocolate woman with brown eyes and white teeth talked to someone f...

I was second in line at the Verizon Store. I decided not to press my case for priority. "What is this about?", I asked myself. It is about not wanting to be surprised by snakes on the phone store floor. It is about not liking people in your personal space. "Terence," I recited to myself-- careful not to recite out loud-- "Terence, this is stupid stuff." I have no idea what A. E. Housman has to do with this.  

It is not the aim of business man to provide jobs. Business men are in business to make money, not provide jobs. Very often, in order to make money, a business will make jobs, but if the same goods or services could be provided by automated programs or machinery, for less money, the boss would buy the machinery:  automated factory floors, for instance. We have a name for it:  "productivity". Productivity is a measure of how many people it takes to get the job done.  "American workers," the Boss likes to say, are the most productive workers in the world. What he or she really means is that we can get by\ with the smallest number of workers to get the job done. We have replaced workers with computer-controlled machines. It is not the aim of a President to make money. The aim of a President is to put people to work, or if not to work, to share in the common good. People who are not working are a burden to the rest of us. President have to think of ...

Let us say his name is Zach. He plays baseball with the Old Timers; real baseball, but with brittle bones. Eighty years ago, Zach was stronger then he is now, and maybe faster, too. Zach hefted the bat, leaning back so as not to cause the earth to wobble. "Come on, Zach!", the team called.  "Get a hit!" The infielders moved in to the grass. The beehive outfield came in, too. Rain could not have hit the ground beneath the leather shield. The pitcher reared back but soon regained his balance. The arc of the ball attested to the growing persistence of gravity. "Ugh!", Zach swung, and swung again! "Strike two!", the umpire called, and Zach waggled and earth wobbled. "Come on, Zach!" his teammates called, and the wall of gloves inched forward half a step. Zach swung the bat, again, when the pitcher heaved again. There are small holes in the universe where sub-atomic baseballs divide and reassemble, where a...

Once upon an electronic era ago, when it was dawning upon us that everything was changing--that business as usual was a way to go broke--it was said that it occurred to the people who owned trains that they were not in the train business.  "Train business" meant doing what one was used to doing with trains, and that wasn't profitable, or sustainable.  Trains hauled corn and coal along railroad tracks.   But was was happening was that trucks were delivering freight to warehouses, and great ships were bringing containers of goods to the docks from overseas.  Airplanes were delivering fresh fish to Minneapolis every day from Seattle and Boston and the Gulf.   It could not remain a train business:  a locomotive and two tracks, hauling corn and coal.  They had to think of themselves as in the transportation business:  a part of moving goods; not just trains and tracks. Something similar happened this last week.  James Lipton, wh...

We have joined the huge numbers of people whose years-long assumption that a house was a good long-term investment is not necessarily so.  Like almost everyone I grew up with, we scratched together a barely adequate down-payment--long, long ago--and ever since have rolled over the small profits each house sale provided, with whatever extra we could add to it, in order to buy the next place to live in. Our most recent home, in Minnesota, is probably about to sell, but there will be no profit.  There might have been a sliver of residue, but a realtor has to have a share, too.   In fact, we are supplementing the sale price. For that reason, I have been smarting under the realization that people like Mitt Romney--people who know more about money than I do, and who have a hell of a lot more of it--are doing quite well.  But this is not really about house equity.  It is about that other decades-long teenage and lifelong ambition, also unfilled. Mitt says that...

Nathaniel Jao and Chicken Little Well, of course a kid is likely to get excited, spotting his first chicken!  The chicken is older than he, by several years.  We first found the ceramic biped in Nogales, Sonora, probably about fifteen years ago, during an earlier time in Tucson. Since then, the chicken, together with an attendant brood of baby chicks, have moved to Minnesota, and back again, to Tucson. This morning, this cool but luscious morning, Nathaniel, as usual, pointed out that there were interesting and unexplored things outside, and that he should see them.  I got him turned wrong, so that he could not ride the chicken, as he had intended, but we have time.  Chicken Little is impassive; close enough to patience!  She has been through sleet and snow:  a kid is just an eye-poking bother. Our old cat, Annie, on her first and obviously last trip to Tucson, is a bit miffed because, although she has been an indoor cat for as long as we have ha...

They came to work with bent backs, as the word went out that John Jacobson or the Henriksons needed hay hands. Their fingers were curled from pitchforks and reins and shovel handles, and they carried three-tined forks for shocking, pitching, and spreading loose hay in the mow. Nobody was paid:  it was a trade, not with each other--a day here, and a day there-- but a trade with an invisible system of justice and of necessity.  Haying is not a single work. Some brought a team and a wagon, each as singular as they were same. One with wide double-racks--front and back-- and some more pole or triangle.  The differences were ascertained, as in last summer, and the advantages filed secret-away. The teams were pride and prejudice; knowledgeable and dangerously spooked. The old sorrel from summers long was remembered, and the big gelding came uneasy to strangers. Years had defined the roles.  The loaders stood tallest, shaping the shocks as they ...

Tommy Thompson wants to be the next Senator for Wisconsin.  The problem, as his supportive son sees it, is Barack Obama, but, as Thompson's son sees the solution, is to send Barack Obama back to Kenya. Tommy Thompson had the good sense to say his son had mis-for-spake, or something. A lot of people are mis-for-spaking, out of context, not meaning what they say they said. There is something discouraging about being old enough to recall the civil rights struggles of the 1960s--a mere half century ago.  The echos continue.  Except that then, it was all black people who were supposed to go back to Africa, where they had come from three or four hundred years earlier, in the holds of slave ships. I do believe that it was not until I was fully grown that I really began to appreciate what had been an obvious fact of my own life:  that is to say, I was very much a part of the immigrant life.  Even though I had been born in Tacoma, Washington, our father had imm...

I am not sure, but I think that none of my father's siblings still live, either.  His immediate generation of the family is all gone.  On my mother's side, only one of her brothers is still alive, edging his way toward a hundred years old.   One!  When a younger uncle died, recently, I wondered whether he had ever traveled very far from the house where he was born and lived, all his long life. He had, but not very often, and not very far.   Of my immediate generation, I am the oldest, at 80, and all seven of us are, if not alive, at least still  erect, nominally, and  symbolically.  We are scattered, in many ways, not least of all geographically, although something like a center still holds, if "center" means the west coast of the United States.  We are, at least geographically, no more than about 1,500 miles apart, from Tacoma to Tucson. My own children are scattered all over the country, hemmed in only by two oceans, east and west,...

We have to change our front door.   Jehovah's Witnesses have found our present door and, if we do not change something, will ruin our back yard.   You can see that All Suffering will soon end, to be replaced by moose in the garden.  That is to say, Real Suffering is about to begin.   As you might surmise, I do not quite understand Jehovah's Witnesses, and all that stuff about Jesus coming again, and dead people getting up to play with moose in the garden.   It is an odd conjunction, but today's newspaper--incidentally, unless Jesus comes again very soon, there will no longer be newspapers for the New Heaven and New Earth:  newspapers are dying faster than sinners--today's newspaper says that lots of people say they are no longer religious, and that for the first time in a moosetime, protestants are no longer a majority in this country.  Nobody is a majority.  All of us are minorities, but that one of the fastest growing minorities is th...

It is a fact that Congressman Paul Broun, Republican of Georgia, looks just like an ordinary person, but we are not to be fooled by facts.  Congressman Broun is the Oldest Man in the World.  He walks up and down on the earth, going to and fro on it, and that is amazing, given that his head is about three thousand years old.  He has a recent haircut--and a neat and careful one it is, too--but the contents of his head are truly and amazingly ancient.  You get a clue about that when he talks.   Just last week, the Oldest Man in the World said that evolution and the big bang theory are "lies straight from the pit of Hell".  "All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.  It's lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior." I don't remember that part of my biology and chemistry classes, but apparently they co...

Enjoying a Non-alcoholic Beer:  Mm-mm! "Is there a non-alcoholic beer that tastes like beer?", I asked, at the biggest store I could find.   She asked me to say it again.  I guess I was ducking my head and mumbling into my shopping cart.   "Not really," she said.  "Let me show you what we have."   They had an astounding variety of beers, arranged by Types here, by Nations of Origin there, and by Not Really, down at the end.   I chose two Not Reallys, and as a concession to my religion, also bought a six-pack of Known to Contain Alcohols.   I wanted to sit in a public park and not give a diddly whether the Sheriff was a tee-totaler.  It reminded me of the first time in my life I decided to stay within the speed limit while driving from Iowa to Washington State.  What made it so brutal was that the speed limit had just been lowered to 55 mph.  But I did it.  Also for the first time in my life, I did not constantly ...

This is not, you know, exactly the land of milk and honey.   Sometimes, in the Promised Land--perhaps always in the Promised Land--there will be those who got there before we did, and if you do not, as the Chosen People of the Lord almost always do, take such measures as will cleanse the Promised Land of the people who think they got there before you, you will discover that they put up yard signs, and driveway signs, and other signs that you are Deluded Scum:  part of the 47%.   Being part of the Deluded Scum, undeniably new to the neighborhood, and being pointlessly curious about what the hill was after which the nearest main road was named--El Camino del Cerro--I decided to drive up to the end of the camino to see the hill.   It is a trailhead; that is to say, there is a parking lot there, and if you do truly believe you are one of the Chosen People who do not sweat, you can park your car there and slog off into the dry heat.  You will sweat, of cour...