SmokeSound

We have winterized the Big Rig for the season. That's it there, just to the right of center, whilst on its most recent excursion. We have had to concede the onslaught of winter: it almost froze last night, and the weather magi are promising more brutalities to come. 'Tis the season to plan outings, as soon as earth can wobble us back to spring, when young men's hearts turn lightly to thoughts young women have been thinking all winter. Our spring fantasies are less enticing: draining the anti-freeze,  reconnecting the battery, hefting the propane tanks, studying maps and asking if-whats. We have a reason to consider new roads! The election has sharpened our minds; made us appreciative of time and choices. Samuel Johnson  said,  "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." No one here is to be hanged, but spring follows closely behind a Tucson winter. Nothin

That is not a stunning photo, but is is a photo taken on November 28th, and for reasons known only to a meteorologist and to a Tucsonan, it brings uncommon pleasure.

One can become weary fighting other people's religious wars. (It is bad enough fighting one's own.) What is worse is getting involved without knowing what it is all about. That is us, fighting in the Middle East. A long time ago-- before Hector was a pup-- when Muhammad died, the question was who should succeed him. It was a family dispute. (It is even worse getting into someone else's family fights.) A large part of the family, centered around Saudi Arabia, are now called Sunnis. A smaller part of the family, now identified with Iran and part of Iraq, are now called Shiites. Everybody in the family chooses sides, and every few hundred years, they shoot at each other. Christians know all about that kind of stuff: once it was the Christians loyal to Rome, and the Christians loyal to Constantinople and, later, Moscow.  West and East.  Oh, dear Lord! Then it was a division among those in the West: those loyal to Rome, and the Protestants. The

Richard B. Spencer is, perhaps, the leading advocate of what has become known as the Alt-Right movement.  At a rally in Washington, D.C., recently, he said that America belonged to White people, whom he called, "children of the sun".  White people, he said, were a race of conquerors and creators who had been marginalized, but now, in the era of President-elect Donald J. Trump, were awakening to their own identity.   I will let Mr. Spencer speak for himself.  Joseph Goldstein reported what he said.   At the conference on Saturday, Mr. Spencer, who said he had coined the term, defined the alt-right as a movement with white identity as its core idea. “America was, until this last generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Mr. Spencer thundered. “It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.” But the white race, he added, is “a race that travels forever on an upward path.” “To be white is to be a creator, an explorer,

I didn't hear how it began, but a band of Whitefaces were keenly commenting about a pipeline being built in North Dakota--sometimes Whitefaces gather 'round in a circle and smoke an oil pipeline together:  bonding, you know:  worry about lung and liver cancer later--and someone must have said something about the Standing Rock Sioux and the others protesting that the pipeline endangered their sacred grounds in North Dakota. Nobody said it, but you could see the scorn in the air, like pipe smoke.  Sacred grounds!  North Dakota ain't no Lourdes or Jerusalem!  Sacred grounds! "They don't even want to be called "Indians", someone said.  "They want to be called . . . " (you could smell the smoke) "Native Americans" ! Actually, it was our government that decided to call the people native to America when Christopher Columbus got lost, "Native Americans".  No explorer into the Americas ever met anyone who introduced him- or

(I only wish I had said it, but I was -11 at the time.)

Oh, dear good lord, the media are gagging on their analyses of why Trump won, and Clinton lost, the election!  Well, Clinton handily won the total vote, but Trump won the electoral college numbers, so America will be great again.  What would really be great is if we got rid of the electoral college, which originally was intended to take the election out of the hands of the uninformed general public, and put it into the hands of gentlemen who understood what was going on.  It has come to be nothing more than an absurd artifact skewing the popular vote. The election was not won or lost because Latinos voted as they did. The election was not won or lost because women voted as they did. Neither was the election decided because Trump was not a woman nor because Clinton was not a man. James Comey did not determine the outcome of the election: he only made it clear that the FBI is not pristine, and that he is a clumsy, self-absorbed oaf with no ballet training. Donald Trump won

We have gotten mostly past the pain of helping our elderly cats and dogs die. Helping was surely more painful than the dying itself.  I should know. I am nearly 85.  And I recognize my own end up there on the road ahead is much easier to admit than thinking of helping another animal-companion die. Cooper is 5.  I said, "What the hell! I will die before he does." So we got a dog; a small dog, a mixture of miniature things. He was quiet, alert, and inquisitive. He didn't bark. He just stood proud, ears up, glancing at us as if to ask, "What's that?" That was days ago. Cooper has discovered his bark, and maybe his lisp and pith and pitch, too. He has discovered birds, and as an intelligent dog should, he has decided to protect us against birds.  He barks at them. "Goldfish,"  I said to myself, "Guppies."

There is good light this morning: you can see what fear of other races looks like. There is good light: you can see how male dominance looks when frightened. In the good light, you can see what fear of what is coming looks like. There is good light: you can see how small the world really is. You can see your relatives and neighbors who did this, who think that e-mails are more dangerous than sexual predators, who probably put up with this kind of thing silently because . . . maybe for the same reasons. There is good light this morning.

I will tell you what really irritates me. What really irritates me is  logging onto what purports to be a news site and being deluged with an avalanche of ads for crap I don't want and imitation news reports about somebody's boobs. I used to have an e-mail account at a college where I taught.   I logged in to it one day after I retired and it was filled with offers to enlarge my penis. Huffington Post, for instance,  has become nearly a joke about news. It is virtually impossible to navigate from the top to the bottom of an article without being ambushed. Google News is deadly dull, visually, and a delightful relief. I almost yearn for  Courier font and a greater-than prompt. Maybe a dot matrix printer. Almost.

What do we know  is happening all around us? We know that burning as much coal, oil, and gas as we do is warming the planet.  Most of us can read a thermometer. We know  that we are a nation of immigrants, and always have been.  We know  that it will not be long before we shall be a nation with a more-or-less brown-skinned majority.  After all, 60% of the world population is Asian, about 15% is Black, and 11% is White.  The world isn't all White.  It is more-or-less Brown. We know  that we actually live in a global economy.  Global trade is almost everybody's lifeblood.  Going back to traveling by wagon train isn't a pleasant idea. We know  that most of our evolutionary male ancestors were bigger and stronger than most of our female ancestors, and that, in our country, we only allowed women, even to vote, only in 1920, even though some women were smaller than some men. We know those things.  They aren't opinions.  They are facts. *   *   * So the que

We began as hunters and gatherers. Generally, the men hunted and the women gathered. Our earliest ancestors went to where the game was; went to where the seed plants and roots were. They were travelers, following seeds and game.      Ten thousand years ago,      someone with a bent back and tired feet      figured out that she could plant the seeds,      near the river, and watch and wait,      and someone else snared a rabbit,      putting it into an improvised pen. Historians said they started a revolution: agricultural revolutions, near rivers everywhere. They made places to store the extra grain, and settled down to stay in shelters, making villages, ten thousand years ago.           An idea became a village,           and a few people quit gathering and hunting           and began to make sandals, and cloth. Two hundred years ago, someone with a bent back and a team of horses figured out that he could capture the steam from the pot on the fire, and make

A few more hours, that all the time we've got! That, of course, is almost what Lerner and Lowe wrote for Alfred P. Doolittle, in My Fair Lady.  Alfred P. was facing his own end time--that is to say:  marriage. We, three hundred million of us, are at election day, and it is clear to many a religious pundit that having to choose between Alfred P. Trump and Eliza Clinton. . . .   ( "No!",  I am saying to myself, "Stop!" , but I cannot.  I am mesmerized by this deep understanding of what an election is.) People like Michael Brendon Dougherty say that this election is God's way of pronouncing judgment upon us .  I do not know who Michael Brendon Dougherty is, but he seems to represent a Band of Believers who say that when God wants to condemn a nation, he gives them a Presidential election, or something like that, and Boom!  Kawhop!  The end of the world is upon them!  Armageddon!  Judgment Day!  Orange Hair!  Ticks and fleas!  Pants suits!  Uppity women!

Mornings are not what they used to be. The quiet hour, sipping half a cup of coffee, maybe or maybe not having made breakfast-- maybe just a snap of Costco biscotti or two-- the Times and the local Tucson paper, have become a juggling act. We have what purports to be a dog now, again after a couple of decades with cats, and the mutt insists that we bond. I don't want to bond: I want to rehearse political madness; not the madness of the candidates, but the lamentable basket of shallow voters that we are, unable to see that the scientific, economic, demographic, and social and psychological facts have shifted everything, something like the earth wobbling on a new axis, but we stumble along, mumbling old slogans, offering modified New Deal programs on the one hand and semi-fascist aspirations for a Strong Man on the other. Because neither represents a clear articulation of the tectonic shifts beneath our feet-- that the old economy and the old jobs and the

It has been almost 500 years since the Great Reformation in Europe, when the Church that had been the symbol-bearer of the society split apart, most notably between the establishment, centered in Rome, and the followers of Martin Luther, located in Germany.  What had been the old Roman Empire and the uncouth Germanic tribes came raggedly apart; not along neat lines. The Roman Empire, the old Roman Empire, had stretched itself too far, and had found itself, a thousand years earlier, coming undone.  The barbarians in the north--those Germanic tribes who did not understand that the Emperor was divine, and all that, crowded in.  The Jews, over there on the other side of the Mediterranean, had spawned a Jesus cult, and it was spreading like cancer.  So the Empire adopted the new religion for itself--you use the glue you can find--and the Holy Roman Empire was formed.  The Holy Roman Empire had, in fact, two heads:  the Emperor and the Bishop at Rome. Ever since, even now, even still

To watch for autumn colors in Tucson is something like looking for bananas in the Yukon. You might find some but you probably won't believe it. I read, however, something in the paper about the colors up on Mt. Lemmon, a mountain 9,000 feet high, wearing a ski run almost like a necklace, almost in our backyard. I do not want to shovel snow, ever again, but who can deny the glory of autumn colors. "I am off!", I cried to Mari, who knew better than to chase ghosts of Christmases past, and I drove up as far as the road can go. It is not necessary for friends who spend their weekends sharpening their snow shovels to send scornful notes.  There is a beauty in being warm, too, kinder than real icicles hanging from the gutters. The campgrounds along the way are closed for the season, and the hikers at 8,000 feet had stripped to their undershirts, pioneers of the season, looking hardy, convincing each other that the 60 degree weather was s