SmokeSound

Swamp.   I grew up knowing the word, "swamp". The most productive field on our grandparents farm had been a swamp.   Swamp it was no longer; not usually, but sometimes yet. A long ditch ran straight from the neighbor's land, south, to the graveled ridges that held the water back.  Before I was born, stubborn negotiations had resulted in an agreement to drain the swamp, across another neighbor's land, to South Creek. Dimly, in some vague recess of my mind, I recall seeing pictures of the ditch being dug, with horses pulling slips, or slip scoops.  I have driven a horse pulling a slip.  Something like a shovel being pushed to shave off a layer of soil, the slip had to be manipulated by use of the handles behind it to shave a layer of dirt--not too much or it would either stick or flip forward, dumping everything; and not too little or it would just slide along the top--but just what the horse could pull.  Then, when the slip was full, and up out...

Sixty-three million people voted for Donald Trump. "Why?", Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote. It wasn't economic anxiety.  Research has shown that people worried about their jobs voted for Hillary Clinton. "But people who dislike Mexicans and Muslims, people who oppose same-sex marriage, people morally offended at a White House occupied by a black guy with a funny name, they voted for Trump. "That's the reality, and its time we quit dancing around it." That is to say, Pitts went on to argue, the culture is changing, and sixty-three million people preferred what Donald Trump is, or did not care what he is, to what is changing in our culture.  Which leads to the still-more important question: "What in the world is wrong with us?"   (In the Miami Herald) In 1927, Willie Raskin, Billy Rose, and Fred Fisher wrote a hit song which compared censorship and prohibition in the United States with the attitudes of the French, who embraced exactly wha...

shuttercock.com I have struggled for months to understand why the election of Donald Trump has spoiled the taste of village water. Unlike any other election I can recall-- and I recall small crackly radios and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; ever since-- the election of Donald Trump has not just been about who won, but who made it possible for him to win. Last night, I heard Charles Blow-- a most remarkable man--say this: "This is not normal, and this is not right . . . , but you chose him.   You chose him." My friends, some of my friends, chose him. They chose him, who is not normal, who is not right, but they chose him. And, for the life of me, I have not been able to avoid knowing that it is not just about Donald Trump: it is about them. They chose what everyone could see was not normal, and not right. Donald Trump charged into the field of ordinary competent and incompetent Republican contenders, like a Pamplona bull, goring, trampling, t...

kansas.com A prairie fire is a most natural thing, a close cousin to a forest fire; another natural thing. Without fire, many of the plants cannot even reproduce properly.  Once the fire has come and gone, the new grasses come up, the animals that depend on the sweet taste of new grass return and, in time, lightning, an Indian clan, a rancher, or someone with a catalytic converter on his exhaust, or a 21st century, urban sniper with one of those lovely exploding targets, sets another fire.   When there were no wooden houses, fire seemed, while still scary and deadly, more a natural part of things.  Storms often meant lightning and fire in the grass; maybe in the trees, too.   For years, we lived in a part of the Upper Midwest where bur oak trees thrived; wonderful, rough, gnarly, nearly forever oak trees.  Bur oaks were a little more resistant to the damage of grass fires than many other trees so, as if they were a crooked picket line, the bur...

It is no wonder that religion and politics keep bumping into each other:  both of them want to shape a society. Some religions--let us leave out names--believe that it is a man's world, and if they get the chance to be in charge of shaping a society, will specify ways to keep men in charge.  Some religions have believed in polygamy, and when they had the chance, herded the women into corrals.  Other religions think white people are the crown of creation, and when they can, they make sure to wear their crowns. For the last couple of hundred years, nations have tended to shape their societies by sitting down together and debating what kind of place they would like to be.  They write constitutions which specify what values they want to affirm, and try to spell out how that will work.  If you are not a member of the local religious group, you will, almost certainly, prefer to write a constitution rather than turn things over to the local holiness society. The...

The Man Who Would Be Strong pinterest.com is wandering off, weak and alone. Before our recent election,  our government had negotiated  with trading partners around the Pacific Ocean to trading terms that did not abandon the area to Chinese advantage.   Of course it was not something perfect. Trade agreements have trade-offs. Donald Trump said to forget it: The Trans Pacific Partnership died. Once upon the carnage after World War II, Europeans and the US forged  the North Atlantic Treat Organization to provide stability and security not only for Western Europe but for us, too.   Donald Trump has not just questioned, but undercut, the notion that NATO  and the Common Market is critical. He and Vladimir Putin propose to cozy up to each other and take care of all of that. Leave Western Europe to Germany and France: England can come along with us.   The Paris Climate Agreement was almost unanimously agreed to, except for t...

thebalance.com According to Donald Trump. . . .  [That sounds like quoting Moses or Jesus or Darth Vader.] According to Trump, "the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive". There you are.  He tweeted that in 2012.  But, of course, while debating Hillary Clinton, he said he had not  said that, in spite of the fact that he had.  And a couple of years later, he said climate change was just costly nonsense.  In fact. . . . [I keep using using the word, "fact".  Give me a little slack even if you would prefer not to deal with little hard things that are there.  They are there.] In fact, Trump argued, things were getting cold:  " This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop.  Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and [sic] our GW scientists are stuck in ice". If it is cold, right now, right here, that must be proof that earth, as a whol...

 

nypost.com Summerhaven is a small community of homes very near the top of Mt. Lemmon, adjacent to the city of Tucson.  Everyone has been ordered to evacuate, temporarily, because of a fire wandering around on the mountainside. There is absolutely no truth to the local rumor that suggests that Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has a summer home up there, and that he refuses to come down from the mountain. "If Christie will not come down from the mountain,", one grumpy evacuee said, "let the mountain come down from Christie." The complete absence of tremors from up the mountain seem to suggest that the Governor is not up there.  It is just another example of fake news.  

holy-landpilgrimage.com When the Roman Empire destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, they tore it down, and even most of the wall surrounding the Temple grounds.  They left a section of the west wall, probably because it seemed trivial. It became the Wailing Wall, possibly the most revered site for prayer for multitudes of Jews today.   Since the Semitic religions are all pretty patriarchal, there are, of course, separate places men and women to pray:  men here, women there.   A few years ago those Jews who, like their Christian and Muslim cousins, were struggling to overcome their common sexist attitudes--not easy after centuries of practice, and with divine approval at that--reached an agreement, not to end the separate prayer spaces, but for a third space where men and women could pray together, if such an abomination appealed to them.   The Israeli government has changed its mind, reacting to pressure from its most conservative religious elements. ...

Looking back, my tracks have come this long way through religion, not exactly from this old Norwegian Stave Kirche, but something more like this one, below, on the island where our father was born.   Precisely that one. I have been there. King Olav Tryggvason built a wooden church there in the year 998, when Christianity was introduced to Norway, and Norway said "How are things going?". Later, King Olaf II convened at Moster, declaring that Norway was converting to Christianity.  The current building, pictured, was probably built on the original church site in about 1150.   That sealed my fate.  We started with Nordic myths and gods, hitched our wagons to Christianity, and became Lutherans about 500 years ago.   A lot of my relatives are buried there.  A cousin, showing me the church and grounds, pointed to a headstone with a round hole in it, saying he thought it was a marker for an unbeliever, affording parishioners a chance to spit through ...

That is no volcano.  It is a hump of granite pushed up from below, alongside a fault line; its neighbor sinking at the same time. We live on the sink, on materials sloughed off from our risen neighbor. It is a quiet neighborhood now; rarely an earthquake.  Tram drivers ferrying us up into Sabino Canyon--one of the creases in the mountain range east of town--like to tell about a big earthquake centered in Mexico, in 1887, tumbled rocks down into the canyon.  It was just one of the little, left-over shivers from what essentially stopped happening millions of years ago. On early maps, published in German, what is now the Santa Catalinas was called Santa Katarina, perhaps named for Father Kino's sister's patron Saint. There is a lost city under the Santa Catalinas, you know, a spectacular mine opened by the Spanish, where gold could be chopped out with a hatchet, where the church bells were solid gold, and which was sealed up by an iron door and rock.  M...