Neither Special Nor Unique

Lughnasa                                             Waning Artemis Moon

Our play date with the role-playing citizens of the Renaissance Fair has ended.  Kate works 9-2 today, a long day for her, all that time on her feet.

I have hive inspections and a varroa mite count.  In the hive inspections I have to find out if my hives have enough honey and pollen stored for the winter.  Not sure how to tell if they have 75-95 pounds of honey and three frames of pollen.  The honey supers also come off today, all of them and entrance reducers go on.  So, a busy day in the bee yard.

It’s Labor Day so Kate and I have our own way of celebrating.

When I grew up in post-WWII central Indiana, the labor movement had begun to flex its muscles.  Manufacturing in industries like steel, tire and automobile factories concentrated workers in large numbers, often in shift work.  In Anderson, Indiana, near my hometown of Alexandria, for example, Guide Lamp (headlights and tail-lights for GM cars) and Delco Remy (alternators and batteries) employed as many as 25,000 workers, all pulling into the same parking lots, punching the same time clocks and working together on the factory floor.  This kind of concentration in jobs that seemed then as if they would go on forever allowed the United Auto Workers to demand and received impressive salary, pension, health and sick leave benefits for the workers.

If necessary, the UAW chose one of the big three (remember them?):  Ford, General Motors or Chrysler, and threatened to strike.  If they could negotiate a settlement, it served as the template for the other two.  If they couldn’t negotiate, they struck.  After the settlement, it served as the template.  The steel workers were strong, too.  The labor movement played a big role in politics since the one sure counter point to lots of political cash is lots of people.  The unions had people and the Republicans had money.  That was the throw down for many, many elections when I was young.

Alexandria had a booming downtown with a men’s store, a women’s store, two dime stores, a PN Hirsch department store, a couple of taverns, two movie theatres, a bakery, two banks, a Carnegie library, barbers and tailors.  It also had a daily newspaper.  All this in a town of 5,000 people.  No Wal-Marts or K-Marts or CVS or Walgreens or McDonalds.  Instead we had Murphy’s and Danner’s, Bailey’s drugstore and the Rexall Drugstore, the TopHat Drive-in and Cox’s Supermarket.

It may have been a good time for labor.  It was.  It may have been a good time for small town America.  It was.  It was not a good time for African-Americas as the 1960’s would prove.  It was not a good time for world peace as we insinuated ourselves into the Vietnamese Civil War, faced down the Soviet Union in Cuba and fought that most peculiar of conflicts, the Cold War.  Dicken’s may have had it right for all times.

Now many if not most of Alexandria’s store-fronts have plywood over them.  Dollar stores and discount chains are downtown, the movie theatres are closed and the creeping franchise serpent has swallowed the rim of the town while hollowing out the center.  General Motors employs around 800, not 25,000.  It is no longer a good time for labor.  It is no longer a good time for small town America.  It is a better time for African-Americans, though they now have to cope, too, with the onslaught of Latinos who have become the nation’s largest minority group.  It is not a good time for world peace–has there ever been a good time for world peace?  We have only this month pulled out of Iraq, mostly.  Our effort in Afghanistan grinds on and on.

Joseph will be deployed next month to Qatar and will fly missions in this latest of the conflicts of a conflict riddled start to the 3rd millennium.  There are jobs in the military.

On October 2nd, I’m returning to Alexandria for the first time since my father’s funeral.  Alexandria is a sort of litmus paper for the health of the country. It is not special, not unique; rather, it gets hit by all the changes that have riven our country and has no levee’s to protect it from them.  That is, I should say, it is neither special nor unique to the rest of the country, but for those of us who grew up there, my friends in the class of 1965 with whom I will ride on a float in the homecoming parade 45 years after our graduation, for us it is more than special or unique, it is or was home.

Well, You Gotta Think About It.

Lughnasa                                           Waning Artemis Moon

Went to office max and had the smaller artemis honey labels printed up.  Now it’s time for a workout then the vikes at 7:00.

As to demagoguery in our time.  Glenn Beck and his band of merry men and women, almost all white, want to return the country to the God drenched republic it was in the golden days of the American revolution.  Let’s aside for the moment that the bulk of the revolutionary leadership, among them Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and many others were not Christian, but deists who believed in a watchmaker god, one who set the universe in motion then stood back to watch how things turned out.  Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that Beck show the same date and place as Martin Luther King chose for his rally 47 years ago.

Instead, let’s look at an ancient Greek idea, one that preceded Christianity and Deism, MLK and Glenn Beck, hubris.  Hubris means extreme haughtiness or arrogance. Hubris often indicates being out of touch with reality and overestimating one’s own competence or capabilities, especially for people in positions of power…The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist’s downfall.  When a person, or persons, claims to have the mantle of the Almighty around their shoulders and intimates they know what this God wants, then the word hubris applies since that person has pitted their knowledge of God’s will against God.

Demagogues, political leaders who seek support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument, will, as Jesus once said of the poor, always be with us.  A democracy can fall prey to them, witness George Wallace, Huey Long, Nathan Bedford Forrest, David Duke, but the self correcting political process can and usually does reject them sooner or later. Beck’s brand of conservative populism fits into this history and his style, co-opting both Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King in one gesture, shows his cunning.

Here’s an example of the though world in his crowd:

Becky Benson, 56, traveled from Orlando, Fla., because, she said, “we
believe in Jesus Christ, and he is our savior.” Jesus, she said, would
not have agreed with what she called the redistribution of wealth in the
form of the economic stimulus package, bank bailouts and welfare. “You
cannot sit and expect someone to hand out to you,” she said. “You don’t
spend your way out of debt.”

Perhaps Ms. Benson and Mr. Beck have not thoroughly read their bible:

Luke 4:

 ¹⁸“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
      because he has anointed me
      to preach good news to the poor.
   He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
      and recovery of sight for the blind,
   to release the oppressed,
    ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

That Mosque

Lughnasa                                          Full Artemis Moon

Today the orchard, tomorrow…the vegetable patch and the orchard.  Kate and I will take up the carpet laid down for paths in the orchard (it keeps weeds down and mulch gets distributed over it), clean out the weeds that have infiltrated, lay the carpet back down and add any to spots that need it, preparing the whole for the wood chips delivered yesterday morning.  Tomorrow Kate will guide Ray, our lawn mowing Andover junior, while he covers the paths with wood chips.  Meanwhile I’ll mulch the areas in the vegetable garden that Kate and I cleared out over the last week.

Over the weekend we’ll put the honey extractor together  and try it out in advance of our first full day of honey extraction on Monday.  This should be entertaining.  Mark has shrunk our Artemis label by a third and modified the glasses based on his realization last Monday that the specs he’d designed didn’t quite match mine.  I already have the PDF from him with the new design and smaller labels.  He’s a pro.

OK.  I understand that some people on the right believe the mosque near the old World Trade Center is offensive.  They feel it pokes a finger in the eye of the whole country and especially those who lost relatives on 9/11.  Their line is, “Just because you have the right, doesn’t make it right.”  True enough.  Doesn’t make it wrong, either.  So the question comes to down message.  What message will a mosque near the ground zero send?

Will it communicate rank insensitivity and disregard for injured feelings?  Will it intentionally stir the pot of an already angry public?  Or.  Will it communicate, as I said before, that we know the difference between terrorists who use Islam as an ideological justification and those for whom Islam is a religion of moderation and peace?  Will it show that our First Amendment freedoms, those that developed in light of religious persecution in Europe, persecutions that, ironically, sent the first settlers to Massachusetts, apply today as they have for over 200 years?  I know which message I want to send.

Now, having said that, is there a way to ameliorate the inflamed feelings of those who have been led to see this as a provocation, an insult?  I don’t know, but I would hope there is.  Next year will see the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster, so some concern probably focuses on this upcoming date.  I wish there was a way to sit down and discuss this, acknowledging the feelings of betrayal, anger, incredulity, fear, grief, sharing our mutual dismay at the act and the struggle with the terrorists since then, while allowing the Muslims for whom this was an equal disaster and one compounded by rejection and xenophobic reactions to open up their feelings.

Or, is the gulf between the right and the left so vast that there is no bridge?  Are we so far apart in our partisan camps that dialogue is no longer possible?  If it’s true, and there are times over the last decade when I’ve felt it was, then our country will have succumbed to the terrorists after all because, as Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I’m not trying to get to a kum by ya moment here.  I would relish, though, genuine conversation between citizens of differing views.  How can it happen?

Here’s an excerpt from a CBS report that gets to where I’d like to go:

Society|Thu, Aug. 26 2010 07:59 AM EDT
Some 9/11 Families Show Support for Mosque Near Ground Zero
By Nathan Black|Christian Post Reporter

A group of religious and civil rights groups and family members of 9/11 victims announced on Wednesday the formation of a new coalition in support of an Islamic community center and mosque near ground zero.

Calling themselves the New York Neighbors for American Values, the coalition stood near City Hall in lower Manhattan defending religious freedom and diversity.

“We share the pain … and yes, even the lingering fear caused by the September 11 attacks. But we unequivocally reject the political posturing, the fear mongering and the crude stereotyping that seek to demonize the project whose goal is to build bridges among the faiths,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

“We are committed to resisting the efforts to push Park51 out of downtown and we reject the refrain of ‘freedom of religion but not in my backyard,’” she added.

Talat Hamdani lost a 23-year-old son, a paramedic, in the 2001 terrorist attacks. But she said supporting the Islamic center and mosque “has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with standing up for our human rights, including freedom of religion,” as reported by The Associated Press.

Build the Mosque

Lughnasa                                Waxing Artemis Moon

On mosques and sites and sealing wax.

Are we fighting with Islam or with terrorists who use Islam as a cover?  You know the answer.  What message do you give to the ummah, the worldwide Islamic community, if you deny a mosque near a site where the terrorists who use Islam as a cover delivered a powerful blow?  That you don’t know the difference.

Or.  What message do you give if you allow the mosque?  That you know the difference.  Which strategy has better long term potential both within the US and outside it.  Again, you know the answer.

When demagogues pander to the lowest common denominator on volatile matters like this, it corresponds to yelling fire in a crowded theatre.  This is intentional inflammation of an issue not because you believe the matter is substantive, but because you know it will rouse the sleeping dogs.

There is, in fact, no issue here.  Let me say again.  No issue.  The first amendment, even earlier than the holy and blessed 2nd, protects freedom of religion and freedom of association and freedom of speech.  Which of these constitutional, black letter law freedoms do you wish to ignore?  Where’s a strict constructionist when we need one?

Let them build.  Let them demonstrate that the United States can discriminate between friend and foe.  Let them demonstrate that the constitutional protections that make us a desirable place for immigrants from around the globe are still in place.

Let us demonstrate that the coward and the bully will not, should not win this kind of rhetorical battle.

Let them build.

Here’s the contrary argument from the New York Daily News:

“…But what about common sense and decency? If Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf had either, he and his group would reconsider the location out of respect for the hordes of Americans, many of them 9/11 family members themselves, who think that this idea just plain stinks. And if it weren’t for political correctness and our decidedly 21st century paranoia over offending Islam, our national leaders would proudly echo those sentiments.

Enough is enough. The speechifying and pontificating on the mosque’s constitutionality are a distraction and a straw man. No one in serious circles who opposes the mosque at Ground Zero is suggesting it should be made illegal to build a Muslim house of worship near the site of the 9/11 attacks.

What they’re trying to say, and largely to plugged ears on the left, is that having the right doesn’t make it right.”

Violence

Lughnasa                             Waxing Artemis Moon

The Woolly discussion topic tonight is violence.  I have tried to write out where I stand in what follows.  It is an unsatisfying position, full of weasel words and difficult choices, but I can see no other that makes sense in this, not at all one of the best possible, worlds.

Violence.  It seems to be everywhere.  Wars.  Homes.  Schools.  McDonald’s. On TV.  In video games.  In books we read.  Graphic novels.  Movies.  In the past, check any history book.  In the future.  Read any Rand report.  And that’s just the most common, banal kind, trauma inflicted by another through physical force.

In seminary, in a course called Constructive Theology, a more subtle analysis of violence got introduced.  In a society of plenty, when millions go hungry or without housing or medical care or decent education, that, too, is an act of violence.  In a world of plenty, when billions go hungry or without housing or medical care or decent education, well, you get the point.  Certain kinds of psychological behavior, whether between spouses or parents and children, violently disrupts the human developmental process or can crush another.

There is, too, the often blatant, but sometimes subtle violence of racism, sexism, any situation in which people in power judge another person or a whole group of people on the basis of secondary characteristics like skin color, gender, sexual preference.

The most extreme examples of violence that occurred in Stalin’s USSR, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s German, Rwanda, Bosnia/Serbia and Armenia are, sad to say, only this last century’s examples of a pervasive human tendency to eliminate the other, the one who makes us uncomfortable, the one who reminds us too much of the dark side of ourselves.

Violence then, is not an aberration, it is a common human response, a way of expressing power or dominance, of enforcing prejudice, of maintaining political rule, of holding on to hordes of cash or weapons or countries.  It is also a tool to defeat oppressors, to defend family and property and to maintain the safety of a town, city, state or nation.

In my case I’ve come up against violence:  in the struggle for civil rights, in the war against the Vietnam War, in a world before a woman’s right to choose how to handle her own body, like many Americans post 9/11.  When I was younger, I would say, “Join the Army.  Visit foreign lands.  Meet exotic people and kill them.” or “They don’t call it murder if you kill by the thousands and the sounds of trumpets with banners flying.”

Even back then, though, I was against the Vietnam War, not war.  It was the wrong war, against the wrong people, for the wrong reason, at the wrong time.  I could point however to WWII as a war whose rationale seemed justified, a just war.  I was not then, nor am I now, a pacifist.  Knowing what I know now would I have fought in WWII. Yes.  Knowing what I know now would have fought in Vietnam or Iraq?  No.  Afghanistan?  Yes.  At least at first.  The current situation has more complex dynamics.

When Joseph joined the Air Force, I struggled with it as a generally peace oriented person, but when he told me he wanted to defend the country that had given him so much, I understood.  I agree that a principle role of government is to protect our nation against its enemies foreign and domestic.  An Air Force, a Navy, an Army, a military in other words, is necessary to that mission. It would be hypocritical for me to pretend my own son could not participate.  Would I prefer he had chosen something else?  Yes, for my own purposes.  But, for his, which is, in the final analysis, what counts, he made the right choice and I agree with it.

What I’m trying to say here is that violence has its place in our world. It may be, most often is, a place we deplore, but it would be naive to ignore state-sponsored violence or the violence of organized terrorist organizations and just hope they will go away.

So, our approach to violence as an issue must be nuanced.  Though the NRA seem like loose cannons (pardon the metaphor), I do agree with one aspect of their rationale.  We must be prepared to defend our freedom and, as Thomas Jefferson enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, it is possible the enemy of our freedom might be the state.  Even the US Government.

It happens.  Witness the colonies and England.  Witness India and England.  Witness the satellite states of the USSR.  Witness the Albanians in the Bosnia/Serbia conflict.  Witness Israel.  Witness Bolivar in South America.  Witness the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  Witness China against Japan in era of the Nanjing massacre.  The Irish against the English.  The Native peoples of this and many other lands against those who came to visit and decided to stay.  Witness the Kurds inside Iraq.  This is not an isolated story and the only answer for those of us who would not live under someone else’s heel is to pay the price: vigilance and willingness to fight.

Should violence be our first resort?  No.  No.  No.  Preemptive war, as the Bush administration not only supported but engaged in Iraq, is the path to tyranny, if it is not in fact tyranny ipso facto.  Should violence be our second resort?  No.  No.  Violence should only be part of our political or personal agenda when diplomacy has failed or real peril confronts us.

As to interpersonal violence, it seems in all but the most unusual cases, that talk is not only preferable but necessary.

I would characterize my position as one which holds out for the full range of responses to threatening behavior, but intends to use only the least harmful method possible in each particular instance.  This recognizes that in some situations the least harmful method may be to deploy violent acts against another intending the same.  Not desirable, no, but then neither is subjugation or death at the hands of another.

You Say You Want A Revolution? Yep.

Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

It’s been done, I know.  Still, I’d like to put in a call for a 2nd American revolution.  Oh, ok, I don’t care what number it is.  I’ll settle for another American revolution.

My American revolution has a bit of  Norman Rockwell, a touch of Helen and Scott Nearing, more than a dab of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, some Benjamin Franklin, the spirit of pioneers and native Americans alike when they relied upon on this seemingly limitless land for food and space.  There’s a Victory Garden or two in there as well, plus generations of smart women who canned, dried, jellied, smoked and pickled all sorts of produce and meat.  This New American Revolution demands no marches, no banners, no barricades, no guns and no repression.  And you can dance all you want.

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and with the land.  It is a revolution that takes the wisdom of a 7th generation Iroquois medicine man who said:  “We two-leggeds are so fragile that we must pray and care for all the four leggeds, the winged ones, those who swim in the waters and the plants that grow.  Only in their survival lies the possibility of ours.”

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and by the human spirit.  It is a revolution that insists, but gently, that we each put our hand and our back to something that feral nature can alter.   It could be a garden.  It could be a deer hunt.  It could be a potted plant outside where the changing seasons affect its growth and life.  It could be a regular hike in a park, through all the changes of the seasons, seeing how winter’s quiet fallow time gives ways to springs wild, wet exuberance, the color palette changing from grays, rusts and white to greens, yellows, blues, reds the whole riot.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would see each person responsible for at least some of their own food, food they grow or catch or kill.  In its fullest realization each person would use whatever land they share with the future in such a way as to increase its natural capital, using the land in such a way that it improves with age and gains in its capacity to support human, animal and plant life.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would find each person closer, much closer to the source of their electricity, their transportation and its fuel, their work and their family.  In its fullest realization this revolution would shut down the coal-fired generating plants, shutter the nuclear generating plants and have maximum and optimum use of wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and biomass generation. In its fullest realization each person would eat food that had traveled only short distances to their table, the shorter the better, the best being from backyard or front yard garden to the table.

What is it?  Well, we have a ways to go yet.  Perhaps a long ways, but if we want our descendants to have a chance to enjoy the same wonders in this land that we have known, we will have to change.  We will have to change radically.  We need, as I suggested, another American revolution.

The 4th

Summer                                        Waning Strawberry Moon

The 4th of July.  A time to think about our country, our home, our sea to shining sea.  Are we in decline?  This chestnut has begun hitting the op ed pages again.  I don’t know, they don’t know.  Only history will tell us.  Does it matter?  Not to me.  We’ll still be Americans, just like the British are still British in spite of the collapse of the empire on which the sun never sat.

Are there major problems within our body politic?  Oh, my, yes.  Does this make our time different from any other time?  Emphatically, no.

Here’s an example from a Frederick Douglass speech quoted in the Star-Tribune today: 

“Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is “American Slavery.”"

Does this harmony of misery make us any less accountable for the unemployed, the dying lakes and rivers, the immigrants who would live among us and share this land?   Emphatically, no.

Whether in decline or doggedly ascending the hill to that Bright Shining City so beloved of our forefathers, we must attend the great American ideals of liberty and equality, the twin conceptual mounts on which both our past and our future rest.

And not these only.  We now have before us the Great Work, the demanding and joyful task of creating a human presence on this planet that is benign, not malignant.

Here are the things make me believe we will continue to rise to these challenges no matter our relative status in the world:  we ended slavery.  we fought and defeated fascism.  we looked at old age poverty and created social security.  we have a statue at what used to be the main entry point for immigrants; it is a statue of liberty and one which says to the world, give us your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.  we have brilliant scientists, great laboratories and universities, students even at this moment learning to be the future leaders that we need.  we have poets, movie makers, authors, critics, musicians, painters and sculptors all ready to help us see what we do not see.  we have neighborhood after neighborhood of people who want only a chance, the same chance many of our ancestors have already had.  we are a people who have won great victories for humanity.  we are a land unparalleled in its ruggedness, its beauty, its flora and fauna, rivers and streams, lakes and forests.

All of these things make me happy and hopeful on this 4th of July.

-

What is the Midwest?

Summer                                           Waning Strawberry Moon

A focus on America hits me about the time the summer heats up.  Something about the lazy, hazy, crazy days tickle my American gene. ( apologies to Carreen, but it’s the adjective of my youth )  I’ll read a novel or history of the American Revolution, look more deeply into some aspect of the civil war, that sort of thing.  Not this year.

May be my immersion in ancient Rome, Kate’s surgery, the bees, the garden, I don’t know, but this year I haven’t got that Fourth of July feeling.   And here we are almost on the date.  My firecracker lilies have more patriotic oomph than I do this year.

Over the last year I’ve watched the HBO series, True Blood.  Yes, I have a thing for horror novels and horror movies that don’t involve slashing, screaming college girls and chainsaws, which, admittedly, pares the crop down pretty far.  OK, there may be the occasional screamer in true blood, but they are adults for the most part.

Anyhow, True Blood is Southern Gothic.  It trips the divisional biases about the south, the bayous and the culture of Louisiana which Ann Rice exploited in her novels like Interview With The Vampire.

Which leads me to my point.  Whew.  Took long enough.  The culture of the south, or the sub-cultures we describe as Southern are well known:  confederate flag, shotgun, pick-up truck with rust or plantation life with mint juleps and chattel slavery or a misty Cavalier life with belles and beaus courting among live oak trees and traveling to Savannah or New Orleans or Mobile.  You know.  The stereotypes, and that’s all they are, are clearly formed and ready for plucking in a fictional setting.

If, however, you wanted to draw on similarly clearly formed stereotypes, let’s say archetypes in both cases to get off that word, of the North, or the Midwest, my home for all my life, what would they be?  I’m not sure.  Farms with cows.  Basketball.  Factories and factory workers.  None of it has the same, pardon the expression, bite.  This is the kind of thing my American jones often picks up on and runs with it.  Maybe I’m not all that far off from the fourth of July after all.

Words Fail

Beltane                                    Full Planting Moon

This goes in my category News of the Strange.  It made me recall my first visit to the Heart of Dixie.  Pulling into an Alabama visitor center, the most evident object was a large piece of granite into which was chiseled, “We Fight For Our Rights.”  Looks like the struggle still goes on.

Op-Ed Columnist  NYT

Alabama Goes Viral

By GAIL COLLINS

Published: May 28, 2010

O.K., not an opening likely to maintain reader interest. Let’s start again, with the words of Dale Peterson, candidate for agriculture commissioner in Tuesday’s Republican primary:

“Listen up! Alabama ag commissioner is one of the most powerful positions in Alabama. Responsible for five billion dollars. Bet you didn’t know that. You know why? Thugs and criminals!”

This is the start of Peterson’s campaign ad. He rides into the screen on a horse that looks increasingly worried as things progress. Brandishing a rifle, the 64-year-old farmer barks at the camera about his opponent (“a dummy”), somebody stealing his yard signs and immigrants being “bused in by the thousands.” The overall effect is like being cornered at a party by an eccentric neighbor who thinks the garbage man is spying on him for the federal government. It’s extremely popular.

There is quite a lot of this sort of thing going on this campaign season. You raise enough cash to film an outrageous ad. Then you post it on the Web and pray that it goes viral, gets mentioned on the cable talk shows and draws in enough donations to put the thing on TV.

The trend goes back to Demon Sheep, the legendary ad for Carly Fiorina’s campaign for the Senate nomination in California. It had regular sheep and then cartoon sheep and then a guy crawling around the ground disguised as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He had on a cardboard mask with red light bulbs for eyes. I believe the message was supposed to be fiscal responsibility, but really, all you got was Demon Sheep. Red eyes. Carly Fiorina.

The man who made it, Fred Davis III, then took up the cause of Tim James, a deeply unremarkable Alabama businessman who wants to be governor. To separate James from the crowd, Davis came up with “Language,” a 30-second ad in which the candidate stared at the camera and demanded to know why “our politicians make us give driver’s license exams in 12 languages.” (The actual answer is: a federal court ruling.)

“This is Alabama. We speak English. If you want to live here, learn it,” James said irritably. “We’ll only give the test in English if I’m governor. Maybe it’s the businessman in me, but we’ll save money.”

James’s staff insisted it was fiscal conservatism, not xenophobia, that put their candidate on the driver’s license warpath. But Alabama’s tests are automatically graded by computer, using federally financed software — even the approximately 2 percent that are taken in a language other than English. Given the fact that the state would probably have to defend the policy in court, James’s idea would actually be a new expense.

But I cannot emphasize how totally beside the point all that is. “Language” went viral. “This is the first election in a long time where the fate of the campaign really did change on a single ad,” said David Lanoue, chairman of the University of Alabama political science department.

James is now one of the front-runners, despite a last-minute crisis involving a rumor that he believed the state was spending too much money on the University of Alabama football coach, who makes $4.1 million a year. Which James vigorously denied wanting to cut. It’s the businessman in him.

He now has a sequel to the driver’s license ad, in which he says that as a businessman, he feels sex offenders should be required to “re-register with the state, face to face, every 90 days.”

“Some politicians think that might inconvenience the sex offenders,” James said somberly. He did not explain who those politicians were, but I suspect the same guys who keep stealing Dale Peterson’s signs.

This has been a peculiar political year, even for Alabama. James’s biggest opponent, Bradley Byrne, was attacked by a group called True Republican PAC, which ran an ad charging that Byrne supported the teaching of evolution.

Byrne, who has multiple degrees and was chancellor of the state community college system, indignantly denied the charges.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out that True Republican PAC was bankrolled by the state teachers’ union, which is angry at Byrne for trying to ban teachers from holding second jobs as state legislators. The Alabama Education Association apparently felt a good payback would be to spend $500,000 on a group that encourages people to vote against any candidate who believes there is a scientific explanation for the origin of life.

Meanwhile, over in the Fifth Congressional District primary, Les Phillip, a Republican, has an ad that features him telling a story of two young African-American men. One did great, served his country and became Les Phillip, while the other fell in with terrorists and other bad company and became Barack Obama.

So far, this is only on the Web, but the campaign is hoping to go viral.

When This Bell Tolls I Stand Inside It

Beltane                               Full Planting Moon

A long nap reminded me that the cold has not yet run its course.  Feel wiped out.  Again.  Sigh.

Not too much longer, though.  He said, hopefully.

The day has turned partly cloudy, not the bright holiday weekend start-up we had in the morning.  Memorial Day looks like a great bee care day, sunny and not too hot with reasonable dew points.   Buddy Mark Odegard has offered to create labels for our honey containers.  He liked Artemis Honey and said he thought The Honeycake Honey was sweet.  Maybe over the top?  He’s going to work with it though, see what comes to mind.

Memorial Day has a strange resonance for me.  Mom and Dad were both vets, Dad serving in the Army Air Corps and Mom in the Women’s Army Corps attached to a Signals Unit (intelligence).  The army paid for their grave markers and they were both open and proud about their service.  As a result I grew up with a lot of WWII culture:  Inky dinky parlez-vous, counter intelligence (Dad), army blankets, cots, snafu, curled Kodak snapshots of my mother on Capris, in Algiers, Dad standing rakishly beside a small plane, the collar of his pilot’s jacket turned up, things from another time, from black and white movies.

(I am stuck between the tone of this Memorial Day Poster and the photograph below.)

Deeper though than the slang and the photographs ran a river of patriotism, of faith in the government and its power, a liberal faith, one confident that government knew more and hence better than we did, could be  counted on when the going got rough.  This confidence showed up at the Decoration Day parades in Alexandria, Indiana, the asphalt crumpling beneath tank treads and its smell blending with gunpowder.  Men marched proudly with the colors in uniforms that no longer fit.  The school band played rousing patriotic music and the baton twirlers threw their batons high in the air and caught them.  Most of the time.

At the cemetery there were flowers and flags and long speeches to which I could not listen as a child, not because they were offensive, but because they were adult and serious and not about my world at all.  I did like the parade and the music.

Now, Joseph has come near to completing his training as Air Battle Manager, a Air Weapons officer.  On June 18th he will have held his 2nd Lt commission for two years and will receive an automatic promotion to 1st Lt.  Either on or around that day he will receive his wings and become a flight-rated officer.  I’ll be there on the 18th and I’m proud of him.

This makes me the generation that skipped the military.  Not only skipped it, but actively fought against the Vietnam War.  Opposed it with hours and hours and hours of activist work spanning many years, over 8.  My opposition to the war created an estrangement between my Army Air Corps vet Dad that never healed.  Mom died in 1964 so the war never became an issue between us though I fantasize that she would have handled it better than Dad.

So on Memorial Day my memories are of other’s service, others closely connected to me, as close, in some ways, as human connections can be:  Mother, Father, Son.  I am the outlier, not anti-military but suspicious from the beginning of any war, not of the military’s role, but of the political decisions and calculations that go into it, of the long term futility of war, of the heartache and suffering, the death and dislocation that follows as War steps across a country.

And there is a strange resonance, as if others hear the bell tolling and I stand inside it, aware only of its clang and the heat and the possibility of being hit by the clapper.