• Tag Archives America
  • 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.


  • America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not.

    Winter                                   Waxing Cold Moon

    OK.  The Cold Moon has finally risen on its namesake air temps.  8 this morning.  It’s a clear day after a small snowfall yesterday.

    If I were to put my finger on one thing to account for the Viking’s loss Sunday, discounting the six turnovers, it would be the 12 men in the huddle call that put them out of field goal range with 28 seconds left.  That’s a coach thing.  In spite of a spectacular job of recruiting personnel, we have the best overall players at many positions–8 Vikes in the ProBowl–the on the field decision making by coaches still leaves something to be desired.  I don’t know what it is, but it seems apparent.

    The Democrats need to grow some cojones and pass healthcare reform.  Whining because you’ve lost a super majority makes no sense.  They still have an 18 vote majority.  Use it or deserve to lose it.  We need leadership and decision making, not caviling and cajoling.

    I read a very interesting analysis of our political system a few days back that jolted me.  Printed in the Atlantic it shows our system has big  problems, based largely on the shift of populations since the early days of the colonies:

    How America Can Rise Again

    “We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

    The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,'” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.”

    The decades-long bipartisan conspiracy to gerrymander both state and federal electoral districts doesn’t help. More and more legislative seats are “safe” for one party or the other; fewer and fewer politicians have any reason to appeal to the center or to the other side. In a National Affairs article, “Who Killed California?,” Troy Senik pointed out that 153 state or federal positions in California were at stake in the 2004 election. Not a single one changed party. This was an early and extreme illustration of a national trend…

    I started out this process uncertain; I ended up convinced. America the society is in fine shape! America the polity most certainly is not. Over the past half century, both parties have helped cause this predicament—Democrats by unintentionally giving governmental efforts a bad name in the 1960s and ’70s, Republicans by deliberately doing so from the Reagan era onward. At the moment, Republicans are objectively the more nihilistic, equating public anger with the sentiment that “their” America has been taken away and defining both political and substantive success as stopping the administration’s plans. As a partisan tactic, this could make sense; for the country, it’s one more sign of dysfunction, and of the near-impossibility of addressing problems that require truly public efforts to solve.”


  • Free kittens. Spaded.

    Lughnasa                    Waning Green Corn Moon

    Rigel and Vega have returned home, a bit foggy and uncertain.  Spayed now, they have to be on home rest for the next 10 days.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll make that.

    Kate and I saw a cute poster on the bulletin board posted in the airlock going out of the Festival Grocery.  Done in crayon it said, “Free kittens.  Spaded.”

    These lectures on the cycles of American political thought I’m listening to right now have prompted a considerable amount of noodling, most of  it focused right now on the central paradox of our democracy.  A solution borne of the Enlightenment, our government and in particular our Constitution and Bill of Rights makes a lot effort to protect the individual and that crucial virtue which ensures individualism, liberty.

    The paradox at the core of our nation is this:  government exists to co-ordinate and organize a community, yet its chief underlying value is individualism.  Thus, the purpose of government, focused on community, stands over against the individual it exists to preserve.  This paradox, unresolvable, lies at the fulcrum of so many of our political disagreements.  I’m not any further along with this right now, but its on my mind.


  • I Love the Midwest

    Imbolc      Waxing Moon of Winds

    Finished the Asmat tour and a visual thinking strategies (VTS) tour for 3rd graders.  I give them tomorrow morning.

    Put together the legislative update for the Sierra Club blog and a morning entry for the Star-Trib.  Soon, it will be nap time.

    This afternoon and over the weekend I’ll dig back into the American Identity piece for the 15th. It’s been fallow since Monday, but it has not disappeared from my consciousness.  I’m leaning now toward a definite geographic hook, an addition to the more usual psycho-political work I’ve read in Huntington and some of the other essays.  I’m not sure yet whether I consider it an equivalent to those notions or whether it is a more important category.

    Here’s what I mean.  The notion of a nation is abstract, in the instance of a nation as geographically large as the USA, it can become even more abstract.  My hunch is that, as all politics are local, so are all experiences of national identity.  In other words, my experience of my land, my hometown, my home state or region is, both of necessity and emotional depth, the basic ingredient of my affection for my native land.

    That is not to say that This land is my land, from California to the New York Island doesn’t also inform my national identity.  I feel the Rockies and hollers of Appalachia, the rain forests of Washington State and the glaciers of Montana have a place in my sense of national identity, some of them in spite of my never having visited them.  They recede in importance for me, however, when I compare them to acre after acre of corn and wheat.  They do not have the emotional resonance for me the Great Lakes have, especially Huron, Michigan and Superior.  My life has been lived in the towns and cities of the Midwest and I love the Midwest.  When I think of my US identity, I think first of the Midwest.

    More on this to come.


  • Home and Heart

    winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

    Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

    Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

    In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

    The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

    Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

    The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.


  • America, America

    83  bar falls 30.00  1mph E dew-point 66  sunrise 6:21  sunset 8:11  Lughnasa

    Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

    “The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau

    Oh, man.  Just spent time on the phone, then online with a customer service tech for a web-based service to which I subscribe.  There’s gotta be a better way of establishing my bona fides.  With accounts and subscriptions all over the net my passwords, user names and security questions get mixed up sometimes.  In this case I think the problem was partly their end, partly my brain.  I haven’t solved it, but I lost energy for it.

    Instead, apropos of Rousseau above, I made telephone calls to candidates for the Sierra Club. I’m not a fan of the telephone, but a large part of that, maybe all of it, is me.  Phone solicitations, unwanted callers annoy me and I do not want to annoy others.  That’s my rationalization, in fact, it is part a sort of phobia about contacting people I can’t see, in a way that comes as a surprise even with caller id.

    When it comes to politics, persuasion has a key role, but I have developed an unreasonable and idiosyncratic reluctance to persuade–or to be persuaded by–another person.  I’m quite ok with persuasion in writing, public speaking, as part of a protest, but one to one I loose patience with the process.  This is a hangover from the sixties and one it is high time I eliminated.  My work with the Sierra Club this year is an excellent opportunity to challenge these predispositions.

    America.  The Woollies spoke Monday night of America, though most seemed to want to collapse America into the United States, a distinction I try to keep fresh and bright.  The United States is the political entity created by American revolution, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  It has and grants legal authority.  The United States is, largely, our government. Congress, the President and the Executive Branch, the Supreme Court, all the state governments and the corpus of laws, rules and regulations these all create and enforce.  We, the people are responsible for our government, not to our government and crucially, we are distinct from our government.

    America exists at the crossroads where a farm elevator rises out of vast fields of wheat.  America emerges at high school basketball games, bass fishing tournaments and baseball games.  America gets together at church socials, VFW meetings and suburban soccer games.  America has a geography, topography, a meteorology.  The United States does not.  America has churches and bowling leagues, softball games and croquet on well manicured suburban lawns.  The United States does not.  America has a history found in MacGuffey readers, Walt Whitman’s poems, Lincoln’s speeches and Frederick Douglass’s.  Moby Dick and Hester Prynne, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett.  Sooners.  Gold rushers.  Mountain Men. Suffragettes.  Temperance workers.  This is America.

    Those four corners with gas stations or drugstores or cafes, those long streets with bungalows and those with Victorian era mansions, the cars and trucks on the highways, Country Music and Bluegrass, Jazz and Gospel these express American culture.

    Culture blends with the land to create an idiosyncratic way of living recognized easily by others, but often not well understood by those immersed within it, just as the fish doesn’t think about water and humans give little thought to air.  Thus, the world knows what it means to be American better than we do.

    This question or topic deserves more probing, greater depth.  It goes to the very definition of ourselves in the world.


  • What Does It Mean To Be An American?

    85  bar falls 29.75 0mph E  dew-point 66  sunrise 5:53  sunset 8:44  Summer

    Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

    The hangover from the docent program continues.  We have to do an Africa check-out tour with two partners.  We each prepare three objects, then share the information and come ready to present any of the objects.  This is a sort of multiple choice test, I guess.  All of us have favorite areas in the museum and less liked areas.  I love the Asian collection.

    The African collection does not excite me.   I’m not sure why.  Africa as a continent and African history, especially pre-colonial Africa have fascinated me since college when I took several courses related to these areas as well as African anthropology.  Contemporary African politics also hold my attention.  The art does not.  There are pieces that are, for me, exceptions.  The Ife Shrine Head.  Kente cloth.  The Magadelene Odundo reduced black ceramics.  The gold weights.  The female sculptures.  The rest does not draw me in.  This is me, I know, for many find these objects stunning, even path breaking when it comes to representation.

    Still, I have to do this check-out tour and I will.

    The drive in was unremarkable, though notable for its reduced heat from the Texas weekend.  On the drive back I encountered several drivers in a row who had not yet graduated from the real world driving class we all take each day.  Left me with a short fuse.  Again.  On me.

    Switched for a third time the Woolly meeting idea.  First was permaculture.  Second was your media stream.  The third, and final one is this:  What does it mean to be an American?  When did  your feel your most patriotic?  Least? Who is your favorite American author?  Painter?  Poet?  Poem?  Book?  Painting?  Does America have a manifest destiny?  How do we or should we fit into the global reality?


  • A Failure of American Education

    46  bar rises 30.08 0mph N dewpoint 32 Spring

                Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

    “There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” – George Santayana

    Santayana liked football, but only practice.  While at Harvard, he attended practice faithfully, but never went to a game.  His philosophical wisdom has a firm place in American letters though he retained his Spanish citizenship until his death.  Here’s a sample of his poetry:                    

    I give back to the earth what the earth gave,
    All to the furrow, nothing to the grave.
    The candle’s out, the spirit’s vigil spent;
    Sight may not follow where the vision went.             

    As Americans we too often forget our own poets, philosophers and people of letters.  We scan back over the literary and artistic output of Western civilization to find exemplars.  If we’re truly catholic, we might even include Asia, but how many among us know Santayana?  Dewey?  James?  Emerson?  Thoreau?  How many have read, say, Moby Dick?  Whitman?  Emily Dickinson?  Even Frost and Sandburg beyond their iconic poems?  Willa Cather?  Have we heard of Charles Hartshorne?  How about Ambrose Bierce?  Wallace Stevens?  John Dos Passos? Sherwood Anderson? American has produced great artists like Pollock, the Hudson River School painters, John Singer-Sargent and Whistler, but again who knows them?  Only a few.

    This is a failure of American education and of our willingness to learn our own heritage.  This is not trivial.  A people who do not know where they come from, as Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. 

    I will add a brief bio here from time to time of more American persons of belles lettres.  Our future depends upon us becoming more than casually acquainted with them.