Category Archives: Politics

Dogs, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Busy Friday

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Beltane                                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

Finally.  One chunk of the Metamorphosis finished in a literal (sort 0f) version.  That’s Book III:138-250.  My learning curve has been steep, sometimes so much so that I thought I might tip over backwards, but I seem to have reached a point where moving forward goes faster now and the hill no longer looks quite so daunting.  The next step is to take it apart and put it back together in idiomatic English, then compare it to other translations, see what insights that adds.  As a guy who thought the world of language had invalidated his passport years ago, I’m pleasantly surprised and pleased with myself.  It means a lot to do something at 64 that I’ve spent a lifetime imagining I couldn’t.

After that I drove into Little Sezchuan and had lunch with Justin and Margaret, the Sierra Club’s lobbyist and Executive Director.   We discussed evaluating our legislative work this year, wrapping things up and getting ourselves squared away for the 2011-2012 session.  This has been a difficult year and it’s not over.

Came home, ready for my nap.  But.  Vega lay in the kitchen, scrunched up in pain and bloodied from some kind of a fight.  No clue what happened, but we first examined her, then took her over to the vet who sewed her up, gave her antibiotics and pain pills and we brought her home.  She’s resting now, but the vet says she be very sore tomorrow.  She’s such a sweety, she just let them work on her.

Now, I’m sleepy, but can’t get my nap because it would interfere with going to sleep.

Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

The Great Lake

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Beltane                                                  Waxing Last Frost Moon

Have you ever had a love affair that ebbed and flowed like embers in a fire wavering between bursting into flame and dying out?  I have.  Today I visited that other lover in my life, Lake Superior.  A bookshelf full of books rest in a room not ten feet from here, each one of them related to Lake Superior in some way.  An entire file drawer of a vertical file drawer contains carefully organized files, each an eco-region in the area around Lake Superior and its watershed.  In another spot sit the maps, some USGS, some others representing the land around the Lake.  There are, too, files of notes from two circle route trips I took, each time stopping in various county historical societies:  Ontanogon, Marquette, Thunder Bay to pursue research about this phenomenon less than 2 and half  hours from my front door.

My brother Mark and I drove up there.  He wandered Park Point and hiked all the way up Lake Street to the top, turning then for a magnificent view of the lake.  While he discovered Duluth, I attended a conference on Sulfide Mining on the Mesabi Range.  This was a large group, 70 plus folks, gathered to hear experts discuss various aspects of sulfide mining’s impact on the waters of three watersheds and the communities of people, trees and wildlife that would share the land with this toxic producing form of mining.

It was one of those clear northern spring days.  The sun flashed off the lake, bouncing off the crests of waves made by lakers going in and out of the Duluth Harbor.  The temperature was cool by the lake, warmer up the slope of the hillside where St. Scholastica sits; it’s fortress like main building dominating the surrounding the area.

The drive was long and the stay short, a combination I try to avoid, though this is my second time recently.  The drive out to Lincoln, Nebraska to get the dogs was also a long drive, short stay, quick turn around.

Not sure where Lake Superior and I stand.  The old spark was there as we crested the hill and looked out over the St. Louis River toward Superior, Wisconsin and the lake spread out below us.  My research, though, sits unused, as it has for several years.  What’s the status of this relationship?  Not sure.

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Nut Job Analysis

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Beltane                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

The Arab Spring.  A nice metaphor.  I remember the Prague Spring.  I have faith in people’s movements when they come out of the genuine frustrations and pains of everyday living.  Ideology bends movements, often turns them into pretzels, twisted things that reflect the head rather than the heart, the so-called radical Islamists, the KKK, the Communist Party, the Kuomintang.  When people begin to move and rustle together, when they become willing to take charge of their own destiny rather than allow others to dictate it, then they become powerful, often unstoppable.  People’s movements topple dictators.  Egypt.  Tunisia.  Yemen.  Probably Libya.  Maybe Syria.  Possibly Saudi Arabia.

Even the Tea Party here has some of the ingredients of a people’s movement.  Only some because the underlying motive force is a crackpot brand of political thought made famous by the Impeach Earl Warren and U.S. out of the United Nations billboard folks, the John Birch Society.  I say crackpot in the unkindest way possible.  Robert Welch, a guy who made his fortune making candy, including the caramel on a stick, Papa Sucker, founded the John Birch Society in 1958.  He believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist.

“In the 1960s, Welch began to believe that even the Communists were not the top level of his perceived conspiracy and began saying that Communism was just a front for a Master Conspiracy, which had roots in the Illuminati; the essay “The Truth in Time” is an example[1]. He referred to the Conspirators as “The Insiders,” seeing them mainly in internationalist financial and business families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.”

With this sort of nut job analysis as its underpinnings, it’s no wonder the Tea Party hacks think Obama is a socialist, a Kenyan and a Muslim.  I’m waiting for a new round of billboards.

Two tours this morning focusing on Spanish/Latin American art.  I’m looking forward to them.

Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Commentary on the news, Friends, Garden, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Garden, Some Latin, Ai Weiwei

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Beltane                                                     New Last Frost Moon

The potatoes are in the ground.  The lettuce has two leaves, as does the spinach, a few beets have emerged.  The leeks look a bit droopy, but they’ll pick up.  The garlic is well over 6 inches now as it makes the final push for harvest in late June, early July.  None of the carrots have germinated yet and most of the beets have not either. The onion sets we planted havecropped-free-ai-weiwei mostly begun to show green.  The bees show up now around the property, working as we do, tending the plants in their own, intimate way.  The gooseberries we transplanted look very healthy.  The daffodils are a carpet of yellow and white.  A few scylla out front brighten up the walk with their blue.

Most of today went into Diana and Actaeon.  I’m down to verse 227, the finish line is 250.  I’m close and moving faster now than I was.  One of the things I’ve learned is that doing this at a pace which would allow you to complete a project in a reasonable time frame would require real skill.  I’m a hobby Ovidist, to be a Latin scholar would take decades.  Who knows though?  I might make it.  When I finish this first tale in the Metamorphosis, I’m going to have some kind of celebration.

Buddy Mark Odegard has come up with three remarkable designs for a Free Ai Weiwei t-shirt.   Here’s an example and the one most seem to prefer:

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Bin-Laden

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Beltane                                                          Sliver Bee Hiving Moon

Dead.  Bin-Laden dead.  The news says so.  Obama says so.  Can’t imagine it would be news offered unless compelling evidence existed to prove it.  News reports claim they have his body.  A feeling of relief, exhilaration.  Then, shame.  Shame at being glad anyone is dead.  Those feelings ten years ago this September still pulse in me, make me mad, make me want closure.  This is a closure of sorts, maybe of a major degree.

Of course, with all things political there is the action, Bin-Laden killed by US, then there will be the reaction.  Alinsky always said the action is in the reaction.  The question though always is, what will the reaction be?

I can imagine bluster, more direct attempts at terrorist acts.  I can picture rage and riots and attacks against US embassies and US corporation and individuals.  But I can also imagine this as a fever that, once run its course, may lead to a calmer, less polarized situation.  God, I hope so.

I’m a little surprised at the depth of my reaction to the news, though I imagine it links back directly to 9/11 and those feelings.

Cinema and Television, Family, Great Work, Politics, Writing

In A World Far Away

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Spring                                                                   Waning Bee Hiving Moon

Spent the day in the world I’ve created, Tailte, a sister world to earth, but separated by several thousand light years.  It’s strange to spend time there, a place that exists only in my mind, yet populated with people, creatures, landscapes, mountain ranges, oceans, islands, gods and goddesses.  Strange, but in a good way.  It’s one of the joys I experience in writing fiction.  It takes me to a place I can’t reach in any other aspect of my life.

I’m still typing in work I did at Blue Cloud Monastery though I’ve also advanced the word count by a few thousand words.  Plugging away.  Just have to keep at it.

We only have a month left to go in the 2011 session of the 2011-2012 legislature.  The number of bad bills, outrageous legislation and outright strange bills (like cutting down walnut trees in State Parks to save the State Parks continues to pile up as the party out of legislative power for years flexes its muscle.  The callous disregard for the future of our rivers and streams, lakes and forests, wildlife and prairie’s just doesn’t make sense to me.  I don’t understand the political calculus that trades temporary economic gain for permanent disfigurement and toxification of wetlands, cutting down old growth forests, polluting the Minnesota, the Mississippi and wetlands around and possibly within the BWCA.

Mark and I watched Salt, an Angelina Jolie spy flick.  Not bad, not great, but entertaining even with the cliches.  We also started watching a three part made for tv movie called Archangel.  It was good; we’re about half way through.

Aging, Memories, Politics

Women. Still Advancing.

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Spring                                                          Waning Bee Hiving Moon

During my first years of seminary the women’s movement, already rolling when I left college in 1969, had begun to pick up a solid head of steam.  Half of the women in my class (one), went to consciousness raising with the wives of male students.  By the time I graduated from sem in 1976 the entering class was mostly female.  At some point in the 1980’s there was actually a junior (first year) class that was all female.

Kate is a pediatrician only recently retired. My ex, Raeone Loscalzo, runs Women’s Advocates, the nations oldest provider of shelters for abused women.  In terms of traditional marks of male success both of these women have out achieved me by a long way:  more money, more prestige.  This would have been strange and aberrant when I grew up; now, I’m happy to say it only reflects the increasing ability of women to lead lives based on their ability and not limited by sexist stereotypes.

Among the many cultural changes our generation has nurtured, none was more wrenching and more life changing than the women’s movement.  It is a great joy to me, at this stage of my life, to see the advances women have made, really in a short time.  It is testimony to the hard work, the steel will, the insightful analysis and the dogged persistence of women at all ages and stages of our culture.  It is no easy thing to leave the cocoon of stereotyped safety for the responsibility of life on your terms.  But look at the huge number of women who have achieved it.

That’s why this excerpt from a news article reveals only the present crest of this still moving wave.

WASHINGTON – For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor’s degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

Art and Culture, Great Work, Politics

Touring

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Spring                                      Waning Bee Hiving Moon

A Titian tour this morning with students from Harding High School in East St. Paul.  My group was largely Asian, Hmong for the most part.  They were attentive and responsive.  At the end Peng and Veng, two boys who had shown a lot of interest, reached out and shook my hand.  An adult gesture.  Surprised me.  Made me feel surprisingly good, too.

Second tour, also from Harding, had kids in a drawing class focused on a project to produce symbolic portraits of themselves.  An interesting tour to design, to think through.  Not sure how this group, also all Asian though with some Chinese students, too, reacted.  They were more closed off, but remained engaged through eye contact.

After that, over to the Sierra Club to return the material from yesterday’s event at North Hennepin Community College.  Spent a half-hour talking to Margaret about mining, volunteers, fund-raising, then drove home in the heart of rush hour.  Bushed.

Art and Culture, Asia, Humanities, Politics, World History

Freedom

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Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

It is never safe to speak and act for freedom in an unfree place.  How many have learned that lesson?  American revolutionaries.  French.  East Indian. American Indian.  The South African blacks.  The list could go on and on.  Spartacus.  Socrates.  Even Jesus.  It is never safe to be unfree.  That’s the paradox, the motivator.

And freedom will have its way.  History, though I know the arguments against this position, is on the side of freedom.  It is an ache in the human heart that never goes away until satisfied. Ask the African-Americans or undocumented folks in the USA today.  Ask the Muslims in France or the Turks in Germany, the Romany especially in the Slavic countries.  Ask the Jews of the diaspora anywhere.

To stand on the side of freedom is to stand with the future and against the past.  Each of us takes a position every day, with every purchase we make, every political decision we try or fail to try to influence, every value we pass on through our behaviors and our teaching.  To live is to choose.  Always.

I spoke with a man today about the political environment for working against climate change, for healthy and sustainable forests, agriculture, cities.  The political winds today blow against us.  Is that a reason to sit down and wait them out?  No.  It is a time to stand up, to find the actions we can take that will move us toward a more just and verdant world

One of those actions, always, is to work on the side of freedom.  Ai Weiwei and others held in China today need and deserve our help.  Not as an action against China, but as one for it.  For a world where political speech and action has a place of honor, not a jail cell.

Art and Culture, Asia, Politics

Dissent Magazine on Ai Weiwei

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Spring                                                Full Bee Hiving Moon

from the friendly folks at Dissent magazine: (please note:  in deference to recent activity about copyright, I’m going to only post excerpts and links of magazine and newspaper articles.

The Purge of Ai Weiwei

Colin Jones – April 13, 2011

WHY WAS Ai Weiwei allowed to say the things he did? Any journalist who interviewed him in the last several years would eventually ask him the question, and it was incredible how Ai could reformulate the same answer again and again. Here he is on CNN in 2009: “On the one hand, the prime minister would memorize my father’s poetry in front of the great public, but on the other hand, the police were, you know, following me. So it’s hard to say.” In other words, Ai did not know why, but he suggested that whether he was going to get away with it or not remained to be seen.