Category Archives: Politics

Humanities, Politics

Union, Yes

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Imbolc                                                              Waning Bridgit Moon

This week had a lot of Latin time.  I made it through ten lines of Diana and Actaeon which Greg and I discussed at length during my tutoring session today.  I need to pay more attention to the verb and its object; when I get that, I get the translation; when I don’t, I make it fit anyhow, the Procrustean bed of my mind.  The work of translation, at least in Latin, lies within my competency level, I can see that now.  All it will require is ongoing attention.  All.  Well.  Good thing there’s a lot in Latin that interests me.

Madison, Wisconsin.  Politics, the way they work in our country, allow this mercurial swing from one perspective to another in the course of one election.  Republicans seem to need two things in the public arena:  enemies they can flog and to be the enemy themselves.  It’s a peculiar combination, like group sado/masochism with both aspects of S&M in action at the same time.  Enemies right now:  public sector unions, bloated budgets and those that love them, perverters of the constitution–at least they one they read, environmentalists, the environment.  Being the enemy right now:  ruling with a peculiar maliciousness–witness the Wisconsin Governor’s “conversation” with billionaire David Koch,  acting as if the nation were a one party system, theirs, with a pesky group of liberals who act like horseflies and insist on inhabiting seats in their government, choosing a mainstream way of interpreting the constitution, the living document school, and pushing it, in their minds, to the dustbin of history as if it had never existed.

We need parties that represent different communities and different interests, that’s what politics is for, the mediation of disputes, but our politics don’t work unless respect for the others existence stands as a given. Continue reading Union, Yes →

Humanities, Politics

The Holly King Still Reigns

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Imbolc                                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

The snow has well begun and the winds howl outside, evidence that the Holly King has not yet been defeated by the Hawthorn Giant.  Even so, the snows of this time of year do not last long, even when they come in depth.  The sun vaults higher and higher in the sky each day, already 11 degrees higher at 33 than it was on January 1st at 22.  This elevation concentrates the sun’s rays, warming the days faster and faster until finally the Holly King will retire to his growing season abode far away in the ice of the northern regions.  I don’t know what he does there, but when he returns after the crops have been harvested and the land left fallow, he will be rested and ready to reassert his dominion.  Today he shows that his reign has not yet ended for this year.

Translating Ovid has been slow, as it always is, looking up individual words in the Latin dictionary, investigating verb forms and the declensions of nouns and adjectives.  The trickiest part, for me anyhow, remains holding the various words and their possible conjugated and declined meanings in my mind, assembling and reassembling them until, like the keystone into the arch, the sentence or phrase hangs together.

I like being in my lower floor study, half below ground, windows opening at ground level show the wind and the snow.  In here I have created a library set up for my needs:  art history references, philosophical texts, books on the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Sierra Club and environmental politics, travel guides from Greece, Cambodia, Turkey, Rome, Great Britain, Cambodia and Thailand among others,  texts, little read, on neuro and cognitive science.  Files for objects at the MIA, old presentations, short stories, novels and research material on the Great Wheel, the ancient Celts.

This is a peaceful place where concentration comes easily and hours can pass without leaving.  I suppose it’s also a meditation room.  Now the snow and the work of the morning have me leaning toward a nap.  Kate’s at work this Sunday, so I’ll sleep alone.  Unusual these days.

Politics, World History

Struggle

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Imbolc                                                      Full Bridgit Moon

Uprisings for democracy in the Middle East.  I’m still a fan and await with some eagerness the next chapter in the story as these people’s movement try to make the difficult transition from protest to governance.  Apportioning power is never as easy as standing in the way of the powerful.  It requires a different lens, a different attitude, because it entails accountability for policy and follow-through.  Most reforms and revolutions fail at this point, the psychology of wielding power a radical turn away from undermining it.  This is the sense in which conservatives have it right.  Order is easy to upend and difficult at best to restore.

Disorder can damage lives and nations.  Order, even order held in place by authoritarian regimes, can provide stability for day-to-day lives.  Thus, the conservative says, better the dictator you know than the one you don’t.

Their argument has merit, too.  Trade and peace flourishes when a powerful government maintains order and enforces laws.  Genghis Khan, for example, opened up trade over vast parts of the East, including the vast grasslands from which he came.  The Pax Romana encouraged a network of trade, scholarship and immigration that enriched the Mediterranean and European regions.  The Pax Britannica created a global network of trade as its empire waxed across the earth.

There is no need to deny the positive elements of imperial power.  They exist and any one with a sense of history knows something about them.

At the same time, though, there is no possibility of avoiding the negative elements either.  A loss of personal and national autonomy defines the nature of imperial or autocratic rule, so there is a bargain made or enforced, our stability and trade for your freedom as individuals and as a nation.  This bargain may even convince people in regions torn by internecine conflict, ethnic rebellions or war lords.  A chaotic past exchanged for a less free but orderly community may appear fair.  At first.

Continue reading Struggle →

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Still Examining

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Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bridgit Moon

Greg Membres, my Latin tutor, recommended a film, The Examined Life.  You may have seen it already since it was made in 2008, but it’s a powerful introduction to some fundamental philosophical questions like ethics, the meaning of life, political theory.

One truth struck me more powerfully than any other while watching this movie.  I imagined, when I was in high school and then in college, that there was an upward and onward nature to learning, a steady progression in which high school and college pushed me, and a progression that would give me enough momentum to take my life up the mountain, all the way to the top, that somehow learning and life would be a regular unfolding of answers and conclusions.  After, maybe, my sophomore year I began to realize this was a mistaken view, not only mistaken but might have had reality actually inverted.

That is, I was never more certain of the truth than when I was in college and then, later, in seminary.  Life since then has offered a sometime gradual, sometimes sudden degradation of both the things I know for sure and the things I know at all.  An abstract thinker by nature and inclination, I found it logical, desirable to hunt for truth in the abstract systems of philosophy, theology, theoretical approaches to various disciplines.  At one point, in fact, I wanted to study the theoretical foundations of anthropology in graduate school.  Turns out not many graduate schools had much interest.  In either the discipline or me studying it.

As life experience and longer thought has lead me to reconsider many of my core positions, I have abandoned Christianity, the liberal politics of my father, the traditional roles of men and women, boys and girls, the positive assumptions about capitalism with which I was acculturated, the metaphysics of Rene Descartes which still informs our unexamined ontology, a soul, an afterlife, respect for the government, though not for democracy itself.  These are not trivial decisions, nor were any of them made lightly nor suddenly.

On some of the big questions like the meaning of life, I have chosen to abandon my search.  Life is what we are, it is what we do and needs no abstract cover story for its purpose.  This may be too minimalistic for many and I get that, but for me, I find my purpose in life itself, the living of it that includes marriage, family, friends and  actions that press for greater justice, a sustainable future, a climate that will not kill us.

Though I’m not a complete cultural relativist, I’m pretty damn close.  Murder, oppression, suppression, starvation, unchecked disease, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination of any kind are wrong, in my view, universally.  In almost all other matters, I’m more than open to different cultural perspectives and practices, I expect them, celebrate them and would find the world shallower and morally impoverished without them.

Still working on this, noodling it.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Life Review

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Imbolc                                                       Waxing Bridgit Moon

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Cornel West   

So, valentine’s day is a justice holiday, too.  I like it.  I met Cornel West in 1974, when we were both much younger.  We attended a week-long conference on liberation theology at Maryknoll College in Detroit.

Since the retreat, I’ve begun looking back, seeing my life as a whole rather than in its most immediate reality.  There’s a task here, called integrity (see below), defined by Erik Erikson, a task in which we review our life and decide if it has threads, through lines, think about its cogency as a work of art.

Maturity(65 to death) Ego Integrity vs. Despair Reflection on Life Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.

This is a delicate task, I think, since most of us, myself included, don’t see our lives slowing down or as less productive or even, in important ways, discontinuous with the life preceding.  That aspect, the final, end note aspect of Erikson seems premature, but the task itself is one that can begin now, that is, in our mid-60s.

There is a need, it seems, for a 7.5 or an 8.0 followed by integrity as a 8.5.  Jung, who broke with Freud early, earlier in his career than Erikson did, sees the second half of life as an inward journey, a preparation for dying, but, also, a recipe for living.  It is this aspect that seems left out of Erikson’s model, that contemplative, meditative facet of life as we pull away from the world of engagement toward a world of the inner journey.  So, I see this ego integrity task as a subset of a more important turn, the turn from achievement and goals, to the interior, to the inner cathedral, the cultivation of the deep Self.

Life review certainly fits as a section of the inward journey, but it fails to acknowledge the still active, still an agent, role of our lives up to our death.  We need to retain agency, to take responsibility for the journey now, just as we have in the past.  Still, there is no question that getting older means taking stock, reviewing our past, but it cannot dampen the vitality and purposive nature of life even in our 80s and 90s and 100s.

Aging, Family, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Good Birthday

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

Relearning old lessons.  Today I went to the capitol to do some lobbying.  While there, Justin (Sierra Club lobbyist) and I met with a member of the legislature whose outline was a bit murky relative to our issues.  We found an ally, someone we can work with who has the ear of folks we can’t reach directly.  It was a fun and helpful meeting.birthday-stupa-james-johnson

A lot of people sent wishes for a good day on my birthday.  Nothing is a better present for me than finding an ally in unexpected places.

Kate made me two wonderful shirts, both short sleeved, Hawaiian like shirts.  When it gets warmer, you’ll see them.  Having a wife that sews and quilts is a great gift.  Oh, and she’s good at diagnosis, too.

Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes.  Brother James Johnson, aka Dusty, sent me a birthday stupa:

Politics

Freedom. A Powerful Word.

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Imbolc                                                    Waxing Bridgit Moon

This Valentine boy would like to send a big Valentine to all the folks in Tunisia and Egypt, to all folks anywhere, including Iran and Pakistan, even to the Tea Party folks, who yearn to be free.  The yearning for freedom and liberty, a chance to steer toward a future of your own choosing is a powerful force.   Once it becomes a dominant theme, its power can and has toppled governments and tyrants.

That said, it carries the same dangers as any revolutionary movement.  As the Who sang, “Here is the new boss, same as the old boss.”  Those yearning for freedom may be no better equipped to create a climate that nurtures freedom than those they’ve ousted.

Why?  Because, no matter the ideology, right or left, Islamist or evangelical, there lies, underneath the layered texts imposed on it,  a human heart, a heart that has its own agenda, no matter the rules imposed upon it.  Often that heart surprises us with its generosity, compassion, fellow feeling; but, too, with its fear, prejudice and ruthlessness.

Still, to paraphrase a UU campaign, I’m committed to standing on the side of freedom and equality, so I give a hearty tip of the hat to all those brave enough to stand up for what they believe, even ones with whom I disagree.

My hope is that whenever freedom lovers grab power, they will reflect a moment on the injustices that brought them there and determine how, this time, their reign will be different.

GeekWorld, Politics, World History

Fire in the Streets

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Imbolc                                                     Waxing Bridgit Moon

See.  It helps to share your pain.  Woolly brother and cybermage Bill Schmidt gave me the number of his son-in-law, Steve Johnson, who runs a part-time business called I-tech.  He knows networks and backups, doing that kind of thing during the day for 3M.  I’m gonna give him a call.  Time to stop banging my head against this stuff.

I’ve not kept on top of the Tunisia, Egypt coverage and have missed a lot of the analysis, so this may be ill-informed; but, it all sounds pretty healthy to me.  Dictators may seem more stable from a US foreign policy perspective, yet they often/always? do disservice to the people(s) and the nation which they rule.  Whether kept in power by US aid and good will or by their own ham-fisted acts, dictators lack a key ingredient for legitimate power, the assent of the governed.  By definition in a dictatorship there is no consent by the citizenry, yet their rule could work if the people assented to their government.  And they may.  At first.  Especially if the dictator rose to power by throwing off a corrupt state government or overthrowing a sitting tyrant.  In the end though dictators dictate and no matter what the political philosophy of the whole, no one likes being told what to do time and again with the force of arms behind it.

It should come as no surprise when people in such situations say, enough.  In fact, to old political hacks like me, it’s more surprising people take as long as they often do, fearing the consequences of action.  Of course, from our North American vantage point, it seems the outcome of these people’s movements must be radical Islamist states, but I think it too soon to tell.

An even more intriguing bit of analysis will come from discerning the true role of social media.    They are, of course, a new player in politics and one few people understand very well.  Except maybe those that use it for these purposes.

Whatever the outcome, whatever the analysis, these uprisings have clear public support.  What happens next could determine the fate of the unfortunate Middle East for years to come.  One less:  beware the lure of wealth from natural resources.  They destabilize as much as–more–than they stabilize.  Just ask residents of Minnesota’s Iron Range or any of the First Nations in either Canada or the U.S.

Great Work, Politics

Mr. Ellis Goes To St. Paul

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Imbolc                                                                          Waning Moon of the Cold Month

Got in the Celica this am and took off for the MNDOT building where I parked.  Three hours for $4.50 in quarters, paid at a central pay station.  The only argument I had with it was that the pay station was outside when there was a perfectly warm building within 20 feet of its location.  Anyhow it gave me plenty of time to have lunch in the MNDOT cafeteria, favored of lobbyists, with Justin Fay, the Sierra Club lobbyist.  We talked politics, a favorite activity of mine, somewhat akin to fly fishing or racquetball for others, I imagine.

The cafeteria has a wide expanse of windows, a hundred feet by 30 foot room full on non-descript tables.  Files and briefcases and blackberries sit slumped by chairs or flat on a table, folks hunched over them as if they had the latest news of breaking legislation.  And, who know?  They might.  I suspect one of this places charms is its distance from the capitol since it sits about three blocks away from the capitol itself, connected by the very sensible tunnel system that passes through S.O.B–nope, not that, State Office Building–then to the capitol and at the other end of its run the State Supreme Building.

After lunch Justin and I walked through the tiled and dimly lit tunnel to the S.O.B., an office building that houses Representatives and Senators, especially now the DFL senate, here for the first time since partisan politics began in the state thanks to the Elephant stampede last fall.  In SOB and in the capitol the hallways and benches, elevators waiting rooms filled up two and three gathered together, huddled and discussing this or that fine point of pending legislation or a Superbowl party.  Suits are the garb d’jour, but there are plenty of us non-suited folks wandering the halls, too.  That way it’s easy to tell the players from the audience.

We met with a member of the House of Representatives after a brief stop in the Senate DFL Siberia to check on talking points on legislation due for a floor vote soon.  This member, a liberal from Minneapolis, welcomed us into his office and we chatted for about an hour, sharing talking points, questions to ask about this legislation and that, getting his reading of the legislature this first day of February.  When we were done, we left, headed for the elevators, down to the basement, through the tunnel back to the MNDOT building and back out to our cars.  Time to go home.

Politics, especially legislative politics, is all about relationships and relationships are all about showing up.  It’s so physical, immediate that you can forget the essential matters being dealt with.  It is, as one veteran lobbyist said, high school.  Never ending high school.

Commentary on the news, Health, Minnesota, Politics

The Moral Test of Government

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Winter                                             Waning Moon of the Cold Month

“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”   It is still said.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Ouch.  Latin infinitives and indirect statements.  I’m on Chapter 25 (of 42) of Wheelock now and the grammar and vocabulary isn’t getting easier, it’s getting harder.  Suppose this should not be a surprise, but I kinda hoped…  My mind has pressed out against my skull, then bounced back, a coup contracoup injury occasioned by working too damn hard.  Ah, ok.  I love it.  Still, in spite of the strib this morning, this love does hurt.  At least now.

The legislative grist mill has begun to grind and this time the sacks will be filled with coal dust as lives, especially lives of the most vulnerable, suffer hit after hit from the budget cutters.  There was an NCIS Los Angeles (see, Latin and pop culture within two sentences of each other.) recently that I thought was corny, about a military number cruncher who wanted to make the numbers names.  The plot was corny, but the point was not.  Just as military numbers mean real people dead or maimed, so do the medicaid, general assistance, aid to the disabled and the elderly numbers mean real lives damaged, often beyond repair, because most of these folks are on the edge all the time.  It takes the smallest thing to set them on the downward spiral.