Category Archives: Politics

Bees, Garden, Humanities, Politics, US History

That Mosque

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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.

Art and Culture, Friends, Minnesota, Politics

Strolling on the Mall

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Lughnasa                                           Full Artemis Moon

Downtown Minneapolis, along the Nicollet Mall, has a lot of art, as Glen Keitel showed a group of 15 or so this afternoon.  We started with shadow portraits made of loonbronze and cast into the sidewalk.  They were commemorations of various political struggles including the 1934 truckers strike, Nellie Stone Johnson’s political career and a moving tribute to a Dakota woman.  Across the street from them at Westminster Presbyterian a Paul Granlund cast three humans up and heavenward from geometric forms all cast in bronze.  We walked a long ways, over two hours, and the leg on which I ruptured my achilles took to aching.

A surprising number (to me) of restaurants downtown now have sidewalk dining and there were plenty of people out and about.  A fun afternoon.

There was, too, as there always is in a major downtown, desperate people pleading for attention, for money.  One woman stood with a sign that said she was 7 months pregnant; another man asked me to roll down my window on the way home.  A few sat heads down, clothes tattered, a look of dejection covering them in gloom.

There are now many theories about the mall, whether it was a good idea or whether it has stagnated downtown, taking the liveliness out of it.  Should we fix it by allowing cars?  Should we close it altogether?  What worried me was the number of businesses with store fronts, but no display windows and several buildings with papered over glass and graffiti.

It is city life, flux, humanity at its richest and most callous, humanity at its poorest and most demeaned, the impermanent made to seem solid and stable amidst the signs of constant change and the flow, always the flow, of paper and food and metal and goods, in and out, as the people flow too, making paths that do not last on streets that will not either.

Commentary on Religion, Politics, US History

Build the Mosque

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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.”

Cinema and Television, Great Work, Politics

Chicken Wings, Legislators and a Wolfman

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

More napping.  Still getting the body back to its old form.  Maybe tomorrow.

Into the Sierra Club for the Legislative Awards.  It was the first time these awards have happened.  Justin’s idea and a good one.  Speeches, good strokes.

Ran into Randy Neprash.  From days gone by.  He was part of Phoenix Builders who worked with the West Bank Community Development Corporation.  I remembered him, he didn’t remember me.  He’s now doing some multi-city storm water drainage project as a civil engineer.  I knew him from somewhere else, too, but it didn’t come to me.

Back home after picking up fried chicken wings from the Wing’s Joint.  It used to be on Nicollet, a ways past Lake Street.  How it ended up in Blaine in a strip mall, I haven’t figured out, but I’m glad its there.  Best wings in town.

Watching the Wolfman with Benecio Del Toro spent the first half of the movie–what I’ve seen so far–trying to capture the heaviness, grief-stricken weariness and stolidity of Lon Chaney.  He’s just not Chaney.  Anthony Hopkins is, as one reviewer said, Anthony Hopkins.  It’s easy to see where they were heading with this.  The set, the costumes, the whole ambiance is right, but the story is draggy, too complex, too frilly.  With Hopkins and Del Toro there are enough acting chops here to produce a good film, but it likes a great story line.  Too bad.

Health, Minnesota, Politics, Weather +Climate

Gentle Politicians, Start Your Engines!

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Artemis Moon

Still feeling a bit punk, but I can breathe and I did get outside, pulled some weeds.  Much better.

As August hits mid-point, we’re still experiencing high dewpoints and temperature, at least for us. Local meteorologist Paul Douglas compared today’s weather to the Congo. Land of 10,000 weather extremes.

Huh.  Just occurred to me, the land of 10,000 lakes.  When the Chinese say the 10,000 things, they mean the whole universe.  10,000 is a favorite number among Chinese writers and thinkers; as I interpret it, it means more than you can imagine.  My understanding of the reason for selecting 10,000 in our state slogan is that it “sounds like more than 16,000,” the rough count of Minnesota’s lake sized water bodies.  Whoever made the decision was right.

With the completion of the state’s first ever August 10th primary we stand now on the precipice of another silly season, campaign ads clogging the air waves, phone calls to support him or her and mailers in the box.  Kate and I, because we both have the appellation Dr. in certain places, often receive mailings to gauge the feelings of Republicans like us in our district.  I vacillate between pitching them and sending in disinformation.

In some ways the electoral process is politics at its purest, retail politics in which candidates use whatever means they can afford to convince individual voters to fill in the oval for them in November.  In another way the electoral process  is politics at its most foul as candidate use whatever means they can afford to distance themselves from their opponents:  attack ads, push polling, deceptive mailings, outright lies and, the worst of all, in my opinion, pandering.

Let me give you an example of pandering.  Tim Pawlenty entered Minnesota politics as a centrist right Republican.  As he attempts to position himself for a Presidential bid (Yike!), he keeps edging closer to nutty right wing tricorn wearing  Tea-Hee Party folks.

“Gov. Tim Pawlenty has rejected a yearslong effort to update Minnesota’s rules for lakeshore development.

Pawlenty says the revisions overreach, and undermine local control and property rights. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported Friday that he has sent regulators back to the drawing board.”  Fox News (sic) Website.

Quick now.  Who builds oversized lakehomes right up to the edge?  Right, your neighbor on Social Security and all those folks recently tossed off GAMC?  Not hardly.  Folks who receive $40,000,000 severance packages like the naughty CEO of HP, that’s who.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Politics

I Sing The Body Electric

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.    “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman

Coming to the end of another round of this summer bug, or rather virus, an intracellular interloper replicating at my expense.  Even though I’ve felt decentered, defocused and dis-eased, my body has gone on working, repelling these bad actors and throwing up barriers to their return.

Do you ever think about the daily miracle that is your body?  All the parts of it that have to work in homeostasis, levels of creatinine, thyroid hormones, testosterone, potassium and the gut with its legion of foreign bacteria working to aid our digestion and the lungs stealing oxygen from the atmosphere which has just enough that we can live and the ear which not only helps us hear but keeps us upright and steady; the nervous system wheeling electricity throughout the body turning this on, that off, moving this muscle, contracting the other, moving my fingers for example in the dance learned long ago in Alexandria-Monroe High School typing class; all that blood moving, moving, moving pulsing, delivering oxygen, energy to muscles and organs, pulsing through the heart, that fleshy pump working night and day, year in and year out, an organ we take notice of most often when it begins to fail or flail; not to forget the only organ connected directly to the brain, the eye with the optical nerve taking information back to the occipital lobe where it converts to actual images of what the eye has impressed upon it.  Amazing.

Let me say thank you to whatever long and distant chain has led from the foamy oceans of mother earth’s origins up through the one-celled, the multicelluar, the strange moving ones who finally made land and who went on to be dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and lions and tigers and bears oh my and me, too.  Each of us sit as the particular and current end-point of one line of protoplasm that could,  if we were god-like enough, be traced to its unique origin in, say, a small amoeba-like creature floating at the time in a place that would someday be called Australia.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Having said that what do you think of Mark Dayton?  I confess, I voted for him, in spite of my doubts, because he seemed the best bet to beat Emmer, a strange duck to have representing anybody except say, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin if they constituted the whole of an odd sub-set of Minnesota voters.  We so need a Democratic governor and legislature over the next four years.  Without them budgets will get balanced on the backs of the poor, just witness the cock-up in GAMC that Warren Wolfe has covered so ably in the Star-Tribune.  Without them budgets will get balanced by trading short term gain for long term environmental degradation.  So, if you’re of the Democratic persuasion, give money, knock on doors, help them.  If you’re a Republican, take a really good long look at Emmer.  He’s a weird one and not right for this state.

Asia, Commentary on the news, Family, Politics, Sport

Congratulations, Mary Ellis

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Lughnasa                                            Waning Grandchildren Moon

A big shout out to sister Mary.  She got her degree!  Dr. Mary Ellis.marygetsdegree670 How about that hat.  She owns all that regalia now.  This was in Singapore last week.

Heard an interesting theory today on Favre’s ankle angst.  Allison’s husband thinks Favre has plans to come back after the first game of the season.  Why?  It’s against New Orleans.  New Orleans is the home team for the Mississippi fan boy.  Who knows?  I do know this.  Favre’s played football for many, many years.  At this point he knows his body very well and he knows/has known the impact of the ankle surgery.  In addition this is a guy who makes split second decisions on the field, about football.  He’s not indecisive.  My guess at this point is that his wife is leaning on him to quit.  He has enough money, a pick-up truck, a dog and a farm.  What more does a country boy need?

Spoke with a docent who taught political science at U of Wisconsin in Eau Claire.  Neither one of us have a clue what’s going on in this election, either at the state or federal levels.  These are peculiar times in American politics, unlike any I have seen.  Right wing nutjobs in ascendancy within the Republican party.  An African-American President.  A recession that will not die and unemployment that will fall away.  Environmental catastrophes and congress can’t even consider a bill on climate change.  Health care legislation at the Federal level challenged at the state level.  Arizona comes out as a state of anti-immigrant bigots.  A California judge overturns prop 8 in California prohibiting gay marriage, a decision that will almost certainly send this lightning rod issue all the way to the Robert’s Supreme Court.  I know I missed a few things.  Who ever said politics were dull?

Kate spent the day with her sister Anne going to quilt shops in the southwestern burbs.  She got home about 7:00 and went almost straight to bed.  Exhausting.

Tomorrow more gardening and maybe bees.  Probably bees.  We’re getting set to order extracting equipment.  That means I gotta keep these lil buggers alive and producing for years to come.  Artemis Hives.

Art and Culture, Humanities, Humor, Politics

Spotlight Turned Off

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Summer                                                    Waning Grandchildren Moon

Thank god, I’m done with the spotlight.  Please never again.  Interrupting people on their journey through the museum, a private journey done under their guidance, is intrusive, invasive.

I had two folks on the Anishinabe to Zapotec Tour, Carl and Carol.  When I said, I’ll bet you’ve got jokes on that over the years, Carl said, nope. We haven’t been together that long.  We wandered in the galleries looking at the kachina, the house screen, the Bella Coola frontlet, the transformation mask, the Nayarit house and the Valdivian owl.  I told them the story of turtle, loon, beaver and muskrat, the pointed out the turtle sign on the Lakota fancy dress.  It was a good tour, engaged and interested.

Spoke with Margaret afterward.  She got me up to date on Sierra Club work and sent me a quick note with a timeline for the legcom process.  I’m also to call CURA and Macalester seeking interns.

Finally got over to Big Brain comics and picked three issues of the Good Minnesotan, a comic done by an MIA guard and her husband. The guy behind the counter shaved his beard and looks like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.  A lot like a slightly pudgy groucho marx.

Cinema and Television, Family, Politics

Leafy Streets, Expensive Cars

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Summer                                      Waning Grandchildren Moon

Kate and I drove 20+ miles to the Edina part of Hopkins, directly across from Blake school’s driveway.  This is the home of former State Senator Steve Kelley, also a former candidate for governor.  This was a Sierra Club fund-raiser.  We listened to speeches, talked to friends, ducked out and then drove past her old home on Highwood Drive in Edina.  This part of Edina has lots of mature trees, leafy and atmospheric, homes with long driveways and expensive cars, landscaping that looks natural, yet manicured.  Her old home had received a new story, slightly curving windows and wooden garage doors.  It was strange to think of her living there, it seems so far from our life here in Andover.

We enjoyed being out together on a fine summer evening.  Cirrus clouds curled and twisted into mare’s tails as the sun set over South Dakota.  We crossed the Mississippi on highway 610 and we were back in the northern ‘burbs.

When I asked Kate why you would send a kid to Blake instead of Breck, she said, “Legacy, maybe.”  I thought, demographics and met geography.  She added, “Some people get their undies in a bunch if you send your kid to the wrong private school.”  It’s hard to be upper class.  So many rules.

Since I have Netflix and it doesn’t cost more to get anything, I watched the first Twilight movie.  The guy looks like a schlub to me, shows you what I know it comes to pretty boys.  The girl, Kristen Stewart, has charm, but is unconventional in her attractiveness.  The plot line weaves teen angst into a bit of supernatural and the favorite theme about vampires since Anne Rice:  the misunderstood, empathic vampire.  True Blood, the Vampire Diaries, Twilight and even the Gates have the vampire who wants to fit in and be friends with their food.  I’m sure ‘ol Vlad is spinning on his home turf inside the coffin.

The movie as a whole is weak, but since my standards for supernatural fare have a lot of flex, I watched it to the end.  Not worth it.

Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

And I Just Sat Down And Wrote This

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Summer                                    Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Night again.  Serenity.  That place to fall into where the universe catches you, holds you in its arms, then you remember that the universe is your body and those arms are your arms and so you sleep.

There are bad things out there:  Democrats pulled back the climate bill.  Geez, guys and gals.  The oil well may be capped but the oil gushed into the gulf cannot be played backwards into the hole.  Only in the movies.  Bernanke said we may face years of a restricted labor market.  And the Republicans want to deny unemployment benefits.  One of the greatest ironies in modern political history may be the news about Cheney’s health.  He could need a heart transplant.  More like an implant.

There are good things out there:  Financial regulation passed.  It’s weaker than it should have been, but it is.  I finished the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  The garlic is ready to bring in and Artemis Hives has produced its first honey.  Blooms fell off the potatoes so we should get some new potatoes in two weeks.  The World Cup is over.  Football training camps begin soon.

We live in a world which we did not make, a life we did nothing to gain and move toward an end we do not comprehend.   To make your way here a clear eye, a straight heart line, a curious mind and a poetic soul will help.