Category Archives: Politics

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Politics

Moving From the Theoretical to the Concrete

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Lughnasa                                            Waxing Back to School Moon

Kate has had a nasty cold since Monday and I can feel it trying to claw its way up my esophagus, making my throat scratchy.  My hope is that the recent two time bout I had with some bug in July, then August has revved up my immune system.  With rest I can pound this sucker down before it takes hold.

Starting back on Latin today.  I took part of July, all of August and the last couple of weeks off with the bees and the vegetables and the orchard.  Thought I’d get work done on Ovid, review, but in fact I got very little done.  An old student habit of mine, if it’s not pressing, it’s not getting done.  I’m looking forward to the weekly sessions, building toward enough confidence to tackle Ovid and others on my own.  It’s a project, like the bees, that keeps the gears turning, not giving them a chance to rest.  Best that way.

A few years back it was the MIA docent training.  Then the move into permaculture and vegetables and fruit.  That one’s still underway as I learn the complicated dance of seasons, cultivars, pests, harvest and storage.  The MIA training, for that matter, only gives you enough legs to get into the books and files yourself, training you to look and think about art, but each tour demands specific self-education on the objects and the purpose of that tour.

(Minoan Gold Bee pendant from Crete, circa 2000 BC)

Part of my impatience with the seminary experience is that I’ve moved so deeply into more concrete endeavors.  Art has the object as an anchor, then its history and context.  Latin has words, grammar and literature as well as Roman history.  Vegetables and fruit have real plants, particular plants with needs and products.  The bees have the bees themselves, the colonies, woodenware, hive management, pest control, honey extraction.  This is, probably, the world I was meant to inhabit, but philosophy and the church lead onto another ancientrail, that of the abstract and faraway rather than the particular and the near.  It’s not that I don’t have an affection, even a passion for the theoretical, I do, but I find my life more calm, less stressful when I work with art, with potatoes and garlic, with conjugations and declensions.

I now have almost three decades of life devoted to the theoretical, the abstract and the political so I bring those skills and that learning to my present engagement with the mundane, but I no longer want to live in those worlds.  They are gardens others can tend better than I can.

Bees, Cooking, Great Work, Politics

Busy, Busy

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Lughnasa                                  Waxing Back to School Moon

Whew.  The new queen came today in a perforated UPS box, complete with a court of five worker bees.  After spraying them with sugar water, I took them out to the honey queen-bee-mdhouse where I pushed in the cork at the end of her wooden home, inserted a marshmallow (tiny) into it firmly, then opened the divide, took off the honey filled top hive box and inserted the queen in the middle of the second box.  This is called a slow release.  The queen and her workers eat away the marshmallow from one side, workers in the hive from the other.  Over the time this process takes, so the theory goes, the new queen becomes less threatening to the workers, who then allow her to come out and become their new monarch.  If it doesn’t work, they kill her.  I won’t check for another week.

With the queen in her new castle (hopefully), the grocery store was next on my list since Kate has a cold and she likes my chicken noodle soup when she’s sick.  While I made the chicken noodle soup, I also cooked lunch.  After we ate lunch, Kate went back to rest and I went outside and picked yet another several cups of raspberries.  Our bushes have been prolific this year.  The chicken noodle soup had our carrots, onion and garlic.

When the raspberries were inside, I worked downstairs answering e-mails while I waited for the soup to finish cooking so I could add the egg noodles and the peas.  At the end of that.  Nap.

After the nap I had to sort out a vote on legislative priorities for the Sierra Club and respond to a few more e-mails.  This took me up to the time to leave for the Minnesota Hobby Bee Keepers Meeting at the University of Minnesota.  The man who runs nature’s nectary, Jim, was there with a refractometer to measure moisture levels in honey.  Our capped honey was 16.9%, a little thick and the uncapped honey was 18.3%.  Since honey is anything below 18.6%, both of our batches were fine.

Home again where Kate and I ate some soup, watched a little TV, put the dogs to bed and then headed there ourselves.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Writing

A Waning Taste For Politics

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Lughnasa                                      Waning Artemis Moon

Bob Feemster owned the Alexandria Times-Tribune which my father served as editor for many years.  In 1951 Bob bought us a black and white TV because the believed newspaperman should be aware of this new media.  My earliest memory of television and politics comes from watching that little TV in the 1952 race between Stevenson and Eisenhower.  A Democratic household, we were pulling for the Unitarian Stevenson against the former General of the Armies, Eisenhower.

This  was long before news organization using exit polling and computer modeling to declare victors.  The actual number of votes was what mattered and they showed up at different points in time.  The far west results didn’t begin to come in until midnight or so.  Dad let me stay up and watch the election returns with him.  Of course, it was partly staying up late at night that intrigued me, but I had also caught my father’s passion for the process.  What would happen?

You know the result.  Far from turning me away from politics, that long ago late night served as a foundation for a life of modest political activism.  You know, student politics in high school, student politics in college, radicalization during the Vietnam war era and engagement since then in various levels and kind of activism from Indiana Presidential politics and Minneapolis City politics to Minnesota state politics, neighborhood politics in Minneapolis as well as community based economic development and a raft of other state and local efforts.

In some ways politics has been the defining theme of my life.  I’ve been at it, more or less, since that night in 1952.  Rarely I have gone for more than a year without some concrete form of political engagement.  When I encounter problems in our broader community, my first thought is of a political response, how to organize it, where to start.

But.  I’m losing my taste for it.  Why?

These days I work on political issues related to environmental concerns.  I have a responsible position in a large Minnesota organization with a track record for achieving change at both the state and national levels.  My role is directly political in that I serve as a sort of manager for the organizations legislative work.  My passion for a peaceful, verdant, and just world (as some foundation says) is not less than it has been.  So, what’s the problem?

It may be broadly an analytical problem.  That is, my political work has a good deal of calculation attached to it. Analysis of political realities and the nature of changes we want often conflict.  The political path is the one on which something can be made to happen.  This puts the work largely in my head, when my motivation comes largely from my heart.  Over the years, now the many years, of political work, I have learned dispassionate detachment perhaps too well.

The work no longer serves as a vehicle for my passion.  Where has that passion gone?  Into art and writing.  When I have downtime, art comes to mind.  The world of art has drawn me, given me space for my passion and an arena in which to share that passion.  Writing has done the same.  I even have a passion for the Latin work I’m about to start up again.  But, no longer for politics.

This is a difficult place for me to be.  It feels as if I’m denying a part of myself or about to become irresponsible.  However, here’s what I’ve concluded.

When I pressed my way into the Sierra Club’s work a few years ago, I did it through the political committee, which seemed the natural fit for me.  Long experience in non-profit organizations and in political contexts have given me skills that helped me move up in the organization’s leadership.  Yet it feels increasingly like a burden.  I wonder now whether this work with the Sierra Club isn’t a regression like my return to the UU ministry.

Regressions, my analyst told me, occur because there is something you need to retrieve or repair.  In this case it might have been my agency.  Agency is the capacity to have an impact and I wondered, when I reengaged with the Sierra Club, if I still had it.  Yes.  The answer is yes.  A more important question now, however, is this:  Do I need to assert my agency at this point in my life?  No.  I don’t.

Politics, US History

Well, You Gotta Think About It.

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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.”

 

 

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.