Category Archives: Politics

Politics

Conceptual Theatre

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Beltane                  Waxing Dyan Moon

“The inner fire is the most important thing mankind possesses.” – Edith Sodergran

Waiting for Al

Act VI

Curtain rises on Al and Norm, their heads peak out from two ballot counting machines.  Al is stage left; Norm is stage right.  Debate on the floor of the US Senate floods the audience.  First Norm, then Al, turn their heads as if trying to listen.

The stage has no props other than the two voting machines and a small bench.

As a debate over the appointment of Supreme Court nominee  Sotomayor turns harsh, three persons dressed only in black robes come out, stand in front of the bench, then sit down.

Al and Norm cannot see the bench.

Al spreads his face in a patented Saturday Night Show smile, wide and goofy, then turns serious as a voice in the senate debate suggests Sotomayor is a racist.

Norm starts to smile, changes his mind, a look of concentration.

A voice from the Senate debate:  “We cannot allow racial or gender politics to have a place in the decision to place a candidate on the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court is for all the people, not just special interest groups.”

Another voice, this time a woman’s:  “… pregnancy and a woman’s right to choose what happens to her body.”

Nods from the three in black.

Norm and Al furl their brows, show evident interest.

An Al Franken campaign appears on a rear projection screen behind the justices.  No sound.

Al breaks into another wide smile as the ad plays though he cannot see it.

A Coleman ad.  Norm smiles.

The three persons in black robes rise off the bench and say together:  “Things are Normal.”

Al and Norm’s heads disappear inside the ballot boxes.

Politics, Travel

Last Stop of the Capitol Limited

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May 16, 2009 Beltane Waning Flower Moon

The Capitol Limited Somewhere outside Cumberland, Maryland

9:30 a.m. EST

Slept last night very well. Early to bed around 10p.m. Tired from early rising and a full day of travel. The train rocked me to sleep as lightning flashed across the northern sky. I went to bed in Elkhart, Indiana and woke up in Pittsburgh.

In a tunnel right now. I’m not sure if this is the one but somewhere along here the ends of the tunnel are in W. Va. and the tunnel itself in Maryland. I have no idea.

Took a shower on the train. It was an ordinary enough shower except it moved like an LA bathroom in a mild tremor. There’s a small area with a seat, two hooks for clothing and a mirror, then a shower stall with non-skid plastic. I took my sandals with me, but habit took over and I was in the shower in my bare feet before I remembered them.

I ate breakfast this morning with a couple from Idaho who have a small hotel near Jhallus, Idaho, the Holiday Lodge. They were nice folks. May go visit since I’ve never been to Idaho.

I’m writing this in my roomette as we travel slowly through the Appalachian range. \I believe we passed through the Cumberland Gap about 15 minutes ago. A lot of history on this route. After a stop in Cumberland, Maryland we head for Harper’s Ferry. Two stops after that and we’re in D.C.

The layover in Washington will be 4+ hours. I plan to have a walk around with the camera, then back to Union Station. No museum on the way down. On the way back I’ll have 6 hours and I’ll hit the Freer and the Phillips.

5:30 p.m.   First Class Lounge, Union Station, Washington,DC

We got in a little late, but no worries since my train, #97, the Silver Meteor, does not leave until 7:30 p.m.  I’m not sure, but since this is a southbound train starting in Boston, it might be an agist pun.  If not, it oughta be.

Louisiana Avenue runs at a diagonal away from Union Station toward the National Mall.  I walked in the heat, keeping to the shade of trees and buildings, taking the occasional shot of the Capitol building and angling toward the National Gallery of Art.  Along the way I began noticing what is very old news to inside the beltway folks, but struck me with force.  Every Federal building has barriers to car and truck bombers.  I took some photos and when I get home I’ll add them back into this post.

They struck me because their defensiveness could not be more apparent.  They seem look like Lilliputian threads tieing down the outsized force of Uncle Sam.

On the way into Washington we stopped at Harper’s Ferry; John Brown’s body is still a’moltin’ in the grave. (what is molting anyway?)  I got to thinking about approaching D.C.  It would be the same as approaching, in different eras:  London, Rome, Istanbul, Baghdad, Xian, Beijing, Mexico City in the time of the Aztecs. No matter how the US goes down in the annals of future centuries it will still be a colossus that strode, for awhile, as the world’s hegemon.  Its capitol, where I write this, may provide future history channel specials:  Washington in the Time of the  Presidents!

Those of us who live in the Midwest come to the Capitol as country folks, far away from the deal making and policy wonking that creates buzz here in D.C.  We might have a few clods of earth stuck to our shoes, perhaps a straw struck in our mouths.  At least I hope we do, not because we lack intellectual or cultural sophistication, but because agriculture and care of the land is our heritage and if we do not come to power as our true selves who can replace us?

I’m gonna stow my bags again and wander around in the Station for a bit.  Talk to you later.

Our Land and Home, Politics

Life Beyond the MUSA Line (and a bit of left wing political thought)

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Beltane                       Waning Flower Moon

We live beyond the MUSA line.  Not very far beyond, it cuts Andover almost in half.  The Metropolitan Urban Services Area line establishes the land which must have city water and sewer. It snakes around the outline of the seven county metropolitan area, attempting to adjust the size and density of suburban development.  Planning officials created the MUSA line in the long ago as a tool to prevent urban sprawl.  It hasn’t worked.

The house we purchased 15 years ago sits on a 2.5 acre lot and has its own sewer (septic) and water, a well.  This has happened all around the seven county metro area.  Larger size residential lots leapfrogged the MUSA line and went in with their own utilities.

From the standpoint of personal independence I prefer our situation.

At any rate this all means we have to manage our own septic system and our own well and water deliver system.  Today we had the septic system pumped out–every 2 years.  The guy who did it took off the manhole cover and checked the baffles. Who knew we had baffles?

Anyhow this 15 year old system was made of concrete and the baffles had cracked and one had fallen off, so we had to replace them.  In order to do this the guys from Kothrade Sewer, Water and Excavation had to get down inside the tank.  Turns out this can kill you.  The fumes.  As I thought about it, I thought, gee, that makes sense.

How would you like to make your living crawling around somebody’s septic system?  Me neither.  It cost $175 for protective gear to work in  a confined space, an OSHA requirement.  This is real danger, two guys in Minnesota in the last year after crawling down a thirty-foot deep manhole into a new system.  Curing concrete sucks up 02.  The first guy in passed out and died.  His buddy went down to see what was wrong.  He died, too.

There aren’t many things worth dying for and our septic system is sure not one of them.

Family, Health, Politics

Baby Plants, Nuclear Energy, and Influenza A(H1N1)

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Spring                  Waxing Flower Moon

All my baby plants have moved from the nursery into big plant pots.  Now we have to wait until May 15, the average last frost date here, and all these babies can go outside into the garden.

The Minnesota House refused to repeal the moratorium on the construction of new nuclear plants citing waste storage and transportation as primary issues.

Kate’s off to the frontlines of the Swine flu (or, as it will be called from now on:   influenza A(H1N1) pandemic.  This has put some new energy into her practice as she approaches retirement, a real crisis which requires her medical skills.

If the pandemic moves to level 6, there will be a division between sick clinics and well clinics.  Doctors in the sick clinics will have to wear hazmat like protective gear when treating patients who have risk factors for the disease.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Politics

Why We Need Universal Health Care

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Spring            New Moon (Flower)

A word for the ones in silent despair, hiding behind doors and well-kept lawns, all those in trouble.

A while back I mentioned a neighbor whose life turned upside down over a week-end.  He went from  a productive, active guy to a suicidal victim of a progressive form of multiple sclerosis.  After his diagnosis and subsequent treatment brought little relief he tried to end his life, bringing paramedics and the blue and white Allina ambulance to his door.  He did this  while his wife talked with us about our new orchard.

Now, six months or so later, their bank account is empty.  They are putting necessities on credit cards and the “disabilty insurance” they have is not insurance, but a loan, a loan they have to repay.  Their lawn is neat, the flower beds tended and ready for plants.  The small evergreens they planted when they moved in some years back have grown into mid-size trees.  The American flag flutters from their flag-pole, lit with lights.

He built an observatory a few years back, I may have mentioned this.  It now sits there, a white dome with a go-to Celestron telescope, abandoned by its maker.  His MS is advanced stage 2, of which, when I asked Kate about it, she said, “It’s not good.”

Vulnerable people have had their vulnerability magnified by the economic crisis.  That’s what this has driven home to me.  Imagine being in a situation where a medical condition threatens not only your retirement, but your house, your family.  Now imagine all that in a situation where the economic eats up what little cash you already have.

Their situation is an argument, the argument, for universal health care and a safety net for persons with debilitating illness, a safety adequate to maintain gains they have made over ther course of a working career.  I’m not talking here about pleasure boats, expensive vacations and country club memberships; I’m talking about a house, food, health care and family security.

This cries out for justice.

Great Work, Politics

Humans or Nature?

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Spring                    Waning Seed Moon

Yesterday I cleared the corn stalks out of their old bed and loosened the soil where I will plant peas, good legumes that will replenish the nitrogen lost due to the corn.  Oh, and we’ll get peas for the table in the bargain.  I’ve always been impressed with legumes, a class of plants that gather nitrogen in little nodules on their roots.  They used rhizobia, a symbiotic bacteria that pull the nitrogen into the root nodules where they live.

In a recent article, likely by a conservative commentator, I read a grumbling about how the United States bifurcates into those who believe nature is salivific and those who see civilization in a similar vein.  Environmentalists and their (our) ilk clothe themselves in leafy greens when they attack the polluters:  fossil fuel consumers, pcb producers, sulphur mining, chemical based industries and nuclear waste generating power plants.

What they forget is the wonder of electricity, plastics, rapid transit, the movement of goods and services that has created the richest economy in the world.  Environmentalists also stand accused, in this perspective, of creating a false tension between bad humans and good nature.  Humans have a right to live, too, just like the damned spotted owl and snail darter, right?

When looking at arguments with apparently polar positions, I find it useful to search the middle ground, see if there might not be a place either camp has missed.  There is a large middle ground here.  Humans, as animals, are part of the natural order, not apart from it, and as animals our home building and self-sustaining activities are as important to us as are those of any species.  I love humanity, the civilizations we have created and want to see us healthy far into the future.

In this sense the dichotomy is false.  This argument becomes problematic, however, when we examine certain aspects of our self-sustaining activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, the pollution of fresh water with sulfuric acid in hard rock mining and the devastation of eco-systems with pollutants like pcbs and ddt.

Now we loop back to the middle ground.  We are part of, not apart from nature.  When we harm whole eco-systems on the one hand or tamper with climatological mechanics on the other, we not only press the snail darter, the spotted owl and the Galapagos tortoise toward extinction, we press ourselves in that direction, too.  If we create a natural order no longer friendly to human beings, our time on this blue marble will end.  If, in other words, we make the planet too hot, the oceans too high, the fresh water and soils poison, we will no longer have a place to live, literally.

So, on the one hand, I embrace Mozart, Lao-Tze, Shiva, Isaac Newton and the techno-computer industial complex, while on the other hand I recognize my need for clean water, renewable energy and food grown in safe conditions.  Humanity and nature are not either/or choices, but embedded and intimate partners, dependent upon each other for wise use of the resources we have.

Asia, Politics

The Chinese People Need To Be Controlled

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Spring             Waning Seed Moon

Back from Wishes for the Sky where I helped visitors read scrolls written in a callipgraphic English that looks, at first glance, like Chinese.  There were some ahas, some head scratching.  One guy, when told that organizers said Chinese had the most trouble with reading the scripts laughed and said, “I must be part Chinese.”

The Mississippi river was high, but the Harriet Park Pavilion, in which the inside part of the event took place, had several disconcerting marks on the wall, labled with high flood marks for various years, most of them well above my head.

I had a chance to have nice chat several folks Scott Simpson, a guy he knows who plays Native American flute and Ming Jen, one of the organizers of the event.  When asked about Jackie Chan’s statement reported in the press  yesterday, “The Chinese people need to be controlled,” Ming Jen surprised me by agreeing with him.

Her rationale surprised me and made me humble once again about my ability to sense things from within a particular cultural perspective other than my own.  She voiced a concern Jackie Chan had, too, saying that Chinese people were individualistic enough.  With as many people as their are in China and the economic unrest created by economic freedom she feared more freedom would create potentially chaotic situations.  Besides, she pointed out, during the Han and T’ang dynasties, the controlling government was feudal in nature and highly centralized, but poetry and the art flourished.

China’s culture has a patriarchal and dynastic tradition stretching back literally thousands of years.  Democracy does not necessarily fit well within that tradition and, she implied, is not necessary for the Chinese people to flourish.

Another aspect of this, I realized while we were talking, was the experience of Chinese culture between dynasties, usually following, as Ming Jen pointed out, weak emperors.  Those time periods were chaotic, violent and the people suffered.

Always pays to ask someone from within the culture for their point of view.

Politics

60’s Ritual Taken Up By Gun Rights Crowd

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Spring            Waning Seed Moon

OMG   The Tea Party at the Capitol.   Don’t know about you but watching so-called patriots straight arming their fists in the sky like the Black Panthers and the protesters at the Mexico Olympics created cognitive dissonance.  A speaker at the rally said, “Do we love our country or what?” then raised her fist high above her head.  The crowd roared.

Personally, I choose “…or what.” in this context.  If love of country demands pulling back from rescuing the economy, taking care of the needs of fellow citizens and killing foreigners, then we have become not a country but a caricature of a country.

We have had 8 years of this kind of chuckle headed, shut the brain off and leave me alone with my righteousness blather.  Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Pearl and other political refugees now await the judgment of history and it will not be kind.

The morphing of political symbols is not new, of course.  The V finger peace sign beloved of my generation had its origin in the V for victory of Winston Churchill in WWII.  This appropriation of the rally style, signboards and pumped fists in the air by the right is not so much blasphemy as it is culture at work absorbing, adapting.

Still, those of us marched and fought the Vietnam War and participated in the struggles for civil rights can be forgiven a twitch of the heart when seeing flag draped anti-socialists holding placards and chanting with their fingers closed in a fist above their head.  Just doesn’t seem, well, you know…right.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Writing

This Is The Question I Face Now. One I Have Not Answered.

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Spring            Waning Seed Moon

Agency.  There’s been a lot written in psychology and history about agency.  We have agency when we can affect the flow of events in our own lives or in the world around us. (No, I’m not going to get into the subtle no-free-will arguments floating around.)  A lot of the historical work has concerned how those without agency–say women, slaves, workers–get it or why they don’t have it.  In the case of the individual agency refers to our capacity to direct our own life.

A sense of agency underwrites our sense of self, or our sense of group identity.  Note that our agency or our group’s agency can be positive or negative.  A more negative sense of agency, that is, sensing that others or factors outside your control influence your life or your group, leads to a feeling of diminished capacity or is a feeling of diminished capacity.  A positive sense of agency promotes a feeling of active and successful engagement with the world, the ability to act in ways congruent with your self-interest or your group’s self-interest.

Here’s where I’m going with this.  In my regression back into the ministry after 8 or so years out I made the move because my writing career had not produced the hoped for results.  I had lost a sense of agency in the work area of my life and moved backwards on my psychological journey to retrieve it.  Going backwards to pick up something left behind is a key element of regression.  Its flaw lies in a return to a previous reality no longer relevant.  The ministy was what I had done, a minister what I had been.  The experience of return to the ministry produced missteps and a low level of energy for the actual work.

Now, about ten  years later,  once again I have reached back into my past, this time even further, to retrieve a sense of agency, the ur-agency, for me, the political.  This is the work with the Sierra Club. (hmmm.  just realized I did the same thing two years back when I studied Paul Tillich.  That was a return to life as a student, a potent form of agency for me.)

What the work with the Sierra Club, the study of Tillich and the ministry have in common is an attempt to regain a positive sense of self through a form of agency already well-established and presumably easily recaptured.  None of these activities in themselves is a bad thing, but that is the lure, the  seductive call of regression.

Back there, if only I could go back in time, and become the captain of the football team again.  Prom queen.  College radio jockey.  The actor I became after college.  My successful years as a bond trader or nurse or carpenter.  Back there I was strong, able.  I had a way with the world, a position of respect and self-confidence. Continue reading This Is The Question I Face Now. One I Have Not Answered. →

Great Work, Politics, Weather +Climate

High Temps and Legislative Sausage

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Spring               Waning Seed Moon

The weather has a run of above average high temperatures, 9-10 degrees warmer through Friday.   Saturday, according to NOAA the temperatures will fall back to average at a 58 predicted high.

Those of us who garden also watch the lows closely at this time of year and we will be well above freezing for the remainder of the week.  There is a chance for below freezing temperatures on Sunday night (30).

We have no rain in the forecast until Saturday and Sunday, then only a chance of showers.  We need moisture, according to the Star-Tribune this morning this was our 10th dry day in a row.  Those of us with irrigation systems have not started them.

Thanks to the wonders of cyberspace I’m writing this and listening to the House Finance Committee hearing that will take up the omnibus environment bill.  I just listened to the House Ways and Means Committee pass the House version of the omnibus energy bill.  Right now the parents of the missing St. Thomas student speak before the Finance Committee because of a quick bill put together by compassionate conservative Marty Siefert.