Category Archives: Politics

Art and Culture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

What Does It Mean To Be An American?

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85  bar falls 29.75 0mph E  dew-point 66  sunrise 5:53  sunset 8:44  Summer

Waning Crescent of the Thunder Moon

The hangover from the docent program continues.  We have to do an Africa check-out tour with two partners.  We each prepare three objects, then share the information and come ready to present any of the objects.  This is a sort of multiple choice test, I guess.  All of us have favorite areas in the museum and less liked areas.  I love the Asian collection.

The African collection does not excite me.   I’m not sure why.  Africa as a continent and African history, especially pre-colonial Africa have fascinated me since college when I took several courses related to these areas as well as African anthropology.  Contemporary African politics also hold my attention.  The art does not.  There are pieces that are, for me, exceptions.  The Ife Shrine Head.  Kente cloth.  The Magadelene Odundo reduced black ceramics.  The gold weights.  The female sculptures.  The rest does not draw me in.  This is me, I know, for many find these objects stunning, even path breaking when it comes to representation.

Still, I have to do this check-out tour and I will.

The drive in was unremarkable, though notable for its reduced heat from the Texas weekend.  On the drive back I encountered several drivers in a row who had not yet graduated from the real world driving class we all take each day.  Left me with a short fuse.  Again.  On me.

Switched for a third time the Woolly meeting idea.  First was permaculture.  Second was your media stream.  The third, and final one is this:  What does it mean to be an American?  When did  your feel your most patriotic?  Least? Who is your favorite American author?  Painter?  Poet?  Poem?  Book?  Painting?  Does America have a manifest destiny?  How do we or should we fit into the global reality?

Great Work, Memories, Politics, Writing

The History of Ideas

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75  bar falls 29.90  0mph ESE dew-point 60 sunrise 5:49  sunset 8:49  Summer

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

The mayfly lives only one day.  And sometimes it rains.    George Carlin, RIP

Freud, Marx and Hegel expelled from school.  The article to which the first sentence here links refers to the strange disappearance from the college curriculum of these three seminal thinkers in psychology, economy and philosophy.

Here’s an e-mail I sent to its author:

Hello, Mr. Jacoby,

In 1965 I began the study of philosophy with the pre-Socratics, moved onto Plato and Aristotle, and then on toward the present.  The early study of philosophy excited me so much I chose it as my major.  The methodology, the history of ideas, has remained with me as the most important intellectual tool I have.  When I switched schools, I entered a school dominated by logical positivists.  The most important and interesting questions of philosophy, questions which mattered to individuals and to public discourse did not matter to this department.  I left philosophy behind, sad that it refused to engage matters of ontology, values and beauty. 

I write to you because I felt then what the gist of your Chronicle of Higher Education article suggests is a contemporary problem.  It is a problem with its roots, I believe, in the logical positivist and linguistic analysis movements which tried to align philosophy with the scientific method.  There would have been nothing wrong with this as an adjunct discipline, but the arrogant dismissal of metaphysics, for example, for reliance on what I would call a shallow epistemology gutted philosophy of its humanist core.

This same attempt to bring economics and psychology into the scientific realm, and sociology too for that matter, has identical problems.  The quantifiable in these disciplines is fine and produces important insights, but, again, the core of these disciplines, with the possible exception of economics, is humanistic, not scientific. 

Your article reminded me of those long ago days when I moved on to anthropology.  The dismissal of historical perspective leaves us with the need to reinvent all those old arguments and to approach their resolution without the aid of some of humankinds most creative thinkers.  Too bad.

As I grow older, history looms ever higher and higher in my intellectual pursuits.   As I said in the e-mail to Mr. Jacoby, the history of ideas, learned during classwork for my philosophy major, has informed everything  I do.  I gravitate naturally at this stage of my life toward the historical record.  Where did that word originate?  How has it been modified over time?  Where did this artistic movement come from and what questions did it try to answer?  What are the roots of the so-called New Age thinking?  Why are not its current proponents interested in its intellectual history?  What is the source of liberal and conservative political thought and how does their history help us modify them to fit present needs?  Why is the issue of climate change such a problematic one?  What in the history of humanities relationship to the natural order created such a situation?

These are the questions that get me up in the morning, that drive my decision making about what to do with my time and how to direct my own work.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Six Degrees Can Change the World

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66  bar rises 30.07  2mph NNE dew-point 56 Sunset 7:22  Summer night, cool and clear

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

National Geographic Channel had a program called Six Degrees Can Change the World.  Geez was it depressing.  A lot of the early stuff was material I’d heard before, but as it went on from 1 degree to 2 degrees, then to 3 degrees with the Amazonian rain forest becoming a scrub land and the Greenland ice sheet melting down and other very nasty stuff, I began to feel powerless, a victim before the inevitablity of increasing energy consumption which will drive the very worst scenarios into being.

Those of you who know me well know I don’t like victim status.  A passive victim does not act, but allows reality to act on them.  Not my way.  So, once I got over the feeling of powerlessness, I reminded myself that I have made several distinct decisions related to effecting change.   The Sierra Club work.  The optimal suburb/exurb home.  Keeping the red car intact.  Our plan to purchase a hybrid or all electric when Kate retires.  Growing vegetables.  Turning off the computer at night.  Working over the next few years to find even more ways major and minor that we can reduce our carbon footprint and encourage alternative energy.  I am not a victim, nor do I want to be a rich world antagonist of mother earth’s.   The struggle of our time.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Literature, Politics, Writing

Steamed Dumplings Stuffed With Yak

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78  bar steady  30.03  0mph ENE dew-point 56  Summer, warm and sunny

Waning Gibbous Thunder Moon

A trifecta.  In to Minnehaha.  Back to Andover.  In to Kenwood.  Back to Andover.  In to Sierra Club and the MIA.  Back to Andover.  Geez.  As I said, I gotta check with my scheduler.

Katarina is an intern from east Germany, Jena.  We folded letters and surveys to candidates for Minnesota House races.  She’s a bright young lady whose lucky boyfriend lives here.  They both study political science and enjoy comparing US and German culture/society.  She gave the example of her parents:  “They have never worried.  They have no debt.  They live modestly.”  She said her mother was not allowed to finish high school in the old East German regime because her husband was a mathematics professor.  If you had an intellengentsia in the home, you also had to have a proletarian.  Odd logic, even for Marxists.

After doing the mailing, I called about half a list of candidates who received the survey by e-mail last Friday.  This was just a reminder call.  Margaret Levin cajoled me into making phone calls and I’m glad she did.  It wasn’t so bad.  Of course, these were all friendly folk, too.

Across the street from the Sierra Club is the Himalaya, a Nepalese restaurant.  It was noon, so I stopped in for steamed dumplings stuffed with yak and a tasty sauce.  The next course was a soup with potatoes, black-eyed peas and bamboo shoots.  Nan accompanied this dish.  Hmmm.  I enjoy finding these small ethnic places and sampling cuisine from countries I have not visited.  Food is one of the fastest ways into a culture, even faster, because more immediate, than language.

I discussed purchasing a Nepalese thangka with the owner.  When I said I would like a Yamatanka, he said, “Oh, you like Yama?” He stuck his tongue out and down, Yama’s typical presentation. “Yes,” I said.  “Scary.”  I’ll speak with him about it again when I go in to the Sierra Club political committee meeting next Wednesday.

Before I went to the Sierra Club, I stopped at the Northern Clay Center and picked up a small plate.  It is my intention, over the next few years, to replace our Portmerion with unmatched pieces from many potters.  This is the fifth or sixth acquistion so far.

Each quarter I define a retreat.  It can be brief, three days or so, and it can be long, like the stay in Hawai’i.  I find I need to punctuate my normal routine with these caesuras or I get stale.  This habit began when I was in the ministry and I’ve found it a good carry over, so I’ve continued it.  Here’s my retreat for the fall quarter:

7/22/08   No traveling for this retreat.  I will take two weeks and stop writing, stop using the internet (except for the blog and e-mail) and study books on novel craft.  In this retreat I will create a reading program and a writing program that will guide my work for the next ten years.

Art and Culture, Memories, Politics, Writing

Psyche’s Politics

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70  bar steady  29.87  0mph NE  dew-point 62   Summer, cloudy

Full Thunder Moon

In Kavalier and Clay, the book by Michael Chabon I referenced a few days ago, the author often talked about art and artists.  At one point he referred to the “…necessary self-betrayal of the artist.”  This was one of those phrases that slipped right under my mental fingernail and caused some pain.  I knew what he meant.

Writing is of no value if the writer plays it safe, stays inside the lines, never transgresses boundaries.  Coloring in what other people have defined as the picture on the page adds nothing to the human experience.  When our frailties or our biases or our inner logic are on display the skin limits of self get pushed aside and others can get a peek.

I read an interesting definition of art as a person turned inside out.

A flurry of domestic activity yesterday.  Though all of the budget watching, bank going, grocery shopping activities undergird our daily lives, still, they leave me feeling as if little got done.  I’m suspicious of this as male acculturation, that is, the chores do not count as masculine work, but even this suspicion does not cross out the emotional response.  This quote from a few days ago sums it up:

“Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” – Edward R. Murrow

The recovering alcoholic never leaves my side.  The recovering racist struggles on a regular basis with instant opinions formed on the basis of skin color or accent.  The let down after a day of domestic work reveals the sexist role divisions imprinted deep in my own psyche.  Kate also points out that I always drive.  Too true.

Recovering may sound like a dodge or an excuse, but it is not.  The often derided politically correct comes from those of us willing to engage in the inner struggle with the cultural assumptions we have inherited.  What recovering admits is that acculturation is forever, just like addiction.  There will, in other words, always be parts of me that diminish cooking, cleaning, balancing the checkbook as unworthy of my time.  This in spite of the many times and the many ways in which I have learned this is not true.  There will always be parts of me that attach secondary characteristics to skin color or age or sex.  There will always be parts of me that trade on the unearned advantage I get from being white, male and American.

My responsibility as a conscious adult lies in owning up to who and what I am, then choosing a different response.  I may not be responsible for the sexist acculturation I received growing up, but I am responsible for the choices I make when it raises its head.

This willingness to throw one’s self into struggle, not for a day or a week, but a lifetime infects the people effected by the creative turmoil of the 60’s and 70’s.   Certainly others of other times, too, but the immersion in those days when the old ways were no longer viable, but the new ways had not yet arrived created a mass of people who came to question their basic assumptions about reality; question assumptions about realities so intimate as the nature of love, the immediate reaction to another, so often unquestioned.  This struggle brought politics to the bedroom as well as the boardroom, to the kitchen counter as well as the lunch counter, to the front room as well as the class room.

There is bravery here, foolishness, too; but, it is the foolishness of the wise fool, willing to risk self for the sake of the other.

Politics, Weather +Climate

Stop in the Aisle, Say a Prayer

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75  bar falls 29.78  2mph  SSE dew-point 52  Summer, warm and sunny

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

These are the dog days, so called because the Romans believed that the bright Sirius, now in night sky, added its heat to the sun, magnifying Sol’s effect. (affect=verb, effect=noun most of the time.  I have trouble with this one.)

While in the dog days, thunder storms are welcome.  They drain the heat up into the atmosphere where it cools into clouds; rain drops form and, if they get heavy enough, fall to earth.  The whole process results in cooler near earth weather.  Like today.  Yesterday in the 90’s with a dewpoint in the high 70’s; today 75 with a dew-point in the 50’s.

During the dog days my gardening energy declines and I work on inside projects like the Twin Cities/Minnesota UU history I’m crafting right now.

It is so easy, to walk the aisle in an American grocery store.  So easy to take the abundance and its affordability for granted.  Those of us raised in the US since WWII have not known want, at least those of us in the working class and up economically.  Mercados take the place of grocery stores in much of the world.  We visit farmer’s markets for the quaint experience of buying food from those who grow or raise it.  Most of the world knows only that or their own garden, their small chicken coop.  A few still hunt and gather, yes, but most of the world has entered some form of economy based either on barter or cash.

Millions have no food to buy, no clean water to drink, no sanitation to stop disease, no medical services.  We have healthy water, food to put in a grocery cart, plumbing and doctors.  No, everyone does not have access to all of these, but at least here it is because the culture is too indolent or too callous; in other places the services themselves are simply not available.

It’s worth it, now and then, to pause in the aisle of your favorite grocery and say a prayer of thanks to mother earth and to the dumb luck that put you here.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Writing

One Thunder Storm of a Word

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88  bar steep fall 29.48  3mph SE dew-point 73   Summer, hot and sticky

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Passion.  A violent word.  One thunder storm of a word.  An Angel Falls and Victoria Falls of a word.  A 500 mile race, first-lap pile up in the first curve word.  

from the Latin, patior: to bear, support, undergo, suffer, endure

Latin words bad, anglo-saxon words good.  To bear.  To burn.  To bind.

Buddha cautions us against passion.  Desire.  It binds us to our weird.  Throws straps around our hands and feet, lashes us to the pillar of the material world.  To move toward nirvana, extinction, we must move away from passion.  Eliminate desire.  Exist in the moment.  The self, the passionate self confined to a moment, gone in an instance.

The world for now exists in me in two:  the passionate one who would bear burdens, burn with the fire of action, bound to this world for I love this world.

The calm one who watches.  Observes.  Lets things pass by.  Become old or yesterday.  Who lives right now.  Here typing, interactive with the screen and the keyboard.

These two have me locked in an inner dance, twisting up then down.  Around a helix shaped stairway down into the my soul and up into the Self.  Opening a gothic iron gate into heaven.  Wielding a hammer to crack apart the bonds of oppression and injustice.  A whirling, sitting dervish in my own body.

Great Work, Politics

Windows Down and Moon Roof Open

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66  bar steady 29.87  0mph NW dew-point 52   Summer night

First Quarter of the Thunder Moon

First meeting of the Sierra Club political committee is under my belt.  I am delighted to say that there were several things we did that I cannot talk about yet.  It was fun, sitting around the table again, considering political strategy, making decisions.  There was a volunteer opportunity, but, unlike many times in the past, I did not step up.  The Sierra Club has a well conceived and well run political operation; it will require some time to understand.

Margaret Levin is an excellent staffer.  Her presence reminded me of my work with the Presbytery, helping things happen, supporting when necessary, providing guidance, prodding at times.  Josh Davis, the chair, is very knowledgeable about state level politics.  He came tonight with a map of the state house districts color coded by safe seats, 5% margin and 2% margin races.  In addition there were districts Sierra Club allies have targeted in blue.

There were two past chairs of the political committee on the committee which is great.  Continuity and experience.  This will be an educational process and I look forward to it.

Drove home with the windows down and the moon roof open, listening to a lecture on Thomas Hardy.

Garden, Great Work, Holidays, Politics

Bozo the Clown and Jesse Helms Die

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77  bar falls 30.01 1mph SW  dew-point 50  Summer, pleasant

Waxing Crescent of the Thunder Moon

Sometimes coincidence says things that would have not occurred to me:

Larry Harmon, longtime Bozo the Clown, dead at 83.

Former Sen. Jesse Helms dies at age 86.

Mulch goes down today.  Old leaves and grass clippings from last year stored in plastic bags.  Straw baled on a farm.  Organic matter that will blend into the soil, enrich it and give it better composition.  Before it does that, it will suppress weeds and keep the soil beneath it cooler, helping plants fight the extremes of summer heat.  An all purpose good deal, mulch.

A columnist referred to the 4th as the happiest of holidays.  It has sparklers, band music, cookouts, fireworks and family gatherings.  As for me, a solid northern European intellectually, I find it a sober holiday.  Our government, at its least competent level in decades, has not made tiny, forgivable, do over mistakes; no, they have blundered on the world stage as well as the domestic.  They have tanked the economy, made citizens suspicious of Washington, politicized the judiciary and made WC Fields and Mark Twain look like optimistic boosters.  On the foreign affairs we have reversed and three upped Teddy Roosevelt.  Now we speak loudly and shoulder nuclear RPG’s.

In light of this July 4th is, for me, a time to redouble my own efforts to bring down these clowns (apologies to Larry Harmon, mentioned earlier) and to change policy at the national, state and local levels.  My own focus now is the natural world, the world that can go along on its own without human interference, if it does not have human interference, that is.  In times past issues of war and peace, civil rights and economic justice were stage front in my political world.  They remain critically important, but I choose to pass that torch to another generation of activists.

On a lighter note I look forward to charcoaled hamburgers, potato salad, corn on the cob and cold watermelon when Kate comes home.  We also have a cache of sparklers to set out in the yard and light.  Star spangledness will live on in our Andover backyard.

Great Work, Memories, Politics

Trust in the Land

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76  bar falls 29.85  1mph ESE dew-point 60  Summer, sunny headed toward hot

Waning Crescent of the Flower Moon

“Over 200 LEED-certified new homes are being built by the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation under the auspices of…Dudley Neighbors Inc., Boston’s two-decade-old community land trust — a burgeoning affordable housing strategy where residents buy the homes but not the land underneath, thus reducing the price.”   This from the Land Institute website yesterday.

Another memory jogger.   25 years ago I worked in a small University of Minnesota and hospital dominated neighborhood of Minneapolis called Cedar-Riverside.  A grand plan for very dense housing proposed by Keith Heller, a UofM economics professor and Gloria Segal, a Minnesota DFL heavyweight would have buried the community with housing for more than 25,000 people.  That would have meant fitting a city the size of Andover on a plot of land that is a small neighborhood by Minneapolis standards, a plot of land those 25,000 + would have shared with Augsburg College, St. Mary’s Hospital, Fairview Hospital, and the University’s West Bank campus which included the Wilson Library, two towers of classroom space and a performing arts center.

Citizens of the neighborhood fought back, filed an environmental impact lawsuit, a notion then in its infancy, and won.  The settlement of that lawsuit provided the neighborhood with several million dollars to use in developing the community at a level consistent with the residents wishes.  We pursued several innovative community development strategies in those days.

Among them was a land-trust.  This was well in advance of the land-trust referred to in the Land Institute quote.  It worked like this.

We developed different housing options, mostly townhomes, all as co-operatives, that is, resident managed and jointly owned.   These were limited-equity co-ops, meaning you paid a small fee up front to join the co-operative, usually around a $1,000 and when you moved you sold your unit back to the co-op and received your fee back in return.  This idea had two positives from a community development perspective.  First, it allowed low-income people entree to a self-governing living situation (no landlord or they became the landlord).  Second, it discouraged speculation in the individual units which would make the units affordable over time.

The land-trust was a guard against a problem that had occurred in the 70’s in some cities. Community based developers would build low-income housing units as co-ops, then turn the whole project over to the co-operative.  As time went by and the property values increased, the co-op and its land would become more and more valuable.  Eventually, a for-profit developer would make the co-op and offer they couldn’t refuse and the co-ops would sell out.   This removed the housing from the ranks of affordable housing, defeating the original purpose in its construction.

The landtrust prevented that in two ways.  First, the land was  held in trust by a third party, usually a land trust corporation controlled by a community development corporation or the community development corporation itself.  This made every transaction for the whole a three party negotiation with the land-trust holding veto rights.  Second, a clause in the contract stipulated that if the land ever was sold, it triggered a penalty which equaled the interest on all the years since the projects completion.

A secondary aspect of the land-trust was its ability to lower the overall cost of the housing by taking land out of the total development equation.

No good deed goes unpunished, however, and I imagine the good folks in Boston will find similar problems to those that have developed in Cedar-Riverside.  Turns out everyone wants a piece of the increase in home value pie.  Tenants became incensed when all they got back was their original fee instead of an inflation or value multiplied amount.  Co-ops also vary a good deal in the people who come to share responsibility for them.  Sometimes general management was an issue, too.  Still, in my mind, the land-trust remains a sound tool for developing and maintaing housing affordable to all.