Category Archives: US History

Aging, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

It’s Here! It’s Here! It’s Finally Here!

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Samhain                                    Waning Harvest Moon

Election day.  Or, as I prefer to think of it, extinguish those politicoporn commercials day.

The constant negative drone, the contention that the other person has committed some perfidy totally unexpected of a human being, let alone a politician, gets on my nerves, so, for the most part, I shut it out.  But that’s not what I mean.

What I mean is the amount of hard cash required for designing, shooting and airing political commercials.   Along with other technological expenses in the modern campaign the dollar amounts required make it inevitable that each politician, each one, Republican and Democrat, spend their incubency focusing not on policy or the politics of the day, but on fund raising.  Fund raising in amounts so large that often times they go back to the same well not just twice, but thrice.  This places every politician in Congress squarely in the sites of those who have wealth or who have become adept at bundling wealth from others for political purposes.  This is not only bad form; it is also a bad way to create a government.

Add the constant fund raising to the incessant drum beat of lobbyists and it’s no wonder our democracy–for which we want to make the whole world safe–has twitches and contortions that make professional gymnasts look clumsy and out of practice.  We are a people proud of our democracy, often hubristically so, and yet it has become a clogged artery, a broken limb, a part of our body politic that needs strong medicine and tough therapy to heal.

Our system of checks and balances has devolved into a system of halts and stops where partisan wrangling and/or ideological purity turns each place where a check might happen into a full body check against the boards and puts a thumb on the scales wherever balance must come into play.

While I’m at it, let me point out, too, a problem in our Senate.  No, not the rules, though those do need attention.  No, not Jesse Helms.  He left office.  I’m talking about representation.  Here’s what the point in a brief paragraph from Wikipedia:

“The Constitution stipulates that no constitutional amendment may be created to deprive a state of its equal suffrage in the Senate without that state’s consent. The District of Columbia and all other territories (including territories, protectorates, etc.) are not entitled to representation in either House of the Congress.[12] The United States has had 50 states since 1959, thus the Senate has had 100 senators since 1959.

The disparity between the most and least populous states has grown since the Great Compromise, which granted each state equal representation in the Senate and a minimum of three presidential Electors, regardless of population. In 1787, Virginia had roughly 10 times the population of Rhode Island, whereas today California has roughly 70 times the population of Wyoming, based on the 1790 and 2000 censuses. This means some citizens are effectively an order of magnitude better represented in the senate than than those in other states. Seats in the House of Representatives are approximately proportionate to the population of each state, reducing the disparity of representation.”

And this from a book blurb on Amazon for:  Sizing Up the Senate: The Unequal Consequences of Equal Representation–

“We take it for granted that every state has two representatives in the United States Senate. Apply the “one person, one vote” standard, however, and the Senate is the most malapportioned legislature in the democratic world.

But does it matter that California’s 32 million people have the same number of Senate votes as Wyoming’s 480,000? Frances Lee and Bruce Oppenheimer systematically show that the Senate’s unique apportionment scheme profoundly shapes legislation and representation. The size of a state’s population affects the senator-constituent relationship, fund-raising and elections, strategic behavior within the Senate, and, ultimately, policy decisions. They also show that less populous states consistently receive more federal funding than states with more people. In sum, Lee and Oppenheimer reveal that Senate apportionment leaves no aspect of the institution untouched.

This groundbreaking book raises new questions about one of the key institutions of American government and will interest anyone concerned with issues of representation.”

I mention this intriguing and disturbing analysis to underscore the problems with the amount of money it takes to win a Senate race which is, by definition, a whole state affair.  This means that money sunk into races in smaller population states can have the affect of negating changes in the House of Representatives while increasing the amounts for which the elected Senator is beholden.  This is not a recipe or a chance for corruption; it is a guarantee, a built in consequence of modern elections and an increasingly unequal Senate.

What to do?  We’ll look at that tomorrow, apres deluge.

Politics, US History

All For Obama Stand Up and Holler

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Fall                                        Full Harvest Moon

Obama.  Has done a fine job.  The Republicans and far left (my crowd) need to back the **** off.  He succeeded in the economic stimulus.  He passed health care legislation.  He reinvigorated the EPA.  He took a good shot at climate change legislation.

His presence in the office is steady and, I believe, calming, though the dark noise of the chattering classes seems to suggest otherwise.  Once the Republicans dug in their heels and decided there was no political mileage for them in bipartisanship the whole Washington scene has devolved back to the Newt Gringrich era, even further back, the right wing nut job politics of the early sixties:  the John Birch Society, the Minutemen and the hangovers from the McCarthy period.

We are lucky to have him in the office and I’m glad and proud that I voted for him.

Nunc disco.

Art and Culture, Hydroponics, Letters, Literature, US History, World History, Writing

Humanities

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Fall                                   Waxing Harvest Moon

With Latin, the Baroque and a sermon on the future of liberal thought all coming up this week and the next, plus the horticultural fall chores:  plant bulbs, clean up, harvest the last of the vegetable crop and care for the bees, I react strongly to the recent closing down of humanities classes in SUNY.

There is hope, though, since the humanities are academic disciplines that can be done at home with little discernible drop in quality.  Yes, there’s the problem of training the next generation in how to do the work at home.  It may be time for the disintermediation of the University’s original core curriculum, putting it on the web and in personal relationships, mentoring.  It may be time for Western culture to imitate the Chinese literati, the Mandarin bureaucrats who ran the country while painting, writing poetry, playing the Qin, doing calligraphy and focusing on the Tao.

Let’s get a dialogue going about how we can preserve the humanities one classic at a time, one work of fine art at a time, one poem at a time, one language at a time, one faith tradition at a time.  Like the Great Work, creating a benign human presence on the earth, we must also labor to produce a humane human presence.  It is no easy task and one that requires facility in a number of areas:  literature, history, language, art history, the history of faith traditions.  We must not let the sacred deposit that reflects on our common life wither into dusts.

Perhaps we need a new renaissance, a new enlightenment, ones that focus no longer on the application of science and technology, but instead return to the big questions:  Why are we here?  What is justice?  What is beauty?  What is a nation?  Why do we fight?  Who was Ozymandias?  What is Baroque music?  How many administrators can dance on the head of the department of science?  What is life?  What does it mean to be human?

This is not an anti-science rant, science is fine; let’s not, however, throw out teaching the question askers of culture, the critics of public life, the dancers, painters and poets.  We need them, too, to know what to do with what science produces, in part, yes, but more to remind us that we have a past and that our big questions are similar and often the same as the big questions of that past.  That thought and that art helps us today.  Right now.

Aging, Friends, Humanities, Memories, Retirement, Travel, US History

A Life in Ruins: Part II

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Fall                                    Waning Back to School Moon

When I visited Angkor in 2005, I wrote a piece for my Pilgrimage series entitled, A Life in Ruins.  Ephesus, Delphi, Delos,Rome. Pompeii, numerous civil war battlefields and Attuthya are among the many ruins I’ve visited, trying to piece together from blocks of stone, information plaques and Blue Guides their meaning and significance. At Knossos I wondered what it felt like to be in the labyrinth of rooms that made up what entered legend as the habitation of the Minotaur.  At Delos I imagined what the birth of Apollo and Diana was like.

Given that history, amazing is an understatement when I discovered my actual life had become a site with ruins, not one, but many.  In my hometown of Alexandria the first factory in which I2010-10-02_0396 worked, Johns-Manville has nothing left but concrete coated pillars and a loading dock.  I worked as a receiving clerk the summer I was there, so I knew exactly what went on there when the trains loaded with coak and limestone rolled onto the factory grounds.

That was the first, but far from the last.  The old High School, my middle school, gone.  Tomlinson, my first elementary school. Gone.  Most of the businesses of my youth, abandoned shells.  This is only in Alex.  In Anderson the mighty General Motors Guide  Lamp and Delco Remy, employers once of 25,000, gone.  Parking lots and concrete factory pads covering thousands of square feet and fenced in with tall chain link are all that remains.

If we had a magic button we could push, one that would light up the home’s lost among those 25,000, we would have a better estimate of the lives ruined along with these structures.  These are the missing elements at Ephesus, Rome, Delos.  What about the lives of the priests, the grounds keepers, the cooks, the sailors?  Like members of my class and their parents forces beyond their control eliminated the places where they earned their livings.  Places made sacred by the holy work of labor.  So much desecration.

These factories, these shops, these shuttered houses, these abandoned people are the friends and family with which I spent the weekend, real people, not statistics.  Never did I think that the mighty flood of cars bearing workers on Highway 9, no absurdly named Highway of Vice Presidents, would dry up.  Never did I think that the vibrant small town of my youth with its mens store, its womens store, two variety stores, two pharmacies, a bakery, two theatres, bars and banks and service stations would fade away only to be replaced by dollar stores and wholesale outlets.

So this weekend, an affair of the heart most of all, a reconnecting with those who lived then, only underscores the pain.  I will never visit a new ruin again with the same detached attitude.  Real people lived there;  real people suffered.

Literature, Travel, US History

The Silversmith

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Fall                                     Waning Back to School Moon

Room 901, the Silversmith Hotel, Chicago  on Jeweler’s Row

The sun had just slipped below the horizon as we approached downtown Chicago.  Red fire glinted off the window walls of the many new skyscrapers in this, the home of the skyscrapers.  As the train slid toward Union Station, I felt the city cloak itself around me.  I was back.

I love this city.  It was, my first.  My first big city.  I came here when I was 12 with a United Methodist Church see-it tour.  We visited the Chapel in the Sky, the Pacific Garden Mission and saw a lot of the poorer areas of Chicago.

This is Sister Carrie’s city.  The city of the Titan, The Genius.  The city of Big Shoulders where the fog creeps in on little cat’s feet.  This is an American city, a Midwestern city built on stockyards and the commodity exchange, a collecting point for agricultural goods from the farms of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska.

The steel mills of Gary used to light up the southern tip of Lake Michigan, you could see them glowing like a peek into the infernal regions.  They glowed red with the heat of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.  A day now gone by.

The el encloses the loop and rattles just 7 floors below my hotel room here at the arts and craft decorated Silversmith.  This is a boutique hotel very near the Chicago Art Institute.

I have an appointment in Ada’s Deli, the restaurant here, at 10 tomorrow, then I’m off the Art Institute.

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.

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.”

Aging, Great Wheel, Great Work, Health, Humanities, Hydroponics, Minnesota, permaculture, Politics, US History

You Say You Want A Revolution? Yep.

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Summer                                            Waning Strawberry Moon

It’s been done, I know.  Still, I’d like to put in a call for a 2nd American revolution.  Oh, ok, I don’t care what number it is.  I’ll settle for another American revolution.

My American revolution has a bit of  Norman Rockwell, a touch of Helen and Scott Nearing, more than a dab of Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills, some Benjamin Franklin, the spirit of pioneers and native Americans alike when they relied upon on this seemingly limitless land for food and space.  There’s a Victory Garden or two in there as well, plus generations of smart women who canned, dried, jellied, smoked and pickled all sorts of produce and meat.  This New American Revolution demands no marches, no banners, no barricades, no guns and no repression.  And you can dance all you want.

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and with the land.  It is a revolution that takes the wisdom of a 7th generation Iroquois medicine man who said:  “We two-leggeds are so fragile that we must pray and care for all the four leggeds, the winged ones, those who swim in the waters and the plants that grow.  Only in their survival lies the possibility of ours.”

What is it?  It is a revolution of and for and by the human spirit.  It is a revolution that insists, but gently, that we each put our hand and our back to something that feral nature can alter.   It could be a garden.  It could be a deer hunt.  It could be a potted plant outside where the changing seasons affect its growth and life.  It could be a regular hike in a park, through all the changes of the seasons, seeing how winter’s quiet fallow time gives ways to springs wild, wet exuberance, the color palette changing from grays, rusts and white to greens, yellows, blues, reds the whole riot.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would see each person responsible for at least some of their own food, food they grow or catch or kill.  In its fullest realization each person would use whatever land they share with the future in such a way as to increase its natural capital, using the land in such a way that it improves with age and gains in its capacity to support human, animal and plant life.

What is it?  In its fullest realization this revolution would find each person closer, much closer to the source of their electricity, their transportation and its fuel, their work and their family.  In its fullest realization this revolution would shut down the coal-fired generating plants, shutter the nuclear generating plants and have maximum and optimum use of wind, geothermal, hydro, solar and biomass generation. In its fullest realization each person would eat food that had traveled only short distances to their table, the shorter the better, the best being from backyard or front yard garden to the table.

What is it?  Well, we have a ways to go yet.  Perhaps a long ways, but if we want our descendants to have a chance to enjoy the same wonders in this land that we have known, we will have to change.  We will have to change radically.  We need, as I suggested, another American revolution.

Great Work, Humanities, Our Land and Home, Politics, US History

The 4th

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Summer                                        Waning Strawberry Moon

The 4th of July.  A time to think about our country, our home, our sea to shining sea.  Are we in decline?  This chestnut has begun hitting the op ed pages again.  I don’t know, they don’t know.  Only history will tell us.  Does it matter?  Not to me.  We’ll still be Americans, just like the British are still British in spite of the collapse of the empire on which the sun never sat.

Are there major problems within our body politic?  Oh, my, yes.  Does this make our time different from any other time?  Emphatically, no.

Here’s an example from a Frederick Douglass speech quoted in the Star-Tribune today:

“Fellow citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!”

To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs and to chime in with the popular theme would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.

My subject, then, fellow citizens, is “American Slavery.””

Does this harmony of misery make us any less accountable for the unemployed, the dying lakes and rivers, the immigrants who would live among us and share this land?   Emphatically, no.

Whether in decline or doggedly ascending the hill to that Bright Shining City so beloved of our forefathers, we must attend the great American ideals of liberty and equality, the twin conceptual mounts on which both our past and our future rest.

And not these only.  We now have before us the Great Work, the demanding and joyful task of creating a human presence on this planet that is benign, not malignant.

Here are the things make me believe we will continue to rise to these challenges no matter our relative status in the world:  we ended slavery.  we fought and defeated fascism.  we looked at old age poverty and created social security.  we have a statue at what used to be the main entry point for immigrants; it is a statue of liberty and one which says to the world, give us your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.  we have brilliant scientists, great laboratories and universities, students even at this moment learning to be the future leaders that we need.  we have poets, movie makers, authors, critics, musicians, painters and sculptors all ready to help us see what we do not see.  we have neighborhood after neighborhood of people who want only a chance, the same chance many of our ancestors have already had.  we are a people who have won great victories for humanity.  we are a land unparalleled in its ruggedness, its beauty, its flora and fauna, rivers and streams, lakes and forests.

All of these things make me happy and hopeful on this 4th of July.

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