Category Archives: US History

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Politics, US History

Teaching Pigs to Sing

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Samhain                                           Waning Thanksgiving Moon

“Trying to get people to reason in a way that is not natural for them is like trying to teach a pig to sing. You don’t accomplish anything and you annoy the pig.” – E. Jeffrey Conklin and William Weil

This seemed like a useful thought as we approach the opening of the 2011 legislative session.  We need to change our message so that those in charge of the legislator can hear it and realize that safeguarding our environmental heritage is a non-partisan responsibility to our kids, our grandkids and their grandkids.

More interviews today, more with talented people who want to work with the Sierra Club.

Little new snow today so I don’t anticipate the crush this morning that I experienced yesterday.  And more Big History on the drive.

Aging, Art and Culture, Politics, US History

Canadian Immigration circa 1968

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Samhain                                                   Waxing Thanksgiving Moon

If you haven’t read the satirical piece about Canadian immigration posted below, it’s worth a look.  I want to tell you here about a true story concerning Canadian immigration, but it comes from an earlier time.

One cold day in 1968 David McCain and I set out from Muncie, Indiana Toronto bound.  Being the 1960’s we were in a drafty Volkswagen Beetle, cranky in the cold and not much help on snow covered road.  Our destination was the Toronto Anti-Draft League which distributed pamphlets outlining how to achieve landed immigrancy status in Canada.  When sent through the mail, these pamphlets were routinely seized, so David and I decided to go after them ourselves.

We drove the distance from Muncie to Detroit in one go and headed for the Bluewater Bridge, the entry point at Sarnia, Ontario.  We both had long hair and, in our orange Beetle, no doubt looked like exactly what we were.  The Canadians turned us away.  Regroup.  We went into a shopping mall, bought white shirts and winter caps, put them on, stuffing our hair up under the caps and tried again in a different lane.  Success!

After some hours we made Toronto, found the Anti-Draft League and picked up the pamphlets.  While there we noticed a store selling Asian presents, so we bought some Hell Notes and some other cheap touristy kind of things.

We had a night in Toronto and somehow found our way to the a performance called Succession*, or Three Games of Chess.  This unusual event featured Marchel Duchamp and John Cage playing three games of chess on stage, the chess board wired for sound.  In addition one of those ducks that dips its beak in a water glass, then comes up, goes down and dips again, stood on a card table nearby similarly wired.  The other performer was a man sitting on a metal folding chair reading the the classified ads from that days New York Time.  Out loud.  Into a microphone.  The audience was free to come up on stage and watch these two giants of early twentieth century avante garde art.

We were among a small audience and we stayed well into the early morning, leaving before the three games ended.  It was only much later in life that I learned this was a signal moment in Cage’s career, an event for the ages.  I was just there accidentally.

Both Dave and I had developed colds on the way up and stopped in a Canadian pharmacy for cold medicine before we began our drive back to the States.

At the border we were stopped, marched into the station and given a strip search.  Free.  No charge.  When we put our clothes back on, we found items from the car on the counter in front of the customs office.  We had these items:  125 pamphlets on landed immigrancy in Canada, several items made in Red China (the gifts) and 2-2-2’s, the Canadian cold medicine which we did not know was 40% codeine.  No wonder we felt so confident crossing the border.  This all added up to a damning conclusion.

The Customs folks confiscated everything.

Fortunately, we had no drugs in the car.  The hood and engine compartments were open, with stuff strewn on the ground and the hubcaps were off.    The reasons for our trip were gone, never to come back.  Except our memories.

*Actually, Cage hadn’t lost every single match with Duchamp. There was one that he definitely won, after a fashion. It happened in Toronto, in 1968. Cage had invited Duchamp and Teeny to be with him on the stage. All they had to do was play chess as usual, but the chessboard was wired and each move activated or cut off the sound coming live from several musicians (David Tudor was one of them). They played until the room emptied. Without a word said, Cage had managed to turn the chess game (Duchamp’s ostensive refusal to work) into a working performance. And the performance was a musical piece. In pataphysical terms, Cage had provided an imaginary solution to a nonexistent problem: whether life was superior to art. Playing chess that night extended life into art – or vice versa. All it took was plugging in their brains to a set of instruments, converting nerve signals into sounds. Eyes became ears, moves music. Reunion was the name of the piece. It happened to be their endgame.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, US History

A Tour Knocked Together

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Samhain                                       Waxing  Thanksgiving Moon

Finished initial work for my tour of the Thaw exhibition.  Some new information will come on Thursday during the Friends lecture focusing on Blackhawk and his ledger book, Elizabeth Hickox and her finely crafted miniature baskets and Maria Martinez, the renowned potter of San Ildefonso Pueblo.  I’ll meld that into the work I’ve just done.

I’m starting on Thursday in the Plains gallery with Judith Fogarty’s martingale and medicine bag for which she won the 1988 best of show at the Santa Fe Indian Art Festival, a prize of distinction in native american arts.  From there we’ll look at the honor shirts and Blackhawk’s ledger book, still in the Plains collection.  The Woodlands gallery, our home region, contains a wonderful bag, probably part of the kit of an Anishinabe shaman of the Midewiwin Society.  In the Arctic and Sub-Arctic I’ll take the group to the Yupik masks.  In the Northwest Coast region we’ll look at the frontlet of Raven-who-owns-the-sun and the bulging sided bent-wood bowl for serving fatty fish.  We’ll end up with a Maria Martinez pot and an Elizabeth Hickox basket.

This is a wonderful opportunity to see the very best of native art covering broad geographic regions.  A rare chance.  Hope you’ll be able to come.

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.