Category Archives: Commentary on the news

Commentary on the news, Minnesota

Minnesota Whacko

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Beltane                                                                   Emergence Moon

John David LaDue.  Byron White. An RV with extra cargo. Geez, Minnesota. A dedicated Columbine-massacre aspirant, a cold-blooded killer of teens and that smell, oh, that’s just the body we left there. We told you not to open the front compartments. Each one of these stories makes national and international news because, because they’re so damned odd.

How about the knife and axe throwing kid who has a storage room filled with bomb-making materials, more guns that needed to take down a white-tail and carefully thought out plan to kill his family, deploy a diversion and then slaughter as many classmates as possible. A quiet kid.

The aging security professional who parked his truck away from home then sat in wait for the burglars who’d targeted him. No, I’m not excusing the burglary. I’m commenting on the predator nature of the trap and the vermin comments and the gap between wounding and killing. Of several hours.

Get the guys together for a bachelor party, hire an RV and drive it to the Kentucky Derby. What could go wrong? Nothing, really, except for renting a vehicle that had a 23-year old man’s corpse in a front storage area. I liked the groom’s spirit though. They rented a hotel room, watched the Wild in the Stanley Cup playoffs, then headed north to watch the Derby at Canterbury.

Now we all know there were many other sane and good things going on here over the last couple of weeks but to the outside world we completely whacko. And not in a funny, haha, sort of way. Nope, in a psychopathic violent sort of way.

Whatever happened to the place where everybody’s good-looking and the kids are above average? Let’s see. Keillor grew up in Anoka. Where was the RV owners home again? Oh. Anoka.

Commentary on the news, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

20-20-20

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Spring                                                        Bee Hiving Moon

Continuing the city theme from the post below.  I live in the exurbs now, just two or three miles or so north of us corn fields begin and our development is a small cul de sac of homes that jut out into a working truck garden.  The MUSA line, the intended sprawl container of the Met Council, runs a mile south of us.  Beyond it a city cannot extend sewer connections.  That’s why we have a septic system and our own well.

But before I lived in the city.  First Minneapolis, then St. Paul.  In fact, over dinner with Kate, I realized I spent roughly 20 years in a small town, 20 years in the city and now have spent 20 years in the exurbs.  Those 20 years in the city were where I found my milieux.  The mix it up, bare knuckle politics of neighborhood economic development, labor organizing and straight political work appealed to my middle adult need for agency.Irvine Park

The varieties of problems, the mix of people, the different communities, the history  rushing into the present all exhilarated me.  In the city years I wanted, needed to make change, get things done, improve life.  And through fortunate relationships with many active folks I had a chance to participate in some interesting and worthwhile projects.

In the exurban years I’ve retreated, pulled back into my own work, writing, learning, gardening, sharing life with Kate and the dogs.  It was time to do that, to pull back.  That’s even more clear these days.

Here’s an example.  A number of young activists, the age of my city years, especially environmentally focused activists lobby for urban density.  They want to tear down parts of old neighborhoods and build apartment buildings.  These are the same folks who advocate for bicyclists, mass transit and against urban sprawl.  They look at the city and say the way to stop sprawl is to keep people in the center city.  How do you do that?  Build up.

In my years in the city we stopped apartment buildings, advocated neighborhood level 400_late summer 2010_0182decision making and tried to make communities stronger through increasing economic development.  These are different times and I understand the arguments of those who want denser urban areas.  Not only do I understand them, but I agree with them.  But fulfilling those policies often means riding over the protests of folks in the neighborhood.

This is one of those instances where momentum and the needs of the time have shifted thinking.  I can approve from afar, but I wouldn’t be able to wade into the politics.  I’d be too conflicted.  In that situation it’s best I’m removed from the scene.  Out here tending our garden.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Third Phase

Burned

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Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful conservative.  So is D.J. Tice, editorial writer for the Star-Tribune, though Tice often sets my kettle to boil.  Both had interesting pieces in their respective papers today, Douthat on individualism and the millennials, Tice on entitlement reform and the baby boom.

Tice writes as a baby boomer and asks us for another shot at society wide influence by seeking and seeing implemented reforms to both Social Security and Medicare.  I agree with him.  We need to solve this issue now, as the largest cohort to enter the python is only a fraction of the way in.  It is our responsibility to demand sensible changes and that our representatives in congress and the White House enact them.

What are they?  I don’t know the arguments right now well enough to recommend, but I know such arguments exist and I would stand with the fiscally responsible ones.  Tice and I agree this time.  I also appreciate his writing as a baby boomer and as one who calls for action.

Douthat read this Pew report on the millennials and concluded (though you have to read between his weasel words) that civilization as we know it is doomed.  This is a favorite conservative argument when societal trends point toward things they don’t like, in this instance, more individualism.

I don’t agree with Douthat.  Conservatives like to place individualism as an ethos over against communitarianism, the former eroding the latter until we’re all small, armed, loosely affiliated gangs.  The reality is much more complicated.  Individualism does not go over against communitarianism.

As an existentialist I believe we are each in this world alone, that our individuality is inescapable and incapable of being increased by any sort of belief or action.  Individualism is a definition of what it means to be human.  As an existentialist, I also know that we can recognize the remarkable affinity we share with others of our species.  And more, with a land ethic like Aldo Leopolds, we can recognize and act on the remarkable affinity we share with all of the natural world, animate and inanimate.  We are, after all, stardust.

Thus, the signal act of the aware universe (that is, you and me), is to bridge the abyss between the depths of one person and that of others, to acknowledge our solidarity as a creature aware of its own death.  We are all, as Camus said, in the river rushing toward our end, and we are in the river together.  It is this common bond we share that makes us compassionate toward the other and makes us want to ease their burdens in this one lifetime.

Now, here’s what’s really interesting in both of these columnist’s pieces today.  Both invoke a future disaster, one fiscal and the other communitarian, but both leave out the certain calamity that requires our action now, our action as a global community: mitigation and adaptation to climate change.  They both speak for the future, yet it is the heat and the storms and the floods and the rising oceans that reach from that future with the most destructive force.

Granted we have to multi-task, communities and nations can do that, though it’s very difficult for individuals.  But to bemoan the future without acknowledging the carbon in our atmosphere (so to speak) will only ensure a time in which individuals and poor old people will burn.

Commentary on the news, News of the Strange

Flying Dutchman

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Imbolc                                                              Hare Moon

The Flying Dutchman.  A legend of the days of sail, the Flying Dutchman could never make port, could only ride the oceans.  The doomed crew, it is said, would try to make contact with other ships, sending messages back for loved ones long dead.

(Flying_Dutchman,_the   The Flying Dutchman by Albert Pinkham Ryder c. 1887)

Perhaps Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 will become the aviation age equivalent, an airliner doomed to circle the globe, never able to land, only occasionally pinging satellites, its crew and passengers preserved in a deathless state.

So, if you’re on a flight to somewhere and all those turned off or airplane mode cellphones start ringing, answer the phone.  It might be a passenger of Flight 370 wanting to send a message home.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Sexism and Privacy

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Samhain                                                                        Winter Moon

Snowden did us all a good turn.  I don’t see others saying it, so I will.  It’s no accident that a US Judge for the first time applied the 4th amendment to the NSA’s actions.  Without Snowden’s leaks we would have no idea how far this opaque bureaucracy had gone in eroding our privacy rights.  We could not have a debate about the reasonable limits of super snooping with cyber tools. Though computer surveillance was not imaginable in the Revolutionary era, abuses perpetrated by the powerful were.

Franklin’s famous quip applies here:  “They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  the original quote according to this wiki site.

Also, how about those Catholics?  Did John Nienstedt really touch a confirmand’s butt? Who knows?  What is known is that the Nixon lesson is difficult to learn for those in positions of power.  The cover up is often worse than the crime.  That’s true in this case.

Why?  Well, covering up sexual abuse by priests is on the face not as bad as the act itself; but, when that cover up allows known offenders to circulate through different parishes and ministries with the laity ignorant, then the cover up facilitates the abuser, gives them opportunities to offend they would not have had in a transparent system.

This is an old boy’s club where a wink here and a nod there pass for scrutiny.  Much like the NSA.

One more place where secrecy and male domination protect abusers.  The military.  When rapists know their crimes will go up the chain of command, up the ladder in a buddy system, then the logic of deterrence due to exposure lessens.  A lot.

In all three of these large institutions run by men the rationalizations of the powerful take precedent over the needs of the powerless.  This is sexism in the service of sexual abuse and the erosion of personal privacy.  Considered from one perspective sexual abuse is, too, a dramatic case of the erosion of personal privacy.

Where is the Ed Snowden in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul?  They need to step forward, files and computer discs in hand.  We need them.

Commentary on the news, Science

Man Picks Raspberries, Spacecraft Sails Through Interstellar Space

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Lughnasa                                                        Harvest Moon

“We have been cautious because we’re dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration,” said Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone.

 

This morning while I waded through the raspberry canes, scratching my hands as I plucked red-purple and golden white fruit, putting them in the small basket I use for such work, Voyager 1 sailed on through interstellar space, out beyond the solar wind.

A professor from Iowa University asked reflexively if it was the equivalent of landing on the moon, maybe not he thought, but it’s still ‘Star-Trek’ stuff.  No question in my mind.  It’s beyond the equivalent; it triumphs.  Since those same raspberry picking hands held number 2 lead pencils in the first weeks of elementary school, space has been on my mind.

In 1957 Sputnik pushed us all into the Space Age.  And things moved pretty fast.  The dog. Yuri Gagarin. John Glenn.  Neil Armstrong’s one small step certainly a highlight, an enormous imaginative leap.  A man.  Up there on the Hiroshima Moon.  How about that?

Enough landings that few recall the last person to set foot on the moon. Harrison Schmitt, who followed Eugene Cernan of Apollo 17 off the landing craft.  Cernan, by the way, was the last to set foot off the moon.  This was in 1972.  All that moon walking in three brief years, 1969-1972.

Yet.  5 years later Voyager 1 and 2 launch.  Now 33 years later Voyager 1 has reached a point where its messages home take 17 hours to arrive.  17 hours at the speed of light.  Three times as far away as Pluto.  Remember Pluto?  In the cold of space, beyond the barrier where the chill of the universe presses hard enough to push back the solar wind, Voyager 1 now travels.  A piece of us.  Put together by hands like mine picking raspberries.

Kate’s former brother-in-law, now retired, worked as an engineer on Voyager 1.  He had has career, resigned.  But his work continued on, becoming in the process a signifier for persistence, for the turtle outpacing the hare.  The hare quit in 1972, satisfied with space-going trucking delivering supplies and few passengers to a space station doing, what?

All hail rocket science.  A tip of the raspberry bucket to the little spacecraft as it carries human will physically where the mind has gone for so long.

Commentary on the news

Short Takes

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Lughnasa                                                             New (Harvest) Moon

Short takes:

Syria:  Stop the chemical weapons wielding tyrant by helping the increasingly Al-Qaeda led rebels?  Seems no would work.  But learning to say no is so hard.

Dennis Rodman:  Makes me wonder if Kim (his buddy, Kim) has any tats.  What would they be?  Firing squads?  Underfed peasants?  Ballistic missiles?  Rodman wants to set up a basketball league in North Korea.  Gosh.

(US Ambassador to North Korea)

Anthony Weiner for Mayor:  “Gosh.  Learning to say no is hard.” Carlos Danger

Obama and Putin:  Maybe we should have Rodman to go to Moscow.  Kim could go along.  Rebound diplomacy.

Areil Castro suicide:  As the Onion said, “Ariel Castro failed by system.”

 

Asia, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Zeitgeist

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Lughnasa                                                               Honey Moon

It’s happening again.  Today.  We’re getting all historical and misty over an event that happened in my lifetime, while I was in high school.

That speech in 1963.  When I went to Washington, D.C. in March I walked past the Obama Whitehouse out to the Lincoln Memorial.  There’s a plaque there, on one of the steps, that marks the spot where MLK stood.

I’d like to say I remember the speech and the reactions to it, but I don’t.  Or, at least, those memories have become submerged in the later, copious reactions in print and in other media.  I can hear his voice, as I imagine you can, soaring and dipping.  “That check came back marked insufficient funds.”  “I have a dream.”  It was the rhythm of call and response preaching, a hallmark of the black church, a tradition that retained, and retains, a respect for rhetoric, for the art of speaking persuasively.

In those days, those same tumultuous times, President Kennedy had authorized American military adviser’s presence in Vietnam.  So even as Dr. King spoke in Washington the seeds of another great domestic conflict were sown, the dragon teeth of Cadmus, and they would come to life in a great battle fought conterminously with the expanding civil rights movement.

And there was more.  As the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement blossomed into a decade of radical protest, another cri de coeur had begun to gain critical mass, the feminist movement.

This was at the end of my first phase, all this roiling pitching crowded press, idea upon idea, action upon action, analysis followed analysis into praxis with the quiet, inhibited era of the post-war atomic age bulging at its anger constricted arteries, veins pulsing with affronted blood.

How could I not have been shaped, reshaped, torn down and built up again by exposure to the racism, the militarism, the sexism that was my birthright, a right mess of potage handed down to me as God’s honest truth?  No wonder those old ties sundered, split apart by cultural sclerosis.

It was King, yes, but it was also the times, the zeitgeist.  This was a moment almost out of time, a moment when the old was no longer adequate, when antiquity could no longer be a reason.  It was a time like the one Ralph Waldo Emerson wanted:

“Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres  of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes . Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”

Today we are still learning how to put enough into the bank so the check will not come back marked insufficient funds.  Today we are still learning how to control a military adventurism that displays American imperialism and idealism in equal measure.  Today we are still learning how to integrate women into all phases of our social existence.  And more.  Now we are learning, too, the same for LGBT citizens, for Muslims, for the disabled and the old.

Yes, things have grown quieter again, but that is only because the zeitgeist is not one of boiling change.  At least not here in the U.S.  That does not mean the problems have been solved or that the need for protest is past.  It will come again.

 

 

 

Commentary on the news, Garden, Our Land and Home, Politics

Bad News, Man

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Summer                                                           Moon of the First Harvests

Reading the paper this morning made me choke several different times.  First two related to horticulture.  The spotted drosophila, a fruit fly variant, lays eggs and larvae in blueberries, strawberries and raspberries especially.  We have all three.  Managing them may be very difficult without insecticides which I’ve avoided all these years.  They may force me into a difficult position if they show up here.

The second horticultural item involved the now seen as inevitable spread of the Emerald Ash Borer.  I’ve not done a census of our trees, but a reasonable estimate would be that 25% are ash.  That means a lot of holes over the next few years.  My plan is to get proactive and start taking them down, a few each year, and planting other species where it makes sense  .

Then there were all the articles about the Zimmerman trial.  Yecchhh.

Student loan rates.  This student loan business is a scandal.  Saddling kids, especially poor to lower middle class kids, with loans the size of mortgages in my day, before they even get started in life, is a real burden on the future.  It’s like attaching a drag chute to the lives of today’s college grads.

Not to mention that bank profits have jumped.

Guess the good news is that getting irritated by the news means I’m still alive.

 

Commentary on the news

Stand Your Ground

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Summer                                                 Moon of the First Harvests

Stand your ground.  An extension of the castle doctrine to include personal space when out of the house if I understand it correctly.  It meshes well with the NRA and those fearful Americans who see a burglar, rapist, home invader, government spy, black helicopter or revenue agent at every corner, but especially just around the corner from home.

The facts of the Trayvon Martin case have been jumbled and mixed since the case began and the decision yesterday should come as no particular surprise.  After all, if you recall, the police initially refused to charge Zimmerman and prosecutors agreed.  It was only after considerable public pressure that Zimmerman saw the justice system.  Even then it seems the prosecution proceeded half-heartedly.

The horror of the case is its probably correct verdict.  That is, with stand your ground as the prevailing legal doctrine governing close personal struggle in Florida, the aggressor is easy to confuse with the victim and vice versa.  The law tips in favor of the one who used deadly force.  In regard to the death of Trayvon Martin it was not only Zimmerman who was on trial, but the vindictive, armed and frightened public that supports laws like stand your ground.

And they were found guilty.  Guilty of creating a situation so murky that one man can shoot another and have the law say look the other way.  In a country where the democratic principle puts power in the hands of the majority it is dangerous, actually lethally dangerous, to have a populus fearful.  Fearful people can create the grossest of inhumanities, just ask any Jew in Europe at the time of World War II, or gays and lesbians before Stonewall, or pregnant women before Roe vs. Wade, or Africans in America before the Civil War.

Fear is the enemy and the NRA and its ilk are its prophets.