Category Archives: Commentary on the news

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Grief

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Lughnasa                                                    Full Harvest Moon

Grief.  I’ve been asking myself, over this weekend, why we have had such an outsized response to 9/11.  Outsized, I say, when considered in the context of other, smaller countries who have as large or larger tragedies.  Outsized, I say, when it suggests we alone suffer.  Outsized, I say, when considered against lives lost in other conflicts like Vietnam, WWII, WWI, the Civil War.

This morning it finally came to me.  Probably obvious to you already.  It is not an outsized response when the grief is for vulnerability, a new feeling of OMG, the dangers of the world might apply to us here at home.  Grief for a nation with two of the largest moats ever to defend a homeland:  the Atlantic and the Pacific.  Grief for a sense of a particular safety, a feeling that we could fight all of our wars far from our own shores.

On 9/11 we entered the global village, became one with Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Russia.  Not one with them in scale of tragedy because their tragedies exceed our own, but one with them as fellow humans now fully exposed to the fracture lines of our too factional world.

We gathered and mourned yesterday not for a particular event, though it was a tragedy, or at least not solely for a particular event, but for a new raw feeling, a wound not to the flesh, but to the heart.  Our hearts are now open, open to the pain and suffering experienced by those who have known all along that the world is not a safe place.

May it make us less willing to inflict on the world yet more suffering.

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

A Special Place in Hell

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Lughnasa                                                          Full Honey Extraction Moon

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those, who in times of moral crisis, do nothing.” – Dante Alighieri

Moral crisis.  Means different things to different people.  Right now I see three moral crises that loom large.  The first, and most troubling to me, concerns the vast unplanned experiment we have conducted with our atmosphere, our water and our land worldwide.  Even the most cynical would agree, I hope, that a polluted overheated world does not satisfy the implicit contract we have with our children and grandchildren and their progeny.  The Iroquois planning idea, look for the impact on the seventh generation, would satisfy that contract, but we don’t look past the next quarter.

(The Barque of Dante, Eugene Delacroix)

A second moral crisis, implicated in the first, and next most troubling to me, plays out each week in Congress and in state legislatures throughout our country.  The U.S. political system, a fragile ship in spite of what it may seem to the world, has lost its moorings and seems almost a ghost ship, wandering and lost in fog.  In the end any political system’s purpose lies in its decision making, since filtering and weighing competing interests, then choosing among various propositions defines governing.   Through a complex process involving the abdication of responsibility by America’s liberal political class, widening economic disparity in a free-market crazed economy, the creation of a so-called “values” voter begun during Richard Nixon’s presidency under the guise of the Moral Majority and the more recent populist angst coalesced in the Tea Party movement, our legislative work at federal and state levels has the appearance of disaffected parties shouting across a great chasm, a chasm so large that the cries of the other come in faint, garbled, so garbled as to make no sense.

This crisis means many generationally significant issues cannot come to a conclusion:  the environment, health care reform, entitlement reform, economic and regulatory reform, military and foreign policy.  The effect of this crisis leaves us captive to the decisions of yesterday as the markers for what will happen tomorrow.  This is a recipe for and results in disaster.

The third moral crisis of our time concerns global movements of people stimulated by war, poverty, disease, famine or political threat.  Visit any southern European country and you will find refugees from northern Africa camped out, selling this and that on colorful cloth spread out on sidewalks.  Drive across the southern tier of US states and you will pass among governments now vying with each other to become the most draconian in their treatment of Mexican nationals trying to get an economic toehold in life by emigrating to the US, either legally or illegally.  Go to the northern states of Thailand and find tribal peoples from Burma.  In Japan there are Koreans.  Throughout South Asia the Filipinos work as maids, gardeners,  laborers.  In Australia the aborigines live in cities, as do many native Americans in the US, often in conditions of crushing poverty.

The Turks are in Germany as Muslim emigres are in many other European nations, numerous, a reality creating great unease, witness the killings in Norway and the banning of head scarves in France, maybe even the riots in England.

You might order these three differently, you might have a different top three, but moral crisis is endemic to our time.  Perhaps it has always been so, I don’t know enough history to say, but I can say with certainty our time seems to breed value conflicts and that those conflicts too often, instead of moving toward resolution, result in political and cultural stalemate.

Stalemate is the opposite political conditions from statesmanship (sic).  Statespersonship.  The former creates deadlock, incremental steps backward in terms of public policy and public feeling.  The latter transcends difference to find a creative, future encompassing solution or policy direction.  As stalemate becomes the dominant political tone, our policies, our countries and our world become stale.  Stale is a marker on the road to decay.

Dante lived in a time of great political upheaval in Tuscany and in his home city of Florence.  In fact, he spent much of his life in exile.  He understood well the need to come to grips with moral crisis, not only intellectually, but politically, down in the theatre where decisions get hacked out, piece by bloody piece.  Hell will not only hold those with good intentions; it will also hold those too timid to act.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Writing

Higher Education Does Not Need The Humanities. But, We Do.

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Beltane                                                    Waning Last Frost Moon

On a pile of essays, yet unread, sits one at the top, “The Great River of the Classics”, by Camille Paglia.  She is my heroine, an outspoken advocate for the content of the humanities, the deposit of art, music, literature and theater that flows from Western civilization’s beginnings in the fertile crescent, a river with a delta now rich with islands and streams, a fan of human experience at its most intense and intimate that nourishes the ocean that is Western humanity’s collective conscious and unconscious.

Egypt’s splendor, the profundity and innovation of the Greeks, the ordered ambition of the Romans, the spirituality of the Celts, the deep feeling of the Russians and the Germans, the list is long and has depth.  Gilgamesh.  The Egyptian Book of the Dead.  The fragments of the Pre-Socratic.  Jewish texts.  Christian and Muslim texts.  The pyramids.  The parthenon.  Rome.  The pantheon. Fra Lippa.  Giorgio. Botticelli.  Michelangelo. Da Vinci.  Petrarch.  Erasmus.  Francis Bacon.  Titian.  Brueghel.  Boccaccio. Chaucer.  Beowulf.  The poetic eddas.  Ovid.  Turner.  Poussin.  Rembrandt.  Barye.   Tolstoy.  Dostoevsky.  Singer.  the Baal Shem Tov.  Racine.  Shakespeare.  Marlowe.  Haydn.  Mozart.  Beethoven.  Brahms.

And the many, the very many left out of this brief evocation.

Perhaps the humanities do not pass the test of occupational preparedness, a test now applied to departments in higher education.  Just yesterday an academic group released a study the dollar value of varying university degrees based on earnings over time and starting salaries.  In many colleges and universities humanities departments look like low hanging fruit when it comes to the budget ax.

So.  If humanities degrees result in less earned income over a student’s life, does this make them, ipso facto, less valuable?  Obviously.  If, that is, the only yardstick is dollars.  No, I’m not going to make the argument that dollars are a grubby, undistinguished measure; each of us has to eat, reside somewhere, raise our children and nourish our dreams.

Even the fact that the humanities stood at the very center of the project of higher learning at its inception does not privilege them now.  The needs and values of the middle ages were different from ours today.  No, the humanities must stand valuable by today’s standards more than they must reflect the values of past centuries.

It may be that the university is no longer the place for the humanities.  It may be that higher education’s mission in contemporary life involves primarily occupational learning, a sort of advanced vocational training.  Institutions focuses change over time.  Their work must meet the needs of those whom they serve or they have no reason to exist.

It does not bother me if higher education strips out the humanities.  Let the music department perish.  Banish the philosophers, the artists, the literati, the linguists and language crowd, let history go, too.  Leave the ivy covered walls with only economics, business, pre-law, pre-med, engineering, architecture, agriculture, veterinary science, family and child psychology.  Keep those subjects that inform the workers of today and tomorrow and let the fluff go.  Keep the hard stuff, abandon the soft disciplines.

Why don’t these changes bother me?  Because an artist does not need an art department, she needs fellow artists and places to display and sell her goods, but art departments, no matter how good, no matter how well intentioned, are not necessary to artists.  Work is.  Literature, too.  Writers write because they must, because words and ideas matter to them.  No writer writes because there are good writing programs.  Of course, they can learn things in those programs, but writing does not depend on English departments.  Music, too, is part of the beating heart of culture.  Musicians, whether trained in universities or not, will make music.  Musicians will and do get trained in many other places than higher education.  Philosophers are stuck with the sort of minds that go to the root of things and they will dig deep without philosophy departments.  They need other philosophers, yes, but there are books and airplanes.

The humanities are of, by and for humans.  Because they are of our essence, they will survive diminished or even eliminated university and college support.  Will they be poorer?  Probably.  For a while.  But not for long.  We need music to fill our souls.  We need literature to grasp the many ways there are to be human.  We need painting and sculpture and print making because beauty satisfies an essential yearning of the human spirit and because we need to experience the interior world of others as much as we can.  We need those among us who will ask the difficult, the unpopular questions and pursue them where they lead.

We need all of these things; they do not need higher education.  It will be poorer without them, less reflective, more insular, more satisfied with apparently easy answers.

What might happen is this.  After the humanities have been ejected from higher education, humanities practitioners and scholars will meet, find they still need each other.  An idea will occur to them.  Why not have a place where the humanities can be taught?  An institute, maybe.  A gymnasium.  An academy.  Or, maybe something new.  A virtual gathering space for artists and scholars, for writers and teachers.

Out of these experiment might grow, what?  I don’t know.  Perhaps an educational institution with its primary mission immersing its students in the Great River of the Humanities, a baptism by art.  Could happen.

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Nut Job Analysis

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Beltane                                                                           Waxing Last Frost Moon

The Arab Spring.  A nice metaphor.  I remember the Prague Spring.  I have faith in people’s movements when they come out of the genuine frustrations and pains of everyday living.  Ideology bends movements, often turns them into pretzels, twisted things that reflect the head rather than the heart, the so-called radical Islamists, the KKK, the Communist Party, the Kuomintang.  When people begin to move and rustle together, when they become willing to take charge of their own destiny rather than allow others to dictate it, then they become powerful, often unstoppable.  People’s movements topple dictators.  Egypt.  Tunisia.  Yemen.  Probably Libya.  Maybe Syria.  Possibly Saudi Arabia.

Even the Tea Party here has some of the ingredients of a people’s movement.  Only some because the underlying motive force is a crackpot brand of political thought made famous by the Impeach Earl Warren and U.S. out of the United Nations billboard folks, the John Birch Society.  I say crackpot in the unkindest way possible.  Robert Welch, a guy who made his fortune making candy, including the caramel on a stick, Papa Sucker, founded the John Birch Society in 1958.  He believed Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist.

“In the 1960s, Welch began to believe that even the Communists were not the top level of his perceived conspiracy and began saying that Communism was just a front for a Master Conspiracy, which had roots in the Illuminati; the essay “The Truth in Time” is an example[1]. He referred to the Conspirators as “The Insiders,” seeing them mainly in internationalist financial and business families such as the Rothschilds and Rockefellers, and organizations such as the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.”

With this sort of nut job analysis as its underpinnings, it’s no wonder the Tea Party hacks think Obama is a socialist, a Kenyan and a Muslim.  I’m waiting for a new round of billboards.

Two tours this morning focusing on Spanish/Latin American art.  I’m looking forward to them.

Art and Culture, Asia, Bees, Commentary on the news, Friends, Garden, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

A Garden, Some Latin, Ai Weiwei

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Beltane                                                     New Last Frost Moon

The potatoes are in the ground.  The lettuce has two leaves, as does the spinach, a few beets have emerged.  The leeks look a bit droopy, but they’ll pick up.  The garlic is well over 6 inches now as it makes the final push for harvest in late June, early July.  None of the carrots have germinated yet and most of the beets have not either. The onion sets we planted havecropped-free-ai-weiwei mostly begun to show green.  The bees show up now around the property, working as we do, tending the plants in their own, intimate way.  The gooseberries we transplanted look very healthy.  The daffodils are a carpet of yellow and white.  A few scylla out front brighten up the walk with their blue.

Most of today went into Diana and Actaeon.  I’m down to verse 227, the finish line is 250.  I’m close and moving faster now than I was.  One of the things I’ve learned is that doing this at a pace which would allow you to complete a project in a reasonable time frame would require real skill.  I’m a hobby Ovidist, to be a Latin scholar would take decades.  Who knows though?  I might make it.  When I finish this first tale in the Metamorphosis, I’m going to have some kind of celebration.

Buddy Mark Odegard has come up with three remarkable designs for a Free Ai Weiwei t-shirt.   Here’s an example and the one most seem to prefer:

Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Bin-Laden

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Beltane                                                          Sliver Bee Hiving Moon

Dead.  Bin-Laden dead.  The news says so.  Obama says so.  Can’t imagine it would be news offered unless compelling evidence existed to prove it.  News reports claim they have his body.  A feeling of relief, exhilaration.  Then, shame.  Shame at being glad anyone is dead.  Those feelings ten years ago this September still pulse in me, make me mad, make me want closure.  This is a closure of sorts, maybe of a major degree.

Of course, with all things political there is the action, Bin-Laden killed by US, then there will be the reaction.  Alinsky always said the action is in the reaction.  The question though always is, what will the reaction be?

I can imagine bluster, more direct attempts at terrorist acts.  I can picture rage and riots and attacks against US embassies and US corporation and individuals.  But I can also imagine this as a fever that, once run its course, may lead to a calmer, less polarized situation.  God, I hope so.

I’m a little surprised at the depth of my reaction to the news, though I imagine it links back directly to 9/11 and those feelings.

Bees, Commentary on the news, Great Work, permaculture, World History

Bee Diary: April 17, 2011

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Spring                                                                 Full Bee Hiving Moon

A full day of bees.  Mostly fun, but sitting for 8 hours just doesn’t have the appeal it used to.  What appeal was that?  Can’t recall.

The info on bee diseases and, again, the multi-valent character of colony collapse disorder keeps getting clearer.  Repetition is useful for this old brain. (I think a companion piece to This Old House could be This Old Brain)  The big problem is varroa mites.  Marla said the bees would have developed adequate resistance to the mites if they had been left untreated, as they have been in Africa, for example, but our wealthier, fix-it-now culture insists on medicine.  The result?  We have resistant varroa mites that are much more difficult to control.

The mites per se are not so much the issue; rather, they weaken the bees through sucking their vital fluids and serving as a vector for any number of bee viruses. This reinforces a long list of other interrelated negatives.  Lost pasturage in clover–reduced by adding fertilizer and decreasing crop rotation, different management practices for cutting alfalfa that reduce its bloom time, increasing pesticide use which further weakens the bees, herbicide use that kills bee friendly native plants (often called weeds) and the prevalence of monocultural planting of key ag crops like corn, wheat, beans create a dark synergy, a whirl of problematics that chip away at healthy bee populations, both native and domesticated.

A rolling loss of genetic diversity, an extinction event with no peer in the geologic record,* characterizes our impact, mostly intentional, on the landscape.  In making incremental decisions concerning agricultural methods, population, urbanization and our hungry, rapidly increasing demand for energy we have added co2 to the atmosphere, cut down forests, built farms in important watersheds (see the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers as poster children for why this is a problem.), delinked corridors for wild animal travel and increased our dependence on smaller and smaller gene pools.  As the patenting of seed corn, wheat and rice, to give three important examples, has concentrated ownership of important food seed stores, the resistance to disease which has kept these key sources of human nutrition vital, decreases.

I mention this last because it is easy to see the bridge between our behavior in general and such problems as colony collapse disorder.  There are, thankfully, many solutions to these problems, but we have to have the will to act.  How many people will grow their own vegetables or participate in Community Supported Agriculture?  How many farmers will turn toward less intensive, and therefore less productive, farming methods in a time when larger farm sizes seem the only route to financial success?  The solutions all seem to lie in a spectrum of activities that support bio-diversity, emphasize sustainable energy and food production and reduce our reliance on steroid-like chemicals such as fertilizers.

The diverse pathways to a positive future give me hope.  Each of us can do a bit:  consume less gas, make our homes more energy efficient, grow some of our own food, patronize local suppliers, recycle.  We can also encourage systemic change in sectors like energy production, agriculture, urban development, defense and foreign policy.  Perhaps it’s time for a JFK moment:  Ask not what Mother Earth can do for you, but what you can do for Mother Earth.

*The background level of extinction known from the fossil record is about one species per million species per year, or between 10 and 100 species per year (counting all organisms such as insects, bacteria, and fungi, not just the large vertebrates we are most familiar with). In contrast, estimates based on the rate at which the area of tropical forests is being reduced, and their large numbers of specialized species, are that we may now be losing 27,000 species per year to extinction from those habitats alone.

Commentary on the news, Great Wheel, Humanities, Politics, World History

Rainfall as Destiny

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Spring                                                       Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

Let the rainy season begin.  Thunder in the forecast for tomorrow.  That means Rigel slinking around, barking at the sky, and, with Sollie and Gertie here, amping up the possible opportunities for red in tooth and claw encounters.  Temperate climates change the game every three months or so, just to see if we’re still alert.

There is an argument in the Star-Tribune today that correlates 50-100 mm of rain a year with democracy.  This is a new version of an old staple, geographical determinism, now sometimes called environmental determinism.  In essence geographical determinists equate a particular land form or climate with political destiny. An explanation from about.com is below.

“The main argument of environmental determinism states that an area’s physical characteristics like climate have a strong impact on the psychological outlook of its inhabitants. These varied outlooks then spread throughout a population and help define the overall behavior and culture of a society. For instance it was said that areas in the tropics were less developed than higher latitudes because the continuously warm weather there made it easier to survive and thus, people living there did not work as hard to ensure their survival…

By the 1950s, (my emphasis, note that this perspective held sway in geography until recently, and, in fact re-emerges now and then.  See today’s star-trib.) environmental determinism was almost entirely replaced in geography by environmental possibilism, effectively ending its prominence as the central theory in the discipline. Regardless of its decline however, environmental determinism was an important component of geographic history as it initially represented an attempt by early geographers to explain the patterns they saw developing across the globe.”

The main problem with this line of thought is that it confuses correlation with causation.  In other words it is deductive rather than inductive.  In its earliest and grossest form it posited, for example, that equatorial regions produced lazy, shiftless people because food was so readily available.  A later version of the same argument claims to correlate 70% of a nations or regions economic production by its distance from the equator.  The reasoning though is backward.

Take the article claiming the causal link between rainfall and democracy in the paper this morning.  It looks at democracies, notes that most fall in temperate regions and asks the question, why is that?  In answering this question they come to a conclusion that moderate rainfall has a goldilocks effect producing an ideal agricultural environment with an environment conducive to food storage (cold winters).  This leads to individual property and strength of individuals who can then join together in democratic government.

Well.  Here’s the way it would have to go if the theory were to actually work.  First, you would have to take a geographic or climactic feature, let’s say rainfall, then look at what rainfall produces and then predict what cultural and political configurations were likely.  At that point you could take your theory out into the wide world and see if it matched up.  If it did, then you might, note might, have a law.  The might, even in this method, is that even with prediction, correlation is not always causation.  That’s why scientific theories have to be tested and verified by others, others who don’t have your assumptions.

Both culture and political configurations are far too many variables removed from climate and geography to demonstrate causation rather than correlation.  That is, the human mind and the creativity of the group, can overcome, in fact, has a long track record of overcoming geographic and climactic variations.  Overcoming, not being overcome by.  We may argue whether that’s good or not, but it is a fact.

And, oh, by the way, this article doesn’t account for China, the world’s largest autocratic state with quite a bit of temperate climate.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on the news, Humanities, Politics

Ai Weiwei In Jail

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Spring                                                                  Waxing Bee Hiving Moon

In all the tsunami/earthquake, nuclear crisis, air strikes in Libya, brother coming, dog biting haze I missed this story about Ai Weiwei, a Chinese dissident artist whose marble chair is in our Wu Family Reception Hall.  I’ve attached a summary from the Financial Times and a video interview with Dan Rather (see above).  Especially in the Rather interview I can see the problem he poses for an autocratic regime.  He gets the notion of freedom, of individuality, of free expression.  That’s frightening stuff to autocrats.

As a man who admires Chinese civilization, its arts, its literature, its inventiveness, its long, long history, I know China and Chinese civilization has room for Ai Weiwei and his kind.  Wandering Taoist sages, eccentrics all, the mountain poets, literati painters are just the ones who come to mind right now.

The more I read Chinese literature and history I do know that they inflect the dialectic rebel/government in a way not easily understood by Americans.  That is, the rebel is bad and the government good.  Or mostly, anyhow.  This has to do in part with the notion of the mandate of heaven.  As long as the government achieves order, the people are fed and happy, then the government reflects the will of heaven.  But, if the people are starving, crime and violence becomes rampant–see the Warring States period and the end of the Han Dynasty as examples–the government has lost the mandate of heaven and must be replaced.

I have also added a TED video (above) about China, one that defines it as a civilization-state rather than nation-state and speculates on the impact of China’s rise.  I think the idea is germane to this topic.

Enough.  I’m thinking about how to impact this man’s detention in a positive way.  If you have any ideas, let me know.

Fears grow for Ai Weiwei’s safety

By Jamil Anderlini in Beijing

Published: April 5 2011 15:22 | Last updated: April 5 2011 15:22

Fears for the safety of China’s most famous artist are growing amid international condemnation of his extralegal disappearance at the hands of the country’s increasingly repressive state security apparatus.

Family members of Ai Weiwei, whose “Sunflower Seeds” installation is currently on display in London’s Tate Modern gallery, said on Tuesday evening they still had no idea of his whereabouts after he was detained at Beijing airport on Sunday and led away by airport security.

Friends, family and associates have been warned not to speak to journalists and Mr Ai’s wife and eight employees were temporarily detained on Sunday after police raided his Beijing home and studio. Beijing police have refused to provide any information concerning his whereabouts.

A member of Mr Ai’s family said at least one of his associates remained in custody after being detained on Sunday but the others had been released.

Human rights groups and associates of Mr Ai say he is in grave danger of being tortured and is probably being deprived of medicines he needs to take regularly.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Family, Weather +Climate

A Jinn Out of the Bottle

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Spring                                                                Waning Bloodroot Moon

Round Lake still has ice, April 1st.  Ice out is way late this year.

Put Kate on the Northstar this morning, headed for MSP, terminal 2, for her Southwest flight to Denver and granddaughter Ruth’s 5th birthday.  Kate gets a real kick out of visiting the grandkids, a sort of grandma thing.  It’s great to see.  Being retired makes all this much easier for her.

Fukushima nuclear disaster appears to grow worse though sorting out the news reports is difficult.  The utility company appears less than forthcoming with data and the Japanese government has been unusually slow, too.  As Bill Schmidt said at Sheepshead, the tsunami and the earthquake have created much greater human tragedy so far.  Over 10,000 dead found and probably and equal number sucked out to sea never to be found.

Those folks need our attention and our care, as do humans experiencing disasters natural or manmade anywhere.

And yet, the media focuses on the nuclear story.   This is a genie that we know, one loosed from its billions of years old bottle, a source of energy confined to the bright heart of stars until the last century.   We say we control it, but like fire, if it gets away from us, its elemental nature can overwhelm our defenses, poison our world.  The record is mostly good, consider all those reactors functioning all these years without an accident, but three, three acknowledged accidents, roils the psyche.  What have we done?  Could such an unusual confluence of events happen here or over there, or over there?

This is a story whose end is not yet written, one whose significance will become clear later, perhaps years, maybe even centuries from now.