Category Archives: Commentary on the news

Commentary on the news, Memories, Politics, US History

First Amendment

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Winter                                                            Waning Moon of the Winter Solstice

Walker stands with national peers in support of artistic freedom.  This is a big deal and I’m proud to be part of a community and an artistic/museum community that supports artistic freedom.

54 years ago I began carrying newspapers for the Alexandria Times-Tribune, a paper route that went west on Monroe Street from Harrison, then fanning out toward the then brand new elementary school.  Learning to fold the evening paper, the Trib was a daily back then, in a square, and how to pitch it in a gentle arc that landed on my customers doorsteps gave me physical pleasure, a manual skill.

My dad was editor of the paper then, so the question of freedom of speech was, at least in our house, not a question at all but a loud proclamation, made every day about 3:30 p.m. when the Trib hit the streets courtesy of myself and several other carriers.

(This artist made the banned movie:  David Wojnarowicz   Four Elements  1990 lithograph on paper  T.B. Walker Acquisition Fund, 1991)

Dad did a couple of things that stuck with me though I imagine he did many more.  First of all when the John Birch Society raised its impeach Earl Warren/US out of the United Nations flag around town, Dad got a copy of its founder’s book, The Blue Book.  In it Robert Welch outlined clearly anti-democratic, plutocratic views.  Dad published relevant portions in the Tribune.  Gutsy in a town of 5,000.   Later, he also published a letter to the editor by a would be English teacher rankled at Dad’s opposition to this coach becoming a teacher of the language.  He printed the letter as received with many spelling and grammatical errors.  Coach did not get the job.

Extraneous sidebar:  the same coach got himself arrested years later in southern Indiana when he stole a bucket of quarters while gambling on a river boat.

You may know the John Birch Society best in its present day position of influence behind the Tea-Party Mad Hatters.  My hometown was and is a hotspot for extremist right-wingers.  Back in the day it was the John Birch Society and the Minutemen, later the KKK and now the Tea-Party.  In fact, the Alexandria, Indiana leader of the Tea-Party got arrested for drug possession last week.  My old buddy, Ed Schmidt, alerted me to that piece of news.  Ed was mayor of Alexandria for a couple of terms.

Muzzling critics, whether political or artistic, cannot be countenanced in a society built on a free exchange of ideas.  The need to speak truth to power demands that we go out of our way to listen to voices on the margin, to open ourselves to what might be unpleasant messages or messages wrapped in unpleasant containers.  The freedom they’re saving just might be your own.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news

10 Best Lists of 10 Best…

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Winter                                                         Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

We have passed the tipping point now.  Though the nights continue long for another 3 or 4 days, we begin to gain back light, a few minutes at a time.  This is a slow process and accounts for much of winter’s length.  Those of us who love the winter find this good news; those who don’t, often head south about now.

This is also a time period when newspapers fill up with the ten top stories, ideas, pictures, sporting events.  A time of lists that attempt to summarize a year, or, in this case, sometimes a decade.  I’ve seen many so far and I enjoy them, always weighing the writers choices against my own, wondering what possessed them to add, say youth condoms, to a list of the year’s 10 best ideas (NYT).

It’s a fun game and I intend to play, too.  Perhaps with my 10 favorite works of art, 10 favorite gardening and bee-keeping moments, 10 favorite family events, maybe my 10 favorite political moments, movies, poems.  I don’t know.  Still mulling, but look for something here before the end of the year.

BTW:  The Thaw Collection of Native American Masterpieces ends on January 9th and Embarrassment of Riches ends on January 2nd.  These are both excellent shows and if you haven’t seen them, I recommend them both.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Minnesota, Politics

Legislature 2011-2012

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Samhain                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Conference this morning with legislative panelists who will have decision making authority in environmental matters.  I got a clear sense of the lay of the land.  There’s going to be a lot of efficiency, getting things done, streamlining, living in the real world and not dwelling on nit-picky words.  There’s also to be a lot of looking for common ground, shared vision, commitment to decisions already made, what Minnesotan’s want, keen thoughts about supplanting and supplementing. (Legacy Amendment Money)

The session began with a frame, the budget over the next few years.  Sobering doesn’t quite capture it.  More like catastrophic, devastating, difficult, no easy answers.  Environmental issues will seem, to some, as second thoughts at best, or, at worst, as possible pots of money to shore up the general fund.

How the legislature works this year and next depends on a group of newly dominant legislators who have not been running things for many years.  A steep learning curve will come into play at the same time a major economic crisis slides into place.  Not a recipe for a clean, clear-headed approach to the state’s needs, economic or environmental.

It will behoove all of us to avoid game-playing, name-calling and stereotyping.  I know that’s a cliche, but in the heat of what will be a contentious and possibly, bitter, biennium, it’s pretty damn important.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Health, US History, Weather +Climate

The Civil War

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The NYT has started a series focusing on the civil war, looking back 150 years ago.   Lincoln has just been elected and the country has an internal division not matched again until, perhaps, the 1960’s, the War’s one hundredth anniversary.  The Civil War fascinates me and I’ve visited several battlefields, as I’ve said here before.  I’ve been especially interested in the war’s execution, why did the North win and the South lose?  What have been the subsequent ramifications?  Did Lincoln’s execution, which put Andrew Johnson in the Presidency, set back the integration of African-Americans into American society by a century or more?  What did we learn?  I look forward to a several year focus on the war, raising these questions anew.

A quiet physical.  Saw Tom Byfield there, apparently we share a doctor.  Tom, Davis that is, collects pueblo pottery and has a couple on loan to the MIA.  I didn’t recognize his description, but I’m gonna check’em out.  This time, the first time in a long time, I had no particular concerns to raise.    He found nothing new or remarkable.   The labs will come in, of course, and we’ll see then, but for now, I’m feeling good.

When I drove in today, each exit off Highway 94, starting at Broadway, then 4th street and finally Hennepin/Lyndale had cars backed up onto the freeway.  I took Hennepin/Lyndale thinking there must a traffic jam in the city because of the snow.  Nope.  A peculiar situation, one of those imponderables that happens here when we get lots of snow and very cold weather.  People drive strange.

On the news sheet:  4 bodies in NYC, dumped along a Long Island freeway, might mean a serial killer.  Motorcycle thief steals $1.5 in Bellagio chips, rides away.  So, is it news stories ripped from the television cop dramas or the other way around?

Commentary on the news, Weather +Climate

A Brane Teaser?

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Samhain                                         Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

You may go now, the storm has ended.  Well, maybe.  The MIA, noted for never closing, closed yesterday and today.  The metrodome collapsed.  See.  We told you.  Zyggi Wilf and family.  I threw thigh high snow off our front sidewalk and trimmed down a waist high drift on our deck so the dogs could get out and come back.  Roughly a foot fell, always hard to measure.

A local meterologist developed the gold standard for measuring snow depth.  He puts a hard rubber mat on the ground, lets the snow fall on it, then pushes a yardstick through the snow.  Check where the top of the snow meets the yard stick.  Voila!  No kidding.

Snowapocalypse.  Snowmaggedon.  Snowmygod.  Local weather weenies tried to raise this to mega-event standards, but it just doesn’t get there.  Yes, we’re a major metro area and a foot to a foot and a half (south) makes the metro pretty miserable for travelers, but our snow totals are no record breakers.

We do have a difference from a lot of other snowy locations.  When our snow comes in winters like this one, it cools the air above it and remains on the ground until spring.  That means accumulating snow fall becomes a challenge with parking lot snow mountains rising up like retail Himalayas and city streets sometimes going from two-sided parking to one-sided.  It begins to get interesting then.

Is there a collapse vortex near this location?  Perhaps a quantum field breaking through into what we conceive of as the one and only true reality?  I mean, it’s a brane teaser I know, but it could be.  Think of the many worlds hypothesis favored by string theorists.  Why do I ask?  Well. This next picture, taken less than half a mile from the site of the dome collapse tells the story.

Art and Culture, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Politics

Day by Day

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Samhain                                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Thursday is art day; Friday is Latin day.  Today Greg and I will go over my (rough) translation of verses 36-48 of Book I of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Though slow going, I get a thrill each time I crack a phrase, write it down and it makes sense.  Even if Greg later points out I’m wrong.   I have a lot of opportunity for improvement and that makes the learning worthwhile.  Saturday is errand day and around the house work day.  Sunday, again, is Latin.  Monday is business meeting and Woolly day.  This leaves me Tuesday and Wednesday as buffer days.  So far, this schedule seems to work pretty well for me, though my lackluster performance yesterday made me wonder a bit.

(this graphic illustrates the verses I’ve translated for today.)

On the climate change front.  The world has begun to lurch forward on two aspects of climate change:  reduction of carbon emissions and adaptation.  In the more radical wing of the environmental movement adaptation or mitigation has been capitulation, something to avoid since it muddies the gravity of the problem we face.  A tipping point may be at hand.  Folks have begun to put forth adaptation in the context of realizing the global warming train has not only left the station, but is well on its way.  A certain, not insubstantial amount of warming is now inevitable, perhaps as much 2 degrees, possibly more.   Given that, mitigating projects that can help soften the damage, are not only a good idea, but necessary.  If proposed in the context of inevitable warming, mitigation projects can also underscore the need to take dramatic steps now to prevent more warming.  I’m hopeful we’ll see progress out of Cancun.

My comments above do fly in the face of polling numbers that suggest climate change has receded in the public’s mind, especially as the economic crisis has shoved personal financial peril forward.  Understandable, but not good.  My hunch about a tipping point comes more from the gradual roll out of an increasing consensus about the science.  We’ll see.

Commentary on the news, GeekWorld, Humanities, Myth and Story

Sticking It To The Man

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Samhain                                                 Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

File under sticking it to the man:  Wikileaks.  File under government mad, pouts, hunts down bad man and charges him with anything they can find.  Come on, guys. I’m no Rand Paulite and even I can see big government blaming somebody, anybody else for the mud in their own eye.  Let Assange go and quit acting like spoiled children.  Transparency is a good thing.   Even if it forces short term changes.  Face up to it and move on.

File in the already fat folder:  Science fiction comes true.  A private corporation put a capsule into space and brought it back to earth safely.  Well, to ocean.  Scenes from 2001 floated before me with weightless passengers on a Pan-Am flight drinking Coca-Cola served by in-flight attendants dressed like Twiggy.

Finished up verse 46 of the Metamorphosis.  If I did my arithmetic right, I am now one third of one thousandth of the way toward my goal.  Of course, this probably inflates the quality of my early attempts which a more adept me will have to redo.  Even so.

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Humanities, Politics

Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton

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Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Back up at 8 am for an 8:30 conference call with the Minnesota Environmental Partnership.  This concerned information we may use when defending against roll backs to current environmental policy.  The sound quality was poor, but the information, presented in power point slides via a webinar website, had a lot of good data.  I can’t discuss it, but it was far from discouraging.

Here’s good news just posted at the Trib:  Emmer concedes governor’s race to Dayton.   A tip of the hat to the state Republicans.  They read the state right; we’re weary of recount wrangles.  Perhaps we can begin a more bi-partisan approach to Minnesota’s future.  I’d like to see it.  Bi-partisanship is good for environmental issues.

We will probably spend more time on administrative and rule-making work for the next two years than we have in the past. We being the Sierra Club and our allies.

In between I looked up Latin words in preparation for translating lines 40-45 of Book I, the Metamorphosis.  It’s something about water and the sky and sun, but I have yet to put it together.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

The Seventh Generation

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Samhain                                  Waning Thanksgiving Moon

Any of us who work the legislature and the administration for any purpose have to take the 6.2 billion dollar deficit seriously.  It will disrupt state work, occupy legislative time and distract attention from other matters, especially longer term matters like environmental and conservation issues.  It could also, in light of its direct cause, the economic crisis and slow return of jobs to our state economy, tilt the scales in favor of jobs based proposals like the Polymet hard-rock, sulfide mine proposed for the edge of the Iron Range.

In times when the books balance and the state’s economy hums along at full employment decisions with long term consequences are still hard to make.  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to simply duck the issues of logging off our state and national forests, their resiliency in light of climate change and the damage to them wrought by invasive species and powered vehicles.  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to put off financial investments in mass transit.  Why spend money when we already have roads and buses?  It would be easy, then, in hard times, to put off more ambitious clean energy goals, continuing to pump electricity out of toxic emitters like coal plants, balking at ground floor investments needed in wind and solar energy.

It would be easy, but it would not be wise.  We have learned already, the hard way, that mountain tops once removed, will no longer rise toward the sky.  We have learned, the hard way, that sulfide mining produces heavy metal and sulfuric acid waste that lasts not years, not decades, but centuries, outlasting the companies that produced it, the jobs created and the governments that allowed it.  We have learned, the hard way, that generating energy with dirty fuels like coal, gasoline and nuclear fission has consequences, world changing, life shattering, additive changes.

This means that especially now we must be vigilant, careful, thinking about the seventh generation when we make our decisions.  Will the seventh generation of Iron Rangers be better off with hard-rock sulfide mines spread along the Range?  Will my seventh generation, my grandchildren of the distant future, find a boreal forest in Minnesota? Will there still be unpaved portions of the metro area?  Areas saved by the development of rail, bicycle and pedestrian pathways?

Hard times, hard as they are, come and go.  The clean waters we love, the dense forests through which we hike, the fresh air we breathe can all be imperiled by decisions made with long term benefits lost, traded for short term gain.