Shall he not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
-- Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens

This Sunday morning, visiting one of my favorite personal pages, Daughter Of The Golden West, I found her latest item, "At The Fruit Stand." It is very simple; very terse. This is it complete:

"The fruit stand has a mountain of grapefruit, grown in the deserts just east of here."

That's all. But what a wealth of wonder is contained in that single sentence; a wealth of ordinary, everyday miracles that are so common we barely remark them and pass on even though they should stop us in our tracks.

It is end of January, the very depth of winter, and yet we have -- everywhere -- not just grapefruit, but "a mountain" of grapefruit. Cheap grapefruit. A dollar -- which is the new dime -- will get you one. Maybe even two or three depending on the merchant.

A few dollars more and these grapefruit can come by the case and the crate to your door in a day though you be a world away. You see we don't mind distance anymore. We toss these grapefruit into aluminum tubes and blast them into the stratosphere from coast to coast, across mountains and rivers and oceans without end. Once upon a time a single piece of citrus, an orange perhaps, was put into the toe of Christmas stockings because a piece of citrus in the dead of winter was an exotic and expensive miracle. Kings had it if they had access to the Royal Greenhouses at Kew. And perhaps their friends. Not you. Not I. Not the Daughter of the Golden West who showed up at her local fruit stand to "a mountain of grapefruit."

Where did the grapefruit come from? Why it was "grown in the deserts." Grown. In. The. Deserts. Just like that. In the deserts, in the midst of the arid climes where, throughout most of the history of the planet Earth, nothing like grapefruit would ever grow. But now it does. By the mountain.

If you look at the picture you'll see these are Seley Reds from the Seley Orchards in the Borrego Valley of Southern California. Seley Orchards are irrigated by water from 300 feet below the surface pumped up with power taken from vast solar panels.

Seley Orchards are in the Anza-Borrego desert...

which is itself but a small part of California's oddly named "Colorado Desert,"

which is itself contained within the even more extensive Sonoroan Desert

"which covers large parts of the Southwestern United States in Arizona and California, and Northwest Mexico in Sonora, Baja California, and Baja California Sur. It is one of the largest and hottest deserts in North America, with an area of 120,000 square miles."

And from this wasteland we get, without thinking it at all miraculous, "a mountain of grapefruit." But it is a miracle of the works and days of human hands. And of the American spirit and drive to make the deserts bloom. And of God who, when it comes to this nation on this morning it can still be said, "America, America, God shed his grace on thee."

How long will such luck and grace; how long will these days of miracles and wonders last? Well, that depends on the grace of God, doesn't it?

September, 2006
1. The Mystic's Dream
2. The Mummer's Dance
3. The Old Ways
4. Dante's Prayer
5. The Dark Night of the Soul
6. The Bonny Swans
7. The Lady of Shallot

Continued...

San Francisco, the nation's leading open air exhibition of failed social policies, never fails to instruct one in the infinite disabilities of social utopianism. Although large sections of this city still retain their charm in the far or middle distance -- the swooping helicopter pan shot in from the Golden Gate; the brightly painted Cable Car cresting a backlit hilltop -- most soon lose all charm in close-up.

Example: A clear and crisp dawn in a small side street near Laguna and Hayes. Plantings in all the window boxes, well but not fussily painted facades. A few, very small, very well kept front yards. Clean curtained windows. All in all a pretty and quiet moment in the city's morning. Then, between two of the cars on the street and a bulging shopping cart on the curb, I noticed a man who has obviously slept rough for at least 200 consecutive days turning in a slow pirouette and gazing intently at the ground. Then he lowered himself delicately down between an Audi and an SUV.

Seeing no real reason not to stroll on past, I did and noted that the man, pants to his ankles, was relieving himself. I was to see this behavior twice in a single day in San Francisco. And I was in the better neighborhoods.

In the course of a random walk of four hours through the most touristed sections of the city, this scene was only the most unhappily memorable of a serious of disturbing moments. Perhaps they only disturbed because they were playing out against the postcards of my memories of San Francisco during the six years I had lived and worked there in the early 70s; against even deeper images of the city in the Summer of 1968.

Against memory any present day moment would pale as nostalgia took its toll. You'd be prepared, at the least, to be disappointed since feeling that the past is preferable to the present is a common human instinct. What you're not prepared to be is disturbed but yet not shocked. After all, you've read and heard about it for years. No matter. The actual San Francisco of the present is a clear reminder that the rap is not the territory.

The extent to which the homeless, the hard-core unemployed, the drunk and the addicted, and general shabby personalities of all kinds are deployed about the city is something to bring even the most hard-core liberal from elsewhere up short. If the myriad policies and millions man-years of effort, coupled with untold billions of dollars in funding deployed in San Francisco over the last four decades have created the current visible result, something is seriously askew with the city's basic social engineering. It is as if the entire region has spent 40 years and 400 billion building a replica of the Golden Gate Bridge on Ocean Beach intending to span the Pacific. A good intention, but a city's gotta know its limitations.

Strolling San Francisco past the blanket wrapped souls that sleep upright in bus shelters, past the ad-hoc shanty towns of clustered shopping carts, past lone men swaddled in sleeping bags on a stretch of stained concrete with only a fence and a warning between them and a few meager blades of grass; all this gives one a deep sense of unease and unmitigated tragedy after the 20th exposure. After the 50th they just fade into the background body count, one more item of the city's detritus -- the sudden sirens, the litter shuffled about by the wind, the hysterical graffiti and the crass billboard ads and signs announcing yet another source of 24 hour lap dancing, the pockets of schizophrenic pan handlers, the others. All just part of San Francisco's rich tapestry of diversification through stupefaction.

Seeing so many driven so low -- and this in what still passes as "the better neighborhoods" -- you have to wonder what happened to, and what is still happening to, the billions of public funds being compulsively shoved at this problem. Where has the money and time and good intentions all gone.

The best that can be said is that it has provided lifetime employment in various government and private agencies for those who would otherwise be part of the problem they have sworn to solve. In a way, although it is commonly thought that poverty creates homelessness, it is also as correct to say that agencies set up to combat homelessness have a deep and abiding interest in preserving it. This interest and these agencies are now such a permanent feature of our government that there is virtually no chance of disbanding or eliminating them. Ever. The best that can be done is to slow, if possible, the growth of their funding since increased funding primarily swells the size of their employee pool and thus perpetuates and enhances their power.

A cynical person might believe that THISF ( "The Homeless Industry of San Francisco)", which recently merged with the Free Schizophrenics Movement (FSM), exists not to curtail suffering but to expand its scope. After all, were the number of the homeless to actually diminish in San Francisco, the number of those serving the insatiable needs of this group would also be expected to fall.

A cynical person would believe that an institutionalized, unionized group with excellent benefits and a fine pension plan would never knowingly do anything that would lower its customer base. Indeed, it would be much more likely to make the description of its customer increasingly complex so that ever more people would be discovered to be lacking in basic social services.

A cynical person would believe that the industry's customer base in San Francisco was booming. Booming to the extent that this year, and the next, and the years that come after the years after, the nation, state and city will all require more and more money from the citizens to continue to not solve homelessness.

But I am not that cynical person. I see hope in the small things, the little signs on the street that not all the homeless wish to remain so; that some of them still possess the classic American entrepreneurial spirit.

Example: At night in the same day as dawn above. I am walking down Laguna Street towards Hayes with an old friend. We have just been to a party and to drinks after and are feeling very in charge of the night. As we walk down the block I can see we are coming up on a parking lot behind a chain-link, razor-wire capped fence. I notice something odd in the fence.

When we get up to it I can see it is a used -- very used -- fishing rod of uncertain vintage and battered aspect. Instead of fishing line, rough brown twine comes up through the line loops on the rod and dangles down from the tip about 11 feet above the sidewalk. On the end of the twine, is a used -- very used -- large Starbucks coffee cup. The twine is very carefully woven into the lip of the cup. On the cup itself a grimy 3x5 card is taped. Printed on the card in hasty letters is the word "Please."

That's it. Just hanging there in the middle of the block panhandling for its owner well out of standard pan handling hours. We glance inside and it's working. There's about three dollars in change at the bottom.

Cynical men would have emptied it out to feed the parking meters for their Escalades. Not having Escalades we just chipped in and strolled on by.

Still, it was nice to know that somewhere in the vast and increasing army of the homeless now occupying The Streets of San Francisco was at least one soul who pushed aside total dependency and chose, instead, innovation in his or her chosen field of endeavor. You'd think that the vast apparatus that exists to keep people from begging on the street could learn a bit about begging from this constituent. But then again, why should they? Getting more money to do less from San Franciscans these days is like shooting fish in a barrel; a large barrel and a lot of very fat-headed fish.

For D. --who loves this city beyond all reason.

2005 Red Wing 875 Before

One of life's many small pleasures is the pleasure that comes from a apir of fine shoes or boots once they are perfectly broken in. One of life's many small problems is that by the time the perfectly broken in state is reached with most shoes and boots those items of footwear are just about worn out.

Michael Williams @ A Continuous Lean knows how important it is to keep the shoes you love in your life. Especially after six years of breaking them in. Here's his fascinating photo-essay on refurbishing his Red Wing 875

"My love of Red Wing began early one Saturday morning when I was thirteen years old. My father came into my room and woke me up and drove me to the Red Wing store in my hometown on the East Side of Cleveland to get my first pair of work boots..... In 2005 I picked up the pictured pair of 100 year anniversary 875s at the Red Wing work store in my hometown. Back in ’05 I was living in New York and was no longer harnessing the wonders of hydraulics to smash things (professionally anyway), but I still loved wearing my Red Wings. Eventually my 875s needed to be redone and I shipped them straight back to the factory in Minnesota. ... The process is pretty significant as you can see from the photos below. The truly amazing part of this process is, the boots come back literally better than new."

2005 Red Wing 875 After

For the other 27 stages of refurbishment: THE FULL ESSAY IS HERE.

of one simple truth:

Now this... this.... is more like it:

First we shall see the Rise of the Newter. This will be the naturual result of a simple qwest for a more nutritious conservative food than Romney burgers.

Then we shall hear of the disaster of nominating Mitt: In a word "Biblical."

And then.... finally we shall hear of the final prophecy of Gingrich the Traveller fulfilled:

"Gingrich the Traveler. He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldrini, the traveler came as a large and moving Torg! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the McKetrick supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Slor! Many Shuvs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!"

All of which will continue until the Republican Keymaster finds the Republican Gatekeeper, which in 2012 can only mean a Palin Paul ticket:

With the magic of the Palin | Paul ticket launched into the American mainstream, it will be time to go forth and confront the waiting Democrat monster:

"I tried to think of the most harmless thing... something from my childhood.... something that could never, ever possibly destroy us...."

What could possibly go wrong?

File Under: "Be careful what you wish for."

“To date no living man has dared
To say that E is not MC squared”

I.

Titanium skaters on lakes of metallic hydrogen
Strew constant curves of crystalline
Isotopes of orange uranium
All about our vacant house.

Enigmas of equations
Slide lattices to rest
In beds of powdered strontium,
Molding energy as form suggests.

In the place of flux we find new forms,
And our flux-formed spaces fold
The charms of magnet's fever
Which conduct the core from pole to pole.

II.

The whiteness of Earth's silence
Is an eye that stares on space.
Orbits chart it ceaselessly,
Etching paradigms of lace.

The inner of Earth's outer
Is a torus twisted twice.
Balloons ascend within it
Claiming shadows are the room.

III.

What can the mind of silence hear
Other than a whiteness past recall?
It evolves from our epicenters,
Stretches measureless as sound,

Or is seen as the floor of the void
Where the whine of protons stills
In the drifts of chromium snow,
Where we gaze upon the bones of matter bare.

At times, men in aluminum cloaks
Descend the neutron ladder,
And move in a sleet of particles
Too scintillating for instruments to record.

At times, men in groups descend
Through the smoke of the universe,
To tend the embers, imprison flame.
Their cascading dance sparkles,

We taste... the afterimage of events.
Below us, pale and silent,
The plutonium leaves arabesque
Through radiant silences of solid helium.

IV.

Sometimes it seems I had a dream and as that dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.

Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools. Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed in echoes the edges of the chamber.

Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand. Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm, as if I had just woken from all water into dream.

There's an old hoax concerning Eskimos and their hundreds of words for snow. Like all good hoaxes it sounds right, especially to those who don't know much about the Inuit. But it still is wrong. It is a myth.

I am, however, undaunted by the failure of the Inuit. I am working on compiling hundreds of words for rain. All derived from careful and miserable observation here in Seattle. Especially in light of the severe snow pasting received yesterday which is today followed up by the latest variation of snorain, a variation so unique that it calls out for its own word.

My newest word is "Hailush." This is a fat blob of moisture that contains all the qualities of hail and slush at the moment it strikes you right between the eyes. Think of a "Hailush" storm as thousands of wet melting snowballs about a quarter of an inch in diameter pelting you without mercy. That's "Hailush" -- pronounced "hail - ooosh." (Rhymes with "WTF?!")

The closest relative to Hailush in literature is, of course, "Ooblek" from the Dr. Seuss classic "Bartholomew and the Oobleck."

Oobleck does share some of the properties of Hailush. As we learn in the sacred text of Dr. Seuss, Oobleck
"Won't look like rain.
Won't look like snow.
Won't look like sleet.
That's all we know."

Well, I'm here to tell you that Oobleck, once you drift its properties down close to freezing, looks and feels a lot like Hailush.

Now you might think Hailush, like Oobleck, is a myth. But I'm here to tell you that the only myth currently on display here in Seattle is the Myth of Global Warming. And yes, my little Gore-Aid drinkers, I recognize that one winter doth not make a trend. But until your "settled science" is a bit more settled, would you please stop sending your brainwashed children around to my door collecting signatures and donations to the frigtarded Sierra Club so that we can save the planet? There's been three in the past month.

The next one to ring the bell is going to get a pail full of Hailush!

In honor of a long chain of snow days here in Seattle.

Continued...

Last night, because he's infected, Juan Willliams indulged himself in, as Morgan puts it, GoodPerson Fever;

["an obsessive-compulsive disorder involving the demonstration of certain positive attributes to strangers, for purposes of self-validation. It becomes a self-perpetuating cycle if these positive attributes don’t really exist, or if there is a great need to achieve this validation for purposes of acquiring social status, contrasted with a much lower level of confidence that these attributes really exist."].

Williams did this by whipping out the extra-large race card he carries in and trying to lay it on Newt Gingrich. Morgan notes:

"We’ve got all these ninnies just like Juan Williams, running around everywhere, and even worse still they are disproportionately represented in the hallways of power. Every decision made has to be absolutely non-offensive, and that includes the decisions of others, about matters well outside of their purview, and so they end up excoriating strangers for violating the Could Be Construed As standard. In other words, they get offended on behalf of other people, people who exist only in theory and might very well not exist at all in reality."

Unlike previous uses of the race card, last night didn't work out for Williams in the manner he's used to. Here's Williams being used like a hand puppet by Newt last night:

Elements of both sides will note this is "the playing of the race card" by Williams followed by the playing of it "right-back-at-cha" by Gingrich. Those elements and others will, from time to time, bemoan the fact that race is playing a role in the election. This ritual "bemoanment" is, to my mind, nothing more than the standard beclownment that both sides indulge in these days.

I suppose that the politically correct stance, one that you will see the president and his critics take at every moment they are not busy playing the race card, is that race has nothing to do with the election of 2012. This is, as everyone knows in their secret lives, utter nonsense. Besides the fact that race seeps into every substantive political issue in America (Hey, that's just how we roll.), it is going to be honed especially keen in the 2012 presidential run. Whether it will be used as a rapier or a machete has yet to be determined.

In the baldest possible terms you are going to be seeing a contest that will pit black against white. Since one hue is already decided the only remaining question is "how white?" Both sides will, officially, be doing all they can to insist that this is not an issue and both will not mind terribly if it is.

On the Obama side, he needs to cling, bitterly it may be, to a phalanx of voters who are not African-American in order to win. He can do this with love, with agreement, with fanaticism, and/or with guilt. Of these, the largest segment he can call on would be that powered by guilt. Knowing this the Obama machine can be counted on never to really let up on the "they hate him not because of the content of his character but because of the color of his skin." This will only get them so far, but combined with other factions, it may get them just far enough for Obama 2.0.

The reason white guilt may still be enough to drag Obama over the goal line is because the Obama Administration for these last few years has not been just about Obama and Progressivism. It has been about the entire African-American Affirmative Equality Project [AAAEP].The AAAEP has been a looming part of the American landscape for over 50 years and is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Put simply, as the leader of the AAAEP brand Obama -- no matter how much his ideas and policies fail and fail utterly -- is, himself, too black to fail. A failure on Obama's part implies, irrevocably, a failure on the part of AAAEP even though that would not be, by any stretch of the imagination, true. In a very real sense, since this is politics, the truth is irrelevant to the impression. The impression would be all that matters. Needless to say, a lot of white people -- as well as nearly all African Americans -- would be quite upset by such a verdict from history. Upset enough to be willing to say and do almost anything to keep it from happening.

A very small sign that this is the case is present above in the behavior of Juan Williams, an African-American with a Hispanic name, who --regardless of how shabbily the progressives have treated him in the last few years -- seems compelled to use the racial ugly stick upside Newt Gingrich's albino head. Poor Juan can do nothing other. He's a captive of his race and his time. As are the rest of the elements of the 2012 Presidential Race.

When it comes to Mitt Romney we already have seen the beginning of the coming tsunami of articles and opinions about his overwhelming whiteness. The opening salvo came a few days ago in an extended New York Times meditation on the whiteness of the Mitt. In a very real sense, Romney's the Moby Dick of Republican candidates and the whiteness of the Mitt will launch a thousand whaleboats with ten thousand tattooed Maori harpooners in the bows.

At the end of the day it's going to be Moby Mitt vs. Too-Black-To-Fail. Any way you look at it, it's going to be a wild ride and civility is going to have nothing to do with it. The only civil thing about the whole uncivil process will be how closely the principles stay to the first principle about the 2012 election: No matter how much it may be about race, you aren't allowed to say it has anything at all to do with race.

Got that. Good. On with the show.

And, as the sun sets slowly on western civilization....

This is a translated transcript of a conversation in Italian between the commander of the cruise lines (Port Authority) and the "Captain" of the wrecked cruise liner who has, it seems, been one of the first off the ship. Port Authority is none too pleased with this and is having none of Shittino's ... er... Schettino's excuses:

Continued...

Mail from one of my oldest friends this morning brings this update of an ageless fable.

Continued...

Some say that snow is sleep. I say
That snow is but the rest
Of clouds upon earth's surface laid
To soothe the forest's breast,
To calm the souls that linger there
Beneath an age of leaf
That hides within it's brindle flesh
Whole galaxies of seed.

Some say that snow is chill. I say
That snow is but a shawl
Draped over stones of silence,
That such silence shelter all.
And in such silence seal within
The brook beneath the glass,
That when the spring shall set it free
All dreams to sea shall pass.

Some say that snow is death. I say
That snow is but the prayer
Said when soul in winter's glade
Calls the body from its lair,
To stand within the last of light,
Becoming less than air,
To leave behind what came before
In the shadows dawn prepares.

"You know how you can tell that "everyone wants freedom" is baloney?....

Continued...

Gallup has some news that should be reassuring -- Conservatives Remain the Largest Ideological Group in U.S.

Political ideology in the U.S. held steady in 2011, with 40% of Americans continuing to describe their views as conservative, 35% as moderate, and 21% as liberal.

It "should be reassuring" if only many of those online that pass themselves off as "conservative" weren't currently demonstrating to all and sundry that, like too much perfectionism, too much conservatism is a mistake.

Yes, nothing is damaging the "Conservative Brand" lately more than the rolling stupidity that is lumping itself around the failure of the Republicans to come up with a viable candidate that is more "Conservative" than Mitt Romney. This "failure", which was predictable as long as four years ago, is causing many online 'conservatives to drop into premature political menopause with whining, hot flashes of anger, and the grinding of dull, old, axes. They are pissed, it would seem, because nobody other than Romney can carry the fight to Obama in the coming election. The more demented among them are declaring, shades of McCain/2008, that they will take their retracted balls and go home on election day rather than vote against Obama.

These people are deeply stupefied and confused. Ideology will do that to you. They seem to think, to actually believe, that this coming election is about only voting if you can vote for a candidate you like. Let me disabuse these kids of this silly notion right away. The election of 2012 ain't a conservative popularity contest. It's a war to, first, last, and always, destroy any possibility of a second term for Barack Hussain Obama.

This is not a "Vote-For" election. This is a "Vote-Against" election. This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election. That is what it is about and that is all it is about.

If people can't understand, at this point, that very simple concept their minds are much too simple to be conservatives and they might as well go off and sit at the kiddy table and write in "Vermin Supreme" with a blunt pink crayon.

If true conservatives want to have a truly conservative candidate in a truly conservative party they will have to commit to the long march. You know, "the long march" like the one the left took through out political, academic, religious, and media institutions. The one they spent decades on. The long hard road to political supremacy. The one that takes work and money.

That's the one thing I don't see erstwhile conservatives actually doing from election to election. Instead they run their lives and their businesses off on the side and they show up every three years or so to watch the little red hens of politics take the nomination away from their conservative flavor of the week.

The way the Republican party is set up in the primary system means that to even have a shot at winning it you have to be running for it years and years and years before the actual elections. That's what Romney's been doing. That's the game and he's got the pieces in place to win it. You may not like it, but, hey, change it or play it.

But if you're beat because your "choices" are late to the party like Perry, or not really in it to win it like Newt, don't start blaming Romney the little red hen.

It's just not dignified to hold your breath, stamp your feet, and threaten to take your retracted balls and go home.

So suck it up and remember this: This is not a "Sit-It-Out-And-Pout" election. This is a "Get-Obama-Out" election.

Go now, my conservative friends, and sin no more.

[Greetings InstaPunditeers! Check out the vast elsewhere here so that we can put a quake in your quaker, some shake in your shaker, and a rock in your sock!]

Continued...

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the cloud.
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
-- Wallace Stevens

A clear day and a long road running south out of Nelson in British Columbia towards the US border. Lakes loom on the left embraced by the forested mountains that rise up displaying more greens than can be counted. The air, as it slips by the window, is crisp even in July. Somewhere up past the first two ranges of mountains, snow lingers. It's a perfect day and the road goes on forever.

We come over a rise and see curling out before us between the forests a rolling S-curve of smooth asphalt arcing down the valley and then up and over the hill far beyond. My passenger, skilled in racing very large motorcycles very well, looks at it and says, "That's the road motorcyclists dream of. Perfectly banked and perfectly curved with a long, long sight line and no oncoming traffic."

I nod and give it the gas. The turbocharger kicks in. The car leaps forward with a growl. The forest outside becomes a green blur. We sweep down and around, up and over the hill.

And we're gone.

I pity the future for a lot of reasons, but I really pity that future that will no longer be able to know the pure pleasures of personal speed. As Jack Kerouac knew,

"Man, you gotta go."

Say what you like about our poor beaten-down gas guzzlers, they've given us over a century of thrills for everyman.

I pity that future that won't ever experience the sweet feeling of motoring in a vehicle with a large internal-combustion engine running on heavy fuel. A vehicle with a glutton's diet of pure petrochemical byproducts. A car that turns the sunshine that fell to Earth on some antediluvian day 500 million summers gone into a surge of pure speed on this fine July afternoon.

I pity my descendants who will never be able to look out at some sweeping mountain road, perfectly curved, perfectly banked, with no oncoming traffic and just "Give it the gas."

"Give it the photons" just doesn't have the same cachet.

---

HT to The Dipso Chronicles: Literary Antacid for bringing this back.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C.  | Confederate Civil War vessel H.L. Hunley, the world's first successful combat submarine, was unveiled in full and unobstructed for the first time on Thursday, capping a decade of careful preservation.

"No one alive has ever seen the Hunley complete. We're going to see it today," engineer John King said as a crane at a Charleston conservation laboratory slowly lifted a massive steel truss covering the top of the submarine.

Continued...

The chairman doubled down with: "Some colleagues still think that car-sharing borders on communism," said Dieter Zetsche, chairman of Mercedes-Benz during his first keynote at CES in Las Vegas while discussing the company's CarTogether initiative in front of a giant image of Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara. "But if that's the case, viva la revolucion!" -- Media - Variety

OOPS! There's just something so German about idolizing a mass murderer:

Continued...

Yeah. Right.: "As a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me..." Newt is now out-Mitting Mitt

Control: We have a rotten apple, Mitt.

Control: [to Romney] There's a mole, right at the top of the Republican Circus. And he's been there for years.

If you've seen the new remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the last few weeks, you've seen the last few weeks of the Republican Party's endless quest to shoot itself. After all, the party has not just nurtured a single spy but a whole festering nest of spies and turncoats in its upper reaches for decades. Indeed if you have any position at all in the Republican Party you are, in essence, a stealth Democrat.

Proof? Cast your eyes on the survivors of the run for the presidential nomination. Got it?

Continued...

From the Southern Literary Messenger. | Published: March 24, 1860 [Emphasis added]

Dear Sir:
You are surprised to learn that I have not a high opinion of Mr. JEFFERSON, and I am surprised at your surprise. I am certain that I never wrote a line, and that I never, in Parliament, in conversation, or even on the hustings -- a place where it is the fashion to court the populace -- uttered a word indicating an opinion that the supreme authority in a State ought to be intrusted to the majority of citizens told by the head; in other words, to the poorest and most ignorant part of society. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.

In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous. What happened lately in France is an example. In 1848 a pure Democracy was established there. During a short time there was reason to expect a general spoliation, a national bankruptcy, a new partition of the soil, a maximum of prices, a ruinous load of taxation laid on the rich for the purpose of supporting the poor in idleness. Such a system would, in twenty years, have made France as poor and barbarous as France of the Carlovingians. Happily the danger was averted; and now there is a despotism, a silent tribune, an enslaved Press. Liberty is gone; but civilization has been saved. I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely Democratic Government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilization would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and Liberty would perish.

You may think that your country enjoys an exemption from these evils. I will frankly own to you that I am of a very different opinion.

Continued...

Sippican says this is: "Like holding a bus station microphone up to a Hiroshima bomb. It's a Rocket 88 running from the law of averages with the lights off. A hive of angry bees sliced thin with a meat-packer's blade. Mount Vesuvius with the knob set to simmer. A club of off-duty arsonists lighting a Lucky Strike with a flare. A Big House rent party supreme. A Buddha made from a bucket of mud, a gallon of process, and a half-ton of lightning."

That's not even the half of it.... but it's a great start to introducing.... Muddy Waters!

Continued...

The record of yet another series of moments when the beauty of the Earth and the human race rises up and takes your heart with it. The Creator made the world and the entire universe for moments exactly like this. And gave you a ring side seat.

Continued...

Matthew had some strong ideas about prayer. It is in his book that we find the Lord's Prayer, also known as "The Swiss Army Knife of Prayers." This particular prayer, according to Matthew (who should know about these things), is the Alpha and the Omega of prayers. He stresses this when he writes in Matthew 6:9-6:13, "After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven....

Of late, and for obvious reasons, I've become more likely to pray than to curse. Indeed my new program is to swap a prayer for a curse whenever I find I've slipped into the cursing mode.

In a world that is, by its nature, accursed, putting more curses into it is never a good idea. We are sort of full up at present. No shortage of curses that I can see. Still, slipping into the cursing mode is easy to do in today's world. We're encouraged to do it by the very nature of the secular society in which we are steeped by contemporary media and culture.

Add to that a thirty year stint in New York City where the standard reaction to almost any event is either a curse that involves the middle initial of the Savior (Just what does that "H." stand for after all?), or the invocation of unnamed males who have an affinity for have rapid violent crude sex only with females of the motherly persuasion, and you've got, when it comes to my ability and propensity to curse, one crude mother....

It's a bad habit and one that I am trying to break. One way is, whenever I catch myself in an angry cursing moment, to recite a prayer instead. And the goto prayer in these multiple moments is always the Lord's. It's brief. It's beautiful. I can say it at high speed and by rote.

Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day...

The Lord's Prayer also has a hidden benefit. It has, at is core, one simple but profound request:

"Give. Us. This. Day."

That's it. That's the real core of all prayers. That is the one request of the Lord without which nothing else matters. That is what all our past, lost days flow towards and which all our future hoped-for days flow from. Without the gift of "This Day" the ones that have passed have no meaning and the ones that are to come have no potentiality. Both are but abstractions or, as the poet has it:

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Which is a fancy way of saying that without the gift of this day being given all else is lost. Secular thinkers speak of this as being "in the now" as if "being here now" was all that it took to be really alive.

I've lived in that popcult now and, looking back, I seem to remember it not as luminous headlands overlooking the sea, but as shadowlands along a darker border. It was neither a gift nor a curse, a burden or a blessing. It simply was and, as a result, was rather unremarkable. It originated out of nothing, out of the limited imagination of the noosphere and, with no reach beyond itself, existed closer to the Alpha than to the Omega. It had, as secular things often do, a tangle of bright, shiny deceivers framing it, but when you arrived at the center it had nothing to say about tomorrow, and very little to promise about this day other than that it would be roughly similar to yesterday. There was little inscape and no escape. Its "Now" was always the same day, neither given nor taken but simply existing. It was the kind of day in which the existence of the Human and the Planaria were essentially equal. I, for one, would rather ask for my day than simply arrive in it.

Which is why, when I pray the Lord's Prayer, I always pause -- at the very least -- when I come to the phrase, "Give us this day." And in that pause I remember another phrase derived from scripture, "Tomorrow is not promised."

I once knew that phrase, "Tomorrow is not promised," in a rather dry, academic, vaguely poetic manner. Now, having had my all my tomorrows removed and then miraculously restored, I understand the phrase down to the marrow of my bones. Coming into the day I always ask "Give us this day." Departing the day I find I return to the early litanies of childhood, "I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake...."

But then, so far, I do wake and I continue in my project to replace curses with prayers. I'm not that good at it yet. Still fairly shaky. Then again, as another poet tells me,

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.

What falls away is always. And is near.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

I learn by going where I have to go.

The Lord give me (and give you) this day.

Continued...

What I said to my "concerned" friends that asked was, "I like to collect permissions to do things." I lied. Being freaked out that anyone they knew would take gun training and get a concealed weapons permit, they tacitly agreed to believe that lie. It kept everything smooth and "non-political," which I how a lot of my friends and I like it these days. All part of the little lies we tell because we cannot face reality in the world and in our relationships.

I took pistol training because one day it dawned on me that if I ever actually needed a gun it would be too late to shop.

It dawned on me after an unarmed mother and daughter were shot to death hiking in the mountains around Seattle. (Mother Daughter Shot While Hiking). It dawned on me after an enraged Muslim had bluffed his way into the Jewish Community Center of Seattle last summer and shot six women and killed one. (Six Women Shot One Killed at Jewish Federation) That was the week I went and signed up for gun training. After the training I felt I would be qualified to get a gun.I would get it because it was my right to get it. I would get it because I could. I would get it because Washington, no matter how deeply mired in denial and dementia Seattle may become, Washington itself is still a "must issue" state. And how long that would last in the demented rush to disarm and make all citizens effective wards of the state for their "protection" was anybody's guess.

Continued...

My Back Pages: Debating on the step of Sproul Hall, UC Berkeley, 1966. (Left to right:) Me (Somewhat younger but just as strident), An Iranian friend named "Jaz" -- worked with me in the UC library, a refugee from the Shah's Iran -- probably went back after the fall of the Shah, (foreground right)"The Anti-Communist." He lost his eye in the Hungarian Uprising and had to run for the border and on into the West to stay alive. In this picture he's attempting to convince me that Communism is an evil ideology. I'm not buying it then, but I buy it now.

Lately Americans seem to be slimming on a daily drip-feed of despair for our future and estrangement from our past. It's not a new diet in this country, but it is starting to assume the proportions of a runaway fad diet, a political Pritikins. This thin gruel is what's being poured into us from Seattle, Washington to Washington, D.C.

If you look closely at this diet for a diminished America you see a familiar list of "ingredients." The list is composed of the ideological stock and trade of a significant segment of Americans to whom this nation, as conceived by our founders, and struggled for for more than 200 years is merely one long, large joke; the Baby Boomers.

And I should know. After all, that boy in the picture up there -- that boy that thought Communism was "something we could live with" -- that young boy was me.

In my small way, I took part in the crafting of The Boomers’ Big Joke on America. For years I thought there was nothing funnier. Conceived during the waning months of World War II, I had no idea I was a Baby Boomer, but that, in the end, was what I was. And being a member of this large and fortunate generation gave me the leisure to develop quite a sense of humor when it came to basic human values. It even gave one woman of my cohort, Stanley Ann Dunham, the opportunity to actually conceive the punch line to our joke, her emasculate conception, the current clone passing as “President.”

When I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s, we were the Brave New World's social engineers driving our little red choo-choo round the bend. We were the innovators, and we were busy innovating the brave new world wherein everything about the old world of our parents seemed either hilarious or evil.

Our program was quite clear early on and it hasn't changed a jot since those years, it has simply gotten more pervasive and elaborate. After all, we're older now and we're in control. We can finally fund these things. With your money.

Here’s how things went in our Brave New Whirled:

• God, if he didn't emerge from 500 mikes of pure Sandoz LSD, was just a funny old guy a little bit like Santa Claus but with less of a user base.
  
• The Bill of Rights was okay as long as you could figure out someway to erase a few of the amendments involving guns and add a host of new ones involving groups.
  
• The Constitution? Too long and too arcane to really read with care. It was a given so what did we care?
  
• History? The only really happening history was the future, man. Ours.
  
• The United States? They were really "AmeriKKKa" -- Satan incarnate.
  
• The US Military? Baby killers and agents of Satan.
  
• The Police? Pigs.
  
• The Viet Cong, Ho Chi Minh, Chairman Mao, Fidel Castro, and a host of other evil dictators and fascists? Heroes of "The People."
  
• The People? Really wonderful as long as you didn't really have to hang out with them.
  
• Voting in political parties? Stupid. We were into "participatory democracy" which involved really long meetings. ( This is now known as "emergent democracy" and involves really long online discussion threads.)
  
• We believed in sex and drugs and rock and roll.
  
• We were determined to resist "the man" on all levels.
  
• We were young.

Continued...

During my years in the cities, returning to New York by air at night mesmerized me during the long approach. Sliding down over the Alleghenies from the west, curving in over the Atlantic from the South, or throttling back and easing off the Great Circle Route from Europe, the emergence of the vast sprawl of lights that defined the Hive always enraptured me.

On moonless nights, after the humming hours held in that aluminum cylinder hoisted into mid-heaven, you saw the long continents of dark water or land dissolve into shimmering white-gold strands connecting to clusters of earth-anchored constellations that merged to expanding galaxies of towns, suburbs, and cities until all below was a shimmering web of man-made stars.

As you swept down still lower, these massive meadows of stars resolved to highways and streets, boroughs and neighborhoods, houses and buildings and the yellow prongs of headlights darting under the streetlights. Then you were over the boundary, the runway blurring just beneath your seat. A bump and a bounce, engines reversing, weight shifting forward then back, and you were returned to earth and rolling towards the gate. If you were coming in from the Caribbean there was grateful applause for the pilot for the miracle of a safe landing.

You deplaned, grabbed your bags, hailed a cab and soon were bumping along the Long Island Expressway, one pair of headlights hazed beneath streetlights you'd looked down on only minutes before. The meter clicked past $30.00, the skyline of Manhattan rose behind the gravestones of the vast cemetery, a bridge and a toll and you were back in the Hive.

Continued...

Presented for your consideration, a two minute slice of what listening to poets who meant what they said and said what they meant must have been like over 1,000 years ago.

These are the opening lines of the oldest English epic poem*, Beowulf, declaimed in the style popular at the time of their origins. Beowulf, written in England, but set in Scandinavia has variously been dated to between the 8th and the early 11th centuries. Take two minutes to listen to this vanished art brought back to fitful life.

The clip begins in an intentionally disarming fashion which, I think, helps us to make a leap of imagination from the present day to the night gatherings around bonfires and flickering torches in which these tales of love and death were told. Attending what can only be a recreation of these arcane styles of declamation seems an effete ritual these days. I'd submit it seems so only because we have grown so used to "all-entertainment all-the-time everywhere," we cannot imagine the impact of these original entertainments when they were the rarest thing in a human life bounded by works and days.

Part story, part panegyric, part worship, the reciting of an epic was an event that could span days, even weeks. How the earliest bards held all of the poem in memory is still somewhat of a mystery, but the rhetorical structure of the poem, known set-pieces played much as jazz would be played centuries later, and various methods of loci, or "Memory Palaces" probably all played a role. No matter how it was done, the fact that it could be done with Beowulf, which runs to nearly 3,200 lines remains impressive. Other epics loom larger than that.

And it wasn't enough to declaim the epic, you had to provide a few musical bridges, many voices, and a lot of acting. For this reason, as well as their rarity, Bards were held in high esteem. Later poets would try, on paper at least, to recapture this sort of esteem but, except for a period in Soviet Russia, poets and poetry have fallen on hard times in recent centuries, becoming an art esteemed slightly above slip mold ceramics.

"I don't get no respect" is a common plaint of our contemporary "poetic" poets attached to their various academic sinecures like stunted embryos on withering umbilicals. About once every twenty years, you'll hear the barbaric yawps of spoken word poets try to cut their way through the petrified forests of the groves of academe, but most are quickly subsumed back into the dusty compost of poetasters and poet poseurs.

The Beats had a run at it in the 1950s, but slumped back into their own comfy berths in the spiritual opium dens of what used to be the "counter-culture." Now the well-codified hipster poet is content with his underwritten "job for life." The Beats went on the road with a Howl but have ended in the cul-de-sac of Maya Angelou.

The "singer-songwriter" poets of the late 1960s / early 1970s had their run powered by the advent of Bob Dylan, who still can impress when he comes to work. But money changes everything and most of them soon vanished into Hotel California.

Currently, there's a craze for Poetry Slams that manages to produce some arresting, if forgettable, work in an environment more conducive to what was once "a battle of the bands." At this time, Slams are touted as "bigger than ever," a sure sign this phenomenon, famous for having fewer formal rules than Rap, has passed its peak.

Ah, but then there is Rap, you say. And in a sense you'd be right since Rap certainly fulfills the aspect of declamation and can even gesture towards length. It is also energetic in terms of its heavy reliance of percussion and a vocal range from shouting to shrill. Rap also benefits from scenting itself with Eau de Hood and delivers a simulacrum of the real. But Rap has been heavily ossified for well over a decade and may soon find itself with more than its share of petrified forests and post-mortum effects. It's hard to imagine people in more than a thousand years gathering to hear some android with an attitude running the changes of Wu-Tang Clan's Forever.

You'd think -- with the advent of the Internet and the much heralded (Global) (Hive) Mind -- it would be easy to jump start epic poetry again as a major art form, but you'd be wrong. One element is missing from the mix of low barriers to entry, cheap recording and distribution, and an audience in the millions for any sort of dreck that manages to be cranked out from the star-making machinery. Poetry today has everything it needs for an epic to bloom except the ability to declaim in the affirmative voice.

Poetry today is, for the most part, deeply embedded in the secular culture, and there is no affirmative available to that culture, since the affirmative depends on a belief in something other than, larger than, the self. Today's denial of the spirit and celebration of the now and the now alone blocks any ability to sound the affirmative, to strike the strings that soul sing, and higher sing. It's the solution that Wallace Stephens sought but could never attain, as he notes in The Man with the Blue Guitar

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

Poetry can't matter as it once mattered because the base ground of being has been yanked out from under the culture, leaving it stranded in mid-air, unable to ascend, having only the fall before it.

Still, we can hear the echoes of what that more heroic and poetic age must have been like, at least at festival time, in the brief two minutes in the clip above. In a way, it's a good thing that it is only two minutes. Most can spare that but would find themselves at sea if anything much longer would be required of them.

As the poet says, "Humankind cannot bear / very much reality."

---

(HT: Myth & True Myth @ Belmont Club)
*Oldest in the sense of an epic poem, not a collection of songs as in The Book of Taliesin.

Republished from May 2009 because "All the news just repeats itself / Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen"

Who says there's no good news? Who says heros are not always with us?

Continued...

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