On the greatest chocolate-chip cookie in the known universe, with recipe....

The Critical American Issue of the Day

This issue is not, as many would have you believe, whether or not the Constitution is a "living document" (It will be a living document on the day that it breaks out of its case and takes the current Supreme Court out for a drink, a toke, a smoke, and a poke -- assuming Justice Ginsberg stays home.), but is centered instead on the much more important and utterly American question: "Just what is the finest chocolate chip cookie in the known universe?"

One night in the Hood River Hotel in Hood River, Oregon on the banks of the Columbia, I had a chance to examine that question again just before the cataleptic sugar shock of nine home-made chocolate chip cookies knocked me sideways for eight hours like a poleaxed pound puppy.

When this coma finally released me, I thought more deeply on the question of the Holy Cookie and what makes for greatness. I would have liked to hand the baker of the cookies that conked me the laurels but I cannot.

I shall explain the nature of my judgment, the history behind it, and also, should you choose to stay with me, provide you and you alone with the recipe for, "the finest chocolate chip cookie in the known universe."

First of all, anything that can be purchased in a supermarket is not fit to be called a cookie, much less a chocolate chip cookie, no matter how thick the BS on the package may be. Especially any with the word "artisan" on the package which must be incinerated in situ. We're all agreed on that, right? Right.

Second, do not be fooled by "boutique" chocolate chip cookies. They are all from Satan's Workshop and are, therefore, instruments of the Enemy who is out to weaken the intellectual and moral fiber of America. Consumption of these cookies leads, inevitably to "a profound sense of fatigue... a feeling of emptiness [and] loss of essence." You may, in a moment of weakness after, say, a friendly strip search at the air port, find that you cannot "avoid" these cookies, but under no circumstances are you to give them your essence.

Eat Not the Cookie of Satan

Yes, ever since Mrs. Fields rightly determined that her days of getting on the covers of the Adam and Eve and Victoria's Secret catalogues were over and she went into the sidewalk-blower bakery business, these evil simulacra of chocolate chip cookies have spread over the American landscape like the Eighth Plague of Egypt. The results are murder, insanity, death and an obesity so monumental that the victims do not so much walk our streets as teeter through them -- a threat to passersby, lost pets and unreinforced brick structures.

Do not, I repeat, consume boutique chocolate chip cookies. Pass by these scented and seductive venues of the Fifth Horseman. Deny them, I say, your essence.

Instead, know that small batch, by hand, and home-made chocolate chip cookies are the only chocolate chip cookies that may even begin to aspire to the realm of the Sacred and the Holy. A realm in which, like wives, many are cold but none are frozen. Indeed, if Nestles, dairy farms and refrigeration had existed at the time of the Last Supper the entire menu of Holy Communion would be different today.

Partake Only of the Holy Cookie

Like American Christianity today, the Church of the Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookie has many branches, subsets and sects. And, like American Christianity, these various factions contend mightily over the question of which, in the eyes of God, is the true gospel of the Chocolate Chip, the Recipe of the Word.

I do not pretend to know the mind of God. Indeed, I am still unclear about the workings of the will of God in my life. But I am clear about what is the true gospel of the Chocolate Chip. I know beyond a scintilla of a speck of an iota of a jot of a doubt that single Cookie which is now and forever shall be the Greatest Chocolate Chip Cookie in America and the Known Universe, yea even unto that alien planet of the hard-bodied and the homeless, San Francisco.

This Cookie Given by the Hand of God would be, beyond question, of my sainted mother's chocolate chip cookies. These and these alone are the good, the true, and the blessed -- the Holy Cookies. All others crumble before them and return to the dust and detritus of the earth from which they were mistakenly called forth by the unconverted, the heathen and the apostates.

The Advent of the Holy Cookie

I was converted to the Holy Cookie soon after my teeth came in. For several years thereafter I lived in heavenly bliss since the only person in the house with whom I had to contend for ALL the cookies was my father and, even though he was much larger than I was as a toddler, he had to work and sleep sometime. This left me free to range about the kitchen in search of yet one more Holy Cookie. Something I did at all hours until my mother saw fit to deploy a leg shackle along with my fresh pajamas.

Alas, Eden was not to endure forever since I had a couple of brothers coming along in the years that followed. With the advent of these "cookie competitors" the leg shackle was retired, but I was required to learn the always difficult lesson of "Share."

As the eldest and hence the largest, my capacity to "share" the plate of Holy Cookies my mother would set out for us diminished in direct proportion to the distance between that plate and my mother and/or father, or both. Sharing was on as long as they were in the room, but if they stepped out my little inner Hitler would emerge and endeavor to take all the cookies and the Rhineland as well.

This dictatorial method of getting all the cookies only served me well for a few years. It fell apart on the day it came to my attention that my "little" brother had at last grown large enough to literally kick my ass when it came to taking more than my share of cookies.

Day of the Judgment of the Father

On that day I was also foolish enough to kick back in an effort to retain my rightful share of all the cookies. A small war broke out in the kitchen which caused my mother to come in from the laundry room, break us up, take all the cookies away and cast both my brother and I into the slough of despond by uttering the phrase no child ever, ever wishes to hear from his mother: "Wait till your father gets home."

An afternoon longer than eternity squared ensued. Our father did get home and subsequently gave instructions to my brother and myself, in turns, on why it was a bad idea to have a fist fight over chocolate chip cookies in his house. He reminded us both of his first and only commandment, "Thou shalt not upset thy mother." It was a lesson that is "seared, SEARED!, into my memory."

Like all sinners, this lesson made us repent briefly but did not actually reform. Instead we made an alliance in order to ensure our survival and advance our quest for the Holy Cookie. Sensing, as she always did, this shift in the order of things, my mother took to hiding the Holy Cookies about the house.

She knew that my father favored the cookies, and that if they were not hidden from us, the chances he would have any upon 'getting home' would range from slim to somewhere below absolute zero. She became, as all mothers of boys must, sneaky. She began to bake the cookies while we were at school, hide them before we got home. She'd also take care to destroy all evidence that the Holy Cookies had been baked and would carefully air out the house. She always was a clever woman.

Quest for the Holy Cookie

But we were two to her one; the smallest band of brothers on a mission from God. In no time, we found ourselves cowlick deep in a war of spying and surveillance against our own mother. It was a cold war that escalated over time as our methods of sensing and locating the hidden cookies became increasingly sophisticated. Towards the end, these methods became so refined that we could have found a single small Weapon of Mass Destruction under the shifting sands of the Sahara if it happened to have a Holy Cookie in the war head.

But we never were required to go that far afield, even if we once found them in the garage of the people who lived next door. (Their kid, our mole, tipped us off for a paltry three cookies.) Over the years we found them at the bottom of the clothes hamper in the master bath, behind a box of motor oil in the garage, in the trunk of her car, under the camouflage of towels in the dryer, behind the set of World Book Encyclopedias in the den, even taped in coffee cans and stuck up under the kitchen counter concealed behind the disposal unit.

Once, in her despair, she actually sealed them in a large container and buried them behind the shrubs in the back yard. We found them by checking carefully for disturbed earth, and that night snuck out after our parents were asleep, disinterred them with a trowel, ate them all on the spot, and then buried the container again with a Crayoned note that said, "Delicious, The Avengers." We were bludgeoned with meatloaf sandwiches in our school lunchboxes for a week after that one.

Spies in the House of the Holy Cookie

Mothers know a lot of secrets about their children, but not all secrets. My mother's favorite way of finding out our secrets was a simple psyche-war method of asserting that she knew what she didn't know in order to elicit a confession. She'd give us "that look" and say, "Well, you might as well know that I know."

"Know? Know what?"

"You know what, so you might as well tell me."

It shames me now to admit that this simple ploy worked on more than one occasion. What never worked, and what she was never to figure out, was how we knew when the Holy Cookies had been made.

Early on it dawned on her that we were watching the house supply of Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips. When those bags were used or diminished, it would be a dead give-away that there were cookies to be located and my brother and I would, as a team, work the grid. Using step-stools, ladders, and a mirror attached to a broom-handle that I kept taped above the door in my closet, there was no area of the home we could not scan. Sooner or later, once we knew they were around, we'd find them. Kids don't have many resources, but they do have oceans of time.

Her solution, so she thought, was to buy replacement bags of chocolate chips before baking a batch. In that way, she foolishly assumed we'd assume -- seeing a full bag undisturbed -- that no cookies had been baked that day. What she did not know, and was never to learn, was that each bag of chocolate chips in the house was marked with a small dot of ink on the lower right hand corner of the back of the bag as soon as we could get to it in stealth mode. We'd check the bag daily after that and when it did not have that mark we would know the truth.

We also, as a back-up, used faint pencil marks, not on the level of Scotch in my father's bottle (that was to come later), but on the canister of Quaker Oats which were another essential ingredient of the Holy Cookie. She bought the economy sized canister and we discovered that using a red pencil on the red part of the package was almost undetectable unless you were looking for it, which we always were.

The Holy Cookie Cold War

The Holy Cookie Cold War of stealth and surveillance continued across the years until my second brother and I left the home for college. My mother breathed a sigh of relief at our departures. Little did she know that before we left we had passed on the full Holy Cookie Finder File to our little brother ten years my junior. He carried on the tradition until he too left. At which point my mother brought out the apple shaped cookie jar which had been stored away for decades and began to enjoy the long peace as well as a cookie or two from time to time.

Except, of course, there would be no peace. The begging letters and phone calls came in from colleges, apartments and houses across the country and down through the years. From time to time, these pathetic screeds and whines would elicit a package of the Holy Cookie, but only at the kind of interval that makes the Pavlovian Rat press the pellet bar that much more compulsively. As long as she held the keys to the Holy Cookie, my mother knew she would hear from us frequently.

But the technology of the time was working against us and the Holy Cookie. This was the pre-eBay era when packing and shipping were still lost arts to most Americans. Lost most of all, I regret to say, to our mother.

East of Eden and the Problem of the Post Office

For while she could bake, she could not ship. As a result of this and the less-than-reverent attitude of the United States Postal Service, the shipments of the Holy Cookies would arrive transmogrified into the Holy Cookie Crumbs. It is, I have discovered, very difficult to dunk a crumb into a glass of cold milk to any sort of meaningful effect other than crummy milk.

After suffering our complaints for longer than anyone other than a mother would, she finally took drastic action. She had to. After all, she had a life to live, friends to see, places to go and tennis sets to play. We were grown men now with fully dysfunctional families of our own, and she was no longer going to allow herself to be crucified on the golden cross of the Holy Cookie.

And so it was that on one faithful day, her three sons received in the mail, not the Holy Cookies for which they begged, but the Holy Cookie recipe and instructions that they learn to cook. I love my mother, but she can be a cold woman once she makes up her mind.

The Torch is Passed to a New Generation

On the other hand, my need was great and my understanding of the gap between desire and gratification scant. And so I learned, at last, to cook. It was one of my mother's many fine and enduring gifts, perhaps the finest next to, of course, life itself.

First, out of sheer necessity, I learned the Holy Cookie and, when that turned out well after only a few disasters, I went on to learning to cook other things. Things like entrees, side dishes, bread and desert right down to and including a Chocolate Souffle.

As my confidence grew I took to exotic dishes and found myself in a Chinese cooking course. Other cuisines followed. I even, during my stint as a book editor for Houghton Mifflin, published one cookbook ( Fear of Cooking: The Absolutely Foolproof Cookbook for Beginners (And Everyone Else) by Robert Scher Amazon rank: 1,332,536 which is not that bad for a book published in 1984).

And so, from a cookie recipe, I grew to have one of the basic life skills that everyone should have; a skill no longer taught in our schools since it is much more important that our children learn the Inner Meaning of the Inner Child of the Maori-Americans than how to do anything with food other than pick a number at the drive-through window. I learned it from my mother who taught it to me not by doing, but by standing out of the way and not doing; by letting me discover how to do it myself. That's always the path to the real higher education in life. It's a path never taught in our crippled schools but always open to everyone regardless of age, color, creed, national origin. All you have to have to get on the path is the need to learn something and the passion to do it yourself.

That and a recipe. Here it is. What are you waiting for? Gentlemen, start your ovens.

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BEHOLD I BRING YOU TIDINGS OF GREAT JOY
MOM'S (Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun's ) CLASSIC OATMEAL CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

Please note: It is not to be made merely by combing the ingredients but by following the procedure, the sacred ritual.

Combine: 3/4 Cup brown sugar with 3/4 Cup white sugar.
Mix in until smooth but gritty 1 cup shortening ( Crisco [classic] or butter/marge + Crisco in varying proportions )* This, and other mixing moments, can be done with your hands if a) you have washed them, and b) nobody's around to see you do it. Maintain plausible deniability.

Add 2 eggs -- Beaten-- plus 1 teaspoon vanilla.

Combine One and 1/2 Cups flour with 1 teaspoon salt and 1 teaspoon soda and then work into sugar, shortening and egg mixture until smooth.

Add two cups of rolled oats and work into the dough. Add one 12 oz package semi-sweet chocolate chips (No more. Resist temptation.) and (optional) 1 cup chopped black walnuts**. Shape into medium-sized (no more than 3" in diameter, baked) cookies and bake on a greased cookie sheet

Bake in a 350 oven for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Monitor at around 8 minutes.

The recipe is usually good for 2-3 standard size cookie sheets. When baking, it is best to start one tray in the lower rack of the oven and after eight minutes move it to the upper.

Allow to cool. You will snake three to five and burn your lip on the first bite, but try to show a little restraint after this, okay?

Yield: 4-5 Dozen

Note: The Holy Cookie, when baked to perfection, should not be chewy or soft but possess, upon being cooled, a toothsome quality and a certain proportion of crisp-walled open cells throughout the cookie that absorb milk when dunked, but do not become a milk sodden mush. The milk should be present within the cells of the cookie, but the cookie itself, providing one has not be lazy and let it just slosh around in the glass, should still retain a certain crispness and emit a distinct crunch when consumed.

* Yes, Crisco. This ancient pure product of Amerca can still be found in the baking aisle. The Holy Cookies cannot achieve their proper milk absorbing properties without its presence. If you have some sort of issue with Crisco, get over it and just cowboy up. While butter or margarine can be used in combination with Crisco, their proportions are problematical. One stick is probably the maximum.

** Black Walnuts are optional but not, strictly speaking, classic. Still, they add an extra texture which is appealing, unless, of course, you are allergic to walnuts in which case you eat them and you die -- happy and with an enhanced skill set.

[ UPDATED FROM 5 YEARS AGO]

Upstream they've allowed the water level of the river to fall until the dam's top blocks can be seen as the waterfall retreats. The river's bottom emerges and a spring shorebird skitters along the edge of the green muck, its beak probing the dirt. Three pigeons pace on and peck at the drying granite blocks. Each block in the slightly curved dam wall under their feet is an easy ton of stone. The dam spans the river and, when the water is allowed to rise, it vanishes under a sheen of falling water. But now the water is low even though the river still flows.

Behind the dam a grating of steel bars lets the river flow under the dam and gush out the spill pipe at the foot of the stone blocks. There the river continues to flow under the footbridge, between the stone and brick walls of the mill, over another waterfall further on, and then, past other mills still downstream, out to sea.

The mill holds the river tight between its walls for a short span and, in the past, the dipping, turning wheels would have spun drawing the river's power into the mill and, through rods and pulleys, relayed it on to the machines.

The first mill at this turn of the river was a saw mill in 1649. Then a grist mill came in its place. In time that too was torn down and the granite and brick buildings here now were raised up. The mill rises above the river, five stories of brick set on many courses of granite foundation stones. In its current form the mill made fabrics from civil war uniforms to fine cashmeres. Another mill just downstream made munitions for our arsenals. One gun from those foundries and lathes went first north to Portland and later west out over the ocean to Pearl Harbor. Later that mill's machines made other parts out of case-hardened steel and pig iron. Other products, over the years, came from the mill: Christmas tree ornaments, cameras and film, paint, ice creepers for the Russian troops during World War II, rifle grenades, ski poles, waterproof boxes, and wooden shoes.

Today those machines are gone. Today the mill houses those who admire the fashionability of loft-like apartments; who value the anonymity of its corridors and numbered doors.

On massive granite blocks the mill as it now is has straddled the river for over a century. With care and maintenance its good for another century -- or two or three -- even though its use then cannot be foreseen anymore than the builders of the mill would have thought in their day that they were building housing.

The men who built the mill built better than they knew; far better than the Frank Lloyd Wright fancy "Falling Water," once lauded by all but now already being rotted out and reclaimed by the stream it enfolded. The mill was not built as a fancy but as a machine for making and now for living, built to last by men whom we cannot hope to emulate.

In full spate the river surges between the mill's walls and, at times, rises to flood the lowest apartments much to the distress of its fashionable tenants.

At flood speed the river rushes beneath the lower windows with a rumble and a stifled roar as if some endless ghost freight train was passing, passing, passing.

But then the spring flood abates to the hushed rustle and hum of flow. Over the calmer water swallows daub their nests under the eaves and, at dusk, dart and flicker over the water. And the mill around them, built long ago on the rocks of capital, skill, muscle, sinew and faith, contains the river below and the spring sky seen in its surface. The mill, raised on granite and formed from fire-forged bricks laid one after the other by arm and hand, mortar and trowel, built to last, endures.

Today we live in the reflection of their times. Today we taste the afterimage of events.

 
Lois Lucille McNair Van der Leun -- then and now

Her earliest memory is being held on the shoulders of her father, watching the men who lived through the First World War parade down the main street of Fargo, North Dakota in 1918. She would have been just four years old then. Now she's 90 years old and she comes to her birthday party wearing a chic black and white silk dress, shiny black shoes with three inch heels, and a six foot long purple boa. She's threatening to sing Kurt Weill's 'The Saga of Jenny" and dance on the table one more time .

She'll sing the Kurt Weill song, but we draw the line at her dancing on the table this year. Other than that, it is pretty much her night, and she gets to call the shots. Which is what you get when you reach 90 97 and are still managing to make it out to the tennis courts three to four times a week. "If it wasn't for my knees I'd still have a good backcourt game, but now I pretty much like to play up at the net." [Note 2012: Alas she had to give up tennis two years back when her knees finally gave up. She didn't. Water walking twice a week.]

She plays Bridge once or twice a week, winning often, and has been known to have a cocktail or two on occasion. She still drives even though it causes my brother to fret. This is a good thing since he's the kind of man who sees the incipient disaster in everything and it's good for him to fret about something that has a smidgen of reality to it.

She keeps a small two-bedroom apartment in a complex favored by young families and college students from Chico State and, invariably, has a host of fans during any given semester. She's thought about moving to the "senior apartments" out by the mall, but "I'm just not sure I could downsize that much and everyone there is so old."

Continued...

For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. --- Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Sometimes small notions indicate issues of larger moment. In the discussion of a previous post, a commenter delivers a vest pocket critique of America seen from abroad. The salient part reads:

As for the last paragraph - well, personally, I don't give a damn whether Americans kill themselves through gross overeating and under-exercising, filling their food with chemicals for short-term profit or turning their cities' air into poison gas - not to mention handing terrorists billions of dollars to kill Americans (and others) with.

What I do mind is that Americans are setting a bad example for everyone else; as a small example the streets of Britain are filled with grotesquely large 4x4s. I am quite sure the fashion comes from across the pond. As another, the Chinese might well ask why they should restrict their economic growth when America already uses many times more fuel than they do - and they'd be right.

What I do mind is various American corporations not only trying to foist their Frankenstein food on us, but trying to make it impossible for us to tell that they are doing it - did you know that Monsanto are claiming in various court cases that labelling of food containing GM soya is against free trade treaties?

I could go on - but I won't, except to say two things. Americans' bad habits are a poor example for everyone else - and America's gluttony for oil in particular, and their actions to make sure it gets fed, and the money transfers resulting from it, make the rest of the world much more dangerous

Some observations strike me as fair, others as dubious. Most strike me as those a reasonable man might form on a daily diet of the American media melange. It is a dangerous diet; a diet rich in junk and toxins. In large doses it might make your head fill with harmful fat.

Just as it was when the Soviet Union lived -- and is still to be found on the islands of socialist utopias still extant -- once the propaganda mills are relentlessly anti-American, a real picture is hard to come by. One is pretty much a slave to one's choices of input. Not much can be done to change a mind fed a constant drip-feed of plaint from the current America-based "My country wrong or wrong" crowd.

I can see how the commenter comes by his impressions. I grant that he comes to them fairly by using what he is given to draw his conclusions. They simply don't map well to my experience of ordinary life in America in 2007. As American life, or a simple driveabout will teach you, "the map is not the territory."

It is not my purpose here to flense his critique point by point, only to note that his intellectual malnutrition is, of necessity, determined by what he feeds his head.

By way of example, my day-to-day experience tells me that while the lumbering results of having "way too much food" are more than visible in America, so is the cult of "way too much exercise." The buffed anorexic and the wobbling obese are the opposite ends of the bell-curve. In the middle I see that most Americans are mindful of what they eat because they can afford to be. Making this possible is a system of food production and distribution that delivers such a wide-spectrum of food choice at cheap prices (organic, non-organic, and junk) to every niche of the landscape. Indeed, the system is so advanced and sophisticated that we have achieved a society in which one of the major problems among the poor that remain is obesity.

The impression that Americans are "turning their cities' air into poison gas" is likewise well meant but ill informed. It is demonstrably not true.

It is not true from a glance at the steadily declining levels of emission in a steadily increasing and mobile population over the decades. It is can be seen to be obviously untrue from the simple fact of living in America for six decades -- decades that have seen more deep and lasting social change than at any other time in the history of the country, perhaps the world.

I was, as constant readers may know, born in Los Angeles six decades ago. I remember the poison air of the 1950s. I remember the smog alerts, the soot that would settle on the windowsills and grind its way into the clothes. I remember the black smudge that would be visible within a block of my front yard. I saw it that same black smudge some three decades later, not in Los Angeles, but in London.

Today there is still a haze over Los Angeles on most days, but you have to stand back some to see it. You also have to stand back in your mind and know that Los Angeles, depending on how you define it, is now home to between 10 and 18 million people (Up a tad from the 4 million of my childhood when only every family and not every individual had a car). The only way that air in Los Angeles today could become perfect would be if you gave every resident a unicycle for transportation, a mandated vegan diet, and forbid flatulence under pain of death.

In short, the air in American cities is today more than acceptable and is not, by any stretch of an imagination not twisted by false impressions, "poison." And it improves daily. Could it be improved more? Certainly it could and inevitably it will.

The same observations hold true for our rivers, our reservoirs, our parks, our homes, our communities, and for all other nation-wide measures by which one might discover the true quality of life. We tolerate high gasoline prices in large measure because we will not drill and pump our vast reserves nor will we build new refineries. This indulgence can be reversed whenever the political will to do so arrives. And it will.

At the same time, as it would be in any imperfect human society of 300 million souls, it is perfectly possible to find the pockets of poison and the ghettos of despair in this protean country. Viewed over an inch of time you would note they are shrinking, but you could still stand on a street corner in South Central or Harlem and focus a camera in such a direction and frame the images in such a manner you could deliver the impression of a vile and selfish society in which the poverty-stricken obese were crushed under some corporate oppressor's boot.

You could, and many still do, ferret out an example of racism daily if you look hard enough. But it’s an evil juju only the most poisoned of our people waste their lives in pursuing. It is the witchdoctor’s feathered fetish shaken in America’s face daily by the race-hustlers and rent-seekers in the Democrat Party and the present administration in order to preserve their plantations of colonized minds. Free men know it is only skillfully shaped propaganda and does not represent anything close to the truth of the American experiment and environment in 2009. Here even our poor are filthy rich measured against the world's poor.

As is often the case in the envious world today, we encounter -- in my critic’s plaint and elsewhere at home and abroad -- a mindset in which "the perfect is the enemy of the good." It is a mindset that views anything less than some imagined perfect state as somehow failing and worthy of excoriation. It is a mindset in which, if the real world falls short of the imagined perfection, it is the real world that is ill rather than the mind of the imaginer. It is a mindset which finds nothing is impossible as long as others do the work and pay the price. It is a mindset forever doomed to disappointment; a doom in which it takes a strange masochistic pleasure. A country that permits all perversions will not shy away from perverted politics. Instead it will seek to fund them in perpetuity.

The commenter seems to feel that it is there is some implicit global responsibility of America to set a "good" example rather than, as he feels, its current "bad" example. He seems to feel that as America goes, so goes the world; that the Brits drive big cars in Britain not because they make that choice as free people but because some bizarre 'American mind waves' force them to do so against their will; that the Chinese, if impressed by some future America's return to some eco-idyllic state, will shrug off the desires that the increasing wealth and semi-liberty of their situation affords them and peacefully return to the days of the ox-cart, the rickshaw, and root-grubbing famine. In short he places too much power in the hands of America and too little in the hands of the human individuals in the rest of the world. To this way of thinking the example is all, and that only if the example is a "good" example can the world be perfected.

To a small extent he is correct. The global reach of American media is a force in the world, but a deeply confusing one. Our media's main export is a mixed message. It constantly tells the world about our shortcomings ("Alas, we have not yet perfected our country. Here's how..."), but at the same time shows the world our achievements ("Check out the good life, the very good life, and get some for yourself. Here's how..."). What he fails to note, or perhaps perceive, is that the American Story rises out not out of agreement but out of the American Argument, an argument that we've been having here in the land where men have been able to freely speak and vote their minds for well over two centuries. It is an argument we're not finished with yet.

There are many ways of stating the American Argument with itself -- indeed, it is many arguments -- but one of the most straightforward is "How shall men be free and how shall a society of free men then be structured?"

From time to time the passions that animate the American Argument run to blood, such as the era that led to the Civil War and, to a much lesser extent, our current era. At other times, the Argument is pitched at a much lower level of intensity. But the Argument is ever present and any number can play. If you can get here and become a citizen you can participate as well. Hell, we'll let you participate even if you are here and not a citizen. We might even allow millions of you to become citizens overnight in order to join the Argument. You don't even have to learn English any longer.

We just had a big argument over that last concept and, even though it's over for now, it's not over yet. Now we are on to arguing over matters of life and death and who will, in the end, pay the reaper's bill. Indeed, the great thing about the American Argument is that it is never over. The Argument will go on and on prompting every generation to add to it and shape it as that generation wills -- for good or ill -- and trusting that America will self-correct over time as long as the Argument endures and is not won by either side.

The reality is that the American experiment continues its pursuit of the good and its flirtation with perfection. In this pursuit of happiness the American experiment continues to demonstrate to the world what a real egalitarian and free society actually looks like and is. Not what such a society could be, but what one actually is here, now, today. And we arrive there by our constant political argument about "the perfect" vs. "the good;" a "utopia tomorrow" via government intervention in all aspects of life versus individual liberty and the best "possible" world here and now. It is an argument that seeks balance rather than predominance, but when one side of the argument seeks a permanent win the social fabric that binds the country begins to tear. When this happens good citizens of either side will endeavor to patch it once again and continue the Argument.

Indeed, for all intents and purposes, the Argument is the American Revolution today. The Argument is an artifact of the American Revolution. It endures because the American Revolution endures, 233 years later, as the most successful revolution in the history of the world. The American Revolution did not start in 1776 -- that was just the shooting phase. The American Revolution began when men from the Old World first came to the New World and decided to make it new; when men of that world set foot here and came “face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to their capacity for wonder.”

The American Argument emerged from the impact of this land on the Old World. This impact is chronicled in the first visions that the New World could be more than the extension of the Old; that it could be truly New. The vision of a world made new is an ancient one in this land. It predates the Revolution and the formal founding of the United States. The roots can be found in such documents as "The Mayflower Compact" and most clearly in John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "City Upon a Hill."

Many consider the Declaration of Independence to be the key document in the creation of the American experiment, but the seeds of it are to be found in many earlier expressions of what it was like to be new in the New World. Of these, the closing words of Winthrop's "City on a Hill" stand for most of the others:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

And to shut this discourse with that exhortation of Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel, Deut. 30. "Beloved, there is now set before us life and death, good and evil," in that we are commanded this day to love the Lord our God, and to love one another, to walk in his ways and to keep his Commandments and his ordinance and his laws, and the articles of our Covenant with Him, that we may live and be multiplied, and that the Lord our God may bless us in the land whither we go to possess it. But if our hearts shall turn away, so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced, and worship other Gods, our pleasure and profits, and serve them; it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.

Therefore let us choose life,
that we and our seed may live,
by obeying His voice and cleaving to Him,
for He is our life and our prosperity.

"Therefore let us choose life...." That's pretty much what we try to do here in America some 233 years out. We try in our halting, shambling, faltering way to always choose life; life with all its flaws and complexities and victories and defeats.

We don't try to be perfect -- although there are many among us who urge it upon us and expect it from us in order to feel more perfect themselves.

At the same time I would not deny that we are by default an example to the world -- if not the perfect example so many would prefer. Instead we are simply, warts and all, the best society in all its multifoliate aspects that currently exists or has ever existed upon the Earth. We are a nation that has never been perfect but always, if you could walk the land and know the lay of it, the warp and the woof and the thought dreams of it, much better than we have any right to be. If you could look at the world from orbit and see the people of the world flowing over its surface in some sort of schematic, you would see, when you came to gaze at the borders of America, many footprints going in and few coming out.

That's why I am always amused by the exhortations from within and without to "get perfect or get gone." They always seem to me to be filled with spleen on the surface but with an incredible yearning on the inside; a yearning that acknowledges in its very bitterness; in its very existence that this country of all the others is still "the last best hope of Earth." America-loathing knows in its bones that, no matter how much it dislikes the world with America in it, it would be a much less perfect and much more dangerous world with America out of it. Then again, given the shape of the world and the nature of the American argument, perhaps this wish may some day be granted and the world can again sink back into the tyranny of individuals, faction, and totalitarian state-control.

Perhaps. But that day is not yet. With all the rancor now on display, I still believe that we've got about two to five more centuries left to continue setting our "bad example." Hell, give us one century more to argue and our "bad example" might even get you your "perfect world."

---

Revised and rewritten from July, 2007

An American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,... No sentimentalist .... no stander above men and women or apart from them...
-- Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)

“I am not an American, I am THE American.”
-– Mark Twain

Remember when Hillary Clinton, during her last attempt to rule the world, stopped calling herself a “liberal” and rebranded herself as a “progressive?”

I do.

It was Clinton's desperate attempt to crawl out from under the vast heap of crap she and all the other “liberals” had piled on themselves

– notably during her own husband's administration.

And who, when trying to run, wanted to have that old liberal ball and chain around her thick ankles?

Not Hillary.

By 2007 “Liberal” had become so drenched in sewage liberals could only clean it through “rebranding.”

The new/old brand name chosen was 'progressive.'

And it worked for them and for Obama just long enough to get them elected by a credulous public who had seemingly never heard "progressive" before.

“Progressive...” it sounded so, well, hopeful. It was, after all, not "trans-" but "pro-"gressive.

After all, who can be against “progress?” Who is not pro "pro?"

Who, that is, except the vast majority of older Americans who had seen the wreckage that the progressives' “progress” had wrought wherever it touched down on the American landscape.

Continued...

Ah, the 80s. Ronald Reagan for the Right and Leather Bars for the Left. Talking Heads fitness videos for everyone else. What was not to like? Except PC, AIDS, mortgage rates north of 12% and its rollicking sidekick, an inflation calculated to give you a permanent facial twitch.

All that and the rise of the Psycho Killer as cultural icon.

"Hi. I got a tape I wanna play."

Continued...

The river gouges its way down into the rock as the stoneland around it surges upwards. The cracked stacks of strata rise towards the vault of sky at a pace that makes the growth of glaciers seem a sprint. When the river's downward adze works through the strata's lift the walls of the chasm soar thousands of feet up until all they frame is a slim ribbon of blue slashed with contrails.

The road -- smooth two lane blacktop on top of an amalgam of granite, grit, arrowheads and dinosaur bones -- runs beside the roiling green muck of the Colorado whose banks are fringed with the sharp slate branches of tamarisk ringing patches of lime green cottonwood groves. Along this road mostly carved out of the cliff and still studded at times with sandstone boulders the size of a large house cars and semis scuttle like bronzed beetles catching glints of sun on their carapaces as they slide in and out of the chasm's shadow.

Across the river or beside the road the vast slabs of rust tinted sandstone tower and, towards dark, close in above you like hands beneath the sky closing in prayer. The red rock marches for miles along the river, unpurposed cathedrals of stone for titans long gone down into earth.

Continued...

Four and a half months

Did you ever have to make up your mind?
Pick up on one and leave the other behind.
It's not often easy and not often kind.
Did you ever have to make up your mind?
-- The Loving Spoonful

No Answers Here. Just Observations and Anecdotes

Like most serious people in America today, I've had to struggle with my views on abortion. You are required, in this deadlocked and soul-locked society to have a view on this issue. "I don't know" just wont cut it. You've got to know. It says so right here in America: The Instructions.

But what do I know about Abortion? Here's what I thought I knew then and what I think I know now. Why today? Because I read the news today (Oh boy). And the news is only too happy to tell me that January 22, 2009, is the 36th Anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision that released the crushing Abortion juggernaut to roll over the soul of America.

Continued...

Their infernal machine lops and trims the green upstarts, the single emerald sprouts, the high stalk topped with the blue cornflower down to the level of the dull brown mass.

Their minds are the godless grave of words from which no living meanings can ever hope for resurrection.

Their secular "green" religion has its bad rap but no hymns.

Their dreams of a "better world" will become their children's small and shrunken lives on a nightmare planet where all men, finally equalized, will live like insects.

And yet, like zombies lashed to a dying animal, they persist in their death-in-life existence, seeking only the freedom of an approved and "assisted" suicide as their reward.

They call themselves "progressives" and flatter themselves that their thoughts and actions are "revolutionary" when they are as reactionary as can be remembered from history.

What happened to all those who, in my youth, marched and sang for "freedom?" How did they become so old, so hidebound, so mired in the past? When did they become stuck in "suppose?" How, from once striving so hard against colonialism in all its guises, did they allow their minds to become so utterly colonized by a matted mass of dim and discredited notions?

They chain themselves deep in the pit of pretend, and celebrate their servitude by bending heaven and earth to get you down in the hole that they're in.

They believe that the individual should become the mass, and that the mass should worship its apotheosis; that one who best reflects their ossified visions on which the anointing oil has long since dried to a brown crust of thought.

They are the monarchists of the mass. They seek a state in which the head that wears the crown may change but where the crown itself grows forever larger.

Earlier today I was commiserating on the phone with an old friend when I happened, as is my wont, to mention "Pony Girls" and the men who make them trot around. My pal asked me, "What's a 'pony girl'?" To his dismay I subsequently enlightened him. He then reflected that I was the only person he knew that would 1) know what a pony girl was and, 2) mention it on the phone. [No, I'm not going to help you out here. You're an adult. It's entirely between you and Google and whatever government agency is so over-staffed it thinks you are worth tracking.]

I allowed that it had to do with my previous line of work and that the knowledge I gained there was only used in a professional capacity. I reminded him that the iron rule of sex on the internet is: "In the instant you believe that you have at last come to a site that expresses the absolute bottom of human sexual depravity... at that precise instant you will be given a link that takes you five miles deeper."

Half an hour later....

Continued...

I've begun to take a two-mile daily walking tour of my neighborhood in Seattle's Queen Anne. This is mostly because of the elemental concept that I should get at least some exercise on a daily basis. It's also because of my long held belief that even with a route that is well worn and well traveled and well known, you can, if you open your mind discover something new every day.

And it is true. Today for example I discovered that if I turn left at the nearest corner it is possible to have one shot of espresso at Ken's market. Which I did.

Walking down and then up a hill and turning right, it is then possible to have a shot of espresso at Cafe Lladro on Queen Anne Street. Which I did.

Moving down the street two and a half blocks at a rapid clip, you can then have a shot of espresso at Cafe Diablo. Which I did.

Out the door and down the street two more blocks gets you to Cafe Appassionata where you can have, yes, a shot of espresso. Which I did.

From there you can go down the hill, making towards home, and as you do you come face to face with Cafe Florian where you can have a shot of espresso. Which I did.

Completing the route I made sure to stop at Bustle where I could order a soothing cappucino. Which I did.

After that I made my way home and I'm here to tell you thatttttttttttttttttttttttt........

There is a world dimensional
For those untwisted
by the love of things irreconcilable.
--Hart Crane

I've written elsewhere that one of the "things you can't say about the First Terrorist War" is that it is, at bottom, a war of two religions. So it is with the culture wars in America today. It too is, and you are not supposed to say this either, a war of TWO religions.

Then again, that is not quite right. Try it this way.

We are fighting a war of two religions in which only one side is allowed to be designated as a religion -- the Right. "The Right" in these terms is always code for "The Religious Right", which is, in turn, code for "Christianity." This is sometimes, by the legion of scribblers ready to push out the party line at the drop of a hat, modified for form's sake into "Christian Fundamentalism." But realistic observers of this game are not fooled and know it to be the same sort of bearded shorthand by which "Islamic Fundamentalism" is made to stand in for Islam, pure and simple.

In whatever form the attack takes, we have seen -- and will continue to see -- an attack on Religious Americans by another group of Americans that previously identified themselves as "secular," but who lately are trying to wrap themselves in the raiment of religion to a greater or lesser extent. I am expecting a plethora of punditry soon that includes the phrase, "Some of my best friends are Christians, but...." at every opportunity.

But this tactic will, in the end, not suffice. It will fail because those of real faith easily see through those of false faith. And to profess a faith is worse than to remain simply agnostic. Still, it will be tried because bare atheism reveals that the Religion of the Liberal/Left is not a religion of the people, but of those who would be master. In the coming years, the acolytes of this Religion may attempt to don the fleece of the flock, but the Shepherd will always be able to tell between the quick and the dead.

Continued...

Communism is alive and well on the streets of Seattle....

Illustration by RapierWitt

THESE DAYS its not often that you see a member of the Despairing Classes being seduced by classic Communism on a city street, but it does happen.

Sidewalk Snapshot: It's a warm Spring evening on Pine Street in Seattle. Lengthening shadows and brightening light brings everything into sharp relief including the random collection of lay-abouts, short-order poets, tattoo artistes, and students a decade between degrees that take up the tables outside the Cafe Laddro on Capitol Hill.

Capitol Hill is one of those neighborhoods in Seattle that compiles a mainstream lifestyle out of alternatives. Even though it is indeed a hill, it has suspended the normal laws of gravity and everything loose in Seattle rolls up to the top of it. That includes, on this evening, me.

I'm stepping out of your "one-every-block" Seattle espresso slop shop with my machiatto when I notice the odd couple at the table just outside the door. That's not too odd since odd couples, like spiked bright blue hair, are pretty much the norm on Capitol Hill. I notice them at first because the youngest is wearing a Motorhead t-shirt with the mantra "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" on it in that faux German Black gothic font that got old when Auschwitz was in flower, and so had to be made new again back when heavy-metal was a fresh idea.

Glancing over Motorhead's shoulder I note that the man across from him is giving him an ideological lap-dance complete with a whole raft of tracts, papers and books being brought out and waved about and placed, with a muffled thwang, one after the other on the thin black metal of the table: Trotsky's "Marxism and Terrorism," (thwang!); the ever-popular Marx and Engels "Communist Manifesto," (thwang!); Lenin's greatest hit "What Is To Be Done?," (thwang!), Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks," (thunk!), Zinn's "People's History of the United States,"(clunk!).

One by one, they come out of the worn back pack and pile up on the table. All in all, a larger pile of ideological dung would be hard to imagine, and harder to handle even with meat hooks and thick rubber gloves.

The man making his pile of "roadmaps to a more perfect world" is quite a bit older than Motorhead with a slim, somewhat furtive look to him. There's the vibe coming off him that you sometimes sense when someone old is trying to pick up somebody far too young for him.

In the intense light of the evening, you can see a faint cloud of dust motes rising from him as he keeps slapping the tracts down. Greying hair in moist ringlets covers his head except for a monk's tonsure on the back of his skull. He's got a mustache and a beard that, with a little care, could be brought to a Van Dyke point. He sports small round rimmed glasses in front of thin blue eyes. His eyes, although they never waver from his prey, carry within them a permanent 1,000 yard stare -- as if he's always looking outside of the present moment at something in the distance that never gets nearer. Overall the face reminds one, as these faces so often do, of a watered down Leon Trotsky, the Christ of Communism, crucified with an ice axe but still twitching in his tomb.

Trotsky is resurrect this evening on Capitol Hill though, and I linger at the table next to them writing down a few notes about their conversation. Except it is not exactly a conversation so much as a monologue as my Trotsky keeps, in smiling and soft tones, returning to the subject at hand which is the inevitable collapse of the evil American Empire ("Long past its expiry date..."), and the inevitable rise of world Socialism ("Everyone will have more than enough, but nobody will have it all.")

Trotsky's sporting, as all good Trotskys must, a collection of slogan buttons and a sheaf of free tracts and newspapers. The button that is the largest is pinned to his faded plaid flannel shirt and proclaims him to be a member in good standing of the ISO (International Socialist Organization, good Latter-Day Trotskyites all. )

He passes the tracts and newspapers over to his intended, "Free, all free," and points out the more salient injustices they outline: eternal racism, eternal slavery of women, eternal repression of the working man by capitalists, eternal imperialism by the United States -- the whole catastrophe. He underscores that the only escape is through the ever-imminent but forever delayed Rapture of the Left, The Revolution.

After several minutes of his soft chants, Motorhead is nodding like the drinking bird over the glass. He's looking a bit dazed. I wonder if Trotsky has slipped a roofy into Motorhead's machiatto and is just waiting for it to kick in.

Trotsky's tales are the sad sotto voce sagas that underscore all the old nightmares of the Gulag, the Killing Fields, and every other massacre done in the name of the Marxist Utopia. It's a litany proving, once again, that some lies lodge so deep in man's hopes they will not die, no matter the murders they require to live.

Today's fresh lie is that if only Motorhead will attend the "event" tomorrow, Trotsky will be pleased to take him to the exclusive "Cadre" meeting that follows so he can meet the "Comrade of Honor," one Ahmed Shawki.

In soft tones salted with a quick twinkling smile that comes and goes like the red queen in three-card monte, Trotsky continues his spiel, his seduction. Motorhead is "obviously a man of no little intelligence" -- even if his five facial piercings (ears, left eyebrow, lip stud and nose-ring) might make one wonder.

Motorhead "needs to live in a system where social justice is the rule for all, not just the rich." Given Motorhead's ripped black jeans, worn black boots and general air of someone not likely to be hired by any business whose work involves meeting the public, this is probably more true than either of them realize. Motorhead nods again to this last proposition, and observes that he yearns for a social order that is more just to his lifestyle than can easily be found outside the subcultural hamlets of Seattle.

Much has been made of Hannah Arendt's phrase, "The banality of evil," and I suppose I'm witnessing a small satori of that kind here on the sidewalks of Seattle. But it seems to me to be a more insidious event than that.

After all, there's nothing evil in speech that argues for ideas that have proven, without exception, to be evil. It is, after all, only speech and the strength of the American system is to protect all forms of speech, especially the idle blather of a coffee house revolutionary. There's nothing, really nothing, in this overheard conversation that threatens the existence of the United States. The mere fact that it can be had, five years into the First Terrorist War, underscores just how strong this nation adherence to its founding principles remains. Here on Capitol Hill dissent of even the most egregious sort, is not only tolerated but celebrated.

The conversation bothers me at the same time it fascinates me. It strikes me that what I am auditing is not so much "the banality of evil," but "the banality of sedition;" a banality we see acted out daily on our television screens and on the op-ed pages of our newspapers.

The banality of sedition is now so well established that it is, well, banal and goes forward without a great deal of remark or trouble. In the last few years, the phrase that has arisen to describe this phenomenon is "The Culture of Treason." I'm not sure who originated the phrase, but its use is proliferating across the Internet for the reason that all such phrases proliferate when the time is ripe; it somehow rings true.

Of late, it iseems that large sections of the better educated and the most privileged among us have decided that the Constitution is, after all, a suicide pact and have determined to preach this death gospel to us all:

"This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen. Step right up into the van carrying you all away into the perfect freedom of the perfect world. Don't worry about those canisters of gas dropping in through the top. It's just to delouse you of your old, traditional ideas of what being an American is all about.

"In just a few painless minutes you'll all be, as we are now, citizens of the world. And in that world to which we are all going you'll forget the old dream of America. You'll forget, at the last, everything that was good about America. You'll also forget the true and the beautiful. In the end, you'll forget about God himself.

"All those old dreams and visions will fade into a gray sameness. And then you'll all be, at the last, perfect citizens of our brave new world. We've breathed deeply of this gas before you and find it is the perfect blend of platitudes, freshly roasted, for the killing of your soul. After all, you weren't using it much. So step right up. First ride's free."

The long evening light was fading down into a warm dusk outside the coffee shop on Capitol Hill. Motorhead, in a moment of awakening, said, "Well, I should probably get grocery shopping."

Having gotten Motorhead's assent to attend the "event," Trotsky the Comrade becomes Trotsky the Closer and skins twenty bucks out of Motorhead's wallet for Gramsci's "Prison Notebooks" ($14.95 at Amazon). The tracts and, of course, the newspaper are free. Such a deal.

The threadbare backpack is repacked with Trotsky's portable library. He and Motorhead set off up the hill and, turning the corner, move out of sight.

I fold up the scrap of paper on the back of which I've made my notes of their meeting. The front side invites all and sundry to a "Solidarity Gathering" at the 45th Street Overpass: "We Support the Rape Survivor at Duke... and the Countless Others Everywhere. Come and join us in solidarity to bear witness to this terrorism against women." I make a mental note to, somehow, manage to be elsewhere.

Walking back to the Century Ballroom, I notice a large flyer that announces the "event" that Motorhead has agreed to attend. Ahmed Shawki, editor of the International Socialist Review, will speak, it seems, on "Black Liberation and Socialism."

Shaki's image dominates the flyer and looks, for all the world, like a Malcom X returned to life. The look is, of course, a carefully studied one since black socialist saints are hard to come by these days.** The Clenched Fist logo is in the lower left hand corner of the flyer. There are other details but I have a hard time making them out. It is, I discover, hard to read a flyer that is lying in the gutter. Especially when the light has failed.

---

In "Celebration" of May Day, 2008. HT: Cynr who created the art.

---

**Written in April, 2006

"I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;"

Last night upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I hope he never goes away
-- Variation on a nursery rhyme

Even as Obama’s methods grow more radical, his means more aggressive, and his motives darker, and his ideology more naked, most Democrats polled persist in their belief that he really is their friend. It’s entirely imaginary, of course, since we see with every passing day that the “friendship” of Obama only lasts as long as it is needed -- by Obama. When the need is no longer there, the friendship fades like the Highland mist at dawn. The now tattered and overused phrase “Under the bus” has become code for “Any speed bumps on Obama's road will be steam-rolled to a flat black stain on the pavement like an armadillo on an Arizona highway in August.”

And yet, if we are to believe the polls, Democrat love for Obama endures in many even as the pain from his policies grows. The tryst that was consummated in the soft and moonlit honeymoon suite in January 2009 by February 2010 seems more and more like a long dark night in Michelle Obama's Dominatrix Dungeon with no safeword.

Incomprehensible as it may seem to any neutral observer many Democrats continue to believe, in the face of stark facts daily seen, that Obama is indeed their friend. It has to be tiring because this fantasy -- now entirely a product of the imagination -- requires that greater and greater energy is expended on the part of the believer in "Keeping it real."

How can Democrats continue to "feel the love" even as the whip comes down? Yes, it's perverse but they have no choice. Those that believe Obama is their friend find it necessary to believe. Why is Obama the imaginary friend necessary to them? Because, regardless of their age, all Obama acolytes and most Democrats are children. They need to believe in Obama like Virginia needs to believe in Santa Claus, and like a beaten woman needs to believe her man really loves her. These are immature attitudes but in the USA of the 21st century “childishness” is what we do. It's the one sector of manufacturing in which we still lead the world.

We’ve been producing the manchild, the femchild, and the girly-boy in this country for decades. What the Chinese emperors once did to women's feet we can now do to human souls and we're not outsourcing. The binding that cripples the soul begins in the early indoctrination of kindergarten, where they learn all they need to know and then stop learning much of anything else. To make sure it sticks, the indoctrination is repeated for as long as they remain soaking in the thick multicutural, transnationalist, progressive soup of our educational system:

“ The New York Times, Grievance Groups, Government, Diversity = Good” vs “The Great Books, Individualism, Responsibility, America = Bad.”

That’s pretty much it these days. Rinse and repeat that mantra like a Hari Krishna on crack and you too can actually succeed in school right up to a Ph.D. in “Diversity Studies.”

It’s Big Education’s formula for stunting spiritual growth and producing Peter Pans and Pams that won’t and can’t grow up. As a result the liberal Democrat's capacity for sustaining imaginary friends never really abates. Indeed, with many of our Baby Hueys living well into their fifth and sixth decade the imaginary friend demand was exceeding the supply. This was all solved by Big Media’s manufacture and distribution of Barack Obama as a kind of “Barakbi Doll – The Only Imaginary Friend You’ll Ever Need!”

As some have gotten chary of pointing out, Obama was tailormade (by an as yet unknown tailor in an as yet undisclosed location) for rich and/or liberal white people. It was a classic example of branding a substandard product in such a way that it gained major market share in the target demographic. Without them, Obama was nothing. Without Obama, they were less than zero.

What was the product? It was “Your New Best Friend in the White House.” It was “President Jed Bartlet Built Better Because a Bit Blacker.” To underscore this point comedian and soothsayer Chris Rock has a routine in which he relates,

“These days black folks have a LOT of white friends and white folks all have ONE black friend.”

This has, he notes, been a trend for quite some time and, given the relative population percentages of African-Americans versus Americans of the Caucasian persuasion, it was only a matter of time before there was an African-American / Caucasian friend gap.

Obama seems to fill that gap providing “a friend in need.” He’s cool. He’s slender. You not only want him to come to dinner, but to stay for the long weekend and bring his family. His family is the very essence of picture perfect latter-day Jeffersons in a Tiffany frame. You want that framed picture with you in it with them to hang on your ego wall. Obama knows you want that photo-op more than anything. He also knows what you like to hear, and he knows how to say it when he’s doing just the opposite. His stiletto is so smooth you hardly feel it going in.

Obama is a better liar than most politicians because he’s far beyond shame. Shame was stripped out of him as a teenager. Shame is for sissies. Truth is not the tool of tyrants.

Most of all Obama knows how hard it is to stop loving someone even when you see them buying lap dances from Nancy Pelosi night-after-night in the champagne court at the back of the DC titty bar. Like all abusive spouses, Obama knows that once he can get you to stick around after he’s been unfaithful and knocked you around, you’ll stay around for even more abuse and infidelity. Why? Because you’ve come to need the abuse more than the love; you’ve come to want more than anything else to just spend more time close to him in the hope that he’ll change and finally feel your pain and feed your needs.

The problem is your needs may be real, but Obama’s got a full schedule when it comes to his “Let’s wreck America as quickly and completely as possible” needs. He just doesn’t have time to hang out with you. So you’ll just have to imagine the love.

Where did this compulsive need for an imaginary friend come from? A 2006 study of the phenomenon of imaginary friends by Dr. Louise Newman, child psychiatrist and the director of the New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry , sheds a glimmer of light:

Most children grow out of imaginary friends, Newman says. But in some cases an imaginary friend can emerge in adulthood, usually in response to trauma, inability to cope with stress and sometimes psychotic illness.In rare cases some adults develop what's known as Doppelganger syndrome, which occurs when they believe a twin or invisible friend accompanies them.

Seen in that light, it’s easy to understand why so many folks retain the impression of Obama as their imaginary friend. It is, as it always is, the fault of George W. Bush. What was once the mental disease that crippled tens of millions of American minds, "Bush Derangement Syndrome" (BDS), has morphed into "Obama Arrangement Syndrome" (OAS)

which requires that people interpret or ignore events in a manner that reinforces their preconceived, and rigid, notions about Obama.

If Bush Derangement Syndrome needed a 12-step program, Obama Arrangement Syndrome is going to need a 13-step program. It begins with, “We admited to ourselves and others that the idea Barack Obama was our friend was utterly imaginary, and no matter how many times he promised it we were never going to be sharing long, hot showers into the wee hours of the morning.”

[Rewritten, updated, and republished from November 4, 2009]

Image by Rodger, Real King of France

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. -- Benjamin Franklin

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. -- Othello

So far March has been a life changing experience for one Sandra Fluke. When the month began she was an obscure activist despairing of life: she was going to law school. Why? Well, on the one hand it was to get some sort of accreditation to do some sort of thing with her heretofore wasted life. On the other it was her chance to butt into the business and spiritual lives of her fellow students with her own half-baked theories of why some people should tell everyone else how to live. It was, as noted, a rather obscure and pointless existence.

Then Fluke testified before a sham congressional committee to exploit her own sex, lies and videorapes with absurd statistics. In the process she became, now and for the rest of her life, the woman who would always be thought of as the official Washington “slut.” She has now, no matter what the truth of her behavior is, firmly planted herself in the minds of her detractors or supporters as “that slut.” Her supporters won’t ever admit they think of her that way. They will always say, “She’s not a slut, she’s a champion of wymyns’ rights to do what they want with their bodies!” At the same time they will think..... “Slut.” Not because Rush Limbaugh had the innate honesty to call her a slut, but because even her supporters now know her to be a slut. When it comes to being honest about sex in this day and age everyone has been trained to say the kind and politically correct thing while thinking and meaning quite another.

In a real way Fluke’s slutitude is parallel to the famous catch phrase from Seinfeld about homosexuality: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.” That phrase has entered the culture so deeply that you often still hear it mockingly said whenever homosexuality is discussed. In polite company it is meant to signal what it says, i.e. “Nothing wrong with gayness.” That’s how we’ve agreed, as a culture, to handle this topic in public. But what people actually think in the back of their minds, gay or straight, is that there really is something wrong with it. If this wasn’t the case, the phrase would not have persisted in American culture for the last 20 years since it was first uttered in 1993.

Another even more similar case was that of Anita Hill who testified against Justice Thomas in 1991. Hill is currently working in the kind of standard “distinguished” professorial positions reserved for good little progressives if they do what they are told , but she will always be associated with “Long Dong Silver” and a public hair on a Coke can. Her reputation and legacy were pretty much cemented into place when she testified against Thomas. She will never emerge from that shadow.

Then we have the “successful” self-degradation embodied by the career of Hillary Clinton. Clinton, it would seem, has become qualified for any political position you can think of by virtue of the fact that she became, following her husband’s harvesting of blow jobs from a zaftig intern, the most publicly humiliated woman in history. No matter what she’s done since and no matter what she will do from now on, Hillary’s decision to “stand by her man” in order to advance her own naked ambition will forever stain her reputation more indelibly than semen on a blue dress. It will forever be associated with her.

Fluke is in that same sort of degraded position now. Decades will pass and she will always be known as “that Slut woman.” She’ll go on in her life with appointments to some sort of law firm, think tank, or government bureau as a reward for being a good little apparatchik. She might even run for some sort of public office and win. It won’t matter. Fluke’s tarnished her own goods with her own testimony in the last few weeks. She’s hoisted herself with her own petard. She’s put the needle in and it will never come out. Just as Marlo Thomas will forever be known as "That Girl, " Fluke will forever be known in the back of everyone’s mind as “That Slut.”

For one week Fluke took the heat off of the president's war against religion and the constitution. She got a phone call from Obama out of it. I hope she thinks the damage she's done to herself was worth it, because to get it she made herself into the kind of “damaged goods” parents once used to warn their daughters against becoming. The rich irony is that she doesn’t even know it yet. But she will. She will.

There oughta be a law against these kinds of high-pressure selling tactics.

Who let them out? Why are they everywhere? On the corners, by the entrances to supermarkets, at the crossings, and all over the place. They swoop into the neighborhood in massive SUVs driven by classic MILFs. They pull in, tumble out giggling, and yank their card tables and their boxes of contraband from the back. Then they set up their offerings in stacks, and slap crude handmade signs with a heavy helping of glitter on the tables. Then they don their gang colors and get to work on you.

They are the most ruthless retail agents known to man. They are virtually irresistable in their peddling of their wares. They do it with cutting edge cute, and they have no scruples concerning your desperate attempt to diet away the winter flab.

They are the Girl Scouts and no matter how I try I cannot avoid them.

Their web of pushers has been strung across Seattle. They don't even offer the first one free. They just jibber-jabber among themselves with their guardian MILF smiling knowingly at you. Sometimes, when the junkies are slow to line up for their fix, they do things like cartwheels or jump rope. Then they get your attention. The MILF sees this and smiles again.

And you are sunk. You have no hope of escape. Your whole universe of abstaining from sugar collapses. The few measly ounces you've lost by denying yourself that fourth scoop of Cherry Garcia at one in the morning are swamped by the tsunami of the C.U.T.E. in their little vests with their patches. You world of hope for a change in your gut is gone, and the only thing left for you is the stark choice: Thin Mints or Samoas?

I've tried to escape their clutches, but it's no good. Today, desperate to kick after discovering last night that I could hear a box of Thin Mints calling to me through a closed door, I even invented a granddaughter.

The MILF saw my glance at their cookie table and smiled. I said, having bought no less than three boxes of their krispy krack over the last week, "I'm sorry, but my granddaughter has made me swear to buy cookies only from her troop." (I have no granddaughter, but I was in despair.)

One of her henchgirls shrugged and did a cartwheel while the other two looked disappointed in that trademark Girl Scout disappointed look that I'm sure they give a patch for.

"Oh, don't worry," said the MILF. "We'll never tell. Right girls?"

"We'll never-ever tell," said all three virtually in unison as if they'd practiced it throughout all of February at their Girl Scout/MILF coven meetings.

It was all over for me. All I could say was,

"Samoas."

Or, "The Ninja Nibbler of the Night"

As a friend of mine recently pointed out, "Women shop. Men resupply."

Too true. Whenever I find myself in one of our current Cathedrals of Food (AKA: "Whole Foods -- Why Pay Less?"), I don't buy meals, I buy components. Though I've lived alone for some time, I buy like I'm supplying a small tribe. I've tried to control this by selecting the "little" cart. You know, that half-pint shopping vehicle, that grocery Miata, that let's you believe you're not really buying as much as you are. It doesn't work. I come home, unpack my "kills" -- at about $69 a bag -- and mumble, "Who's going to eat all this?"

House guests are the God's answer to "Who's going to eat this?" They are. That's okay. I love to cook for people. I'm good at it and it gets boring cooking for one; expensive too since I loathe leftovers.

Problems return when your house guests are stealth eaters. You know who I mean. Yes, you. Stealth eaters never, ever overeat -- except on the sly. They are the Merrill's Marauders of the post-midnight refrigerator.

Continued...

Continued...

"Meth In Mexico: A soldier stood in a room full of barrels containing powder after the seizure of a small ranch in Tlajomulco de Zuniga, Mexico, Thursday. According to the Mexican army, 15 tons of pure methamphetamine were seized at the ranch."

15... Fifteen?... TONS? of meth were seized? A bit of calculation tells me that 1 short ton = 907,184 grams. Let's say that one gram of meth = one to four hits to a tweeker.*** That means that in one (1!) raid the Mexicans seized between 14 and 56 million hits of crank. Can that be real? Can that be true? Can that be what one Mexican meth operation is cranking out?

That exceeds the mind's capacity to boggle. Is everybody in this country wired except me? Is it really that out of control? Doesn't seem possible. Can the government of Mexico be lying? Can our government be lying? How can I think such a thing? I must be sleeping. I need something to wake me up from this nightmare.

---

***How much meth did you use?

Tweeker 1: "When I started, it was about 1/4 gram per day. I was still able to "sleep" (or at least pretend to), go to work, be an activist, and do a lot of mentally demanding things very well."

Tweeker 2: "At my worst, I was using a teener a day. (1.75 grams) I was utterly incoherent by that point. The only time I felt any clarity was when I was getting that rush."

Tweeker 3: I've done a gram in one day. I don't know if it is because it wasn't working like it should or if it was because I was just brain damaged.

"Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form.

"Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow. What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world.

"You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden. That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it.

"Turn it whatever way you will---whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent." -- Abraham Lincoln. Speech at Chicago, Illinois | July 10, 1858

Well, this seems to have touched a nerve.

"That right there is your laptop. You see it right there on the ground. This right here... is my 45.

"That was the first round. These are exploding hollow point rounds, and you have to pay me back for these too, because these are a dollar apiece.

"1,2,3,4,5,6... Oh yeah, after that comment you made about your mom your mom told me to put one there for her. So that one's from her and if i got one left.... Oh I got two left... Now I'm out....

"So, just for the record, whenever you're not grounded --whatever year that happens to be -- you can have a new laptop when you buy a new laptop.... and when you pay me back the $128 I spent on your laptop yesterday."

Now playing at:Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen. - YouTube

UPDATE: Attention Media Outlets "If we have anything to say, we'll say it here on Facebook, and we'll say it publicly, but we won't say it to a microphone or a camera. There are too many other REAL issues out there that could use this attention you're giving us. My daughter isn't hurt, emotionally scarred, or otherwise damaged, but that kind of publicity has never seemed to be to have a positive effect on any child or family." [HT: Joan]

"The Derelicts by ICON are known for being vintage classics refashioned into stylish modern vehicles. The hand made classics are one offs that boast a fully patina'd exterior. Jonathan Ward's upgrades and attention combined with a modern Art Morrison powder-coated chassis, unique interiors, and all new electrical components are what make the Derelicts so desirable. The 1952 Chevy Deluxe Business Man's coupe has a 430hp Camaro 6.2 LS3 engine while the 1952 Chrysler Town and Country custom wagon has a DeSoto front end with the power from a late model Hemi engine." -- Via eGarage - VIDEO

Here's more detail on one of the derelicts, a 52 Chevy coupe that is nearly identical to one that I owned in 1970. Could be the same one. I think I sold it for $250.

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.

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

Continued...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
        -- Eliot

Last Sunday in Seattle I was still sitting with my morning coffee when the phone rang. It was my old friend, the constant urban explorer, who lives a few blocks away. "I want to give you a gift," he said, "but I can't bring it to you. Instead, you've got to go to it." This man's gifts are not lightly chosen (Except for the inflatable Sarah Palin love doll -- but he's getting that one back when he least expects it.), so I listened.

"Write this down. Walk to the Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in your neighborhood."

"Oh..kay....."

"No. No. You'll be glad you did. Then go in the main entrance and stroll along the road on the west side."

"Right."

"Look to your left for a large white stone with two benches on either side of it. The name carved into the stone is 'PUDDY.' "

"Got it."

"Sit down on a bench and look around. That's your gift. Talk to you later. Oh, you'll want to take your camera."

I wondered for a moment if this could be some sort of geocaching joke. At the same time I knew it wasn't. He's a man with little use for the latest techno-ephemera. He values time, his and others. Sleeveless errands are not his style. It was a bright, somewhat cool, Indian Summer Sunday in Seattle and the cemetery was only a few blocks away. I suited up and out the door I went. In a few minutes I was walking into the cemetery and looking around.

Mt. Pleasant is fine cemetery as cemeteries go. Quiet and expansive without being overlarge. You can be buried with your own kind if you are Asian or Jewish, or you can just be planted helter-skelter in the great Seattle diversity plots that make up most of it's area. I've written about this place before in Small Flags, a meditation about loss and war, but the cemetery tells, as all cemeteries do, more than one kind of story if you settle your soul down and listen.

At first I was a bit disoriented inside the gates since the one-lane road winds hither and yon around the grounds and the office with the map to the grave sites is closed on Sundays. By and by, however, I spied off to my left and over near the wall of trees and bushes and chain link fencing that is the western border of the cemetery a large white stone with two white stone benches on either side. I went over and read:

PUDDY

Come sit with us awhile and share our sorrow. Though you weep share the joyful memories too. Look in your heart: In truth you mourn for that which has been your delight.

For Joy and sorrow are inseparable.

I sat and looked north to the outer edge of the large plot that, so far, had only one grave. And there they were.

I've taken this ride in winters past. I've taken it as a child with my mother and father and brothers. I've taken it one New Year's Eve in New England by myself. Right into a tree and the emergency room for thirty stitches. I've taken it as a young adult under the moonlight on the banks of the frozen Red River in Fargo racing my cousins to the bottom and out onto the ice. I've taken it as a father in other winters past. It's a great ride while it lasts; one that -- barring impact with a tree -- makes you want to get up, pull the sled back up to the top and go again. One that makes you want to race your sled against the others. One that makes you want to see how many can pile on and go down, embracing the others and whooping all the way to the bottom where you all tumble off into a laughing heap.

You can take lots of rides in this life, but a full sled careening down a hill of fresh snow is the closest to a ride of pure joy as you can get. You'll find it near the top of my list of "Best Moments in This Life." It's probably on yours too. If you've never done it, move it to the top of the Bucket List now.

The man buried here died in his 45th year: R. Scott Puddy

On the morning of June 18, 2002, Scott perished doing what he loved: practicing aerobatics in a Yak-52, in the mountains of Brentwood, Calif.

He was survived by his parents, his sisters, and his daughter.

The dark secret fear lurking inside you when you are a parent is that your children will die before you do. That fear came true for this family. All parents can imagine their grief, but all choose not to do so. But they did not choose, as so many do, to be utterly undone by grief. Instead they chose to balance grief with joy, "For Joy and sorrow are inseparable," and place upon this grave a bronze symbol of all that is best in this life and in this world.

It's a gift to their son, R. Scott Puddy, and a gift to any in the world who chance upon his grave. It's a gift outright.

If you ever happen to be near Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Queen Anne, Seattle, go see it. Take your camera. Send your friends. Sit a spell and leave a token, stone or blossom or leaf. When it comes to gifts like this, the gift must move. Pass it on.

---

Young boy in pilot's helmet and goggles

"And down we went. / In the mountains, there you feel free."

[This is back from last October because Puddy's daughter came by and left a comment on the anniversary of his passing.]

In New England in December the cold does not come in on little cat feet. Instead some mountain god of the great north woods throws open the door to Canada late one night. When you step out the next morning your scrotum promptly goes into hibernation somewhere around your arm pit. The cold gets hammered down tight. And it stays that way. Until, oh, somewhere in the middle of March.

I’d come to New England after many years away and, in Seattle, thought I’d packed well for the trip. I’d made a point to bring my very warm Seattle jacket. I stepped outside into the New England winter this morning and between the door and the car I knew, based on testicle retraction velocity, that my coat had nothing to say to this winter. I might as well have packed and dressed in a Speedo. At least I would have been rapidly arrested and taken to a warm jail cell until my need for medication could be determined.

In the car, having cranked the heat to fat end of the red stripe on the dial, my thawing reptile brain hissed, “Get a coat or die, monkeyboy.”

Continued...

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
--Eliot, Journey of the Magi

Small moments in long journeys, like small lights in a large darkness, often linger in the memory. They come unbidden, occur when you are not ready for them, and are gone before you understand them. You "had the experience, but missed the meaning." All you can do is hold them and hope that understanding will, in time, come to you.

To drive from Laguna Beach, California to Sacramento. California the only feasible route takes you through Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. If you go after dark in this season of the year, you speed through an unbroken crescendo of lights accentuated by even more holiday lights. In the American spirit of "If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing," the decking of the landscape with lights has finally gotten utterly out of hand.

Airports, malls, oil refineries, the towers along Wilshire and the vast suburbs of the valley put up extra displays to celebrate what has come to be known as "The Season." All the lights flung up by the hive of more than 10 million souls shine on brightly and bravely, but the exact nature of "The Season" seems more difficult for us to define with every passing year.

For hours the lights of the Los Angeles metroplex surround you as if they have no end. But they do end. In time, the valley narrows and you come to the stark edge of the lights. Then you drive into a dark section of highway known as the Grapevine.

The Grapevine snakes up over the mountains that ring the Los Angeles Basin to swirl down the far side into the endless flatland of the Great Central Valley. From entrance to exit is about 50 miles.

Continued...

Billy Joel: He's a nice man, but he's gotta go.

They tell me, in this shaded room where the machines beep softly and the drip feed makes a soft “plop” every minute or so, that I am mad to declare, as I do, that my only solution is to go back in time and strangle Billy Joel in his cradle. They say that I am mad, but I say infanticide is the one ambition that still attaches me to sanity. Like Carthage, Baby Billie must be destroyed!

It wasn’t always this way with me. In fact it all started on Thanksgiving but a few weeks ago. Started, as many disasters do, by killing me softly with its love.

The parasite embedded itself in my brain during a vulnerable moment in the postprandial stupor that descended upon me after the third and last helping of Thanksgiving dinner. As the tryptophan torpor of turkey eroded my normal defenses I sat, minding my own stomach, by the warm fire in the study. Next door in the kitchen over a hot hand of Pinochle my host said, “Turn up that Billy Joel song I like.”

If I had known what that meant I would have choked myself with the leftover drumstick at that moment.

Continued...

We'd finished filming John and Yoko for the video a day or so before he was shot to death. It was their last video, but of course we didn't know it at the time. There was film of them holding hands and walking in Central Park in the place that would later become "Strawberry Fields." We'd filmed them rolling naked in bed together in a Soho Art Gallery where she looked healthy and ample and he looked small and slight, with skin that was almost transluscent. I remember being slightly surprised by the fact that Lennon's need for Ono was so constant and palpable. He was seldom more than two feet away from her side and had the disconcerting habit of calling her "Mommy" whenever they spoke.

My role was as "executive producer" which really meant that I was to stand around with a roll of hundred dollar bills and pay-off the teamsters and solve other problems with copious applications of money. It was an odd job in more ways than one, but I was grateful to have it at the time.

We'd sent the last of the film to the lab, and the director, Ethan Russell, had gone back to Los Angeles to begin editing. The crew had dispersed and I'd taken to my bed racked with pain. The job, this time, had been so tough and high stress that my neck had gone out. I could barely turn my head without feeling as if a sledge was hammering a hot-needle into the cervical vertebrae. I was lying carefully propped on the bed eating Bufferin as if they were Tic-Tacs and trying not to move. My neck was held in one of those tight foam collars. Not moving was the best thing to do at the time and I was doing it with all my might.

It was a small one-bedroom apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. My first wife and I were there after three years of living in London, Paris, the Algarve and other European locations. She was eight months pregnant with our daughter and looked as if she was trying to smuggle a basketball across state lines for immoral purposes. Her mood, never really cheerful, was not improved by her situation.

The apartment was on loan from her uncle's girlfriend. I was down to my last few thousand dollars and was looking for a job. The film gig had been a gift from my old friend Ethan, and I'd been glad to get it. But it was over and, with a baby banging on the door of the world, things were not looking up. At the time, the only thing looking up was me since my neck required me to lie flat and gaze at the ceiling. It had been a rough two weeks but I thought things would certainly improve.

And of course, that's when things got worse. It got worse in the way most things do, the phone rang and my wife called out, "It's for you."

Some New York wag once said, "Age fourteen is the last time in your life when you're glad the phone is for you."

I groped blindly to the side of the bed and picked up the extension. It was Ethan calling from an editing room in Los Angeles. "John's been shot. He's dead."

I think my reaction then was my reaction now when I wrote out the phrase above. I just stopped doing and thinking whatever I was doing or thinking and stared at the rough plaster ceiling above and blinked slowly in the silence.

Then I said whatever I said. I'm sure I expressed shock, disbelief, and something about how alive he'd been at the filming session the day before, or two days before... whatever it may have been. But Ethan, ever the professional, brought the call back to the reason for it.

"Here's what has to be done and done now. The footage we shot in the park is now the last footage ever taken of John. It is sitting in a film lab in Manhattan. We've got to get control of it, all of it, and secure it until everything is sorted out. There can't be a bootleg copy floating around for the tabloids and the television shows. It's probably the property of Yoko but we'll sort that out later. For now, you've got to get it out and safe."

The call ended and I stood up. Slowly. Dressed even more slowly and watched, as I dressed, the unfolding of the end of Lennon's life as reported, beat by beat, by all the television stations on the dial.

The next 24 hours are a blur. I remember sitting rigidly in the back of a limo learning to hate the potholes of the New York streets with a passion as each one slammed another heated needle deep into my neck. I somehow got the film out of the lab and took it to a midtown bank and placed it in a safe-deposit box. There were lawyers and paperwork to deal with, phonecalls and more instructions.

In the end, I took the keys to the safe-deposit box and the paperwork to the Dakota apartment of John Lennon to turn them over to Yoko's assistants.

The street in front of the Dakota was packed with people along both sidewalks and the crowd spilled into the street. The police were keeping it moving in a quiet way. Small seas of flowers flowed across the sidewalk and up the walls and gates of the Dakota. Pictures and scrawled messages of love and loss were taped to the walls and flung into the flowers. Widening puddles of melted wax where hundreds of candles burned lapped at the edges of the flowers. Some people held each other, others walked and wept openly. Some stood to the side and sobbed quietly. A path through the offerings had been cleared at the entrance to the Dakota and to get in you had to wade through the grief.

This spontaneous shrine was a harbinger, as so many things in John's life and death were. The same motif of flowers, pictures, candles, weeping and grief would be repeated on a vast scale across the entire city and country some 21 years later on 9/11, but that sort of thing could not have been imagined in December of 1980. This was the largest grief that could then be conceived by us - the killing of one of the Gods of music. "Our music." Which the "Man can't bust," but, as had just been proven by one of our lunatics, we could kill.

Taken large, this was the death of the music in the death of a man in whom we'd invested much of our misplaced faith. Taken larger it was the death of the 60s and all that we once "imagined" it might mean, might become. And all of it happening in a way that would be echoed in later years as the 60s died again and again - and always at the hands of those that lived it. I might have seen it then, if then I could have seen clearly, as a portent of so much that sprung from those fertile blindingly optimistic years that would go wrong and twisted in the years ahead, but "I am no prophet and here's no great matter."

On that day, I didn't see anything clearly -- nor would I for decades. I just walked into the courtyard of the Dakota, took the elevator up to the apartment, said some words to the small and aging Asian woman in the white room, dropped off legal papers and keys and went down the elevator, out to the car and had it drive me back to bed across the park.

That's what I did on that day. Just another walk-on part in the war.

Some days later there was a memorial service for John in Central Park. I went with an old friend from Berkeley, Jon Cott, who'd interviewed Lennon once or twice over the years for Rolling Stone. I don't remember much about the service. I'm sure "Imagine," that anthem of dubious distinction, was sung by all of us, and that there were more flowers and candles and crying as is the way of these things.

When it was over, I walked out of Central Park with Cott, one of my amigos from those diamond sky nights in Berkeley, the Haight, "swinging" London, and all the other scenes we'd flowed through in the 60s and 70s. I walked East out of the park towards what would soon become not just my first wife, but my family for 12 years -- a whole new life containing all the seeds, good and bad, of the old dead life.

I said goodbye to Jon Cott at the entrance to the subway that would take him downtown to the Village where he'd put aside writing about rock and roll and was now writing a book about children's fairy tales. Cott was always just ahead of the curve. I watched from the street as he went down under the ground.

I'd never see him again. But then I'd never see the 60s again either. On that day, it all went down under the ground.

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
Photograph ©, 2006 by Ethan Russell @ EthanRussell.com

I admire excess. I admire fellow Americans who keep the faith when it comes to one of the central guiding principles of this nation: "If it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing." So when I learned that Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft ultra-millionaire and the guiding force behind the six-volume $625.00 cookbook Modernist Cuisine would be speaking at Town Hall in Seattle last night, I had to attend.

I'd first bumped into Myhrvold in the Penthouse offices in New York over a decade or so back. He was touring New York promoting something that never really got off the ground for Microsoft -- something that happened a lot in that period. He impressed me then as a very high functioning prodigy moving into middle age. He's a fascinating polymath and his years with Microsoft have left him with the means to indulge his obsessions. One long term obsession, stemming (so goes his myth) from nine years of age, is cooking. The apotheosis of this obsession is the book, say rather "block of paper and ink," known as Modernist Cuisine.

"Initially the book was planned to be 150 pages on cooking sous vide in water baths and combi ovens, along with some scientific fundamentals relevant to those techniques.It gradually grew in scope; by late 2009, the book plan had expanded to 1,500 pages,[7] and when finally printed it was 2,438 pages."

Another fact is that the ink used in printing the book weighs four pounds.

Myhrvold spoke about the book and the recipes and techniques of the book for about an hour in his rather high-pitched but scratchy voice. I was kept interested and informed for most of it if not overly impressed. After all, it seemed to be one of those projects where, if you had the obsession and money (He had both.) to toss at a project, you could staff it and fund it enough to make it happen. He was being marginally more interesting than the ultra-rich nerds who go out and fill barns with Ferraris and Lamborghinis.

Then he came to his variation of "The Cheeseburger." Like other things in Modernist Cuisine, Myhrvold's "Chesseburger" is constructed by taking infinite pains to concentrate flavors and make various ingredients do techno-tricks. In exploded form,"The Cheeseburger" looks like this:

Tasty, right? But the payoff is when Myhrvold informs you about exactly how they cook the patty. For reasons explained in the video below, the "shortrib patty ground vertically to align the grain" is first dipped into liquid nitrogen and then lowered into boiling oil.

That's right: first liquid nitrogen at -346F and then into boiling oil. That's when I knew I was listening to a certifiable maniac whose resume and fortune were the only things that stood between him and an Institution for the Cusinely Insane.

Still I had to wonder, "What can that cheeseburger possibly taste like?" I was more than a bit disappointed when he offered to sign copies of his $625.00 book after the talk. I was sort of hoping he'd invite us all out for some burgers.

Moments of real awe that overwhelm the soul are rare, but if you look closely at the miracle of creation in the macro or micro cosmos you can create such a moment almost at will. Real awe is front-loaded into the universe.

At the same time, those things of man that inspire awe diminish moment by moment under the unstoppable onslaught of the word "awesome." The descent of the word "awesome" from a valuable modifier when describing an experience to the status of a brain fart is a classic example of how our "educated" illiterates destroy literacy.

I've had a few moments in my life where genuine awe shook me to the roots of my soul. Holding my daughter in my arms a moment after she was born comes to mind as does a time when I was very young, lying a field and looking up at the sky and the high cirrus glowing burnt orange in the fading rays of day. There were others as well, gifts given and grace notes. Common to all were an intake of breath and a feeling as if your heart had been grazed by a thought of God and forgot, for that moment, to beat. Matched up against all the torrent and cascade of moments though, this genuine awe was rare; it was one of the pearls beyond price, the shining instant of "Ah ha, so that's what it's all about."

Not so today. Today awe is as common as clay. Today all things of man possesses the awe of someness. The movie is awesome. The SmartCar is awesome. The candy bar is awesome. The cheeseburger is awesome. Today it would seem that every slice of tripe spun out of the crap factories of pop culture is awesome even though one note of the 9th Symphony would crush the entire oeuvre of Arrowsmith. My morning latte was described by the barrista as "awesome" when, like all our cornucopia of crapulous things described as such, it was quite mediocre, thank you.

I'm not sure when "awesome" died, but it was sometime in the very late, not-so-great, 20th century. You'd think it would be mummified by now, but no. Whenever someone so forgets to drive their mouth responsibly that the word "awesome" emerges it carries with it the stench of that slaughterhouse where perfectly good words go to die.

In a time when moments of true awe are needed to slake the parched post-modern lost souls, the intense trivialization of awe by the neutered generation is awesome.

FIFTY YEARS AGO, when I was a boy of fifteen and helping to inhabit a Missourian village on the banks of the Mississippi, I had a friend whose society was very dear to me because I was forbidden by my mother to partake of it. He was a gay and impudent and satirical and delightful young black man -a slave -who daily preached sermons from the top of his master's woodpile, with me for sole audience. He imitated the pulpit style of the several clergymen of the village, and did it well, and with fine passion and energy. To me he was a wonder. I believed he was the greatest orator in the United States and would some day be heard from....

One of his texts was this:

"You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."....

I think Jerry was right, in the main, but I think he did not go far enough.

1. It was his idea that a man conforms to the majority view of his locality by calculation and intention. This happens, but I think it is not the rule.

2. It was his idea that there is such a thing as a first-hand opinion; an original opinion; an opinion which is coldly reasoned out in a man's head, by a searching analysis of the facts involved, with the heart unconsulted, and the jury room closed against outside influences. It may be that such an opinion has been born somewhere, at some time or other, but I suppose it got away before they could catch it and stuff it and put it in the museum.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed....

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his life -- even if he must repent of a self-approved act the moment after its commission, in order to get his self-approval again: but, speaking in general terms, a man's self-approval in the large concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter.

"A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale...."

Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest -- the bread-and-butter interest -- but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise -- a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way.

A political emergency brings out the corn-pone opinion in fine force in its two chief varieties -- the pocketbook variety, which has its origin in self-interest, and the bigger variety, the sentimental variety -- the one which can't bear to be outside the pale; can't bear to be in disfavor; can't endure the averted face and the cold shoulder; wants to stand well with his friends, wants to be smiled upon, wants to be welcome, wants to hear the precious words, "He's on the right track!" Uttered, perhaps by an ass, but still an ass of high degree, an ass whose approval is gold and diamonds to a smaller ass, and confers glory and honor and happiness, and membership in the herd. For these gauds many a man will dump his life-long principles into the street, and his conscience along with them. We have seen it happen. In some millions of instances.

Men think they think upon great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side; they arrive at convictions, but they are drawn from a partial view of the matter in hand and are of no particular value. They swarm with their party, they feel with their party, they are happy in their party's approval; and where the party leads they will follow, whether for right and honor, or through blood and dirt and a mush of mutilated morals.

In our late canvass half of the nation passionately believed that in silver lay salvation, the other half as passionately believed that that way lay destruction. Do you believe that a tenth part of the people, on either side, had any rational excuse for having an opinion about the matter at all? I studied that mighty question to the bottom -- came out empty. Half of our people passionately believe in high tariff, the other half believe otherwise. Does this mean study and examination, or only feeling? The latter, I think. I have deeply studied that question, too -- and didn't arrive. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it the Voice of God.

[Happy 176th Birthday, Sam.]

 

"It was as if we slept from Friday to Monday and dreamed an oppressive, unsearchably significant dream, which, we discovered on awaking, millions of others had dreamed also. Furniture, family, the streets, and the sky dissolved, only the dream on television was real. The faces of the world's great mingled with the faces of landladies who happened to house an unhappy ex-Marine; cathedrals alternated with warehouses; temples of government with suburban garages; anonymous men tugged at a casket in a glaring airport; a murder was committed before our eyes; a Dallas strip-tease artist drawled amiably of her employer's quick temper; the heads of state of the Western world strode down a sunlit street like a grim village rabble; and Jacqueline Kennedy became Persephone, the Queen of Hades and the beautiful bride of grief. All human possibilities, of magnificence and courage, of meanness and confusion, seemed to find an image in this long montage, and a stack of cardboard boxes in Dallas, a tawdry movie house, a tiny rented room where some shaving cream still clung to the underside of a washbasin, a row of parking meters that had witnessed a panicked flight all acquired the opaque and dreadful importance that innocent objects acquire in nightmares."

Continued...

“Strait times come in history. Our time is such a time, millennial, full of fast currents, tossing, eddied, dangerous to pass through.” -- John Fowles, “The Aristos"

The thing is under the boat. The crew suspects as much but can't know for sure exactly where it is. They won't know where Leviathan is until it rises, inevitable and unstoppable, from the deep directly beneath them.

Can you feel it lurking just under the surface? I can and I think you can as well. The Greeks knew it as "Nemesis." Melville's Ahab knew it as "thou damned whale" and he struck at it from Hell's heart. Unperturbed it gathered him up and took him down. Then it took the boat and after that the ship. All save one followed. The whale beneath the surface of America's life is still there and all signs point to its breaching soon. Exactly where and exactly how are still unknown, but soon.

I feel the thing beneath the boat and I think others of my fellow citizens in ever growing millions feel it as well. We do not feel good about it and what it augers for the near and far future.

The jobs are not coming back. To know that you need to get off the inter-states; off the scenic blue highways that lead to your summer beach retreats. You need to get into the towns that have been passed by; the towns whose main industry has become food stamps and "assistance." These towns are growing in number daily and will continue to grow.

There is no work in these towns. The factories that supported them are long dead or dying. They, like the people they supported, are carbon based life forms and the strange insects that govern us seem to be united in making sure they never return. The checks and the food stamps come, but that's not enough to paint the houses or put in the gardens or do much more than eat too many pizzas and drink too much watery beer. The young would leave but more and more there's no place to go. They spend their time instead deciding on what sort of new tattoo will go well with the previous twenty.

The building of new houses and malls and condos and other large construction projects are not coming back. And even if they did where would we find the workers trained to build them? Old carpenters have moved on to making a living at something other than construction. There's not enough work to bring young ones onto the job and help them to master the skills needed. When a nation stops building it stops having the jobs that can train the next generation of builders. Mexicans, working cheap and off the books, are still in some demand, but there's a limit to repainting and the kind of minor brickwork that makes for a pleasant garden.

The money isn't coming back except at something worth less with every passing day. It begins to seem like mere slips of paper or a meaningless string of numbers that always seems to decrease. The stock market moves in fits and starts but doesn't seem to inspire the confidence needed to boost what once was the middle class. The debt looms ahead and consumes everything even as the argument is over whether or not to increase the debt rather than pay it down.

It's large and it's under the boat and it is beginning to rise. The crew is confused and flailing about. And the captain is insane but convinced he's on the right course. During the boom years it was commonly said, "A rising tide lifts all boats." True enough, but the rising of Leviathan can break the spine of our boat and send it down into the Maelstrom. And the thing is under the boat.

“We are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” -- Oscar Wilde

If you could pick up the Northwestern US by the southeast corner of Idaho and shake it, everything loose would roll down into Seattle. So many loose bipeds have rolled into town over the years that the city boasts not one angry and twisted little “alternative paper” but two: The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. Of the two, The Stranger is the stranger, the more angry, and the more spiteful. Strangely, The Stranger -- in this age of Obama and “springtime for progressive Hitlers" -- grows more angry and peevish every week since the November elections. It no longer competes with the Seattle Weekly to see who can be more revolting. It won that dubious contest long ago. These days The Stranger seems to mostly compete with itself; trying every week to put out more slime and bile than the week before. Most weeks, it wins. This week was no exception.

No matter what the standard Democrat/Progressive line may be, it is never quite good enough for The Stranger. This may be because of it’s editor, one Dan Savage by name, a man who seems to live to reveal that for some, when it comes to being intellectually twisted, there really is no bottom. It may be because The Stranger’s infected bloodlines run from from the ancient wheezings of The Daily Worker, down through The East Village Other, and out onto the news stands of Planet Moonbat with classifieds courtesy of The Berkeley Barb. Or it may be because the editor is simply an awful person with a full load of obsessive-compulsive disorders.It’s difficult to know when it comes to this perfect storm of spit, spite, and smut.

All one can know is that, with The Stranger, you see deeper into the soul of today’s post-modern American quisling than any other “alternative” weekly. And what you see is the utter lock this mindset has on what once we called “The Seven Deadly Sins.” It is positive for all of them and takes no medication. Instead, it showcases them in order to effectively infect every freshman class that arrives in Seattle looking for an “education” in how to be fashionably depraved in worn fleece. I read the paper every so often to keep in touch with how dementia, depravity and degradation are progressing in progressive America.

These days it would seem that the 7 deadly sins are now the 7 cardinal virtues of the progressive left. As I shall demonstrate....

Continued...

Of course, the sample size was one, which means that the margin of error could be on the high side. But still . . . Remember the dangers of hippiedom, kids, as the "Occupier" protesters fill the parks and civic centers of America's urban areas, pretending to change the world while they issue largely incoherent position papers, rip each other off, bang on their drums, and disregard the advantages of modern sewage systems.

Why? Well, because Mr. Gerard Van der Leun, who once referred to himself (accurately) as "the f*cking Forrest Gump of the 1960s," suffered a heart attack about week ago, and is being held at an undisclosed hospital in the Pacific Northwest. All is okay, thanks to medical miracles that present-days hippies generally take for granted: a stent was placed in the offending blood vessel, and GVDL has been assured that after his recovery is complete he may even be "better than before" (cue the theme from "The Six-Million-Dollar Man," and imagine the awesome advantages of a bionic heart).

Mr. VDL did consider the upsides of simply staying at the hospital; perhaps, he mused, it might prove to be the ultimate writers' colony. There was the option of having one of his well-wishers bring his keyboard in, hooking that up to his smart phone, and cranking some copy out. A few disadvantages presented themselves almost immediately, though: for one thing, the hospital staff was extremely narrow-minded about letting him out of bed to cook dinner in his room, and if you've looked at the cost of hospital visits these days you'll be knocked over by the nurses' chutzpah. Also, the other guests at the resort weren't up to the usual standards for a writers' colony; few of them were conversationally up to snuff, and some of the others . . . well, they just didn't have either a cosmopolitan outlook, or a connection with bedrock American values. Many of 'em just lay there, without contributing any insight whatsoever. What was that all about?

The upshot here is that Mr. VDL has consented to come home, probably the day after tomorrow, and he expects to be blogging another 48-72 hours after that—or whenever he finds all those little notes he's making about truly brilliant entries for the blog, some of which may not gleam as brightly after the doctors cut down those blessed post-surgical levels of painkillers.

What that means to me is that I have precious little time if I want to really vandalize the site properly; please do drop me a line if you've got ideas for shaking this place up over the next several days. After all, the cat is away—so the mice should play. Or, just leave your suggestions in the comment box. (And pray that the healing continues to go as beautifully as it has gone.)

Some of you are probably at your wit's end, though, with Gerard out of the picture. Remember that you can always scratch that itch via Amazon. Particuarly if you want to read about the implications of the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont (the pictures are amazing), or the genius of Sherlock Holmes.

If you will, please contemplate the OWS hippies one more time, meditate on Gerard's experiments with alternative culture (not to mention that sweater and the all-too-appropriate copy of The New York Times), and sort of shudder at how all that heightened his cardiovascular risk profile. Then put on some ooky, Bach-inspired and Halloweeney music.

That concludes today's morality tale. Thank you.

UPDATE: Yes—yes, that is Telegraph Ave. How did you know? I got that one terribly wrong. From the comments: "Mr. Vanderleun would like to assure Miss Atilla that said locale is not Telegraph Avenue, but just outside Carol Doda's estabishment for the overendowed in San Francisco's North Beach." Clearly I'd hit the wine early the night we talked about that pic.

In December of 1964 I stood in a crowd at the University of California at Berkeley where the student protest movement that shook the sixties and beyond was about to begin.

That day, and the days that would unfold after it across the decades, began with an extrordinary speech by the late Mario Savio, a passionate and tragic man. The speech he gave that day at 22 years of age was, in many ways, the peak moment of his short life. Still it was a moment many would wish they had in their own life. It set in motion many things, some good, some not so good, and some evil. For me it was a speech I would never forget, for better or worse.

It is, I think, a speech that speaks more to our era today, and more broadly, than the incident and world that was its focus when it was given. Like many great speeches it is subject to interpretation, misinterpretation, appropriation and revisionism. What it means now is not exactly what it meant then except in a more far reaching manner than perhaps Savio knew or intended. But then again perhaps he did know and did intend. Give a listen and see what you think.

I've never forgotten Savio's speech and, off and on in my own small way, I've tried to incorporate its sentiments and attitudes into my life through all manner of changing circumstances.

Today, in Daniel Greenfield's "Winning the System" I found an echo of these words from a time more than 46 years past. Reading them I thought about how far we've come from the America of those years and, at the same time, how much we've veered away from the direction of those dreams, preferring to have the experience of freedom and miss the meaning of liberty.

At the same time, in reading Greenfield's thoughts and finding the echo of that long ago December embedded in them, I think that perhaps, after all, the end is not yet and that enough stout hearts and able hands remain to steer the ship away from the lee shore:

All that's left is stopping the machine. That doesn't mean violent revolution, it means determined political change. The Tea Party was the first step of that change. It was extraordinary because for the first time in a long time, outrage at the operation of the machine brought massive numbers of people together around the country. Their principled stand was doomed to be muffled because the system has no interest in shifting power away from its institutions and toward the people. But it's only the beginning.

[In the elections of 2010 we saw that] a giant was slowly waking.

The task of the left is to complete its machine before the giant wakes. Our task is to wake the giant and point him at the machine. In that way the last three years have helped us more than they have helped the left, which could have made the same gains if it had waited and taken it more slowly. They put a face on the machine and that was their mistake. Now they're trying to take it back by putting Wall Street's face on the machine.

We will fight the good fight this election, and with the help of G-d may we win it, but it's the machine that is the real war. We cannot count on an Andrew Jackson to tear apart the machine for us. That will most likely come when the giant wakes and finds the continued operation of the machine so intolerable that he tears it apart. When the day comes that the machine advances and finds its path blocked by millions of people who are determined to stop it from operating then the people will have won over the system. And then the system can be scaled down to human level again. -- Winning the System by Daniel Greenfield

To repeat the nub of Savio's speech:

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

Well, maybe.

But there's a lot of power -- and even a prayer -- packed into that last small word in the last sentence: "May. Be."

Now that his "Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying" approach hasn't worked, Obama's decided to try for a mercy vote.

Not all young people are deadbeats. Many are actually doing something about being laid-off.

"We moved from this crazy idea to 'Look we can make something..."

Breuckelen Distilling Company, the first gin distiller in Brooklyn since prohibition. Founder Brad Estabrooke talks about starting from nothing and the imperfect process of perfecting a craft. His experience bears a lesson for us all: knowing you could fail brings you that much closer to success. -- Made by Hand

"They're reminding me to speak in English because right now I'm having problems with that."

I think it's safe to say she won't be going back to Europe any time soon no matter how "sophisticated" and "stylish" those French and Italians are.

"The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Now that's a President who's hip to what is happening today. And on the cutting edge of fashion too.

“This is a flat-bed scan of an original ca.1920s KEYSTONE VIEW COMPANY curved-mount, silver-print stereoview that was printed from a copy negative made directly from a 60-some year old rare albumen print in the Library of Congress. Photographed by LEWIS EMORY WALKER around February 1865, it was originaly published by ANTHONY. It’s the last known stereoview of him before he was assassinated." -- Love Truth & Beauty

Collective Behavior Civil Disturbances, Part 1 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

"Ye Olde Walk-In Seattle"

Where Lake Washington meets the ship canal at Union Bay, that's where Seattle has tucked in its slight, but somewhat interesting, Museum of Science and Industry. I'd been putting off going there since I seldom hear of anything interesting that the museum is exhibiting. It's a bit like the city thought it needed such a museum in order to qualify as a first-rate city. There's a lot of that kind of stuff in this town. It usually disappoints. However, having little to do other than avoid the rain last week -- and being in the general area -- I pulled into the road to the parking lot.

I had to stop and wait while a bus from a local old-folks home slowly unloaded its compliment of day-tripping seniors. You've seen these groups. They're the people that we usually store out of sight in one of God's proliferating waiting rooms. You know those places too. Somewhere ahead there's one of them with your name printed on a temporary tag and slipped into a bracket next to the door.

Continued...

Sippican Cottage: One Of These Is Banking. One Is Running A Pawn Shop. See If You Can Tell Them Apart

Situation 1: People need to borrow money, so they put up gimlet-eye-appraised collateral against the sum they need and pay a non-adjustable rate of interest on the money. There is a balloon payment due at the end of the term to repatriate the collateral. If you default, the lender keeps the collateral and sell it to others more able to afford it....

Situation 2: People need to borrow money, so they put up capriciously appraised collateral, and/or submit to a byzantine, arbitrary, personal appraisal of their financial affairs made by a slew of shady and disreputable third parties. Both the lender and the borrower know that the third party appraisals are akin to a farce, but neither really cares about the long-term viability of their transactions....

Details HERE

[Click to see the plan]

If you are worried that the little red choo-choo of our American culture might, just might, have jumped the tracks, fret no more. It has.

Continued...

"Well, it was only 3,000 people and we've moved on. Why can't you? Carpe diem, man."

Simon Dedvukaj, 26, Mohegan Lake, N.Y. janitorial, foreman, ABM Industries / Confirmed dead, World Trade Center, at/in building 2

The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For joy I did not move and dared not speak,
Not doctors would cure it, but time, its patient still.
-- Thom Gunn, The Wound

EVERYONE WHO WAS IN NEW YORK ON on "The Day" will tell you their stories about "The Day." I could stun you with an eight figure number by running a Google on 9/11, but you can do that as well.

"The Day," even at this close remove, has ascended into that shared museum of the mind to be placed in the diorama captioned, "Where Were You When." The site has long since been cleared and scrubbed clean. There is even an agreement on the memorial which will, I see, use a lot of water and trees. "The Day" has become both memorial and myth.

Less is heard about the aftermath. Less is said about the weeks and months that spun out from that stunningly clear and bright September morning whose sky was slashed by a towering fist of flame and smoke. You forget the smoke that hung over the city like a widow's shawl as the fires burned on for months. You don't know about the daily commutes by subway wondering if some new horror was being swept towards you as the train came to a stop deep beneath the East River. You supress hearing over the loudspeaker, always unclearly, that the train was being "held for police activity at Penn Station." Was that a bomb, poison gas, a mass shooting, a strike on the Empire State building? You were never sure. You carried a flashlight in case you had to walk out of the tunnels that ran deep beneath the river. Terror was your quiet companion. After the first six weeks you barely knew it was there.

Continued...

At the end of April in 2006 a couple of friends asked me to go with them to see "United 93," but I declined both offers saying I wasn't sure that I needed any reminders other than what I saw in New York on that day. In the end, though, I went to it as I went to the funerals, alone.

When people who were in New York on that day talk about it, it always seems to be focused on the day itself. Nobody talks much about the days and the weeks and the months that came after that day in New York City.

In a way, that's understandable because what happened for days and weeks and months after was pretty much a slowly diminishing repeat of that day. Things got better, got back to the new "normal." The wax from the candled shrines was scraped away, and in time -- quite a long time actually -- even the walls and fences full of fading flyers asking if you had seen one or the other of those we came to call "the missing" were gone.

Most of these ghastly portrait galleries were simply washed away by the snows and rains that followed that autumn day. Some were covered in long sheets of clear plastic duct-taped and sealed.

Continued...

Now the wintertime is coming,
The windows are filled with frost.
I went to tell everybody,
But I could not get across.
-- Bob Dylan | It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

Chico, CA: Early September, 2007

This September, as in most Septembers, the days have been hot and parched here in the upper reaches of California's Imperial Valley.

Continued...

Wilmer McLean landlord to history:

The initial engagement [of the Civil War] on July 18, 1861 of what would become the First Battle of Bull Run took place on McLean's farm, the Yorkshire Plantation, in Manassas, Prince William County, Virginia. Union Army artillery fired at McLean's house, which was being used as a headquarters for Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T. Beauregard, and a cannonball dropped through the kitchen fireplace. Beauregard wrote after the battle, "A comical effect of this artillery fight was the destruction of the dinner of myself and staff by a Federal shell that fell into the fire-place of my headquarters at the McLean House."

Maclean however had had enough:

He decided to move because his commercial activities were centered mostly in southern Virginia and the Union army presence in his area of northern Virginia made his work difficult. He undoubtedly was also motivated by a desire to protect his family from a repetition of their combat experience. In the spring of 1863, he and his family moved about 120 miles (200 km) south to Appomattox County, Virginia, near a dusty, crossroads community called Appomattox Court House.

.... Two years later ....

On April 9, 1865, the war revisited Wilmer McLean. Confederate General Robert E. Lee was about to surrender to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. He sent a messenger to Appomattox Courthouse to find a place to meet. On April 8, 1865, the messenger knocked on McLean's door and requested the use of his home. Lee surrendered to Grant in the parlor of McLean's house, effectively ending the Civil War.

At left, Wilmer McLean's house where the Civil War 'began.' At right, Wilmer McLean's house where the Civil War ended.

For a contemporary analysis of what this could possibly mean we turn to noted scholar and culture interpretrer, Tengobaila2.

Continued...

In Word Around the Net: A BLACK FUTURE, essayist Taylor points out the obvious elephant in the room:

Blacks are disproportionately represented in government jobs. In fact, hiring blacks in federal jobs is so out of norm with the general population that NASA has the smallest over representation by only hiring 49% more blacks than are in the general population. Blacks make up about 10% of the United States population, but make up about 20% of the federal government jobs according to a 2010 study by the Office of Personnel Management. .... So we're faced with a brutal dilemma: in order to lighten the pressure of the federal government on the economy and businesses so both can breathe and prosper, we're going to have to slash the government down in size which will result in many people losing jobs in a time of dire unemployment. And many of those lost jobs will be black jobs.

His conclusion? Try cutting into this constituency and "America will burn."

But would it? I tend to agree with him that the make-up of the rising black middle class is such that no cuts of any significance in the government work force can be forthcoming. I also tend to agree with him that the risk of widespread rioting is real. But I also think that, well, maybe not. I've lived through and clearly remember the Watts Riots, the riots of the Long Hot Summer of 1967, the Miami Riots of 1980, the highly lethal LA 1992 riots. I don't think that that is the current mood of the country regardless of how much doom-saying is being bandied about.

Riots over job reductions? Maybe we have grown beyond that. Maybe the only thing that will spark riots is the chopping off of federal funds to the left-behinds in the armed welfare hamlets of the inner cities. And even then it would probably take a provocateur's spark.

What do you think? In the face of obvious financial disaster, should we take such dire warnings at face value, or should we say, "Go ahead. Make my day."

---

That your tree?

I'd say it is. Quite a tree, isn't it?

You got that right. I've walked all of the top of Queen Anne today and your tree's got "Best of Show."

It's gorgeous. Just gorgeous. Every year when it blooms I know that this is as close to heaven as I'll ever get on Earth.

How old is it?

It's 36 years old. I planted it myself when I first came up here on Queen Anne. It was just a sprat when I put it in. Top came no higher than my waist and the trunk was about as big around as my big toe. Now it's over thirty feet tall and the trunk is bigger around than I am, and I'm big enough.

But I gave it what it needed. I poured everything I could bring home from work on it. I gave it fish heads. Fish tails. Oysters in the shell. A tub of guts when I had the truck and could put them in back. Just poured that ocean on it year in and year out. Just going to rot on the docks if I didn't. Thought it might be better if it rotted into my tree.

Didn't the smell give you any trouble with the neighbors?

Trouble? Nope. Wasn't no trouble at all. Thirty six years ago there weren't no neighbors to give you trouble. Only trouble I ever had in my life was from my wives. Now that they're passed on, I don't have any trouble left at all. Just me and the tree.

They didn’t want to turn her on but they did. I never want to turn her on but I do. After they had turned her on for awhile they grew tired of listening to her. After listening to her for even ten seconds I’m enraged by her. Somewhere along the long road to their duck hunting camp they named her “The Bitch” and turned her off. At random points on any road I drive I want to throw “The Bitch” out the window and run over her until she’s nothing but a flat black splotch on the asphalt.

“The Bitch” has her uses. She’s helped me find my way to unknown destinations and out of places where I’m hopelessly lost. It doesn’t matter. I hate the very thought of her. She’s the worst nag since Eve made Adam slap on the fig leaf and remarked on how small it was. She’s Lilith and Delilah and the “What-ever Girl.” She’s the most passive-aggressive talker since the last speech by Barack Obama. She’s “The Bitch.”

It’s not what "The Bitch" does and doesn’t do but the voice of "The Bitch" that instantly sets my teeth on fire. It’s so pale and distantly grating that it draws me into a conversation even though I’ve got nothing to say to "The Bitch" and she isn’t listening.

“In sixth tenths of a mile, turn right on Mac Graw Av-en-you.”

“Got it.”

“In two tenths of a mile turn right on Mac Graw Av-en-you.”

“I said I’ve got it.”

“Turn right on Mac Graw Av-en-you.”

“Shut up. Just SHUT UP! I GOT IT. I GOT IT! Here, just to show you I’ll turn LEFT on ‘Mac Graw Av-en-you,’ bitch.”

And I turn left just to spite her and get about ten yards up the street when I hear her say the one thing that makes me want to strangle her with her charging cord:

“Re-cal-que-lating….”

Recalculating? Shit. Here it comes….

“In two tenths of a mile turn left on Harper and then turn left to Queen Anne Av-en-you… In sixth tenths of a mile, turn right on Mac Graw Av-en-you….”

Nag, nag, nag…. Short of pulling the plug nothing, but nothing, will shut “The Bitch” up. I don’t know what sort of market research came up with the voice of “The Bitch” as the optimum voice for a GPS unit, but I suspect knew what they were doing all along. They were looking for the optimum voice that would drive men out of their minds. And they succeeded. Sadists.

For added insanity, try handing the bitch to a woman who's driving with you and have her tell you what “The Bitch” is saying at the same time “The Bitch” is saying it. No jury of 12 men would convict.

And don't tell me to reset “The Bitch” to that English Accent choice. She's just bitchier with the bright tang of British smarm smeared on top. She's “The Brit Bitch.”

I hate “The Bitch.” I hate her every time I hear her say “Re-cal-que-lating….” I’ve been known to set her destination to “Home,” and then get on the freeway and drive fifty miles in the other direction… just to hear her ever more passive-aggressive and faintly irritated plaint of “Re-cal-que-lating….” every time I pass an off-ramp.

She’s “The Bitch” now and forever. No other female voice can even hope to come close to her voice. It is seared, SEARED, into my memory.

One of these days I’m going to take a very long drive into the heart of Death Valley and dump her. I’d do it today if I didn’t need her so much.

A summer rerun from 2009

August 1910: It wasn’t the last summer but it was one of the last summers when America was at peace with the world and at peace with itself. The Civil War was a 45 year old memory. The first of the World Wars that would scar the century to come was not even the shadow of a premonition. Lenin was an exile in Europe with no power and Mao was a student in Hunan. Hitler was living in a homeless shelter in Vienna selling paintings to tourists. Stalin was either being sent to or escaping from Siberia. Churchill was the Home Secretary in England and planning the first bit of social engineering, the National Insurance Act. Taft was President and his plan was "try to accomplish just as much [as Teddy Roosevelt] without any noise."

Both the automobile and and the electric light were ubiquitous. Air conditioning was still a wild fantasy, but the swamp cooler had begun to come online in 1904 so it wasn't completely out of the question for the very rich.

Halley’s Comet had just passed by taking Mark Twain with it. Somewhere in Macedonia Mother Teresa had just been born. If men looked up they could have seen, had they been in the right place at the right time, other men in flight. If any had been in Sheepshead Bay out side of New York City on the 20th they would have heard the first gunshots ever fired from an airplane. Individual lives might have their small tragedies but there was no perceptible or imaginable catastrophe in the cards dealt Americans that summer. It was August and everywhere Americans paused to refresh themselves.

Presented for your contemplation: One wave breaking over a group of Americans who have waded into the Atlantic on the Jersey shore sometime around noon on a hot day in August in 1910.

The wave would have swelled up and started out far over the eastern horizon near the edge of the Gulf Stream. It would have rolled with strict impunity in the midst of thousands of others like it, all bound towards the shore. The photographer would have gotten up early and hauled his cumbersome equipment towards the shore. The bathers would have arrived in the late morning if they were not already staying near the shore.

Once there they changed into swimming apparel known more for modesty than comfort. From the light it was around noon and would have been hot. Seeking to be cooler they waded in. Some stayed near the shore. Others waded further out the steadily deepening water.

On some kind of elevated platform above the sand, the photographer put the 8x10 glass plate into the camera and ducked under the black hood for final adjustments. Then he stood up and called out and called out and called out and finally got the attention of some. Most ignored him.

The wave rolled in from somewhere over the horizon, rising up and down, maybe cresting here and there, until it swelled one last time and, just as the photographer happened to release the shutter, jumped up in that one moment and splashed and spattered the unwary people posed and unposed in the cool salt water just off the beach on the Jersey shore.

That was the moment, less than a second, in the midst of that summer now more than a century gone. All, each and every one, of those nearly 300 souls are now gone as well, even the children held on the shoulders or standing in the shallows, all gone -- all perhaps, maybe, save one now almost silent centenarian.

Well, what of it? That’s the way of the world and the way of the waves of the world and our lives. What we have is this moment snatched out of time on the Jersey shore one afternoon in August before the last century went smash. Who is there? What were they like? It can’t be known, but it can be seen and what can be seen, at least in this one moment, is that these people had what anyone would recognize as that thing we call happiness. Let’s see what we can see of it.

Continued...

"Baby, it's cold outside...."

"Limbo lower now. How low can you go?"

UPDATING: Today, in 2011, a new low: Obama approval drops to 39% : Don Surber Which brings me back to last year at this time....

Today's bad news for Obama just extends the previous bad news:

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 24% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as president. Forty-six percent (46%) Strongly Disapprove, giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -22.

The good news is that it's not a new low. It's a tie!:

"This matches the lowest Approval Index rating yet measured for this president."

Reading that took me back about four years to an evening out in Seattle with a friend. He's a long-gone liberal who's never coming back. I've long returned from that dark tunnel, but I admire and respect him and our friendship of long standing. Our default position on politics is that "it doesn't come up."

Meeting him were a couple of his friends which are only acquaintances of mine. As such, this being Seattle, they did not suspect, even for a moment, that I happen to be "one of 'THEM'." (Indeed whenever a Seattle acquaintance discovers my politics -- as happened last week at the airport -- the reaction is invariably along the lines of "I never knew you were THAT WAY." )

Into the bar came his friends, one of them walking with a swagger as if he'd just been sprinkled with holy water by the Messiah himself. He ordered a round of drinks and when they were put up lifted his glass and said, "Forty-three percent." This was in reference to the approval rating of George W. Bush that had been announced that day.

Three glasses clinked but mine remained on the bar. My hand edged it away. The man who ordered the drinks looked at me quizzically. I looked at him and, because I am blessed with an English Major and a large mental file of American poetry, said, "'There is some shit i will not eat'."

An awkward silence ensued from which all were saved by the start of the show we'd come to see.

My friend and I still see each other. Less now than before and the elephant has moved from the lawn to the porch with its trunk in the room. I never saw his friends again. Never had to refuse another drink. I'm okay with that but they came to mind today when these new disapproval numbers of their tin god were released.

I wonder what they do now. Do they still order drinks to make toasts, or do they just grab the whiskey and CHUG-A-LUG it straight from bottle?

We have reached a crisis when upon their action depends the preservation of the Union, according to the letter and spirit of the Constitution; and this once gone, all is lost. -- President James Buchanan, 1858, as quoted in Life and liberty in America: or Sketches of a Tour in the United States, 1858 by Charles Mackay which continues:

As the venerable statesman truly observes, the United States incur no danger from foreign aggressions; there is no one to injure them but themselves; and they have nothing to fear but "the just judgments of God." But this is only a portion of the subject, and the questions still remain, Will they not injure themselves? ....

That the people will increase and multiply and replenish the whole continent no one can doubt: and that in the course of ages North America will be as populous as Europe.... But in speculating upon the future of a people the mind clings to the idea of Empire and Government — and we ask ourselves whether Empire in this noble region will be one or many — central or local — imperial or republican?

Continued...

"These people are not unusual.

It is not their fault they have been gelded and made useless. They did as they were told. I find them interesting, because they appear to my eye to be about average. They have participated fully in American public life, and it has made them useless to themselves and to others. The reaction necessary to shine is missing, and the ingredients have collapsed in on themselves, and they only have the slowly fading appearance of the citizenry they sprang from. God bless them, they're got enough mettle to try to squeeze something from the raw material of their lives: Maybe I can be crowned the king or queen of the shiftless, and appear as a Reality Sideshow geek, displaying my underdeveloped limbs and the stubs of my intellect for a few pennies." -- More at Sippican Cottage: My Children Will Not Be Appearing On White Dwarf Star Search, Thank You Very Much

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.
How does it feel?
-- Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone

At some point in the next nine months, depending on the level of Democrat desperation, the ReElectO’s will advance the following proposition: ‘Obama MUST be re-elected to CONFIRM AND SANCTIFY post-racial America.’

This ReElectO position will assert that giving their token but a single term will throw the entire nation back to Jim Crow or even before; that the South will rise again; and that no ReElectO will transform all citizens of the Caucasian or Asian persuasion into Grand Dragons of Klu Klux Klan. Without a sweeping ReElectO victory and “Four More Years!”, America will become a vast slave ship from which those of African descent will be forever trapped in the Middle Passage, fed through funnels and confined, in chains, below decks. This vision, this furred and feathered witch-doctor shibboleth, will be shaken in the face of the nation to reignite the shame that sent their slick-suited symbol to the White House in the first instance.

The assertion that the nation’s failure to go with the ReElectOs confirms its racist soul would be risible if it were not so despicable. The current term -- gained on the pretty promise of a post-racial America -- has been stained and scarred by programs and policies that have done more to ramp up racism in this country since the days of Bull Conner. It is a mark of indelible shame that the one president elected for his ostensible capability to bind up the nation’s wounds has been at the forefront of exacerbating them; of repeatedly “pulling off the Band-Aid”. If one were to scour the landscape of America in the summer of 2011 for a single person who could assume the crown of Racist-In-Chief looking in the Oval Office would assure a short search and a quick coronation.

The racist realities of this administration and its chief are things the ReElectOs will struggle to obfuscate under their "new and improved" program: “Give the Kid Another Chance Already.” For the ReElectOs a second term is essential. It is essential not shore up “The Story of O,” but because, in truth, the entire racial gambit the progressive left has ridden on for more than six decades hangs in the balance.

In the final analysis the progressive program rests on O being seen to be living proof of their essential premise: “African Americans are just as good, even better; just as equal, even more equal; just as smart and even smarter than all other Americans regardless of race, class, creed or national origin.” Thus is division disguised, as it always is, by "diversity."

Politically this premise is fundamental since it secures significant political bases for progressives across the board.

Economically this premise is mission critical since it secures private and public funding and payrolls for tens of millions of voters.

The one-term failure of this premise at the level of The O implies that the premise itself is flawed or, worse still, false. A collapse of the premise at the level of The O could instigate a cascade of failure that threatens to undo, not the achievement of individual African Americans, but the entire Voodoo edifice of the African-American Race Hustling Industry. There are tens of millions of gold-plated rice bowls set for smashing if The O should “faw down and go boom,” and the owners of those bowls will not readily see them shattered. The economic implosion of the Race Hustling Industry in America would be much worse that the housing implosion.

The O may believe that the ReElectOs are “all about him,” but they are really “all about themselves.” Race hustling, from the ancient 1960s era of Radical Chic and MauMauing the Flak-Catchers has been a rich vein that people of low character, cheap morals and thug tendencies have not been slow to exploit in the United States. In fact it is entirely probable that everything sacred about the African-American quest for nobility died on a motel balcony in Memphis with Martin Luther King, and rose clad in a hand-daubed bloody turtleneck in the form of the quintessential race-hustler and extortionist role-model, Jesse Jackson. From there the shape of the hustle was codified until today we all, black, white, Asian, indian recognize the type in a twinkling. The O was merely the race-hustler’s apotheosis.

Indeed, The O was to the manor born for his present station. All the pieces were in place without the need for a conscious conspiracy or an obfuscated birth. Utterly unnecessary. He was the "Affirmative Action Elvis." The O was quite simply the inverse of Sun Records owner Sam Phillip’s famous statement: “If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” Flip that around and extend it to read “make a trillion dollars and, dare I say it?, rule the world,” and you’ve pretty much got The O career trajectory. Merit and achievement were, in 2008, quite beside the point. The Story of O was always about “look and feel” and never about what was real. In short, in 2008 was time for an O and the most perfect O appeared. The rest, as they say, is history.

The problem today is, however, that the history of O is bad history. The look is fading and he’s lost that loving feeling. No matter. The ReElectOs will wail, “He just hasn’t had enough time! He needs more time and a freer hand. You can’t reject him. He’s black and rejecting him just proves you’re racist, again and again and again, racist world without end always.”

In a way, they’re right. This coming election will be, unlike the last election, all about race and racism. But it won’t be because of the deeds and the dreams of America to move into a post-racial society, it will be because of the deeds and the policies of a man who, in the final analysis, has done everything in his power to keep America racially polarized. It will be about the token who, after all was said and done, didn’t have the right stuff to be the champion of African Americans, to be “The One they had been waiting for.” He just had the timing. Vote for him anyway, the ReElectOs will say. Vote for him because he’s black and tan and rested and.... this time we promise... finally ready.

-or- The Pre-Launch Abort Ritual [From February 2009. For now, God bless Atlantis. Come home safe.]

Discovery on launching pad

Two M113 Armored Personnel Carriers (Remember these, they'll come in later)

A couple of weeks ago I was on a bus tour of the space shuttle launch area at the Kennedy Space Center Florida. For $58 you can ride a bus past some of the outlying security barriers and get within about a mile of the Discovery on the pad. This is about as close as an ordinary citizen can get without being asked serious questions by men with automatic weapons.

It was an impressive tour in all respects, but this story today brought back a part of the tour related by the guide: NASA Delays Discovery Launch Fourth Time

An all-day review of the craft's readiness for launch left managers still under-confident about the operations of three hydrogen control valves thatchannel gaseous hydrogen from the main engines to the external fuel tank. Engineering teams have been working to identify what caused damage to a flow control valve on shuttle Endeavour during its November 2008 flight. NASA managers decided Friday more data and possible testing are required before launch can proceed.

That's a good call. We can all remember what happens to a shuttle when damage to the surface of the shuttle reacts to the incredible heat and stress of re-entry: it becomes a very unpleasant low-earth orbit comet, kills everyone on board, and litters a vast swath of the southwest.

But what happens when something goes wrong while the crew is in the shuttle but the shuttle has not yet been launched?

Continued...

1. Somewhere in this great land a concerned and responsible corporation is having their twice weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

2. As soon as they are completed millions of these supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U. S. Post Office.

3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these supplements are broken out, put on U.S. post office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside Seattle.

4. My postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout Seattle, and load up their vans with enough of these 100% recycled colorful and compelling advertising supplements to deliver one each to every house on their route.

5. My very polite postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling advertising supplements.

6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits said 100% recyclable advertising supplement into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.

7. Hearing the clang I wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said supplement.

8. With a sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling advertising supplement into my Recycling bin.

9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Seattle Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul what is in it off to the Seattle Recycling center.

10. The advertising supplement will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into..... recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year postage will increase because the U.S. Postal "Service" will need more money to keep this thing going.

A short list. In no particular order.

We told our children that any child could grow up to be President. And then we made it come true.

We had car shows, boat shows, beauty shows and dog shows.

We ran robots on the surface of Mars by remote control.

Our women came from all over the world in all shapes and sizes hues and scents.

We actually believed that all men are created equal and tried to make it come true.

Everybody liked our movies and loved our television shows.

We tried to educate everybody, whether they wanted it or not. Sometimes we succeeded.

We did Levis.

Continued...

Provincetown's "Fresh Sea Clams," 1940.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." -- Yogi

Summer's at last heating up and so it's time for the cool to get cool by the shore. This will be especially cool this year because, so we hear, the coolest president in history may cool out on Martha's Vineyard. How cool is that?

It's even cooler when you consider that the cool One is sure to take the last final shred of whatever may have once, long ago, been cool about the Vineyard and grind it into fishmeal. When that's done, the Vineyard will look and feel, at last, pretty much like Provincetown, but without the Gay Pride floats and speedos. People worry about the coming fall and the heating up of swine flu, but I don't worry about fevers when I see that the all-consuming chill of "cool" is likely to get us first.

Cool's a funny thing. Before it was cool to be cool, being cool was actually sorta cool. But now that being cool is as required as a tramp-stamp at age 14 in order to gain admittence to a U2 Concert, cool's just not cool. Once "cool" is codified it's kaput. And since cool's not cool, there is no way to really be cool. Once you have a bunch of media lapdogs actually lapping on the lap of the President of the United States, even media's uncool. That would be okay since nothing cool is cool forever. After all, the groove must move to keep from becoming a rut.

Continued...

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It's hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it's been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it's a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

Via Katz

Continued...

{ED: Twist again like we did last summer....}

Were they real and were they spectacular? Youth wanted to know!

Rodger @ the everCurmudgeonly & Skeptical posts "My Youth in one E-Mail."

Mine too. I once rode my bicycle five miles and back on the rumor Annette Funicello was staying at a house in a neighboring suburb. (My friends and I knew, just knew, to a certainty that Annette had [whisper]breasts[/whisper] that were being held down by skillfully deployed Ace athletic bandages. I was going to go for an off-camera sighting to confirm or deny once and for all. Alas, the house was curtained and nobody went in or came out for hours and I was under strict standing instructions: "Home before dark."

Even if this wasn't your youth how many of these 36 items and images do you recognize?

Continued...

"Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky..."

Libraries are levelers. Like home, when you go there they have to take you in. Libraries collect the affluent and the indigent, the young working on assignments that will make them ready for life, and the old catching up on knowledge that they've missed. From time to time I go there to see what's new in the world of books and what's old in the realm of the classics.

My library is a brick building, cool inside on hot days and warm on cold days. Its facade and interior speak to the elegance of a former age that today's public works cannot hope to emulate. Inside books line the walls and stretch back into the stacks. It's staffed with bright and helpful souls known as "librarians," and they are a special and wonderful breed. It's a bit disappointing that all of them now seem to be women, but that's the way it goes in the realm of high security jobs with good pensions and low pay. It's hard to imagine a man taking the job, especially now that the profession has devolved into a world of women.

But more than it's bricks, books and librarians, a library is made of its patrons. Because it is free and is open and warm and comforting it gets its share of people who, in the middle of the day, have no real place to go. Since it has put in a number of free machines with free internet hookups it also draws in those who have no home computer but who still maintain, through the miracle of Google gmail and online document storage, a way to connect to the wider world of the internet. They come to the library to work with their email and their writing since the expense of a computer is, temporarily or forever, beyond their means in this slow rolling depression.

In many ways, the library is a means of seeing what's going on in the lives of your fellow citizens. I've gotten into the habit of using my visits there to take a kind of core sample of what our democracy is doing at this moment. I tend to notice what others are reading and writing and checking out. It's not really that I'm nosy. I'm just interested.

Today in a nave filled with free computers there were six women, all facing the screens and all searching, or typing emails, or scanning jobs on Craigslist and sending out the 500th copy of their resumes to the scant jobs listed that they might be suited for.

All except one. She was a woman working at her screen and it was open to a page that said, "MAKE A NOTE." I saw this in a glance as I was browsing the shelves nearby that offered hardcovers and paperbacks for sale at very reduced rates. Her back was to me but she had the size of the font turned up large and was still squinting at the screen as she slowly typed her note into the frame provided.

My glance lingered and a phrase caught my eye. It was rude to look longer but I was curious and I foolishly indulged myself in a brief moment of reading over her shoulder.

I wish I hadn't.

What she had written began, "It has been two weeks since I lost my precious baby boy. The pain that I feel is unbearable. I never knew a heart could break like...."

At that I broke away, ashamed I had allowed myself to intrude on this moment, and left the area. At some remove I glanced back and she was still typing slowly, intensely focused on the screen, writing down the bones of her life and saving her pain and her memory as a note, a terrible footnote to her life. Perhaps by making it a note and saving it somewhere in cyberspace she was putting the pain and the loss away. It would be in the world but, at the same time, it wouldn't. I prayed it would help her find peace.

A bit later in a large box store where I'd gone to get some meaningless object I imagined I needed, I looked around at the others in the store pushing their carts around in the daily ritual of getting and spending. I wondered how many there had a similar "note" stored with faded photographs in the shoe boxes of their lives. Quite a few I decided since time and chance happens to all. Still I was struck by how, even faced with deep and scaring tragedies, we pick ourselves and go on, even if it is only to go shopping, or to the library, where the computers are free and you can, as they say, come as you are.

When I got home I turned on the news. It was a program presenting the circus of "candidates" currently "running" for the Republican candidate for president in 2012. They didn't seem to be saying anything to me. I turned them off. Turned them all off.

None of them had anything to say to me. None of them had anything to say to the woman in the library whose screen I had overseen.

Earlier today, for what were flimsy reasons, I attached the opening of Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts to a brief blog item about Tiananmen Square. It didn't seem to fit so I removed it later. But it did fit what I had overseen at the library,

About suffering they were never wrong,

The old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position: how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

... Or seems to be just typing a note on a screen.

A note that contains a terrible memory. A note I didn't need to read but, at the same time, did.

Noted in Life and liberty in America: or SKETCHES OF A TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES AND
CANADA IN 1857-8:

Continued...

Continued...

Back in the dawn of online when a service called The Source was still in flower, a woman I once knew used to log on as "This is a naked lady." She wasn't naked of course, except in the minds of hundreds of young and not-so-young males who also logged on to The Source. Night after night, they sent her unremitting text streams of detailed wet dreams, hoping to engage her in online exchanges known as "hot chat" - a way of engaging in a mutual fantasy typically found only through 1-900 telephone services. In return, "The Naked Lady" egged on her digital admirers with leading questions larded with copious amounts of double entendre.

When I first asked her about this, she initially put it down to "just fooling around on the wires."

"It's just a hobby," she said. "Maybe I'll get some dates out of it. Some of these guys have very creative and interesting fantasy lives."

At the start, The Naked Lady was a rather mousy person - the type who favored gray clothing of a conservative cut - and was the paragon of shy and retiring womanhood. Seeing her on the street, you'd never think that her online persona was one that excited the libidos of dozens of men every night.

But as her months of online flirtations progressed, a strange transformation came over her:

Continued...

Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The Obvious Truth

SIGMUND FREUD has established for all time that a cigar can be a penis substitute. At about the same time Rudyard Kipling observed that while a woman was only a woman, "a good cigar was a smoke." Lighting up and reflecting on this, Sigmund Freud agreed that a cigar could, in certain places, be "only a cigar." For nearly three decades now, millions of American men, including even politicians such as Nancy Pelosi, have been unable to make this fundamental distinction.

In any reasonable society this signal failure of perception would be a tragedy shared by both sexes. But fortunately for the future of the country, millions of American women have lately come to prefer cigars to penises. Their decision is not utterly without a sunny side since millions of American men have decided - faced with this doleful feminine reality and subsequent weight gain - to prefer penises to both cigars and women.

Both of these responses are islands of light in an era of increasing darkness, but the central tragedy still remains. If things are not clearly out of hand in America's sexual circus (And indeed the declining birth rate and rising divorce rate demonstrates that things are probably all too often in hand), then they are at least at sixes and nines. In this paper we will study the reasons for the decline of the American Penis, and what can be done to hasten its resurrection.

Continued...

Across the street they've nailed the curtains

They're getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

A perfect image of a priest


-- Bob Dylan


The Weiner Self-Fornication Festival currently climaxing throughout the nation instructs us yet again in what our media (online and offline) expects of candidates and holders of office: pseudo-moral celibacy in thought, word, and deed stretching from the cradle to the grave.

Our sermon for today is "What doth it profit a man to gain the office of dogcatcher or above, if he must bid adieu to his sexuality in late childhood?"

In this realm 'profit' seems to be spread around unevenly. At times the profligate survive and thrive, but mostly it is the cream of the celibate or asexual that rises. Asexual celibacy has profited Barack Obama since he has no clearly discernible, or deeply closeted, sexuality whatsoever.

Wrath would seem to be Obama's sin, but wrath well hidden. With no photos of his frothing Fuehreresque rages or tapes of his highly pungent obscenity streams this otherwise colorful sin gets a pass by the media. Thus another of Obama's flaws are submerged beneath the vast beige pond scum of his coverage. If the medium once was the message, today the color is the camouflage.

In general, to be elected and remain in office today a man (or a woman) must prepare at an early age to either leave no trace of a human existence, or determine never to have one in the first place. Hence, the strange paucity of former "girlfriends" of the current president. No People Magazine profiles. No "I remember the prom with Barack" books. Nothing. It is as if the man was with his wife twice, begot two daughters, and then dropped the whole subject.

This is purity perfected. Where there is no sex there can be no sex scandels. Like the pagan religions of antiquity or the cloistered Catholic orders that persist into our era, today's politicians must be -- according to our media -- the last surviving virgins over 18 in the United States of America.

Of course, they must also be married and have children, although these can, on occasion, be rented.

It would seem that for high office a married, virgin priest (of any one of the six genders) is the only sort acceptable to the mainstream media or the internet sources right and left and their co-conspirators; but only if they can be shown to have something that resembles a family in storage that can be attached for photo ops.

In addition to retrofitted virginity, such a person must be 'politically qualified.'
To innocent Americans weaned on the standard social studies classes served up in high school, these qualifications may seem to begin and end in the state of actually being a citizen. This is, of course, wrong. The actual path to power is to the side of citizenship and is marked "Rulership."

'Political qualification' begins in high school when the aspiring virgin moves towards the priesthood by running for class office in place of puberty. It continues throughout the ensuing decades as getting elected takes the place of getting laid. With luck, the qualified virgin climbs the fund raising rungs and learns how to pass the hat -- and take the soft funds within or without the unmarked "giving envelopes."

Along the way, the virgin priest learns to respect the deacons and bishops and cardinals of the Church of Our Lady of Perpetual Patronage. In due course, he is rewarded with nifty clothes, drivers, security, free lunches, unctuous smiles, false friendship, and lessons in how to pawn any principle he may have for a mess of pottage.

Finally, sexless, graceless, bereft of conviction, with a hand full of gimme and a mouth full of much obliged, he has accrued enough markers to be boosted into office.

Much palaver ensues en route to his balsa throne. Much is made of his family, his upbringing, and little of his views and opinions since by then his views and opinions are what he is told to have. Indeed, they are what he has had since any vision or values or morals he once possessed were removed, along with his genitals, about the time he received the required advanced degrees in either accounting, social work, or law. (Pick one or all three.)

During the ritual of his ascension, he eats the ritual meals of rubber chicken and an endless spectrum of ethnic foods, for there are as many food groups as there are victim groups. At these ritual meals he pronounces the approved prayers over the congregation. He assumes ritual poses with the leaders of the congregation. He blesses infants with a kiss.

Various scribes examine his views via a ritual series of questions eliciting rote-learned responses surprising to no one. It is the call and response of the catechism. Should some small transgression (or even large ones) be discovered, mea culpas are extracted at lens point until all are assured the sexual organs have been sanded down to a nub.

Then he is placed on the sacrificial altar of the election and, if found, at last pure of any visceral or earthly taint he is elevated. Music is played. Balloons tumble. Hossanahs are raised. Oaths are administered. Some media acolytes even call him "a kind of god."

And then his reign begins. He finally ascends into the capitol to sit upon the right hand of the State, hence to judge the special and the not-so-special interests. A man so pure, so bereft of any soul, so pure and so semi-white, so in aspect like Mister Rogers, so empty of any sexuality, that it is all he can do not to begin screwing everyone in the state in the first 24 hours of his reign.

A priest to the downtrodden in the palace of the people. A man for all seasons. A man, in short, much like Barack Obama.

Continued...

GRAND RAPIDS HAS GOT THE GROOVE! Is this a great country, or what?

Continued...

Continued...

Army Capt. Ed Arntson, of Chicago, kissed the grave of Staff Sgt. Henry Linck in Arlington, Va., National Cemetery Thursday. Staff Sgt. Linck was killed in Iraq in 2006. Armed forces placed flags at more than 300,000 gravestones ahead of Memorial Day. In this year of our Lord 2010, the president of the United States will decline to review them.

The cemetery at the top of Queen Anne is busy this weekend. This even though a cemetery under all circumstances is seldom thought of as a busy place. We haven't had busy cemeteries since 1945. Since then the long peace and its sleep was only briefly, for a few years every now and then, interrupted by a small war. The cemeteries fill up more slowly now than ever before. And our sleep, regardless of continuing alarms, deepens.

These days we resent, it seems, having them fill at all, clinging to our tiny lives with a passion that passes all understanding; clinging to our large liberty with the belief that all payments on such a loan will be interest-free and deferred for at least 100 years.

Still, the cemetery at the top of Queen Anne does tend to take on a calm, resigned bustle over Memorial Day weekend, as the decreasing number of families who have lost members to war come to decorate the graves of those we now so delicately refer to as "The Fallen." They are not, of course, fallen in the sense that they will, suddenly and to our utter surprise, get up. That they will never do in this world. For they are not "The Fallen," they are "The Dead."

In the cemetery at the end of my street , of course, all the permanent residents are dead. But those who are among the war dead, or among those who served in a war, are easily found on this day by the small American flags their loved ones who still survive place and refresh. In this cemetery atop Queen Anne hill in Seattle, the small flags grow fewer and smaller with each passing year. It is not, of course, that the size of the sacrifice has been reduced. That remains the largest gift one free man may give to the country that sustained him. It is instead the regard of the country for whom the sacrifices were made that has gotten smaller, eroded by the self-love that the secular celebrate above all other values.

As you walk about the green lawn and weave among the markers, the slight breeze moves the small three-colored flags. Some are tattered and faded. Some are wound around the small gold sticks that hold them up. You straighten these out almost as an afterthought. Then the breeze unfurls them.

Here and there, people tend the grave of this or that loved one; weeding, washing, or otherwise making the gradually fading marks in the stone clear under the sky. Cars pull in and wind slow, careful on the curves, and park almost at random. An old woman emerges from one, a father and son from another, an entire family from yet another. They carry flowers in bunches or potted and, at times, gardening implements and a bucket for carrying away the weeds. It's a quiet morning. Nobody is in a hurry to arrive and once arrived to leave.

When I lived in Villers-Cotteret , between Compaigne and Soissons, along the Western Front in France, the cemeteries were as quiet but on a scale difficult to imagine unless they were seen.

In the Battle of Soissons in July of 1918, 12,000 men (Americans and Germans) were killed in four days. Vast crops of white crosses sprouted from the fields their rows and columns fading into the distance as they marched back from the roadside like an army of the dead called to attention until the end of time. American cemeteries merged with French cemeteries that merged with German cemeteries; their only distinction being the flags that flew over what one took to be the center of the arrangement. I suppose one could find out the number of graves in these serried ranks. Somewhere they keep the count. Governments are especially good at counting. But it is enough to know they are beyond numbering by an individual; that the mind would cease before the final number was reached.

To have even a hundredth of those cemeteries in the United States now would be more than we, as a nation, could bear. It would not be so much the dead within it, but the truth that made it happen that would be unbearable. This is, of course, what we are as a nation fiddling about with on this Memorial Day. We count our war dead daily now, but we count mostly on the fingers of one hand, at times on two. Never in numbers now beyond our ability to imagine. This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a "tragic" exception that need not have happened and will -- most likely -- never happen again.

That, at least, is the mind set that I assume when I read how the "War on Terror" is but a bumper strip. In a way, that's preferable to the the mind set that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this "explanation" is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.

Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag -- unlike their souls -- is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation.

In the cemetery at the end of my street, there are a few small flags. There are many more graves with no flag at all, but they are the ones that the small flags made possible. Should the terrible forests of white crosses ever bloom across our landscape -- as once they did during the Civil War -- it will not be because we had too few of those small, three-colored flags, but because we became a nation with far too many white ones.

The grave of James A. Wilmot, Pvt 49th Spruce Squadron, World War I. Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Queen Anne, Seattle

[Originally published Memorial Day, 2007]

Those damn Chinese commies are at it again! We all know that the omnipresent tag on goods "Made in China" means cheaper, shoddier, and at times dangerous to small animals, children, morons and democrats. But since cheaper trumps shoddy and risky, we swipe the debit card and take them away regardless of what may be their hidden intent, which is to undermine the American way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than in that most insidious product now coming out of the slave cloning pens of Peking and roboticized neuro-protein vats of the Matrix caverns beneath the Gobi desert, the Chinese mirror.

It seems that, when I wasn't looking, secret Chinese agents replaced my trusted and faithful American bathroom mirrors with a mirror "Made in China." It is a hideous substitution and one that would go unnoticed except for the fact that from time to time I look in my mirror for this or that grooming ritual. When I do I know that the mirror has become a Chinese mirror because the effect is immediately and consistently horrifying. Briefly put, the person in the mirror is someone that does not resemble me at all. I don't know how he got in my mirror but he's got to go.

Like all of us, I have a perfectly good idea of what I look like in my mind's eye. It is, indeed, so perfect that I haven't had any good reason to renovate it for over thirty years. Unlike the Chinese mirrors in my house, my mind's eye knows that I have a well-cut chin, assertive full-face and sharp in profile. It does not add the two or three secondary chins that the Chinese mirror, through some Fu Manchu optical magic, slaps on.

In my mind, I am quite safe in the knowledge that my brow is unfurrowed and that the lines around my eyes are only there for a brief moment during laughter. The Chinese mirror seems, especially in the morning, to be able to carve in the brow lines with a dull chain saw and make the lines around the eyes resemble the cracks seen in ill-maintained Dutch portraits from the age of Rembrandt. How the Chinese manage timed optics in ordinary cheap mirrors is beyond me, but they probably stole it from an American inventor and professional sadist.

Another power of the cheap Chinese mirror is the ability to actually amplify gravity. I know to a certainty that my face is as it was 30 years ago (the last time I really checked) well structured and taut as a snare drum in a high school marching band. The Chinese mirror in my bathroom seems to emit some sort of force field that actually makes it appear that my face has fallen towards the center of the earth. If a Chinese mirror can do that to my face I hate to think of what the similar technology could do to the fighters and bombers of the USAF. Not only that but the mirror can also puff one's face outward while dropping it at the same time. Sheer twisted genius!

Finally, the Chinese mirror, through some sort of uncanny symbiosis between its fun-house surface and advanced microchips grown in the organ banks of Chinese prisons, actually has the power to project brown age spots onto my skin and have them follow me around in the mirror no matter how I twist and turn my face. Very spooky and very persistent since no matter how much I scrub my face and the mirror the spots seem to stay exactly where the mirror places them on first glance in the morning.

I've considered scrapping the Chinese mirror and spending the monumental sums that a high-quality French mirror would cost so that I could see myself again as I know I am, but I am a cheap bastard and have decided not to give the French the money or the Chinese the satisfaction. I've looked around for an American mirror but I've discovered there are only two areas of the country that manufacture them any more; five blocks in the West Village near "The Ramrod," and the Castro District in San Francisco. Made by the Rainbow Glass Blowers and known as The Dorian Gray in New York and The Oscar Wilde in the Castro, the mirrors ar more affordable but do no reflect you as you are but only as you would be if you were more fabulous.

Since I'm now about as fabulous as I get I'm sticking with the lying, cheating Chinese mirror.

But I do have some standards.

I recently crossed a picket line of impossibly rich progressive busybodies at Walmart and bought a full length Chinese mirror. I did so because of complaints that it was impossible in my house to see if what one was wearing matched one's accessories. Why seeing yourself full-length before going out is important I don't really understand. I've always thought that if you have your shirt, shoes, boxers and pants on you're pretty much good to go. (Socks optional.) Nevertheless I am reliably informed by GynoAmericans of all persuasions that a full-length mirror is something no home should be without.

So, I broke down and got the full-length Chinese mirror from the Walmart toxic waste dump department, carried it home and installed it in my closet where it seemed it would do the most good.

It did not occur to me that this mirror, being four times the size of the bathroom Chinese mirror, would have four times the power. Indeed, it seems to have the power of teleportation. I say this because the very next morning when I opened the closet to dress I discovered that the mirror had somehow brought into my home a strange man who seemed, in the midsection at least, to be six months pregnant.

That mirror and the stranger it held is now in the recycling bin marked "Hazardous Waste." Me? I'm writing to some contacts at Disney to see if I can get one of those Mirror Mirror On the Wall items from Snow White. After all, if it worked for the Queen....

Every day it does not rain, and many days when it does, this man walks three miles to the Pike Street public market in Seattle to play long alien notes on his Chinese instrument.

You walk by him on your way to the Athenian Cafe in the market. He's got a couple of bucks and change in his begging cup so you toss in a couple more. When you come out of the restaurant an hour or so later, he's got what he had, what you gave him, and a couple of quarters more. Almost everyone is ignoring him. He plays on.

Seattle is a second-level city mostly famous in popular culture for a second-rate rock band who did not so much invent "grunge" as simply show up on stage playing and wearing it. The band and its lead singer have been in different stages of dead for decades now, but their style lives on in Seattle like the galvanic twitches in the corpse of a frog long after it has been pithed. Seattle's left with a zombie pop culture whose only hope for survival is feeding on the brains of the bovine young. That's thin gruel for a zombie, but Seattle's "cultural scene" is eking out an undead living with inspirational shows such as this:

Lest you misunderstand, the names on the portable outhouse door are band names. If you attend this venue of "cutting-edgy" and oh-so-transgressive "creativity" you can hear hymns to little monsters, excrement, liquid excrement, maimed animals, and vague apocalyptic rumors. If you are fortunate your ears will not bleed as part of the "fun." Make no mistake about it, the names of the bands will be the best thing about them. In fact, the poster itself tells you so in no uncertain terms.

I don't think the old Chinese musician in the market will get into this club, unless it is to make five bucks for scraping the roaches, rubbers, and lost drugs works off the floor, and to mop out the toilets. It's pretty much how "youth culture" rolls in this second-level city.

Postmortem effects. The twitching of the pithed.

But of course that's just "pop" culture and it's pretty much drained of the new, the beautiful and the true everywhere. There's always "haute" culture to turn to, isn't there?

Let us go then, you and I.... to the acclaimed and recently redone Seattle Museum of Art. It's just a couple of blocks from the old Chinese musician in the market. It's recently undergone one of its relentless expansions under the watchful gaze of Bill Gates mom. The entrance is vaulting. Vaulting enough to have room for an extremely awful sculpture of five or six bad cars hanging from the ceiling with sticks of lights spurting from them in a vague pattern. What does it all mean? Well, in the words of R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, "It don't mean shit."

But wait, surely with the Gates family doing the heavy fund-raising lifting, this cathedral to high art in the 21st century is light years beyond the grunge and excrement of the pop culture music scene? It just has to be, doesn't it.

Of course not. Here's what you see enshrined in the dead center of the main exhibit floor of the Seattle Art Museum:

Yes, that's a museum quality ceramic toilet by one of my old art teachers, the late Robert Arneson. I studied under him for a couple of terms at the University, and he was an amazing man, and not a bad sculptor, but still second-level when confined to his era. He'll be virtually unknown in another 50 years and this particular piece will be part of the reason. Even though it gets pride of place in the Seattle Art Museum, it is -- to say the least -- one of the worst Arneson's around and he has many. Still, a third rate collection in a second level city has to take what it can get.

On the wall to the right is, as it happens, another third rate work by another of my instructors, the painter William Wiley. Wiley can be an interesting and amusing, if obtuse, painter, but the one seen here gives you no more close-up than it does as a smudge in this photograph. It fits right to the collection of SAM though. It's a museum where many artists are represented but none well. The museum seems to buy the names but not the quality. Deep down, it's shallow.

The single area in which the museum excels is the one area, of course, that is given short schrift; the totem poles, lodge carvings, masks, and ceremonial costumes of the Native American tribes of the Northwest Coast of North America. The collection, so I am told, is vast and world-class. Hence SAM hides most of it away so that more toilets of clay can be exhibited.

It's to be expected since in culture high and low these days, we are it seems a country half in love with easeful death and half in love with excrement.

Long ago, the natives of Seattle wore clothes like this:

Today, the descendants of those same tribes wear clothes like this:

Just the gear for a great night out at The Funhouse listening to "Shit Gets Smashed" and "The Hershey Squirts."

When I went back to the market to catch the bus I passed by the Chinese musician again. He'd made another couple of bucks from putting the music of a thousand years ago into the streets of the second level city of Seattle. When the bus finally came, I was encouraged to see that there was even more haute culture coming our way:

First Published: 2009-05-04

The Asheville, North Carolina restaurant was one of those common to our post-post-modern world. Open and airy with a wall of windows framing hanging plants. Casual to the point of paper napkins. Sporting a list of local beers and -- surprise -- local wines. Tarted up with the kind of overtly ironic art on the walls where the painter has one statement and one image in his repertoire and repeats it ad nauseam. This time it seemed that the sensibility being trotted out was one of Hieronymous Bosch meets Hello Kitty.

The menu, a litany of updated regional classics such as black-eyed pea cakes, was relentlessly "improved" by garnishes such as avocados and Basmati rice. The joint's "philosophy" -- since all new restaurants must now publish a justifying manifesto along with their menu -- centered on the now tedious homage to "local" "organic" produce and a dedication to "reviving tradition" -- plus the removal of trans-fats. Collard greens, sweetened lima beans, and salty sweet potatoes bracketed the entrees. In the center you'd find rib-eyes under slathers of sauteed onions, broiled slabs of local fish dusted with some orange spice, chickens with a roasted-on glaze, pork in five different variations, and dried cranberries slipped into cakes on the sly just when you thought it was safe.

It was a boutique version of the kind of food once common to the region, but that now survived either in roadside diners named "Granny's" and "Hubert and Sal's,"or at upscale nostalgic eateries such as this one. I suppose you could call it a "cuisine" -- as the local magazines and guides are wont to do -- but that word has too many curlicues. Call it "eats" and get on with it.

The diners seemed to agree and were not slow about getting on with their meals. One man to my right hulked over his plate like a Turkish sumo and ate mechanically as if his hands were back hoes in some mountain grave yard, the coffin inbound on the midnight train and the kinfolk getting antsy. Across from him, a slim woman ate in a punctuated manner and talked at him at the same time, her hand gestures angular and as precise as scalpels. He nodded dully as if barely feeling her opinions and just put his head down and ate right on through them, looking up just often enough and nodding just slightly enough that she might believe he was actually hearing her.

Hearing anyone was a sometimes thing in this room. It was one of those restaurants whose hard ceilings, walls, and floors made for a constant din and clatter and clang. You had to raise your voice to be heard over it, and -- since raising your voice added to the din -- it made you and everyone else speak ever louder until the yabble peaked, then plunged into brief silence as everyone lapsed back into murmurs. Then it began building, again, inevitably to shouts, and so on.

It was a down-home yuppified place with a pretty good kitchen and fine intentions. It was a place where you could get the same meal you could get at "Granny's Country Kitchen" out along the highway, but you could rest assured that none of the boys from the hills -- those with flag decals on the pick-up's bumper and a deer rifle on a rack in the rear window -- would be smoking or farting or telling tales next to you. This privilege only cost you about three times as much.

This was downtown Asheville in the heart of the freshly gentrified, cosmopolitan zone and instead of pick-ups rattling down the streets, Porsches prowled growling in the night outside the rock-climbing gym. This was an armed cultural hamlet in the New South, guarded by down-home decorating parlors ready to give your custom log-cabin that shabby chic lived-in look; where the sentries were hair salons called "The People" with mirrors in front of each station resembling nothing so much as the guillotines that "The People" of France once used so effectively in solving their aristocracy problem. The difference here was that the new aristocracy of this region was busy admiring themselves in the mirrors of these guillotines with nary a Marat or Robespierre in sight. Instead, downtown Asheville -- or at least some small section at the top of the hills -- was relentlessly promoting our new secular religion of senseless and endless shopping opportunities.

Down in the gulch streets below the mini-Madison Avenue of Asheville a wide variety of ethnic restaurants from the Jerusalem Cafe to Mela Indian foods jostles with used book stores and the ubiquitous tattoo parlors. Antique stores have arrived with a vengeance as have poodles and other toy breeds that bring with them shops devoted to "canine cuisine". After all, once you've got a whole generation of 20 or 30 and sometimes 40 somethings that have elected to raise dogs rather than children, nothing is too good for your fur-faced kids, is it?

And where there are bakeries for dogs, there are restaurants whose owners handle regional foods as carefully as curators in a museum. In this, I admit, they do not do half-bad at the Early Girl Eatery where quick bread can be had at breakfast for three bucks a plate, and slow-cooked pork in the evening for fifteen. It's not quite the roadside diner down in the hollar, but that land's been bulldozed for one of the endless gated communities sprouting across the landscape in these parts like dubious toadstools. At least at the Early Girl you're pretty sure the pork isn't road kill. And even if it was, the sauces and seasoning would make up for it.

The check had come and I'd paid it. They'd filled the restaurant and turned it once since we'd been there. A popular place. A post-post- modern place, a place that was a sterling example of how we live now -- the real and the regional reduced to a remembrance, the communities gated, the homes "maintenance -free." History in a bottle, cleaned, pressed and with the trans-fats removed. Just the way we like it. Traditional in style but tradition-free in content. The experience without the meaning and not missing it.

As I got up to leave the family of six at the long table across from me was served with the quick flourish and satisfied air of presentation that is the style of serving these days. The was food steaming in front of them, but none of them made a move towards it. Instead, they talked quietly amongst themselves and seemed to come to a decision. They made their selection from among them. It was to be one of the daughters, a girl of about 17 I guessed. The din in the restaurant rose and fell, but the family of six sat quietly and then bowed their heads as one. Then they said grace.

I stood motionless at my table. I had, I thought, never seen this before in a restaurant. I'd seen it in private homes to be sure, but upon reflection I realized that I'd not seen it there in quite sometime. And I was quite sure this was, for me, a rare event. I'd probably not been paying attention since it no doubt went on all the time, but still it was a startling moment. Perhaps I'd just been too long in Seattle where the only manifestations of spirit are flimsy; where the invocations are raised to a watery Buddhism or bloodless Unitarianism where God is impossibly distant if at all extant. Be that as it may, this simple act of saying grace did not so much shock me as still me. I paused to listen in. And the daughter did not disappoint.

Her's was no gestural grace -- "Bless this food. Amen. Let's eat." -- but an extended meditation on the good fortune to find oneself among family and before a rich selection of food; an acknowledgment of an unusual level of being blessed by God, and a calling down of God's grace on members of the family present and not present, and ending with a wish that God continue to bless the family, the community, the state and the country. Then, and only then, was "Amen" spoken and the meal begun.

Outside along the Asheville streets, it was a balmy evening. Down the block another restaurant offered "Exceptional International Vegetarian Food," and a shop on the corner sold items imported from Africa whose purchase was purported to help suffering children here and there in that blighted continent. A local freebie paper picked off a stack had decided that a photo of a tribal protest in Santiago, Chile on the Dia de la Raza was important information for the citizens of this part of town. Down in the Asheville hipster-dopester-homeless gulch at a more cut-rate vegetarian restaurant, citizens with shaved heads, "message" t-shirts, multiple facial piercing and full-body tattoos were climbing the stairs in search of a bran muffin, bitching about George Bush, global warming, and their personal collection of STDs while complaining of residual racism in a city that seems more white than Seattle.

The road back to the house in the hills was dark and winding and you had to take it slow. Going back it was nice to know that somewhere, somehow, and for reasons that sometimes challenge all understanding, there were people still asking God to bless America.

For now, that's the big headline news of the day here in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

---

[First published October 2007]

It began when my brother, Jeff, reached into his cupboard one evening in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and pulled out a small can. "You want to see some vague food?" he asked holding the tin out.

"Vague?"

"Yes, vague," he said. "Just what is "Potted Meat" anyway? Has it been smoked, drenched, strained, and then slammed into the can with extreme prejudice? What animal gives potted meat?"

I looked carefully at the can and turned it to the list of ingredients "as required by law." Not vague in the least.

Mechanically Separated Chicken, Beef Tripe, Partially Defatted Cooked Beef Fatty Tissue, Beef Hearts, Water, Partially Defatted Cooked Pork Fatty Tissue, Salt. Less than 2 percent: Mustard, Natural Flavorings, Dried Garlic, Dextrose, Sodium Erythorbate, Sodium Nitrite

The first item caught my eye since I had no idea what "Mechanically Separated Chicken" was except that it sounded bad for the chicken. Since then I've learned what the process entails:

Mechanically separated meat (MSM) [I'll let the acronym "MSM" pass without comment], also known as mechanically recovered meat (MRM), is a paste-like meat product produced by forcing beef, pork or chicken bones, with attached edible meat, under high pressure through a sieve or similar device to separate the bone from the edible meat tissue. Mechanically separated meat has been used in certain meat and meat products since the late 1960s.

That really perks up the taste buds, doesn't it?

My brother, to his eternal credit, didn't open that can of "Potted Meat." If he had we might have had to vacate his home at high speed surfing just ahead of the odor wave. Instead he prepared a very good dinner using real food.

Still, his concept of "vague food" stuck with me. How much vague food was there and what was it like? The next morning I found myself roaming through one of Food Lion supermarkets that are scattered about North Carolina. It was a bit of spontaneous cultural anthropology. My mission was to discover what other strange offerings had crept onto the grocery shelves during the years in which my own tastes had tended towards the more high end of offerings at YuppieChic Whole Foods style markets. I was not to be disappointed.

It was a series of small satoris. Here are some items that caught my attention. None of these things are on my current diet.

First up was this mercifully seasonal offering from Starbucks:

In this one offering we see a grand harmonic convergence of everything that has gone terribly, terribly wrong for Starbucks over the last few years. To get an abomination like this on the shelves means that hundreds of people at the company are working overtime to put it there. But before that can even get started you need a small group of executive marketing bozos sitting around trying to justify their phony baloney jobs.

"Okay, here's what we'll do. We'll take some bad coffee extract, dose it with some cheap chocolate syrup, and then lace it with peppermint!"

"Sounds suitably disgusting. How do we get people to buy it?"

"We'll tell them that it's available for a "Limited Time Only."

"Fookin' genius!"

Of late I note that some 300 jobs at Starbucks' headquarters in Seattle were eliminated. One can only hope these soooper-geniuses were not only among them, but rowed out into Puget Sound and put into the water with chains wrapped around their legs.

The next things not to make it into my shopping cart were the musical Tuna Medleys:

I did take one down and hold it to my ear to try and discern just what songs the tuna chunks were singing, but I couldn't quite make it out.

I also noted that, deep in the mountains of North Carolina, the "living in the shadows" population of illegal aliens had been spotlighted by Food Lion. Offerings of food favored by Mexicans took up fully half an aisle, with the following item asserting a kind of gastronomic assimilation we can only dream of.

Humm, Mayonesa-Mayonnaise. That's one massive train wreck of Spanish-French-American cultural concepts contained in a single jar. I suppose that this is some sort of sauce designed to appeal to the demographic of WASP Mexicans, but I really can't see why anyone in their right mind would whisk chipolte peppers into the otherwise palatable white-persons condiment of choice.

Still the Food Lion constantly reminded me that I was not in Mexifornia but in the deep South. If I harbored any doubts in the Mexican aisle a few regional specialties the next aisle over brought me around.

I can't even begin to imagine the tooth-fulness of these snacks and it is my profound wish that you would need to prove residency from birth in the South in order to be allowed to purchase them.

Clearly though, the above are only side-dishes. Main courses are strange as well. This region seems to be one inordinately fond of getting its teeth into necks:

But enough of what's for dinner in Vague Food Lion. Better to ask, hey, what's for lunch?

Here too you can depend upon being suitably revolted. First up are various sandwich fillings like:

Say that slowly several times: "Liver..... cheese.... liver.... cheese...." It's the kind of thought that would make a toddler contemplate suicide.

Of course I did find a few things that you could slap on a Liver Cheese sandwich to improve it.

Things, and I do mean "things," such as:

(Dubious even at the fabulous price of 99 cents!)

Things such as:

(The one slice of potted meat to have if you're having only one.)

Things such as the ever-popular:

(Which I am sure have never been within 6,000 miles of Vienna.)

And things such as:

(Very small fish making for very small steaks in very small tins.)

Now if you stack those altogether you will get some very distinct eating -- especially if you slather them with some Chipolte Mayonesa-Mayonnaise. But what would be, in Vague Foodland, an appropriate item to put them between in order to make the ultimate vague food sandwich?

Food Lion did not disappoint. In the very next aisle I discovered, to my horror:

Yes, pre-cooked and pre-packaged waffles already infused with syrup. No effort required at all. Is this the age of miracles and wonders, or what?

True, the conjoined twins of "De Wafelbakkers" might give you pause, but once you get past the potential of long mustache hairs getting into the batter, it's all good.

It's more than all good, because with these syrup-soaked waffles wrapped around your sandwich, you are ready to choose from the vast selection of vague desserts offered.

These would include, but not be limited to:

"Ready to eat!" Yumm. Why bother with putting it in a crust when you can just pop the lid and dig in?

Not to your taste? Not to worry,there's always:

This is an item that has a somewhat soft and flexible pastryesque shell surrounding a semi-solid and slick inner fluffed filling. The advantage of this item is that one can be eaten for dessert and the other saved for vague food emergencies.

By this time you're probably thinking, "Well, that's just the natural depravity of the packaged foods industry. It can't possibly represent the more natural inclinations of America's current diet."

Well, you're wrong. Because while I was fleeing from the Food Lion and the aisles of dead and vague food, I ran past the bakery counter touting "Fresh Baked Goodness." I paused long enough to snap a picture of the current cupcake offerings:

Now I don't know about you but I tend to reject any food that is blue that doesn't come with the word "berry" right after it. Not so the bakers of Food Lion it would seem.

Having driven all thoughts of eating any thing from my mind, I left the Food Lion and fled back into the hills of North Carolina.

The last thing I photographed before leaving was this label:

The vaguest food of all. I bought three. After all, it was a good price.

Continued...

"One of the dumbest things that the Right did in the 2008 primaries was to operate under the assumption that tearing down Candidate X was the best way to get Candidate Y the nomination. As near as I can tell, this only ended up resulting in: tears; a lot of resentment and bitterness between various factions; and John McCain." -- Moe Lane ｻ The Quiet Man.

As Ronald Reagan once said to Jimmy Carter, but now would say to many in his beloved Republican party, "There you go again."

Reagan would also remind you of his 11th Commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican."

Purists attitudes among purity-seeking "Republicans" helped boost Barack Obama into the White House in 2008. Now the same factions are at it again even though it is early innings in the drive to unseat the most malicious pretender to the White House ever to occupy the porcelain throne in the president's private quarters.

Yes, the party of PlaysNiceWithProgressives is busy being rotten to its core yet again. This was the sort of behavior that handed the election over to the progressives in 2008 and it looks to be on track to doing it again in 2012.

From the Paulist Purists to the Romney Revisionists of late it would seem that again nobody is "pure enough" to inhale the heady fragrance of their refined conservative flatulence. Instead we seem to be in for an extended session of Republicans eating their own and then blaming the progressives for their extended heartburn.

Dear Republicans,

With all due respect I say unto you: "If it were not for the progressive democrats you would be the dumbest political party in the history of the republic."

Please try to remember that your party's job in 2012 is to kick Obama's ass not kiss it. That line forms to the left and, since it stretches from Ghettozonia in the East to the Republic of Rimming in the West, it is very, very long.

I had thought about writing you all a long letter but then I remembered I had already done so in February of 2008. You didn't listen then and you won't listen now, but here it is again just for the laughs.

The McCain name may change but your brains, evidently, do not. Which is why they continue to drop kick your ass through the goal posts of history and spike your balls just to drive the point home.

Keep it up and that's what's going to happen to you again in 2012. If so, give me some warning so I won't have to watch you slip into the Speedo, lube up, and assume the position. You just aren't that attractive. If this turns out to be same Speedo / different McCain both myself and a lot of people are going to be very disappointed with you.

Some years ago I recall leafing through a slight volume of the collected sayings of New York City taxi drivers. One that stuck in my mind was that of a Bengali driver who observed, "Bicycle messengers, they thirst for death."

Watching the blistering salvos fired against a McCain ascendency throughout the net in the past week has put me in mind of that observation, only applied to the incondite arguments of recondite Republicans:

The gist of the Republican argument against McCain seems to be that he is not pure enough for many conservatives. I submit that that is precisely the point. The pure products of extreme ideology don't win elections in this country. The pure products of ideology start, well, civil wars.

NeoNeoCon has a long exegesis on this bizarre phenomenon at Conservatives jump the shark: party purity über alles where she states the obvious:

Candidates don't win by ideological purity. That's a delusion to which the extreme wings of both parties are subject.

But it turns out that for some, it's not even about winning. It's about party purification, about who owns the soul of the Republican Party.

It reminds me of the Biblical wandering in the desert. Forty years of that, and the Jews were ready to enter the Promised Land.

If you'd like a crash course in the current extreme Republican insanity, you might take a brief tour through the comments to that post above. Most illuminating when it comes to understanding that not all moonbats inhabit the cave on the left.

Does all this spuming and carping about McCain bode ill for his candidacy? I like to think not. I like to think that what we are seeing in the last week is simply the froth that always rises to the top of a hot cup of blather on the Internet.

Still, it is instructive to follow the heft of the arguments that shore up the ruins of the Republican party. These seem mostly to stem from McCain's real or imagined positions on "The Big 3 Issues" -- abortion, immigration, homosexuality -- plus -- just for fun -- some sort of running around outside his marriage a decade or more back. The latter is often thrown in because it just wouldn't be politics as usual without some mud in the mix.

Why the blow-up on the Right. It's not really about McCain. The conservative rage to my mind is powered not by the actual prospect of McCain candidacy itself. The looming reality of McCain's nomination brings a deeper failure into focus. That knowledge is powered by the unconscious awareness that, on "The Big 3 Issues", the culture war is over. And the conservatives have lost. Reaction? Consume your own.

Here's the news on "The Big 3 Issues:"

Abortion: Alas, this is a done deal. There will not come a time in the foreseeable future when abortion on demand will not be available in the United States. The best that can be hoped for at this point is a widespread understanding among the populace that abortion, though perfectly legal, is morally wrong except in certain, widely understood, circumstances. (And, no, I'm not going to spell those circumstances out -- that's up to you. Work it out with yourself, your family and your friends.)

The law and public morality are not coterminous, nor should they be. When they are the result is dhimmitude. Not really the state one is seeking, correct?

Homosexuality and gay marriage: This too is a done deal. To paraphrase Gay Rights activists from years ago, "They're here. They're queer. Get used to it."

Democracy, at the bottom, runs on a simple axiom: "Everybody's in. Nobody's out;" although these days you might want to cast the last part as 'Everybody's out.' If people want to enter into a state of marriage, that's up to them, not the state. The official recognition of gay people's right to be married or not married is merely generational. It will roll forward, couple by couple, state by state. As the poet says,

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
-- Omar Khayyam

Indeed, rather than resist the desire of gay Americans to marry, it seems to me that insecure straights who for some reason have it in for gays should welcome their entrance into the twisted state that secular marriage has become. After all, it is a staple of comedy that straight marriage brings not bliss but woe and regret and the death of romantic love. Think of the decades of rich comedy material gay marriage will bring all Americans. Think positive. Think -- "Gay Divorce Court." Ratings to the moon, Alice. To the moon!

Reversing Illegal Immigration: Done deal #3. I know that, like visions of sugarplums, visions of some sort of "fence" protecting America from the hordes of marching Mexicans dance in the heads of Americans who just want them all to turn around and march back. But, alas, that too joins the previous two issues in the category, "It Ain't Gonna Happen."

I know, believe me, all the designs for a kinder and gentler fence that will have hi-tech detectors and some sort of ready interdiction corps sitting on helicopter scramble pads across the southern border. I know all the arguments for expanding the ever-so-effective techniques used to stop the flow of illegal drugs to stop the flow of illegal aliens. None of these will prove any more effective than "The War on Some Drugs" we've be squandering billions on over the decades.

What would work would be some sort of East German wall 1,969 miles long. This monstrosity would have guard towers, mine fields, attack Dobermans, armored cars, and about 100,000 armed border guards with a shoot on sight policy (3 shifts of 17 guards per mile). After around 500 Mexican civilians were shot dead, this might have some effect on reducing the flow. I'm not quite ready for this draconian a solution. Are you?

Then there is the extended policy of finding those illegals here and, well, just deporting them. Another 25-watt idea.

Okay, let's follow that one home with the vision of hundreds of buses chock full of thousands of illegals (rounded up in armed swoops through the US barrios) departing daily for Tijuana and all points south. The first problem is finding and then imprisoning the illegals. That would mean raids into homes and apartment buildings around the country as well as stop and frisk identity checks on the street for "looking Mexican." Then you'll have to refurbish those Japanese internment camps in the Owens valley and elsewhere as holding pens. Think the Manzanar Concentration Camp to the 10th power on the outskirts of every major city. You start opening those up and armed Mexicans are going to be the least of your problems.

Which brings up the small problem of resistance since male members of La Raza are not known for their submissiveness. No, not all of these armed roundups would be met with a tug of the forelock submission. And it is best to remember that this America is, first and foremost, a heavily armed country -- especially in the barrios. Are you ready for gun fights across the US? I'm not sure I am. But that's what we'd get since many illegals, faced with internment and deportation on a mass scale, would not go quietly.

Next, let's suppose that, after countless "regrettable" deaths (Each one of which is given the full "Pobre Maria Treatment" on NPR and in the New York Times. Yes, your head will explode.), that after these deaths hundreds of thousands of Mexicans did indeed show up at the border in surplus Greyhound buses. (Don't kid yourself, we're going to need a lot of buses.) What if Mexico decided, "Hey, we don't recognize any of these people as ours, and just what do you mean 'looks' Mexican?"

Are we then going to use the armed forces to force Mexico to take back their huddled masses? And even if they did, do we really want a country as corrupt and unstable as Mexico to become even more unstable? If you want to see a wall come up on the southern border overnight, just wait until a full-scale revolution breaks out in Mexico. Think "American Civil War" X 2 with automatic weapons and plastique explosives. If one side wins you get Nazi Germany to the south. If the other side wins you get Communist China during "The Great Leap Forward." Neither is what you'd call a "desirable outcome." Either will make you wish for the status quo ante when decent yard work and fine tacos everywhere were a staple of American life.

For these reasons and many more, the concept that a McCain candidacy and presidency would be "unacceptable" to Republicans and Americans is, in the land of realpolitik, simply delusional. When you want "everything" out of a president, you get "nothing." Huckabee is not the answer since he's too evangelical for the middle. Romney is not the answer since, well, the middle feel -- no matter what you say about it -- there's something too weird about being a Mormon. McCain's not only the best shot at the middle, he's really -- when you come down to it -- all the Republicans have in their quiver. And in politics, you don't beat somebody with policies and purity. You gotta beat somebody with somebody.

This, of course, will neither still nor stifle the true believers among conservatives. Like the sorely afflicted BDS democrats who have yet to get over the fact that Al Gore lost the election of 2000 fair and square, so there will always be those MDS conservatives among us who have not gotten over the fact Goldwater was skunked by Johnson in 1964. History has no lessons to teach the true believer.

Many of these mossbacks seem to feel that four more years of the Clintons or the first four years of Obama will be a small price to pay for ideological purity.These folks simply will not see that, as the TV infomercials say, "AND... it doesn't STOP there!" I know I am shoveling seaweed against the tide here, but I would ask those people, for but a brief moment, to consider these two potential line-ups:

Clinton/Obama 2008
or
Obama/Clinton 2008

This is, for so many reasons, the Democrat dream ticket and the pure Conservative's worst nightmare. Not the least because it means, at the outside, the potential of 16 years of a Democrat with a big socialist jones in the Whitehouse. Let's spell that out: S I X T E E N - Y E A R S.

Give one party sixteen years in power and you could, dare I say, appoint every single justice of the Supreme Court. Especially if you've got congress on your side.

"Not voting" to register a protest is also, in this case, not an option. A "not vote" counts as two against you; the vote you did not cast and the vote you did not cancel.

So, what the Republicans have to ask themselves before signing off on the No-McCain purity test is, "Do you feel lucky? Well, punks, do you?"

Continued...

Wonder no more. Behold as they gather deep beneath the shadowy wings of their great god, Moonbat:

Everyone at the Washington, DC 5 meetup on September 6, 2008. From left to right: SchuminWeb, Aude, Staeiou, Swatjester, Kirill Lokshin, BRG, and Newyorkbrad. -- Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 5 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Continued...

The Ferris Wheel, lit in long stripes of searing red and blue and green neon like some whirling sketch of an earth-bound star, pirouettes into the night sky above the slate waters of the Pacific at the end of the Santa Monica pier. Below it, the old seafood restaurant now serves Mexican food where gang-bangers herd their Saturday night dates around the bar, and the loud murmur of Angelino-accented Spanish rises above the waves that lap the pilings driven deep through the slow Pacific swell and into the sands below.

In a dark hollow somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, the first winds of winter hiss around an old dance hall where hundreds of white people and one black man stomp the boards in a contra dance. Dressed as vampires, wolf men, fairies, cowboys, and a host of other laughing fantasies, the dancers welcome the day of the dead to fiddles, guitars, pianos and drums as the caller makes the long lines of whirling people into stars and boxes, and a new girl is spun into your arms, flirting and bobbing, with every change in the ancient pattern of the dance, only to roll away with a half-sashay.

Outside the lights from the hall catch the flying drifts of gold and red leaves the wind is tearing from the trees, pushing them across the stars, and rolling them up in long drifts of crisp shadows against the wheels of Willys jeeps, old bangers, and brand new SUVs of every make and model. After the dance, Waffle Houses along Route 26 will fill up with costumed, exhausted dancers, their endorphins convincing them that, for this night at least, they are probably immortal.

The long wave laved beaches of the Isle of Palms outside of Charleston reinforce the new rule that no poor -- or even middle class -- people are now allowed to live by the ocean in America. The lots on which the endlessly elaborate houses that look out on the sea stand now cost between three and four million dollars each. If you bought one and immediately burned down the four to six bedroom three-story house, the cost of the lot would still be three to four million dollars. The house is, in essence, free.

Offshore, even on a dank day with large winds pushing in from the Atlantic, the bright scoops of kite surfers soar and pull their riders up off the crest of the waves high into air before gliding down to slide on the surface of the long breaking waves, and into the sands where the plastic pails of the nation's fortunate children are abandoned just above the reach of the waters.

Continued...

Barnhardt has had it with Islam, the Koran, Lindsey Graham, and all the rest of the wretched pack.

"Lindsey Graham, understand that if you pick a fight with me the only way it ends is with you sobbing in the men's room."

How long this lasts on YouTube is anybody's guess.

Here's part 1 where she flays Lindsey Graham down to the bone:

So my pal and I are standing in line in a sandwich shop waiting to see if two chicken salad sandwiches, chips, and cokes will yield any change from a $20 (They don't), when this guy my pal knows staggers in the door and joins the line. He's the blonde, aging and pear-shaped frat boy type on a life pension from his grandparents common in these parts. He's an elite member of the Maynard G. Krebs Zero-Work Brigade.

It's possible to see he is a reasonably good looking man, but just. This is because, besides a distinct wobbling lurch in his step, he also appears to have gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime.

His nose is thickened along with the rest of his face, and not just from a lifetime's love affair with single malt.

There's a huge nasty scab across the bridge of his nose and a larger one running along the side of his jaw and under his chin giving off a rusty red gleam like some speed strawberry birthmark.

Both his eyes have large, dark circles around them as if they've gotten special attention from a ball-peen hammer, and their expression is that of a man who's just walked out of a fire-fight in the Afghan hills.

Continued...

Attention All Those Who Would Be King (or Queen): This is the list by which ye shall be judged. Do not be found wanting... or be found wanting higher office.

Continued...

Mouseover image and select full screen icon in lower right to see large images

When a man has lived a long time with a city and then decided to leave her, it seems best to make a record before departing. Otherwise, from all the years he has lived with her, all he will have left will be the shards of moments and not the mosaic complete.

The archives he retains will, invariably, be merely personal -- clippings from the local papers, a box of business cards, filched matchbooks, a sheaf of menus, random pay stubs, a well-thumbed Rolodex, and a few albums filled with pictures of friends and acquaintances remembered with varying degrees of accuracy. And his snapshots.

They will by default be snapshots of his personal celebrations; the birthdays, anniversaries, shared summer houses, days in the park and nights on the town. He'll be in some of them. Friends will proliferate in others. And the city will persist, implied -- either in the background or intruding in the middle distance -- like the air, unnoticed until absent. When you leave her, this is what you will carry away. It will fit in a medium-sized cardboard box. We've all packed this box. Mine was labeled, "New York."

Continued...

Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
-- Eliot

He's one hundred years old and his long hands, once strong, are growing translucent. He does not so much sit in his wheelchair as he is held upright and at a slight slant by straps. Even awake his eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the florescent lights in the roof of the home.

His meals of pureed food are spoon fed to him by attendants who speak to him in the tones he once used, long ago, on his infant children. When the drapes in his room are partially opened they reveal a view of a gravel roof, exhaust fans, and the brick facade of the opposite wing of the home. It's not a view but he doesn't mind. His eyes are shut against the glare and the blur of the present, and he's gone off on a fishing trip in the summer of 1949 where he will say to no one in particular, "Jesus, the fish are thick on the ground."

Don't make the mistake of thinking he's not in the here and now, because he'll surprise you now and then. He'll come out for a bit if it is worth it, but it seldom is. And then only for a moment.

He's my mother's brother, my uncle, and his life has now spanned a full century.

Continued...

Thus was Myth-Making in the pre-digital 20th Century: Case Study House No. 22 « Iconic Photos

Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 (also the Stahl House), shows two well-dressed women conversing casually inside. In the photo, the cantilevered living room appears to float diaphanously above Los Angeles. “The vertiginous point of view contrasts sharply with the relaxed atmosphere of the house’s interior, testifying to the ability of the Modernist architect to transcend the limits of the natural world,” praised the New York Times. Yet this view was created as meticulously as the house itself. Wide-angle photography belied the actual smallness of the house; furniture and furnishings were staged, and as were the women. Although they were not models (but rather girlfriends of architectural students), they were asked to sit still in the dark as Shulman exposed the film seven minutes to capture lights from LA streets. Then, lights inside were quickly switched on to capture two posing women.

One hour and 14 minutes of hit magic. Fascinating. Good background for cruising the net. Click and listen to the decades rock and roll on by.

It's amazing to me that I have actually heard every single one of these on or about the day they were released. That's right. I come in at "Memories Are Made of This." Where do you come in?

Five Seconds Of Every #1 Pop Single Part 1 by mjs538

Five Seconds Of Every #1 Pop Single Part 2 by mjs538

Called "Chartsweep" the work was created by Hugo Keesing, a

Continued...

Here's a cover from American Legion magazine in 1951. It highlights, "Commies and those who play their game." [emphasis added]

How strangely contemporary it seems. It's sixty years later and yet it seems that nothing has changed on ye olde picket line. Has nothing changed in America in sixty years? Whole worlds have shifted in the country to such an extent that it would exhaust libraries to shelve the books written on those changes.

Continued...

This from today, February 2011: "The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicted last week U.S. corn farmers will have just 675 million bushels of corn at the end of August, before next year's harvest begins. That's just an 18-day supply, Nagel said. -- World Bank report says food prices are at "dangerous levels" after rising 29 percent in a year - 2/15/2011 3:39:28 PM | Newser

This from August, 1919:

Continued...

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