Nonpartisan Chickadees

Just filled the bird feeders for a clutch of chickadees clustering around the backyard -- they're so cheerful and plucky, with their little high-pitched chirps. And they're so courteous -- they go to the feeder one at a time, get a single seed, and then fly up to a nearby branch to eat it; the next one goes down and does the same; then the next, the next, and then starting with the first one again. It's so orderly and, well, nonpartisan.

A Night to be Proud of Flint

For once, Flint made a choice that doesn't make it look like everybody got too much lead in the water. Congratulations to Dayne Walling -- a Rhodes Scholar! I'm so proud. Also congrats to Dale Weighill, who won the primary for city council person from my neighborhood. I'm hopeful he'll take the spot in the November final. It's interesting and energizing to imagine what these smart young men might be able to do for our city. While I've often cheered on Michael Moore's snide commentaries about the city, I think there's also room for serious problem-solvers who will not see everything as grist for parody, especially delivered from out-of-town aeries. We've been way too prolific in the parody department -- obviously so much to work with, God knows. Now could we have just a little interval of dignity?

Unfortunately, the Hurley Hospital millage went down by about 700 votes. People aren't feeling very compassionate these days -- and it's really hard on folks to accept any more taxes. I'm impressed, actually, that the vote was this close.

It's really sweet that Dayne finally pulled it out.

My Vote is Really Absentee: "Hot Case" Cold

Boo Hoo. No Vote

Ted and I just saw the rather mediocre movie "Swing Vote" in which a good-hearted but dopey drunk (Kevin Costner) ends up casting the deciding vote in a presidential race. Who did he pick? Kelsey Grammer or Dennis Hopper (Dennis Hopper??? Man, he's the one for me...delicious to imagine). Anyway, we were supposed to get the message that every vote counts. Okay, I get it.

Mine didn't. I really wanted to vote for Dayne Walling, the kid Rhodes Scholar whose mother I've known for about 25 years, for Mayor of Flint today. I really wanted to vote in favor of a millage for a hospital that serves the poorest people of Flint. i really wanted to vote for a gay friend who used to be my neighbor at Sylvester Manor for City Council.

But I'm in LA, where at the moment, for example, some guy is going up and down 26th Street with a cart, yelling "tamale tamale tamale" and the guy downstairs has his woodfire grill going in the driveway for an al fresco dinner facing the harbor. It's a long way from what we used to call Buick City. I love both of my locales, but it's Flint that rouses my political passions most -- it's been a long hard trudge, still very much in progress, for the city to pull itself up out of misery. Increasingly, I care about that. I want vindication for GM's abandonment. I want the people who are left, hanging on to whatever they can of grace and hope, to get some reliable goodness.

So anyway, before I left Flint I sent in my request for an absentee ballot -- it was received June 26. Never got the ballot. Until today. Election Day. In my mailbox in San Pedro. It arrived at 11 a.m. PST, 2 p.m. Eastern, giving me six hours to file my vote.

Though I'd essentially given up hope before today, I placed a call to Gloria Boone in the Flint City Clerk's office. Of course she told me I was out of luck with no options. But I continued the conversation. Let's see, it was my fault that I submitted from an online form -- that is "not normal," Ms. Boone told me. I mistakenly sent it to the County Clerk's office. They sent it to the Flint City Clerk's Office (receipt stamp July 7) but apparently it was mixed up in a pile of voter registration documents. I should have checked -- didn't I wonder what had happened? So basically it was my fault. However. my envelope was postmarked July 31...how could anybody have turned this around that fast? Before I got Ms. Boone, another worker told me they hadn't received the ballots until last week. So I'm wondering if my complaints and the series of gaffes were immaterial. Anyway, Ms. Boone said she resented that I was criticizing the City Clerk's office when "we are only human." Indeed. Very human.

I want new city government. I want something to work right. I want government officials to be nice to me and to do their jobs professionally. But at least this time around, I didn't get to say that with my vote.

I see the envelope had written on it "Hot Case." You can see that above. Huh. Right. By now it's stone cold.

P.S. Fortunately, early returns suggest Dayne Walling has a healthy lead, without my vote.

An Emotional and Historic Day

I just got back from standing in line to vote for 2 1/2 hours, and I didn't mind. I got there at 6:55 a.m., and already there was a huge line snaking all around the Sarvis Center. But people were in a great mood and I thought hell, I'm going to be crying all day -- this is the way it's supposed to be in my country. It's a beautiful warm day, a blessing for everybody waiting in line. I saw a lot of people I knew, of course, and at one point, somebody got the crowd singing "We Shall Overcome." It was awesome. I was in line with two middle-aged African American men -- Bernie and Melvin -- and a young kid who's an anthropology grad student at UMF -- sweet, sweet. Steve and Cary were there, along with Jake and Helen (VERY pregnant) with their twin boys Micah and Jonas in arm. My old friend and colleague Diane from Family Service Agency. And many, many more. The line just kept coming and growing and was still all around the outside of Sarvis Center when I left. Is it possible then, that the times and the country can change?? I proudly cast my vote for Barack Obama, feeling that my vote has never mattered more.

When I got home, I had this message from my husband, who went back to LA in time to vote at one of the most beautiful polling places in the world at Pt. Fermin Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Here's what he wrote:

Good morning, my beloved wife and voter. This is truly a great and historic day. I confess to some very powerful emotions about this event, this agonizingly important election. Forty years ago, 1968, was a year of tear gas, assassination, protest, Richard Nixon, the Poor People’s Campaign, and I was in the thick of it. It was the year that my own political and social soul was forged. It was one of the most intense years of my life. What I worked and struggled for then manifests itself today in this election. Today is the opportunity I thought might never happen in my lifetime--to vote in a presidential election of awesome significance where the forces of humanism and rationality have an excellent chance of prevailing. I know that when I stand in line to vote this morning, with the Korean Bell, Point Fermin, and the Pacific in the background (and maybe some pelicans), my feelings will be running high. I will be particularly touched if I end up standing in a long line. This is the way it should be. And if Obama wins, as it seems he will, this will be a defining day in our history, and not just because he will be our first Black president. You would think that 67 years of kicking around would have turned me into a cynic, but I really believe that this could be the beginning of something sweet. Forty years is a long time to wait. I will take pleasure in sharing this experience with Jesse. This is a good day for the United States of America and my heart is glad.

Peaceful Power Outage: Are We Losing Silence?

For about 75 minutes tonight, the power was out in my neighborhood. I enjoyed it. A brilliant moon rose through the trees, casting a bright shadow on the street and the back yard. I felt my way around to a dozen candles and lit them on the dining room table, the mantle, the kitchen counter, and my bedroom windowsill. The house was so silent: after today's cataclysmically scary stock market gyrations, the abrupt break from CNN, PBS, NPR, Wall Street, email, Facebook, blogging -- it was a relief.

Briefly, in the curious absence of news, I wondered if something apocalyptic might be happening. I filled up a pot with water and inventoried the canned goods and medicines I have on hand. I called Ted on my cell phone, realizing too late that it was down to 10 percent charge. We had enough time for Ted to assure me the world wasn't coming to an end -- at least not that he'd heard.

So I relaxed. Coming down the stairs holding a brass candlestick I've always loved, I talked to myself: though I've been sick lately, though the world is in turmoil, I'm basically doing okay. The silence afforded me that one brief moment: I'm okay.

I'm not sorry the power came back on, but I must admit that I could do without the loud commercial about the Sonic Scrubber and the raucous arguments about Sarah Palin and Barack Obama on Larry King that are hitting my eardrums. How hard it is to just turn off the cacaphony.

As it happened, the comp staff from UMF convened at my house this afternoon for one of our Friday social gatherings, and we'd considered these very issues. Today our catalyst article was a recent piece from The Atlantic by Nicholas Carr titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" We talked about how we've all become multi-taskers and that the experience of simply sitting still, deeply reading, is rarer and rarer. Carr says once he was "a scuba diver on a sea of words," and now he's more like a guy skimming over the surface on a jet ski. He cites a study suggesting "we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think." Carr reviews other technological innovations in history -- starting with Plato's suspicions of writing -- and taking a look at what happened to Nietzsche when he started using a typewriter. He notes how the development of clocks in the 14th century changed everything: "In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock."

My colleagues and I, leisurely sipping wine and snacking on little plates of fruit and cheese, declined to agree that "Google is making us stupid." We did agree that the way our students are experiencing the world -- and the way we ourselves, like Carr, are changing how we read -- suggests we need to consider and reconsider how we teach. Prodding our students into critical thinking from whatever texts they encounter remains the challenge -- and we figured teachers have been bemoaning their students' fumbling attempts at critical thinking for decades, if not centuries. Like us, our students have to learn how to sort through the noise.

Still, I do crave the silence; We'll never know the silence of the world as it used to be. I wish I had the chance to know that quiet -- how it might have been, four hundred years ago, say, to walk into the world at night, and to hear the sounds of that world: no motors, no jets, no trains, no sirens.

But I couldn't resist turning on CNN during the meeting to check the 4 p.m stock closing -- my friends tried to stop me! And when the power was out tonight, I could have read by candlelight. But feeling restless and at loose ends, I just stretched out on the couch and took a nap. The sound of the house woke me up first, the frig and furnace cranking rhythmically into action, and then the house lit up, the candlelight dwindling and insignificant in the bright glow of my conscientiously-installed fluorescent coils, and CNN blared back into the room.

NO MORE WINKING

Oops -- found my original version of this post, embarrassingly in another blog -- the one that's supposed to be for my grad students -- and isn't supposed to reveal my cantankerous and highly partisan political views. So, in a lame attempt to compartmentalize my worlds, I grabbed it off of there and quickly slapped it back here where it belongs. Sort of. Ta Dah:

I didn't think there was a clear winner in the debate last night -- except maybe all the rest of us finally released from the suspense, exhausting ourselves wondering what was going to happen.

Well, I mean, I think by far Joe Biden was the smarter and more tolerable of the two. His answers were passionately on point and he managed to respond with the depth that his experience and intelligence afford him. I'm very relieved, despite her "right off the bench," presumptuous, "Hey, can I call you Joe?" that Biden referred to her as "Governor Palin." It was that kind of situation: no false intimacy, please. She was the sexist in the room.

I most admired his spirited "John McCain is no maverick" riff late in the debate. To me that was Biden at his debating best. I also thoroughly enjoyed his follow-up response to Palin's description of how she visualizes her potential role as a VP by admiringly invoking Dick Cheney -- and Biden promptly, bitingly said he thought Cheney was the most dangerous Vice President in U.S. history. Touche, Joe, yeah, say it's so!

I also cheered when he asserted, "Facts matter!" Yes! Yes! Of course, he got a number of his facts wrong. And I know most people really don't care. Still, I wished for something more -- harder questioning, more rigorous tangling, more substance. Dream on, I know.

Palin's smarmy refusal to answer the questions really got on my nerves. When she said she essentially felt no obligation to answer the questions posed, I felt echoes of the attacks on Gwen Ifill's right to moderate and a sleazy cynicism about the whole point of the debate. The Fourth Estate hasn't been stellar in its behavior, but once Palin and her handlers agreed to the debate, they should have shown more respect. Let's see, doesn't the Constitution elevate freedom of the press? Isn't there something in our history that calls for the stringent and enlivening necessity of having vigorous journalism? Oh, reporters...don't you just hate them?

One of the many questions Palin didn't bother to answer, revealingly, was the closing one about her Achilles heel. Not that Biden developed the subject much more lavishly, but he at least acknowledged the question, admitted discipline was indeed one of his bugaboos, and added one more -- what he called his "passion." Revealingly, Palin, who never blinks, except for those cloying, infantilizing winks, blew the whole question off, turning it into an opportunity to congratulate herself.

Finally, Palin's tiresome closing line -- on which I've ranted before in this space -- set me off just as much as it has all the other times: that John McCain is the only one in the race who's fought for the country. That smug faux patriotism is one of the things that I hope will get her and her arrogant side-kick, the candidate supposedly at the top of the ticket, soundly thrashed on Nov. 4.

Trying to coddle my irritations -- and a lingering cough -- with healthful panaceas, I was drinking strong green tea laced with Bushmill's. It didn't help. It took several tablespoons of Nyquil later to get me to sleep. And even then, Ted said I snored loudly and drove him into the guest room. That's marital politics -- the politics of the body, the politics of adaptation, the politics, when the day is done, of forgiveness.

Shaky Sunday at the Autumn Equinox

When in doubt, thrown in a sunset shot

Oh, lord, am I the only one who noticed Henry Paulson's left hand shaking as he was being fruitlessly grilled by George Stephanopolos? That crooked little finger, the hoarse voice, the slight shake (ominously, on the left side of his body) -- it's foreboding. My Friday giddiness has worn off along with the burnishing pleasures of the Verget du Sud, and today, vestigial remains of my Ohio Protestant childhood sweating out of my pores, I'm, like, PRAYING.

And what, exactly, WILL happen? Nobody -- Paulson, white coiffed Chris Dodd, scarily blue-eyed John Boehner -- nobody seems to know what, exactly, was said in that meeting where "all the oxygen left the room," as Dodd keeps saying. All the oxygen left the room? What does this mean?

Meanwhile, George W. Bush, who has essentially taken Rome down in the worst presidency of my lifetime, looks like a drowned rat, a whipped dog, in his brief pathetic appearances, limply whimpering, "it's gonna work." My interpretation of W's affect is: deeply depressed. Exhausted. Joi de vivre kaput. Hooverish, as others have said. Will he make it to Jan. 21 when he'll get to clear brush once again?

I take a long deep breath. Still oxygen in this room, at least for the time being. What could I live without? Is it time to buy a gun and a generator? What will happen to the birds? Will there still be poetry?

Perhaps elegy, cried out from the fetid ruins of Galveston, from the smoky remains of the Marriott in Islamabad, from the graves of the 62 U.S. military who have committed suicide so far this year.

I breathe again, grateful in the moment for whatever grace this Sunday morning affords: finding an old poem in a dusty folder, sipping a cup of strong English breakfast tea, a hot shower and a clean black teeshirt that says "art" in 40 languages.

Here's the poem I found, at least 15 years old:

In Autumn

This is a difficult season, dense
with hue. Is it true we have just
so many heartbeats? Profligate old
bootmaker, my heart pumps on,
ragged with hope and regret,
while the earth tries to settle,
all that rot a smile toward spring
all that sweet cessation and giving up.

Giddy Friday

I'm giddily happy tonight. My car has been in the garage, untouched, since a week ago, and I've walked to work every day this week -- five days, an hour each day, a half hour each way, in brilliant tangy autumn weather, my beloved black backpack secure against my body.

And it's possible that the country is not quite so mindlessly infatuated with Sarah Palin this week as last, and maybe I feel fizzy because of the huge financial crash we've seen happen this week -- it's like the way you feel after getting high on LSD and thinking you're never going to come down and then you wake up the next morning and everything is ultra-clear and daily life in all its ordinary beauty is a relief.

Here's Barbara Mikulski: " Democrats wear lipstick too, and we need somebody who gets it! We don't need George Bush in lipstick!" That image is making me giggle, but maybe that's because my system is flush with fresh-air endorphins and the two glasses of rose from the bottle I found in the refrigerator door (Verget du Sud, 2006) It's so funny because Barbara Mikulski doesn't really look like she wears lipstick, but God bless her! The Wall Street Journal (yes, the Wall Street Journal!) lambastes John McCain for his hot-headed call to fire Christopher Cox from the SEC. So I relax and play with my tiny zen garden (see photo above...for the record, the bottle is empty now.)

The world's complications are amusing and fascinating tonight. I'm in a much better mood. Even while listening to idiot Bay Buchanan bluster about Palin and McCain on CNN. Tonight she just seems silly and irrelevant.

And by the way, how about Joe Biden saying it's patriotic for people making $250,000 or more to pay more taxes? I say, three cheers. I don't think that was a gaffe. It makes sense that the rich should pay more. This of course means that prosperous Americans would develop some late-in-the-game altruism, which doesn't seem to accompany standard capitalism. We don't know from sacrifice. How 'bout a little dose of sacrifice, damn it? I like what Joe Biden said.

I'm not saying I'm happy about the bailout. Welfare for the bigtime capitalists, at a massive scale, probably means that any hope for universal health care, decent public education and -- yeah, even -- the arts won't be in the picture for the rest of my lifetime. We've just rewarded the slobbering, snarling dog for stealing food from the baby.

Nonetheless, it's a beautiful autumn night and that rose has me mellow and optimistic. I'm going to sign off and enjoy it.

Plus ca Change: Politician in the Buckeye State

I'm enjoying hearing an account of Biden invoking Catholic phrasing ("Bless me father for I have sinned...", McCain having a "political, not a policy, epiphany") in one of my childhood neighborhoods of Wooster, Ohio. The high school band strikes up, there's a parade, there's the drawling political talk -- as the commentator says, it's all rather timeless. One could be cynical, but since as a preacher's kid I respond with amusement and wry recognition to these religious catch phrases, the effect on me is positive -- not that I'm observant, but that I enjoy the rhetorical allusions. And, I must say, it's a bit reassuring. This is more entertaining to me than Palin addressing an Ohio crowd the other day as "guys and gals" and talking to them like they were a roomful of third graders. As one onlooker and fan put it, "He's not a flashy pick but he tells us the way it is, and that's what we need to hear." Well, I'm not sure anybody knows "the way it is" right now, but I'd rather have a sly and soulful rhetorical approach than a dumbed-down bit of condescension. Later Biden's going to Canton, my actual hometown, which is in almost as bad a state as Flint. Ahh...America.

Flint Mayor Don Williamson's Latest Idiocy

Kay Kelly Illustration by Patty Warner

In the latest act of ignorant cronyism, Flint Mayor Don Williamson has fired Kay Kelly, project director of the wonderfully successful Kearsley Park Project. I'm so frustrated and outraged about this that I'm ready to go down to City Hall and SIT IN.

Here's a link to my June East Village Magazine column about Kay. Kay Kelly Reclaiming a Public Space. It is infuriating that in a town so often bereft of good news that Kay's remarkable project should have to fight for support, much less be axed. This is not just knucklehead myopia, this is urban sadism.

Added later: Here is what Mike Kelly posted about Kay's firing on Facebook this afternoon. You'll note I'm making no pretense of objectivity about this...I haven't heard any of "the other side" but here in Flint we are used to Williamson's capricious and often irrational actions.

There may be some rumors flying around so I wanted to get the facts on the record.

Don Williamson terminated Kay Kelly as Kearsley Park Project Director via a perfunctory letter on Friday, September 12, 2008.

His decision was made despite the fact that Kay Kelly had turned Kearsley Park from a park people avoided to a vital place used by diverse individuals for exercise and recreation. Kay had raised money to bring playgrounds, ball fields and walking/biking paths to Kearsley Park. In addition, she turned the park into a vital center of community activities from theater and concerts to weddings and family reunions.

All of this was accomplished by fundraising efforts that resulted in no cost to the City or the city taxpayers and often provided free entertainment and enrichment to the community.

Kay had already received confirmation of a grant to continue her position for two more years when it appeared that Williamson wanted to replace Kay with one of his cronies.

Caught with our Pants Down Again

Flint has a faultless way of getting into the news -- usually for dumb, embarrassing or damaging reasons. Today is no exception -- in the "fall out," so to speak from Flint Police Chief David Dicks' recent saggy pants ultimatum (see my July 11 post) -- the LA Times actually ran an editorial on the silliness. Link

Here's the first paragraph:

Flint, Mich., has run out of crime. There are no statistics to prove this assertion, but it must be true. Only the total absence of lawbreaking can explain why the police department has turned to fashion enforcement. Flint, best known as the hard-luck, gritty town featured in Michael Moore's documentary "Roger and Me," is being mocked across the globe for its police chief's decision to arrest and ticket the wearers of sagging pants."

I don't know why I feel a slight impulse to defend him, but I'm yielding to the urge to mention that Dicks' own son was shot to death on the very same day he was installed as police chief this spring. I'm not sure if that excuses his irrationality, but it correlates with it.

Anyway, for decades now, the city of Flint seems to be suffering from a collective head injury, as if major brain trauma is the result of the weapon of mental destruction known as General Motors. I keep going back to Arnold Seligman's theory of learned helplessness. Flint is the shocked dog that doesn't realize the lid's been lifted off the cage.

The Crow on the Counter

Finally heard somebody on NPR bring up "It's a Wonderful Life" this morning when talking about the IndyMac bank collapse. it started in Pasadena last week, a town full of the old rich; It's old California, with a very upscale facade trying to be a bit like Bedford Falls. Many depositors there, one is quite sure, have much more than the FIDC-insured $100,000.

People literally pounded on the glass doors of the Pasadena branch and jostled upstreperously in lines down the block: "inline and enraged," before dawn even today, according to a "Day to Day" reporter this morning in Santa Monica.

Oh for the days when Jimmy Stewart made it all right, cajoling his customers to take $20 at a time from his honeymoon stash: he took time to talk them out of their panic. It ain't working in Pasadena and elsewhere. Too many Mr. Potters, perhaps? And people are saying no matter what they're being told, they don't trust the gov'mint. Whaaa???

"I don't understand our government, I don't understand how it got this way, and I'm really pretty unhappy -- and the people at the top don't think anything is going on...but don't get me started," one customer in line spat out. "This is a travesty -- this was supposed to be the safest place," one guy waiting on a lawn chair added.

My dad, whose family lost their Indiana farm in the Great Depression partly because his father disastrously speculated on "hog futures," forever thereafter hoarded cash. He felt secure only if he had about $10,000 in Franklins tucked away in various hiding places that he took pride in designing in his woodworking shop. When we sold his house we always worried we had not found all his caches, though we dug rolls of greenbacks out of five different places. Lately I've found myself hoarding cash like my old man. But if the whole system collapses will cash even matter? I'm even hearing a six-pack of Budweiser has gone up a buck over the past year.

My favorite part of that Jimmy Stewart shot above is the crow -- one of the smartest birds -- overseeing the negotiations. Maybe IndyMac needs a resident bird -- not, of course, the canary in the coal mine which one suspects expired at least a week ago.

It's SATIRE

It's called "The Politics of Fear." Does this have to be tiresomely explained?

The New Yorker/Obama cover fracas unpleasantly reminds me of MANY incidents with my students having to do with satire. They don't get it, they hate it, and when presented with it, they get all sweaty, agitated and disagreeable. They don't understand why on earth somebody would say one thing and mean something else.

One time one of my brightest, most curious students asked me to define a word I'd just used, "incongruous." Rapidly free-associating, I used the example of the closing scene of the Monty Python movie The Life of Brian. I described "Brian" and his two buddies pinned to their respective crosses, cheerily singing the ridiculous ditty "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." "That's incongruity," I said, and, fondly remembering the movie, god forbid (so to speak), I chuckled.

Cue the dark, foreboding music.

No sooner did I get back to my office than I had a bitter, vitriolic email from another of my students, an ardently observant Protestant fundamentalist, vociferously objecting to my example and saying I had violated his religious rights. He threatened to take the matter to my supervisor, which I readily urged him to do. I had to take pains -- which I did voluntarily -- to assure him that I did not mean any offense to his religious passions; in fact, I explained, it was MY religious tradition too, and, as my colleagues and I agreed, many of our Christian students are the best we get -- conscientious, ethical, responsible. I appreciate their innocence.

But like David Remnick at the New Yorker, I hated being in the position of explaining (again) why my example was not meant as religious attack, but as a very precise example of "incongruity." It was satire. And as a preacher's daughter who grew up in a world where a sense of humor was my mark that I'd transcended zealotry, I was deeply disheartened.

Has the national intelligence plunged so precipitiously that the whole idea of satire now escapes us? Is this the best we can do after all these decades, these 232 years of struggling with issues of freedom of speech and tolerance, that we are still so unresolved, so unevolved, so easily triggered to truculence, and still so fearmongering? And I wonder, are all our years of cuts to education budgets beginning to show in a kind of contagious intellectual Alzheimer's?

And what's wrong with the Obama camp? These are Ivy League whizzes with street smarts: They've given us a tantalizing whiff of politics that allow for intellectual complexity. So why this tiresome, cliched automatic response? I'm disappointed.

Obama in Hollywood

Oh, man, this picture has it all..Barry on Hollywood Boulevard in his cardboard cutout gorgeosity, bubbles (yes, look for them, they're there) reminding us of our indubitably happier days ahead, the resplendently garish El Capitan, not to mention the Walt Disney Studio Store, the Walk of Fame, the teeshirts, the posters, the bumper stickers, the ideas. Oh, wait...not those. No, wait, again, Macy, don't be snooty..."no ideas but in things"! Okay, there's a bunch of those in Hollyweird. If you enter "Obama Hollywood" on Google, you get 9,600,000 entries. My, my, my, life is good. This, my friends, is American politics today! Yes we can! Yes we can!

Only a Cold Hearted Sourpuss Would Object

I'm a married het for same sex marriage. I'm happy for the gay and lesbian couples in California who are getting married today. I do not understand the protesters who see these joyful acts of commitment as threatening to anything. What's the problem? It's love. The more the better. It's a civil rights issue. These judges are not "activist judges" as one dour critic put it this morning on NPR -- they are judges paying serious and responsible attention to the Constitution.

But more to the point, weddings are just so much fun -- tribal events that involve neither war nor death. My first wedding was great -- in my back yard, with lots of hugging and champagne under the leafy maples. My late father in his ministerial robes read I Cor. 13 and gently launched us; my niece, now a prospering physician, was our bashful flower girl. it was a fabulous day and made me happy to be alive. My second wedding, on the cliffs of San Pedro, was one of the best days of my life: full of hope and the milk of human kindness -- my handsome smiling husband in his straw hat and his arm around me -- a day of flowers and great food and sweet affirmations: everybody in purple leis, dancing in our driveway while the July 4 fireworks popped sensationally over the LA Harbor. We renamed the holiday, henceforth our anniversary, Interdependence Day.

Sourpusses who would deny this outpouring of l'amour to others are hard-hearted and mean. Here's to love and lots of it.

Progressive (Not Liberal) Lenses

Ah, the joy of optical insurance, which allows me new glasses each year. I have astigmatism, myopia, presbyopia and a few other opias I can't think of at the moment. Every year my eyes rudely show my pitifully advancing old age, squinting inexorably up the eye chart to a line they can actually make out. I think I'm up to the inch-high letters. Do they get any bigger?

So this year, in the flush of my ophthamological modifications, I decided to buy my first pair of "reading" glasses, though for me they are for the most part "computer" glasses (websites call them PC glasses) since that is when I need them most.

With all my opias, combined with my boundless vanity, I've insisted every year on getting "progressive lenses" so as not to look like my mom in glasses. Hers had those big lines across the middle and caused her (as I thought of it then) aged and vaguely embarrassing habit of raising her chin when she had to look at something up close -- like my own face, which she examined with unnerving curiosity, scanning for evidence of failure and dissolute living. (As an optical scan, my mother's gaze was like a laser, leaving little scratches like paper cuts on my emotions. She saw things there I could hide from everybody else. It was infuriating. The powerful bifocals of her later years exaggerated the torment).

Whoa! I didn't know this was going to be about my mother! Damn. I thought I was going to make a few cute comparisons between "progressive lenses" and the current political scene, in which people suddenly are using the "P" word, as in my stylish glasses, much more than the "L" word. I must say the moniker "liberal lenses," while certainly appealing as alliteration, doesn't have the same across-the-board appeal.

Here's the thing: on progressive lenses, especially for those of us who require trifocals, the "sweet spots" for each kind of vision, as my nice eye doctor puts it, are by necessity of design quite small, and require considerable training of the brain. It takes fine discrimination and practice to see the world through progressive lenses. Sometimes, though, my eyes tire of the effort and I just want to see things one way -- up close -- the distant view consigned to fuzzy indistinction. It's arduous to keep track of the near and far view simultaneously. See? There IS a metaphor here. Focus, I tell myself, focus!

In conclusion, look! Everybody wants to be progressive, right? Isn't that All-American, as All-American as flag lapel pins and putting your hand over your heart during the pledge? (The HEART, Barack -- not the upper colon -- you gotta pay attention when you're running for office in a cliche-ridden society!) And everybody wants to think that he or she can see equally well up close and at a distance -- it's all in how you tilt your head, right? Left?

I think even my mother would agree. As long as I'm eating enough (locally grown) roughage, that is, and taking a daily constitutional. Now there's something progressive to get exercised about.

4,000 Dead. For What?

Just heard the news on CNN that four U.S. soldiers were killed today, by grim irony the day of the Christian Resurrection, in Baghdad, taking the American toll officially to 4,000.

For what? For what?

May they rest in peace, despite their sacrifice to an obscene and arrogant mistake.

Love Poem on the Second Day of Spring

The terrible waste of war goes on, it's Good Friday, that darkest day, and some parts of Michigan might be getting a foot of snow. Yet this poem, from the vernal equinox four years ago, still applies. Here's to love embattling darkness.


for Ted

Cruel worlds conspire
against my need for
ease this gloomy day, deaths
piling up on hectoring news,
a frozen rocky orb found circling
the sun beyond Pluto.
We are pecked by circumstance
beyond control; as I write this,
sleety rain swoops down
on struggling tulips, mid-morning
light curtained almost to night. Street
lights blink on again as if winter
decided not to go. In the chilly dark
my day dips down
toward deductions, floods and
rumors of more war. Yet love, you are
the daffodil blooming in snow. You
are my real spring, my lion roaring
against the universe.

On Dewey Whitwell's Knee, I Consider My Second Amendment Rights

Back then an eight-year-old girl not quite at home in a starched cotton dress with a grosgrain sash could climb into the evangelist's lap in the parsonage after the revival meeting, and nobody'd think anything of it. He had Necco wafers in his pants pocket and he handed me a couple and I took them, not my favorite candy but not bad either– such mild chocolate you had to think about it, secular host, dry powder on my tongue, tasting, before the chocolate kicked in, faintly of shoe polish and copper pennies, the stuff in his pockets. He was a robust man with red cheeks and a ready smile, a special guest, and my parents encouraged me to sit on his lap, his preacher suit pants scratching the backs of my thighs. Somehow we got it together, where I'd put my arms, shyly, one around his shoulder, and I can't remember where he put his arms, but it was proper and even a bit absent-minded. He seemed tired after his rousing sermon: being a traveling evangelist was hard work. I got the feeling my parents wanted me to be nice to him to make up for his daughter, just a year or two older than me, who was back home in Tennessee. Memory fails: let's call her Missy. Maybe he'd like to have a little girl sit on his lap to remind him of Missy, so he wouldn't feel so lonely so far away from home.

So I perched there, balanced on his shiny serge lap, and he told me about Missy, blonde curly headed Missy, and how he and Missy liked to do a lot of things together, how one thing they liked to do was go out hunting. Did you ever go hunting, honey? I think even a girl should know her way around a gun. My Missy has her own gun, he said. I gave it to her, a little .22. How he missed walking out into the woods together with her and coming back with a rabbit or two, he said, one that Missy might have shot herself, with Dewey Whitwell's help, of course. A little girl with her own gun? It astounded me. “I'm proud of that little girl,” Dewey Whitwell said as I cast my eyes downward and imagined.

Where were my parents, people horrified of the gun, not far removed from Quaker forebears who refused to have anything to do with killing? Was my mother in the kitchen regretting that gentle instinct to offer Dewey Whitwell my little substitute childlike love? “He's not like us,” she might have whispered, biting her lip, upbraiding herself for setting me up. But it was too late – there I already sat, transfixed on Dewey Whitwell's knee, imagining me in Missy's place, brandishing my own little private weaponry, placed in my pink and eager hands by Daddy Dewey, God's hearty messenger to half the Protestant Midwest. Me walking hand and hand through the Tennessee woods, the TVA booming not far away, the squirrels and rabbits dashing right into our sights. My hand in Dewey's, both of us in flannel jackets, my blue jeans rolled up...Dewey would have taught me how to walk as still as an Indian through the underbrush, and he would have whispered don't make a sound. The cinnamon air, the sweet swampy air – we'd appreciate it all together. I coveted what Missy knew.

Then the story about Missy was over and Dewey Whitwell kind of woke up and looked at who was sitting in his lap, and I was pretty sure he was disappointed to see that it was me, a poor substitute, a plain Ohio girl with straight brown hair in her scratchy church dress, a little girl who read Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins, a little girl who'd never held a gun and whose father felt really bad when he sliced through a snake with his riding mower. Oh, the glamorous Missy, whom I would never be. My embarrassment, my humiliating inadequacy stung: I didn't add up to Missy. Missy with her .22 and her daddy and hushpuppies and rabbit stew out on the porch and men playing banjos at night, Missy picking the chiggers off her blue jeans and accepting Daddy Dewey's praise for her steady hand and silent step. But most of all, I envied Missy's gun.

Fifty years later, after Malcolm X, and after Medger Evers, after Kent State and Jackson State and JFK and MLK and RFK, after Marvin Gaye and John Lennon and Vietnam and Iraq, the world and I have traveled a long, long way from Missy's gun. I'm sitting in conference with an earnest kid whose paper exhorts the government to “stop controlling guns." I listen with weary and conscious pretend dispassion as he says, “really, if teachers had guns maybe Virginia Tech never would have happened. And maybe not NIU either. If teachers just had guns.” He looks at me again as I say nothing. “It's your Second Amendment right,” he says.

I avoid eye contact, taking a breath. “Look at me, young man,” I say. “Do you really want me walking into class with, say, a holster and a six-shooter?” I quickly smile – but I really don't want to make fun of him. This is serious. He smiles wanly back, sure, I suspect, I'm about to launch into proof I'm one of those college liberals. But I don't.

What he doesn't know is that once I sat on Dewey Whitwell's knee, and wanted Missy's gun so badly I wanted out of my own life, and that back then walking in the woods and taking aim at other creatures and bringing them home for dinner was somehow tied to "God's plan" for my life, yet something wild and brave and big, something related to staying out of the eternal fires of hell. Having my own gun and walking in the woods with Dewey Whitwell, "God's plan"– it seemed to be my right, my destiny. But as I was about to learn, my mother the heretic still fretting behind the kitchen door, claiming my Second Amendment rights was one of God's plans, one of many of God's plans, that would thankfully elude me.

Super Tuesday: Exuberant Democracy

Sitting in the coffee shop at Bishop Airport waiting for foggy daylight after dropping Ted off, I watched CNN on the big screen TV as Hillary Clinton walked into her polling booth in Harlem. She looked good in that stylish chocolate brown suit -- I think the same one she wore for last week's debate. Bill was at her side, but interestingly, kept his back to the cameras. When Hillary went into the booth and pulled the curtains closed, I thought, thank god, she has a moment of solitude. I wondered what she was thinking in there -- a bit of privacy, courtesy of the 232-year-old American tradition, less than a hundred since women got the vote. I felt a little teary-eyed. The fabric of our old republic, so worn and tattered in recent decades, suddenly seems fresh and invigorated. I've never seen such energy, even, as Jon Stewart doubtfully offered last night, a blend of "hope and joy." "I just gotta say," he cracked dyspeptically, "I don't much care for it."

Well, here's another scene for us cynics to chew on: at our goodbye dinner out last night, Ted and I eavesdropped as a couple in a booth behind us talked animatedly about the primaries: a young woman in spiky, highlighted hair offering enthusiastic opinions about McCain's chances, while her companion, a young man, tried to keep up though he didn't seem too sure of all the facts. She covered everything: McCain's views on the war, on abortion, on the economy. Here's the kicker -- did you get it? They were YOUNG! This is big.