Talk Nice to the Conservatives

Some of my best friends aren’t necessarily Republicans, but I’ve recently had opportunities to discuss public policy with conservative acquaintances and family members. Because of the pre-existing relationships with these people, both sides make Obamian attempts to find common ground and not let discussion degenerate into in-your-face scream fests.

In one case we were talking about climate change, in the other health care policy, and in both instances I found these people espousing views so far to the left of Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin as to be immediately suspect.

Climate change has made formerly safe conversational gambits such as “Hot enough for you?” potentially dangerous. Having slipped into this area accidentally with my friend Dean, I decided to plough straight ahead, and told him I guessed he was perfectly at home with the heat.

“You know, don’t you, that I’m a long-time proponent of a carbon tax,” he replied.

“Me, too,” I said, “except it’s too straightforward to ever be passed into law.”

“Exactly,” he pounced, delighted to have coaxed me onto common ground, and proceeded into a 15-minute diatribe against cap-and-trade. I listened patiently. The longer he went on about it, the more I began to suspect that he wasn’t so much in favor of taking the most direct action against global warming, as he was against doing the one thing that had the best chance of actually happening.

Miami will be under water before any American Congress passes an anti-carbon initiative with the word “tax” in its name. It struck me that Dean is in favor of a carbon tax like he’s a stalwart proponent of rocket service to Jupiter—if it smooths the conversational waters, why the hell not be in favor of it?

Similarly, at another friend’s house liberal pundits came on the TV talking about how the health care bill was a giveaway to the insurance companies and Congress should junk the whole thing and start over. My host, a veteran of the ballot-counting brigades that descended on Florida in 2000 to save America from a Gore presidency, declared that the pundits on the tube were exactly right, and that what the country needed was a European-style single payer system.

“Right,” I said to myself, but not out loud, “and that’s the reason you’ve been voting Republican for 20 elections, to make sure we enjoy the benefits of a government-run health care system as soon as possible.”

Both of the talking heads on TV agreed that Obama had wimped out on health care, and while one guy said we should just go back to the drawing board (“If the Democrats lose control of Congress for six or 20 years, maybe they’ll learn not to kowtow to special interests next time they’re in power”), the other wasn’t so blithe about the political effects of failure this time around, and said the Democrats should hold their noses and pass the bill, public option or not.

“That’s what I think,” I told my in-law. He didn’t reply, and I didn’t keep going, though I had to bite my tongue to hold back. The Republican Party right now is in the hands of people who believe Obama is a foreigner trying to euthanize their grandmothers, and they’re handing away House seats that have been safe for Republicans forever (namely the one in upstate New York) if their nominee doesn’t happen to be as unhinged as they would like him to be.

Democrats should leave this kind of self-destructive behavior to the Republicans. The health care fight is about health care, and that matters, but it’s also about who runs the government and—given what a disaster a return to Republican government would be—that really matters. I’m glad my friends on the right claim to care about a safe and sound environment and the right to health care, and I’m happy to talk nice right back at them. But in the privacy of the voting booth, saving my own sweet ass continues to come first with me.

Gay Agenda Threatens to Devour Houston

According to my dictionary, an agenda is “a list, plan, outline, or the like, of things to be done, matters to be acted or voted upon.”

Sounds pretty harmless, doesn’t it? For years, I had thought an agenda offered about as much excitement and fascination as a 12-hour-long Powerpoint presentation. The word said, “city council meeting,” “flies buzzing interminably around a light fixture,” “the bailiff has gone to sleep and so has my fanny.”

Little did I realize all those years that an agenda was a thing of danger, like a concealed weapon, a conspiracy, a secret, ominous plan concocted by the forces of evil to seduce the kids into child prostitution, to kidnap the family dog and return him to my home as a double agent eavesdropping at the bathroom door and taking clandestine dumps in my houseslippers.

The word has fallen victim to the polarization of politics, highjacked by negative campaigners of all persuasions and transported out of the school board meeting into the paranoid fantasy world originally peopled by “fellow travelers,” “dupes,” and “pinkos.”

Once a brand name for boredom, now an agenda is tool of deception wielded by apparently benign but actually sinister agents attempting to slip a fast one by an unsuspecting public. Behind a candidate’s public platform is the real plan for subverting all our cherished ideals and poisoning our precious bodily fluids.

Are you scared, worried, anxious, insecure? You’d better be, because that seemingly charming candidate in the political commercial is really hiding a oozing, pus-filled, stinking agenda that will only become revealed when it’s too late to save yourself from its contagion.

Like Lennie in Of Mice and Men dying to hear about the rabbits, phobes of all stripes have come to expect and even yearn to be told about the agendas that will be sprung upon them, confirming all their worst fears.

Nothing fascinates and frightens Americans like sex, particularly sex that’s beyond the pale of majority behavior. That’s why Houston, our fourth-largest city, now finds itself in the grip of agendamania.

Annise Parker is running for mayor of Houston. A former city council member and city controller, she says she stands for the kind of things common to the old-fashioned, city council-style, safe-but-boring agenda—she wants responsible spending, she favors job creation, she’s against crime (I want to know when is some candidate going to show some courage and come out for encouraging crime).

But Annise Parker is gay. She has a female life partner with whom she is raising two children. Remarkably, in past campaigns, and in the present mayoral election until it went into a run-off, this was not an issue.

No longer. Local fundamentalist organizations have mobilized against Parker’s candidacy. The Houston Area Pastor Council has declared her an “open advocate of a gay agenda.” It says Parker will try to re-establish domestic partner benefits for city workers, even though she has said she has no such plans.

So great is the connotation of hidden evil conveyed by the word “agenda” that you can use it to make up your opponent’s agenda for them, falsely call it a declared plan, and when your opponent denies it, it looks like part of her perfidious scheme (“You don’t think she would admit it, do you?”).

The run-off election takes place Saturday, December 12. Parker has an open agenda to win a majority of the votes. We’ll see if she gets away with it.

Peace Prize

The Peace Prize established by Alfred Nobel (who also invented dynamite) will be picked up this week by Barack Obama (who is also running two wars in the Near East). Altogether a thing that makes you go “Hmmm” about guys who make things go “Booom!”

Want Change in Afghanistan? Wait 18 Months

When it comes to Afghanistan, President Obama delivers on his promises. In the 2008 campaign, he vowed to undo what he considered the Bush administration’s neglect of the Afghan war and take the fight to the Taliban, calling it “a war we have to win.”

In February of this year he sent 17,000 additional American troops to Afghanistan. This month he upped the ante again, committing another 30,000 troops to the conflict, which will bring the total number of troops in Afghanistan to more than 100,000.

Newspaper accounts indicate he believes the surge of troops in Iraq begun in 2006 by the Bush administration worked, and he wants to apply the same strategy in Iraq.

Many people who believe, as I do, that this country has essentially become addicted to war—if not against the Russians then against the Vietnamese, if not against the Vietnamese then against the Iraqis, if not against the Iraqis then against the Iranians, if not against the Iranians then against the Afghans—are despondent at this turn of events.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank and others pointed out this week, a lot of liberals bet the emotional farm on Obama and, regardless of his consistency of opinion and action on Afghanistan, feel betrayed and angry at his failure to pull out now.

Me, I’m taking the longer view, if for no other reason than that politically there’s no other option available. The country is effectively split down the middle on Afghanistan, and because of the weight of opinion, history, and money backing war in this country, the tie goes to the warmakers.

This country doesn’t pull out of wars easily. Put the troops in action overseas, and any movement to bring them home becomes a failure to support the troops, with heavy suggestions of weakness and even treason. We’re a country born of war, with a long history of fighting and winning wars, and have been since World War II the number one military power in the world.

Perhaps more importantly, military contractors, the industries that build the weapons systems used by our armies, have learned how to make sure the maximum number of jobs are dependent on continued military appropriations. When these companies learn how to parcel work on particular weapons systems out to a variety of key congressional districts spread across the country, ensuring the widest political backing for the programs possible, then you have weapons makers running the government. Once you’ve built the biggest war machine on earth, it’s hard not to use it.

So why is there any hope at all, long-term or short-term, for a change in Afghan policy?

Even if Obama is deluded now in relying on a surge in Afghanistan, the fact remains that his latest moves do represent change from the positions and policies he laid out in the past. In March of this year Obama backed outright defeat of the Taliban and creation of a stable democratic government in Kabul.

Obama is now telling journalists that he regrets that decision because it led his commanders to view the mission more “expansively” than he intended. Now he says all he is after is ensuring enough stability to keep pressure on Al Qaeda.

Where before he signaled a readiness to do what it took to build a democratic Afghan central government, now he’s talking about giving up on the corrupt Kabul government altogether if necessary and dealing mainly with more reliable local governments.

Where before he seemed ready to stay in Afghanistan as long as needed to beat the Taliban and set up democracy, now he is pushing his commanders to surge up as fast as possible in order to be able to get out as fast as possible.

It took George W. Bush six years to decide that Rumsfeld’s war on the cheap in Iraq was a failure and adopt the surge there, and even then it seemed as if he preferred to pretend that there was no change in policy. To admit there was a change would have meant that there was something wrong with what he’d been doing in the first place. Being George W. Bush, as we know, means never wanting to say you’re sorry.

If you choose to argue that Obama isn’t changing enough, OK. If you think Obama is trying to have it both ways at once, simultaneously advocating advance and retreat, fine. But you can’t say the guy has barricaded himself in the Alamo here. Next to Bush he looks as bendable as a reed, slippery as an eel, similes critics on the right have been using since he was inaugurated.

This guy will change if he sees a reason to do so. Whether we surge for 18 months or not, I believe Afghanistan is going to look pretty much as hopeless then as it looks right now. I believe it will be apparent at that point to everybody but the nutcase right that something’s got to give.

Precedent indicates that this guy is willing and able to recognize when change needs to happen and do it. I’m not relying on Obama to do the right thing now. But I’m not willing to bet against him doing the right thing in 18 months.

Red State Rag

My state, Tennessee, has the fourth most regressive tax structure in America. That's the report of the 2009 edition of Who Pays, the annual analysis by the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Ecomonic Policy of the distribution of state and local taxes across income groups in different states.

The poorest 20 percent of people in Tennessee, those families making less than $17,000 a year, paid 11.7 percent of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 3.1 percent of income paid by the richest 1 percent of families in the state—families making $414,000 or more a year. This means that the share paid by people making less than $17,000 was nearly four times greater that that paid by people making more than $414,000. In Tennessee the middle 60 percent of the population paid 7.6 percent of income in state and local taxes, more than twice the rate paid by the richest of the Tennessee rich.

As you may have guessed from these numbers, there is no income tax, progressive or otherwise, in Tennessee. Sales taxes make up most, about 70 percent, of total revenues. The state sales tax on food is 5.5 percent; obviously, such necessities are going to take a much bigger bite out of a $17,000 household budget than a $414,000 one.

Clearly this is obscene.

The fair thing to do would be to lower the sales tax, drop the tax on food, and add a progressive state income tax. During the 25 years I’ve lived here, there has been an almost continuous argument over doing just that. Generally the argument doesn’t get too far beyond the word TAX. At that point we are immediately get in tea party territory—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore, don’t tread on me with your big government European socialism—and the discussion is over.

Of course, what this tea party amounts to is 80 percent of the population shoveling their early retirement and their kids’ college education and the vacation in Florida and their daily bread into the harbor, while a tiny group of people making more $414,000 stand on the dock and laugh at them.

If it were just the bottom 20 percent of the population getting screwed here, it would be easier to understand. As we’ve seen in the health care debate, compassion is not a significant political motivator. Nobody above the poverty level, middle class or rich, really cares about the people on the bottom who get shafted the most. We don’t care if they die with no health coverage, we don’t care if they pay taxes that could be going to food and rent. They are the unwashed “them” and they don’t vote and they don’t count.

More interesting is the 60 percent in the middle who are essentially shafting themselves. I live next door to people who get up every morning and start thinking of new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. More often than not these schemes involve shooting me in my feet as well. This is why I’m interested in how these people think.

But I would suggest that what goes on in these people’s brains should be just as important to those who don’t live next door to them. The past year has amply demonstrated that even when the red states lose an election, they can still call the tune for everybody in the country. The majority does not make policy; who makes policy is the guy who casts vote number 60 to cut off debate in the Senate. He can shoot you in the foot, whether you live in Knoxville or Boston or San Francisco.

So, yes, to protect yourself, you first build a majority on your side, and then you build a supermajority.

When was the last durable supermajority? Around 1936.

What do we do while we wait for 1936 to come around again? We make compromises. We sit down with our neighbors and try to talk them down from their ingrained hysteria. We listen to what they have to say. We make the best deal possible, we keep plugging, we do pretty much what Obama is doing right now.

Bob Dylan, Love, and Death in the Mountains

If you listen to your iPod on shuffle play, and you’re in the right meditative state, I swear it can speak to you like the voice of God. For one thing, these are your tunes. If they didn’t have something to say to you in the first place, you had no business putting them on your iPod.

OK, it’s a free country and you can do what you want. But I don’t put whole Beatles albums on my iPod, and there isn’t a Beatles album I don’t love. What I put on my iPod are just those tunes, by the Beatles or anyone else, that say something that matters so much to me that I don’t mind if I hear it over and over again.

The result is that I’ve got about 450 special tunes on my iPod, enough of them to give me the illusion in shuffle play of a random soundtrack, but each of them loaded with a personal message that—depending on what’s happening in my life on the particular day that the particular song jumps out at me from the mix—have the potential to crush me where I stand.

For example, when my friend David died of cancer I held my composure through the yearlong illness and final three months in the hospice and the entire memorial service. My breakdown moment didn’t come until I was sitting in the airport the day after the service waiting for the plane back home. I was listening to my iPod, and each time a song came on that I loved but had never talked to David about, I’d wonder if he had heard that one.

Talking with David’s family about him at dinner the night before, I realized that comparing notes on books, movies, and particularly music was what David and I did for a friendship. When Springsteen’s Born to Run album came out he sat me down, put it on the record player and made me listen. When I discovered he had not tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, I took him to the website and made him listen. Repeatedly, the music that mattered to him mattered to me, and vice versa.

So I’m running my iPod in the airport, counting the songs that I could have asked him if he’d heard had he been sitting beside me. As I listened I got up to walk down to the Starbucks for a snack and Dylan came out of the earbuds, singing an old song, one he didn’t write and David didn’t hear, an Appalachian murder song called Delia.

They knew something about grief management in the mountains back then, because there were plenty of sources of it, so many that sometimes you just let go and created your own. There was a whole class of songs—The Willow Garden, Knoxville Girl, Delia—about murder. First you’d kill your girlfriend; then you’d write a song about it.

In Delia, it’s not the singer who did the killing, it was some other rounder, and Delia took too many chances herself, for that matter. “Delia was a gambling girl,” the singer explains, “she gambled all around. Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s dear mother took a trip out West. When she returned, little Delia had gone to rest. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s mother wept, Delia’s father mourned. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the poor girl died at home. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Cuddy’s looking high, Cuddy’s looking low. He shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Man in Atlanta is trying to pass for white. Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Judge says to Cuddy, ‘What’s this noise about?’ ‘All about them rounders, Judge, try to cut me out.

“Cuddy said to the judge, ‘What might be my fine?’ Judge says, ‘Poor boy, you’ve got 99.’ All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You loved all them rounders, but you never did love me.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.

“All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I didn’t make it to the Starbucks or even to the end of the song. I was sobbing after the second stanza.

Social Media Blues

What's so sociable about social media?

When we were all sitting staring blankly at TVs, at least we had to fight over the remote every half hour.

Now we sit alone at our computers by ourselves, virtually connected to the entire human population, electronically exchanging snippets of information with people we saw five minutes ago and who are now sitting in the next room at their computer, and with people we haven’t seen in 30 years who are sitting at their computer in Berlin, and while it may constitute a virtual community, it doesn’t add up to being a real community at all.

The little bits of ourselves that we put out there seem to fall into two categories. The bursts of virtual road rage that erupt on political blogs seem to rise out of the protected isolation that people feel at the computer in their room, similar to the protected isolation of the automobile on the road. Because you don’t have to look your correspondent directly in eye, you feel empowered to drop the constrictions of manners and empathy and just let out your inner beast.

The second category of “interaction” is even creepier. This is the avalanche of people at social sites inviting you to join their network of friends, people you sometimes have to scratch your head for 15 minutes to be able to even recall what they looked like, but when you finally pull them out of the memory bank you say, “Sure, I remember you, I’ll be your friend,” because what the hell, there’s a recession on, and the more people I can squeeze into the sinking boat of my career, the more chances are that maybe someone can save me from drowning. [ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I have real friends, relatives, business partners, and friendly acquaintances on social sites who have at various times enriched my life, spiritually as well as monetarily. But every single one of them I met and stay in contact with offline.]

If you blog, as I do, there’s an entire science of virtual community-building called SEO, search engine optimization. There are even electronic versions of Dear Abby (or Miss Lonelyhearts) who hand out the guidance to online social interaction you need to con people into actually looking at the words that you dump down the rabbit hole of the blogosphere.

Mostly it boils down to being as nice to as many of your fellow bloggers as possible—reading their blogs, commenting positively, making new friends on the site, generating whole streams of insincere comments, linking back and forth, electronically scratching each others’ back as furiously as possible until Google or some other machine out there picks up these signs of electronic interaction and starts sending more people your way for even more back scratching.

Eventually you end up with oodles of readers—or at least positive commenters—who are just as penniless and starved for real connection as you are, but are incapable of responding like real human beings, because they are locked into responding positively no matter what kind of crap you post. And there’s a whole bunch of these electronic soulless beings responding falsely to your blog, so you feel great. You’re writing for a virtual audience and having virtual interactions with a virtual community of friends.

The problem, of course, is that you spend real hours in this virtual community, until you have to face your real life with its real problems and real people and real bills, none of which can be tended or paid with all the virtual currency in the world.

So that’s my rant. And what am I going to do with it? I’m going to put it right on my blog, and share it to Facebook.

Fond Memories of the Kennedy Murder

The other day at church we had a meeting of what we call our "small group ministry" before the regular service. This is a kind of touchy-feeling session the first and third Sundays of each month of about eight people from the congregation designed to encourage bonding and community with the bodies that are sitting in the next pew in church.

In principle I approve of bonding and community, but in practice I'm not sure that I'm really built for it. For example, we recently filled out a list of questions meant to help reveal our inner selves to our neighbors--what was your childhood ambition, your wildest dream, your proudest moment, your first job, favorite movie, inspiration, soundtrack of your life, etc.

Sometimes I feel safer keeping my inner self tucked away in my innards--Dylan said it; "If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

I was a bit quirky but safe enough on some of the questions; childhood ambition--"President of the United States," favorite movie--"Duck Soup," first job--"getting my act together." You can read the whole list a couple of blog entries ago, if you want.

But where I got into trouble was "fondest memory." What popped into other people's heads was the puppy they got for Christmas, playing baseball with their dad, their mother singing in the kitchen. What popped into mine was the Kennedy assassination.

I was asked by the group to explain. First of all, I told them, that event certainly cured me of my childhood ambition. And indeed, generally, what I like most in life, and about my baby-boomer childhood in particular, are those moments that pulled the rug out from under me, that upset the apple cart, that made me wake up and think.

Imagine you're 13 years old, you've watched 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver in a row and in the first five minutes of the 56th episode, Wally walks into the living room, reaches under the sofa cushions, pulls out a shotgun, and blows Ward Cleaver's head off. Then your own father switches off the TV, turns to you and says, "Well, son, you saw what happened there. What do you make of that?"

At the time, few people gave a straight answer to that question. Mrs. Kennedy, refusing to change her bloody dress, was probably on the right track. "Let them to see what they've done," she said bitterly.

Generally though, what people made of the event (those who didn't break into applause at the news) was a bunch of bullshit. There were lame comparisons between Kennedy and Lincoln, the Warren Commission was convened to report that everything was OK, and we went on into Vietnam.

Certainly at 13 I was pretty much in tune with these reactions. But as the Sixties unfolded, and the bullshit kept hitting the fan and getting sprayed across the room like the President's brains, year after year, again and again, it became clearer and clearer that reality was a lot less like the programmed safety of the first 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver and more like the totally unexpected, disturbing, and astonishing uncertainty of the 56th.

The home of the free and the land of the brave was a bit like what it was billed to be, but also a lot like a chaotic, violent banana republic. My childhood was pleasant, but my adulthood would be more complicated and difficult. Life was good, but suffering was inevitable.

Illusions are pleasant, but dull, dishonest, and dangerous. As a country we've spent the last four decades trying to put the lid on the Sixties. That's what the Reagan and Bush years were all about. Me, I remember the murder of John F. Kennedy, and I remember it fondly.

Afghan from Iowa

Hamid Kazai, following a finding by UN-backed investigators that nearly a million of the votes cast for him in the Afghan presidential election were fraudulent, has decided that he has not won a majority of the vote after all, and must stand for a run-off election November 7.

So what’s a million votes or so gone wrong? If the man wins in November, he’s the head of a legitimate government, right? And if there’s a legitimate government in Kabul, doesn’t that mean there’s something to fight for here, something a bit more substantial than shadows and dust to grab hold of and shape into an alternative to the Taliban?

Why are we even having this discussion? Having backed corrupt warlords in poverty-stricken Third World settings going back six decades to Chiang Kai-shek in China (remember Chiang Kai-shek? Syngman Rhee? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? Nguyen Kao Ky? Big Minh? Little Minh?), why should we think this approach is a winner?

Even if Karzai isn’t a hollow substitute for a truly national leader who’s been installed, certified, and propped up by piles of outside guns and money, that’s exactly what he looks like, particularly after he’s been caught stealing hundreds of thousands of votes and has his Western handlers force him to give the election back.

Essentially we’ve got this guy saying, “Oops, I guess that was a sleazy, brazen power grab. Now I’ll run again, this time not as Al Capone, but as George Washington.”

And this is the rock we’re going to build a strategy around? Maybe Afghanistan will never be a real country. Maybe General McChrystal is just looking for a guaranteed 30-year gig. Maybe al-Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan.

Definitely the Taliban are crazy, vicious, fundamentalist authoritarians, but they’re the local boys, and at this point, Pashtun or not, Karzai might as well be the candidate from Iowa.

Questionnaire

2006 American Express ad series My Life My Card: 13 standard questions to provoke reflection & expression

my name: John Yates

childhood ambition: President of the United States

fondest memory: Kennedy assassination—cured me of my childhood ambition, as well as a host of other fantasies

soundtrack: Beatles’ Second Album

retreat: safer than attack

wildest dream: Splish-Splash by Bobby Darin

biggest challenge: self-satisfaction

alarm clock: nothing you can do that can’t be done; the clock tells whether it gets done before the alarm sounds

perfect day: today

first job: getting my act together

indulgence: not getting my act together

last purchase: venti Earl Grey tea with two Splendas

favorite movie: Duck Soup

inspiration: Groucho Marx

my life: will end

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.

Pre-Postmortem

Just when did the Obama administration end? Was it was when he lost Saturday Night Live? When Chicago lost the Olympics? When people forgot his dog’s name? When John Boehner emerged from the President’s meeting with Republican senators on Afghanistan this week and said nice things about him?

It’s hard to be president, particularly of a country with the attention span of a may fly. Having elected this guy to clean up an enormous mess, we promptly forgot the enormous mess, until, apparently, we noticed it again several days ago—Look! There’s a recession! Hey! There’s two wars going on! Yikes! Crazy people hate health care reform! Wow! Republicans don’t like Democrats!

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Barack Obama.

Is this the same Barack Obama who discovered insulin, designed the Chrysler Building, fathered three United States Senators, swam the English Channel? This guy looked pretty good last November, and here we are, 11 months later, and still in deep doo-doo.

As meaningful health care reform looks more doable day by day, the stock market rises, the recession bottoms out, it’s hard to look past Jon Stewart and SNL. Yes, Afghanistan could be a nightmare and the banks are still underregulated and global warming is probably a long-term disaster and no one will do anything about energy conservation in the near future. The ointment is teeming with flies.

But that’s how we came to pick this boy wonder in the first place. Things were so fouled up that, hey, how could he do any worse than the people we’d already tried?

Not exactly a high benchmark for success, but good enough for America, I think. Maybe Obama is struggling, but I say don’t shoot him yet.

Anger Management for the Socialist Slayers

How angry are you? Are you mad as hell? Are you mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore? Are you locked, loaded, and determined to stop socialism dead in its tracks?

Right-wing populist rage is in the news. Shout-downs of supporters of health care reform have been heard from local town halls to the halls of Congress, together with the more restrained commentaries of conservative pundits and congressmen expressing weak disapproval of the public outbursts, but insisting that the anger is real, justified, and politically potent.

Watching all this, you can't help being reminded of earlier "days of rage" in the late 1960s, another watershed period in our political history. Then the anger came from the left instead of right, from radical opponents of the Vietnam War.

In October 1969, protesters organized by the Weathermen and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) fought the police in the streets of Chicago. This was more serious and violent stuff than what we've seen this summer and fall from the right. But the depth of feeling is similar and the gun-toting patriots who have shown up at anti-Obama rallies have not been subtle about what use they would like to make of their right to bear arms. The Oklahoma City bombing in the '90s, as well as the violent attempts to suppress the civil right movement earlier, demonstrated that anger from the right can bear fruit just as crazy and deadly as anger from the left.

The apologists for the current ugliness cite the million of "murdered babies" lost to abortion and more the tenuous threats posed by Obama's "government power grab." The point they end up making is remarkably similar to that made 40 years ago by apologists for radical, anti-war violence: "We agree with their goals but not their tactics."

I don't know if that's a valid moral stance in either case, but I do know that politically it is very difficult to draw a line between goals and tactics. What matters politically in these arguments between left and right is the people in the middle, the 40 percent or so of the electorate who define themselves as independents, and who decide elections.

Confronted by extreme tactics by either the left or the right, the people in the middle tend to forget the goals that seem so moral to those who feel driven to do anything to achieve them. If you act crazy, the people in the middle think you are crazy, you and your goals both, and they want nothing to do with you.

That's why Martin Luther King's nonviolence ultimately trumped George Wallace's ugly defiance in civil rights. That's why the "revolution" of the '60s radicals resulted in 40 years of dominance by the right.

Obama is right about one thing, this really is a watershed moment in American politics. What happens in the next couple of years could tell us who will be running things for the next couple of decades.

Whatever happens to health care reform, and however genuinely outraged the right may be, it needs to take some courses in anger management. The conservatives might take as an exemplar their Great Hero, and how he came to power.

After all, the defining moment of the 1980 presidential debate and of that whole election, when Carter said Reagan was going to wreck Social Security and Medicare, was not an image of Reagan turning purple and shouting, "You lie!"

It was Reagan's simple, politically masterful grin and shrug, and the genial, "There you go again."

I'm Not in Kansas Anymore

I returned to Tennessee Tuesday after a long weekend visiting my dad at his nursing home. My dad’s complex and the surrounding town are thoroughly spiffy and spotless, as is the entire state of Kansas. The people who prefer Germany to Italy (“Who cares about old churches crammed with art? Germany is so clean you can eat food off the sidewalk!”) generally love Kansas. In Kansas, the pavement-dining potential is astronomical.

In Tennessee, it ain’t. When I walk dogs in my neighborhood I make a point of picking up trash along the way to the park and back. After four and a half days out of state, I could tell no one had taken up the slack in my absence.

We had empty Dasani, soda, liquor, and drug bottles. We had dirty shirts, dirty linen, dirty diapers. Most of this stuff was within 20 feet of the nearest trashcan. When I walk the dogs, I find it simple to swoop by, scoop up the trash, and drop it in the next can along the way. Was there no one walking down this street while I was gone who could have done the same?

I admit that I do feel superior about public service I perform for this neighborhood, and why shouldn’t I? My god, the trashcans are sitting there in public view. What am I supposed to do next, follow these people into their bathrooms and wipe their asses for them when they’re done?

“Can you help me here, buddy, I can’t seem to find my butt.”

“It’s in the middle of your body, towards the back, right there.”

“Whuh?”

“Right there, in the back.”

“I can’t find it.”

“OK, go to your belly button.”

“Whuh?”

“In the middle, in the front.”

“This thing?”

“Right, that’s it. Now go around to the back.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Now go down to where your legs split apart.”

“Right there?”

“That’s it! That’s where you wipe.”

“What do I wipe with?”

So if Kansas is America’s Germany, does that make Tennessee its Italy? Well, we haven’t got the art, but with entertainment like this, who needs it?

What I Learned at Stanford

Riding up an elevator in the Washington D.C. Metro with my friend David, I hand him my IPod cued to a live 1969 recording of the Stanford University basketball band. I’m playing saxophone on the song, David is playing trumpet. Now we’re both pushing 60, David is in treatment at NIH in Bethesda, dying of cancer, I’m walking around blithely unaware of what I’m dying of, but I know I do want him to hear “Midnight Hour” one more time.

About 10 seconds into the recording, right on cue, he starts laughing, and I know he’s gotten to the point where, after four big introductory chords and a flourish of trumpets, there’s been an explosion in the drum section, as if the drummers had simultaneously experienced rapture but with great willpower and a communal spasm of energy had managed to fend off transport to the afterlife, and held the beat to finish the song.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but this same thing happens often in rock ‘n’ roll. The first time may have been in the 50s in “Jailhouse Rock,” when the inmate band turns down a chance to make a break out of the joint because as one of them puts it, “I wanna stick around I wanna get my kicks.”

The whole notion of “getting my kicks” was foreign to me when I joined the Stanford Band. In the winter of 1969 I was more or less fresh off the plane from Kansas, plopped down in chaotic, war-protesting, drugged-out, miniskirted-topless-and-worse California and playing rock songs with this zoo band. I was playing arrangements of big hits I hadn’t ever heard, not because the radio wasn’t playing them in Kansas, but because I wasn’t listening. I spent the fall of 1968 in a marching band that didn’t march but scattered, that never did disappearing diamonds in their halftime shows, instead performing theme shows on birth control and salutes to the parts of the body.

By the time basketball season came around, I was hooked. I know the moment it happened. It was about a month into the previous fall and we were on the practice field rehearsing an arrangement by a tuba player named Phil Imming. Imming was cool, what the Band called “godlike,” what Imming himself called “fat,” as in, “You’re fat, man.” He was tuba stocky, surfer blond. He wore T-shirts, shorts and a half-smile.

In these field arrangements saxophones seldom got the melody line. The melody went to the brass, the trombones or trumpets, people who could make themselves heard outdoors or in a noisy gym. Saxophones ended up playing background chords, whole notes, rests, more whole notes.

But in rock ‘n’ roll arrangements we also got the backbeats. I just didn’t know yet what to do with what I got. So we’re on the field and we’re playing Imming’s arrangement of Midnight Hour and Imming is walking up and down the line of players in formation, listening to what’s coming out of the horns.

As he came down the line I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what the song sounds like in microcosm?” When he got to me he stopped and listened, and I thought, “This is weird. What does this guy care what my dits sound like?” Because that’s what I was playing, back beat dits, on the second and fourth beats—rest, dit, rest, dit—short, precise, military band dits. “Who’s gonna hear these dits, anyway?”

Well, nobody, of course. At this point, I probably hadn’t heard Wilson Pickett’s original version of the song, and I certainly hadn’t heard Chuck Berry’s dictum “It’s got a backbeat, you can’t lose it.” On the Wilson Pickett version, there are no dits on the backbeat. There are big, fat, solid BOPs, that nobody could ever possibly lose.

And that’s what Imming started singing to me as I played my dits—rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—until my dits got longer, and heavier, and more solid—rest, dit, rest, dit, rest, dat, rest, dot, rest, bot, rest, bop, rest, BOP, rest, BOP—and Imming smiled and said, “You’re fat, man.”

I also studied history of the English language and the French Revolution and biology and German at Stanford. But the most important thing I learned was the importance of the backbeat, and those who play it.

Wilford Brimley vs. Humphrey Bogart

They’re at war within me waging a battle for my soul (or maybe who my soul would like to have lunch with). Both of them are intense. Both of them are intensely moral. Both of them have patently goofy names, but they are so intense you don’t even notice how silly the names are.

It’s when you ask these two to step out of the car and walk a straight line that their differences become evident. For Wilford Brimley it’s no problem. He knows what’s what and doesn’t hesitate to share it with others. He’s certain about everything; Bogart is certain about nothing. Bogart is sloppy, nihilistic, sarcastic, funny, self-indulgent, at times self-pitying. He will do right, but only after showing every indication of doing wrong.

My inner Brimley has had the upper hand for years. To maintain a comfortable living and my inner equilibrium I have given Brimley carte blanche to direct the way my mind works. His sense of order directs the way I organize my workday. His moral earnestness reproves my sense of fun in a way that keeps me second-guessing my every outburst of wackiness.

He even appears in my dreams. I am in a van riding to an assignment, a meeting I am covering somewhere on an upper floor of an office building. Brimley is in the van, driving me to the meeting. We go through towering mountains past deep canyon-like pits scoured out of the landscape. (At one point, as we drive through one of the pits, Brimley spots a van like our own teetering on the edge of a cliff above us. He stops our van, climbs out, and, Titan-like, reaches up, lifts the van as if it were a toy, and puts it down on the top of the cliff with all four wheels safely on solid ground.)

When I get to the office building I can’t remember where my meeting is. I climb up stairs from floor to floor until I come to a landing filled with people waiting in line outside a meeting room door, and I join the line, knowing I’m in the right spot—everyone in the line, women and men, is a Wilford Brimley.

Why is this a nightmare? What’s my problem with Brimley? How has he ever steered me wrong? What’s wrong with unflinching moral certainty?

I think the problem is that moral certainty strikes me as bogus, inauthentic, and unearned without the flinches of doubt. When Bogart does the right thing and resumes resistance to the forces of evil at the end of Casablanca, I’ve watched him struggle to seize that moral ground, and I feel like he’s earned it.

When I watch Brimley lay his moral pronouncements on some struggling whippersnapper, it’s like I’m supposed to believe he knows what he’s talking about just because he’s got a deep voice and an authentic Dr. Phil drawl. He acts like he’s got a license to tell other people what to do just on the basis of his blank stare, 19th-century moustache, and folksy accent. I feel like I’ve spent my life following this guy’s advice; now I want to review his resume before I make one more moral choice based on his sense of certainty and order.

In the June issue of the Atlantic there was a fascinating article by Joshua Wolf Shenk about the Grant Study, a lifelong documentation of the lives of a cohort of Harvard graduates from the 1940s to the present day, including examples of the lives of “happy” and “unhappy” lives, with a notion of determining what really constitutes happiness, or a life well lived.

The story included anonymous profiles of some the study’s participants, the most interesting of which was the account of what Shenk calls “the study’s antihero, its jester, its subversive philosopher.” This guy skipped World War II as a conscientious objector and, in filling out a questionnaire for the study right after the war, wrote, “I’ve answered a great many questions. Now I’d like to ask you people a couple of questions. By what standards of reason are you calling people ‘adjusted’ these days? ‘Happy’? ‘Contented’? ‘Hopeful’? If people have adjusted to a society that seems hell-bent on destroying itself in the next couple of decades, just what does that prove about people?”

This guy worked in public relations, married young, had three kids, started drinking, divorced, remarried, came out of the closet. Eventually he became involved in the movement for gay rights. In an interview for the study in the 1970s, he revealed that he loved The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ famous documentary of the German occupation of France. He said the sort of people the Grant Study described as well-adjusted, happy, and successful ended up collaborating with the Nazis, “whereas the kooks and the homosexuals were all in the resistance.”

The study’s leader, Dr. George Vaillant, doesn’t quite know what to make of this guy, describing him as paradoxically depressed, yet full of joy and vitality. “He could have been a resistance leader,” Vaillant reported. “He really did seem free about himself.”

I’m not prepared to draw judgments about this character, any more than I can reach conclusions about the real Wilford Brimley or Humphrey Bogart, separate from their personas in popular culture. People who lead messy lives often hurt the people around them. People can do great good publicly and behave miserably in their private lives, and vice versa.

Adoph Hitler doesn’t look to me like he was having fun; Ronald Reagan seemed to never have a bad day; George W. Bush appeared never to have had a doubt; Lincoln was wracked by depression. I don’t know how it all sorts out. I have come to believe, though, that whatever doubts, fears, sadness, and second-guessing I’ve subjected myself to in life need not end up as pointless suffering. I believe that real good, even a kind of happiness, can be drawn from getting through the torments of life, and resolving to keep trying.

Pig Paths

My wife MaryElizabeth says the shortest distance between two points is the one that keeps you moving. Whatever Einstein meant by space-time, my wife has a definition all her own.

She says it’s all laid out in pig paths, alternative routes to the most commonly used (and most congested) ways of getting around town.

The way MaryElizabeth sees it, space and time are not separate entities; the point of the game is not to eat up a given amount of space in a set amount of time. Rather, space and time are all one hunk which shrinks as time stranded in traffic diminishes, and expands with every second that ticks away as you sit idle, anywhere along your route. The winners in life are the ones who hold it all to a minimum.

What this has to do with pigs is for MaryElizabeth to know and the rest of us to meditate on, as she steers her way down side streets, across church parking lots, down one-way alleys the wrong way, hopping onto the freeway at one exit and back off at the next, then doubling back a block to her destination.

As most of us measure time, this trip might take more minutes and seconds than just driving down the straightest route and stopping dutifully at the stoplights.

For MaryElizabeth, though, the pig path holds resting in place to a minimum, and in doing so redeems any extra time or effort involved. Getting there isn’t half, or three-quarters, of the fun. What matters is getting there without having to hit your brakes.

I ride shotgun on the pig paths, which is fine with me. If I were driving I’d waste space-time right and left, and ME would be driven nuts. Plus, as the bemused observer, I get to watch her scurry down the paths babbling to herself and emitting little pig grunts. On the road, I feel like Hopalong Cassidy playing sidekick to Gabby Hayes.

Can you imagine what a joy it is to sit back, drop the leading man poses, stalwart demeanor, and straight-arrow lines, and just careen down the road with a wacko who knows what she’s doing? What a delight it is to be George Fenneman to a Groucho Marx?

This is my kind of traveling. For me, on the pig paths, getting there is all the fun.

Macbeth, Tolkien, and My Geekster Son, At One Fell Swoop

So what in the hell does “fell” mean, anyway, and what does it have to do with swooping? Is this English?

Well, it is, and it comes from William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the scene where Macduff finds out that Macbeth’s killers have murdered his whole family:

All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?

First time I read this, my sophomore year of high school, I was so familiar with the turn of phrase (euphemism for cliché) that I read right over it. Only recently did I look it up at the Phrase Finder site and realized out that because Shakespeare coined or popularized more clichés than maybe God in the King James Bible (not just phases but words; if Shakespeare couldn’t come up with the right word on a playwright’s deadline he just threw together some syllables that sounded right), I missed the whole point.

The kite is a bird of prey, and the image is of this killer bird swooping down and taking out the chicks and their momma in, well, in one fell swoop. So what is now obviously the only way to express the idea was originally a pretty nifty metaphor that this showoff came up with out of the blue--and the first time I read it, what I took for lazy writing was in fact a genius making something out of nothing (see King Lear; really, it’s like this pushy know-it-all bastard Shakespeare is inside our brains whispering the ways to end our own sentences).

As for “fell,” that’s an old word meaning “terrible, horrible, awful,” that would have long ago gone the way of “avast me hearties” if Shakespeare hadn’t pickled it in formaldehyde for the rest of time by using it in “one fell swoop.” (I’ve read that Elizabethan English generally sounded like Wallace Beery as Long John Silver in Treasure Island, which is neither here nor there until you start thinking of Moses in the King James, Queen Elizabeth I, or Edmund Spenser talking like drunken pirates, in which case it’s kind of fun.)

I was talking this over with my son Sam, a college kid, gamester, and self-described nerd who reads and writes fantasy stories, and he tells me that “fell” is used all the time by fantasy writers, who (again because of overbearing whims of a trailblazing genius) are driven to cram old-sounding words into their books.

J.R.R. Tolkien was a Middle English scholar at Oxford who came by his tick of using archaic language in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings honestly. This was his academic turf, and though I’ve never been able to get far in his stuff, and I pretty much hate what strikes me as the cuteness of the language in the books, I don’t begrudge his use of it, since that was the world he chose to write about, an imagined archaic landscape.

As for everybody else these days who uses this meaning of “fell” outside of “one fell swoop,” I they should pay me a dollar for each time they fall.

Can a New Brand Save Chrysler? The Dodge Fallopian

All right, my wife agrees that the Dodge Ram truck logo looks exactly
like a diagram of a uterus and fallopian tubes. Did gender confusion
play a role in the fall of Chrysler? Is it Ram Tough or Fallopian
Tough? Should Fiat drop macho and go feminist? I believe
MaryElizabeth would buy a Fallopian pick up just to make a political
statement--would anyone care to join her?

The Price of Breath Is Inhaling

Driving up the Carolina coast for Fourth of July at the beach, we passed miles and miles of Camp Lejeune, home of the U.S. Marines.

This stretch of road is truly Marineland--marquees on churches, grocery stores, dry cleaners, and hamburger stands repeated the same reminder: "Freedom is not free."

This notion first entered my consciousness in the rowdy junior high school I attended in my hometown in Kansas, where our beleaguered principal's motto, warning, and repeated incantation warding off the spirits of disorder was "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."

In junior high, I could see the usefulness of this idea, just as I can see how people born without any bones in their body would need to wear a straitjacket to be able to stand up. If you have no self-discipline, I can understand how something like the Marine Corps could provide the exoskeleton you'd need to survive while you were getting your act together.

And six decades of life in America has taught me the light and dark sides of how freedom plays out in this country.

The price of Thomas Jefferson is Sally Hemings.

The price of Abraham Lincoln is the Civil War.

The price of Mark Twain is Ernest Hemingway.

The price of John Ford movies is Wounded Knee.

The price of Fred Astaire is the Great Depression.

The price of the Marx Brothers is the Three Stooges.

The price of Jon Stewart is Dick Cheney.

The price of the Sixties is having to listen to Lee Greenwood sing "God Bless the U.S.A." for the 40 years thereafter.

All in all I believe it's been worth it. But even now, after all these years, I still object to the notion of a trade off for freedom. When Greenwood whines that he's "proud to be an American where at least I know I'm free," it's like the old fart in Hard Day's Night stuck in the train car with the Beatles, grousing about having to have fought the war for punks like them. Says John Lennon, "I bet you're sorry you won."

There is no price to pay for real freedom. It is inherently priceless. In a slave society it's possible to buy your freedom; in a free society you get it by waking up each morning.

If you listen to Bob Dylan and think "Like a Rolling Stone" is about how hard it is to lose everything, rather than how absolutely liberating it is, you haven't got a handle on what freedom is about. He's not just asking a snide question. He's having an orgasm:

How does it feel
How does it feel
Oh, how does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

Have a happy Fourth.

The Trees Know Where Your Children Sleep

The old woman was paranoid. When they would pass a flatbed truck carrying goods protected by a tarp, she'd tell her daughter, "There's poison under there. Radioactive poison. They don't want you to know what it is."

Taxes were part of the conspiracy. "Why do they make us pay these taxes? It's not their money, it's our money. Who do they think we are their personal bankers skablanker money not theirs gabearus not fair to us badonkus worked for it and we should get to keepitkabeepit. I don't want to pay for all this stuff and it makes me mad doesn't it make you mad?"

"No, I'm not mad, because my money is going to pay for the national parks and I like the national parks."

"What?!"

"My money is all going to the national parks and that's where I want it to go."

"It doesn't work that way! They take your money and they use it the way they want to."

"Not mine they don't. Mine all goes to the national parks."

"You can't say where it goes. They take the money and do what they want with it."

"Not mine. I say mine goes where I want it to go."

"But you can't do that!"

"Yes, I can, and I'm happy doing it. You're the one who's sitting there having the heart attack, not me."

Was your dad as paranoid as your mother?

"Daddy worried all the time. He worried about us when we rode our bikes in the street. He worried when we climbed trees that we would fall out. He worried about things that logically might happen. But he didn't think the tree was going to suck us into its innards."

It's all part of their plan. The trees inhale the children, and then they fall on the house.

"That's how mother would have seen it--'That damned tree didn't fall on the house, it snuck over and jumped on it.'"

Downsizing Lucky

We've got our two dogs and five cats moved into the cottage. They all fit in 800 square feet, but moving from one room to another is complicated, particularly for the kittens.

These two are maturing, but have not outgrown chasing each other pell mell across the floor plan, which in the big house posed no problem, but in the cottage requires planning beyond these guys' capabilities.

Lucky is the big furry oversensitive fly in their ointment. Like most of our animals, this dog is a rescue from the pound, picked off death row by my wife with no regard for his past history. We know Lucky is scared of thunderstorms and that he, for whatever reasons, can't abide large black dogs.

We believe that somewhere in his private past he was captured, taken to an undisclosed location by terrorist cats, and tortured within an inch of his young life. He has been marked forever by some such horrible experience, because any time one of the cats gets within 20 feet of him he curls his lip and snarls viciously. Every time he does it we tell him to get over it, but he never has.

In our big former home the two kittens on a tear had plenty of room to move, but in the cottage, every chase path invariably leads right over the top of Lucky, who explodes in a paroxysm of rage, panic, and barking.

Doesn't faze the kittens a bit. They scramble over him as if he were one of the better special effects in a horror movie.

For poor Lucky, though, this is real life, so, rather than yelling at him, we give him whatever comfort we can.

Luckymuck

I just brought the dogs in from walking.

At the walking trail where I take the Sophie and Lucky some asshole kids had dumped the garbage can into the creek. I crawled halfway down the embankment and hauled the can up out of the ravine, just so I would have somewhere to dump Lucky's shit.

Lucky is the poopmeister; he lays out about three loads per walk, great big bulky handfuls of it. I say handfuls, because the best way to deal with this stuff is take a plastic bag, turn it inside out, pick up the shit with your hands, and then turn the bag inside out. This approach gives you the heft, warmth, and smell of the shit without having to squish it through your fingers.

So Lucky just by himself is a three-bag dog. Happily, Sophie is good for only one dump a walk, and she takes them back in the bushes where no one will notice, so I don't bother to pick hers up.

Lucky lays his out on sidewalk (all he's lacking is his own personal logo and brand, something like "Luckymuck" with little handcrafted signs saying "Stomp your Nikes in this pile!") and so I'm obligated to pick up after him. Then I throw the bags of shit in the garbage can, and then the kids dump the can in the creek. In East Tennessee, where I live, this is called "recycling."

The Bag o' Death

My wife has placed me in quarantine. This week I am battling a cold, and while she is perfectly willing to support the cause from afar, procuring war materiel--Puffs, antihistimines, aspirin from the grocery store--there is no way she is willing to join me on the front lines.

I understand and to some degree support her squeamishness. She works as a massage therapist, a hands-on, one-woman business that would quickly tank if her nose were dripping all over her clients on the massage table. I rely on her income as much as she does.

But it's been a lonely and comical week. When she enters the room she asks what I have touched, and promptly sprays the contaminated object--doorknob, countertop, drinking glass, cat--with Lysol. She waves cheerily at me as I drag my tired, stuffy head to my bachelor's bed each night. I carry my Puffs around with me as I move from room to room, along with a plastic sack full of used tissues she calls "The Bag o' Death."

Sneezing is discouraged, tolerated only if the sneeze is captured, successfully contained, and immediately disposed of in the BOD.

I like to think our enforced distance has brought us together. It has given us a common project, a goofy new child that we monitor constantly, a partnership of avoidance in which we both have a stake. It's an oversized ottoman in the living room around which we dance.

Slip ups are sweet. She buys a hot chocolate at Starbucks so delicious she impulsively gives me a sip. In my isolation I am never alone--I sneeze on the toilet and the door opens, a disembodied hand injects a disinfecting spritz of Lysol into the middle of the room, and quickly withdraws.

Rat Attack

Last night the PBS program Nova reported on cyclical plagues of rats in the Indian state of Mizoram, warning viewers that some of the scenes about to be shown were too graphic for the elderly, small children, and pets.

Every 48 years, it seems, a plague of rats descends on Mizoram state, a landlocked subtropical region politically part of India, but isolated from the rest of the country by its location east of Bangladesh. The rats devour the rice crop just before it is ready for harvest, leaving subsistence farmers to starve.

The last time this happened, in 1959, the distress was so dire is spawned a rebel uprising that continued for 20 years.

Well, there a were a few gross-outs. There were some shots of mother rats devouring their young, for example--evidently this is necessary because the rats themselves generally live in a state of semi-starvation, only catching a break once ever 48 years when the local bamboo goes wacko and produces a bumper crop of bamboo fruit, so much that the rats have more food than they know what to do with and reproduce at astronomical levels.

When the bamboo germinate and are no longer edible, the hordes of rats attack the rice. So there were lots of scary shots (it looked like they shot these in a studio) of rats running fast through the underbrush--representing, I guess, a particularly voracious version of rat scurrying.

The baby rats themselves were pretty disgusting, kind of pink slimy Raisinettes, and there was a great display by villagers at one point of a bag full of 300,000 stinking rat tails collected to cash in on the rat-tail bounty imposed by the government to combat the plague.

Really, the most sick-making moment was when the geeky Australian biologist Ken Alpin, the first man to connect the rat attack with the bamboo boom, was slicing over dead mother rats to count their embryos.

This guy was great--while he was out there in the fields rooting for the farmers in their battle against the rats, he also confided at one point to the camera that as a science geek, he couldn't wait to see the coming rat attack in all its horror--after all, happening once every 48 years as it does, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Of course, just like Ken, that's what I was there to see myself, and what the show was selling, an opportunity to see a full force rat attack on defenseless villagers. Alas, it was not to be. Moi, the farmer whose fields we were monitoring, had by sheer luck planted his rice just early enough to get most of it in before the rats hit.

They showed up, scratched their tiny heads, and then scurried off camera to ravish the fields down the road.

And so I, too, deprived of rat disaster, switched over to the State of the Union.

Elvis Presley Died for Your Sins (the Ones You Were Too Gutless to Commit)

Every time they catch a serial killer, it seems, they talk to the minister of the church where the guy taught Sunday school and he describes how good this guy was with the children and how he was a faithful deacon and came to the 9 o’clock service every Sunday and despite the 12 bodies found buried in the guy’s basement, the minister can’t quite bring himself to judge, lest he be judged himself. His neighbors describe a nice, quiet fellow who never threw loud parties, the landlady says he paid his rent like clockwork, the girl at the Starbuck’s drive-through says he always smiled and left a tip.

Indeed, I half expect to wake up myself one morning, sniff a strange aroma rising up from under the kitchen sink, and discover that I’ve got five bodies of my own buried in the crawl space. This is the Dr.-Jekyll-and-Mr.-Hyde syndrome, a Victorian neurosis that has remarkable staying power. Like Dr. Jekyll we fear what unspeakable damage our interior Mr. Hydes may have committed when he slipped last night out of our control; like Dorian Gray we feel we must keep the true picture of our diseased inner selves hidden from public view.

When my income tax refund came in the mail several years ago, I knew what it was right away, but I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I knew it was large, dangerously large. I had withheld more than I needed to, worried that I would fall into arrears as I had the year before. I’d adjusted the withholding in the government’s favor, and increased my payments to my therapist in case the insurance company failed to cover their share of the bills. I didn’t want my accounts to slip over the line.

But now the money had come back to me and I could spend it on anything I wanted. I had my eye on a box set put out by Rhino Records called Loud, Fast, and Out of Control. It has all the big bad hits from the ‘50s, no doo-wop, no “Peggy Sue” or “All I’ve Got to Do Is Dream” or “Love Me Tender,” but the scary, disturbing, nasty songs that had undermined decent society and everything this country stood for.

It had songs with words like “Good golly, Miss Molly, you sure like to ball” and “I’ve got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind, I’m just 22 and I don’t mind dying” and “You wear that dress, the sun comes shining through, I can’t believe my eyes, all that mess belongs to you” and “Come into this house, woman, and stop that yakkety-yak, don’t make me nervous, I’m holding a baseball bat” and “You can talk about me, say that I'm mean, but I'll blow your head off, baby, with nitroglycerine.”

I had an unsettling urge to listen to this stuff, a full four-CD collection of it, and only its $70 price tag had held me off this long.

Now I had the money and I bought it. It turned out the songs I hadn’t heard of were scarier than the songs I had. There were people like the Rock-A-Teens (“Woo-Hoo”), Dale Vaughn (“How Can You Be Mean to Me”), Janis Martin (“My Boy Elvis”), Billy Riley (“My gal is red hot,” he sings, “your gal ain’t doodly-squat”), Jimmy Dee and the Offbeats (“Henrietta”), Don and Dewey (“Koko Joe”), Big T Tyler (“King Kong”), and the Phantom (“Love Me,” at once one of the weirdest, most primitive, and ominous things I’ve ever heard). God know what people thought of these songs when they were released in the late ‘50s, because some of them bother me today.

What kind of people would make music like this? What is the human soul capable of? I had seen only one star of that era in person, Bo Diddley, at a street fair in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1984. A memorable event, if not exactly what you’d call pleasant. It wasn’t like he was playing Yankee Stadium, mind you, he was on the back of a flat bed truck, there were about 50 people standing around, it was 25 years at least since his last hit, but in spite of all that he radiated a menacing arrogance that went way beyond self-possession. As far as he was concerned he possessed himself, his band, the truck, the audience, the city of Greensboro, and all of North Carolina up to the Virginia line. It occurred to me that this was the kind of attitude it took to be who he was and do what he did, against all odds and the collected weight of proper society, in 1955.

The spectacularly vivid liner notes of the CD set (the notes say of Wanda Jackson, “while other women singers were simpering about where the boys are, Wanda always sang as if they were in her hotel room”) describe the lives these people led. Two of Jerry Lee Lewis’s wives died under questionable circumstances, perhaps by his hand. Larry Williams (“Bonie Maronie” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzie”) was a pimp and a drug dealer. Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”) died in a car crash in England in 1960, Johnny Kidd (“Shakin’ All Over”) in a car crash in 1966, Little Willie John (“I’m Shakin’”) died in jail in 1968.

Vince Taylor (“Brand New Cadillac”) died of venereal disease in Switzerland in 1991. Kid Thomas (“Rockin’ This Joint Tonight”) moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, where he ran over a child in 1970 while working a day job mowing lawns in Beverly Hills. He was tried and freed, but when he walked out of the courthouse the dead boy’s father was waiting for him and gunned him down. Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper died in a plane crash in Iowa in 1959. Elvis Presley burst his intestines straining on the toilet and died in Graceland in 1977. He was 42.

Is it any wonder that they could have had second thoughts, that Little Richard dropped his career a couple of times to enter the ministry (there’s a church I’d join), that Wanda Jackson and Conway Twitty abandoned rock ‘n’ roll altogether and retreated to country and western music? They were living the lives we still both fear and hope we might slide into ourselves.

They were our Mr. Hydes, and they put a genuine taste of danger and horror into their songs, where I, 58 years old, balding, nearsighted, worried about paying for my retirement but dancing past my bedtime with my cats, can access it any night I want.

Jane Austen, the Dalai Lama, and Harry Cohn's Ass

I picked up a book of interviews with Dalai Lama at the bookstore the other night, and he was talking about the nature of compassion in an interesting way. It was a discussion of the difference between how we experience our own suffering and the way, in a state of compassion, that we experience someone else's—what the odds were that we can experience someone else's suffering at all, and to what extent.

I was struck by his idea of compassion being more essentially a state of profound awareness, of deep noticing, than an outward action. Compassion as he described it came before any action we might take, like tut-tutting over another person's problem, or telling them they're a Christian martyr, or even doing something to actually help them out of their trouble.

Not surprisingly, the Dalai Lama was more concerned with compassion as a way of existing than with the actions resulting from that state—the implication being that if you're able to reach the true state the actions will follow of their own accord.

So I realize more and more that my ability to act in any constructive way depends on my ability to get my feelers out, to turn my radio on, to notice what's really going on within me and without me.

There's a great Hollywood story about Harry Cohn, the monstrous head of Columbia Pictures. Herman Mankiewicz, the guy who wrote Citizen Kane, says that when he was a writer at Columbia he was talking to Harry Cohn one day about a story idea, and Cohn told him he could tell if a story would be a hit or not by whether it made his fanny squirm, to which Mankiewicz replied, "Imagine, the whole universe wired to Harry Cohn's ass!"

Cohn fired him, but the point of the story (in our context, at least), is that the Dalai Lama would be more likely to share Mankiewicz' perspective than Cohn's. Harry Cohn was a notorious egoist and bully and while he may have imagined that his fanny was in tune with the cosmos, what he really meant was that when it came to the dominant vibe, Harry Cohn's ass was sending and the cosmos was receiving, if it knew what was good for it.

My feeling is that a lot of people, when they try to judge what's going on around them, confuse sending and receiving just like Cohn. I grew up an enormously self-conscious young man and, as far as my perception of my influence on the world around me was concerned, very much in the same place as Harry Cohn.

It wasn't out of a bullying stance, but out of quivering meekness, that I imagined that my every action and even attitudes and thoughts were making the stars whirl through the ether. I thought my mistaken deeds and attitudes were controlling how people acted towards me, and only if I corrected these false transmissions from my error-ridden insides would I be able to get people to like me.

Self-consciousness at this level is not consciousness at all, of course, but an enormous delusion. By assuming such blanket responsibility for other people's actions and reactions, and by casting it is such a negative light, you miss the few things that really are connected to what you're putting out, like people liking you because you're a good person.

How do people get out this hole? How do you reset your receiver to pull in the True Cosmic Consciousness or NPR or the Mr. Rogers or any transmitter of bonafide sanity?

I don't know. Meditate, see a counselor, collect hard knocks in the school of experience, maybe immerse yourself in Jane Austen novels. Austen talks about these problems all the time. Every book is about people misreading social interactions, misjudging the opposite sex, and groping towards some halfway accurate state of awareness. The "good" guys turn out to be actually bad, the "bad" guys turn out to be actually good, and eventually the characters sort it all out and get married.

Austen died unmarried herself, so she surely understood the long odds of bumbling your way to consciousness. But so fetching is her dry, deadly realistic sense of humor, so clearly was she in tune with what's really going on herself, that we buy her happy endings. The essentially realistic part of the books is her characters' ability to make their way to awareness. That happens in real life, whether you end up married or not.

Auld Lang Me

Resolutions, schmesolutions. This New Year I'm relying on evolution for real change in my life. There's never been a meaningful change in my life that wasn't forced on me by circumstances at the point of gun.

My biochemistry major son would scoff at this idea. This budding scientist, know-it-all, and dedicated Darwinian has contempt not only for the creationists but the Lamarckian heretics, theorists who believe species can change in a lifetime and pass on the changes to their offspring.

This is like believing giraffes happened when a zebra ran out of grass and was forced to nibbles buds in the treetops, the boy genius scoffs. He says natural selection works nowhere near that fast.

Well, having watched this kid progress from knowing everything about his bedroom at the age of five to everything in the universe at the age of 19, I'm not so sure about that. It's like when someone breaks up with their lover and tells me, "We just grew apart," as if nothing beyond the angle of their planting caused them to cross paths in the first place, and nothing about the way they collided affected them in the slightest for good or ill.

When I married my 4'11" wife I did not immediately feel myself beginning to shrink, but my mind quickly lost the ability to bring forth the word "short" and developed an almost instantaneous predilection for "petite." For a while I would get on my knees to make eye contact, but my waddling freaked her out—she had no stomach for hot penguin love—and over time it became unnecessary. Like the zebra with his head in the treetops, my body adjusted to the demands of nature.

OK, maybe I didn't literally lose 12 inches of height. But at this time of year I do not reminisce about old times or old acquaintance as much as old long me. I'm a shape shifter, we all are, inside and out. I liked the old me, but he and all his body parts are long gone, physically, psychologically, and forever changed by time and circumstances.

Siamese twins don't become Siamese distant cousins. But you can bet they make profound individual accommodations to live with the ties that bind. Subjected to the trauma of 9/11, America quickly embraced torture and domestic surveillance; threatened by the menace of economic collapse, she voted for a black president.

The George W. Bushes of this world hold on relentlessly to their preconceived notions and existence. But throw a shoe at them after they've maintained that unremitting grip for eight long years, and you'll find that even they have learned to duck.