In the May Garden

garden shed we started building last summer

We have had a wet and cool spring in southeast Louisiana. The ground was soggy so long that I couldn't weed or add compost as I had planned, but now I am catching up. Our little acre of land requires a lot more work than one might imagine. We have plans for a little pond surrounded by islands of native shrubs and flowers on the south side of our property, we just finished building and painting a garden shed, we have planted more citrus trees, and we sprouted more tomatoes than we had room in our big garden--sixty or so heirloom tomato plants altogether (German Johnson, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Black Krim). In order to get all those tomato plants in the ground, we planted tomatoes in beds in which I had planned to plant flowers, such as the circular bed I tilled and composted around our largest fig tree (planted two years ago, so still a young tree). We also planted tomatoes in an old compost pile, having removed most of the uncomposted vegetation to another area.

Many flower seeds I planted in the early spring didn't sprout, as we had too much rain. I had to reseed, and those seeds have sprouted and are growing. Today I planted more zinnia seeds, and if we have a sunny weekend, I'll be adding compost to many of my flower and herb beds and building up a bed that I have expanded near our patio. One of the photos below is of pine cones that I piled around our crepe myrtle trees. Our cats were sharpening their claws on the trunks of both trees, though one tree was bearing the brunt of the scratching. We were afraid that the cats might girdle the trees, so I placed pine cones at the base of both of the trees near our patio to discourage the cats. This seems to have worked. However, I noticed recent cat scratches on our newly painted garden shed, on the door frame!

Gardening is my refuge from the insanity of American politics and the madness of the world.

Looking for love (on a sage flower)

very tiny pollinator on a dill flower

tomatoes planted around fig tree

California poppies and basil

pine cones around crepe myrtle trunk

tomatoes in the big garden

For the Record: Torture

The New York Times published an article today about the findings of the independent, non-partisan 11-member panel appointed by the Constitution Project to review "interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Those who are horrified by our country's use of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attack will feel vindicated by the review. Those who have convinced themselves that torture is justified--despite our country's repudiating torture in the past, seeking convictions of those charged with perpetrating torture, and being a signatory of the International Convention Against Torture--will probably continue to support the Bush Administration's decision to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners. The power of propaganda lives on in the Orwellian language of the Bush Administration's torture memos.

But for the record, one more non-partisan review panel has concluded that our country did, indeed, torture people and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The Republican leader of the panel, Asa Hutchinson, who served in the Bush Administration, said that "after the panel’s nearly two years of research . . . he had no doubts about what the United States did":

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews. 

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds. . .  

. . . .The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

This report may be lost in the heavy media coverage of the most recent terror attack, that of the explosions at the Boston Marathon and the horrific--and fatal--injuries resulting from that attack. As of now, no one knows who is responsible for the attack--home-grown terrorists, an individual malcontent, or international terrorists. In the midst of such horror, some people are too ready to surrender freedom to fear, just as our country surrendered its ethics to fear in adopting torture after 9/11. But as these recent attacks indicate, we can never be completely protected from harm. Losing our "moral compass" is not worth such an impossible goal.

For further information:
The Constitution Project's Report on Detainee Treatment, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/16/world/16torture-report.html

Still Here

I've been absent from this blog since the end of January but not absent from my garden. Last fall, my daughter gave me snapdragons she had grown in her college greenhouse management class, and those snapdragons are still flourishing in the flower bed at the back of our house. You can see them in the photo at the left. I found the football in brush at the southern edge of our lot that runs along a neighborhood street. I'm thinking of painting it with bright colors and using it as a garden decoration. 

We had a mild winter with only light frosts until March, when we had a couple of late freezes. Most of the garden plants survived since we protected the delicate ones though we seem to have lost one of our banana plants. I planted sunflower and zinnia seeds a couple of weeks ago, thinking that temperatures would stay above 50⁰ at night. However, we had a couple of cool fronts that brought temperatures down into the thirties and forties at night, so those seeds have been slow to sprout. I'm waiting for even warmer weather before I plant basil seeds, but I did buy some purple basil sprouts and lemon basil sprouts from a vendor at the Covington Farmer's Market. I planted those last week. Also, I planted poppy seeds on February 18th; those have sprouted, and I thinned them last week. Poppy flowers enjoy cool weather, I think, so I don't know how well they will do as the weather gets hot here in southeast Louisiana.

My husband successfully sprouted about sixty tomato plants, and he planted fifty-six of them. We didn't have enough room in our big garden, so I suggested he plant the remaining ones in a couple of beds that I had prepared for flowers. These are heirloom tomatoes--Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Brandywine, German Johnson--and I am hoping that they will all produce a lot of tomatoes for canning and for making salsa. Last year our tomatoes were infested with stink bugs; I hope that this year's late freeze will have slowed down the bug population. I'm not looking forward to doing bug patrol on fifty-six tomato plants, but I'll do what I have to do.

In addition to gardening, I've taken on a few more craft projects, have become involved in some community activities, and am still scanning and transcribing Armstrong and Nugent letters. My virtual world may be dormant, but the real world continues to revolve.

I created the trellis for morning glories and purple hyacinth beans.

Last summer's parsley is now bolting.

Bad Medicine

 As I have been reading, scanning, and transcribing letters written by the Edward McCarty Armstrong family in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, I have been struck by the descriptions of disease and death. The letters are full of references to epidemics of yellow fever and scarlet fever, to the deaths of neighbors, friends, and relatives, and to medicine administered to aid the sick, the depressed, the fatigued. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong (Sr.), was a practicing pharmacist in the last two decades of the 1800s, and his older half-brother William Dillon Armstrong was a physician, as is noted on his tombstone. "Brother Will" was often called out to the Armstrong farm, "Edgewood," to administer aid when a family member was ill. And in our collection of family letters, clippings, and photographs is a pocket notebook of Baker Armstrong's, full of handwritten recipes for pharmaceutical concoctions. We look at those drug recipes today and may think they represent magical thinking more than medicine, but perhaps we aren't so far removed from that magical thinking ourselves.

In the summer of 1883, James (Jimmie), one of Edward's sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, was very ill and went to the home of his father and stepmother for care. His wife, Agnes, pregnant with a son who was to be born three months after his father's death, was there with him. The letters of the family to Baker, who was then living in Baltimore, Maryland, reference Jimmie's illness. Louisa, Baker's mother and Jimmie's stepmother, described some of the details in a letter of June, 1883:

Jimmie is a little easier. William drove him to town for a little while on Friday. The ride did not hurt him we think but he has been much worse since Saturday -- not able to be out of bed. He suffers terribly at times & can be relieved only by Opium. To-day he had been suffering from nausea & vomiting but is somewhat relieved now. William has been with him since 2 o'clock Saturday except for a few hours yesterday evening. He is so changeable -- we do not know one hour what he will be the next. We fear he is in a critical condition; but do not say so to any one but Robert.

In the back of her Bible, Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong recorded the death of her stepson: "James A. Armstrong died July 14th, 1883, about 5 p.m."

In January of 1885, Katie Armstrong, youngest daughter of Edward and Louisa Armstrong, insisted on attending a church "protracted" meeting even though she hadn't been feeling well.  Her father describes the result in a letter of January 27, 1885, to his son Baker, then living in Bryan, Texas.

Mr. Gordon was holding a protracted meeting in Salem and [Katie] and Janie went down to attend it on Tuesday the 13th day of this month and was to return on Thursday to let Fannie and Nettie go down, but the sleet prevented, and they did not go down or get home, until Friday. Katie complained much of her headache and backache when she started to town but was so anxious to attend the meeting, that she went. She attended all the meetings but two, and came home much complaining on Friday. William saw her and gave her some medicine and thought she would be well in a day or two, but she did not get better and William sent her more medicine, and came out to see her on Tuesday the 20th. He treated her but did not think her case serious. That night he got a telegram calling him to see Mrs. Robert Glasgow, who was critically ill. He went, supposing Katie would be all right when he returned, but for fear he might be mistaken, he saw Dr. Bruffey  before leaving, and Bruffey came up in his stead (when we sent for William [the] next day). William returned Thursday night . . . . but nothing they could do seemed to arrest the disease. Delirium came on, and blood poisoning commenced and continued to the end and no remedy seemed to prove efficacious and she quietly and peacefully passed away last night . . . Her dissolution was very rapid . . . I had no idea she would pass away during the night, but her strength gave way, and she breathed her last. O so peacefully and calmly, her life seemed to ebb away, just like the going out of a candle. . .

Katie Armstrong was nineteen years old when she died. Her mother recorded her daughter's death in her Bible: "My dear Katie died Jan. 26th, 1885, at 20 min. past nine P. M. We sorrow not as those who have no hope. She had given herself to Christ some years before."

Many of the Armstrong letters also reference Louisa Armstrong's illness, which lingered for over a decade of letter-writing. What she suffered from is not clear from the descriptions, but she spent weeks at Yellow Sulphur Springs, Virginia, seeking respite from her illness in 1874, and in the years up to her death in 1887, various siblings update Baker on how well or how badly their mother is feeling.

Who knows how many of these family members would have survived their illnesses if they had had access to modern medicine, perhaps to penicillin, which wasn't distributed in significant amounts until World War II. Other illnesses might have been caused by the very medicines being prescribed by doctors and pharmacists. In her letters, Louisa Armstrong mentions the "blue mass" pill, a popular medicine at the time that was administered for illnesses ranging from depression to tuberculosis to toothache to the pains of childbirth. In a letter to her son Baker, dated July 15, 1874, Louisa writes that she is "anxious about [your Pa]" and advises Baker to tell his father "he had better take some more blue mass."

The main ingredient in the blue mass pill was mercury, and, according to an article on the National Geographic News website, this pill "[i]f taken at the normally prescribed dose of the time—one pill two or three times a day—. . .would deliver nearly 9,000 times the amount of mercury that is deemed safe for people by current health standards" ["Did Mercury in 'Little Blue Pills' Make Abraham Lincoln Erratic?," Hillary Mayell, for National Geographic News, 17 July 2001]. A typical U. S. pharmaceutical recipe for the blue mass pill contained "mercury (33 parts), powdered liquorice (5 parts), althaea (root of the marshmallow)(25 parts), glycerin (3 parts), honey of rose (34 parts)" ["UK Lab Reveals Shocking Mercury Level in Lincoln's Blue Pills," Royal Society of Chemistry press release, 22 March 2010]. According to Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn, a New York medical historian, the blue mass pill was "really the Prozac-plus of the time because [doctors] used it to treat a lot of conditions . . . for anything they thought was related to the liver."  But the blue mass pill "only poisoned you," and its effects could include "decreased brain-wave activity, irritability, depression, memory loss, and impaired kidney function." [Jeremy Manier, "For Lincoln, ancient cure worse than his malady," Chicago Tribune, 17 July 2001]

Reading of how frequently such poisonous concoctions were prescribed and ingested may horrify us, but then we may wonder what medical procedures touted as effective today will be proven just as ineffective by researchers in the future. Recent studies indicate we may be at the mercy of ineffectively administered cures just as our ancestors were. In his book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, Ben Goldacre, British physician and science writer, explores how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates the science of drug research, with a deleterious effect on the practice of medicine. In an excerpt from the book published in Salon, Goldacre describes how clinical tests supported by pharmaceutical companies usually conclude positively in favor of the method or drug that the pharmaceutical company is promoting. These positive conclusions can result from conducting faulty research, from suppressing negative results, from choosing participants who are more likely to respond favorably to the treatment being tested,  from halting research before it yields negative results, or just from failing to publish negative results.

Dr. Goldacre writes:

Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine, from research to practice. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? Nobody can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or have the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. ["Bad Pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, and lies,", in Salon, 27 January 2013.]

The result is that doctors--with the best of intentions but unaware of the full medical research--prescribe medicines and treatments that are no more effective, and perhaps just as injurious, as the blue mass pill.

photocopy of a page from Baker Armstrong, Sr.'s pharmacy notebook

Some Consequences of the Confederacy

E. M.Armstrong, Sr.'s (partial) letter to Baker W. Armstrong, Dec. 20, 1884

Update below
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been immersed in reading letters written by Tom's great-great grandfather and his family, all of Virginia. Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., had been a prosperous merchant in Romney [now in West Virginia] before the Civil War. His father, William Armstrong, had immigrated to America from Ireland as a young boy, settled in what was then Virginia, and eventually represented Virginia in the U. S. Congress.

In 1861, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr.  was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861, a convention in which delegates were to discuss and to vote on whether or not Virginia would secede from the Union. He was among those who voted against seceding from the Union. Both representatives of Hampshire County, Virginia--Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and David Pugh--voted no. But the Ordinance of Secession eventually passed, and a majority of the citizens of Virginia ratified the vote.

We have no letters of the Armstrong family from before the Civil War or from during the Civil War, so I have little insight into why Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and several of his sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, decided to fight for the Confederacy. One son, Isaac Armstrong, was mortally wounded in the battle of Gaines Mill; lingering for weeks, he finally succumbed to his wounds. I suspect, though, that like many Southerners who weren't connected to the plantation system, the Armstrongs joined the war out of loyalty to their state, to their region, to a sense of place. That doesn't make the decision right--for the Civil War was about slavery--but it makes the decision more understandable to those of us on the other side of Civil Rights.

After the war and now with children from a second marriage joining those from the first marriage, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., moved to Salem, Virginia. He was never again to be as prosperous as he had been before the War; his last years were spent farming and worrying how to support his family. He also was a board member of the Union Theological Seminary, then associated with Hampden-Sydney College, which today remains one of the few all-male liberal arts colleges.

The letters that Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., wrote his son Baker White Armstrong, the son who moved to Texas and who became my husband's great-grandfather, reveal the man to be kind, generous, loving, and very religious. That he fought for the Confederacy does not make him a bad man; it makes him a misguided man, misguided by the zeitgeist of the plantation economy:  the idea that some people are more equal than others, that some people deserve privileges bestowed on them by an accident of birth and the color of their skin, that some people, by that accident of birth and/or color of skin are providentially destined to be either leaders or laborers. He serves as a reminder of how good people can be persuaded to fight for bad causes--and of how religion can also be used as a tool for a bad cause.

In his letter of October 5, 1883, Edward wrote his son Baker:

I heard a splendid speech from Major Daniel last Monday. He had a full House, and many Re-Adjusters to hear him -- I think it highly probable that this country will gain a democratic majority this fall --Many of the old democrats who were enticed off by re-adjusterism have returned to the democratic fold, [and] others will follow. Mahoneism is a disgrace to our old state, and I can but hope there will be good [and] honest people enough found to throw off the party shackles and redeem the state at the Nov. elections.

The politics behind this letter are murky, the waters muddied by individual expectations and needs and the wider politics of a state that had lost the War. The politics have to do with railroads and debt and government services and the rights of poor whites and blacks freed by the defeat of the South. "Mahone" is William Mahone: he had been a slave owner, he had backed secession, he had been in charge of Virginians who massacred Union Colored Troops, and he moved up the ranks in the Confederate Army to major general. He was also a railroad tycoon, and after the Civil War, he fought to build railroads that would also provide profit for his railroad. Here is where E. M. Armstrong's personal desires probably intersected with politics, for Armstrong had bought land near Salem, hoping to profit from the Norfolk and Western Railroad's building yards, shops and a roundhouse in Salem. This didn't happen, and the family was reduced to what some call "genteel poverty." Perhaps William Mahone's financial success had something to do with E. M. Armstrong's failure to profit from his land acquisition.

During Reconstruction, the Virginia Constitution of 1870 provided suffrage for all men, black and white, over the age of 21, and also instituted state-funded public schools. Later, however, Conservatives used the state's war debt as a way to argue for cutting social services, and thus the access of blacks to education. William Mahone used this argument over debt vs. services as a way to gain political power. He created a biracial coalition of Conservatives and Republicans, and in 1881, was elected to the U. S. Senate. This coalition led by William Mahone was known as the "Readjusters," for its focus on "readusting" the state's war debt downward; this group of uneasy alliances also passed legislation that "abolish[ed] anti-black regulations, establish[ed] Virginia State University, increas[ed] financial support to public institutions, and charter[ed] labor unions." Mahone raised the ire of many Virginia voters, however, by caucusing with the Republicans, and his leadership tended to be autocratic.

A riot in Danville, Virginia, on November 3, 1883, gave Conservative Southern Democrats--the Democrats of the Old South-- the extra fuel they needed to ignite their political campaign to re-take state offices. Some reports describe a scuffle that broke out between some black men and white men after a meeting of prominent white men who were determined to defeat the government of the Readjusters. Other reports describe the riot as having started when black residents failed to give way to white residents on the sidewalks of the town. Whatever the specifics, the riot was obviously the result of the uneasy relationship between white and black citizens, and the repugnant idea of white supremacy. Several people were shot and killed, and the Conservative Democrats used this incident to incite "the fears of white voters."

William Mahone lost the 1884 election to another former Confederate officer, John W. Daniel, the man Edward Armstrong, Sr., had mentioned in his letter of October 1883, to  his son Baker. By the election of 1884, however, Baker W. Armstrong had moved to Bryan, Texas, to seek employment as a druggist with a drug store there. His brother Robert provides the news of the 1884 election, in a letter of November 10, 1884:

"Old Va" I am glad to say went Democratic on last Tuesday, [and] I cannot but hope that Mahone is "done for."

And in a letter written the 20th of December of that same year, E. M. Armstrong, Sr., tells his son Baker:

I wrote to Major Daniel requesting him to send you a copy of his Richmond jollification speech, and, if he could conveniently, his photo which I hope you will receive and appreciate.

And so the experiments in white and black coalition governments in the South came to an end, with the stoking of racial fears. Major John W. Daniel was also to serve as a delegate to Virginia's 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, the focus of which was to disfranchise African-Americans. Conservative Democrats had campaigned for the convention, touting the need for "electoral reform and better state government," code words then --and even now-- meant to obscure the marginalization of a minority group. But make no mistake--disfranchisement of African-Americans was the convention's main goal:

The main question for the delegates was how to eliminate the black vote without violating the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eventually they proposed that under Virginia's new constitution, a man would be eligible to vote if he could satisfy one of the following three requirements: he could read or understand the state constitution; he had paid taxes on property worth at least $333; or he was either a U.S. or Confederate veteran or the son of a veteran. All three conditions were loopholes designed to protect white voters. Further narrowing the pool of possible voters, minimum requirements were set for age, residency, and literacy, and a poll tax requirement was also instituted.[ "Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902", on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

To make sure that blacks would not be able to vote on a constitution that would disfranchise them, "the Convention instead took the unusual step of proclaiming it the law of the commonwealth." ["Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902," on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

And so are good people manipulated and deceived through fear, personal interest, and a misguided sense of superiority.

Unfortunately, plantation politics continue today, and the myth of the Lost Cause obscures the horrors of slavery, of the debasement of one people to the enrichment of another.

Election "fraud" is still used as an excuse to make voting more restrictive even when the "fraud" is practically non-existent. [See "UFO Sightings are More Common than Voter Fraud," Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee, Mother Jones, July/August 2012.]

And yesterday the politically-evenly split Virginia state senate pushed through a re-districting map while one of their Democratic colleagues (a civil rights veteran attending the presidential inauguration)  was absent and then afterward adjourned their session on Martin Luther King Day by paying tribute to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps there is a way to honor "good" men who fight for bad causes. This is not the way: publicly honoring a white man who fought for the enslavement of African-Americans on a holiday established to honor a black man who fought for the political and social freedom of African-Americans. This was also the day our first African-American president was inaugurated for his second term. Anyone who sees such actions as purely accidental and devoid of political motivation is willfully blind or ignorant. [For more juicy details, see: the blog of Blue Virginia, "Breaking: While Dems Distracted by Inauguration, Virgina Senate GOP Stages a Coup," in which Republican state senator Deeds is described as "rambling" on about Stonewall Jackson's love of peaches, lemons, and women.]

The poisonous fruit of the Confederacy continues to blossom. Let's hope that good men and good women are not deceived. The murky waters of politics require an alert and engaged citizenry.


UPDATE:
As one of the readers of this post has noted, although Edward McCarty Armstrong did vote against secession, he eventually did sign the ordinance to secede. The majority of the delegates elected to the convention were Unionists, and the debate'"raged on for months." You can read about that debate on the Encyclopedia Virginia website here: "Virginia Convention of 1861".

Writing for the Encyclopedia Virginia, Nelson D. Lankford describes how the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Fort's surrender and then Lincoln's proclamation "calling for all loyal states to send their militias to put down the Confederate rebellion" swayed many of these southern Unionists to change their vote. They had withstood months of prolonged debate and the fiery rhetoric of secessionists, but in the end:

[t]he tragedy of the Unionist majority in the convention was that, though its members loathed the thought of leaving the United States, in the end they could not countenance fighting against fellow white Southerners. [Lankford, Nelson D. "Virginia Convention of 1861." Encyclopedia Virginia. Ed. Brendan Wolfe. 23 Jan. 2013. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. 5 Apr. 2011 .]

See a copy of the Ordinance of 1861 here: Virginia's Ordinance of Secession.

President Obama's Inaugural Speech

I listened to President Obama's inaugural speech after the fact, because I was immersed in 1884 and forgot the time while transcribing a letter written by Edward McCarty Armstrong, Tom's great-great grandfather. Edward McCarty Armstrong was  a "good" man in many ways but a man who was on the wrong side of history and steeped in the myth of the Confederacy for which he had fought, a man who, in 1884, wrote to his son, recently moved from Virginia to Texas, about his happiness that the Democratic party of the Old South had taken back the legislature. The man elected that year, Major Daniel, mentioned by name by EMA, was later to participate in the Virginia Constitution of 1902, which instituted Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising African-Americans who had been given that right in the Virginia constitution of 1870--other Southern states were doing the same.

And so the South stood -- segregated, resistant to Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation with its institution of  "slavery by another name"-- until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act which was avidly opposed by another Democrat and segregationist from Virginia, Chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard W. Smith. But President Johnson, a Democrat, too, from the South, used the bully pulpit of the presidency to help get the votes for the act, and an unprecedented parliamentary procedure enabled the bill to be moved to the Senate floor for debate.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic party lost the segregationists of the Old South (and over the next few years, much of its southern support). We would do well to remember this history in our time, when certain forces are again calling for the passing of laws that would disenfranchise particular populations of our citizens, using the same language of the legislators of the Old South--ostensibly to prevent voting "fraud."

With this history so vividly called to mind by my research and my reading of old family letters, I was even more moved by the words of President Obama:

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

A New Year, New [and Old] Goals

one of our cats in the middle of Christmas packaging

Two months have passed since I last wrote a post. My absence is partly due to the business of the holidays, partly due to my usual turning inward during the cold winter months--even here in not-so-cold southeast Louisiana--and partly due to my resolve not to be drawn into the poisonous rhetoric of today's politics. I'm just tired of the hatred directed toward and the conspiracy theories projected onto our first African-American president. Facts do not seem to matter to a great number of people. Other bloggers are writing more consistently and engagingly about politics than I am, so I've decided occasionally to link to a post I find interesting and to focus my writing on my own projects--or on more positive events in the world than the latest right-wing, fear-mongering topic, though I won't rule out the occasional post on politics. 

Most of my goals for the new year are the same as the past year: I will spend a great deal of time gardening, and maybe this year I will begin clearing out the brush that has grown along the fence line of this acre of land on which our hundred-year-old cottage is located. Last year my husband and I put in 8X8-foot raised garden areas for herbs and flowers behind our house, and my husband finished tilling and adding compost to a large row garden on the north side of our property for vegetables.  We began building a shed for my garden tools; the shed is almost complete, and now I have to paint it. My goal is to have the shed ready for use before spring planting.

One of my new goals for this year is to become more engaged in my community. My move here was a difficult one for many reasons--the older I get, the more stressful moving seems to be. I grew up in a community of relatives, where five or six generations of families had developed relationships, many of the ancestors of my contemporaries having migrated to that area of Texas together. My adult life, however, has been a very mobile one. When I was younger, the moves seemed much easier, the friendships more quickly established. I easily found employment teaching at local universities and colleges, joined local churches, immersed myself in work, family, community. Now I no longer attend church--and in the South, church attendance is the quickest way to establish one's self in a community. The children, also, are grown, away at universities in other states, so their activities no longer pull me out into the community. And since I decided, after over twenty-five years of college-related work, not to continue teaching, I find myself unemployed at the age of fifty-five. I have a natural tendency towards introspection and am not averse to spending a great deal of time alone, and now none of these external demands--children, church, career--temper those tendencies. I have to work against them myself.

I have already begun work on one of my goals for this year: to scan and transcribe many of the hundreds of family letters my husband and his sister inherited. The bulk of these letters were written from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s, and they follow the movements of an educated and genteel class of Southern families after the Civil War. I began this work a few years ago on my Left for Texas blog, and am continuing that work, though with a great deal more concentration and commitment.

The work is tedious, as I am creating digital files linking documents of the transcribed letters to images of those letters. But some of the letters are fascinating, full of chatty news about the family's activities as well as historical events, and in the research that I'm doing concurrent with reading and transcribing the letters, I am learning a lot more about history, especially history of the South after the Civil War--and the attitudes of those who fought for the Confederacy. In another post, I'll write about what I perceive to be the burdens of this work--and those burdens are not restricted to the tedious work of the amanuensis.

Last year--and the year previous--I spent a lot of time making things out of recycled materials and yarn: folk art felted wool quilts and throws, necklaces and scarves of my own design, felted wool pouches, felted wool pins, etc. I sold some of these items at a couple of festivals, but at the end of the year, I gave away as presents some of my best pieces and decided that this year I would concentrate on making quilts of my own design. So when I'm not immersed in family history or gardening, I'll be stitching on quilts, some made conventionally on a quilt frame and others made out of felted wool from recycled sweaters. In late spring of last year, I finished a felted wool folk art quilt, and last summer, I finished a quilt top inspired by a friend's photograph; this year I plan to finish quilting it. 

quilt top inspired by a friend's photo--cotton and felt

 These are my goals: seeking more community involvement; digitally recording old photographs and letters with the intent of editing those letters eventually; gardening and beautifying the grounds of our "cottage"; quilting. Any personal growth will have to arise out of those activity-oriented goals. I gave up on aspiring to become a better person beyond what might be a natural outgrowth of what I do.

And yet...I've enjoyed reading this exchange

on James Fallows' blog:"Is there any 'Reasoned' defense of the Atlas Shrugged Guy?"

Hearing both sides of an argument (even though most of the responses have been overwhelmingly on the progressive side) has encouraged me to re-examine my own assumptions about business owners and taxes.

The discussion began on November 5th with this installment: "What if the GOP Loses? 'Atlas Shrugged' vs. 'The Fire Next Time."  James Fallows then posted responses to the 'Atlas Shrugged' business owner, "No Love for the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy." The 'Atlas Shrugged' business owner re-entered the fray here, "The 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy Pushes Back!" And Fallows provided a wrap-up here, "By Popular Demand: One Last Immersion in the World of the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy," but then continued the discussion here, "Let's Get Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy."

To all those business owners whining

over the Affordable Care Act, Matt Yglesias has a thoughtful response: "Keep Tipping Your Servers," in Slate, 16 November 2012.

November Morning in My Garden

I have written a lot about gardening since beginning this blog in 2007, when I was living with my family near Atlanta. (My first post about gardens, here.) I love gardening. It's a sanity-maintaining exercise, requiring hard work as well as organizational and aesthetic skills. It's also a philosophical enterprise, as one confronts the cycle of the seasons. Voltaire used the garden as a metaphor for how we should live, as a corrective between optimism and despair. Taking my camera into the garden encourages me to look more closely at the burgeoning life there that we often overlook in our busyness. Some people look to the stars for perspective on our place in the universe; I look to my garden.

Here in the middle of November, my garden in southeast Louisiana is still full of life.

Compare the size of this bee--in relation to the length of the flowers--to that of the bee below.

I like the watercolor effect of this photo.

These little guys are prolific in my garden, and I like capturing them in different poses. Here one hides in a pot of mums.

This lizard is in camouflage among the basil and tarragon.

another view of a lizard in my potted chrysanthemums

purple basil blooms

leafy dill--I am interested in seeing how long it survives through the winter.

Take Back Your Slur, Senator McCain

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham have been leading the attack against President Obama's selection of Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, as a nominee for Secretary of State in Obama's second presidential term. In that attack, John McCain has accused Susan Rice of misleading the public on the Benghazi attack in Libya, suggesting that she mouthed talking points of the White House and dismissing Rice's insistence that she was using information provided by the CIA.

Here is what Senator John McCain has said:

Those talking point (sic) that the ambassador used did not come from the CIA. They come from the White House. Who in the White House – was it the president of the United States? Was it one of his people? – who was it who gave her talking points that clearly indicated something for which there was no basis in fact? (Chris McGreal, "Republican senators set up showdown over possible Rice nomination," The Guardian, 15 November 2012)

Now CBS News has discovered the CIA talking points that Susan Rice was given, proving that Rice has been telling the truth all along: she was communicating information from the known intelligence at the time. See "CIA talking points for Susan Rice called Benghazi attack 'spontaneously inspired by protests,'" CBS News, Washington, 15 November 2012.

Take back your bitter, partisan-hack slur, Senator McCain.

(h/t, live updates from Richard Adams, for The Guardian)

 

More Than You Want to Know: The Petraeus Affair and Our Sex Scandal Obsession

Update, 19 November 2012: Well, this is good news: "Pew: More Americans Following 'Fiscal Cliff' than David Petraeus Investigation"

Yes, it was asking too much that we "be spared the salacious details of General David Petraeus's extramarital affair", as the narrative continues to dominate the headlines and the plot line thickens. So, here I am providing, for anyone interested in all the developing details, a list of news articles that have followed all the minutiae of the tangled tale. Maybe there is something huge here, hidden in the volumes of e-mails that have come to light, but so far the situation seems to be a sad tale of infatuation, obsession, adultery, and jealousy, with a little bit of a petty political paranoia and too-ready access to the privacy-prying power of the FBI. 

Nothing reported so far seems to be a national security issue....but, then, who knows. Before it's over, maybe the FBI will be poking through all our e-mails and discovering all our petty little secrets.

ALL THE DETAILS, updated as discovered, or until I tire of the updates, which was yesterday, 18 November 2012:

"CIA Director David Petraeus resigns, cites extra-marital affair," Andrea Mitchell and Robert Windrem, on nbcnews.com, 9 November 2012.

"Petraeus Resigns over Affair with Biographer," Fred Kaplan, in Slate, 9 November 2012.

"Woman Linked to Petraeus is a West Point Graduate and Lifelong High Achiever," Michael D. Shear, The New York Times, 9 November 2012.

"A Brilliant Career with a Meteoric Rise and an Abrupt Fall," Scott Shane and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times, 10 November 2012.

"CIA Chief Resigns over Affair," Devlin Barrett, Siobhan Gorman, and Julian E. Barnes, in The Wall Street Journal, 11 November 2012.

"Veteran: Paula Broadwell 'Not the Type' to Have Affair," Reena Ninan and Alyssa Newcomb, ABC news, 11 November 2012.

"Motives Questioned in FBI Inquiry of Petraeus E-mails," Scott Shane and Charlie Savage, The New York Times, 12 November 2012.

"Here's the e-mail trick Petraeus and Broadwell used to communicate," Max Fisher, The Washington Post, 12 November 2012.

"Petraeus 'ghostwriter' clueless to affair," Vernon Loeb, The Washington Post," 12 November 2012.

"Exclusive: Paula Broadwell's Emails Revealed," Michael Daly, The Daily Beast, 12 November 2012.

 "FBI Agent In Petraeus Case Under Scrutiny," Devlin Barrett, Evan Perez, and Siobhan Gorman, in The Wall Street Journal, 13 November 2012.

"Patraeus investigation ensnares commander of U.S., NATO troops in Afghanistan," Craig Whitlock and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, The Washington Post, updated 13 November 2012.

"Scandal Widens; US General's E-mails 'Flirtatious,'" Peter Yost and Robert Burns, Associated Press, 13 November 2012.

"Who is Jill Kelley and Why is Everyone Obsessed with Her?," Henry Blodget and Grace Wyler, Business Insider, 13 November 2012.

"There's Something About Jill Kelley," Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, 13 November 2012.

"Petraeus friend Jill Kelley found place hosting military parties," Tampa Bay Times staff and wires, Tampa Bay Times, 13 November 2012.

"Jill Kelley requested 'diplomatic protection' in 911 call," myfoxmobile, 13 November 2012. (h/t, Josh Marshall, "Just Gets Better and Better," TPM, 13 November 2012.)

"Jill Kelley is an 'honorary consul' of South Korea,"Josh Rogin, on the Foreign Policy blog, "The Cable," 13 November 2012.

"General Confusion," David Weigel, Slate, 13 November 2012. 

 "FBI investigating how Petraeus biographer Broadwell obtained classified files," Sari Horwitz, Greg Miller, and Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post,"
13 November 2012.

"Tampa is Seen as Social Link for Unfolding Scandal," Michael S. Schmidt and Sheryl Gay Stolbert, The New York Times, 13 November 2012.

"Jill Kelley Loses VIP Privileges at Military Base," Luis Martinez, The Blotter at ABC News online, 14 November 2012.

"Veteran F.B.I. Agent Helped Start Petraeus E-mail Inquiry," Michael S. Schmidt, Scott Shane, and Alain Delaquérière, The New York Times, 14 November 2012.

"Meet the Shirtless FBI Agent from the Petraeus Love Pentagon," Adam Clarke Estes, The Atlantic Wire, 14 November 2012.

"What Was in Paula Broadwell's 'KelleyPatrol' E-mails?," Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, 15 November 2012. 

"Jill Kelley outraged other military liaisons with her flirty ways," Jessica Vander Velde and William R. Levesque, Tampa Bay Times, 15 November 2012.

" In Petraeus' fall, a familiar tale of power and its dangerous allure," Michael Doyle, Frances Robles, and Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers, 16 November 2012.

"The Wonderful World of Jill and Scott Kelley," Elspeth Reeve, The Atlantic Wire, 16 November 2012.

"Petraeus scandal: Jill Kelley and the Tampa society set," Emma Brockes, The Guardian, 16 November 2012. [These last few articles are just precious in their descriptions of social snobbery.]

OPINIONS

"A General Lesson," Fred Kaplan, in Slate, 10 November 2012.

"When a C.I.A. Agent had Scores of Affairs," Stephen Kinzer, The New York Times, 10 November 2012.

"How I was Drawn into the Cult of David Petraeus," Spencer Ackerman, on the blog Danger Room: What's Next in National Security, on the website of Wired, 11 November 2012.

"The David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell Affair: The Danger of Male Mentors?," Jenna Goudreau, Forbes 12 November 2012.

"The Siren and the Spook," Frank Bruni, The New York Times, 12 November 2012.

Petraeus the paper tiger," Joshua Foust, Need to Know Opinion, PBS online, 12 November 2012.

"How Paula Broadwell Wronged Her Readers," Laura Miller, Salon, 13 November 2012.

"The Real Petraeus Scandal," Joan Walsh, Salon, 13 November 2012.

"Petraeus situation: You asked, I answer," Thomas E. Ricks, on his blog The Best Defense, on the Foreign Policy website, 13 November 2012.

"Stop Judging, You Prudes," Katie Roiphe, Slate, 13 November 2012.

 "What the Heck, FBI?," Marc Ambinder, on his blog The Compass, in The Week, 13 November 2012.

"Paula Broadwell, A Hanger-On in King Petraeus's Court," Noam Scheiber, in The New Republic's blog The Plank, 14 November 2012. 

"When did Socialite Become an Insult?," Libby Copeland, Slate, 16 November 2012.

"The media's woman blaming," Jennifer Vanasco, Columbia Journalism Review, 16 November 2012.

FALLOUT

"FBI investigation into Petraeus's love life may damage ties to other agencies," Tom McCarthy, The Guardian, 13 November 2012.

"Panetta Orders Review of Ethics Training for Military Officers," Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 15 November 2012.

ADVICE

 "My Secret Strategy for Avoiding Petraeus-Style Email Pitfalls," James Fallows, on his blog on The Atlantic's website, 12 November 2012.

"A Cheater's Checklist," Emily Yoffe ("Dear Prudie"), Slate, 13 November 2012.

BIGGER ISSUES?

 "Questioning the Brass," Thomas E. Ricks, The New York Times, 11 November 2012.

"The Real David Petraeus Scandal," Robert Wright, The Atlantic, 12 November 2012.

"Petraeus Case Raises Fears About Privacy in Digital Era," Scott Shane, The New York Times, 13 November 2012.

"FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation," Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian 13 November 2012.

"The Petraeus Legacy: A Paramilitary CIA?," Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, 14 November 2012.

"Forget Petraeus: The Real Scandal Is Generals' Corrupt Weapons Procurement," Dina Rasor, Truthout, 14 November 2012.

 "Collateral damage of our surveillance state," Julian Sanchez, Reuters, 15 November 2012.

"Paula Broadwell's Big Mistake," Andrew Leonard, Salon, 16 November 2012.

Scenes from a Fall Garden

Gulf fritillary on violas, November 2012

At Christmas I no more desire a rose

Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows;

But like of each thing that in season grows.

(Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost, 1.1)

Here in southeast Louisiana, the seasons overlap, with flowers of the summer blooming into the fall. A couple of weeks ago, I transplanted pansies, violas, and snapdragons into a flower bed that also has second-generation zinnias blooming in it, zinnias that re-seeded and sprouted from my summer bounty of flowers. These zinnias are short, their stunted growth having responded to the shorter day length, and surely the first frost will rebuke their green impudence.

This summer, I transplanted baby aloe vera plants from a large aloe vera that I have growing in a pot (several generations removed from the original plants that I dug up from the yard of a great-aunt several years ago). I am interested in seeing how well they can survive a southeast Louisiana winter--though, given enough warning, I will probably try to protect them from freezing temperatures.

Bumblebee almost comatose on my basil, November 2012

Yesterday, before a cold front blew into the area, the backyard was full of pollinators, especially gulf fritillaries, which seemed to like the violas almost as much as the zinnias, though the still-blooming red salvia remained their favorite. The strangest sight we've seen in our garden is that of huge bumblebees clinging to basil flowers on chilly days, waiting for the weather to warm. Today, with highs in the low 60s, I found three bumblebees tightly holding onto the Genovese basil blossoms, impervious to my poking and prodding among the leaves as I photographed them. They moved their antenna but little else. The smaller honeybees, though, were busily flying around the blooms, gathering pollen. The cooler temperatures do not seem to affect them as much. Or, perhaps, these bumblebees are nearing the end of their natural life (usually, only the queen survives the winter by hibernating), and the scents of the garden are providing some kind of bumblebee comfort here at the end. 

The tomatoes we planted as an experiment in fall-growing tomatoes--which we have never grown successfully in the past--have tiny green tomatoes on them, but I doubt if those fruits will ripen on the vine. The gourmet mesclun mixes that I planted among the tomatoes are producing far more bountifully, for those plants are truly growing in season, as are the radishes.  Tom and I have been enjoying the most wonderful salads from those greens, for which I prepare a very simple lemon juice and olive oil dressing (heavy on the lemon juice), seasoned with a little sea salt and freshly ground pepper.

Tom holds up sweet potatoes on a runner

Fall 2012 sweet potatoes

Tom dug up the sweet potatoes yesterday. He had planted sweet potato slips later than usual, so our crop wasn't a large one, but it was satisfying, nonetheless, to see the pile of sweet potatoes grow as he turned over the manure-enriched soil of our vegetable garden. He is also increasing the size of our "big" garden, which, when it's complete, should be approximately 50 feet long by 20 feet wide. The 8 ft.X8 ft. beds we put in behind our house our first year here will now be primarily planted with herbs and flowers--and the occasional winter greens.

I planted seeds of curly-leaf parsley in the late spring. The seeds sprouted, and though they suffered a bit from the hot weather, the plants grew well enough during the summer to provide meals for a slew of gulf fritillary caterpillars. After I had planted the parsley seeds and transplanted some flat-leaf parsley plants, I overheard an experienced Louisiana gardener say that she planted parsley in the fall. My parsley plants do seem happier in this cooler fall weather, but I will continue to plant parsley in the spring, too, so that there will be plenty of food for those caterpillars.

Radishes, tomatoes, and mesclun mixes & 2nd generation zinnia

Even as we are gathering the fruit of our fall garden, I am already thinking of spring, which will come much too early. According to NOAA, this past spring was the warmest spring on record, and "March was the warmest March on record by far." I hope to be better prepared this next year for an early onset of spring.

This Democrat is watching

Ms. Warren’s adversaries are said to be trying to keep her off the banking committee, where she could push for more regulation, while her admirers want her to be on it. “Her strategy will depend on what happens,” said Simon Johnson, a professor at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management. “If she doesn’t get on the banking committee, then she’ll take a more outspoken approach.” He said that Democrats as a whole had not followed through on several issues of financial reform, so “it matters a great deal” where Ms. Warren is assigned. “Not putting her on banking would make the Democratic Party look like a creature of Wall Street, which, by the way, it is,” Professor Johnson said. “But they don’t like to be too explicit about it.”

Katharine Q. Seelye, "New Senator, Known Nationally, Sometimes Feared", in The New Yorks Times, 10 November 2012.