Torture Probes in the UK

Scott Horton links to an article in The Guardian about a torture suspect whom British intelligence allowed to fly to Pakistan and then tipped off Pakistani intelligence to arrest the man. In Pakistan, the suspect was tortured, including having three of his fingernails removed, and British intelligence worked with the Pakistanis, knowing that torture was used, to question the man. Cozy. David Davis, former shadow home secretary, brought these details to light and had this to say about Britain's and the United States' examination and prosecution of those who used, or who were complicit in the use of, torture:

The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, whilst explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction. We have done the opposite. As it stands, we are awaiting a police investigation which will presumably end in the prosecution of frontline officers. At the same time the government is fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up both crimes and political embarrassments, to protect those who are the real villains of the piece, those who approved the policies in the first place. (quoted in "Revealed – the secret torture evidence MI5 tried to suppress," Ian Cobain, The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 July 2009).

David Davis ended his speech to the the British Commons with these words:

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

The entire speech can be read here: "David Davis on Torture: Statement in Full, The Guardian, 8 July 2009.

Chance Encounters

This weekend I've been reading my old letters and journals in order to bring to light for my son and daughter some stories from their childhood, the funny things they said and did. Just a few minutes ago, I came across this entry (which has little to do with the kind of journal entries for which I was searching), in which I recorded a chance encounter at an art museum in Columbus, Georgia, February 28, 1997:

The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley, California (1938)

A dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, excitedly walks up to me as the kids and I are viewing the Dorothea Lange Photo Exhibit at the Columbus Museum. "Those men," she says, "don't they look like they come straight out of the pages of GQ? Those faces, that bone structure. No fat bellies there. Like hundreds of Gary Coopers. Where can one find men like that today?"

"Yeah," I reply, "they're hungry--It's the Depression."

A few minutes later the same woman comes up to me again in a different section of the exhibit. She wants me to look at a particular photograph, that of a woman looking out of the oval window of a black hearse-like car, from the title of the photograph, one in a funeral procession. The woman in the photograph looks pensive; her left hand partially obscures her nose and the bottom of her face. The middle-aged wrinkles around her eyes add to the pensive and sad air of the woman.

"Look at the clouds reflected in the window," points out my momentary friend. "They give the impression of eternity--all those clouds going on & on behind her. Look at how her eyes follow you. She's a spirit--in reality because she's dead by now but that moment captured forever in this photograph. She reminds us that we too will be like her."

"Even the oval frame of the car window suggests a family photograph hung on a wall," I add. "She reminds us of our own mortality."

As the woman walks out of the exhibit, she says, "I'm glad you were here for me to share my thoughts with. You've got to talk with someone when you're affected so by art."

"And I appreciate your sharing them with me," I told her. "I know the feeling."

The older we get, the more we rely on the kindness of strangers.

Driving in Georgia

A mother in Kennesaw, Georgia, has come up with an idea to identify new teen drivers on the road. She has created large magnets to be placed on cars of teens, Caution: Newly Licensed, which she sells nationwide. Now she has the support of a Georgia state senator to get a bill passed to require all newly-licensed teens to have this magnet and a window decal displayed on their cars: "Should Georgia Teen Drivers Sport Warning Magnets?", posted on the website of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 5, 2009.

Anyone who has driven in Georgia, especially around Atlanta, would sympathize with this mother's campaign, I think. I have lived in several states, and the drivers here are among the worst I have ever encountered. Unfortunately, LOTS of people drive as if they've just been newly licensed. Just last night, on our return from Lithonia, where we dropped our daughter off at a party, we were turning right at a green light when four drivers turned left right in front of us: one, two, three, four, without slowing down, as if they had absolutely no knowledge of right-of-way rules. Then, later, on our way home after picking up our daughter, someone ran a red light as ours was green, and at least two people absolutely RACED through caution lights. These experiences and observations are typical. AutoAdvantage Road Rage Survey reveals that Atlanta is among the top five cities as the worst for road rage.

I think part of the problem here is that Georgia does not have a good driver's education program. To get her learner's permit, our daughter attended several classes and then had to complete only a few hours of in-car instruction with a licensed instructor, hours that she completed in one weekend. And I wasn't impressed with the driving instruction, at all. To get her unrestricted license, our daughter is expected to complete 40 hours of driving under parental instruction. But I wonder how many teens actually complete those 40 hours. Susie Kessler, the mother who is marketing the magnets for new drivers says:

I talk to the state licensing people that actually give these kids the test … and I’ve asked them how many of these kids have really had 40 hours with parents. And they’ll tell you [some of the kids] don’t know how to turn the lights on in the car. It’s scary. Even if they do the minimum of 40 hours, that’s nothing.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, car crashes are the leading cause of teenage deaths, "accounting for more than one in three deaths in this age group.1 In 2005, twelve teens ages 16 to 19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries." Those are awful statistics.

Fourth of July

Yesterday evening, our daughter attended a Fourth of July party with friends, and Tom and I headed to the local downtown center, within walking distance, to watch the Fourth of July parade. The parade consisted of local folks walking with their kids in strollers or wagons and on bikes. Some strollers were decorated with small flags or banners. Two years ago I drove my art car in the parade, the strangest element in the parade, I'm sure, and while I received an invitation to do so again this year, I declined. The car has been exposed to inclement weather and needs some work before I put her on the road again--or attempt to sell her.

Before the parade was over, Tom and I headed to a local restaurant near the town square and settled on a table outside where we could watch all the folks gathering for the evening's festivities. We could hear the faint strains of martial music from the bandstand while we feasted. In honor of our president, I ordered an arugula salad with feta cheese (very good) and a crisp cold glass of hard cider. When I ordered the fish and chips--a dish we associate with England--Tom commented that the choice seemed appropriate since Georgia was loyalist in the Revolution.

I, however, am a patriotic American, despite what the far-right says about liberals.

Below are views of the parade from our table and of the crowd gathering for the evening's events.

Going West

In a few days, my family and I will begin what may be our last long trip together, a car-camping journey to the west coast of the United States and back to Georgia. The kids are adults or nearly adults: our son will be a senior at the University of Texas this fall, and our daughter will be a senior in high school. Maybe we will take more long trips together, but as the children grow, one realizes that the time one can expect to spend with them is increasingly limited. Living only an hour's drive from Austin at the time, we then left our son in Texas to move to Georgia. He has proven to be very self-motivated, getting involved in clubs and activities that suit his science and engineering-tuned mind, but I miss the time we would have spent together had we stayed nearby. Having grown up in a family that remained in the same area for six generations, I realize too clearly what one loses in our very mobile society. I am the only one of my siblings to live out of the state of Texas (from Louisiana to Minnesota to Georgia), and, frankly, I am ready to move on now, having lived only two years in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Some people, I think, have a tendency to wander. Perhaps I am one of those.

This tendency may explain why I hold on so fiercely to tangible connections to the past. I have kept over the years all the letters my friends have sent me; every year I send Christmas cards to friends and family from whom I haven't heard in years and from whom I really never expect to hear. And my husband's family: Lord have mercy--we have letters going back to the mid-1800s. Those people kept everything, from letters to photographs to advertisements from magazines to recipe clippings.

As we prepare for this journey West--or, rather, as I prepare, for I'm the organizer in our family, the one who plans the route, the places to camp, the attractions from which the rest can choose to experience--I think of all those ancestors who traveled west before us: the original Abraham Dugast who headed across an ocean from France to the New World; the descendants who traveled south and west to Louisiana when the British were so unfriendly; the Scotts and Coles and Deweeses and Bentons who migrated across the country from Virginia and Alabama and Delaware and North Carolina. Something propelled them west, a similar something that produces this restless spirit in myself. Oh, I know what it's like to be a part of a community for generations; for twenty years I stayed in the same place where generations of my family had lived. Even today, years after leaving my home, I long for that kind of connection, but it's never occurred again. Instead, I drag my restless body from state to state, and behind it? journals and letters of all I have ever loved.

I am tempted, sometimes, to burn it all. But I can't let go. Maybe someday I'll meet my Death Valley and leave all I've loved beside the wagon-rutted roadway. Until then, well, it's westward ho and a stagger as I drag my past behind.

Fruits of Our Labor

I don't know what I would do without work. When I write "work," I don't necessarily mean tasks associated with a paycheck or some other kind of exchange for services rendered--though I do include that sort of work, too. My everyday work, the twenty-five years of teaching college writing and literature and the hours that I now spend tutoring students in writing at a community college, has been necessary for me, too. Teaching was frustrating in many ways: the dynamics of university politics, the demands on one's time, the apathy of many students. Yet it also had its rewards: friendships that, while many didn't stand the test of time and distance, helped me grow intellectually and emotionally and now provide me with vivid memories; encounters with people from all over the world; opportunities to travel; the respect and gratitude of many students; the fun of being creatively engaged with my work (I loved organizing my classes and coming up with new ways to communicate ideas).....

But by work, I mean also the extent of one's labor beyond the workaday world, the world of paychecks and time clocks. Gardening is work, hard work, yet it also gives me great satisfaction. I am rewarded not only with the fruit of that labor (as the picture at the top of this post illustrates) but with a consciousness of the seasons that my gardening provides. Here I am in the middle of a large metropolitan area, yet gardening helps me connect with nature, with the earth, and with all the creatures I notice when I'm outside in my little urban garden.

Other kinds of labor sustain me, too. For the past few months, I've been working on two unusual quilts that I've designed for my son and daughter--quilts that I'm making out of recycled and felted wool sweaters. I've cut the sweaters into squares and embellished half of them with needlework. This week, I will complete the squares and then crochet them together to make the quilt. Here are photos of the squares of one as-yet-unassembled quilt, laid out on my queen-sized bed. I am enjoying the fruits of my labor. The joy is doubled when the fruit is shared!

Hair

My best friend, who lives in northern California now, and I have shared many adventures and confidences over the years. We met in 1984, when I was teaching in the English Department at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and my husband was completing his Ph.d. in forestry. When I first met Chris, we were in our twenties; she had one child, but I hadn't had children yet. (My first child was born four years later when I was thirty years old.) Our knees didn't hurt then, at least not much, our hair wasn't gray, and we weighed less (especially me!). Now, twenty-five years later, we're middle-aged and hurtling toward old age faster than we want to acknowledge. Both of us want to age gracefully, with wisdom, and we also resist giving in to the myth of eternal youth that is ingrained in our culture, from advertisements to medicine. I sport my gray hair with pride. Except when I don't.

Four years ago I was wandering through a craft fair in Wimberley, Texas, with my sister who is three years younger than I. She is taller by three inches, and she has maintained her original hair color over the years with artful coloring. I, however, had a head full of gray hair that I proudly kept natural--until one of the crafters mistook me for my sister's MOTHER. That week I colored my hair. But I can't commit to maintaining my hair color, so eventually, the gray grew out and I lived with the gray for a few more years.

Then this past week I was noting how my husband, who is only eight months younger than I, has a head full of his original brown hair with just a barely noticeable sprinkling of gray. I look eight years older rather than just eight months older! Ah, pushed in the back of a dresser drawer was a box of hair dye I had purchased on a whim a couple of years previously. I applied the hair color; the results are above, fairly close to my original hair color. I don't know how long I'll keep up this pretense, but it's amazing what hair color can do to lift one's spirits. I still have all my aches and pains, and I'm certainly no younger, but I feel a little younger in spirit.

Right after I colored my hair, I sent an e-mail to my best friend, with a photo attached. She was inspired to blog about hair. Here are her pensive thoughts: "Hair."

Public and News Media All Agog over an Adulterous Affair.....

Okay, while I didn't watch South Carolina governor Mark Sanford at his news conference where he confessed to his affair with a woman in Argentina, just a few minutes ago I did read a little of those e-mails released by some unknown person to a South Carolina newspaper. I was titillated enough to scan the e-mails but not enough to read them entirely. And as I clicked around the Internet for news today, I thought about how the news media has followed the Mark Sanford story so closely the last few days. Everyone was all agog.

What a wonderful news media we have, so ready to reveal the most salacious details of any secrets of our leaders and stars, so reluctant to ask really serious questions about those same leaders and stars. Oh, yeah, there are reporters who pursue the truths our government would like to bury in an unknown, mass grave somewhere. There are newspapers that will publish the stories. But our popular media--the cable news and major networks--well, they are are all about ratings and viewers. Who wants to hear about the recent report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody? Golly, the executive summary alone runs to 19 pages. (The report itself is 263 pages long.)

Who is interested in listening to boring reports on health care reform? So what if our Congressmen and Senators are owned by insurance companies and health care companies? According to those same Congressmen and Senators, we have the best health care industry and insurance in the world. Ha. ha. Let us return, instead, to this story about the dalliance of ole Mark Sanford. Now that's a story that rocks our world.

Update: Rush Limbaugh blames President Obama for Republican governor Mark Sanford's affair with a woman in Argentina. According to Rush, Sanford was just so dispirited by Obama's presidency that he sought relief from that despondency in the arms of another woman. P-L-E-A-S-E! This is a stupid argument on so many levels, least of which is that it disregards the fact that Sanford began his affair before Obama won the presidency.

Finally, of all the comments I've read about Mark Sanford's affair and the public interest, these struck me as most worthy: John Dickerson's article, "Heartless," at Slate and Gary Kamiya's "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford", at Salon. Move along, people, nothing to see here but the sad complexities of the human heart. Get a life of your own.

The Corruption of Power

I've been dropping in on Nico Pitney's blog on Huffington Post for updates on what's happening in Iran. CNN is another news source. Pitney reports news sent him from individuals in Iran as well as from traditional news sources. A couple of items caught by attention as I scanned the blog this morning. The first one was about a letter reported to have been signed by some 40 members of the Assembly of Experts. In this letter, the clerics call for an annulment of the presidential election results and also accuse Supreme Leader Ali Khamenai of working to have his son succeed him as Supreme Leader. According to the letter, Khamenai has lung cancer. Ah, how those in power want to hold onto that power, even in death. The second item that caught my attention was the news from the Wall Street Journal that European technology companies Nokia and Siemens provided the Iranian government "one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale." Ah, how those in power want even more power. The seduction of power is not limited to Iran and other authoritarian governments.

Can You Watch and Not Weep?

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Father's Day in America

Here is Tom with his Father's Day presents: one of three ties, a vegetarian cookbook, and shirt and shorts. Tom told M-M he needed some new ties; after years of not having to wear a tie at work, he now has to don one occasionally for meetings. So M-M chose two ties for him, a green one and a red one. I gave him a blue tie for blue days, the shorts and shirt, and the cookbook. Now, of course, we expect Tom to prepare some dishes described in the cookbook! But, then, he loves to cook. He has been experimenting with the recipes in the Indian vegetarian cookbook I gave him some months ago and has made some really tasty dishes recently. In fact, we have leftovers, so our Father's Day menu will be comprised of leftover, homemade Indian dishes, freshly prepared potato salad (with red potatoes from my father's garden in East Texas), and corn-on-the-cob. M-M is preparing angel food cake for dessert, topped with whipping cream and berries (blue berries, black berries, and raspberries). We will toast the day with a beer or a bottle of ice-cold hard cider. Wish our son were here, too, to share the day with us.

What do They Want?

Update Below

I am by no means as knowledgeable as I would like to be about the Middle East, Iran in particular. However, William Pfaff, author and political commentator on international relations, makes sense to me in his article "The Islamic Republic is Not in Danger, posted on Truthdig. Pfaff writes that

Iran’s cosmopolitan and liberal middle classes and its students are making a revolutionary bid without intending a revolution. The Islamic Republic is not in danger. At least not now.

Few think that the demonstrations in Tehran, and now in other Iranian cities, can produce a change in regime. The government’s police power, and that of the Revolutionary Guards, with the support of the farming and working-class population that believes it has a defender in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, makes that convincing.

What is being challenged is the reactionary social and political form the Iranian system has assumed under Ahmadinejad and the most conservative clerics. The Islamic state itself is not, or at least not yet, in real danger.

The mass rallies and marches in Iran have been compelling, even inspirational, but from what I've read and observed, it seems that those rallying and marching are not advocating overthrow of the government, with American-style freedom as an object. They seem, rather, to be speaking out against the government's repressing their votes. The leader they would want to rule their country would still be an advocate of the Islamic Republic of Iran. I don't think most of those protesters want separation of their religion and the state; they would prefer, however, a relaxation of religious restrictions and a more modern outlook.

Granted, I draw these conclusions from my reading and my small number of Iranian contacts, three or four people whom I know. One is a woman my age (or a little older) and the others are young women in their twenties. The older woman left Iran years ago, has lived in the United States for many years, and is an American citizen. She openly expresses her desire for a secular Iranian government. She returns to Iran, however, to visit family.

The younger women are more closely tied to Iran and less dismissive of the religious rule in Iran. They moved to the United States as children but have many contemporary friends and extended family members living in Iran. They are experts with Twitter, the Internet, and texting; they are in as constant contact with their Iranian friends and family as they can possibly be in this technological age. Over the past few months, I have listened to these younger women describe their visits to Iran, their anxiety over dressing correctly so as not to get arrested or to get their male companions arrested. (One of these young women has been arrested before.) One must pay attention to the neckline of one's outfit--the morality police might deem it too low and revealing. Tunics buttoned up the middle rather than slit on the sides are suspect because they may reveal the crotch of one's pants. Such restrictions on dress seem arbitrary at times. Women are often harassed or arrested for wearing bright colors; one year, pink seemed to be a particularly egregious color choice.

This week, an exchange between one of the younger women and the older woman illustrated to me the difference I see between these two generations. The two women were talking about the rallies in Iran. The older woman said that she didn't think the rallies would produce a real change in government, and, of course, she would like to see Islamic removed from the name of the government. She has little sympathy for religious leaders telling people what to do. The younger woman demurred. "That's not the point [of the protests]," she said. "We want our vote counted." She has followed the news from Iran as closely as possible, getting little sleep and frequently checking the internet and her cell phone throughout the day.

My impression was that the younger woman, who is representative of many of the young people like her in Iran, is not interested in an overthrow of the government. It's Ahmadinejad she doesn't like, as well as the overly restrictive religious requirements in public space. Young Iranians want a more modern Iran but not necessarily secular democracy.

As William Pfaff suggests, however, one might not really understand the true nature of one's desires or the consequences:

One wonders to what extent the young people on the streets of Tehran this week are conscious of just what they do want from a new government. They would undoubtedly be happy with a vote recount that gave them Mir Hossein Mousavi as president, and an end to the morality police who patrol in search of symptoms of modernity to stamp out. But if they got this, they would find that it was not enough. That there are far more difficult problems ahead.

Update: The tough response of the Iranian regime (in the form of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei) has resulted in violence. Not wanting to show weakness, Khamenei refused to back down from his support of Ahmadinejad. So now more than the election is being challenged; the legitimacy of the Iranian regime is challenged. It remains to be seen what will come of the reformists' protests and the Iranian government's fierce response. Too bad the reformists don't have a character such as Christian Bale played in Equilibrium, which we watched on the SciFi channel last night. Only in the movies is one person, with guns blazing, capable of toppling an entire regime.

Small World....the Iranian Election

One of my young co-workers is from Iran and has many friends and family there. Today she told me that she hadn't slept in three days because she was so concerned about what was happening in Iran after the re-election of Ahmadinejad. One of her friends there, she said, has been arrested, and no one has heard from her since. It's difficult to get information from Iran; the Iranian government is limiting communication access. Foreign reporters are confined to their hotels and are forbidden to report events. My young friend is trying to keep in touch with her friends through Facebook.

Another of our young co-workers is in Iran now; she and her brother left the U.S. in May to visit family in Iran for several weeks.

Garden Structures

Tom has once again proven his talents in constructing bamboo cages for our cucumber plants. To make each cage, he took a large bamboo pole and split it six ways. Then he split narrow pieces of bamboo which he fashioned into hoops. He wound wire at the top of each bamboo pole to prevent further splitting, then spread the legs of the cage apart and placed the bamboo hoops over the cage and affixed those hoops to the cage. The hoops hold the shape of the cage. Our cucumbers are now clambering up these garden structures.

Later today Tom and I took a walk, and I took photos of other garden structures, at ways we manipulate the landscape for garden beauty. Here are a few examples.

When Religion Rules

The earlier words of my colleague from Iran have proven true. When I had asked her if she were avidly following the election in Iran, where young people were taking to the streets in large numbers to support Mir Hossein Mousavi against Ahmadinejad, she shrugged. "In Iran, you know," she said, "votes can be stolen." She dejectedly reminded us that the name of the country reflects the true power in the government: the Islamic Republic of Iran. And indeed, the election results indicate that votes were not merely stolen but that the goods are being brazenly flaunted. Ahmadinejad has been announced the winner by a wide margin, even from areas where opposition support was strong, that no one believes. The supreme religious rulers of the country have made a mockery of the will of the people. And that's what happens when religion rules: whoever speaks for the religious group always claims to have God on his side, the ultimate power. Laura Secor has an interesting article at The New Yorker: "Laura Secor: Iran's Stolen Election," News Desk, New Yorker, June 13, 2009.

And Steven Benen at The Washington Monthly points out that not only our major news networks (which are poor purveyors of news in the world, anyway) but also cable news channels have done a poor job covering the results of Iran's elections and the violent aftermath. Newspapers, evidently, have done a much better job. He also points to Nico Pitney's post on Huffington Post, which is a compilation of a number of news sources, from Twitterers, e-mailers, news columnists in Iran, etc.: "Iran Violence: Protests Erupt, Riot Police Launch Crackdown," posted June 14, 2009.

Here's Middle Eastern expert Juan Cole's take on the elections in Iran: "Stealing the Iranian Election," posted June 13, 2009, on Cole's blog Informed Comment. Cole hedges his analysis with uncertainties, but he theorizes that Mousavi was perhaps bringing in enough votes to be declared the victor in the election but when that news reached Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, "who has had a feud with Mousavi for over 30 years," the religious leaders "sent blanket instructions to the Electoral Commission to falsify the vote counts."

Developing Self-Awareness

In her review of Eve Pell's memoir, We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante, Megan Hustad describes how Pell, descendant of a rich and privileged family, traveled west and embraced radicalism in the 70s, hoping to escape the aristocratic failings of her flawed family back East. However, in her memoir, Pell comes to see that her turn to radicalism wasn't really a shift in perspective. Here's how Hustad describes Pell's reflection on her life:

The last part of the book offers a glancing overview of Pell’s immersion in early ’70s radical chic. She starts working with assorted anti-capitalists, joins the Prison Law Project and shares a brief kiss with Black Panther Field Marshal George Jackson in the visiting room at San Quentin. This account of Pell’s radicalism is made more compelling in that it didn’t require a fundamental shift of perspective—her world was not reimagined so much as flipped around. Pell at the revolution retained the strident elitism she was born to, only now black, brown and other oppressed peoples occupied the moral superior slots.

Pell eventually realizes that she’s in over her head when a brick thrown through her window lands on her son’s bed. Satisfaction would have to be found elsewhere, and likely after dispensing with self-righteousness and resentment. To her lasting credit, “We Used to Own the Bronx” is a graceful object lesson in how perspective is gained not all at once but by accretion, the reward of years of methodical observation.(from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," posted on Truthdig, Arts and Culture section, June 12, 2009--my emphasis)

I've underlined the phrases that jumped out at me when I read this review because they reflect some recent ponderings of my own. I have observed over the years the various ways that people--including me--attempt to transcend their past by seeking redemption in work or a new religion or travel or education or by getting the hell as far away from family as one can. Unfortunately, the attitudes that we've inherited or nourished go with us. Those attitudes just get placed on the new life we've adopted. In her case, Eve Pell transferred her family's sense of moral superiority to the new "family" she adopted: radicals of the 70s. These were the new "superior" groups to her.

I didn't grow up in a rich, privileged family--far from it--but I grew up in a very religious family and one with a fierce pride in family history. We were members of a country Southern Baptist church that my father and his mother helped found. The pastors of this church were often the yelling, hell-fire-and-damnation pastors one encounters in film and literature. Sin stuck like flypaper and contaminated everything we touched. In addition, I lived in a culture that practiced corporal punishment. Whippings with leather belts or even leather-braided bull whips accompanied the shame of our short-comings. A less sensitive child would have listened to those sermons, accepted her punishments, and would have been perhaps only superficially affected. I was too sensitive and took everything to heart. Self-righteousness and self-doubt doubled up in the seat of my saddle. Over the years, of course, my religious views changed. Eventually (over a long period of time), I abandoned most of them except the ethical ideals, espoused by many religions, which seem very true to me. I consider myself to be an agnostic Christian, if such a philosophical combination can actually make sense. But I don't think I quite abandoned the self-righteousness; that attitude was just transferred to other things: my political views, my views of personal responsibility, my views of parenting.

In the last few years, however, I've been working on un-saddling that sense of self-righteousness. It's hard--but a work in progress. And feeling resentment about the past just clouds the present. I can relate to Pell's conclusions about her own life:

In a wistful prologue, Pell admits to lingering mixed feelings about her background. “My relatives include bigots, humanitarians, eccentrics, athletes, and ordinary people, most of them infused with a strong sense that they are aristocrats. Like them, I love it that our family used to own a manor in colonial America.” But “while the family forms a sort of bulwark against time, a base of permanence in a world of flux, it exacts a terrible price.” (from "Megan Hustad on Class in America," Truthdig, June 12, 2009)

Donald Rumsfeld and Taos, NM

When I read of Taos, New Mexico, I think of artists who visited and were inspired by the landscape of New Mexico, such as Georgia O'Keefe, and of writers such as D. H. Lawrence who once owned a ranch near Taos. Taos has a reputation of being an artist's community. So I was surprised--stupidly so, perhaps--that Donald Rumsfeld owns a ranch near Taos, New Mexico; he divides much of his time these days between a home in Maryland and his ranch in Taos. It's easy to view public figures as caricatures, particularly when one disagrees with decisions those people have made. Bradley Graham's article "Decline and Fall: Donald Rumsfeld's Dramatic End," reveals some interesting details about the man who receives a lot of blame (and rightly so) for misjudgments in the early days of the Iraq war. The farm in Taos is just one of those minor details.

Just a New Saddle?

The director of the tutoring center where I work part-time is from Iran but is an American citizen. She has many relatives in Iran and usually visits once a year or so. When I asked her today if she had been keeping up with all the news covering the election in Iran, where people are taking to the streets in mass numbers to criticize President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she stuck her hands in her sweater pockets, leaned against a desk, and shrugged her shoulders. "We have a saying in my country," she said,"that goes something like this: It's the same old donkey with a new saddle ."

A less succinct and less colorful quote from a White House official reveals a similar conclusion:

"We take what we get," a White House official said of the forthcoming Iranian elections. "Whether with Ahmadinejad or Khatami in power, it's clear the Iranian president has limited influence, either for better or for worse. So even were Ahmadinejad to lose, there will not suddenly be flowers blooming" in Washington's efforts to engage Iran. (from Laura Rozen's blog The Cable, at Foreign Policy: "Lebanese election results relieve Washington," June 8, 2009; and quoted in Schmuel Rosner's essay, "Who cares who's president of Iran," in Slate, July 11, 2009)

Consequences of the Economic Crisis

I've never really understood the intricacies of the stock market or Wall Street, but the economic crisis of the Bush administration and the continuation of that crisis in the Obama administration have prompted me to become a lot more informed. This week I followed a link to an article published in Vanity Fair by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at Columbia University. I had read other articles and interviews with Stiglitz, and what he said made sense, so I was interested in reading "Wall Street's Toxic Message." In this article, Stiglitz discusses what he sees as consequences of a world-wide economic crisis for which America (Wall Street, bankers, mortgage lenders, the American government, the American people who lived beyond their means) is greatly responsible.

With the ideals of democracy, America has also proselytized the ideals of an unfettered market to developing countries (as well as to the rest of the world and ourselves). Now, however, this recent economic crisis has revealed to developing nations the magnitude of America's displaced faith in unfettered markets. "Today," Stiglitz writes, "only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-regulated behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly." Even in the past, unfettered markets did not work to the advantage of developing countries; the cards were stacked in favor of western powers:

Europe and America didn't open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.

These countries have noted that the United States and the International Monetary Fund responded much differently to the East Asia crisis of ten years ago than to the current economic crisis. Then, the United States and the I.M.F. insisted that Third World countries be tough: to "cut their deficits by cutting back on expenditures," "to raise interest rates, in some cases more than 50 percent," and not to bail out their banks. These restrictions created great hardships in the countries most affected. Now, however, in the current crisis, the U.S. has not expected from itself what it expected from poorer, developing countries in that crisis ten years ago. The U.S. government has bailed out its banks, has raised the deficit, and has lowered interest rates. This hypocrisy does not improve our standing in the world. Stiglitz notes, "Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?"

There are consequences to these actions, Stiglitz argues:

• The role of the Unites States has diminished and may continue to diminish: "We are no longer the chief source of capital. The world's top three banks are now Chinese. America's largest bank is down at the No. 5 spot." Developing countries have used the American dollar as their "reserve money" to maintain confidence in their solvency. However, the American dollar does not engender the confidence it once did. The world may choose other currency to serve as reserve currency, and the Chinese are out front in suggesting such a possibility.
  
  
• In the current economic crisis, America has provided less monetary support to developing countries. Stiglitz points out that we were never terribly generous anyway. However, China is stepping into the breach, and more and more developing countries are turning to China for assistance. I can think of how countries such as Sudan have received much infrastructure support from China. China is a lot less interested in human rights than the U.S. is, so China's increasing influence will have a different effect than that of the U.S.
  
  
• There is the possiblity that this increasingly lack of confidence in America will blossom into a rejection of capitalism altogether, at least by governing powers of developing countries, which can lead to regimes that will not be good for the poor.
  
  
• The loss of confidence in American-style free markets may also result in a rejection of other American ideals, such as democracy. Stiglitz writes that "democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world," but concludes that "[t]he economic crisis, created largely by America's behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have."

More of Joseph Stiglitz's analysis can be found here: Articles by Joseph Stiglitz about the Current Economic Crisis. Other economists may have different views that merit our attention. This is just the most recent article about the economic crisis that sparked my interest.

By the way, the photo at the beginning of this post has little to do with the economic crisis. This is Tom stir-frying beet greens and chopped beats to serve over pasta for our evening meal. My contributions were a green salad with leafy green stuff from a local farm and our own garden--and a fruit salad that included fruit not-so-locally grown. Living with two vegetarians has meant that I eat many vegetarian meals these days, though I did have a turkey-ham sandwich yesterday!

Poetry and Luck

When I was a child in Old River, Texas, my family lived in an old wooden house on land my ancestors had owned and that my father had cleared of brush and trees. In our yard were patches of clover in which I and my sisters and brother would often find four-leaf clovers. We would press the clovers between pages of books and then glue them to cardstock to make bookmarks or tape them to letters we sent to cousins. I'll bet we've never felt so lucky since. Today while walking from the compost bin where I had deposited potato peelings, I glanced down and saw a four-leaf clover at my feet. Of course, I plucked it, and it's now pressed flat inside the back cover of Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. Looking at this picture I took of my four-leaf clover, I remembered a poem that I wrote years ago. I never have been satisfied with any version, but I've done a bit of tinkering with it this evening, and it captures some of my feeling about that




Early Luck

At the concrete steps of our childhood home
each spring through summer we would find
clover of the most unusual kind,
four-leaved, even five or six-leaved.
We soon grew confident of our treasure,
just minutes needed to bring to hand
a lucky token grown on demand,
it seemed, to our then more trusting minds.
We could hardly pass a leafy patch
without stopping to search, to count
the leaves whose numbers seemed to surmount
all odds, all natural probabilities.
We plucked our luck, then pressed it flat,
its green life turning brittle, dull as a dollar bill.
With steady fingers and cut-and-paste skill
of children, we fastened our fortune to paper.
Like prayers to St. Jude our letters were mailed,
those splayed-out specimens of luck bestowing grace
on all correspondents who touched that holy space
where we had glued the simple optimism
we never quite lost, though pressed hard by sorrows
and dulled by time. I learned luck rarely follows
one's wish, one's desire. But I still pause when I pass
a patch of dark clover in a lawn of grass.

Anita D-G

At about the same time I put away what I thought would be the final, disappointing version of that poem, I took up writing haiku. Oh, like most people, I had written haiku as literary exercises in high school. But now, years later, I had discovered the works of Matsuo Basho, a Japanese master of haiku, and I sought to capture in three lines suspended moments of daily experience. At first I tried to write one haiku every day; that goal diminished to one haiku a week. Finally, I thought I would write enough haiku in a year to fill a favorite pottery jar. I wrote each haiku on a small square of post-it paper, rolled up the paper, tied it with ribbon, and dropped it in the jar. At the end of the year, I planned to host a party, invite friends, drink some wine, smoke some cigars, and read the haiku by candlelight. The party never transpired, the pottery jar never quite filled, but this evening, I've one more haiku to add. If only there were a few cigar-smoking friends still around.....

Hydrangeas, old jar,
the years are long between us--
your face blooms fresh here.

Follow-up on Catmo

I'm not one to crow about success because I've had too many experiences in life where success comes with a thick codicil. However, it seems that at least for now, my husband's amendments to Catmo (described here and here, here, and here) seem to be working. Pluto has been confined to our backyard for two weeks now. For a few days after his last return (when he received an electrical shock as he escaped from the yard), I kept him inside at night, with a kitty litter box at the ready. The other two cats were allowed in and out. At first, Pluto responded to this nightly house arrest by running through the house with his tail held high. Finally, he settled down, finding a restful place to spend the night on our daughter's rattan clothes hamper. When I let him out after the sun rose (I was off from work between semesters, so I had the leisure to cat-sit), I would check on him periodically during the day. He saw me checking, though I don't really know a cat's mind, so I can't conclude that he knew what I was up to. Then, while we were in Texas, we left the cat door open so all the cats could go in and out. There has been no indication that Pluto has escaped. So--success.

That very loud knocking noise you hear? That's me knocking on wood.

Early June Garden Update

In the week I was in Texas, the garden in Georgia blossomed. Here are some signs of that growth. I took the photo of the scarlet Monarda didyma at left on May 29th, the day before my daughter and I left for Texas. I took the photos below today. The monarda (bee balm) is in full flower near the grape arbor. The scarlet bee balm is "Jacob Cline," which is powdery mildew resistant. The pink bee balm that I've planted by the mail box is pretty, but the center of the clump succumbed to powdery mildew (or something like it), and the sprouts around it aren't as tall and healthy-looking as the scarlet bee balm. Click on each photo for a larger view.

Texas Journal: A week in Texas

A visit to Texas is always a mixed experience for me. The scissor-tail flycatchers and roadside wildflowers always remind me of what I miss. The heat and the political arguments with my father remind me of what I can never change. But this time, the heat was surprisingly absent because of a cold front that pushed through the area, bringing rain to some areas and a cool wind to the Dallas/Ft.Worth area. And although voices were raised a couple of times, my father and I managed not to get too enmeshed in any religious or political differences. I enjoyed taking photos of my father's cattle (about thirty head or so), and I admired my father's garden, so neatly planted.

My parents moved to their 75-acre farm in East Texas in 1987, and my parents have improved the place immensely. My father has spent many long hours improving the pastures, building fence, raising cattle, and gardening; my mother has spent many long hours canning the vegetables my father raises. This week she canned beans that she, my daughter, and I picked, and she sent several jars of those beans home with us. I enjoy picking beans because I love to eat them raw as I pick. These were especially tasty snap beans, an heirloom pole bean called Rattlesnake Beans; the skin is mottled purple and green. We picked quite a few very thin beans that hadn't plumped out much in addition to more mature pods. The less-mature pods I steamed with salt, pepper, and dried marjoram, and tossed the steamed and spiced beans in a little olive oil before serving warm. Very good. I think the beans would be even better steamed with fresh thyme.

Everyone always eats well at my parents' house. Daddy and one of his grandsons and a friend had recently dug Irish potatoes, so I made a potato casserole one evening. A neighbor brought freshly-caught fish, fileted and cut into bite-size pieces, ready for frying--as thanks for some service my father had rendered him earlier. Two evenings Mama prepared shrimp dishes: fried shrimp one evening, shrimp creole with rice another evening. One of my father's distant cousins shrimps in Texas bays and the Gulf, and my mother drives to the coast every year to get shrimp fresh off the boat.

We also had some time for family history. I located some information on the internet about the Dewees (also, Deweese) family: my great-great grandfather James Fenton Dewees married Lottie Lou Pollard. Lottie Lou is the oldest woman in the five-generations picture I have posted on this blog (top, left). She is the mother of my great-grandmother, Dora Olive Dewees Benton and the grandmother of my maternal grandfather, Leonard Everett Benton. She also hand-stitched the most beautiful quilt tops that my mother has had for over fifty-two years and has yet to quilt! We took those quilt tops down from a shelf in a closet and admired them this week and talked of quilting them. The photo above is of one of the quilt tops.

On Wednesday, my daughter and I headed to Dallas, where our son Benton was participating in a solar car competition and where we would also be picking up my husband, who was flying in from Georgia. Benton had worked with the University of Texas solar car team for two years, trying to get the Samsung Solarean ready for competition. Last year, they missed the deadline for the cross-country race by three days. This year, they took the car to Dallas and passed the "scrutineering," the qualifying tests for the 2009 Formula Sun Grand Prix in Cresson, Texas. About ten university teams entered the race, and eight of those teams qualified the first day; two teams continued working on their cars in order to try to qualify for at least part of the race that began on Wednesday and ended at 6 p.m. on Friday. On Wednesday the race began at 9 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m.; on Thursday and Friday, the race began at 8 a.m. and ended at 6 p.m.. The goal was to get in as many laps around the track as possible. The University of Minnesota, which has a very experienced solar car team, was the best team there; the team's solar car performed well on the track, out-pacing all of the other cars, and the team was well-practiced in taking care of mechanical issues as they arose. This was the first race the UT solar car team has ever qualified for, and I think they did surprisingly well for a first race. They dealt with a battery that overheated too easily, with a blow-out on the track, with a blown gasket on a tire, and with various other mechanical and electrical issues. All of the team members are electrical engineering students--except for our son, who is an aerospace engineering student. Benton served as the lone person in charge of mechanics. Last year he designed the shell of the car; this year he designed the rear suspension. He didn't know much about solar cars when he began work with the team; he has learned an amazing amount of information since then. Many students contributed to the sophisticated computer and electrical devices associated with the car. Although the UT Samsung Solarean was the slowest car on the track (issues with drag and that overheating battery), it had computer systems the other cars didn't have: a GPS unit and a monitoring system that the team in the pit could use to monitor that overheating battery, among other things.Trying to be friendly one afternoon, I approached a man who was accompanying one of the other teams. "Are you a professor?" I asked this person.

"They're threatening to make me an adjunct professor," he responded.

"Oh," I said, "Are you a sponsor then?"

"Yes, I'm a sponsor," he replied. "I'm the one keeping the team in order." And he added, knowingly and a little dismissively, "They're just kids."

Just kids? Look at what these "kids" have done, I wanted to say. Every team had worked hard to get here. Sure, some of the teams had more experience than others in competitive solar car racing, but every one of those students had contributed enormous amounts of time, knowledge, and effort into creating these cars. One of the University of Texas students told me his mother had been concerned that he was being "anti-social" because he spent so much time helping create the complex electrical system for the solar car. Other students had "pimped up" the trailer for the Samsung Solarean with solar cells to power the electricity needed for the computer monitoring. Additional students created those computer monitoring programs. Students who had graduated returned to help with various details on the car. That other teams had similarly dedicated students was very apparent even to a casual observer such as myself. The Iowa State University team suffered a real setback early in the week: the electrical system of their solar car was fried by a nearby lightning strike. One of the faculty advisors told me that they were lucky to find a local wholesale supplier of the kind of motherboard the team needed; the students convinced the wholesaler to sell them the necessary item. With a lot of team effort, those students had that car on the track by Thursday. Another team of freshmen from Berkely had inherited a solar car with a system created by a graduate student; the team had to reverse engineer the car to figure out the system. Although the car didn't pass the qualifying tests on Monday and Tuesday, the students kept working on the car and were able to qualify and get on the track by Thursday afternoon. The car had a number of problems thereafter, but those young people persevered.

These students demonstrate what the next generation offers our world. I hope that they can fulfill their promise.