Thursday, February 28, 2008

What is Patriotism?

The Response

Barack Obama
“My attitude is that I’m less concerned about what you’re wearing on your lapel than what’s in your heart. And you show your patriotism by how you treat your fellow Americans, especially those who served. You show your patriotism by being true to our values and our ideals and that’s what we have to lead with is our values and our ideals.”

from Zeleny, Jeff. "Obama's Labels." The Caucus: The New York Times Politics Blog. 4 October 2007.




What Others Are Saying:

David Crisp, editor of The Billings Outpost, explores the meaning of Michelle Obama's statement about being really proud of her country for the first time in her adult life

Mary Mitchell, in the Chicago Sun Times, discusses African-American pride and patriotism

Friday, February 22, 2008

More Beef

Twenty-four hours of much-needed rain has relegated me to my study (my original plan for the day was early-spring gardening) where I've been reading articles online, covering subjects from recently-released biographies of Edna St. Vincent Millay; to John McCain's murky relationship with a female lobbyist; to who won the Democratic debate in Austin, Texas; to problems in the meat industry. In this casual browsing of information, I clicked on my bookmark for Atlantic.com and discovered that the online magazine has conveniently prepared for its readers links to previous articles written on "the decline of the meat industry" in America.

The opening article led me to a 2005 article by B. R. Myers, "If Pigs Could Swim." Myers describes how Europeans take much better care of their meat animals than Americans do. And why do they? He answers:

Livestock are treated better in Europe because Europeans want them treated better. They are treated worse here because we hardly think of them at all. It's as simple as that. . . [O]ur concern usually lasts only as long as it takes for an industry hack to express his.

Got Beef?

The recent recall of millions of pounds of beef reminded me of an experience I had the first week of my marriage. I was twenty years old and had always eaten beef from grass-fed cattle raised by my family--my father, grandfather, uncles, and friends of the family. In the sixties and seventies, my family and some of their friends ran a couple hundred head of cattle on government land in the marshes of Old and Lost Rivers, located about midway between Beaumont, Texas, and Houston, along the I-10 corridor. And we usually had a few head of cattle on our small plot of country land, maybe a mama cow or two and three or four calves whose future was our freezer.

Flush with money we had received as wedding gifts, my husband and I went shopping for the ingredients of our first home-cooked meal as newly-weds. We purchased some packaged ground beef. I don't remember what particular dish I was preparing, but I do remember my shocked response to the meat as I began to brown it in a skillet. It smelled funny. It looked funny. It looked nothing like the meat I had eaten up to this time.

I called my husband into the kitchen. "I think this meat is spoiled," I said. "It smells awful."

Tom looked at the meat, leaned forward to sniff it, and then started laughing. "Anita," he said, "there's nothing wrong with this meat. It's just not your daddy's grass-fed beef. This is what store-bought beef looks like. The cattle are kept in pens and fed grain to fatten them. So the meat's got a lot of fat in it."

I've had my share of hamburgers and restaurant-prepared beef dishes since then, but over the years my father continued to supply us with meat. One of my favorite dishes for years was fried steak served with rice, homemade gravy, and shallots fresh from my father's garden. However, in the mid-90s, Tom stopped eating red meat, stunned by his father's early death from heart disease. Now he is a vegetarian, and I only eat red meat when I'm visiting my parents, whose small, seventy-five acre farm can support the twenty or so head of cattle they raise, mostly Brahman cattle. My parents' freezer is always full of meat from grass-fed cattle, fish my sister and her husband catch in the Sam Rayburn reservoir, and shrimp caught by a distant cousin who shrimps in the Gulf of Mexico. And my father maintains a huge garden of vegetables, fruit trees, and sugar cane.

Most Americans, however, not only do not know the source of their food; they don't even think of where their food originates until some big news item such as the beef recall catches their attention--briefly. And that's a shame. We should be concerned with more than the safety of our food supply. We should be concerned with the ethics of our food supply. If we are going to eat meat, we should think about how the animals are raised and treated, what the animals are fed, how the animals are slaughtered.

If only Americans would remain outraged long enough to initiate serious changes in how that hamburger meat gets from the cow penned up and pumped up with antibiotics, to the slaughter house, to the supermarket, to the family's meal of Hamburger Helper. Of course, when people begin to think about the ethics of their food supply (just type the phrase "the ethics of eating meat" into Google and note the results), the responses and discussion can be very wide ranging. But at least the participants are thinking.

Other Voices:

A veterinarian's view of the use of antibiotics in beef cattle, in Cattle Today

"The Ethics of Eating Meat: A Radical View", by Charles Eisenstein (the Yoga of eating)

Grass-fed cattle, on Atlantic.com: "Back to Grass," by Corby Kummer

"Chew the Right Thing," a Mother Jones interview with Peter Singer, bioethicist and author of Animal Liberation

Michael Pollan, "An Animal's Place," on Peter Singer, vegetarianism, and "conscious" meat-eating

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

What Others Say

I've not been posting much this year mainly because the new year began with my being ill, and it took a while for me to recover. A visit to the otolaryngologist today brought welcome relief. Now I won't have to lean in quite so closely to my friends and colleagues to hear conversation, and I might feel well enough to begin my garden planting and landscaping.

Offline, I've been reading a lot of poetry lately--Margaret Gibson, Mary Oliver, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Bishop (the new Library of America collection of her poems, prose, and letters)--some nonfiction (began Derrick Jensen's A Language Older than Words, a Christmas gift from a friend; have almost finished reading Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time, a Christmas gift from Mary-Margaret) and some fiction (reread Anita Brookner's Hotel du Lac and am a chapter and a half from finishing A Friend from England; am about 100 pages into Marcel Proust's Swann's Way).

Meanwhile, here are some links to what others are saying online:

James Fallows on the charges of plagiarism against Barrack Obama

Jack Shafer on charges of plagiarism against Obama

Col. Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor for Guantanamo's military commissions, on trials at Guantanamo (in an interview with The Nation--and hat tip to Kevin Drum)

Nicholas Kristof on torture and Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held for more than six years at Guantanamo Bay

Paul Kramer on earlier American use of the "water cure"--and an earlier Atlantic article on torture and rendition by Jane Mayer

The BBC on learning English

Thursday, February 14, 2008

Happy Valentine's Day


In Season

An Occasional Poem for Valentine's Day, 2008

Signs of love are everywhere,
symbols that beckon, more
than what they are—
shiny foil on chocolate hearts
like treasure long sought,
the glitter that attracts,
the sweetness that rewards.
Red and pink entwined, such
a fashion no-no,
become a yes of hearts,
lips, kisses, candy favors
that shorthand I LUV U.
And so you say you do,
if at no other time than this—
the season of valentines.

Anita

Monday, February 11, 2008

When We're Afraid We Won't Have Enough

Updates below blog

Why is aggression always the Republican answer to problems these days? The drought in Georgia has heated up the rhetoric over state boundaries. First, Governor Perdue disputed Alabama's and Florida's rights to the water of the Chattahoochee River; now state Republicans are trying to get a piece of Tennessee.

In the late 1700s, the Tennessee-Georgia border was set at the 35th parallel. However, in the early 1800s, a surveying team placed the border at a little over a mile south of that parallel, and thus the Tennessee River has been within the Tennessee state line since that time. No one complained until this year, when Georgia Republican state senators introduced a bill to change the border back to the 35th parallel.

This is how Republicans want to solve Atlanta's thirst: not by conserving what we have, not by regulating growth and thus the out-sized demands on our resources; not by changing people's attitudes toward water use--but by stealing from our neighbors!

According to some news sources, changing the state line would also give Georgia a slice of Chattanooga and Mississippi a slice of Memphis.

1818 Map Error Raises New Water War Front," Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Drought-Thirsty Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The Ledger

"Dehydrated Georgia Wants Slice of Tennessee," The St. Augustine Record

Updates: What Others Are Saying

"Bordering on Ludicrous," says the Augusta Chronicle Editorial Staff, on Feb. 24, 2008

It's not just about water, says Sen. John Bulloch (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, say no more)

Secret water talks affect more than those within I-284, says Dusty Nix , for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer editorial board

Border Bill a diversionary stunt by leaders who lack courage, says Bill Shipp, of the The Athens Banner-Herald, Feb. 24, 2008