Doing Justice

The tip of my hat to Steve Benen today who posts on justice finally being served to REPUBLICAN attorneys screwed by George Bush's Justice Department. The first was Leslie Hagen, who, despite her "outstanding performance" and Republican credentials, was kicked out of the Justice Department in 2006 because Monica Goodling heard a rumor that the attorney was gay. Like many other people who think their world view is the only one and that therefore they are always right (a kind of insanity, I think), Goodling not only did not renew Hagen's contract, she undermined the attorney at every turn, making sure that she could not get an appointment anywhere in the Justice Department. If hell exists, there is a special place for people such as Monica Goodling. And since I don't think hell exists, I believe it behooves the rest of us to counter-act in whatever legal, moral--hey, and maybe even comedic--way we can the malicious, vindictive acts of people such as this. There is a singular perniciousness in people who vindictively try to prevent qualified folks from attaining appropriate employment.   After a national search to fill the position in the new administration, Hagen was re-hired. (Gee, and she isn't even a Democrat! Imagine an administration that doesn't politically vet all of its Justice hires.) However, as an article on NPR's website describes:

It is not a perfectly happy ending for Hagen. Nobody official from the department ever apologized to her for what happened. She still owes thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and the Justice Department has refused to pay those bills.

The other attorneys Benen mentions in his post are William Hochul --who Goodling got rid of because Hochul's wife is active in the Democratic party though Hochul himself is a Republican-- and Daniel Blogden, who, as U.S. attorney for the district of Nevada, was fired because he refused to politicize his office. Both attorneys have been rehired by the Obama administration. 

What to do with bad presents?

The smirky morning team at ABC has some advice on what to do with bad presents.....

Gee, I didn't get any bad presents.

Here is Odyssey at the end of our Christmas morning unwrapping, telling us that the best presents are the animals who love us.

Happy end of the year!

"Do No Injustice"

Over the past couple of months, I have been going through the papers of my husband's family: letters, photographs, recipe clippings, greeting cards, cancelled checks, and all the ephemera of everyday life left behind by folks who disposed of very little. Their paper detritus suggests their unwillingness to leave this world. Hundreds of letters are stacked in boxes and an old steamer trunk, whispering in the darkness, trying to tell their tales. And I am now trying to make some sense out of the chaos and to channel those voices. I have learned a lot about writers of the family letters; the people are just as ambiguous and conflicted as any today. But in those letters are revealed values that at times seem to shout and echo in the moral hollowness of today's business world--whether it's political business on Capitol Hill or financial business on Wall Street or the daily business of a national non-profit.

I just turned to a letter dated January 12, 1886, a letter written from a father, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., to his young adult son, Baker White Armstrong (later Sr.; my husband's great-grandfather). The son has left the family home in Virginia to find better prospects in Texas. Baker had evidently received an offer of business from one man to take on a partnership. The father offers his son this advice:

I want you to be very careful that in advancing your own interests that you do no injustice to others.

What a world it would be if people took that advice to heart.

Little Stupidities

Okay, I know that the retail business will have some excuse...uh, explanation... for this, but.......Why does the curling ribbon I bought have a sticker on the ribbon itself and not the plastic wrap around it? So I'm wrapping presents in a hurry, and I take out the curling ribbon, unwrap it from its plastic, and then try to peel the sticker off the ribbon. Impossible. I'm left with reams of curling ribbon with white sticky paper attached to it at regular intervals.

Are retailers that worried that people will unwrap the curling ribbon from its plastic in the store and then harass cashiers with items that have no bar code? Are they afraid the holiday lines will be held up like those in the commercial where the woman tries to cash a check instead of using her debit/credit card?

Yes, I've got plenty of more important things to worry about: Will my son arrive safely at the Atlanta airport this evening? Will we have to move in order to provide our family with financial stability again? Can anyone really get justice in this world?  How come people think it's okay that millions of Americans do not have health care and that millions are without jobs?

Oh, and why am I using this curling ribbon, anyway? Shouldn't I use something that's recyclable? Or save paper and not wrap the presents at all?

But it's the sticker glued to the curling ribbon that seems to have unglued me for a moment. Amazing.

Citizens' Rights to Bear Tomatoes

So....people are free to bring guns to events in which the President of the United States appears, but their rights to carry tomatoes are abridged by a local grocery store! A Costco store in Utah took its tomatoes off the shelves because Sarah Palin was appearing at an event in town and because some nut had thrown tomatoes at her when she appeared at the Mall of America. (He missed and hit a police officer, instead.)

Wow. Can this story really be true?

The Comfort of Cats

The semester is over at the community college where I tutor part-time, and now I'm home with the cats.  How can one be stressed with cats around? At the left is Persephone, who keeps me company in my study. She sleeps in here because she is the sweet cat the other two cats dominate; in the study she gets her own chair and cushion and a spot on top of boxes full of material for one of my projects. And when I'm here she has me all to herself. Persephone will crawl up on the desk and rest her chin and paws on my right arm as I type on the keyboard.

Below are the uber-cats of the house, the ones who fight for domination, but Odyssey, the oldest cat in the house, always wins. Odyssey is on the recliner, sleeping beside the partially-crocheted work of my daughter. Pluto has the chair. Both sit in the livingroom, cozily purring near the fireplace.

As long as we have our pets, the world is a little warmer place.

Dashed American Dreams

Today my husband, a highly competent and reliable professional, joined the ranks of the unemployed. He signs up for unemployment benefits tomorrow, having arrived at the local unemployment office too late in the afternoon today (mid-afternoon) to make it to the head of the line. The unemployment office in this county is evidently doing a booming business. I have been under-employed for some time--mostly out of choice for personal and family reasons--but I am now applying for full-time jobs so as to more adequately support my family in this difficult time.

We have become a part of the depressing stream of statistics one reads about in newspapers and on blogs.  In her article at the Huffington Post, Elizabeth Warren, Chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel, lays out some of those shocking statistics:

• "One in five Americans is unemployed, underemployed, or just plain out of work."
• "One in nine families can't make the minimum payment on their credit cards."
• "One in eight mortgages is in default or foreclosure."
• "One in eight Americans is on foodstamps."
• "More than 120,000 families are filing for bankruptcy each month."
• "The economic crisis has wiped more than $5 trillion from pensions and savings....and threatens to put ten million homeowners out on the street."

The middle class is suffering while Wall Street and bankers took handouts from the government (paid from our pockets) and now are making money once again, paying back the debt they borrowed and acting as if they are now free from any responsibility for the economic crisis.

My family is doing better than many Americans in our situation. We began taking care of financial debt as soon as the economy began to tank and started economizing around our household. We had long-term financial plans in place years ago--but as two adults who are unemployed and underemployed with two college-aged children, we now are facing the possibility of those financial plans failing. Oh, yeah, and what about health care? As Republicans unite to stall the health care debate, Americans are losing their access to adequate health care as they lose their jobs.

There is every reason to believe that we will recover, that my husband will be employed again and that I will find an interesting and challenging full-time job when our last child goes off to college. But this is not a given. I work with young people just out of college who are having a very difficult time finding full-time work in their chosen professions. One young woman, a psychology major and a recent graduate of an excellent liberal arts college, has applied for jobs ranging from holiday retail staff to parole officer. She sends out two to four applications every week while holding down a part-time job that offers no benefits. Other college-educated people with whom I work cobble together two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet.  And we see more and more of the recently laid off on our college campus, anxious to update skills in order to be more competitive in a distressfully diminished job market.

Sitting here, now, at this keyboard, I can count my blessings....as I have been trying to do since last week, but I also have a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, that hollow feeling of anxiety that whispers, "What if?  What if one of you gets really ill? What if things don't work out the way you hope?" The economic news does not inspire confidence. We've been without jobs before, but we were younger, and the economy was better. As Elizabeth Warren notes:

Going to college and finding a good job no longer guarantee economic safety. Paying for a child's education and setting aside enough for a decent retirement have become distant dreams. Tens of millions of once-secure middle class families now live paycheck to paycheck, watching as their debts pile up and worrying about whether a pink slip or a bad diagnosis will send them hurtling over an economic cliff.

And now....back to composing that cover letter and updating my vita.

The Evil of Praying for Evil

Anyone who has never been treated unfairly lives a very charmed life. Can such a person exist? Perhaps. But most of us have encountered, numerous times, situations or people that caused us pain or injury unnecessarily, unfairly, or deliberately meanly. So we can sympathize with those who wish bad things to happen to venal people who initiate, nudge, or incite the harm that befalls others. Been there, done that, here's the souvenir. But we also suspect that such wishing does not emerge from our better nature; it crawls up from the primordial mud with the animal that snarls "kill or be killed." Our more deliberative pre-frontal cortex puts on the brakes and "gather[s] a more judicious 'big picture'. . . .  and thereby exert[s] executive control over behavior." The primitive brain has its place and its uses, but we usually realize, after some reflection, that wishing for evil to befall others is fraught with more danger to ourselves than to the one whom we think deserves the curse. We all know people who fall into the pit of bitterness and blame and learn to love the smell of their own excrement.

And that's the stench I catch a whiff of when I read about people praying for the death of President Obama.  These people aren't primitives raised by wolves and thus taught to tear at the flesh of their victims; they're leaders of Christian churches. Southern Baptist pastor Wiley Drake is just such a leader, and a former vice-president of the Southern Baptist Convention. He invokes Psalm 109 in his prayers that God kill President Obama: "May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow. May his children be wandering beggars; may they be driven from their homes."

Okay, this goes beyond wanting mean people to get their comeuppance. The fact that the verses appear in the Bible is no excuse to be muttering them like curses toward the President of the United States--or anyone, for that matter. What kind of person prays for evil to happen to the children of political opponents? Someone listening to his basal ganglia and not his pre-frontal cortex. The thing about religious texts is that they're something like the human brain; they contain all that's human in us, from the first howling of the wronged that wants revenge to the ecstatic poetry of the mystic who realizes the connectedness of all things and the frailty of all humans.  To read the texts as if they are recipes is to court disaster. Once these haters pray for the death of one enemy, will they stop there, especially if that prayer seems to be successful? Won't they think, "hey, this is better than pulling the trigger myself, getting God to do it for me" (albeit through some nutcase like the abortion opponent who shot and killed Dr. Tiller)?  And then they'll go on to the next person they've labeled the "enemy." (And anyone want to guess what really drives this hatred of Barack Obama?)

So for all those people with bumper stickers that say "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8"--Evolve, People!

"Because He Cannot Cry"

This morning I read an article about a young man who was injured in an automobile accident when he was twenty years old. He has been immobilized for twenty-three years and, for twenty of those years, in what doctors thought was a "vegetative state. But doctors discovered three years ago that the man was actually conscious during those years, just unable to communicate that consciousness. What hell that must have been--to have your relatives visit and not be able to communicate your love for them; to have doctors diagnose your condition and not be able to refute them; to hear of a loved one's death and not be able to cry. And, of course, the story will make many people question the "vegetative" diagnosis of other paralyzed patients. However, a PET scan finally revealed that this man's brain was "almost normal," and doctors were finally able to make contact when the man was able to respond by slightly pressing a computer device with his foot.  When the patient later visited his father's grave, he closed his eyes for half an hour because he could not cry.   His physical condition may never improve, but his consciousness is no longer "locked in," unable to communciate.

While many of us have never experienced this kind of physical horror, we may have experienced that "locked-in" feeling when people on the outside label us and, through that labeling, think they understand us. (And people, like those doctors, who label us may also have the power to convince others of their "diagnosis." ) We may be unable to communicate our real feelings because that communication might have negative consequences on us or people we love. We remain stoic and silent for ethical reasons, because the situation that has created the "locked-in" feeling must be contained for the sake of others. Or  perhaps we just feel that to give way to our feelings would be to make us vulnerable in a way we are unable to face. How does one escape such a locked-in situation? Just as this young man did: with the help of someone who loves us or believes in us and with the help of people willing to listen to that person and to re-examine their own pre-conceived ideas. This man's mother continued to believe that her son was conscious, and she continued to press doctors to re-examine the diagnosis and to free her son.  Somehow she knew that her son was locked-in, fully aware but unable to communicate.

Most people can only hope for such a friend.

Being Thankful

In my previous post, I noted a news article that revealed the huge increase in the number of Americans who are going hungry and those who often do not have quite enough food to put on the table. Many other people are without jobs and have little expectation of being hired before holiday decorations are lit in downtowns across America (especially since some of those lights came on right after Halloween). Many of us have circumstances that cause us sleepless nights and that bubbly, anxious feeling in one's chest that seems to seep from one's pores and to fill the air one breathes. It's a hard time of the year for many people. Oh, yes, some seem immune from life's vicissitudes, but most have had that feeling at one or another time in their lives. And it's here, in the middle of that breath-catching moment, that it seems to me to be the most important time to be thankful. That's when it counts the most--not when one is sitting on top of the world, satiated, but when one is confronted with situations that seem to suck the air right out of the room. For I believe that thankfulness can help inflate one's lungs for that next, more hopeful breath.

I've been in such situations several times during my fifty-two-next-week years of living. Sometimes those situations were of my own blundering; at other times they were caused by the simple unfairness of life--the luck of the draw--or the callousness of others.  While I was never in great danger of starving, I do recall tough times in the first years of our marriage while my husband and I were struggling students.  During one particular rough spot, we sold my gold high-school ring to buy groceries. What we could have been thankful for then, however, is that if we hadn't had the money from that sale, we could have turned to family and friends, hands out, and had those hands filled--or an invitation to belly up to a full table.

And if family or friends aren't available--for whatever reason, death, disease, abandonment, distance--there is always the sunrise or the sunset or the smile on a stranger's face for which we can be thankful. That moment of thankfulness can be enough to produce the first oxygen-laden breath after disaster, a breath that just might allow us to think more clearly in order to navigate the maze of despair.

It's not easy.

But it's easier if you have a friend to show you the way. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry that seems to do just that, sent to me by my friend Christine (Chris): Listen to and read Berry's poem "XI," here.


My friend likes best these lines:
"They came eager
to their feed, and he who felt
their hunger was by their feeding
eased."

I love those, too, as well as these, which speak especially to me:
"Was this his stubbornness or bravado?
No. Only an ordinary act
of profoundest intimacy in a day
that might have been better."

"The South still lags" and Other Fun Facts

Note: I have rewritten this first paragraph since I first published this post. Saturday, Nov. 21, 2009
This post is not about me. It's about what's sorry about the South, where more than six generations of my ancestors have lived. I've found myself defending the South lately, first in a conversation while on vacation, with a woman in northern California; then in response to a blog post by Kevin Drum, whose blog I read often; then to a friend who was describing what some of her friends in California say or wonder about the South. But today I'm complaining, too, about the inequities of the South.

Take salaries, for example. Over ten years ago, I taught part-time at a community college in Duluth, Minnesota. My pay? $3500 per course per quarter. Fifteen years later, adjuncts at the community college here in Georgia where I tutor part-time make $2100 per course per semester. Adjuncts at the community college in Killeen, Texas, made $1550 per course per semester when I was teaching there in 2004-2007. I have taught full-time at universities, and when I was full-time, I was a voice for adjuncts and their pay. But my voice didn't make a difference.

And now, just a few minutes ago, I read that the United Health Foundation has published its results on the healthiest and unhealthiest states in the United States. Big surprise what states are the unhealthiest. The bottom 12?

• Texas
• Arkansas
• Kentucky
• West Virginia
• Georgia
• Tennesee
• Nevada
• South Carolina
• Louisiana
• Alabama
• Oklahoma
• Mississippi

The healthiest state in the country? Vermont. Oh, and guess what, health care has something to do with that:

[E]very pediatrician in Vermont accepts Medicaid and the benefits extend to families who earn up to 300% of the poverty line.

The New England states evidently should be the role model for slacker states:

New England in general sets a benchmark for the country, the report found. All six New England states are in the top 10. These states have favorable demographics and an excellent public health infrastructure, including a large number of doctors per capita.

Eight of the ten states on the bottom of the rankings list are in the South:

In general, residents of these states are more likely to be smokers or to be obese, the report found. They also have worse health insurance coverage, fewer physicians per capita and live in areas with high violent crime and more child poverty.

Oh, and the article does report that 96% of Vermonters are Caucasian and "that health outcomes can be worse for racial and ethnic populations as well as those with lower incomes and education levels."

I read this article and couldn't help but make connections with this book I'm reading now: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.  Why does the South lag? Because the rest of the country tends to give up on the South--or what might stand in as a signifier of today's South. After the Civil War, the intransigent racism of the South led to laws that essentially re-enslaved African-Americans. How did the North respond? Well, eventually by giving up on the South until the South rose up again in the form of--no, not Johnny Reb, but the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and all those other heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson  "legitimized the contemptuous attitudes of whites," especially those whites who held power in the South, and that "new consensus

marked an extraordinary turning point in the political evolution of the nation. Thousands of northern whites had fought not because of their fondness or empathy for African Americans but because the principles of the Declaration of Independence coupled with American compulsion with honesty demanded it. The abandonment of that principle, and embrace of an obviously false mythology of citizenship for black Americans, brought an end to the concept that abstract notions of governance by law and morality could always be reconciled with reality. It marked a new level of unvarnished modern cynicism in American political dialogue. And it established a pattern over the ensuing years in which almost any rationalization was sufficient to excuse the most severe abuses of African Americans. (Blackmon, p. 110-111)

I see this same betrayal today in our political discourse--oh, please, don't think I'm equating health care with the enslavement of millions of African-Americans. This is a comparison, not an equation. But just note the many politicians--not all of whom are from the South!-- who claim that we have the best healthcare system in the world. Who claim that every citizen has adequate health care. These are the voices of today's metaphorical South--it's not necessarily a region but a state of mind, a state of mind that condemns a vast portion of the nation's citizens to poor resources because of its slavish faithfulness to an ideology.

Other findings that represent this "separate but equal" myth? How about how uninsured and insured people are treated when seeking emergency care?

Uninsured patients with traumatic injuries, such as car crashes, falls and gunshot wounds, were almost twice as likely to die in the hospital as similarly injured patients with health insurance, according to a troubling new study.
The findings by Harvard University researchers surprised doctors and health experts who have believed emergency room care was equitable. ("Uninsured ER patients twice as likely to die", Associated Press, 16 Nov., 2009; posted on MSNBC.com)

Or how about this fun fact, that there are more hungry Americans today than there have been "since the government has been keeping track," as reported in The Washington Post :

The data show that dependable access to adequate food has especially deteriorated among families with children. In 2008, nearly 17 million children, or 22.5 percent, lived in households in which food at times was scarce -- 4 million children more than the year before. And the number of youngsters who sometimes were outright hungry rose from nearly 700,000 to almost 1.1 million. ("American's Economic Pains Bring Hunger Pains," Amy Goldstein, The Washington Post, 17 November 2009.

And earlier this week I read how,  in "its analysis of health care legislation,"  Goldman Sachs "concluded that, as far as the bottom line for insurance companies is concerned, the best thing to do is nothing." Do nothing, and stocks rise for stockholders in insurance companies: "The study's authors advise that if no reform is passed, earnings per share would grow an estimated ten percent from 2010 through 2019, and the value of the stock would rise an estimated 59 percent during that time period."  Hurray for rich bastard stockholders! Tough shit for all those millions of Americans who can't get adequate healthcare.

Something is seriously wrong in this country when over a million of Americans go hungry, many millions can't get adequate healthcare, many other millions can't change jobs because they are afraid of losing health care, and millions of workers do not receive pay commensurate with their skills and abilities.

Fun quiz: How many Southern politicians are supporting health care reform and sponsoring bills to decrease hunger and to provide workers with more rights? How do those numbers compare with politicians from other regions of the country?

Where I Am

I began this blog when we moved to metro-Atlanta in mid-2007, as a way to discipline myself to write about what I think, observe, and experience (the writing goes out into cyberspace, and who knows who will be reading--if anyone) and as a disinterested way to keep in touch with folks I love who live elsewhere. By disinterested, I mean impartial, not directed personally toward particular people, but with those people in mind as well as any anonymous reader who might stumble across my blog. (I also write letters, personal, private, non-blog-like, with a little stamp in the upper right-hand corner of the envelope.) My faithful readers are my best friend in California, my husband, my son, and perhaps a niece in Texas who has logged on as one of my "followers"; local readers appear occasionally in comments. Others are lagniappe and I welcome them, though I rarely am aware of their presence beyond the counter on my profile page. But, mainly, my audience is myself, or, as Emily Dickinson wrote, "This is my letter to the world....."

I am a faithful reader of other blogs, blogs written by friends and by more publicly recognized people whose judgments I've come to trust. Occasionally I read the comments on those blogs, and most recently I was struck by a snarky comment left on one blog: Hey, congratulations! [this person wrote] You made Mark Steyn’s “Reader of the Day” portal. Enjoy your 15 minutes of fame before sinking back into the realm of those of whom it is said, 'Never have so many had so much to say to so few.' Oh, yeah, the sneering about having a small audience. Well, what writer has never had a small audience? And, really, who cares. Some of us write because writing helps us organize our thoughts, review our assumptions and conclusions, analyze our interpretation of events. If someone reads what we write--and responds appreciately--wow, cool. Otherwise, we know we're bound for oblivion, but until we go there, we're going to squeak a little along the way.

I have been writing less lately on this blog because I'm in the middle of a huge personal project that I'm recording on my second blog, Left for Texas. Also, I've gotten a little discouraged with what passes as political intelligence (Joe Wilson, Jon Voight, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, that stupid plumber guy--Joe something or other, ugh) in this country and have been content to read other people's posts on health care and the war in Afghanistan, etc. Yes, I want a robust public option in the health care plan; yes, I think Bush dropped the ball in Afghanistan years ago, and now we're reaping the fallout from that [sorry for the mixed metaphor]. Ummmm.... think Global Warming is NOT a hoax and that Barack Obama is NOT a socialist or Hitler or whatever latest moniker the fear-mongers have tried to hang around his neck. Okay, believe that, said that, signed the petition, move on.

What I really want is happiness, happiness for my children, for myself, for my friends, for the world, really. And if I can't have that.....well, a little squeaking before oblivion. That's what I do here. Thank God.

Twice the Size of Texas

I have read several articles over the past several months about the huge gyre of trash in the Pacific Ocean that turns in upon itself, pulling in more and more detritus from our throw-away lives. Today's New York Times had another story on the Pacific garbage patch, "an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas." The idea that not one but several such tremendous toxic turds of human waste exist is really rather difficult to comprehend. And so the smaller evidences of our indifference seem to capture more clearly the monstrous consequences of the myth of convenience: the anecdote of the rainbow runner caught by researchers that had 84 pieces of plastic in its body and the picture in The New York Review of Books of the baby albatross, dead and eviscerated on a beach, revealing the many pieces of plastic its parents had fed it, thinking the colored bits to be food. The picture of that baby bird is more horribly eloquent than anything more that I could write here.

Oh, and this is depressing, too.

Chickens in the City

Today my husband and I attended a two-hour class sponsored by a local community garden project. The subject was on raising chickens in the city, and the teacher was a man who keeps five or so hens in his backyard. Evidently, there are a number of such backyard chicken enterprises throughout our community here on the east side of Atlanta. And the city has ordinances to provide some kind of control on backyard chickens while also not discouraging the practice. The Chickens-in-the-City class is so popular that it usually fills very quickly each time it is offered. One attendee at this morning's class said that she had tried many times to sign up for the class and had been put on a waiting list. On Friday, I received an e-mail from the community garden supervisor advertising that five slots were still available for this class from 10 A.M. to noon, so I quickly signed up online.
 

It was actually quite a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning; temperatures were in the mid-fifties at the beginning of the class, warming to mid-sixties, maybe, by noon. The sky was clear, and beautiful fall leaves stood out brightly against the blue. The teacher had set out a semi-circle of metal folding chairs in his backyard, and his talk was punctuated by the contented clucking of the chickens in the hen yard behind him. (My pleasure in the rather quirky gathering would have been much increased, however, had I not been suffering from a migraine that lingered well into the afternoon and early evening hours.)

I spent my childhood in the country in East Texas, and both my grandmothers raised chickens, as well as my father. My grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat mainly raised leghorns; she had a white henhouse of about one hundred chickens for a while, after she retired from teaching English to middle school children in Barbers Hill (also known as Mont Belvieu), Texas. My grandmother Ruby Scott Benton had a smaller, motley flock of red and brown chickens. And my father chose his chickens by their unique characteristics: Turkens with their featherless necks, Frizzle chickens with upturned feathers, Araucanas that lay blue or green eggs. He chose those chickens just for the delight of his children. But because I grew up in the country, I also knew the downside of raising chickens: snakes and possums in the henhouse, dogs chasing a flock and killing indiscriminately, and first-hand experience with processing chickens for Sunday dinner. I have smelled chicken death and plucked the feathers from many slaughtered chickens. (I never could eat chicken right after participating in processing those chickens for food; it would take about two weeks for me to get that raw, bloody meat smell--as well as the acrid smell of singed feathers--out of my mind.)

When our Chickens-in-the-City teacher turned to the more earthy topics associated with raising chickens, people began shifting a bit uncomfortably in their chairs. He described the raccoon he caught in his henhouse two months ago which he dispatched with a shovel. His Ameraucana hen was so traumatized by the raccoon invasion that she hadn't lain an egg since then; most of the time she crouches under bush cover at the edge of the henyard. The raccoon had killed one hen and left another near death. The chicken owner had to dispatch the second hen in order to diminish her misery, and he described the various ways to kill a chicken. "Can we call you to dispatch our chickens when something like that happens?" one Chickens-in-the-City student asked, plaintively.

I know that I could kill a chicken if I had to, but over the years, I've left the butchering to other people. My husband followed the policy of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat: a chopping block and an ax. My grandmother Benton would take a chicken and break its neck by whirling it around and then snapping the neck with a flick of her wrist. I was the chicken-plucker. Most people in the class, however, seemed to be interested mainly in egg production and in the counter-culture act of owning chickens in the back of their very suburban yards.

While standing in the chicken yard looking at the construction of the teacher's henhouse, my husband and I heard the call of a white-throated sparrow, one of my favorite bird songs, perhaps because the song reminds me of the times we hiked in the cool coniferous forests of Minnesota and heard that bird calling from deep within the woods. Despite the migraine, I felt that the Chickens-in-the-City class had exceeded my expectations.

We're #1! (Unfortunately)

Years ago we lived near Baton Rouge, Louisiana; I taught on the LSU campus while my husband was in graduate school. The area along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans was known as "Cancer Alley," called that because of all the industrial plants along the river and anecdotal evidence of high rates of cancer (unsubstantiated scientifically). Well, now it seems we're in another toxic place: Forbes just named Atlanta the most toxic city in the United States. Forbes based its calculations on 

the number of facilities that reported releasing toxins into the environment, the total pounds of certain toxic chemicals released into the air, water and earth, the days per year that air pollution was above healthy levels, and the total number of Superfund sites.

Actually, by "Atlanta," Forbes means "metro-Atlanta," including Marietta and Sandy Springs. Interestingly enough, cities such as New York don't make the top-ten of Environmentally Toxic Cities in the U.S. A. because of fine subway systems that encourage people to leave their cars at home. Here in Atlanta, we have MARTA, a system in financial difficulties and, according to Wikipedia, "by far the largest United States transit agency not to receive state operational funding." (Yay, Georgia! so progressive!)  The other states in the top ten ETCUSA:

2. Detroit
3. Houston
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia
6. Cleveland
7. Los Angeles
8. Jacksonville, Florida
9. Baltimore
10. Portland

Oh, and in my home state of Texas-- "Houston, we have a problem," an air problem, that is, according to Jim Lester, vice president of the Houston Advanced Research Center.

Facilities in Houston released 88.7 million pounds of toxic chemicals in the environment in 2007, and the former site of a methanol fire and chemical explosion number among the city's 50 Superfund locations. Factories that serve the local petrochemical industry emit benzene and 1-3 butabeine, toxins proven to be particularly harmful, that the area's intense sunlight and lack of wind keep trapped in the local area's atmosphere.

Fortunately, I wasn't planning to return to the Houston area to live, even though five generations of my family preceded me in making the Houston-Baytown-Beaumont area their home. But where to go if Atlanta gets too toxic for my tastes? Well, according to Forbes, here are the top ten LEAST toxic cities (among "the  country's 40 largest metropolitan statistical areas") in which to live:

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. Sacramento, CA
3. Riverside, CA
4. Austin, TX
5. Seattle, WA
6. San Diego, CA
7. Virginia Beach, VA
8. San Jose, CA
9. New York
10. Phoenix, AZ

Oh, well....none of these cities is on my list of dream places to which to retire. So I guess I can still keep dreaming......

A Real Horror Story

Today I opened up the free local newspaper, Dekalb Neighbor, and leafed through it before dropping it in the recycle bin in the kitchen. The Lifestyle section had  a special on locally "haunted" places, and one of the articles was about the Decatur cemetery:

In 1879, Capt. Edward Cox shot and killed Lt. Col. Robert Alston. The two Georgia statesmen and Civil War veterans were in a heated debate over the state's convict labor laws. Alston was trying to put an end to the practice of renting out prisoners for profit while Cox was becoming rich on the corrupt system. Cox was convicted of murder but later pardoned. Now Cox and Alston lie just a few feet apart in the Decatur Cemetery. Cox's grave is one of the stops on the new Decatur Ghost Tour, co-founded by psychic Boo Newell. Since beginning tours in September, Ms. Newell said visitors have reported feeling cold, touched, pulled and breathed on at the grave site. "Cox is still here trying to prove he's the man," Ms. Newell said. "He feels he never got the credit he deserves." (Dekalb Neighbor, 28 October 2009, B:1)

Ms. Newell may be a psychic, but I think she's misread the vibes at this grave site. More likely, Cox is unable to sleep well in his grave because of a guilty conscience. The convict labor laws were instrumental in re-enslaving black Americans after the Civil War, especially in the South. Draconian laws were passed, guaranteed to gather in African-American men who could not pay the fines the courts levied against them, and so their sentences, often for ridiculous non-criminal activities such as "changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight carts without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity--or loud talk--with white women," were lengthened (quote from Douglas A. Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name).

In this way, the white South continued to profit from the unwilling labor of African-Americans. The system was corrupt and brutal--and continued well into the twentieth century until World War II. As Blackmon writes in the introduction to his well-documented history of the re-enslavement of African-Americans,

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina--where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. (Blackmon, p 7-8)

That people were well aware of the moral bankruptcy of forced convict labor is evidenced by the fact that Lt. Col. Alston, who fought in the Civil War, argued so strongly against its use that Captain Cox, profiting from just such a system, refused to hear those arguments, refused to countenance them so fiercely that he killed the man trying to convince him. That the whole society was complicit in the brutal system is illustrated by how long it lasted and by how that society viewed the man who murdered Lt. Col. Alston: Cox was pardoned. In fact, years later, when Lt. Col. Alston's widow died, The New York Times published a derisively dismissive obituary from Atlanta, GA., that not-so-subtly supported the murderous Captain Cox:

DEATH OF MRS. ROBERT A. ALSTON.

ATLANTA, Ga., Sept. 5--Mrs. Robert A. Alston died in Decatur to-night at 6  o'clock. She was the widow of the late Col. Robert A. Alston, who was murdered some years ago in the executive office by Capt. Edward Cox. The shock of her husband's death followed Mrs. Alston through life. Col. Alston was a liberal liver, and on his death left nothing, so that his widow's life has been much trouble. Capt. Cox, who was pardoned by Gov. Stephens, now occupies an official position here. (published September 6, 1884, from The New York Times archives)

No, I don't think that Capt. Cox is still trying to show "he's the man." More probably, he rests badly in his grave because he profited from murdering a man who was in the moral right, the man that the writer of that obituary sneered as being a "liberal liver."

And so here, I praise Captain Robert A. Alston, despite whatever faults he might have had personally, a man who tried to do what was morally right and was killed for it. The re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South after the Civil War is a real horror story that all Southerners should confront--or else sleep fitfully in their graves.

Cleaning the Creek

Early this morning we headed north to the Georgia Mountains, to Holly Creek, near Chatsworth. The Nature Conservancy was sponsoring a clean-up location for Rivers Alive, "Georgia's annual volunteer waterway cleanup event that targets all waterways in the State including streams, rivers, lakes, beaches, and wetlands," according to the organization's website. Our mission was to clean up a certain length of Holly Creek. We left home before dawn and arrived at Holly Creek a little after 9 a.m., along with several other people. I'm not sure how many people participated at our site because as soon as volunteers arrived, we signed the necessary paperwork, chose a partner, got a trash bag, and went to work. A Boy Sout troop of about eight boys arrived, with their adult sponsors, families with young children showed up, as well as couples and folks on their own. We trudged the creek from around 9 a.m. to noon, and by the end of that time, we had collected many bags of garbage, as illustrated in the photo.

The most disgusting items I found were disposable diapers, especially one group stashed in a hole in a bank of the creek near a picnic area. Because the area had recently received rain, these diapers were not only full of human waste; they had also absorbed a large amount of rain water, so they weighed down one's trash bag quite a lot. Our daughter had the most disgusting experience of the group, however. Leaning down to pick up trash, she plunged her gloved hands into the putrefying remains of a small animal. She quickly returned to the rendezvous site to exchange her gloves for a fresh pair. Tom had the most exciting find: a dollar bill.

Despite the disappointment of discovering that such a pristine-looking area was so littered with human garbage, the clean-up was really quite enjoyable. The day was cloudy and very cool, and the woods created a sensory overload in colors and textures. I took photographs, but photographs cannot duplicate the experience or even a true image of the experience. In one shallow area of the creek, fall leaves had massed just below the surface of the water, creating an impressionistic image like a Monet painting. In another part of the creek where water rushed over and around several big rocks, the movement created a low rhythmic sound like distant, hollow drums. Staghorn moss covered slick areas of ground, fantastic mushrooms grew on the wet humus, bright red sweetgum leaves fluttered down from branches to catch on branches still blanketed with green leaves. Holly Creek is a beautiful place. Too bad people pollute such beautiful, soul-restoring places.

A Walk in the Woods

This afternoon we took a walk in the woods in Sweetwater State Park, up the blue-blazed trail through the shade of lollolly pines, American beech, sweetgum, slippery elm, and burr oak. The day was beautiful: clear, bright sunny skies and temperatures in the 50s (Farhenheit). I had tested the temperature at the sunny, south side of the house before we left home and thought the air warmer than it really was. When we arrived at the park, the wind was blowing cold off the water of George Sparks Reservoir. Canada geese, coots, and large white geese waddled across the lawn near the lake where we had parked first, but then we drove up to the interpretive center, re-parked, and began our walk through the woods.

Little streams ran through the woods, and once we stopped to turn over rocks, but Tom didn't find anything of interest beneath them. The blue-blazed trail switchbacked up a bluff and then down to the creek, where the remains of an old mill still stands. This mill was once part of a small creek-side settlement before the Civil War. Slaves made the bricks from which the mill was built, and poor white women did the mill work while their husbands were away fighting the war. In 1864, Union soldiers burned the mill, freed the slaves, and loaded up the women and children for transportation to prison in Kentucky. Many of the people never returned...but evidence of their work remains. The old millchase still channels some of the creek toward the mill, but the water returns to the creek through collapsed stone walls of the millchase before reaching the mill. Some walls of the mill stand, and piles of broken brick peek brightly from beneath their thick cover of earth.

Two weeks ago, a lot of countryside around Sweetwater Creek and the Chattahoochee River was underwater, and some roads still remain closed. The trail to the falls was closed with yellow tape across the trail, but we stepped over some of the yellow tape in order to get a closer look at the creek. There in the rocks that tumble downstream and pile up along the banks, I saw small pieces of brick, probably from the mill, that had tumbled and settled with the rocks. Some of the brick pieces were as round and smooth as the tumbled rock, and could have been taken for rock except that their red color stood out among the quartz, gneiss, and mica schist, as illustrated in the photo at the upper left-hand corner of this post. Given enough time, Mother Nature reclaims all that we have ever dared to call our own.

What We Cannot Deny: The Tangled Web of Ancestry

I’m not sure what, exactly, excites people about exploring their roots. Perhaps it’s an inherent urge to identify tribal connections. Perhaps it reflects an underlying need to establish one’s “worth” and to validate one’s existence. For some people, I’m sure, the excitement is in exploring rather than in identifying the branches of the genealogical tree, the “sussing out” of secrets and hitherto unknown connections. Others, such as I, just love a story; we’re caught up in the drama of individual lives almost submerged by the sands of time. Every person’s genealogical search is different, and nowhere is that difference so stark as the difference between the search conducted by a white person in the United States and that of an African-American. And nowhere is that search so fraught with tension as a search in one’s Southern background. If you’re African-American, you run up against slavery and the unpalatable truth that at one point, you’re going to be searching not through birth and death certificates but through bills of sale and property records. If you’re white, you’re likely to discover that no matter how humble your roots might be, there’s probably a slave-owning ancestor somewhere in your family history. (And if you have a conscience, that discovery is going to make you queasy rather than pleased.)

A recent New York Times article discusses the roots of our First Lady, Michelle Obama, whose family history so tellingly reveals the tangled history of the South. Michelle’s great-great-great-grandparents were a slave girl, Melvinia, and an unknown white man. Melvinia took the surname of her slave owners, Shields. After the death of her original owner in South Carolina, Melvinia found herself in Georgia, one of three slaves owned by her former owner’s daughter and son-in law, Christianne and Henry Shields. This couple had four sons, still at home and ranging in age from 19-24, at about the time Melvinia became pregnant with her first of four children. Whether or not one of those young men or some other young white man visiting the 200-acre farm is the father is unknown. After the Civil War, Melvinia worked as a farm laborer on a farm next to that of one of the sons, Charles Shields, until she eventually moved further west near the Alabama state line.

Melvinia’s child, Dolphus Shields, from whom Michelle Obama is descended, was light-skinned enough almost to pass as white. What some white folks encounter when they search their family roots is a similar ancestor who decided to pass as white and thus was integrated into the white community in the South, the family’s losing in time the knowledge of their slave past.

I was struck, as I read the article in the Times that Melvinia Shields, the eventually emancipated slave, is a sort of African-American opposite to my husband’s great-great-great-grandfather, Paul Cook: black, enslaved, illiterate and great-great-great-grandmother to Michelle Obama; white, wealthy, well-educated, and great-great-great-grandfather to my husband. Born in Rhode Island, Paul Cook was not an original child of the South, but as a participant in the sugar refining industry in Louisiana in the 1800s, he certainly profited from African-American labor. According to his obituary, he settled in New Orleans in 1846, and went into the western produce business until, in 1866, he got involved in the sugar refining business. The history of African-American labor in the cane fields from which that sugar came is not a pretty story. And yet, four generations later, the great-great-great-granddaughter of the slave is First Lady of the United States, and the great-great-great-grandson of the Southern merchant works for a non-profit organization.

As I delve more deeply in the background of the Armstrongs, Nugents, Cooks, Whites, Robbs, Greenes and all the ancillary branches of my husband’s family, as well as my own, I know I will run up against this Southern dilemma: how to discuss—or, rather, WHETHER to discuss the relations between the white ancestors and their black slaves and servants and whether to reveal what we would now identify as bigoted attitudes. If one is honest and true to history, one will confront what one finds and reveal that information in all its tangled glory and infamy.

Further Information: Searching for Slave Ancestors

• Tamie Dehler, “Searching for Slave Ancestors Requires a Strategy, Terre Haute Tribune-Star, 12 January, 2008.
  
• Tony Burroughs, “Commentary: Tracing Michelle Obama’s Roots—and Yours, special to CNN.

Prizes

First, congratulations to Barack Obama for winning the Nobel Peace Prize. We all have a pretty good idea why the Nobel Peace Prize committee awarded him the honor: Obama has changed the tone of the White House by embracing the rest of the world as partners in arms rather than opponents to arm against. This is a good thing. The rest of the world--except the Taliban, Al-qaeda, and the usual fringe voices on the right (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, those people)--think this is a good thing. Republicans who have not forgotten how to be gracious think that's a good thing. That being said, the award of the prize to Barack Obama, whom I support and for whom I voted for President of the United States, reminds me of when my son played Little League baseball one year in Waverly Hall, Georgia.

The person in charge of the Little League teams was a woman who also was going to coach a team. She made sure that she had a chance to see every child's baseball skills; then she chose the best players for her team. My son, who was enthusiastic but not skilled at baseball and who was also a little unconscious at times (looking at the sky, thinking of something else besides the baseball heading his way), ended up on a team of very unskillful players. It was a sad situation. The woman who should have made sure that every team had an equal mixture of skilled and unskilled players was looking out only for herself and a handful of children.

At the end of the season, my son's team had not won one game. (Wait, I think they may have been awarded a game because another team forfeited for some reason.) Anyway, the coaches of the team planned an end-of-season picnic, and we all showed up to discover that each child was receiving a huge trophy. My husband and I couldn't believe it. Sure, we weren't happy that the team suffered from a huge handicap due to the poor choices of the Little League leader; we were sorry our son's team didn't win one game; and we thought it was important to praise the boys for the work they had attempted. But huge trophies? Maybe a small gift or token to illustrate the importance of trying and to encourage the kids not to give up when faced again with such insurmountable odds.

I'm afraid that our son's trophy was a family joke. We told him that we were proud that he had done the best job he could have done but that we didn't think the team's efforts were worth such ostentatious rewards.

I feel a little the same way about our President's award. I'm happy and pleased that important people think our president is doing a good job, that he has begun to lift the dark cloud of hubris and suspicion that the Bush administration created, that he is really pushing for nuclear disarmament, that he is engaging the world in diplomacy. But the peace prize seems a little premature. Oh, I know there is an argument for it. The prize shows support of his efforts. But it's such a big prize. Couldn't a smaller prize have done?

I just hope the Nobel Peace prize doesn't become a family joke and that the President lives up to the expectations it raises. Good luck to him. We should all support him.

Note: I think that James Fallows provides a good analysis of the President's speech this morning in which the President acknowledged the Nobel Peace Prize: "Obama's Nobel Remarks: Four Very Skillful Paragraphs."

I Had a Friend

Last night I received a telephone call from my best friend, who now lives on the coast of far northern California. We met twenty-five years ago--in 1984--when I was teaching at Louisiana State University and she was teaching in a local high school east of Baton Rouge. Although my husband and I moved from Louisiana in 1987, my Louisiana friend and I have been best friends ever since, through highly dramatic times and more peaceful, settled times. For years, I did all the moving, from Louisiana back to Texas, to Minnesota, to Georgia, back to Texas, back to Georgia, while my friend stayed in Louisiana. Now she has moved, and an entire continent separates us.

My friend and I rarely talk on the phone. The only people I frequently call are my mother in Texas and my husband and children for short conversations on the cell phone. For years, I was a prolific writer of letters, and this is how my friend and I kept in touch, as well as how I kept in touch with other friends. The other friends, eventually, quit corresponding, but this friend has remained a faithful correspondent since 1984. We write fewer letters, but we keep in touch by e-mail. Letters are best, I think, but it seems that few people these days are letter writers.

Not too long ago, letter-writing was an art and a blessing. It was how people who loved one another yet who lived far away from one another kept in touch. We have boxes and boxes of letters written by my husband's ancestors and their friends, some going back to the mid-1800s. I have begun going through those letters again and all the ephemera attached to them: the recipe clippings of a grandmother, the postcards of a great-aunt who was epileptic and who collected postcards as a hobby, the valentines collected by another great-aunt, the religious pamphlets and tourist guides someone collected and filed in a drawer somewhere to be discovered again 70-100 years later, the photographs of people long forgotten. I went through these boxes when we first received them in the late 1980s, but the remnants of these once engaged and eager lives filled me with sadness. They reminded me too well of the eventual fate of myself and all that I have ever loved.

Last night, after talking with my friend for a hour or so, I returned to the pile of family records I have here in my study (boxes are stacked elsewhere). In one basket I had placed a number of those memorial booklets provided by funeral homes. The geographic stability of a family can be established by looking at such booklets. The oldest one in this particular collection is dated 1943; it's the memorial record for my husband's great-grandmother, Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (Sr.--one of her daughters had the same name), who was born in 1864 and died in Houston, Texas, in 1943. Next comes the memorial record of Edwin Oscar Cook, a cousin of the family, who was born in New Orleans in 1880 and died in Houston in 1955. Next is the memorial booklet for the great-aunt who was epileptic: Helen Frances Armstrong, born in Houston, Texas, in 1898, and died in Houston in 1962. Finally, the latest memorial booklet is for Mary Ophelia Nugent Armstrong (known as "Mimi" to her family, the daughter of MONA Sr.), born in Houston in 1896, died in Houston in 1986. Every one of these remembrance booklets have the stamp of Geo. H. Lewis & Company or Geo. H. Lewis & Sons. From 1943 to 1986, George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors have prepared the final services for the elderly members of my husband's family. The company still exists in Houston, Texas: George H. Lewis and Sons Funeral Directors.

Having in her possession when she died most of the family materials, Mimi lived all her life in Houston, with summers spent in Boulder, Colorado, and she taught first grade in Houston for 30 years. As old as she was when she died, a number of friends and family remained to write their signatures under the "Relatives and Friends" column of the remembrance album--sixty of them, including me, an in-law. Edwin O. Cook, however, the cousin who died 350 miles from his New Orleans home, at the age of 75, has no signatures of friends left behind--though the booklet does contain a typed list of eleven floral remembrances. Finally, we outlive every friendship, and some distant relative sends chrysanthemums to the funeral home, or, these days, donates to the American Cancer Society.

Going through these old papers, photographs, and memorials can be depressing as one remembers that they represent people who once lived and loved. Years ago I read Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford and was struck by the profound insight revealed by the main character, Miss Mary Smith, when she and her elderly friend Miss Matty sit down one evening to read old letters:

I never knew what sad work the reading of old-letters was before that evening, though I could hardly tell why. The letters were as happy as letters could be - at least those early letters were. There was in them a vivid and intense sense of the present time, which seemed so strong and full, as if it could never pass away, and as if the warm, living hearts that so expressed themselves could never die, and be as nothing to the sunny earth. I should have felt less melancholy, I believe, if the letters had been more so.

Yes, the reading of old letters is a sad enterprise, as the letter writers rise up before us as apparitions of their corporeal selves. And it seems very appropriate, as I was having these thoughts by going through old letters, that this morning I opened a book I've been reading, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and encountered this poem by Buson:

Mourning for Hokuju Rosen


You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you so far away?

Thinking of you I go to the hillside and wander.
The hillside--why is it so saddening?

Yellow of dandelions, the shepherd's purse blooming white.
There's no one to look at them.

A pheasant calls and calls without stopping.
I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.

Smoke rises, the west wind blowing so hard
in the fields of bamboo grass and sedge
it doesn't linger.

I had a friend. We lived with a river between us.
Not even the birds call out hororo.

You left in the morning. Tonight my heart is in a thousand pieces.
Why are you far away?

By the image of Amida I light no candle
and offer no flowers. I sit here alone,
my heart heavy, filled with gratitude.

Gratitude. Yes. I have still a friend. We live with a continent between us.

New Blog--Left for Texas

I have started another blog on which I will post historical information. Most of the posts will be about my husband's family, from whom we have inherited many boxes of letters and ephemera, but I will occasionally include information about the history and times of my own family. I have begun the blog with descriptions of some of my husband's ancestors and will include images of advertising, copies of family photographs and other clippings that the family gathered over the years. That blog is called Left for Texas. At this point the blog is open to any reader. Feel free to visit it!

Oops! I just repaired the link to my new blog. I had inadvertently mistyped the link.

Cozy, Cozy, Cozy

Matthew Yglesias links to a Frank Rich column today in The New York Times, in which Rich describes the lobbyists' cozying up to Democrats. Those of us who cheered--especially those of us who care a lot about health care reform--when Barack Obama promised in his inaugural address that under his leadership Washington would "do our business in the light of day" are cheering less these days as it seems as if business is being conducted as usual in Washington. Just a few highlights from the Rich column:

• Heather Podesta, the high-profile lobbyist for "health care players like Eli Lilly, HealthSouth and Cigna"? She is married to "Tony Podesta, the brother of John Podesta, the Clinton White House chief of staff who ran the Obama transition."
  
  
• How do these close connections to the White House work out for the lobbying duo? Tony's "business was up 57 percent from last year in the first six months of 2009. Heather Podesta’s was up 65 percent."
  
  
• During the last administration, the place to meet, greet, and influence was Jack Abramoff's restaurant Signatures. These days, it's Ristorante Tosca, where the likes of Heather Podesta (lobbying against health reform for big healthcare companies) and Steve Elmendorf (former chief of staff for Dick Gephart now lobbying for financial clients such as Citigroup and Goldman Sachs) meet their clients and government officials they hope to influence.
  
  
• "[I]n early August...the UnitedHealth Group and its fellow insurance giants had already quietly rounded up moderate Democrats in the House to block any public health care option that would compete with them for business." Those lobbyists whose clients include UnitedHealth Group? Steven Elmendorf (Elmendorf Strategies), Tom Daschle (ummm, not officially a lobbyist, but a "special policy advisor"...), and "a former chief of staff to Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader."
  
  
• Of course, the Republicans may be out of power, but they're just as easily influenced as those in power. Eric Cantor and John Boehner "are big recipients of UnitedHealth campaign cash." And, of course, there's John Ensign (R-Nevada), who used his connections to provide clients for his mistress's husband--a special category of lobbyist influence all of its own.

But then, we knew that...and those of us who voted for Barack Obama hoped that he would deliver on his promise. As Frank Rich says, "If the Olympic committee has the audacity to stand up to a lobbyist as powerful as the president of the United States, then surely the president of the United States can stand up to the powerful interests angling to defeat his promise of reform."

Quotations from Frank Rich's op-ed column, "The Rabbit Ragu Democrats," The New York Times, 3 October 2009.

See also: Thomas Franks' column in The Wall Street Journal, "Obama and the K Street Set," 30 September 2009.

Haiku for an early-fall day

This morning glory
blooming with chrysanthemums--
Summer waves goodbye.

Living Haiku

Discouraged by the extreme rhetoric of mainstream Republicans as well as those I know who are on the far right, I haven't been writing much on my blog lately. Other bloggers address the ridiculous claims of the far-right better than I do, and I don't just want to repeat what I read. Also, I have returned to Facebook, having deleted the "friend" who had the most vile posts about Barack Obama and refusing to admit any new "friends" who admit to far-right views. I have enough of those friends already, family members who compare Barack Obama to Hugo Chavez, who think Obama is some kind of far-leftist and who claim they want the government totally out of their lives (no Medicare or Medicaid, no public schools, etc.), yet who had nothing to say when the Bush Administration increased presidential power, suspended habeas corpus for terrorist suspects (even American citizens), and provided unprecedented power to the NSA to eavesdrop on American citizens.

To maintain my peace of mind, I've decided to write at least one haiku every day that emerges from something I experienced or observed during the day. This is what I post to my Facebook status. Several years ago, I studied haiku in conjunction with teaching world literature classes at a university in Georgia and as a consequence, also, of having read and thoroughly enjoyed the travel sketches of Japan's most famous haiku poet: Matsuo Basho. I've been amazed by how writing haiku has influenced my perspective. Committed to writing one haiku a day, of condensing a mood or image or experience into seventeen syllables (I'm sticking to that traditional syllabic limitation although I don't believe it's a requirement), I pay more attention to small details, especially details of nature. As R. H. Blyth writes in his classic book on haiku,

Haiku is concerned with the ordinary, the everyday. It has nothing to do with exceptional things, evenings of extraordinary magnificence and splendour. It turns inwards, toward the infinitely small and subtle, not to the vast and sublime.

To pay attention and to recognize the significance of these subtle details of life twenty-four hours a day is "the Way of Haiku," says Blyth. Well, I can't claim to be totally awake to the "real nature of things" all day long, but I am paying more attention. And so, when I first saw a caterpillar on the parsley in my Victory Garden, I began looking closer and found several other caterpillars in various instar stages, the stages between molts--of the beautiful black swallowtail butterfly.

There on the parsley
a black swallowtail larva
becoming itself.

And then I began looking closer at other plants and discovered orange and black caterpillars--again, different instars--of Gulf Fritillaries, eating the leaves of the passion vine on our mailbox. Being aware and open to the small details of nature puts into perspective the pettiness of politics and the unreasonableness of those who demonize others with views (or ethnicity or lifestyle) different from their own.