Quote of the Day--Andrew Bacevich

I listen to Andrew Bacevich, graduate of West Point, retired army Colonel, and professor of international relations at Boston University, who, according to Wikipedia, has described himself as a "Catholic conservative," and I think that he makes so much sense that I must be conservative, too. And that's because Bacevich is an old-fashioned conservative: prudent, moral, reasonable. Here is a quotation from a short essay of Bacevich's that has been posted on Salon as well as TomDispatch:

When it comes to avoiding the repetition of sin, nothing works like abject contrition. We should, therefore, tell the people of Cuba that we are sorry for having made such a hash of U.S.-Cuban relations for so long. President Obama should speak on our behalf in asking the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for forgiveness. He should express our deep collective regret to Iranians and Afghans for what past U.S. interventionism has wrought.

The United States should do these things without any expectations of reciprocity. Regardless of what U.S. officials may say or do, Castro won't fess up to having made his own share of mistakes. The Japanese won't liken Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor and call it a wash. Iran's mullahs and Afghanistan's jihadists won't be offering to a chastened Washington to let bygones be bygones.

No, we apologize to them, but for our own good -- to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century. (Andrew J. Bacevich, "Farewell to the American Century," posted on Salon, Wednesday, April 29, 2009.)

You can watch a YouTube clip of Bacevich covering a shorter version of this essay here: "Andrew Bacevich: "Farewell, the American Century." Months ago I listened to an interview that Terry Gross, the host of NPR's Fresh Air, did with Bacevich, and I was impressed then. Bacevich fought in the Vietnam War and remained in the army until the early 1990s. His son, and namesake, died as a soldier in Iraq, in May 2007. His book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, is now out in paperback.

Final Bit of Poetry for Poetry Month

For the past few years, I've written poems and created handmade valentines for a few friends every year for Valentine's day. These are my "occasional poems," and I don't attempt to have them published. Here I'll record a sonnet I wrote in 2004, which I mailed with a handmade valentine. Here's to Poetry Month (also, the month of the Full Pink Moon, the Egg Moon, The Full Fish Moon, the Full Sprouting Grass Moon, Sugar Maker Moon, Frog Moon, Moon of the Big Leaves...).

A Sonnet to Craft

Why take the time to make a simple thing,
transforming trash to something more worthwhile,
a decorated box to hold a ring,
a sheet of paper folded in the style
of origami, shaped into a crane,
a symbol of long life, good fortune, peace,
or send a love note high upon a plane
of paper worked with angles, edge, and crease?
For logic tells us craft may be a waste
of time spent better in some other art
aligned with higher standards, finer taste,
as Jesus said to Mary, "that good part."
But what is labeled low, of less amount,
Needs only love to turn to great account.

Anita D-G

Random Thoughts on the Teaching Profession

When we moved to the metro-Atlanta area, I decided not to pursue either a full-time or a part-time teaching position at some local university or college. Oh, yeah, I looked at the position announcements, but after 25 years of teaching--many as a full-time instructor/lecturer or non-tenured assistant professor--I was tired and disenchanted. When I started blogging, I made a decision not to write about work or about the observations that led to my disenchantment. I had sat in too many faculty meeting discussions and read too many articles on how to address the "issue" of part-timers and non-tenured full-time faculty to think I could effect any change. And the bitching of academics gets tiresome pretty quickly.

Now my daughter wants to become a secondary English teacher, a career that engenders less respect than even a full-time lecturer position at a large university.

The general public--that is, people not associated with colleges and universities--do have respect for those who teach in higher education; they often do not understand the tenure structure or the teaching load or the pay. Years ago, when I was a full-time lecturer (with a contract that could be annually renewed, of course) at Texas A&M University, one of my uncles who had only completed high school dropped by to visit. He couldn't tell me enough how proud he was of a niece who was a teacher at a university. I hadn't the heart to tell him that I was an academic migrant worker, that most universities have time limits for their non-tenured faculty: three or four years and then one has to move on to the next post. I think he was a little non-plussed that I rented (a small house on a large ranch, this being Central Texas) and that my home wasn't as fine as his. Years later, a friend of mine at a small university here in Georgia related to me how people's attitudes seemed to change when she was hired as a full-time instructor at the local university. For years she had taught English in high school; she was a well-liked teacher. However, once she started teaching at the university, people who had condescended to her before (while she was teaching their children!) no longer did so; they were impressed with her new position.

My friend and I had attained master's degrees; hers was in education, mine in English. At this university, we had been promoted to the rank of assistant professor, a non-tenured position with no time limit beyond which our contracts could be renewed. She directed a lab and later a writing center; I taught four classes each semester, some semesters adult re-entry classes in the evenings, and directed a summer language program for Japanese students from Kiryu, Japan. We worked hard. But I don't think we worked any harder than good teachers in high schools throughout the country. Although my sisters, who teach middle-school and high-school students in Texas, had higher salaries than I, I thought that the respect I received teaching at a university, at whatever rank, somehow compensated for the lower pay. (Also, I didn't have to meet with parents or deal with the bureaucracy associated with public school teaching in this country.) Perhaps I was delusional.

I think public education would be improved in this country if teachers in public schools could be given the same respect, with better pay, as that bestowed on university professors. God knows, the respect that some university professors receive far outstrips their production and actual performance. Teachers of secondary education, particularly, should be required to attain at least a master's degree in their teaching subject, and they should be amply compensated.

I'm not sure how to increase respect for public school teaching, but attitudes are learned. One of my co-workers from Nigeria told me that in his country, "professors are like gods." He added, "They never have to carry their books to class because a student is always there to perform these kinds of duties for them."

Treating teachers like gods can lead to a different set of problems, but certainly, teachers do deserve more respect in this country. It just seems so surreal to me that the financiers who picked our pockets--and continue to do so--receive so much more respect and obscenely more pay than the teacher who taught them how to read and write, than the teacher who taught them how to appreciate the art they hang on their walls, or the teacher who taught them the second or third language they haltingly--or fluently--speak when they travel. I'm not against people being amply and generously recompensed for their high-stress, high-profile jobs. I just think teachers deserve more respect and more compensation, too.

A Picture is Worth.....

Slate has a jaw-dropping graphic illustrating nationwide losses in employment since 2006. See this "interactive map of vanishing employment across the country" here:"When Did Your County's Jobs Disappear?," Chris Wilson, posted April 15, 2009. I watched the bright happy blue dot of Gwinnett County, Georgia, with its 15,085 jobs gained between January 2006 and January 2007, become an angry exploding red dot, with 24,885 jobs lost between January 2007 and January 2008.

Victory Garden Update

Just a week ago, the house would get chilly enough for the heat to be turned on; now warm weather has settled here, and seeds are sprouting. This evening, I'll be planting basil seeds, but I noticed today a small one-inch basil plant that reseeded from last year's crop. The Swiss chard (Bright Lights) is up--hope the weather won't get too warm before we can harvest the leaves. The cilantro that re-seeded from last year's crop is going to flower, as is the arugula that over-wintered in the bed next to the house. The red stems of beets are bright in a bed next to our front steps and near the red geranium I planted in a hollow piece of wood. The tomatoes we planted earliest are flowering, and various mixes of leafy plants have sprouted. While photographing the garden, I nibbled on a few tasty leaves of arugula sprouted from seed this spring.

I have a lot more work to do in our Victory Garden. We're going to try to fashion a border to surround the beds--out of bamboo that a neighbor thinned from a patch in his backyard. Tom and I plan to cut the bamboo in one-foot pieces, nail pieces to two-feet strips of bamboo, and then submerge each two-foot strip of bamboo pieces six inches into the soil around the Victory Garden. I'll try to remember to take photos of this process and will post later--provided we're successful with our plan! Although I won't get all this done before the end of the growing season, I plan to create more beds in the front lawn: one along the sidewalk for low-growing herbs and flowers, and another bed between the two trees, perhaps for taller flowers, such as zinnias. Anyway, it's all a work in progress. The last photo is a picture of our home, pre-Victory Garden.

Sunny April Day

Today was a beautiful sunny day here in this Southern state where native son Newt Gingrich can't quite decide whether or not waterboarding is torture--even though our country has prosecuted people for waterboarding prisoners. But today I weeded my worries away--or at least chopped them down for a brief time--in our backyard, where I am trying to get violets to take over most of the shady spaces, along with beds of native plants that I've introduced. Tom chopped wood--a task he actually likes; he told a neighbor over our back fence that he chops wood instead of getting a gym membership. Later, Tom, M-M, and I walked about a mile and a half to a local Mexican "cantina", where we had the best food we've had at any Mexican restaurant here.

We began our walk back home a few minutes before 8 p.m. and stopped at the local community garden on the way, where I took photos of the chickens, the roots of a downed tree, and some of the recently-created garden art.

Unfortunately, our best camera is broken, and the camera I had is really best for close snapshots. Also, the light was fading. Here are a few photos, all except the cat at the window taken at the community garden. (M-M took the picture of Persephone looking out into our neighbor's sunny yard.) Click on photos for a larger view.

Protect Yourself Against Swine Flu

Although I've kept this blog open to the public, my main purposes have been rather personal: to examine, articulate, and share my own thoughts about local, national, and world-wide events; to provide a record of my responses (and links to those of others whom I admire) to events and personal experiences; and to serve as a role model for my children, who are young adults. I want them to be engaged in the world, to care about what their leaders do, to exert whatever influence they can on their elected officials, and to do good in the world, as corny as that sounds. Now I'm hoping my son, who lives in Texas, will read this post, because I'm copying advice on how to protect oneself against swine flu, which has spread beyond Mexico:

1. Sanitize -- i.e. Wash Your Hands Frequently. It may sound obvious, but hand-washing with soap and water for around 20 seconds is the single best thing you can do (if you're going to go out into the world and interact with other human beings). The CDC estimates that 80 percent of all infections are spread by hands. If you can't wash your hands regularly, try hand-sanitizers with 60 percent alcohol content.

2. Avoid -- i.e. Engage in Social Distancing." That's the fancy term for staying away from other people if you're sick or if you're concerned that they may be infected. It may not be especially practical when you have to go to, say, work, but experts believe it's worth repeating: Isolation and avoidance reduce your chances of getting infected or infecting others.

(Researchers in the UK - mentioned above and sponsored by a common cold remedy - found that 99 per cent of commuters suffer at least one cold per winter. By contrast, 58 per cent of peole who work from home and 88 per cent of those who walk to work caught a cold last winter).

3. Be Alert -- i.e. Recognize the Symptoms and Get Help. Swine flu symptoms are similar to regular flu: Fever, body aches, sore throat, cough, runny nose, vomiting, diarrhea, and lethargy. If you don't feel well, seek medical attention. So far, it's important to note, this swine flu is treatable (and absolutely survivable). It's resistant to two of four antiviral drugs approved for combating the flu: Symmetrel and Flumadine. But two newer antivirals - Tamiflu and Relenza - appear to work. (from Ben Sherwood's post "Swine Flu Survival: Three Simple Ways to Protect Yourself," on The Huffington Post, April 26, 2009)

Confession: Tears of a Fool

Reading Nora Ephron's criticism of Susan Boyle's singing, Meghan O'Rourke's cynicism of the public's response, and less well-known (but no less thoughtful) bloggers' examinations of the reasons so many people seem moved to tears by Boyle's performance, I began to think about my own tears: What makes me cry? My tear-threshold is very, very low, I'm afraid.

One day this week, one of my co-workers asked me if I watch American Idol. "No," I replied, "I don't like to see people humiliated." I could have added that neither do I like to see people being bullied. So the tears that filled my eyes when I watched a clip of Susan Boyle singing were for the woman's triumph over those rolled eyes and raised eyebrows and for how effortlessly those first notes slipped from Boyle's throat. And, I'm sorry to say, suspecting that the clip was probably edited to manipulate my emotions would make no difference in my physical response. I've always cried too easily, and, as a person who dislikes sentimentality, this over-production of my tear ducts has long been a burden.

When I was young, family members made fun of my tears. At the conclusion of any television show that evoked emotion--lovers being re-united, protagonists overcoming great odds, sympathetic characters dying, animals saving the lives of their owners--all eyes in the room would swivel to me. I seemed to be the family's emotional barometer. My father and younger brother would make sniffling noises and wipe their hands over their eyes--cheerful teasing, they would say, not mockery. I would try not to cry--pressing my lips together, blinking my eyelids, looking up at the ceiling to keep any moisture from falling down my cheeks, or ducking my head to obscure my face. To no avail. "Anita's crying!" someone would say, and my weakness would be revealed.

Over the years, I grew to despise my tears and to control any tears that arose out of my own hurt. But I could not control my sympathetic and empathetic tears, and, to my horror, I could not control how little it took to make me cry: a commercial about an adult son calling his mother on Mother's Day, a story of a missing animal re-united with its owner, the longing of WALL-E the robot as he observed humans in a video-taped musical clasping hands. I really am a lover of reason. For years I taught students to recognize the elements of persuasion and the language of manipulation. But these damn tears betray the softest, mushiest heart I sometimes wish I could triple-lock in steel.

When my husband and I were in graduate school, we went to a showing of Bladerunner. At the end of the film, I could barely walk because I was so overcome with emotion. Leaning on my husband, I managed to make it to our car, where I collapsed in the fog of the dimly-lit parking lot and burst into tears, my chest heaving. I was shocked by the intensity of my feelings. What set me off? My identifying with the replicants' desire for freedom from their human creators and masters. The desire of the humanoid Roy Batter (Rutger Hauer) to confess the horrors of what he had perpetrated; Batter's love for the replicant Pris; his last act in saving the human hired to destroy him (Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard); and Batter's final poetic words, illustrating his appreciation for beauty and his understanding of the tragic brevity of human life, were my undoing:

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhausen Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

That scene and those words played over and over in my head. It's a great scene played by a great actor. But couldn't I have appreciated it just as well with dry eyes?

Today at work I was reading Part IX [Funeral Blues] of W. H. Auden's "Twelve Songs":

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

Uh, huh, I had to duck my head over the Norton Anthology of Poetry to hide the tears in my eyes. And, you've probably guessed, I recalled that scene in Four Weddings and a Funeral when Matthew (John Hannah) quotes these four stanzas at the funeral of his lover Gareth (Simon Callow). (And, my God, my eyes water even now--in the middle of this analytical examination of my own tears--when I review the beautiful despair of those lines!)

When I was in ninth grade, I first read J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and cried with Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin when Gandalf fell in the Mines of Moria. I loved the book and read it every year for about six years, and each of those six years I cried at that scene, even though I knew Gandalf would return in even a more powerful form. I cried years later when I read the scene to my children as we read the novel together in the evenings. And, yeah, the scene in the movie brings tears to my eyes every time--and, oh, the scene when Baramir (Sean Bean) is killed by the Uruk-hai. Yep, every time. Grief for bravery and betrayal, for loss, for the human condition:

Where is the horse gone? Where is the rider?
Where is the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

from "The Wanderer" (Old English poem)

I am fifty-one years old. I can be tough. (Just ask my kids.) I love argument and reason. One of my favorite philosophers is Seneca; I admire the Stoics. But my tear ducts are Sentimental Sisters, maudlin and mawkish.

"Mama, are you crying?" my daughter asks, as we watch Kiki rescue her friend Tombo and the air fill with celebratory confetti. "Of course, sweetie," I reply, "but ignore it. You know I can't help it."

So let us have our tears, Nora Ephron and Meghan O'Rouke. They will dry soon enough.

Poetry for Poetry Month

For me--as for many people, I'm sure--when the world gets to be too much, I turn to art and craft, to gardening, to everyday pleasures, to remind me of the joys of life. So today, to celebrate Poetry Month before the month is quite over, I'm posting a poem that was rejected in a submission to Atlanta Review. (The editor chose another, titled "Paradise," which was published in the Fall-Winter 2008 edition of the journal.)

Bird Watching

Here in the understory of the sky,
a neighbor’s leaf-blower whines at winter’s mess,
swooshing last year’s wardrobe into discarded piles
while red buds and Bradford pears strut
the street’s runways, their bright couture
radiant on leafless, anorexic branches.
Two blue birds scout a suburban yard,
a cardinal sings endlessly of its success,
the limits of its domesticity.
Persephone the cat dozes in a flowerpot,
her belly cooled by damp soil, black fur
absorbing heat; perhaps she dreams of dark
tunnels, soporific rivers, the furtive sounds of fear,
the smell of death.

High above a robin’s panicked “tut-tut-tut-tut-tut,”
the drum of a downy, a nuthatch’s nasal “he-uh, he-uh,”
the tight new leaf buds of sweetgum,
the drawn-out whinge of jet engines mark
a flight pattern of planes leaving Atlanta,
underbellies flashing silver or blue,
or—sharp eye—an elusive red tail, the flightless borne
on rigid wings, a seasonless migration.
Minutes apart, the bright birds trail sound--
crescendo, sforzato, decrescendo, rest.
In the brief silence a lullaby rises,
the mourning dove’s song, pianissimo, such a small
measure, bracketed by the tinnitus of machines,
calling us back to earth.

Anita

Again, Torture Cannot be Contained

Spencer Ackerman has an article out this evening in The Washington Independent discussing the just-released unclassified version of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. The report demonstrates how the torture began and how its authorization from senior officials led to abuse, including the abuse of prisoners by military personnel at Abu Ghraib:

As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.

Ackerman ends his short article with a quote from Sen. Carl Levin (D-Michigan), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee:

Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.

You can read Spencer Ackerman's article, from which these quotes were taken, here: "Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies," The Washington Independent, posted 4/21/2009, 10:00 p.m.

Spencer Ackerman has also written a short post on his article here: "How the Torture Started."

Earlier this evening, I watched Jon Stewart's clip of people justifying torture (Yes, I usually watch Jon Stewart a day late). Like Ta-Nehisi Coates, I, too, found it difficult to laugh even though I appreciate Stewart's satire. But, as Coates noted, Peggy Noonan's comments on the release of the torture memos were so absurd as to be almost impossible to satirize. Listening to Noonan's so soft, so reasonable voice and watching her sad, sympathetic smile as she said the following words just about made me gag (beginning at 6:09 into Stewart's "We Don't Torture" clip):

It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents [the Obama administration's releasing the torture memos written by the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel] and sending them out to the world and thinking, 'Oh, much good will come of that.' Sometimes in life you want to keep walking... just keep walking. Some of life has to be mysterious.

(hmmmmm... What was that parable told by Jesus about the folks who just kept walking? Yeah, the priest who kept walking....the Levite who kept walking....the Samaritan who stopped...) So, according to Noonan, torture should be mysterious? Something from which we avert our eyes, whistling in the dark?

The critics who justify our "great nation's" use of torture evidently think it's more egregious to send truth out into the world than to send torture out into the world.

For a discussion of a timeline on torture, read "Torture Planning Began in 2001, Senate Report Reveals," by Mark Benjamin, Salon.

Quote of the Day

"There is an enemy within—dormant in our own fragile minds and emerging with paranoid intensity at times of stress. Our only antidote is to insist on evidence. Whenever there are charges against a person or group, we must ask insistently: How do we know? Show me the proof. Show me three times. Show me 10." Johann Hari, "Why the Wicked Witch Isn't Dead: The Timeless Allure of Witch Hunting," Slate, April 20, 2009.

Torture in the 21st Century

For the past few days, I've been reading the "torture memos" and thinking about them. In previous posts, I've discussed Voltaire, who spoke out against torture in 18th-century France when European countries were still torturing citizens in the name of the state and of religion. Voltaire's imagined scenario where the wife of a torturer is first horrified and then interested and then inured to the horror seems so in keeping with the matter-of-fact tone of these 21st-century torture memos. Torture had become banal. The writers of the torture memos would have their readers believe that--totally ignoring moral considerations--torture was necessary, that torture could be targeted, that torture could be quantified, and that torture could be contained. Yet evidence proves otherwise.

Abu Zubaydah's capture in 2002 gave the administration what it needed, someone on whom to practice its newly-minted attitude toward torture. In a speech in April of that year, President Bush's characterization of Zubaydah as "one of [al-Qaeda's] top operatives" was proven incorrect. Dan Coleman, an FBI agent working with the CIA's bin Laden unit, read Zubaydah's secret diary and, along with many others, concluded that the guy was "insane, certifiable, split personality....He was like a travel agent, the guy who booked your flights...He knew very little about real operations, or strategy." (Ron Suskind. The One Percent Doctrine. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006: p. 100). Yet the President and Vice-president continued to claim publicly that Zubaydah was a top operative:

"Around the room a lot of people just rolled their eyes when we heard comments from the White House. I mean, Bush and Cheney knew what we knew about Zubaydah. The guy had psychological issues. He was, in a way, expendable. It was like calling someone who runs a company's in-house travel department the COO [chief operating officer]," said one top CIA official, who attended the 5 p.m. meeting where the issue of Zubaydah came up. (Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine, p. 101)

When Zubaydah was captured, he had suffered serious injuries, but the United States gave him the "'finest medical attention on the planet,' said one CIA official. 'We got him in very good health, so we could start to torture him'" (Suskind, p. 100). Zubaydah was

"stabilized in mid-May [2002], and, thus, ready. An extraordinary moment in the "war on terror" was about to unfold. After months of interdepartmental exchanges over the detainment, interrogation, and prosecution of captives in the "war on terror"--as well as debates over which "debriefing" techniques would work most effectively on al Qaeda--the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered. (Suskind, p. 111).

And the torture memos just released reveal that Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in one month, in August 2002. That's just the waterboarding, not to mention other methods of coercion used against him ("confining him in boxes and slamming him against the wall"--Scott Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure, The New York Times, April 18, 2009). The harsh coercive measures "were ordered by senior Central Intelligence Agency officials despite the belief of interrogators that the prisoner had already told them all he knew... Abu Zubaydah had provided much valuable information under less severe treatment, and the harsher handling produced no breakthroughs, according to one former intelligence officer with direct knowledge of the case" (Shane, "Divisions Arose on Rough Tactics for Qaeda Figure"). Even the most important information he had to provide--"naming Khalid Shaikh Mohammed...as the main organizer of the 9/11 plot" (Shane, "Divisions Arose...")--was given up before these harsher interrogation methods were begun. The United States was to later capture KSM and to waterboard him 183 times in one month, in March 2003. And have we forgotten what happened the following fall at Abu Ghraib? The greenlight for torture trickled down to the military rank and file.

So much for "targeting" and "containing" torture.

The language of the torture memos is extremely dry, matter-of-fact, while describing the most grotesque methods of coercion. The memo of May 30, 2005, claims that "the interrogations at issue here are employed by the CIA only as reasonably deemed necessary to protect against grave threats to the United States interests, a determination that is made at CIA Headquarters, with input from the on-scene interrogation team, pursuant to careful screening procedures that ensure that the techniques will be used as little as possible on as few detainees as possible." Yet the history of the torture used on Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed clearly suggests the real problems with "careful screening procedures" and with using torture "as little as possible." Waterboarding someone 183 times in one month does not meet the standards of "as little as possible." Nor does applying the same method 83 times in one month to a mentally-unbalanced person who had already provided under less coercive means the useful information he had. The fact that these claims can be made so dryly, so surely, so deceptively should make a person with any remaining morality recoil in disgust.

The torture memo of May, 2005, authorizes up to 180 hours of sleep deprivation, in which the detainee is kept standing and shackled, usually with hands tied in front of his body, under his chin. Or the hands can be raised above the head "for no more than two hours." The sleep-deprived detainee is given perhaps a two-to-three-foot diameter space in which to move. The detainee may also be kept nude. The memo confidently claims that keeping the detainee nude "does not involve any sexual abuse or threats of sexual abuse." Again, what's so coldly claimed on the page may not necessarily translate so coolly in the field. One has only to take another look at those pictures taken at Abu Ghraib to see the hollowness of such a claim.

Because the detainee is forced to stand, sleep-deprived and shackled, there is the problem of bodily functions. The lawyerly tone of the memo-writer assures readers that

a detainee undergoing sleep deprivation frequently wears an adult diaper. . . Diapers are checked and changed as needed so that no detainee should be allowed to remain in a soiled diaper, and the detainee's skin condition is monitored. You have informed us that diapers are used solely for sanitary and health reasons and not in order to humiliate the detainee. (p. 13 of Memorandum to John A. Riggs, Senior Deputy General Counsel, CIA; May 30, 2005)

Oh, of course, nudity, dietary manipulation, and sleep deprivation are not meant to humiliate prisoners. No, they are "conditioning techniques...used to put the detainee in a 'baseline' state, and to 'demonstrate to the [detainee] that he has no control over basic human needs" (p. 12, memo of May 30,2005). In other words, they are techniques used to dehumanize prisoners, to turn them into that "haggard, pale, defeated" man, no longer human to his keepers, described by Voltaire over two hundred years ago. The "conditioning" process prepares the way for "coercive" techniques of slamming the prisoner's head into a wall, dousing the prisoner with cold water, forcing the prisoner in stress positions and cramped confinement, and, the pièce de résistance, waterboarding the prisoner.

The memo of May 30, 2005, written by Steven Bradbury, Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, is but one of the torture memos. The one that has been targeted as the most egregious is that one dated August 1, 2002, and written by Jay Bybee, former Assistant Attorney General and now Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can read that memo here: at the Washington Post.

The argument of those who claim that torturing "enemy combatants" or possible Qaeda operatives keeps Americans safe is countered by men in the field, people who are charged with getting information from the enemy. Matthew Alexander [a pseudonym] who "led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006," writes that:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans. (Matthew Alexander, "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," The Washington Post, November 30, 2008.)

Many are calling for the impeachment of Jay Bybee, who flourishes in his after-torture role as the Federal Judge of the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. I concur, even though, as Marty Kaplan suggests, impeaching Bybee may "leave unplumbed the mystery of his moral blindness, and maybe, awfully, ours." Not to impeach him seems even more complicit to me. To put all this behind us when we haven't even fully confronted it doesn't seem right, either. I'm not necessarily advocating prosecution of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but I do wish our collective disgust with their leadership would make Cheney particularly STFU. Cheney continues to slam President Obama publicly. "'I don't think we have much to apologize for,'" he recently told Sean Hannity in an interview. "[Waterboarding] worked,'" he added.[Ummmmm......266 times on two people?!] "'It's been enormously valuable in terms of saving lives and preventing another mass casualty attack on the US.'" The rule of law doesn't count much with these people. Neither does morality.

And now, to a blog roll of other voices on the topic of torture and consequences:

• Scott Horton, "The Torture Tango", posted April 20, 2009; "Impeach Jay Bybee," posted April 20, 2009.
• James Fallows, "Torture from Afar," posted April 20, 2009.
• Hilzoy, "Looking Forward," posted at Washington Monthly, April 20, 2009.
• Elizabeth de la Vega, "Of Black Holes and Radio Silence,", posted April 20, 2009.
• Andrew Sullivan, "They Waterboarded Him 183 Times in One Month," posted April 19, 2009.
• Glenn Greenwald, "Meet the Press and the media's distortions of the prosecutions debate,", posted April 20, 2009.
• And much less prosy than us all is David Crisp, "Tombstone Blues," posted April 20, 2009.

Voltaire's Published Comments on Torture

In his Dictionnaire Philosophique Portatif, which he began to circulate in July, 1764, and published anonymously later that year, Voltaire commented wittily and ironically on issues of morality and society . Here is his entry on torture. Note: "To apply the question" was double-speak for torture at that time.

Torture: The Romans never used torture except on slaves, but then slaves were not regarded as men. Nor does it appear that a judge in the criminal court regards as a fellow human being a man whom they bring to him haggard, pale, defeated, eyes downcast, the beard long and dirty, covered with the vermin that gnawed at him in his cell. He gives himself the pleasure of applying the great and the little torture, in the presence of a doctor who takes his pulse, up to the point where he could be in danger of death, after which they start again; as they say, 'It helps to pass an hour or two.'

The grave magistrate who has bought, for a certain amount of money, the right to carry out these experiments on his fellow-man, will tell his wife at dinner what happened that morning. The first time, Madame was revolted; the second, she acquired a taste for it, for after all women are curious; and then the first thing she says to him when he comes home in his judicial robes is: 'My little heart, haven't you had the question applied to anyone today?' The French, who pass, I do not know why, for a very humane people, are astonished that the English, who have had the inhumanity to take from us the whole of Canada, should have given up the pleasure of applying the question. [Ian Davidson, Voltaire in Exile, New York: Grove Press. 2004. page 116].

Open Letter to President Obama

Update below, links to other voices on the torture memos

Earlier today I sent an e-mail to President Obama, praising him for releasing the "torture memos" and encouraging him to do the right thing and the courageous thing: prosecute those who authorized torture. I then e-mailed a few friends, asking them to send their comments to the president, and included a copy of my own e-mail to the president. At least one friend immediately forwarded my e-mail to other friends and family. Now, a few hours later, I've decided I may as well post a copy of my letter. I don't have much hope that it will actually be placed on the president's desk. However, if we all remain silent, the rest of the world will believe that most Americans were complicit in these unjust actions, that we are hypocrites: accusing other countries of torture, telling other countries not to torture, and then using torture ourselves. Here is my letter:

Dear President Obama,
After eight years of a presidency that increasingly turned my country into something other than the beacon of democracy and freedom it has long touted itself to be, I was very happy to support your presidency. I kept up with the details of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the wire-tapping of American citizens, and with news associated with the incarceration of "enemy combatants." I was extremely distressed to discover that my leaders were authorizing treatment that has long been labeled torture. Today, my support of your presidency has been vindicated by your releasing what has been called the "torture memos," the despicable legal reasoning that led to a great Republic and democracy torturing people it deemed enemies, men who were provided no legal representation, no recourse to face the charges against them.

However, Mr. President, your actions should not stop there. Our country needs to bring to justice those leaders who justified torture, who sanctified such villainous actions, actions that reasoning people all over the world for at least two centuries have recognized as despotic and evil behavior.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire began a campaign against the use of torture in his own country of France, with a case about a man named Jean Calas, a man put to the rack, forced to drink many jugs of water, physically broken, and eventually strangled when he didn't confess to the murder of his own son, a charge for which the state could provide no proof. Calas was considered an enemy of the state because he was Protestant. This torture was done in the name of the "law." Voltaire wrote his friends: "You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof."

He demanded an account, a public airing of this horrible miscarriage of justice. Here in our "enlightened" times, we can do no less. To publish these memos and then refuse to indict the people associated with authorizing such medieval practices is dishonest and irresponsible. The world needs an accounting. We need an accounting. The men who were tortured need an accounting.

Not to demand such an accounting is to tacitly agree with the practices, no matter how many nice public words one expresses in horror. The men who used such dry legal language to justify torture continue to hold important positions in our government and in our universities. They--and anyone else who authorized torture-- should be required to justify their actions publicly, in court. Remember, in doing so, we will be providing for these torture promoters far more justice than they provided for the men they authorized to be tortured.

As a mother of two children, one an adult (who also voted for you in his first participation in a presidential election) and another nearly an adult, I do not want my children to live in a nation unable to address its failures, unable to rectify its mistakes. If powerful leaders cannot be held accountable, the powerless are in a heap of trouble, if not now, then the next time power is unchecked.

Update: For more on the torture memos, click on the links below. Andrew Sullivan's post is particularly thoughtful.

• Andrew Sullivan, "The Bigger Picture,", posted 17 April 2009.
• Kevin Drum, "Defining Torture Down, posted April 16, 2009.
• TMPMuckraker provides information on the torture memo authors, "Who are the Torture Memo Authors?," posted April 17, 2009.

Susan Boyle Again...

Someone has unearthed a millennium celebration CD created ten years ago on which the recently overnight sensation Susan Boyle sang the blues song, "Cry Me a River." What a lovely voice the woman has. Her story, it seems to me, reminds us of the wonderful talent not yet discovered and perhaps never to be discovered among ordinary people around the world. Susan's story is not just a story of taking a chance with one's talent or of never giving up a dream. It's a story about how to live one's passion even when there is no indication that anyone will ever notice or care. Obviously, Susan Boyle continued to sing when no one else was listening. So should we all!

Voltaire and Torture

A few days ago I began reading Ian Davidson's history of the last twenty-five years of the life of Voltaire, Voltaire in Exile. Born in 1694, François Marie Arouet took the name of "Voltaire" when he was 24 years old. Today, he is best known as the author of Candide, the picaresque tale that satirizes religious fanaticism, the excesses of power, and blind optimism in the face of horrible human suffering. The last twenty-five years of his life, Voltaire was in exile from Paris and the French court; it was during those years that he began championing the rights of ordinary people unjustly accused and punished by a state ruled by an absolute monarch and "buttressed by the superstitions of the Catholic Church." In his prologue, Davidson writes "that Voltaire's individual campaigns, together with the development of his thinking about the general principles and practices of the French justice system, were landmarks in the history of penal reform in France and Europe."

Eighteenth-century France was quite different from twenty-first-century America, but reading of the first case that Voltaire championed, I couldn't help but think of how power breeds similar despotic behavior even in democratic societies. We might be freer to check that power, but if the voice of reason is muted by fear, nationalism, fanaticism or fundamentalism, the powerful force of that freedom is diminished.

The case that Voltaire challenged was the case of a Protestant family led by its patriarch, Jean Calas, a prosperous cloth merchant. The Calas family were Protestant, except for one son who had converted to Catholicism. In France at that time, Protestants were terribly oppressed:

Protestant services of worship were forbidden, male offenders were liable to a life sentence in the galleys, female offenders to life imprisonment and preachers to execution. The only valid marriages were those sanctified by the Catholic Church, and all newborn children were required to be baptised and brought up as Catholics. Many professions, including that of the law, were open only to those who could prove they were practicing Catholics. Protestant families were required to employ Catholic servants.

One evening, this particular family discovered one of the adult sons dead in the family shop downstairs from the family's domicile. When the authorities were called, the family first said that the young man had been found dead on the floor. Later, they changed their story, saying that they had found the young man hanging in the shop; they had hoped to keep the suicide private because in France at that time, suicides were denied honorable burials. The brutal magistrate arrested the entire family on the assumption that the family had murdered the son to prevent him from converting to Catholicism (though there was no proof that this son was contemplating such an action), ignoring the fact that one son had already converted and wasn't murdered by his loved ones. However, the populace was superstitious, easily inflamed, and religiously intolerant; public opinion turned against the Calas family, even though no proof was ever discovered to tie the death of the son to the father. And anyway, the son was young and strong at twenty-nine-years of age; the old father much feebler at sixty-four. The family's Catholic servant was also present in the house.

Although the father was tortured--stretched on the rack, forced to drink ten jugs of water twice, and had his legs and arms broken with an iron bar--he did not confess. He was then strangled, and his body was burned.

A description of the typical trial process also reveals the extent of state repression in France at that time:

The accused was allowed a lawyer, who could make representations on his behalf outside the courtroom; but the lawyer was not permitted to be present at the questioning of the accused, which took place behind closed doors. The accused was not given any advance notice of the questions, nor of the evidence or witnesses arrayed against him, and he might even not know the details of the offence he was charged with.

We read of such torture and rigged trial proceedings and may well be happy that we don't live in such brutal times. But then perhaps we will remember the "enemy combatants" we kept for years (and continue to imprison) at Guantanamo Bay, men who for a long time had no access to legal representation and who were held without being charged. And now, the torture memos of the Bush administration are being released in which the following methods (i.e., torture!) were used to get prisoners to talk: slamming prisoners against a wall, pouring cold water on them, depriving them of food, making prisoners remain in stress positions, placing prisoners in close confines for hours, keeping prisoners awake for hours--even days, slapping prisoners in the face, making prisoners remain nude, confronting prisoners with things that they were terrified of, such as insects, waterboarding prisoners.

Over two-hundred years ago, Voltaire faced an oppressive regime that tortured with impunity with the support of many of its illiterate and superstitious citizens, and he had this to say to his friends:

You may ask, my divine angels, why I am so strongly interested in this Calas. It is because I am a man, because I see that all foreigners are indignant at a country which breaks a man on the wheel without any proof.

Trying to get the facts of the trial proved extremely difficult because trials were conducted in secret. In letters to friends, Voltaire championed transparency:

What do we ask? Nothing more than that justice should not be as dumb as it is blind, that it should speak, and say why it condemned Calas. What horror is this, a secret judgement, a condemnation without explanations! Is there a more execrable tyranny than that of spilling blood on a whim, without giving the least reason? . . .You owe an accounting to men for the blood of men. As for me, I do not ask anything more than the publication of the trial procedure. . . It is important for everybody that such decisions should be publicly justified.

Later, Voltaire published a ninety-page pamphlet criticizing the roles the Catholic Church and a prejudiced Catholic population played in this miscarriage of justice; he argued for tolerance and warned of how such events effect us all:

If an innocent father of a family is delivered into the hands of error, of passion, or of fanaticism; if the accused has no defence except his own virtue; if the arbiters of his life run no other risk in killing him, than that of making a mistake; if they can kill with impunity by a simple decree; then the public outcry is raised, every man feels he is in danger, one can see that no one's life is in safety in the face of a tribunal set up for watching over the life of the citizens, and all voices in unison demand vengeance.

These words of a flawed but brilliant man, a father of the Enlightenment, a champion of reason, speak to us today.

I'm Linking, Too

Checking my Yahoo mailbox this evening, I clicked on a link to the story about Susan Boyle, the Scottish spinster who wowed the crowd on Britain's Got Talent. I watched the truncated version of Susan's performance and then called M-M in to listen. Both of us had tears in our eyes. Then we watched the full performance on You-Tube and almost bawled together. Yes, I'm joining the crowd of online viewers whose day has been brightened by this incredible performance. Here is a story of a dream come true: a young girl singing away her hurt over being teased by village kids and years later turning a cynical audience into an overwhelmed and appreciative audience, not only on British television but around the world. Here's to Susan Boyle and to dreams. I hope that Ms. Boyle gets to bask in the glow of accolades long after the initial applause.

Easter Parade

We drove to Kennesaw Mountain early Sunday afternoon to enjoy the first full day of sunshine we've had in days. The weather was clear and cool, in the upper 60s or low 70s. Kennesaw Mountain is the location of a Civil War Battlefield, one of the battles to prevent Sherman from marching on Atlanta--which ultimately failed. The Confederates won the battle but lost the war. The older I get, the less I have any inclination to romanticize war; in fact, that inclination is about out of my system altogether now. Over 5,000 young men, Union and Confederate, lost their lives at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. An open grassy field near the Visitor's Center commemorates the bones of the slain that lie there underneath the soil. Signs warn visitors to neither picnic nor fly kites on the area.

Inside the Visitor's Center is a small museum with a few items of the times, dioramas of cut-outs of men associated with the Civil War and the battles in the Atlanta area, and lots of words describing the Civil War and the battles. Again, I'm a daughter of the South, but I don't have any romantic notions about the Civil War or about the plantation culture that enslaved millions of blacks. And anyone who does should ingest this bit of information I gleaned from our quick turn in the Kennesaw Mountain Museum: local slave owners "loaned" their slaves to the Confederate Army to dig battle entrenchments and to do other labor associated with the war. The slave owners received $25 a month per slave; soldiers made $18 a month. War is ever the same, isn't it? The rich get richer (for the slaves didn't get that money; their white masters profited) while young men die.

Smelling the stench of blood even through this distance of time, we quickly exited the museum to walk up Kennesaw Mountain. The day was glorious, but, unfortunately, I still had a lingering head cold from my bout with flu, and I'm sure allergies added to my misery, too. The walk up the sometimes steep trail was a little wearing on someone who hadn't gotten any exercise recently. But we made it to the top, past the display cannons set behind the remains of the battle mounds dug by Confederate soldiers. Kennesaw Mountain was a popular destination on that Easter Sunday. I don't think I've ever seen so many people and their dogs on a woody walking trail. When we left the park a little after 3 p.m., vehicles were bumper to bumper at the entrance.

This is not a trail for people who crave silence. During the Civil War, Kennesaw Mountain was surrounded by plowed fields and farms; today it's surrounded by business districts with metal warehouses and heavily populated suburban areas. We listened for birdsong above the constant chatter of visitors and heard Eastern Phoebes, Cardinals, Pileated Woodpeckers, and Rufous-Sided Towhees. But mostly we heard people. It was an Easter Parade of urban and suburban dwellers longing for the outdoors and making their way to the nearest woods to celebrate spring and a day of sunshine.

Freaky? Well, Unusual Weather

Tom just e-mailed me to let me know that it is snowing in Mid-town Atlanta. I think we must have been still stuck in our experiences of Central Texas weather when we began planting our Victory Garden this year! Tom did have the foresight to cover most of those plants last night (he was feeling a lot better than I at the time). So far, no sign of snow here where we are, just east of Atlanta.

UPDATE: Okay, it's 12:12 p.m., on April 7th, and it's snowing here. Tiny, tiny, flakes of snow, to be sure--the wind is blowing strongly and bitingly, too. But snowing, briefly.

Update, 2:30 p.m.: According to weather.com, the temperature here is 44 degrees, but it feels much cooler. I walked outside to take a few pictures of blooms, hoping that those blooms won't freeze tonight. The apple tree we planted just a couple of months ago is blooming, and the native flowers I have planted in the backyard are blooming, too. M-M's strawberry plants are blooming, and she is so looking forward to those first tasty strawberries. The last frost date for this area is around April 10th, but according to one local blog, the last April freeze in Atlanta was in 2000, and before that, 1992. Weather.com is predicting a low of 32 degrees tonight.

My brief foray into the cold led to an encounter with a neighbor two streets over--Pam--who approached while I was photographing the apple blossoms. One of our neighbors keeps a few children in her home, and Pam's child is one of those. Our front yard has been of interest to the children because we are growing things, and children love to watch things grow. Also, my art car captures attention when it's parked in the driveway. Pam mentioned that she and her child enjoyed looking at it. Right now The Lady is parked in our small garage in the backyard. When the weather warms up (again!), I plan to spruce up The Lady and perhaps drive her in a few more parades before trying to find someone who would like to re-invent The Lady for his or her own art car adventures.

The Beginning of the College Search

Today I finally feel well enough to get out of bed for long periods of time. Toward the end of last week, I started having symptoms that suggested the onset of a cold. M-M had been ill earlier in the week, even stayed home from school one day, something she rarely does willingly. So I thought I had caught whatever had made her ill. I managed to make it to the end of the my work week, and although I didn't really feel well on Saturday, I carried through with our plans to visit the campus of Georgia State College and University in Milledgeville.

It was a beautiful day for a drive down to (or close to) the heart of Georgia. Once we left Interstate-20, we were in green rolling hills of pastures, Georgia's "Antebellum Trail." I had spent a week in Milledgeville several years ago while I was on the English faculty at Columbus State University in Columbus, Georgia. I signed up for a week-long poetry workshop led by the poet Margaret Gibson; the workshop was part of a literary festival of workshops and events. I had a wonderful experience there and wish I had kept in touch with the interesting women who were part of that experience, but time, distance, responsibilities and personal challenges made it all too easy to drop our correspondence over too short of a time. However, my memories of that time surfaced when M-M's high-school counselor mentioned the college as a possibility for M-M's continued education. Georgia State College and University is the state's liberal arts college, a small college, but recognized as a good college. And since M-M wants to be an English teacher, this seemed as good a place as any to begin our search for a college in Georgia. The Hope Scholarship (tuition and many fees paid for students who maintain a "B" average or above) encourages us to give Georgia colleges and universities priority in our search.

We arrived a few minutes after 9 a..m.. People were already gathering on the lawn in front of Russell Auditorium and forming lines in front of the tables bearing big bowls of strawberries, platters of tiny muffins, and urns of coffee. We surveyed the crowd for a few minutes. Then I turned to my daughter and asked her, "Well, what are your first impressions?"

M-M hesitated for a moment. "It's very white," she said, "not much diversity." And so I had noticed, as well. Although the student chosen to address us later in the auditorium was African-American, most of the visiting high-school juniors were white. Of the 5,000+ undergraduate students, about 125 of them are international students. However, in these days of economic upheaval, parents are looking for colleges that offer the best opportunities for less money, and Georgia State College and University has been listed in the annual report of America's 100 Best College Buys, and Princeton Review has listed the college as a "Best Southeastern College."

M-M decided which sessions she would like for us to attend, and we divided up those sessions between us. For the next hour or so we attended separate sessions on financial aid, the college essay, the SAT/ACT, and a student panel. After those sessions we went to lunch in the student center and then walked around campus and downtown Milledgeville, comparing notes, making observations. We opted not to take the guided tours of campus, where parents and potential students clumped together in a big group around a GSCU student. We wandered instead, admiring the lovely green areas of the campus, the blooming dogwood and azalea. Downtown, we wandered into a gallery of pottery pieces and talked for a few minutes with the proprietor, a small, rinsed-blonde woman in her mid-forties to early-fifties who pointed out to us some of the empty buildings which were undergoing renovations. Downtown Milledgeville has a lot of empty buildings, a few restaurants and pool bars, a barber and style shop, a few businesses such as antique and junk shops. As one gets away from downtown one encounters the usual businesses of any town in Anywhere, America: Walmart, Walgreens (a new addition to Milledgeville), JC Penneys, fast food restaurants, Econo Lodges and such.

By 1:30 p.m., we had seen all we wanted to see that day, and I was feeling worse, so we headed north to Atlanta. Leaving town, we passed the sign to Andalusia, the farm-home of Flannery O'Connor, a destination for another day. M-M is still willing to keep an open mind about the college, but she is beginning to get a sense of the kind of university she would like to attend. And it seems to me that a diverse student body is one of the characteristics of that kind of university. The college M-M chooses will have to offer something very important to her to offset that lack of diversity. Her search has just begun.

Back home, I quickly succumbed to what must have been the flu, for I was in bed the rest of that day and all day Sunday, and for most of the day on Monday. Tom, returning from a quick trip out-of-state, where he delivered a car we bought for B (a 1993 Volvo--not a cool car but a practical car in terms of use and cost!), was also ill, though we think we might have had different contagions. Today I'm up and about, weak but gathering strength to return to work and play. The photos are pictures of my recently completed wool blocks for the quilts I am making for B and M-M.

Rainy Day Reverie

The spate of recent personal posts does not indicate that I am ignoring the larger world of politics. No, I'm just so depressed by that larger world--by the inability of leaders to usher in real change, by the greed and ineptitude of people at the highest levels of management in business, by media that seem to refuse to take their responsibilities truly seriously by focusing on the trivial, by an opposition party that seems to be increasingly hypocritical and hysterical and fails to offer any viable alternatives to what it criticizes, and so on--that I've been turning inward. Yes, I continue to watch the evening news, to read blogs and news sources online. But I just don't much feel like writing about these issues. Or at least not today.

The day began with rain and continues to be overcast. Arugula and leaf lettuce that I sowed a little over a week ago are sprouting in our Victory Garden. House finches have been feasting at the feeder I hung in the black locust tree a couple of weeks ago. The morning is hushed and leaden with humidity. Just a few minutes ago I took this picture of my herb garden at the front of the house. As the weather warms, the trellis will soon be covered with muscadine vines, and bee balm will be blooming on the other side. I hope that last-year's petunias by the front steps have re-seeded and that some will sprout. Those flowers bloomed profusely all through last summer's drought, with little or no watering.

Inside my house, I have surrounded us with items that remind me of friends. Today I'll post just a few photos: a ceramic pot given to me by my best friend and a hand-crafted horse this friend, Chris Parmentier, gave my son when he was a little boy; a painting by my cousin Karen, with a sculpture in front that I made which I call "Unknown Bird," after a poem by W. S. Merwin; close-up shot of an origami deer folded by one of my two children; a stack of poetry books on a study shelf; an old toy of my husband's in front of a set of books by Charles Dickens. When life gets crazy out there, one turns inward, to beloved objects that remind one of happier times. One turns to the hallways of memories, the corners of the heart. These photos suggest some of those corners in my own heart.

My post begins with a picture of my large, cluttered desk. The desk had once been the desk of my husband's grandfather who was a doctor in Houston, Texas. It's big enough to hold a small bookshelf. Notice the cut-out pictures of my own grandmother, Margaret Cole Dugat, a woman who had a profound influence on me. She began her adult life as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Texas. She was my seventh-grade English teacher. What I am is so much entertwined with who my grandmother was. Perhaps I will post later explaining some of that connection. I will end with this: my daughter also wants to be an English teacher, a high-school English teacher. How did she come to this decision, I wonder. How startling at times are the tentacles that bind each generation to another, the inexplicable connections that remain hidden until someone makes a decision that reflects influences one might not otherwise have realized.