This Morning's Reading

Updates included

Browsing online newspapers, magazines, and blogs this morning, I gleaned some interesting information:

• Watch the Animals: At The New York Times, Richard Coniff reminds us that we don't have to travel to Serengeti to benefit from watching wildlife. I knew this, of course, being a watcher of animal life here in my urban neighborhood, but a reminder can make one become more attentive and appreciative. Coniff concludes in his editorial, "The Consolation of Animals" that "[a]nimals are built to watch other animals, and for animals like us, otherwise separated from the natural world, there’s consolation in it. Television is in truth a poor substitute." So go watch some animals today.
  
  
• Don't Smile: Most of us like to have a pleasant picture on our driver's license, one that doesn't make us look too old or too grumpy. Well, an article in The Washington Post describes how the state of Virginia is insisting that its citizens not smile for the driver's license photo. Citizens are told to maintain a neutral expression. The state wants to develop "a facial recognition system that could compare customers' photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft." A smiling face evidently gums up the works of such a system. Getting a driver's license is becoming more and more like a visit to the local precinct for a line-up: both require the mug shot and the finger-printing.
  
  
• Nurture Relationships: Just because you're rich doesn't mean you're going to be happy, Suze Orman told the audience on Oprah yesterday. Of course, she amended, being poor can make you miserable, too. According to the LA Times, Peter Falk, who made his money in television and movies, most memorably as Columbo, in the eponymous series, has developed dementia, and his daughter and wife of thirty years are disputing who has custodial rights of the man. The step-mother suspects the adopted daughter of Peter Falk and his first wife wants to get her hands on her father's money; the daughter claims the step-mother has long prevented Falks' children access to their father. When the daughter visited her father during a court-mandated visit in February, she asked her father if he recognized her. "I want to," he replied.
  
  If you have money, spend it on your kids (or set up a fund for them) before you're old. That way they won't argue over the spoils when you're too infirm--or too dead!--to negotiate the disputes and to remind them how much you love them. Also, I've never understood the rich folks who leave more money to one kid than another. Even if one child has proven a disappointment in some way, why nurture resentment beyond the grave?
  
  
• Don't Look (or we'll be sorry, they say): I read this article yesterday, and since I had come across the details in other sources much earlier, this is not news to me--but it may be to others. Those some 2,000 torture photos [Update: These numbers are disputed; other sources mention only 21 photos.] that Obama has decided not to release reportedly include photos of a teenage boy being raped by an Egyptian translator and a female detainee being raped by an American soldier. Britain's Telegraph quotes Major General Taguba:

  These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency. I am not sure what purpose their release would serve other than a legal one and the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan. The mere description of these pictures is horrendous enough, take my word for it.

  The photos were taken between 2001 and 2005 at Abu Ghraib and six other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  
  UPDATE: I have read several reputable bloggers who write that The Telegraph is not accurate in its depiction of the unreleased photos. There evidently is no proof that photos of the rapes described exist or even that these particular rapes occurred. Alex Coppell, at Salon's War Room links to a post by Michael Scherer at Time's Swampland blog: "The Daily Telegraph's Rape Photo Claim". A number of questions have been raised about the reporting for that Telegraph article. Scherer says that The Telegraph should seek further clarification from General Taguba, who is reported to have seen photos of rape (see quote above).
  
  
• Be Ornery: "There won't be any biographies of me," [Flannery] O'Connor wrote, "because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy." However, biographies abound, and in The New Republic Christopher Benfey reviews a new biography of Flannery O'Connor, Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. As a child Flannery O'Connor was uncommonly stubborn, creative, and funny. She hated home economics, and when the students were required to sew a completed outfit for the final exam, O'Connor showed up with her pet duck and beautifully sewn underwear and other clothing that fit the duck. She taught a pet chicken to walk backward. And as a student at Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville, she was the campus cartoonist. Reading these details of the young Flannery O'Connor (who died young, too, at thirty-nine years of age) inspires me to dip into her collection of letters again, The Habit of Being, which I have here within reach on my bookshelves.

Debt

Reading Gene Lyons' opinion piece, "America's Addiction to Debt," in Salon this evening reminded me of the few minutes of Oprah I watched this afternoon. Suze Orman was on the show telling women how to get out of debt; the woman on the hot seat had 23(!) credit cards; she had racked up thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, took out a loan (or money out of her 401(k)--I don't remember exactly where she got that money) to pay down that debt, but then she immediately racked up additional credit card debt to the total of $79,000.

I sat there with my mouth open. I can understand if one were suddenly confronted with serious medical issues that insurance wouldn't cover. But that much money just spent on stuff? And she's not alone; our country is full of people like her. Earlier this week I caught the re-run of the documentary House of Cards about the housing bubble, the mortgage brokers who helped convince people to buy homes they couldn't afford, and the sleazy Wall Street types who bundled those mortgages into toxic assets to sell to investors, banking on the hope that housing prices would continue to go up and that folks would pay their mortgages. People re-financed their houses to build swimming pools, to upgrade their kitchens, to landscape their backyards, and to buy more stuff. Then they discovered they couldn't afford their lifestyles.

And, as Lyons points out in his essay, "we're all stuck paying for it."

Little Stupid Things

Reading the blogs (and the links provided) today, I smirked at the little stupid things that pass as "serious thinking" and "real critiques" these days:

• Mark Krikorian over at National Review gripes about how Sonia Sotomayor (So-toe-my-YORE) pronounces her name; he thinks she and the rest of us should conform to the English pronunciation, putting the emphasis on the first syllable. An article in The New York Times relates Sotomayor's own pride in her name:

  John W. Fried, Sotomayor's first supervisor in the Manhattan prosecutor's office, said she gently corrected him when he mispronounced her name so that it sounded more anglicized.

  
  Well, hell. I grew up with this story in my own rather conservative family: When my father was in the Army in the early 1950s, he insisted that people pronounce the family name the French way, with a silent final "t" (Dugat= "Du-gah"--or with a Texas accent, "Doo-Gaahw"). If someone said "DU-gaT," my father refused to answer, even at roll call. All those Cajuns from south Louisiana (Thibodeaux, Boudreaux, Arceneaux, Benoit, and such) would let the Army butcher their names, but not my dad, descended from Cajuns who moved into Southeast Texas in the early 1800s. This story was a favorite in the family. We still pronounce our surname the Acadian way. I just don't get this far-right obsession with Anglicizing everyone's name.
  
  
• An increasing number of conservatives raise the possibility of Sonia Sotomayor being unduly influenced by her gender and ethnicity. Would they say that about a white, Anglo male? Matthew Yglesias notes with great irony the minority members of the Senate Judiciary Committee--white males, every one. No gender or racial bias there, of course.

Oh, so many, many more little stupid things, but I haven't the heart to list them. Oh, and this morning, I turned on Good Morning America (because I was looking for a local weather report) and saw that Diane Sawyer had dueling guests: James Carville (in the studio) and Ann Coulter (remote). I didn't even turn on the sound; I can't stand to listen to either of these people. Another reason not to watch morning television "news" magazines: no serious news going on here, just a lot of drama.

The Cat Came Back... The Very Next Day

. . . . .
The man around the corner swore he'd kill the cat on sight,
He loaded up his shotgun with nails and dynamite;
He waited and he waited for the cat to come around,
Ninety-seven pieces of the man is all they ever found

But the cat came back the very next day
The cat came back, we thought he was a goner,
But the cat came back, it just couldn't stay away,
Away, away, yea, yea, yea. . .

On a telegraph wire, sparrows sitting in a bunch,
The cat was feeling hungry, thought he'd like 'em for a lunch;
Climbing softly up the pole, and when he reached the top
Put his foot on the electric wire, which tied him in a knot.

But the cat came back the very next day
The cat came back, we thought he was a goner,
But the cat came back, it just couldn't stay away
Away, away, yea, yea, yea....

from the folk song, "The Cat Came Back," by Harry S. Miller (and later folk additions)

Additional Information: Now, this is the cat that ate the fluffy wool wings on the angel in our wooden finger-puppet manger scene, a collection of finger puppets that I painted and clothed in felt when the kids were very young. (A friend sent me the kit. By the time I had finished the kit, I really didn't want to see another manger scene again.) Every year that I take that manger scene out and place it on a table, the angel ends up on the floor, chewed on some more. Yes, our cat PLUTO is appropriately named.

Morning Glory and all that......

This morning I took the photo (at left--click to enlarge) of a morning glory blooming at our front steps. Our daughter had transplanted morning glories from my herb bed to the side of the steps so that she could train them up hemp twine, onto our banisters and up to the canopy above our front door. I look at this photograph and think how the flower has an ethereal glow that lives up to its name. Surely there's a metaphor there waiting to be extracted or at least some reflection on the beauty of the natural world, of taking time to notice that beauty, fleeting as it may be in the concrete and asphalt world of Atlanta. But, no, today I'm not feeling so optimistic and poetic. I've been watching episodes of Life After People on the History Channel, and I'm not feeling so kindly toward invasive plant species. Also, contradictorily, I'm feeling a little misanthropic today, too. I think it's the weather--too much lovely rain--and the neighbors--too little compassion for cats. My garden looks beautiful, though. Perhaps I'll just sit and gaze at this lovely picture of a morning glory and work myself into a better mood.....

Failure

Despite all our efforts to contain our wayward cat, Pluto, we have failed. First, Tom stapled chicken wire at the top of our backyard fence; then, this weekend, he put in an electric wire on the fence. After Pluto scaled that (he was shocked, sat crying for a while, and then skedaddled into the yard of the neighbor who wants nothing to do with cats), Tom made further amendments to the wiring where Pluto has been escaping. We kept him indoors at night, closing the cat door with the wooden piece that slides into place over the cat door. Then, this morning, when Tom wasn't looking, one of the cats managed to force that wooden piece up and gain access to the cat flap. Pluto was gone in a flash. It's noon now, and I haven't seen him all morning. We've searched the backyard, but the cat is gone.

In 2003, Pluto wandered up to our house in Harris County, Georgia, on our 24-acre property that I called Wild Ginger Woods, in the middle of the night, in the middle of our daughter's going-away slumber party. (We would be moving back to Texas; my husband had already moved and had begun his new job.) I was wakened by highly excited 6th graders; they heard a kitten mewing by our front door, and they were afraid our dog was going to kill it. I got out of bed and rescued the tiny kitten, feeding it milk in a bowl and being amused by the girls who thought I had somehow arranged this experience for their entertainment. We took the kitten with us when we moved. Pluto's been the most recalcitrant of cats since.

We tame animals and think we own them. Those we thoroughly subject, we eat. But every once in a while we get a reminder, even from our tamed and affectionate pets, that animals have wills of their own. Their dreams are not our dreams. They march to a different drummer, every one.

Remembering...

Paul Rieckhoff has this article on Talking Points Memo to help us remember those who have been awarded the Medal of Honor "This Memorial Day, Honor the Fallen", May 25, 2009. And here is a link to a list of Medal of Honor Citations from 1863-1978: Medal of Honor.

On James Fallows' blog today, I found the link to this: Sean's Map the Fallen project. Sean "develops geospatial content for the Google Earth Outreach team," and he has created a Google Map that locates the hometowns of "more than 5,700 American and Coalition servicemen and women that have lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan." He created this program to honor those men and women. You can download the program from his website, www.mapthefallen.org.

The Consequences of War

Here in the United States, we've been spared the real consequences of war. Our media and government censor the images that are shown on television news and, until recently, even the returning bodies of soldiers in flag-draped caskets. But Iraqis have not been spared the real consequences of war. Thousands of thousands of Iraqis remain missing. The number of missing isn't clear. Many bodies are hidden in mass graves that are discovered every once in awhile. Other bodies remain in morgues, yet to be identified. According to an article in The New York Times today:

Dr. Munjid Salah al-Deen, the manager of Baghdad’s central morgue, said his staff was working to identify 28,000 bodies from 2006 to 2008 alone.("Fate of Missing Iraqis Haunts War's Survivors," by Timothy Williams and Suadad Al-Salhy, The New York Times, May 24, 2009)

The article opens with a story of a mother of seven children, six who are still alive, the seventh, a thirteen-year-old who went out to buy vegetables one afternoon and never returned home. The mother has exhausted her life savings searching for her son. Sometimes I stop and think of the original act that started us on a trajectory into war with Iraq--the loss of those original 4,000 or so lives in the Twin Towers and on those planes. Those terrorist actions were horrendous, evil. But has the loss of life since then--the war in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands of homeless Iraqis, what's probably hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and the lives of American soldiers worth the cost? The answer to many of us in this country may come easily as we salute the flag and hear "The Star-Spangled Banner" sung on this Memorial Day Weekend. But the answer is not so easy for those who have borne the consequences of a war that was peddled in bad faith. The obscenity of that war goes beyond the bodies to the living, a mother searching for a lost son, a woman whose family survives by recycling aluminum cans they find in a nearby dump. Or what about the soldier home from war but unable to find a job, perhaps physically disabled or suffering from PTSD? Yes, we should remember the dead, memorialize their sacrifice. But we also should damn well do all we can to take care of the living.

Catmo: A Story of Containment

As I have recorded elsewhere, we live in a city with a strict leash law, a law that includes not only dogs but also cats. And one of our neighbors has a long history of zealousy trying to enforce that law. As soon as we moved into the neighborhood, we were welcomed by neighbors bearing cupcakes and goodwill--and warnings about the neighbor across the street who keeps a humane trap just for cats who wander into her yard. Wanting to keep the peace as well as comply with local law enforcement, we restricted our cats to our house and backyard. This worked well for a few weeks as the cats familiarized themselves with their new home, but then our male cat, Pluto, discovered that he could scale the wooden fence, and he began prowling the neighborhood in the evenings and early mornings. Of course, our pet-less neighbor has a yard that all the neighborhood cats--those that I see free and prowling in the evenings--love. Inevitably, Pluto headed straight for her yard.

Our next-door neighbors have an invisible electric fence around their front yard, and most of their cats wear collars that apply an electrical zap when the cats approach the perimeter of the yard. We thought of putting in a similar invisible fence around our backyard. However, Pluto has managed to pull off every collar I've placed around his neck, and our neighbors' cats have learned that if they run really fast, they can get past that invisible monster with a minimum of hurt. So occasionally even those cats wander to our pet-less neighbor's yard, happy to dig around in fresh dirt and pine straw.

Looking on the Internet for other ideas on how to contain terrorist cats, I discovered websites of companies selling "cat-proof" fences or attachments for the tops of pre-existing fences. I thought we could contrive to make our own, and so we purchased chicken wire, which Tom and our son stapled to the top of our wooden fence. Well, that contained Pluto for several weeks. The other two cats, both females, had made no attempt to escape the backyard except through the occasional unguarded open gate or open front door.

The months flew by; the cats seemed more content to stay home in the winter. But then spring arrived--and a phone call yesterday morning at 7:15 a.m. Our neighbor across the street was calling to complain about Pluto's visits to her yard, about the cat poop and the dead bird she found in her yard last week.

"I have lots of birds in my yard," she said, "and this morning I heard them clucking. When I went outside, I saw your cat." She went on to describe how she believes that all urban and suburban cats should be kept inside their owners' homes. The cats are a menace to birdlife--and to the peace of mind of people who hate encountering scat in their flowerbeds and home gardens. She was angry and near tears. I was sympathetic. I, too, have a home garden in my front yard which is being fertilized by neighborhood cats (the young cats next door who haven't been wired yet for their invisible fence). I assured her that we would try a different method to contain Pluto, the terrorist cat, to our backyard.

Although we had initially meant to have only one cat, our daughter's cat Odyssey, the two black cats, when tiny kittens, had been dumped in the country when we lived in Harris County, Georgia. One had been viciously damaged; the other was hungry. We took them in, and now we are a three-cat family when we meant to be only a one-cat family. We have lived with those cats for eight to six years now; at times they were indoor cats, at other times indoor/outdoor cats. But we've never had the issues with the cats that we have here. Dogs will stay in their fences; terrorist cats are more difficult to contain. And, of course, we love our animals, even the recalcitrant ones, and we want them to be comfortable and happy.

So we have continued to "Catmo-ize" our backyard. This morning, Tom installed a one-wire electrical fence along most of the wooden fence in the backyard. He left one leg of the fence free, from the garage to the gate, because Pluto doesn't seem to scale that part of the fence (there's a dog on the other side of that fence, too). With chicken wire on top and the electrical wire mid-way up, perhaps this set-up will finally contain our cat.

But I want to tell our neighbor that even with this one cat contained, others leave their yards in the dusk of the evening and the pre-dawn morning--even when their owners have the best intentions of confining their cats. Cats slip out front doors in an unguarded moment. They scale fences, find holes behind the shrubbery. And though the cats may be completely contained, other dangers lurk. Hawks fly into our backyards, hunting for tiny mammals and birds. A hawk nests in this neighborhood. I've been six feet from it, almost eye to eye, when it flew in, chased by smaller birds, to perch in our black locust tree. I've watched it sitting quietly for long minutes on a neighbor's gate to a shady backyard, listening, looking. Even squirrels eat birds. And this neighborhood is over-run with squirrels.

No, there is no way to be perfectly safe, to be perfectly free of animal scat and the musky scent of mammals.

Update: It took Pluto an hour or less to figure a way out of the recently electrified backyard. He is now confined to the house until we figure out how he is escaping Catmo. We're glad he is neutered. Otherwise, his descendants might be a threat to our own species!

Backyard Chickens

NPR has a piece on urban and suburban backyard chickens, highlighting chickens in Winona Park, a 1940s suburb of Decatur, GA, near Atlanta. I've reared chickens when I lived in the country in Texas and in Georgia, but discovered that some cities allow backyard chickens as long as one follows certain restrictions. Here is the piece on chickens in metro-Atlanta: "Backyard Coops Make Chicks Chic", National Public Radio, May 21, 2009. And, to be fair and balanced, here is a grumpy response about the suburban chicken rave by Jack Shafer, posted last week on Slate: "Bogus Trend of the Week: Raising Backyard Chickens."

Responses to Obama's Security Speech

I've a host of tasks to do today (daughter hosting movie night for her friends tonight), but I want to record here (mainly for myself) some of the responses to Obama's speech yesterday morning (and Cheney's) from people with whom I often agree and others with whom I might not agree but who make me think. Here is the list:

• James Fallows, over at Atlantic.com, writes that

  The parts of Cheney's speech I saw today, and everything we know about Bush's decisions and statements in office, assumed without argument that they faced choices between due-process and national security more painful than those that George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or FDR wrestled with. A reminder that others have faced difficult choices and dire threats is useful for judging our response and placing it in the long context of American values that Obama repeatedly emphasized. (The entire piece here: "On Obama's Security Speech," May 21, 2009.

  
  
• Glenn Greenwald, over at Salon (Greenwald is particularly interested in civil liberties, and his posts indicate that interest):

  Ultimately, what I find most harmful about [Obama's] embrace of things like preventive detention, concealment of torture evidence, opposition to investigations and the like is that these policies are now no longer just right-wing dogma but also the ideas that many defenders of his -- Democrats, liberals, progressives -- will defend as well. Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well. The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.(See the rest here: "Obama's Civil Liberties Speech," posted and updated May 21, 2009.)

  
  
• David Brooks, with whom I often disagree but listen to avidly every week on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, says that

  [w]hen Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.
  
  The inauguration of Barack Obama has simply not marked a dramatic shift in the substance of American anti-terror policy. It has marked a shift in the public credibility of that policy. (The entire piece here: "Cheney Lost to Bush," posted in The New York Times, May 21, 2009.)

  
  
• Hilzoy (also professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins), blogging for Political Animal at Washington Monthly, is really disturbed by Obama's promotion of "preventative detention":

  If we have a need for preventive detention, which I do not accept, it's a short-term need produced by Messrs. Bush and Cheney. The long game is the preservation of our republic. It is not a game that we can win by forfeiting our freedom.
  
  People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is something we can do that will bring us perfect safety. There is no such thing. We can try our best, and do all the things the previous administration failed to do -- secure Russian loose nukes, harden our critical infrastructure, not invade irrelevant countries, etc. -- but we will never be completely safe. Not even if we give up the freedom that is our most precious inheritance as Americans. (The rest of the piece here: "Just Shoot Me Now," posted May 22, 2009)

And now to today's tasks.

Fruits from the Garden

Yesterday we harvested the first beets from our Victory Garden, four smallish beet roots with luscious green and maroon tops. (We're letting the plants get a little larger before harvesting many more.) I sliced the beets and steamed them; we ate them freshly steamed, with no seasoning. Lovely! Tom cut up the greens and sauteed them with ginger, garlic, salt, and soy sauce. The taste of these greens was unbelievable. Nothing one buys in the supermarket--even the Dekalb Farmer's Market (which always smells like seafood, a smell that permeates everything, especially the cheese one buys there) comes close to the flavor of these home-grown vegetables. Growing a suburban garden is a lot of work, but the flavor of the food is unbeatable. In another week, we will start getting fresh vegetables weekly from Riverview Farms, a local CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Eating fresh food, simply prepared, is a real joy in life. I grew up eating fresh vegetables, grazing in our gardens in southeast Texas, but the intervening years of eating processed foods now provide me with a fine contrast with which to judge flavor. Every day I gaze at our little garden and harvest a leaf here and there, munching as I observe the growth of each plant. No lettuce tastes sweeter than the leaf I've just plucked.

"Contrived Indignation"

Watching back-to-back segments from Dick Cheney's speech and President Obama's speech on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, I was struck by the different tones of the speeches. Cheney speaks with his characteristic sneer, like a grumpy and angry uncle, condescending to anyone who disagrees with him. Obama speaks as if we're all grown-ups; maybe we don't all agree, but we can treat one another with respect. Cheney seems to be addressing his words to the already-persuaded or those who don't keep up with the news and thus won't recognize statements that have been thoroughly discounted. Obama is still trying to speak to those who might not agree with him and to those who need to be more educated on whatever subject he is addressing. Cheney has to label all those who disagree with him as "other," as "enemies." Obama does not. I don't agree with all of Obama's decisions, but I'm willing to listen even to those views of his with which I disagree.

I was particularly annoyed with Cheney's claim that those who are against "enhanced interrogation" or "harsh questioning" (i. e., torture--"harsh questioning" is as sleazy a euphemism as I can think of) are guilty of "contrived indignation and faulty moralizing." Here is an example of that over-weaning condescension in the man. My indignation, I assure bilious Uncle Dick, is not "contrived"--it is strong and true indignation, based on deeply-held morals. Nor am I, and others like me, "blam[ing] America for the evil others do." I am thoroughly capable of recognizing the evil that others do. I want evil-doers held accountable. But I am blaming the American government for the evil it has done in my name: torturing prisoners of war. I want those held accountable who smeared my good name as an American citizen and who trampled on the values of my country. If you're gonna call fighting terror a "war," well, then, the prisoners you capture from that war are "prisoners of war." The United States has traditionally and lawfully denounced the use of torture against prisoners of war. Hence, the use of torture is un-American. Oh, and immoral.

I have loved and cherished the values this country stands for; any person who challenges those values challenges me, as an American citizen. Someone, please send Uncle Dick back to his bunker. Maybe there's room for some of those terrorists from Guantanamo Bay in there, too. Dick Cheney needs to look his real enemy--not the American people who disagree with him--in the eye and argue his values then.

Democratic Weakness: Letter to Harry Reid

I don't know how effective e-mailing our governmental leaders is, or, for that matter, whether blogging about my reactions to life and politics has any real effect on anyone but myself. I often feel as I feel about prayer, that the words coalescing in my mind and issuing out of my mouth really have an audience of one--myself. However, I guess that--despite my sometimes cynical exterior--I am an optimist. Just in case someone might be listening, for the past few years, I have made a habit of writing letters to our political leaders when I really want to register my reaction to something they have said or done. On May 20th, I sent the following e-mail to Senator Reid:

Dear Senator Reid,
As Senate Majority Leader, you also represent me, even though I live in another state. And I want you to know how seriously disappointed I am with the Democratic Senators who have failed our president by whining about moving prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to prisons in the United States. When Barack Obama won the presidential election, I was so proud and happy, knowing that many of the bad decisions made by the Bush administration would now be rectified. I had not, however, thought that the Democrats themselves would stand in the way of rectifying bad policy.

Your recent stand on not allowing those enemy combatants to be moved from Guantanamo Bay is faithless and cowardly. It reminds too many independents why they hesitate to vote for Democrats. If Democrats can't show courage now, when they have a popular president to lead the way, they certainly can't be trusted to do the right thing when the going is tough.

Will you and the other Democratic senators please fight for what is RIGHT, not for what is expedient? I live in a state that's Republican, but there was a lot of support for Barack Obama here--and a possibility of gaining ground for the Democratic Party. But not if the Democrats refuse to stand firm and offer a real, substantial, alternative choice over Republicans.

Sincerely...

Now, today's Washington Post has an article on the growing number of political independents in the United States: "Pew Values Poll: Independents Upper Hand," Jennifer Agiesta, Washington Post, posted May 21, 2009. The "independent" voters that I know seem to fall in line with the description of this poll:

On questions of the social safety net and equal opportunities and rights, independents have shifted toward traditional Republican positions, while on broader role of government questions, independents hew more closely to the Democratic point of view. Independents also tend to lean closer to Democrats on issues including regulation of the free market, social values, religiosity and national security, but are more apt to agree with Republicans on government responsiveness.

Those independents that I know are family members who, I suspect, usually vote Republican, but they hope for the Democratic Party to offer some real solutions and leadership. When that leadership fails, they turn to the party they have traditionally trusted, while complaining that the two-party system is inadequate. Obama's presidency offers a chance to find more support among independents for Democratic policy--but that chance will disappear if independents perceive Democratic leaders as waffling and indecisive.

Commencement Speakers

I don't remember much about the commencement exercises I attended as a student and later as a faculty member or about the commencement addresses by locally or nationally well-known speakers. Or rather, I don't remember the successful commencement speeches; I do remember a cringe-making commencement address in 2002 by Jeane Kirkpatrick, former United Nations Ambassador; the speech was so rambling that I thought perhaps Ms. Kirkpatrick was ill. Over at Slate, Timothy Noah has some useful advice on choosing commencement speakers: instead of choosing people who have succeeded, choose people who have failed and learned from their failures. As he says, "people typically have a much easier time recounting, in often vivid detail, where they screwed up in life than they do explaining what they did right." His suggestions are here: "Wrong Commencement Speakers!," Timothy Noah, at Slate, posted Monday, May 18, 2009.

Thirty-one Years Today

Rainy Day Garden

The Atlanta area has been receiving a lot of rain lately, a wonderful respite from the drought that has plagued Georgia in the last few years. And this week we're experiencing rather cool weather for May, with highs in the 70s and lows in the low 50s. (Acccording to Weather.com, the average high for our area at this time of the year is in the low 80s and the average low in the low 60s.) The garden is thriving with this rainfall. I have frequently harvested the leaf lettuces, mesclun mixes, and arugula for salads--very good with just a simple dressing.

Experiencing such hot, dry weather in the past two years since we moved to metro-Atlanta makes me appreciate all the more the recent rainy and cool weather. Even several gray days in a row last week could not dampen my thankfulness for the rain. Today the weather is very cool (in the low 60s between 11 a.m. and noon) yet sunny. Just a few minutes ago I walked outside to gather up all of my dirty gardening gloves which I usually throw on a metal shelf on our patio after gardening. As I was returning from the garage to the house, I heard the call of a rufous-sided towhee (Eastern towhee), a familiar sound in the leafy woods and bushy backyards of this neighborhood. What is less familiar, however, is a sighting of the towhee, which likes to hide in shrubbery. But there he was, right on our fence. He sat there and called over and over while I stood silently and still and Persephone our cat indifferently licked her fur. What a lovely bird, all the lovelier for the clear sighting, unimpeded by underbrush.

Think Progress on Torture

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, conservatives continue to praise torture as effective. Think Progress has a long summary of experts demonstrating otherwise: "Why Bush's 'Enhanced Interrogation' Program Failed". Evidence does not convince a surprising number of people in this country, but at least the evidence is there for those who care.

Gross Manipulation of Christian Scripture

Today Steven Benen has a link to GQ magazine, where Robert Draper, the author of the Bush-endorsed biography Dead Certain, has a long article on Donald Rumsfeld and the Department of Defense during the Bush Administration. Frank Rich's column discusses that article in The New York Times today, as well. According to Rich, "Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers." I haven't read Draper's article yet; I'm printing it out to read later because I have more manual labor planned for this afternoon. However, I have looked at the selection of "cover sheets" that Rumsfeld and his department prepared for President Bush daily. These cover sheets "were approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself" (Rich, NYT, May 16, 2009).

Frank Rich calls these "triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations" creepy. A Christian would (or should) call them blasphemous. The Department of Defense used scripture from the letters of St. Paul and St. Peter, which were meant to encourage early Christians in their daily living in a highly militarized culture opposed to the teachings of Christ ("love your enemies," "Do good to those who hate you"), to promote war. Sure, Paul used military metaphors because these were metaphors his Greek audience would understand:

Put on the full armor of God so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. (Letter of Paul to the Ephesians, 6:13-17, NIV)

Rumsfeld and his department took these scriptures entirely out of context to manipulate those for whom they were intended, specifically a president of the United States who called himself a "born-again believer." St. Paul was not telling his readers to arm themselves literally with weapons. As he wrote just previous to the scripture quoted above, the war he foresaw was not one "against flesh and blood" but against evil. Christian faith, Paul said, was the weapon against evil. In addition, these words come at the very end of a letter in which Paul had more specifically described how those Ephesians should live: husbands and wives loving one another, masters and slaves treating one another well, fathers being kind to their children, people speaking truthfully to their neighbors and not allowing the sun to go down on their anger. "Live a life of love," Paul exhorted those early Christians, "as just Christ loved us" (Ephesians 5:1).

Any true Christian would be appalled to see those words accompanying a picture of an army tank bathed by the glow of a desert sunset. Any Muslim who saw that picture accompanied by those words would have every right to conclude that the U.S. government was engaged in a "holy" war against Muslims. Above a slide of Saddam Hussein, these words are quoted from I Peter 2:15: "It is God's will that by doing good you will silence the ignorant talk of foolish men." I am disgusted that these words were used to promote war. Sure, Saddam Hussein was an evil man who tortured and massacred his own people. But St. Peter's words were meant to encourage followers to live justly and righteously in a very repressive society. St. Peter was encouraging those early Christians to persuade by actions acted out of love and faith, not anger and retribution.

The more that is revealed of our government's actions in the "war on terror," the more appalled I am at how much of those actions are diametrically opposed to all I have believed about the values of our country and about the religious values with which I was reared (steeped and marinated).

Nothing Found in Nature

The orange juice you drank this morning, if not fresh-squeezed by yourself, just might not be what you expect it to be. According to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice,

“from concentrate” and most “not from concentrate” orange juice undergo processes that strip the flavor from the juice. The largest producers of “not from concentrate” or pasteurized orange juice keep their juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year round supply. Aseptic storage involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as “deaeration,” so the juice doesn’t oxidize in the “tank farms” in which the juice sits, sometimes for as long as a year.

To get that "fresh-squeezed" taste, the orange juice companies re-introduce flavor in the liquid with flavor packs "fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil." So in that glass of orange juice, you're drinking chemicals that have been concocted to taste like orange juice; Ethyl butyrate is one of the prominent chemicals in that concoction.

But those Star Trek episodes have prepared us for this future, haven't they? "Computer: Orange Juice!"

Oh, those of us in the United States, our orange juice is more likely to originate in Brazil, not Florida.

Further information:"Ask an Academic: Orange Juice," interview with Alissa Hamilton, The New Yorker, May 14, 2009

Dreaming of Birds

Alexander Wilson, Short-eared Owl

This morning I woke later than usual for work, rising out of a dream set in dark hallways where family members passed by like walkers in a mall. But the image that remains with me most vividly is that of a big room with a wooden stairway and large wooden arches framing pane-less windows open to the sky. Crouching in a large area under a landing of the stairway were three huge, beautiful birds, an eagle, an owl, and a bird I could not identify. While the setting of the dream was dark--dark wood, dim room, dark sky--the emotional atmosphere of the dream was suffused with awe and surprise. The birds' feathers glistened, reflecting some faint light, perhaps from somewhere in the room, perhaps from the sky, and the birds were aware but unafraid of the humans standing nearby.

Audubon, Golden Eagle

My dream self was standing slightly above the birds, looking down, as if from steps on the staircase. As I watched, the birds prepared to fly, each stretching its wings fully before launching into the sky. The eagle flew first, up through the wooden arches, then the unknown bird, almost transforming its shape as it passed closely overhead, revealing a long neck and a narrow head. It let out a wild, piercing, plaintive cry as it flew. Briefly, the mood of the dream shimmered into loss, grief, a slight hint of fear. Finally, the owl--a tremendously powerful bird with intelligent, limpid brown eyes set in a large round head with feathery ear tufts--spread its wings and flew up. However, just as it reached eye-level, it turned its head toward me and deliberately spoke. Then it flapped its large, silent wings and disappeared into the sky.

No, I do not remember the words of the owl; I'm not sure that I understood them in the dream. I woke from the dream, dumb-struck, my body heavy on the bed as if the sentience required for moving it still lagged behind in that other, shadowy land.

What might be the significance of this dream? I wondered later, as I sat in the Learning and Tutoring Center where I tutor part-time. It's the end of finals week, and the lab was quiet. I remembered that in many cultures throughout history, owls have been associated with the dead, as messengers of death or omens of evil; others have viewed the owl more positively:

For centuries, all around the world, humans have had a continuous and strong cultural relationship with owls, traceable back 15 000 years to caves in France. Some cultures view owls as omens of bad luck, sickness, and death, while others view them as creator beings, helping spirits, having profound wisdom, oracular powers, or the ability to avert evil. (David Johnson, The Little Owl Conservation, Ecology and Behavior of Athene noctua, Cambridge University Press)

The eagle has less ambiguous associations. In most cultures it is viewed as a symbol of bravery, power, immortality:

As the supreme master of the air, the eagle is one of the most unambiguous and universal of all symbols, embodying, as it does the power, speed and perception of the animal world at its peak, together with majesty, domination, victory, valour, inspiration, and spiritual aspiration. . . .Soaring toward the sun, the eagle seemed a creature capable of carrying souls to heaven--the origin of the Roman custom of releasing an eagle from the pyre of emperors. (Jack Tresidder, The Complete Dictionary of Symbols, Chronicle Books, 2005)

Its opposite is the owl, the bird of darkness and death. (Juan Aduardo Cirlot, translator, Jack Sage, A Dictionary of Symbols, Courier Dover Publications, 2002)

Audubon, Anhinga

And what about that unknown bird, the second one that took to flight, with its narrow iridescent head and long, snake-like neck? An anhinga? The anhinga is also highly venerated in some Native American cultures. According to Peyote and the Yankton Sioux: The Life and Times of Sam Necklace, by Thomas Constantine Maroukis, the "stylized bird" is "represented [in Peyote art] in swift flight, headed skyward and carrying prayers."

I entertained my co-workers for a few minutes by describing this dream and contemplating its significance. Then, with no students to tutor, I opened up the book I had brought this week to read between tutoring sessions: Czeslaw Milosz's poetry anthology, A Book of Luminous Things. The bookmark was placed where I had previously left off reading. The next poem? David Wagoner's "The Author of American Ornithology Sketches a Bird, Now Extinct," a powerful poem about Alexander Wilson, the "Father" of American ornithology, and an ivory-billed woodpecker he had wounded and brought home to sketch. The opening lines of the poem describe Wilson's carrying the bird through town, under his coat:

When he walked through town, the wing-shot bird he'd hidden
Inside his coat began to cry like a baby,
High and plaintive and loud as the calls he'd heard
While hunting it in the woods, and goodwives stared
And scurried indoors to guard their own from harm.

And the innkeeper and the goodmen in the tavern
Asked him whether his child was sick, then laughed.
Slapped knees, and laughed as he unswaddled his prize,
His pride and burden: an ivory-billed woodpecker
As big as a crow, still wailing and squealing.

The poem continues to describe the ivorybill's desperate and futile attempts to escape and the artist's equally stubborn will to capture the bird's image on paper. The powerful impact of the poem is magnified by our knowledge that the bird that Wilson shot--and ultimately killed--to record with ink and paint became extinct around 1880, with only a sighting or two in the twentieth century. There have been some disputed sightings in the twenty-first century, but the search continues for unambiguous evidence that the bird has survived the devastation of its habitat.

Wilson, Ivory-billed Woodpecker and Pileated Woodpecker

What to make of these connections? I'm not sure. However, the dream and the poem that followed do remind me of how we have plundered the natural world, sometimes with the best intentions but with just as devastating consequences as if our actions had been evilly intended. Alexander Wilson left behind the most beautifully-captured illustrations of birds and descriptions of their behavior and habitats. To do that, however, he sometimes disregarded the needs of the bird, tamping down his own empathetic responses to his subject. Wilson wrote about the ivory-billed woodpecker: "While engaged in taking the drawing, he cut me severely in several places, and, on the whole, displayed such a noble and unconquerable spirit, that I was frequently tempted to restore him to his native woods. He lived with me nearly three days, but refused all sustenance, and I witness his death with regret." As a short biography of Wilson indicates, the self-taught ornithologist had a great affection for his subjects, as "he notes the habits and habitats of birds as if they were companions rather than objects of study." Yet to complete that study, the ornithologist often shot the bird to facilitate the process of recording the bird's image.

One ornithologist shooting a bird is no real threat to the natural world, but the attitude that one has the unquestionable right to take the life of another animal--or to destroy the habitat in which it lives-- is a danger. Hence, the long list of animals made extinct, not by some lengthy natural-selection process, but by the unimpeded hubris and greed of humans.

But I digress from my dream. Perhaps the owl was calling my name; in that case, the dream could be a premonition of my death. Or perhaps the owl meant to comfort me; recent suffering in my extended family and concerns about circumstances in my own nuclear family have made me a little anxious. Or perhaps the owl spoke to startle me to attentiveness. The brain continues clicking away while our body sleeps. Psychologists at Harvard University are studying how the brain works during sleep, how sleeping facilitates memory and learning:

The search for answers focuses around a surprisingly small s-shaped area deep in the brain, called the hippocampus. Most neurologists consider this the storehouse for new facts. [Harvard psychologist Matthew] Walker believes that, during sleep, the hippocampus carries on a conversation with the main thinking and organizing part of the brain, the so-called cortex that sits over the top and front of human brains...

Other research has shown that memories seem to be consolidated both during dreamless sleep at the beginning of the night and during dreams that usually occur later. How does this tie in with the conversations between hippocampus and cortex? One idea is that new memories move out of the hippocampus and into the cortex during dreamless sleep earlier in the night. When new and old memories meet, they mix in bizarre and novel ways we call dreams. (William J. Cromie, "Learning While We Sleep and Dream," Harvard Gazette Online, May 3, 2007)

As I left work this afternoon, I was especially alert to the natural world. As I approached the parking lot, I noticed a blue bird, perched on a metal sign post. It sat there for a few minutes as I opened my car door and slid into the driver's seat, heading home.

Alexander Wilson's Work:
"Alexander Wilson, American Ornithologist," American Studies at the University of Virginia.

Torture--It Won't Go Away

Every time I think this is the last post I'm going to write on torture, I change my mind. What our government did is unconscionable, and until justice is served, I'll keep bringing up the subject here, particularly since it is increasingly clear that some people would love for the subject to go away, and they are doing their darnedest to walk away; others are using their power in the public sphere to justify and to support the use of torture--Dick Cheney just can't shut up about how wonderful torture is; and others are just trying to obfuscate the issue as best they can.

Then there are those that continue to make the stupidest comments on record. Several bloggers have discussed the hearing on torture today before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary (See “What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration”). Think Progress has a post, with a video clip of Lindsey Graham saying:

The Vice President is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I’d like the committee to get that information. Let’s have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work. (Think Progress: ""Graham: Since torture techniques have ’survived for about 500 years,’ ‘apparently they work.’"

"Both sides of the story"? What sides, exactly? That torture works or doesn't work? That we should torture or not torture? If it works, does that justify our torturing people? If it doesn't work, should we still do it? That because something "has survived for about 500 years" it's necessarily successful and justifiable? Does Lindsey Graham read? does he know his history? Does he have any moral backbone? Here are just a few thoughts that come to my mind (and, how lucky, I've research notes right here):

• Torture has historically been used to get people to confess to what the torturers want to hear, not particularly because the torturers want the truth. Just read the story of the Frenchman Jean Calas in 1762. Calas was tortured by authorities because they wanted him to confess to killing his son--even though there was no proof. And when Voltaire sought information about procedures of the case, the authorities would not release that information; the procedures were kept secret. The man died without confessing, a niggling little detail that worried the authorities; had the man confessed--no matter whether the confession was "true" or not--they could rest easy.
  
  Oh, lo and behold, the Bush Administration wanted to increase the use of "coercive techniques" because the prisoners associated with Al Qaeda were not providing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq during questioning. More "coercive techniques" (some stressful positions, several days without sleep, some slapping around, a little waterboarding) might establish the link the government so desired in order to justify going to war against Iraq. (See Ron Suskind's The One-Percent Doctrine, specifically, chapter 3, from which this quote is taken: "Early doubts voiced by the CIA about any connection between [Saddam and Al Qaeda] were duly noted and largely ignored by the Vice President, Don Rumsfeld, and their respective staffs" p. 123)

• Does torture provide good information? According to an article on ProPublica that recounts the findings of the Senate Armed Services Committee Report on detainee treatment, Major Paul Burney, from the Behavioral Science Consultation Team who "help[ed] ramp up intelligence collection at Guantanamo, "there was 'a lot of pressure to use more coercive techniques' because prisoners were resisting interrogators and 'we were not being successful at establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq.'" That same article discusses how in a memo of Oct., 2, 2002, these psychologists "versed in the military's 'SERE' program" (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) warned government officials "that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command. 

Col. Larry C. James, then psychology chief at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, also warned that

 the use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects. . . When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, i. e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. . . it usually decreases the reliability of the information...Because of the danger involved, very few SERE instructors are allowed to actually use physical pressures. . . everything that is occurring [in SERE school] is very carefully monitored and paced. . . Even with all these safeguards, injuries and accidents do happen. The risk with real detainees is increased exponentially...(quoted in "Tortured Profession: Psychologists Warned of Abusive Interrogations, Then Helped Craft Them, by Sheri Fink, ProPublia, May 5, 2009).

• And just what is an "acceptable" level of torture? Well, according to CIA lawyer Jonathan Freedman, torture techniques that the Behavioral Science Consultation Team described were legal, and the signatory agreement to the United Nations Torture Convention could be disregarded because the wording was too vague. In short, he argued, the convention was "'basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong.'" (quoted in Finks' article) Oops! I guess that was too much torture. The detainee died. My bad.

I could go on and on, but I'll just end with this note: I am disappointed with Barack Obama's refusal to release the remaining photos that record interrogation (and torture) of detainees at Abu Ghraib and other military installations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think there should be a full accounting of the consequences of torture. Otherwise, it won't go away.

Other Voices:

Mark Benjamin, "Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering," Salon, May 14, 2009.

Scott Horton, "A Convenient Death," posted on his blog No Comment, at Harper's Magazine, May 12, 2009.

Juan Cole, "The Hidden Hand of Dick Cheney," in Salon, May 13, 2009.

Nick Baumann, "The Torture Dissidents' Tale," Mother Jones, May 13, 2009.

Mike Webb, "Mark Danner and ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer Talk Torture," on ProPublica, May 13, 2009.

David Rittgers, "Former FBI Agent: Torture Sucks; Don't Do It," Cato @ Liberty, posted May 13, 2009.

Andrew Sullivan, "The President Explains," on his blog, The Daily Dish, at The Atlantic," May 13, 2009.

Clint Hendler, "Transparency Interview: Jameel Jaffer," Columbia Journalism Review, May 4, 2009.

David Crisp, "Torture Revisited" and "Thursday Talk Radio Update II," on Billings Blog, May 1, 2009.

Mark Danner, "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means," The New York Review of Books, April 30, 2009.

Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, "In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Look at Past Use," The New York Times, April 21, 2009.

Dueling Feminists

Because I read Hilzoy's posts at Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog, I was aware of the back and forth between Hilzoy and Linda Hirshman on women and their abusers. Today, Hilzoy quoted Hirshman from that original argument. Here's the quote:

Individual stories eventually add up to evidence, true, but a personal, revelatory anecdote tends to abort what is supposed to be a political conversation. (originally appeared here, "Sheltering Women: Linda Hirshman Responds to Hilzoy")

How I hate that kind of condescension: "what is supposed to be political conversation." (Hey, I thought the personal WAS political.) Hirshman continues in that original post of April 14th: "If we are to discuss the politics of abuse, we need to resist this rhetorical move. It would be churlish of me to downplay the suffering of this well-known intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere." What's up with that: "this well-known intellectual with many friends in the blogosphere"? Would it be less churlish to "downplay the suffering" of someone who is NOT an intellectual, someone with few friends in the "blogosphere"? And also, what's wrong with explaining how one's political views arise naturally out of one's own experiences and observations? If one remains in the personal anecdote without trying to see the bigger picture or without acknowledging that one's personal experiences don't define the world, then perhaps there is a problem. However, this tendency to make argument bloodlessly intellectual, with little regard to empathy or the personal experiences of others, is what has gotten us in trouble over and over again in history. Oh, and if you think I'm exaggerating, just look at Hirshman's advice for feminist success: she essentially tells women to become men--or rather, what alpha men have historically been. (You can read that argument here: "Homeward Bound," Linda Hirshman, available on the web only at the American Prospect. I'm not totally unsympathetic to Hirshman's argument. But I do believe it is elitist in the worst sense, with little regard for the lives of ordinary, middle-class and working class women and with little regard to the multiplicity of human experience and the possibility of happiness and worth grounded in other things besides financial and familial independence.)

That very adjective "revelatory" gives the personal its power.

For more on this exchange, see Hilzoy's post today at Political Animal: "Two Sizes Too Small." I'm totally with her on those last two paragraphs of the post. See also, Linda Hirshman's post, "The Trouble with Jezebel," at DoubleX. There's a lot I agree with here, too. But Hilzoy certainly does bring out an important point in her response, too, and that point is that each of us has to make choices based on individual experiences, experiences grounded in a particular place, at a particular time, embedded in personal and political realities far beyond the Ivory Towers where professors of philosophy pontificate on power and feminism. It may be true that every woman who reports a rape is striking a blow for feminism, but that doesn't mean the reverse is true: that every woman who decides not to report a rape is cowardly capitulating to male domination. She may just be making the best choice for herself.

Garden Update

Yesterday Tom and I finished putting in the bamboo border around this garden in our sunny front lawn. Then today I took a few photos with the camera Tom gave me for Mother's Day--just snapshots. I've not had time to fiddle with all the technical bits yet. The late morning sun was very bright, and my photos a little overexposed.

Mother's Day 2009

This morning my sixteen-year-old daughter woke me up for breakfast in bed. I'm not a breakfast-in-bed sort of person, so, groaning as I moved the muscles I had put to more use than they were accustomed in yesterday's gardening, I got out of bed to enjoy my Mother's Day breakfast. The breakfast M-M prepared included a scrambled egg decorated with two bright nasturtium blooms, a slice of Gimme Lean: Ground Sausage-Style Veggie Protein (my husband and daughter are vegetarians), buttered (Smart Balance Omega Buttery Spread) toast with jelly my own mother made. This was accompanied by a cup of hot tea. Yesterday my son had chatted with me on Gmail, assuring me that he had mailed me a Mother's Day card but that it would arrive late. I told him that he was just carrying on the family tradition of responding late to holidays such as Mother's Day and Father's Day. I tend to be late with such greetings. But I did call my mother this morning to wish her a Happy Mother's Day.

How did this Mother's Day tradition begin? Ruth Rosen has the story on Slate, "Soap to Ploughshares: Returning Mother's Day to its Original Meaning."

The women who originally celebrated Mother's Day conceived of it as an occasion to use their status as mothers to protest injustice and war. In 1858, Anna Reeves Jarvis organized Mother's Work Days in West Appalachian communities to protest the lack of sanitation that caused disease-bearing insects and polluted water to sicken or even kill poor workers. In 1870, after witnessing the bloody Civil War, Julia Ward Howe—a Boston pacifist, poet, and suffragist who wrote the "Battle Hymn of the Republic"—proclaimed a special day for mothers to oppose war. Committed to ending all armed conflict, Howe wrote, "Our husbands shall not come to us reeking with carnage. … Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience."

For the next three decades, Americans celebrated Mother's Days for Peace on June 2. Women political activists of this era fought to end lynching and organized to end child labor, trafficking of women, and consumer fraud. In their view, their moral superiority was grounded in the fact of their motherhood.

When Anna Jarvis died in 1905, her daughter, also named Anna, vowed to honor her mother's political activism by creating a national Mother's Day. The gift card and flower industries also lobbied hard. As an industry publication, the Florists' Review, put it, "This was a holiday that could be exploited." In 1914, Congress responded and proclaimed the second Sunday in May to be Mother's Day. (Ruth Rosen, "Soap to Ploughshares: Returning Mother's Day to its Original Meaning," Slate, posted Friday, May 8, 2009).

I loved my breakfast in bed and the camera my husband purchased for me (our old one just died). However, I bet many mothers feel as I do that any time our children do something that illustrates they've carried on our values or learned some skill we taught them, that's Mother's Day for us. When my son spends Saturdays volunteering at an organic farm near Austin, Texas, that's Mother's Day for me. When my daughter spent one week (over 40 hours a week) out of each of the past two summers helping with home repair for people who couldn't afford to pay for that work, that was Mother's Day for me.

Rosen reminds us that the first Mother's Days were really Mother's Days for Peace, celebrated on June 2nd for three decades. I'm all for returning Mother's Day to its original meaning: a day to celebrate political activism, in honor of our mothers, who taught us to do right.

When is Torture Torture?

As Andrew Sullivan points out, to the The New York Times, torture is torture, that is, those "enhanced interrogation techniques" or "harsh interrogations" being labeled "torture," when another country does it. The hypocrisy in this whole torture debate is disgusting: It's torture when "they" do it, but it's not torture when "we" do it.

The torture debate has now moved to finger-pointing about who knew what and when. Was Nancy Pelosi briefed on how interrogation techniques were being used? She seems to have been present for one briefing in September 2002. Pelosi says that she was not told that waterboarding was being used, and, anyway, there wasn't anything she could do. However, Zachary Roth, on Talking Points Memo, points out that "Jane Harman, who succeeded Pelosi as the ranking Democrat on the intel committee," sent an official letter of protest (classified) to the CIA in 2003.

I'm with Roth on this: the argument over who knew what and when, the partisan finger-pointing, is a dead-ender. An investigation into our government's using torture to interrogate prisoners should be authorized and commenced, with no regard to party involvement:

Here's the larger point: Whatever we end up finding out about the specifics of what was and wasn't said in that briefing, it already seems clear that Pelosi didn't do all that she could have. Of course, that's not an argument -- as some Republican torture supporters seem to think -- against a full investigation into how these techniques were developed and approved. In fact, it's yet another good reason why such a probe is exactly what we need.(Zachary Roth, "Record Suggests Pelosi Did Little In Response To Torture Briefing," TPM Muckraker, posted May 8, 2009)

So often our political leaders in Congress remind me of children. This particular finger-pointing is reminiscent of the Alpha kid who is caught beating up a little kid and is threatened with punishment. The bully kid then whines, "There were witnesses. In fact, Beta-kid was watching and did nothing to stop me." Beta-kid then says, "Hey, I didn't see the actual kick to the face and kidney."

Is there no adult in this country who can get these children to take responsibility for their actions?

What's Up with Public Prayer?

Evangelical Christian leaders and far-right religious folk are criticizing Barack Obama for not holding a formal White House event on the "National Day of Prayer." The President released a proclamation designating the first Thursday in May as National Prayer Day, a proclamation that included these words:

It is in that spirit of unity and reflection that we once again designate the first Thursday in May as the National Day of Prayer. Let us remember those who came before us, and let us each give thanks for the courage and compassion shown by so many in this country and around the world.

On this day of unity and prayer, let us also honor the service and sacrifice of the men and women of the United States Armed Forces. We celebrate their commitment to uphold our highest ideals, and we recognize that it is because of them that we continue to live in a Nation where people of all faiths can worship or not worship according to the dictates of their conscience.

Let us also use this day to come together in a moment of peace and goodwill. Our world grows smaller by the day, and our varied beliefs can bring us together to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted; to make peace where there is strife; and to lift up those who have fallen on hard times. As we observe this day of prayer, we remember the one law that binds all great religions together: the Golden Rule, and its call to love one another; to understand one another; and to treat with dignity and respect those with whom we share a brief moment on this Earth.

However, these gracious words are not enough for the Dobson crowd. Becky Armstrong, marketing and media manager of the National Day of Prayer Task Force, said that not holding a public event at the White House "would be belittling to those millions of people" who are meeting publicly around the country to pray out loud. Sometimes I wonder where the real Christians are. Do these far-right religious people even read their Bible? What did Jesus say about prayer? Would Jesus expect Barack Obama to have a fancy prayer meeting at the White House? Well, let's just see what he might say.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. (Holy Bible, Matthew 6:5-8, New International Version)

I've never understood the hysterical whining about public prayer--because as a child in the Southern Baptist Church, I read these words and figured that's just what Jesus wanted his followers to do: shut their mouths, go to their rooms, and pray to God. So what's up with all this fuss about public prayer?

Gone to Texas

Click on photo to view an enlarged, easy to read, version.

In the early 19th century, a huge migration took place as people in the United States traveled west. Some of these people left a cryptic sign on their abandoned homes, revealing their destination: GTT, Gone to Texas. In the latter part of the 19th century, more people headed to Texas as the railroads made travel easier. Two of these late-comers to Texas (compared to some of my ancestors who arrived before independence from Mexico and were given Spanish land grants) were my husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong, and his great-grandfather's brother Robert Armstrong. The two brothers left home and family in Virginia for Texas. Robert settled down in Bryan, Texas, married Cora Cavitt, and practiced law. Baker, a pharmacist, traveled around Texas selling pharmaceuticals, worked as a pharmacist at a drugstore on Main Street, in Bryan, Texas, married Mary Ophelia Nugent, whose family had moved from New Orleans to Virginia in the mid-1880s, and eventually settled in Houston, where he was connected with two or three of those ubiquitous oil companies of the early twentieth century. He also speculated in land.

One of the items handed down in the Armstrong family is the Bible of Baker's and Robert's mother. The inscription in one of the inside leaves reads: Mrs. L. T. Armstrong, From Her Daughters, July 7th 1878. Running sideways and parallel to that inscription are these words: For Baker W. Armstrong, from His Mother. The Bible had been passed on, from mother to son, from Virginia to Texas, with a mother's sorrows, comfort, and anxieties clearly revealed in its pages: handwritten notes on deaths of family members, clippings of obituaries, various flowers pressed between the pages, a newspaper clipping of a beloved son's recent appointment as pharmacist to "Geo. W. Norrell, Druggist, Main St., Bryan---Texas." And on the first pages, notes of her sons' travel, a mother's version of GTT:"Robert left for B--Aug 30, 188?; Baker left for Roanoke, Aug 20, 188?; Baker came home sick Oct 5, 1882 & left for Baltimore Jan 2 1883; Baker & Robert left Sept 18th 1884; Baker left for Texas Oct 8, 1884; Robert left for Romney, Mar 13, 1885; Robert left for Texas Aug 31, 1885; Baker reached home July 7, 1886, from Texas--left for Texas again July 26, 1886."

I'm thinking of starting another blog that just focuses on family history, on those ancestors who left in their wake the blaze: GTT, Gone to Texas.

Gravestone in Decatur Cemetery, Decatur, Georgia

The Heart of the Garden

M-M took this photo of nasturtiums.

Each spring, our city schedules a Saturday for Super Trash Day when people in our neighborhood can place at the curb items too large or unsuitable for regular trash pick up. Most people begin putting out items late in the week, items they have cleaned out from their attics and garages, limbs they have cut from their trees. The fun part about Super Trash Day is scavenging; people begin driving slowly in the neighborhood eyeing each other's trash. Last year I noticed a woman driving through the neighborhood in a beat-up white truck, the bed full of garden items and discarded furniture. She stopped and picked over our trash, a lot of which had been abandoned in the attic and basement by previous owners. She told me she was going to turn some of the furniture into yard art. Another man stopped and loaded his truck with scrap metal that he was planning to resell. This year, we didn't have much to put out, but on a trip around the neighborhood, Tom noticed that one of our neighbors was trimming his backyard bamboo patch. Tom knew that I had imagined using pieces of bamboo as a border around our Victory Garden. I had priced strips of bamboo tacked in two to three-foot sections at local gardening centers; I wasn't satisfied with either the price or the product. So Tom loaded up the pick-up with four-to-ten foot lengths of bamboo. I was excited when Tom drove up with the load of bamboo, so excited that I asked him to get another load. The neighbor said that if Tom wanted more bamboo, to just ask; he has to keep it cut back or it will take over his yard.

Finally, after days of rain, we had some clear weather on Sunday and thus had the opportunity to put my idea to the test. Tom cut up the bamboo into one-and-a-half foot pieces. He dug a trench around the garden, and we placed the bamboo ends in the ground. In four hours on Sunday afternoon, we had finished the border on the front, yard-side, of the Victory Garden. We'll complete the border on the back side of the garden this next weekend, or as soon as we have the clear weather and the time to do it. I'm pleased with the result. Here are some photos of our progress.

And for contrast, the photos below are of the last garden I planned and then created with Tom's help, what I called my Haiku Garden (herbs, flowers, native plants) and an extended vegetable garden next to it--in Texas, 2004-2007. I think I did permanent damage to my knees shoveling gravel for that Haiku Garden. We don't have this kind of space here in our little suburban yard in metro-Atlanta.

I realize how much I miss this garden in Texas. We put so much work and imagination into creating it. But then, I've gardened everywhere I have lived; I've left something of myself in each of the gardens I've planted or helped to plant, beginning with the gardens of my childhood in East Texas. Each place had its own requirements, its own history. In each new home, I have enjoyed waiting for that first spring to see what others had planted before me: spider lilies in Louisiana, Lily of the Valley and peonies in Minnesota, brown irises and beautiful daffodils in west-central Georgia, roses and paperwhites in Texas, and here--in Georgia again--violets and azaleas in our backyard. And I have always planted seeds, bulbs, or plants given to me by my grandmother or my parents: daylilies, purple globe amaranths, irises. This is the heart of the garden: the connections forged between gardener and earth, between gardener and plant, between gardener and gardener; the hope in the seed that miraculously becomes new life. Every gardener is a person with hope. That's what I remind myself when I mourn the gardens I've left behind: There will be another garden.