Christians and Hatred

Justin Elliot of TPM Muckraker points out today that the guy who showed up with an AK-47 at an event where Barack Obama spoke attends a church where the pastor preaches sermons with titles such as "Why I Hate Barack Obama." In fact, Chris Broughton, the man with the AK-47 and handgun, had heard just that sermon the day before showing up armed. I tried to listen to the entire sermon, but I couldn't stand to hear such hatred. The preacher referred to "the whoredoms and witchcrafts of the U.S. government and Barack Obama" and said that he prays to God that Barack Obama will "die and go to hell."

We might be tempted to wave a hand dismissively and label this pastor as a small feeder on the fringe. But elected Republicans are spouting language that is just as incendiary. Republican Senator John Inofe (Oklahoma) told his constituents, "We're almost reaching a revolution in this country." (h/t Steve Benen, Josh Marshall) He says he doesn't know what's in the health reform bill, won't read it, and will vote against it (in the full splendor of his self-proclaimed stupidity). Representative Michele Bachman (R-MN) wants her constituents to be "armed and dangerous." These people may claim to be using such language "figuratively," they may be punctuating their calls to arms with little moues of self-righteousness, but they are building a fire they will not be able to control.

A Right Wing Terrorist A "Great American"?

Here's a thought: If someone stood up in a town-hall meeting and said he was proud to be a left-wing terrorist, what do you think would be the audience's response and the response of mouth-frothing radio talk show hosts?

Well, in Redding, California (that's northern California, far away from the "crazy" Southerners Kevin Drum excoriated in a blog a couple of weeks ago and to which I responded), a citizen stood in such a meeting and said he was proud to be a right-wing terrorist. Instead of repudiating the language and the violence inherent in it, the crowd cheered him. And the Republican congressman present praised him:

“Amen, God bless you,” [Republican Congressman Wally] Herger said with a broad smile. “There is a great American.” (Paul Boerger, "Web extra: Congressman Herger calls Obama plan 'threat to democracy'," Mt. Shasta Area Newspapers, posted Friday, August 21, 2009.)

Ummmm.... Timothy McVeigh was a "right-wing terrorist." Is he a "Great American"? My God, what is happening in our country where people can make these claims and be cheered?

Phil Gingrey Encourages Gun-totin'

When Chris Matthews asked Phil Gingrey (R-GA) if he believed that people should bring guns to town hall meetings where health care is being discussed, Gingrey replied, "I would think that they should exercise their rights under the 2nd Amendment." Gingrey essentially is encouraging people to take guns to town meetings, to meetings where folks have already been worked up into hysterical fear by lying politicians and media faces. Folks who carry guns to those meetings didn't just casually strap on their weapons when they dressed in the morning; they deliberately holstered-up when they prepared to attend a meeting in which they disagreed with the speaker. They are visually communicating the idea that if the speaker says something they don't like, they have force on their side: a deadly weapon. Even if they don't intend to use that weapon, their message is clear. And it's clear to those who might be so fearful or so mentally unstable that they indeed might use deadly force.

People like Phil Gingrey are helping to establish an atmosphere of intimidation and potential violence in public discourse. In a country where four presidents and several popular leaders have been assassinated (and others have faced would-be assassins), it seems insane to me that people are encouraging gun-toting to political rallies. That Gingrey understands the potential violence is revealed in his own words when he laughs and says he has nothing to fear because he gets standing ovations at his town hall meetings:

I've already had five town hall meetings. I have six more planned. I don't plan on wearing a bullet proof vest. In fact, I usually get standing ovations when I come into these meetings, so I have no fear.

So my question for Phil Gingrey is this: If you didn't get standing ovations at your town hall meetings and if you were, instead, faced with people shouting angrily at you, would you then fear for your life if you saw those same folks toting guns?

Rachel Maddow addressed the issue of gun-toting at political events in an with interview Joseph Petro, who served for twenty-three years as a special agent and who authored the book, Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service. She asked Petro how the Secret Service deals with ordinary citizens, not police or security officers, who show up armed at a political rally where the president is present. She referred to an AP report about how a dozen such armed folk showed up at a recent event with President Barack Obama. "Well, that's not something the Secret Service often encounters," Petro responded. He went on to say the following:

But I think this is less a Secret Service issue and more an issue for all of us. [What] you said a few days ago that the possibility of American politics turning to violence or to terrorism at the fringes is not all that theoretical. I would argue that the vitriolic political rhetoric we're hearing, some from seemingly responsible people, is stimulating a lot of these foolish stunts, and they're not very helpful. And I think they're dangerous, actually. And I think they're dangerous for two reasons. One is: it's hard enough to protect the president. The Secret Service and the local police are being distracted from that duty, to keep our president safe. And I think the second reason may be even more serious, is the fact that it could incite or encourage one of those individuals at the fringe that you mention from doing something really dangerous and perhaps violent against the president or some other person .... Maybe the politicians should look at lowering some of the rhetoric to try to create a more positive atmosphere. (Joseph Petro, Rachel Maddow Show)

Angry mobs, inflammatory political atmosphere, and gun-toting citizens....even at open events with President Barack Obama. If anything happens to my president, people like Phil Gingrey will have a lot to answer for.

See Also:

David Sirota, "What it Means to Wear a Gun in Public," posted in Salon, 22 Aug 2009.

Read Bob Herbert

"most of us are, indeed, hard-pressed to give a damn."

--T.A. Franks, "Why is Bob Herbert Boring?: The Perils of Punditry for the Powerless," Washington Monthly, October 2007

I had read T.A. Franks' column some time ago but was reminded of it this morning in one of Matthew Yglesias's posts. Franks writes about how right New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been on many issues over the years--yet Herbert is not an influential columnist such as David Brooks or Maureen Dowd. I quit reading Maureen Dowd a while ago; her columns are smarmy, and her nasty descriptions of public people can go viral so quickly in mainstream media that her characterizations stick to those people like tar, absorbing all light and directing attention away from the real issues. I only occasionally read Brooks' column, but see him every Friday evening on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer voicing support of Republican ideas and actions in his soft and reasonable way (ideas which he is finding kind of difficult to defend these days; he has actually criticized recent Republican shenanigans). But I don't read Bob Herbert much, either, only when a blogger links to his column. Well, I'm going to make a real effort to read Bob's column and encourage others to do so, too. These days, with people screaming at town halls so that no civil discussion to take place, we need calm, reasonable voices that clearly identify the problems in this country and in the world and that encourage us to work to fix those problems.

Another reason I'm going to read Herbert's column is that his column of August 7th clearly articulates thoughts I have rolled over and over in my mind about George Sodini and his attack on those women in that aerobics class--but I hadn't gotten around to putting those thoughts into any coherent order. In "Women at Risk,", Herbert writes that

[w]e have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

I, too, had been thinking of how so many of these public mass killings have been perpetuated by men who direct their disappointments in themselves and in their society toward women. As Herbert points out, if the victims of these men had been chosen because of their ethnicity, there would be a huge uproar; but because they are women, there is an immediate shocked response, and then a return to life as usual. No one seems to be trying to get to the root of misogyny in this country in order to weed it out of us. (Of course, there is disturbing evidence of racism and an unhinged attitude toward Barak Obama in Sodini's online journal, as well.)

Oh, and Herbert received 310 comments on that column, so someone is reading him.

"Weaponized Christianity"--THIS is What Jesus Would Do?

In Khaled Hosseini's novel, The Kite Runner, the homicidal Assef, childhood bully of the main character and his friend, has joined the Taliban. Afghanistan is under an extreme-fringe interpretation of Sharia law. The law is really whatever the Taliban rule. Mobs of young Taliban men massacre people in the streets and destroy centuries-old artifacts. In a climactic chapter of the novel, the first-person narrator, Amir, is confronted by his childhood enemy, Assef, who describes to Amir the massacre of members of an Afghani minority group:

"You don't know the meaning of the word 'liberating' until you've done that, stood in a roomful of targets, let the bullets fly, free of guilt and remorse, knowing you are virtuous, good, and decent. Knowing you're doing God's work. It's breathtaking." He kissed the prayer beads, tilted his head.

It's a horrifying scene and a horrifying philosophy, that rampant murder of innocent people is blessed by God. As the writer of the novel wants to convey, that philosophy does not reflect the true philosophy of Islam, that it is the philosophy of fringe elements, bullies, thugs.

As I read the novel, I realized that we have our own religious fringe elements, people who say they are "Christians" and yet who tout a philosophy not unlike that of Assef. They might not be massacring people on Mainstreet, U.S.A., but they are communicating that philosophy politically through other means, and even, yes, with weapons.

Here are a few examples of how this idea of a "weaponized Christianity" is spreading, intentionally in some ways, unintentionally in other ways, yet no less creepy and insidious.

The war in Iraq has particularly brought out the militant in the Christianity fringe. We see evidence of this in stories about Blackwater, the military contractor that sent many people to Iraq to guard government personnel. The owner of Blackwater, Erik Prince, and his company have been under investigation for some time for illegally smuggling arms into Iraq and for killing Iraqi civilians. Now Prince is getting a closer look: A former employee of Blackwater and an ex-Marine who worked in security for the company have filed sworn statements in court against Prince and his company:

The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince, may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life." (from "Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder," by Jeremy Scahill, in The Nation, posted August 4, 2009.)

According to one of these former Blackwater employees, Erik Prince deliberately hired men who

shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince's executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to "lay Hajiis out on cardboard." Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince's employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as "ragheads" or "hajiis."

Despite these allegations and previous investigations, Blackwater, which has been renamed Xe, continues to be hired by the Obama administration to provide security overseas. (See "U.S. Still Paying Blackwater Millions," Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, 7 August 2009.)

As Jeremy Scahill relates in an interview with Keith Olberman, one of these former employees of Blackwater was also in management in Blackwater, someone who would be intimately familiar with the culture of the company. He and the second Blackwater employee provided this startling information in "sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia." Jeremy Scahill has been researching the use of privatized armies for some time and has written a book based on his research.

These are not frivolous allegations, and their content unnervingly reflects an apocalyptic viewpoint expressed by other people in our government, including, evidently, former president George W. Bush. Jacques Chirac, president of France when the Bush administration was pushing invading Iraq, has revealed the language President Bush used to try to convince France to join the coalition:

"Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. ... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled. ... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins." (from "Agog over Bush's Comments on Gog and Magog," Saturday Gazette-Mail, posted 22 July 2009, by James Haught--h/t to David Crisp; See also, Mitch Potter, "Did He Feel the Hand of God?: Apocalyptic fervor may have held sway in White House," Toronto Star, 29 May 2009, posted on TheSpec.com--h/t to Kevin Drum)

Evidently puzzled by this language President Jacques Chirac asked a theologian at the University of Lausanne to explain the strange references. Thomas Romer, the theologian, later "recounted Bush's strange behavior in Lausanne University's review, Allez Savoir." He explained to Chirac that the arcane references were to Biblical scripture from the books of Ezekial and Revelation. It's troubling to me, as it should be to all Americans, that our president may have been making decisions of war based on an interpretation of Biblical scripture that remains in great dispute among Christians.

Also evident in these stories is the racist attitudes expressed toward Muslims and citizens of Middle Eastern countries. People who incline toward racism in the first place are emboldened when their attitudes are supported, tacitly or explicitly, by their leaders. In his article for Harper's, "Jesus killed Mohammed: The crusade for a Christian military," Jeff Sharlet describes how a Special Forces unit in Samarra carried out their military mission: by openly denigrating the religion of the people they were there to "liberate." Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey and his squad of nine men were assigned to guard the 10th Special Forces Unit, who called themselves "the Faith Element." He recalls how the men that Easter Sunday were shown Mel Gibson's bloody re-telling of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Then the 109th National Guard Infantry rolled out to confront insurgents; they returned under fire from a furious crowd, and the compound remained underseige for the rest of the day.

Sergeant Jeffery Humphrey describes how the men in the compound prepared four Bradley Fighting Vehicles to run from the compound in order to draw enemy fire and how "his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio," and a couple of sergeants were snickering because they had convinced their interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint in Farsi on the side of the vehicle: "Jesus Killed Mohammad." At dusk, this tank, along with the others, rolled into the streets of Samarra, a holy city of Iraq, with its militarized Christian message on its side and the Iraqi interpreter shouting from a bullhorn, "Jesus kill Mohammad, Jesus kill Mohammad," while local Iraqis were being called to evening prayers. Of course, the tank came under increasing fire, and its superior firepower exploded house after Iraqi house. Who was firing from those houses? Just insurgents? Or perhaps, also, Iraqi civilians angered by the lack of respect shown their religion?

"Humphrey heard Lieutenant DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on all doorways that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—each Iraqi household is allowed one gun—with 25mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through the front of a house and out the back wall."

According to Jeff Sharlet, a militarized version of Christianity permeates American armed forces. He cites example after example of highly-placed military leaders who view the United States' intervention in Iraq through apocalyptic lenses; they are holy warriors. How, then, do they--and we, if we do not work diligently to maintain our Constitutional ideal of separation of church and state--differ from the Assefs of the world?

Sources and Further Reading:

• James Haught, "Agog over Bush's Comments on Gog and Magog," Gazette-Mail, 22 July 2009.
  
  
• Mitch Potter, "Did He Feel the Hand of God?," Toronto Star, 29 May 2009, posted at TheSpec.com.
  
  
• Jeremy Scahill, "Blackwater Founder Implicated in Murder," The Nation, 4th August 2009.
  
  
• Jeremy Scahill, "US Still Paying Blackwater Millions," The Nation, 7 August 2009.
  
  
• Jeff Sharlet, "Jesus Killed Mohammad: The Crusade for a Christian Military," Harper's, May 2009.
  
  
• Scott Horton, "Blackwater's Dark Secrets," No Comment, Harper's, posted 6 August 2009.
  
  
• Bill Moyers interviews Jeremy Scahill on PBS's Bill Moyer's Journal about the use of Blackwater mercenaries on U.S. Soil, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. See, also, Bill Moyers' website on PBS: Information about Blackwater and extended interview with Jeremy Scahill.
  
  
• David Antoon, "The Cancer from Within," Truthdig, posted 7 November 2007. (one man's experience and opinion)
  
  
• Eric Mandonnet, "Chirac, Bush et l'Apocalypse," L'Expresse.fr, published 26 February 2009. (h/t truthout.org).

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6 & 9, 1945)

Updated

"I can't describe what I witnessed. I don't have the words. It's like when you burn a fish on the grill. That's what they looked like," a survivor recalls. One of the burned fish, a woman now reconstructed by plastic surgery, describes her father peeling her charred face away from her head with scissors. Another recalls looking at a woman whose body had been burned beyond recognition and realizing from the gold tooth that it was her mother. As she and her sister reached out, their mother crumbled to ashes before their eyes. "This happened 60 years ago, but I'll never forget it," she says quietly.

(from "Still Surviving Hiroshima," Hugh Gusterson, 1 August 2007, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Update: Read Greg Mitchell's article on how the press reported the story: "The Day After Hiroshima: How the Press Reported the News -- And the 'Half-Truths' That Emerged," in Editor and Publisher, 7 August, 2009.

Blame all our woes on one region?

Well, it seems that our experience with the nice lady in northern California (see this post) was just a precursor to what Southerners could expect from more prominent voices. Kathleen Parker, a conservative writer whose column I read yesterday, blames the GOP's problems on Southern Republicans who have a lot of wing-nut ideas. I don't disagree with this. "Southern Republicans," she writes, "have seceded from sanity." Okay, I'm up with that. Sure seems that way to me, too. But now we have progressive columnists taking up the flag and condemning Southern whites and Southern culture. Well, again, I see plenty to criticize about the South, but I don't think the South is monolithic; nor does the region today deserve the scathing scorn that commenters to Kevin Drum's post heap upon it. The South today is not just a remnant of Scots-Irish culture, as many seem to believe. It has been influenced by many cultures. I, myself, am descended from Acadians who left Nova Scotia in the 1700s when the British kicked out the French; pockets of the South are vitally influenced by Acadian culture. I am also descended from Germans who immigrated to Texas in the 1800s. German culture influenced Texas. We knew people born in Texas whose first language was German; they didn't learn English until they began school. Many immigrants from old Czechoslovakia clustered in towns in Texas, giving us one of my favorite desserts, kolaches, as well as polka (not my favorite music). African slaves influenced the South, too, even the white South.

So when Kevin Drum--whom I keep hoping is parodying prejudice--impugns Southern white culture, I'm not sure just what he means. There are plenty of Southern ideas left over from the old-slave South that need criticizing. But Southern white culture? That's an imprecise term, and inflammatory in its impreciseness.

Wing-nut ideas are not confined to the South and to "Southern white culture," whatever that means.

Oh, and how could I have left out the Hispanic influence?

What's Up with This?

Watching the clips of the screaming middle-aged and old white people (people my age) at town hall meetings, I am just astonished at these folks who are being encouraged to act so stupidly and disrespectfully. Howls from mobs never convinced me of the rightness of something: in fact, just the opposite. Will there be lynch mobs next?

I went to the website of one of those organizations that is encouraging people to disrupt town hall meetings. A link on that website led to this picture of old white dudes showing some attitude: (Old white dudes wanting to "kick some liberal ass"). Well, one can find idiocy in any group or movement. But the more I see of those heckling people on television, the less I want to have to do with anyone associated with the movement, even folks who might have legitimate gripes.

At Slate, Timothy Noah lists links for keeping up with the health care debate.

Crazy "Birthers"

Update below

After publishing my previous post this morning, in which I ended on some comments about crazy "birthers," I received an e-mail from an anonymous person "arguing" (I use the term loosely here) that the vote on Sotomayor should be postponed because Barack Obama's presidency is illegitimate. The "argument"? That Obama couldn't be president because he holds "dual citizenship" with the U.S. and with Kenya. I won't publish the comment because the writer does not identify himself/herself and because it seems to have been some kind of robo-response. It might have been copied from some mass e-mail, for it bears the characteristics of those blightful communications (illogical sentences, confused content, inflated language). But I've summarized the gist of the comment here.

As Steve Benen notes, these people never quit, no matter how many times they have been confronted with the facts. The non-partisan Factcheck.org also is fed up with responding to these folks, as indicated in the post "The Last Word? We Wish."

We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our "Born in the U.S.A." article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up. She has now released her second statement (the first was made last November) saying that state records show Obama was indeed born in the U.S.A. This one states unequivocally that he is "a natural-born American citizen," and will everyone please just leave it alone now? (We confess we are paraphrasing that second part.)

And in case my readership (which is small!) actually includes crazy birthers, here is the link to Factcheck.org's 2008 post on Barack Obama's citizenship: "Born in the USA: The Truth about Obama's Birth Certificate," posted August 21, 2008 and updated November 1, 2008. And in March, FactCheck.org fielded another silly claim by birthers: "More Citizenship Quibbles."As far as dual citizenship, Factcheck. org addressed that bit of silliness back in 2008, too: "Does Barack Obama Have Kenyan Citizenship,". As the factchecker on that issue noted, after a good discussion of that issue:

"the Kenyan Constitution prohibits dual citizenship for adults. Kenya recognizes dual citizenship for children, but Kenya's Constitution specifies that at age 21, Kenyan citizens who possesses citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan citizenship unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.

But, then, as my husband has often reminded me, crazy people are not rational, and, thus, facts mean nothing to them.

Update: More on those birther statistics in the South can be found here: "Early Poll Data: Half Of All Virginia Voters Are Birthers," Eric Kleefield, posted on Talking Points Memo, 3 August 2009.

Regional Bias

Most people feel at least a little faithful to the region in which they were born and in which they grew up. We want to defend our "home," even when that defense might seem wrong-headed. If we are thoughtful people, we recognize the shortcomings of our birth home, and, when we do, wish for improvement. And, of course, we get defensive when people from other regions spout ill-founded judgments about the region with which we most closely identify. Southerners, particularly, seem to have to work hard to overcome negative images some people have of the region and its people. I was reminded of this bias on our trip to the northern California Pacific Coast to visit very dear friends who had moved from the South (Louisiana) to Crescent City, California.

We had been in the area for about a day when one of my friend's new local friends dropped by to meet us. This well-spoken, lovely woman in her sixties had grown up in Oregon. Within only a few minutes, she expressed her ambivalence about the South. "I think I would like to visit the South," she said, "but I'm a little afraid of the South. It's prone to violence, isn't it? Several years ago at a conference [she was a counselor until she retired], we discussed a study that concluded that Southerners tended more to violence because the South was settled by Scots-Irish."

Oh, yes--the study that proves Southerners are more violent than other Americans because the majority of them are descended from Scots who settled in northern Ireland where bloody war continued between the Protestant Scots and the Catholic Irish--these "Scots-Irish" later immigrated to the United States in great numbers, many of them moving to the Appalachians and further south. That study continues to be used by otherwise thoughtful folks to bolster their bias toward the South. My husband encountered the study when we lived in Minnesota; folks at a Minnesotan university brought it up in an interview with him. Behind the reference to that study is the suggestion that the Southerner in the room is therefore suspect: he can't be trusted because he might have heretofore unexpressed violent tendencies. It's used as an excuse to condescend to and to judge an individual based on his or her place of birth. And it encourages the undiscerning to judge a whole region of individuals, many of whom have very mixed genetic heritage.

Of course, some information coming out of the South makes even me wonder what's up with us. Take the "birther" movement. Although it's not just Southerners who question Barack Obama's birth--despite hard evidence, including a birth certificate (!) that proves the man was born in the U.S.--an astonishingly high percentage of Southerners question Obama's right to the presidency based on this "birther" conspiracy. As Steve Benen discusses in this post, a recent poll indicates that some 20% or so of Southerners think Barack Obama was not born in the United States and 30% are unsure. How can that be? Is that 20% of ALL Southerners or 20% of Southern REPUBLICANS? Can it be true that about 50% of Southerners either believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. or that perhaps he wasn't? Statistics like that make me want to enroll in a voice class to eliminate my Southern drawl.

The bottom line is, however, that we shouldn't judge individuals based on statistical studies. We should judge them by their own character.

Update: Steve Benen addresses more birther nonsense today: "They'll never stop," Washington Monthly, 3 August 2009.

What I Missed While I was on a Three-Week Road Trip

My family and I traveled across the country, from one coast to another, in three weeks, leaving behind my blog and often cell phone access as well as internet access. When we camped in National and State Parks, we focused on local phenomena--wild life, fauna and floral: a gray fox quietly passing our tent site, a herd of javelinas, a dusk visit from a pole cat in the Davis Mountains of West Texas; millenia-worth of natural wonders--Carlsbad Caverns, Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley; examples of eons of erosion in the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest; the biggest, tallest, and oldest trees in Kings Canyon/Sequoia National Parks, Redwood National Parks, and the Great Basin National Park of Nevada; the Milky Way which the lights of cities dim to nothingness in much of the United States. When we stayed overnight in a hotel, we would catch glimpses of what was going on in the outside world. One of us would read a bit of news on the internet; another would turn on the television for weather reports.

I don't think we missed much, actually. The flare-up over Barack Obama's really rather honest response to the arrest of Henry Gates, Jr., in his own house seemed strident, hysterical. (And so, I agree mostly with Frank Rich's assessment of the entire brou-ha-ha: "Small Beer, Big Hangover," in The New York Times, 1 August 2009.) The political fight over health care just reminded us that the political world goes on as usual: the American citizen about to lose his or her job and the health care associated with it gets screwed again by the insurance companies and by our wonderful representatives who are beholden to them and to an ideology that sounds more and more like "I've got what I want: screw you!"

In our own personal lives, we are dealing with jobs that pay poorly or that introduced problems we didn't foresee; with opportunities that seemed to have slipped away as we aged; with paying for our childrens' college expenses; with health issues that make us anxious; with insurance companies that don't want to cover our doctors' bills; with dwindling paychecks and the escalating costs of everything. In short, we are ordinary Americans--well-educated but from humble roots--dealing with the modern world. And on this trip, far from those everyday anxieties, we were free for a while from our usual fears. It felt so good that if our kids were out of college, I think we would pack up everything and move to some place where we could see the Milky Way on moonless nights.

And I agree with Bob Herbert, too: "Anger Has Its Place," The New York Times, 31 July 2009.