Living Haiku

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

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

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

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

There on the parsley
a black swallowtail larva
becoming itself.

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

Sane Conservative Voices I: Bruce Bartlett

As many mainstream Republicans have been echoing the anger and paranoia of the far-right, some sane conservative voices have been trying to break through the static. In an essay posted on the Capital Gains and Games blog, written in response to the death of Irving Kristol (the father; the son, as the writer points out, is another matter altogether), Bruce Bartlett writes:

The intellectual bankruptcy of conservatism today is even greater than it was when Irving Kristol founded The Public Interest in 1965. What passes for a conservative movement these days wears its anti-intellectualism as a badge of honor. But as Kristol correctly understood, right-wing populism has no future and fundamental changes in the direction of government policy must be based on serious research and analysis that is grounded on hard data; that is to say, reality.

Bartlett is no liberal. He was domestic policy advisor to President Reagan and deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1988-1993 (under President Bush). He has served on the staffs of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp. I disagree with some of Barlett's economic theories and with his (very unscientific) understanding of climate change, but I certainly agree with his assessment of the Republican party today. Sane people on either side of the political spectrum are alarmed by the lack of civility in public discourse, the paranoia manifested in the outrageous myths circulated about current domestic and international policies, and what amounts to demonization of the President.

In a recent column in Forbes, Bartlett addresses the Republican mantra that cutting spending will ameliorate the fiscal problem. It won't work, he writes, because Congress will resist cutting spending, no matter which party is in control of Congress, because the nature of the federal budget has changed, and because the population has changed (aging population will resist cuts in entitlement programs such as Medicare). And Republicans, he points out, never seriously address cutting entitlement programs:

On the contrary, they defend entitlements when Democrats suggest cutting them. The Republican National Committee has run television ads opposing cuts in Medicare because Obama proposed using such cuts to fund health reform. Many demonstrators at right-wing tea parties were seen carrying signs demanding that the government keep its hands off Medicare.

He also addresses the oft-repeated lie that Reagan cut spending:

When I raised these facts [about Medicare and the increasingly aging population] with a prominent Republican recently he counted that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

In a column on fiscal responsibility, Bartlett addresses the myth that tax cuts always illustrate fiscal responsibility:

Beginning in 1982, [Reagan] supported higher taxes almost every year of his presidency.....Reagan's successor, George H.W. Bush, promised during the 1988 campaign that he would never raise taxes--read my lips: no new taxes, he said at the Republican convention. But faced with large deficits and the need for Democratic congressional support for deficit reduction, he abandoned that pledge in 1990 and supported a large tax increase in return for tough spending controls.

Bartlett goes on to discuss how Clinton's tax increase, roundly criticized by Republicans, triggered "a huge economic expansion" and a surplus that George W. Bush inherited and then squandered:

Taxes were cut willy-nilly throughout the Bush years, and spending shot up for wars, new entitlement programs and any Republican-sponsored pork barrel project. Bush left office with a deficit of 3.2% of GDP--a reversal of 5.6% of GDP compared to the surplus he inherited."

In his article "The GOP's Misplaced Rage," Bartlett addresses the anger of those town-hall meetings we saw over the summer:

I think conservative anger is misplaced. To a large extent, Obama is only cleaning up messes created by Bush. This is not to say Obama hasn’t made mistakes himself, but even they can be blamed on Bush insofar as Bush’s incompetence led to the election of a Democrat. If he had done half as good a job as most Republicans have talked themselves into believing he did, McCain would have won easily.

Conservative protesters should remember that the recession, which led to so many of the policies they oppose, is almost entirely the result of Bush’s policies. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession began in December 2007—long before Obama was even nominated. And the previous recession ended in November 2001, so the current recession cannot be blamed on cyclical forces that Bush inherited.

And Bartlett puts forth the idea that this Republican anger is not born out of any real disenchantment with liberal policies but out of the petulance of having lost an election:

In my opinion, conservative activists, who seem to believe that the louder they shout the more correct their beliefs must be, are less angry about Obama’s policies than they are about having lost the White House in 2008. They are primarily Republican Party hacks trying to overturn the election results, not representatives of a true grassroots revolt against liberal policies. If that were the case they would have been out demonstrating against the Medicare drug benefit, the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, and all the pork-barrel spending that Bush refused to veto.

There is plenty with which I can disagree with Bruce Bartlett, I'm sure, but his sane conservative voice reminds us that liberals and conservatives can find common ground in order to make our republic truly strong. Loudly supporting fringe behavior such as Joe Wilson's shouting out to the President of the United States "you lie" is not the way to do that. The Republican Party needs to back away from the abyss.

Health Care Reform--Polling doctors

The New England Journal of Medicine has posted the results of a health care reform poll focusing on doctors' opinions: "Doctors on Coverage — Physicians’ Views on a New Public Insurance Option and Medicare Expansion". The initial poll was sent to a random sample of 5,157 U.S. doctors (some excluded from the original list of 6,000 because of their being in training or their practicing medicine outside U.S. territories). The doctors were divided into four groups:

• primary care physicians,
• medical subspecialists, neurologists, and psychiatrists
• surgical specialists and subspecialists, and
• other specialties

The physicians were asked which of three options for expanding health care they preferred:

• "public and private options, providing people younger than 65 years of age the choice of enrolling in a new public health insurance plan (like Medicare) or in private plans;
• private options only, providing people with tax credits or subsidies, if they have low income, to buy private insurance coverage, without creating a new public plan.
• or a public option only, eliminating private insurance and covering everyone through a single public plan like Medicare."

Of the total number of doctors polled, 43.2% of doctors responded:

• 62.9% supported the public and private option
• 27.3% supported offering private options only
• 9.6% supported offering only a public option.

Interestingly, of the four categories of physicians, primary care doctors most supported the public and private option. Also,

Overall, 58.3% of respondents supported an expansion of Medicare to Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 years. This support was consistent across all four specialty groups, with proportions in favor ranging from 55.6% to 62.4%.

So, as in the wider American public, a majority of doctors favor expanding insurance coverage by providing access through both public and private options. Just saying.

Go to the article (link above) for graphs and such. For further discussion of this poll and others, go to "Listen to Your Doctors," by Harold Pollack, posted at The New Republic, 15 September 2009.

Animal Feces--or Worse--in Your Water?

The New York Times has an interesting article on violations of the Clean Water laws, of the EPA's lax oversight during the Bush administration, and of the consequences of that laxness: "Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering." In interviewing "more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists," New York Times journalists have discovered that "an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways." The article describes the consequences of water pollution on the health of one family in West Virginia who live just seventeen miles from the state capital and on the career of one lawyer who joined West Virginia's environmental protection agency, where, he discovered, "everyone was terrified of doing their job." He eventually lost his job because he did his job; powerful industry lobbyists used their leverage with state politicians to get him fired.

In West Virginia, as in Washington, the corruption of those hired to keep the state's water safe can be seen in the revolving door of the state's environmental agencies: regulators "leave for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed." Pressure from the EPA has been seriously lacking, too:

Enforcement lapses were particularly bad under the administration of President George W. Bush, employees say. “For the last eight years, my hands have been tied,” said one E.P.A. official who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “We were told to take our clean water and clean air cases, put them in a box, and lock it shut. Everyone knew polluters were getting away with murder. But these polluters are some of the biggest campaign contributors in town, so no one really cared if they were dumping poisons into streams.”

The New York Times has gathered data on "more than 200,000 facilities that have permits to discharge pollutants and collected responses from states regarding compliance." Want to see how your state measures up?: "Find Water Polluters Near You." I clicked through the pages of companies in Georgia that have permits to discharge pollutants and was surprised by the number of violators who hadn't been fined for their violations. Uh.... okay....maybe I wasn't surprised. Just disgusted.

Here is another interactive map: "Clean Water Violations: The Enforcement Record." Enforcements in Georgia: 48.2 per 100 violations. Enforcement Record for my home state of Texas: 7.6 per 100 violations. Big surprise.

Health Care Costs

Updates below

Conservatives I know--and these are the Fox-News adherents--always bring up predictable issues when we argue politics. In a recent discussion, one family member seemed to suggest that health care costs would be significantly lowered by tort reform. It's amazing to me why this person, a blue-collar worker all his life, worries so much about medical malpractice. The class of people who seem to concern him most are folks who make five or six times what he made working in a carbon black plant. Because I love him--okay, he's my dad--I usually drop the issue when the discussion becomes too contentious or when he changes the subject to another hot-button issue, a familiar technique: chase another rabbit when the first one looks like it's going to become dinner for another fox. I try to bolster my arguments with facts, but facts just don't stick with many people; too often we ingest "facts" that are watered down--or dissolved completely--and served up with a toxic salsa of paranoia, fear, and self-refential world view.

But because I am at heart an optimist who thinks that perhaps people can change their minds when confronted with facts, carefully gathered details, and thoughtful observations, here are some facts about health care and medical malpractice, courtesy of Health Affairs: The Policy Journal of the Health Sphere (with a h/t to Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein for the link):

• Yes, more Americans sue their doctors than citizens in the UK and in Canada. However, "[t]wo-thirds of the U.S. claims were dropped, dismissed, or found in favor of the defendant; in one-third, plaintiffs received compensation after a settlement or judgment." Here is a table comparing the "Malpractice Claims and Payments in Four Countries, 2001."
• What about the legal costs of defending those malpractice suits?

  Legal costs are estimated to average $27,000 per claim in the United States, which adds approximately $1.4 billion in costs to the $4.4 billion paid in settlements and judgments.23 The costs of underwriting insurance against malpractice claims are estimated at an additional 12 percent, or $700 million.24 The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims, including awards, legal costs, and underwriting costs, was an estimated $6.5 billion in 2001—0.46 percent of total health spending.

• Look at that last line in the quote above: "The cost of defending U.S. malpractice claims" is less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Malpractice claims do not add significantly to overall health care costs. The writers conclude that malpractice litigation is a growing problem--and it probably should be addressed. However, the claim that health care costs in this country would be significantly reduced by tort reform just does not hold up under the facts. Once again: The cost of defending malpractice claims in the United States comes out to be less than 1/2 of 1 percent of total health care spending in this country.

Can we then, please, turn to a more thoughtful, fact-supported discussion of significant ways to reduce health care costs in this country?

Source:
Gerard F. Anderson, Peter S. Hussey, Bianca K. Frogner and Hugh R. Waters. "Health Spending In The United States And The Rest Of The Industrialized World." Health Affairs, 24, no. 4 (2005): 903-914. 13 Sept. 2009. http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/full/24/4/903

Updates, more sources:For another discussion of healthcare costs and medical malpractice, see Maggie Mahar's blog, Healthbeat, and these posts: "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part I and "Medical Malpractice: Fiction, Facts, and the Future; Part II.

See, also, Atul Gawande's article, "The Cost Conundrum," in The New Yorker.

Decatur Book Festival 2009, Second Day

On the second day of the Decatur Book Festival, I got a late start. My husband left home earlier in order to meet one of his favorite cartoonists, Keith Knight, at a noon venue. He bought two or three of Keith's books, too. Tom has purchased more books than I at this festival. With just a part-time job, I'm really aware of where every penny of that paycheck goes. I bought a volume of the journal Five Points, a publication of Georgia State University edited by David Bottoms, because the young woman at the booth looked so bored and because she was handing out free copies of older journal issues: a two for one. I purchased a couple of copies of the Wren's Nest latest publication because my daughter's artwork appears in this year's volume and because I like to support youthful writing endeavors. And on the second day of the book festival, I purchased a slim volume of poetry from a young woman standing on the sidewalk near the outside food court.

"Would you like to buy my book?" the poet asked.

"Not really," I replied, but then I softened my refusal by asking her a few questions before moving on. When I came back by a few minutes later and saw the woman still standing there, I thought, what the heck. What's five dollars? I'll buy one of her slim little books. I can always use the book for art projects later if I'm not moved by the poetry.

She said she was from California and that she had attended the book festival in previous years. Later I saw another middle-aged woman like me holding the poet's books while the poet bought some food from a vendor. What easy marks we are, I thought, for the young and hopeful.

Authors were everywhere hawking their books in many imaginative ways. I saw an alien right after I arrived, standing behind a board advertising Drake Highlander's book, What Not to Do When You Find a Spaceship. Drake Highlander himself was rather nondescript, a young man in his mid-thirties, I would guess, dressed in shorts and short-sleeved polo shirt. He handed me a brochure about the book and a bookmark with more information. The alien posed for me.

Although I didn't plan it, the venues I attended turned out to be focused mostly on Southern writers. I found Tom at the Decatur Conference Center where John Yow was promoting his book The Armchair Birder in his good-humored Southern drawl. Yow first read a passage from the book where he describes his inability to catch a glimpse of a wood thrush. It's a funny passage because everyone he asks has seen a wood thrush but himself even though his own yard, he claims, is good habitat for one. After the reading, Yow led a bird-calling contest, with help from two of his friends sitting at the conference table with I-pods and recordings of bird calls. He solicited members of the audience to perform bird calls and then to compare those calls with the recordings. This was a lot of fun, and the person who won the contest, hands down, was a young woman (teens? early twenties? it was hard to tell from the back of the room where I was sitting) who did a loud, convincing, and energetic call of a sandhill crane.

Tom and I then went to hear Sonny Brewer and Rick Bragg, both from Alabama, though Bragg is the most well-known of the two as a journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing that he did for The New York Times and for the well-received books based on his experiences growing up in Possum Trot, Alabama. Although I haven't read any of Bragg's books, I have run across his writing elsewhere and remembered the trouble he got in at The New York Times for using a stringer's reporting to write a story in the first-person as if he had done all the interviewing himself. But the big guy (almost 6-foot, 3-inches and quite a bit over 200 pounds) is funny, thoughtful, self-deprecating, and profane--as many good Southern story tellers are. He blamed his weight on the M&Ms that hotels stock in their mini-bars. "I don't drink," he said, "but those fancy hotels that I stayed in on book tours always had three-pound bags of M&Ms in their mini-bars. Now these are hotels that wouldn't have me if I weren't a well-known author on a book tour. I'd have a pound of M&Ms in the evening while watching pay-for-view and another pre-breakfast pound the next morning. Now this is true. I gained thirty-five pounds eating M&Ms."

The final event I attended was in the Decatur Courthouse and was titled "Women & The New South," featuring Janis Owens, Masha Hamilton (the only non-Southerner of the three), and Cassandra King. On her blog, Janis Owens wrote that "The title of the panel should be: Running Our Mouths, because that’s what we do." And she certainly did a lot of the talking. Raised in the Florida panhandle in what she calls the "cracker culture," Owens told one funny story after another about her life, her culture, and her family, without skipping a beat between each story. For instance, she told the story of a grandmother who was so large that the mortician had to break her legs to fit her in the coffin. When the three women opened up the discussion to questions from the audience, however, the other two authors got a chance to talk. Some of the audience members were very familiar with King's and Hamilton's books and had very specific questions. One person asked what inspired Cassandra King to write The Sunday Wife. "I made it up completely," she said. Then she paused and told the real story, that she was once the unhappily circumscribed Sunday wife who eventually left the pastor. The novel wasn't published, she said, until after her mother died, for her mother always held her accountable for leaving the pastor. Now King is married to well-known author, Pat Conroy.

Masha Hamilton, who has worked as a journalist and foreign correspondent, is also a novelist. She went to Afghanistan in 2004 and returned in 2008, and has begun the Afghan Women's Writing Project as a way to give voice to Afghan women. The website for the project describes the efforts:

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

As Hamilton was preparing to leave New York and her three children to visit Afghanistan, she thought long and hard about how her traveling to such a dangerous country might impact her children. But she also wanted her children to know that some actions are worth the risk. Just before she left for Afghanistan, she said that her teenage daughter went out one night to Central Park with some friends. When her daughter returned home, Hamilton told her that she should never go to Central Park at night, that she was very worried about her. Her daughter looked at her and said, emphasizing every word with a pointing finger, "You are going to Afghanistan and you're worried about me being in Central Park at night with friends?"

I left this session very glad that I had attended it on the spur of the moment, for these are authors whose writings I will look for in the future. One of the great things about the Decatur Book Festival is that it brings in lots of well-known authors along with a little less well-known authors and even obscure authors. There is a venue for almost every interest. What a great event!

Decatur Book Festival 2009, First Day

Yesterday we attended several afternoon events of the Decatur Book Festival, sponsored by, among others, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dekalb Medical Center. The day was overcast, and when my husband and I set off on the mile-long walk to downtown Decatur, a few stray drops of water fell from the sky. However, there was no significant rainfall to dampen the spirits of the crowd in downtown Decatur. Our daughter attended some events at the teen gathering in a dance studio near the downtown square, and then she and friends went to lunch together.

Tom and I first went to the Decatur Public Library Stage to hear Niall Stanage, an Irish journalist who covered Barack Obama's election. Stanage first gave us the international perspective on Barack Obama, nothing new, of course, to those of us who keep up with the news, but it was good to be reminded that Obama's election "really redeemed an old idea for America" that had been eroded over the years by the Bush administration. Stanage said that while there is a small margin, a fringe on the left, that has an "implacable" resistance and dislike of America and its power, most Europeans have a fondness for America. The Bush administration policies, however, had seriously eroded that goodwill (for example, in 2000, Germans had a 70% favorable attitude toward the U.S.; by 2007, that goodwill had dropped to 30%). Barack Obama re-invigorated the fondness Europeans had for America.

What was really interesting to me, however, was the audience's response to the clips of Obama's speeches that Stanage showed to illustrate his points. The first clip was the very hopeful speech Obama gave at the 2000 Democratic Convention, the one where he says these rousing lines: "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America." I could feel the energy in the room as these words echoed in the small auditorium. People clapped after every speech with the kind of enthusiasm I remembered from the election. I swear, the middle-aged guy next to me was crying, removing his glasses and wiping his eyes. Now, cynical far-right Republicans would call this Obama-awe. I think it's something way more important: it's hope. There still remains among us liberals the hope that the country can be re-united; that we are the United States of America. But the radicals on the right, what Kevin Drum and others call the "fever swamp crowd," have just about eroded that hope in their terrorist takeover of the national dialogue.

After Stanage's speech, Tom and I parted ways to attend different events; he attended an environmentalist presentation, and I walked to the First Baptist Church of Decatur to hear Douglas Blackmon, the Atlanta bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. Blackmon has written an exhaustively researched book titled Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The title pretty much summarizes the point of the book, and that's how Blackmon began his presentation, with a summary of his book, a summary of the re-enslavement of African-Americans in the South in a kind of neo-slavery, involuntary servitude. He reminded us that many of the early fortunes of the "fathers of Atlanta" were built on this practice of servitude and that many Atlanta-based companies we know today tie back to the brutal practices of another time.

There is an American mythology that "Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves" that Americans cling to, totally removing from memory the brutality of the early twentieth-century. Thousands of African-Americans, Blackmon said, are alive today who were born into defacto slavery in the 1920s and 1930s. Georgia and Alabama particularly supported this practice, for their economies depended upon free or cheap labor: agriculture, mining. These southern states "used the criminal justice system to create a new slavery and the fear of this system to intimidate African-Americans." As just one example, Blackmon described how a black man who wanted to leave one farmer and work for another had to get permission from his original boss. If he did not, he would be charged and slapped with a fine. This is just a small example of the ways that African-Americans were intimidated. Of course, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. Right? I left this presentation determined to buy Blackmon's book, but all the venues were out of their supply; I'll have to order it later.

Tom and I later met up for a poetry reading that ended with two very moving poems by Patricia Smith. The last one, written for the 34 victims left behind in a nursing home during Hurricane Katrina, brought tears to my eyes.

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.

Oh, for Pete's Sake!

Sometimes the short-sightedness, weirdness, and stupidity of people and organizations leave one sputtering, speechless:

• First up, a story of the Bureau of Prisons, which had at first refused to let a prison inmate read Barack Obama's books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope. The bureau's reasoning? "The books contained material 'potentially detrimental to national security,' prison officials said in two separate rejections from August and September." However, in November, the Bureau allowed the man to read the books.
  
  
• Next, another fight is brewing in Texas over curriculum standards for public schools, this time in social studies. Three men appointed by Republicans to a panel to "help guide" the teachers, community representatives, and academics who are charged with writing the standards have complained about the credit given to some civil rights leaders. One of them has "questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure." Another thinks Cesar Chavez "'lacks the stature, impact, and overall contributions of so many others'"--and thus is not as worthy of discussion.
  
  The condescension of these men is captured very well in the tone evangelical minister Peter Marshall adopts toward the inclusion of Anne Hutchinson in the social studies text. (Hutchinson was "a New England pioneer and early advocate of women's rights and religious freedom." She was later invited by Roger Williams to "help establish a colony in what became Rhode Island.") According to Marshall, Hutchinson "does not belong in the company of these eminent gentlemen" [William Penn, Roger Williams and other early leaders]. Can this short-sidedness and stupidity be topped? Oh, yes, for David Barton, a former vice-president of the Texas Republican Party, "said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be 'republican' rather than 'democratic.' That means social studies books should discuss 'republican' values in the U.S." (from "Conservatives say Texas Social Studies Classes Give Too Much Credit to Civil Rights Leaders," published in The Dallas Morning News, 9 July 2009, and written by Terrence Stutz)
  
  
• Oh, and, finally, Sarah Palin. I know that she is the darling of certain conservatives, but, please, give me a break. She speaks of responsibility and leadership, yet she resigns her governorship before her term is up--and blames her shortcomings on others: just another person falling back on the politics of victimhood. While I certainly disagree with Peggy Noonan on many issues, I think her criticism of Sarah Palin in The Wall Street Journal is pretty accurate: "In television interviews she [Palin] was out of her depth in a shallow pool. She was limited in her ability to explain and defend her positions, and sometimes in knowing them. She couldn't say what she read because she didn't read anything. She was utterly unconcerned by all this and seemed in fact rather proud of it: It was evidence of her authenticity. She experienced criticism as both partisan and cruel because she could see no truth in any of it. She wasn't thoughtful enough to know she wasn't thoughtful enough. Her presentation up to the end has been scattered, illogical, manipulative and self-referential to the point of self-reverence. 'I'm not wired that way,' 'I'm not a quitter,' 'I'm standing up for our values.' I'm, I'm, I'm."
  
  Noonan ends her editorial with a call to arms for the Republican party: "Here's why all this matters. The world is a dangerous place. It has never been more so, or more complicated, more straining of the reasoning powers of those with actual genius and true judgment. This is a time for conservative leaders who know how to think." I may lean liberal, but I'm behind you on this one, Peggy.

Torture Probes in the UK

Scott Horton links to an article in The Guardian about a torture suspect whom British intelligence allowed to fly to Pakistan and then tipped off Pakistani intelligence to arrest the man. In Pakistan, the suspect was tortured, including having three of his fingernails removed, and British intelligence worked with the Pakistanis, knowing that torture was used, to question the man. Cozy. David Davis, former shadow home secretary, brought these details to light and had this to say about Britain's and the United States' examination and prosecution of those who used, or who were complicit in the use of, torture:

The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, whilst explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction. We have done the opposite. As it stands, we are awaiting a police investigation which will presumably end in the prosecution of frontline officers. At the same time the government is fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up both crimes and political embarrassments, to protect those who are the real villains of the piece, those who approved the policies in the first place. (quoted in "Revealed – the secret torture evidence MI5 tried to suppress," Ian Cobain, The Guardian, Wednesday, 8 July 2009).

David Davis ended his speech to the the British Commons with these words:

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

The entire speech can be read here: "David Davis on Torture: Statement in Full, The Guardian, 8 July 2009.

Chance Encounters

This weekend I've been reading my old letters and journals in order to bring to light for my son and daughter some stories from their childhood, the funny things they said and did. Just a few minutes ago, I came across this entry (which has little to do with the kind of journal entries for which I was searching), in which I recorded a chance encounter at an art museum in Columbus, Georgia, February 28, 1997:

The Photographs of Dorothea Lange
Funeral Cortege, End of an Era in a Small Valley, California (1938)

A dark-haired woman, probably in her forties, excitedly walks up to me as the kids and I are viewing the Dorothea Lange Photo Exhibit at the Columbus Museum. "Those men," she says, "don't they look like they come straight out of the pages of GQ? Those faces, that bone structure. No fat bellies there. Like hundreds of Gary Coopers. Where can one find men like that today?"

"Yeah," I reply, "they're hungry--It's the Depression."

A few minutes later the same woman comes up to me again in a different section of the exhibit. She wants me to look at a particular photograph, that of a woman looking out of the oval window of a black hearse-like car, from the title of the photograph, one in a funeral procession. The woman in the photograph looks pensive; her left hand partially obscures her nose and the bottom of her face. The middle-aged wrinkles around her eyes add to the pensive and sad air of the woman.

"Look at the clouds reflected in the window," points out my momentary friend. "They give the impression of eternity--all those clouds going on & on behind her. Look at how her eyes follow you. She's a spirit--in reality because she's dead by now but that moment captured forever in this photograph. She reminds us that we too will be like her."

"Even the oval frame of the car window suggests a family photograph hung on a wall," I add. "She reminds us of our own mortality."

As the woman walks out of the exhibit, she says, "I'm glad you were here for me to share my thoughts with. You've got to talk with someone when you're affected so by art."

"And I appreciate your sharing them with me," I told her. "I know the feeling."

The older we get, the more we rely on the kindness of strangers.

Driving in Georgia

A mother in Kennesaw, Georgia, has come up with an idea to identify new teen drivers on the road. She has created large magnets to be placed on cars of teens, Caution: Newly Licensed, which she sells nationwide. Now she has the support of a Georgia state senator to get a bill passed to require all newly-licensed teens to have this magnet and a window decal displayed on their cars: "Should Georgia Teen Drivers Sport Warning Magnets?", posted on the website of The Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 5, 2009.

Anyone who has driven in Georgia, especially around Atlanta, would sympathize with this mother's campaign, I think. I have lived in several states, and the drivers here are among the worst I have ever encountered. Unfortunately, LOTS of people drive as if they've just been newly licensed. Just last night, on our return from Lithonia, where we dropped our daughter off at a party, we were turning right at a green light when four drivers turned left right in front of us: one, two, three, four, without slowing down, as if they had absolutely no knowledge of right-of-way rules. Then, later, on our way home after picking up our daughter, someone ran a red light as ours was green, and at least two people absolutely RACED through caution lights. These experiences and observations are typical. AutoAdvantage Road Rage Survey reveals that Atlanta is among the top five cities as the worst for road rage.

I think part of the problem here is that Georgia does not have a good driver's education program. To get her learner's permit, our daughter attended several classes and then had to complete only a few hours of in-car instruction with a licensed instructor, hours that she completed in one weekend. And I wasn't impressed with the driving instruction, at all. To get her unrestricted license, our daughter is expected to complete 40 hours of driving under parental instruction. But I wonder how many teens actually complete those 40 hours. Susie Kessler, the mother who is marketing the magnets for new drivers says:

I talk to the state licensing people that actually give these kids the test … and I’ve asked them how many of these kids have really had 40 hours with parents. And they’ll tell you [some of the kids] don’t know how to turn the lights on in the car. It’s scary. Even if they do the minimum of 40 hours, that’s nothing.

According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, car crashes are the leading cause of teenage deaths, "accounting for more than one in three deaths in this age group.1 In 2005, twelve teens ages 16 to 19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries." Those are awful statistics.

Fourth of July

Yesterday evening, our daughter attended a Fourth of July party with friends, and Tom and I headed to the local downtown center, within walking distance, to watch the Fourth of July parade. The parade consisted of local folks walking with their kids in strollers or wagons and on bikes. Some strollers were decorated with small flags or banners. Two years ago I drove my art car in the parade, the strangest element in the parade, I'm sure, and while I received an invitation to do so again this year, I declined. The car has been exposed to inclement weather and needs some work before I put her on the road again--or attempt to sell her.

Before the parade was over, Tom and I headed to a local restaurant near the town square and settled on a table outside where we could watch all the folks gathering for the evening's festivities. We could hear the faint strains of martial music from the bandstand while we feasted. In honor of our president, I ordered an arugula salad with feta cheese (very good) and a crisp cold glass of hard cider. When I ordered the fish and chips--a dish we associate with England--Tom commented that the choice seemed appropriate since Georgia was loyalist in the Revolution.

I, however, am a patriotic American, despite what the far-right says about liberals.

Below are views of the parade from our table and of the crowd gathering for the evening's events.

Going West

In a few days, my family and I will begin what may be our last long trip together, a car-camping journey to the west coast of the United States and back to Georgia. The kids are adults or nearly adults: our son will be a senior at the University of Texas this fall, and our daughter will be a senior in high school. Maybe we will take more long trips together, but as the children grow, one realizes that the time one can expect to spend with them is increasingly limited. Living only an hour's drive from Austin at the time, we then left our son in Texas to move to Georgia. He has proven to be very self-motivated, getting involved in clubs and activities that suit his science and engineering-tuned mind, but I miss the time we would have spent together had we stayed nearby. Having grown up in a family that remained in the same area for six generations, I realize too clearly what one loses in our very mobile society. I am the only one of my siblings to live out of the state of Texas (from Louisiana to Minnesota to Georgia), and, frankly, I am ready to move on now, having lived only two years in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Some people, I think, have a tendency to wander. Perhaps I am one of those.

This tendency may explain why I hold on so fiercely to tangible connections to the past. I have kept over the years all the letters my friends have sent me; every year I send Christmas cards to friends and family from whom I haven't heard in years and from whom I really never expect to hear. And my husband's family: Lord have mercy--we have letters going back to the mid-1800s. Those people kept everything, from letters to photographs to advertisements from magazines to recipe clippings.

As we prepare for this journey West--or, rather, as I prepare, for I'm the organizer in our family, the one who plans the route, the places to camp, the attractions from which the rest can choose to experience--I think of all those ancestors who traveled west before us: the original Abraham Dugast who headed across an ocean from France to the New World; the descendants who traveled south and west to Louisiana when the British were so unfriendly; the Scotts and Coles and Deweeses and Bentons who migrated across the country from Virginia and Alabama and Delaware and North Carolina. Something propelled them west, a similar something that produces this restless spirit in myself. Oh, I know what it's like to be a part of a community for generations; for twenty years I stayed in the same place where generations of my family had lived. Even today, years after leaving my home, I long for that kind of connection, but it's never occurred again. Instead, I drag my restless body from state to state, and behind it? journals and letters of all I have ever loved.

I am tempted, sometimes, to burn it all. But I can't let go. Maybe someday I'll meet my Death Valley and leave all I've loved beside the wagon-rutted roadway. Until then, well, it's westward ho and a stagger as I drag my past behind.