Today's Blooms

morning glory

nasturtium bud

Our peas and okra have sprouted in a garden we put in last week, and the herbs, flowers, and vegetables we planted early in the season and last year, in smaller 8 ft. X 8 ft. raised gardens in our backyard, are flourishing, with a few setbacks from some caterpillars we're trying to control with Bt and the old-fashioned way of locating the caterpillars and crushing them. I don't know if the much above average temperatures we've experienced this year have influenced an increase and diversity of garden pests, but I wouldn't be surprised if climate change is affecting our gardening experience. But our flowers are blooming, and I'm looking forward to later-season blooms, too.

Here are a few photos I took this afternoon during a very light rain.

blanket flower

blanket flower

hydrangea

hydrangea

daylily

daylily

johnny jump-up

 

onion

landscape with cat

Gay Marriage a "Radical" Experiment?

I like Conor Friedersdorf's response to Dennis Prager's claim that "nothing as radical as redefining marriage to include members of the same sex has ever been publicly supported by a president of the United States" and that gay marriage is "the most radical social experiment in modern history." Friedersdorf reminds Prager and others who would make similar claims that "same sex marriage would permit gays to participate in an existing institution that encourages those who enter it to practice sexual fidelity, give emotional support, and provide financial stability."

Encouraging gay people to marry seems like an argument for traditional values to me, and giving gay couples rights is just plain fairness. Maurice Sendak, famous author of some of the best-loved children's books, recently died at the age of 83. For 50 years, he and his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, lived together. When Glynn was dying of lung cancer, Sendak made all the arrangements to provide his partner with around-the-clock medical care in their home. But how many gay couples have the financial resources for such care? Instead, their loved ones are checked into hospitals or hospice care, where in many states the healthy gay partner can be refused admittance to the loved one's bedside by family members inimical to the relationship, no matter how long or how committed that relationship has been.

Conor Friedersdorf lists the many radical experiments that have been initiated in this country, a list that includes women's suffrage, the birth control pill, the GI bill, in vitro fertilization, the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. How about public education?

So folks should just temper their hyperbolic language and dampen their fear of change. Gay marriage would not end civilization as we know it. No.....that would be climate change.

Update
Dahlia Lithwick writes  thoughtfully in Slate today about President's "evolving" thinking on gay marriage: "It's  About the Empathy, Stupid."

Here is the conclusion of his essay:

I read [President Obama's words on gay marriage] as a very literal reminder of what needs to happen more often during this election campaign: We need to listen to the experiences of others before dismissing them as dangerous, immoral, and wrong. Obama wrote in The Audacity of Hope, that his whole moral code was conditioned on the idea that to be able to empathize with people richer and poorer, more liberal and more conservative, is to be "forced beyond our limited vision.” Andrew Sullivan has called what Obama did yesterday “letting go of fear.” You can’t do that unless you listen to fear first, and that’s as good a descriptor as any for what the president did this week. 

Okay, so President Obama Supports Gay Marriage

Years ago, I stood in the hallway of a Southern Baptist church discussing homosexuality with my pastor. I had grown up in a very conservative, country church but as an adult attended a much more liberal church in a mid-sized town with a large university. However, for years I had been struggling with the disconnect between my evolving beliefs and the increasing fundamentalism of the Southern Baptist Church. The whole carapace of my childhood faith, I thought, was either going to shatter or be transformed. I was seriously considering leaving the Southern Baptist Church, and the deciding factor was the church's stand on homosexuality. Oh, there were many other reasons to leave, but this one issue was the most important to me at the time. One of my best friends was gay; he came out of the same religious tradition as I, and I had watched him struggle to reconcile his sexuality with his religion. I had witnessed his pain. I had seen his first love in the death grip of AIDS, and I had watched him find love again. The gay friends I had in college opened my heart to tolerance; this friend opened my heart to complete acceptance. 

Now I had children of my own. If I left my church, in what religious tradition would I raise my family? Yet how could I raise them in this church? I knew I couldn't. 

In the hallway, my pastor described to me the Sunday School class whose members were gay, the pianist who was gay, the silent minority that sat every morning among people who would prefer them to live as celibates, who would prefer them to live a life without love, or who believed they could be "converted" to heterosexuality.  He said he believed that science would prove that sexuality was a continuum, that homosexuality was biologically linked; he was concerned that, once again, the Southern Baptist Church would find itself on the wrong side of history. He told me that he had the same concerns as I but that the day he stepped into the pulpit and announced that gays should be accepted fully in the church would be the day he would be out of a job. 

I think of that pastor today as I read the reactions to President Obama's interview with Robin Roberts of ABC News, in which the president announced his support of gay marriage. David Plotz of Slate is "irked by [the president's] all-too-eloquent conversion story" and believes that rather than evolving, the president had "always" favored gay marriage, that the president's announcement is one of political convenience.  (Others, here and here, are more generous.)

Perhaps, like my former pastor, President Obama indeed figured he might be out of a job if he officially announced his support of gay marriage, that he would lose political support. But I think he deserves praise for finally making that public announcement, even if it reveals what he has secretly thought for some years. I don't know if my former pastor ever stood before his church and revealed his unqualified support for gay rights. I moved across the country shortly thereafter and left the Southern Baptist Church.

Barack Obama's support of gay marriage will certainly affect the presidential campaign. It remains to be seen how, exactly, but I bet you there is a flyer out already claiming that Barack Obama's support of gay marriage is really a War Against Marriage and the Family. Ironic, huh?

Down the Rabbit Hole

I just downloaded the newsletter of the Republican Party of Greene County, Virginia, and after reading it, I feel like Alice who has followed the rabbit into some subterranean hall of mirrors. The editor of the newsletter calls for armed revolution if Barack Obama is re-elected in the fall (h/t Think Progress):

We have before us a challenge to remove an ideologue unlike any thing world history has ever witnessed or recognized. [really???].... The ultimate task for the people is to remain vigilant and aware ~ that the government, their government is out of control, and this moment, this opportunity, must not be forsaken, must not escape us, for we shall not have any coarse (sic) but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.

The newsletter also includes a page titled "Is Barack Hussein Obama America's Most Biblically Hostile President?" that's a conspiracy theorist's dream. It's based on writings of David Barton, a pseudo-historian from Texas who has founded a Christian nationalist organization called "Wallbuilders." Warning bells of skepticism would immediately go off in the head of a rational person reading that list drawn from Barton's writing.

But we're moved by emotion, not reason, right? And fear is the most motivating emotion of all.

 If I listened and read this stuff all the time and heard it on the feedback loop one finds today on talk radio and in some churches, I might be a crazy conspiracy theorist, too.

Thank God I've got a garden to tend.

 Pushback against David Barton's scurrilous claims here: "More Zombie Lies from David Barton," posted March 12, 2012, on TFN Insider, of the Texas Freedom Network.

Reasons not to Vote Republican, Part 2b: Refusing to Disavow Conspiracy Theories

Reason #2b: Refusing to Disavow Paranoia and Conspiracy Theories

I'm going to follow through with my plan to write several posts on why not to vote Republican in 2012 (which translates to why I'm not going to vote Republican, because--haven't you read your neuropsychology?--whose mind am I going to change) although I already feel as if I've fallen down a rabbit hole. But these are the rational posts I'm going to cling to as the Crazy Season hits hurricane force before the election. 

I can't think of a single mainstream Democrat who publicly supported the crazy conspiracy on the far left that President George W. Bush and the American government destroyed the Twin Towers, but I don't have enough fingers to count the mainstream Republicans who have publicly supported the Birthers or who have remained silent in the presence of others who publicly support the Birthers. That anyone believes that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery is a mystery to me, for that belief requires all kinds of mental contortions. Do people really believe that one political party would allow a member of the other political party to become president if that president-elect were not a natural born citizen? Geez.  I personally know people who believe the Birthers, who think that Barack Obama is president illegitimately. (Where were these people when the Supreme Court ordered that the vote recounting be stopped in Florida in 2000? Oh, and by the way, the loser in that election supported the right of George W. Bush to be accepted as president.)

But, hey, refusing to disavow the crazy birthers helps Republicans in the polls. Donald Trump received a bump in the polls when he stepped aboard the Birther Train. In February 2011:

Fifty-one percent of 400 Republican primary voters surveyed nationwide by Public Policy Polling said they ascribe to the controversial birther conspiracy theory — despite the fact that the state of Hawaii has posted Obama’s certificate of live birth.

 Only 28 percent said they think the president was born in the United States — a constitutional requirement to be president. Twenty-one percent said they were “not sure." (Politico, "Poll: 51 percent of GOP primary voters think Obama born abroad.")

In April of last year, the new Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, was reported in an interview with U. S. News and World Report to repudiate the birthers and their crazy conspiracy, but later, Priebus tweeted that he never said that. As Sahil Kapur states in a blog post on the topic ("RNC chairman denies he ever repudiated 'birthers'"): "[t]hat Priebus felt the need to back away from what US News & World Report depicted as nothing more than a clear repudiation of the birthers is a testament to the influence that the fervent conspiracy theorists have in mainstream Republican circles."

Overlapping the birther crazies are the Obama-should-be-impeached-for-treason crazies and Obama-is-a-Muslim crazies. Mitt Romney is being compared to John McCain because of an incident that happened at a town hall meeting near Cleveland, Ohio, this week.  A woman who stood to ask Romney a question said that Obama "should be tried for treason," for which comment she received a round of applause from the audience. In a similar situation in the last presidential primary, when a woman at a town hall meeting said that she didn't trust Barack Obama because he was "an Arab," John McCain denied her claim civilly, saying that Obama was a "decent family man, citizen." But the current Republican presidential candidate let stand with no comment a claim that our president is "treasonous"--until much later, away from the crazies, when he was questioned by reporters.

Mainstream Republicans are acting in rational self-interest, of course, by not repudiating birtherism and other crazy shit conspiracy theories that have sprung up to try to deny our first black president's right to the office. Those of us who remember the Clinton years remember how well conspiracy theories rallied the far-right base then. But, really, if mainstream Republicans repudiated the conspiracy theories of the far right, would those voters vote the Democratic ticket? Of course not. But they might stay home and stew in their conspiracy juices and not vote at all. 

This is personal for me. Although I am no longer on the crazy list for forwarded political e-mails, I am just tired of hearing people I know spout this stuff. Thank you, Reince and all you other otherwise rational Republicans, for helping destroy whatever respect I once had for some of those I love. But even more importantly, now that you've gotten in bed with conspiracy theorists, you're going to have a difficult time kicking them out of the bedroom if you win the presidential election in 2012. What will you concede to then for their support?

Maurice Sendak

Among our children's favorite books were Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice and Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, from the Nutshell Library. Sendak died today, at the age of 83. In January, Stephen Colbert interviewed Sendak for his comedy show. Sendak is hilarious. RIP, Maurice Sendak.

           

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

       

At the End of the Party

Years ago I hosted a party at my home, and as the sun set and our wine glasses emptied and filled again,  the subject turned to politics. Most of my guests were fellow academics with whom I sympathized politically. What bothered me in thinking afterward of the conversation was the condescending certainty with which some of my colleagues pronounced their ideas as if those who differed from them politically were outside their circle of understanding,  It's a danger we all face: to see the opposition as Other, beyond reason, unknowable, scary. When politicians speak of their opposition as "traitors," "evil," "unpatriotic," reducing everything to an either/or scenario, an "us vs. them" situation, my hackles rise just as they did that evening among people with whom I had much in common. And I think of a poem I wrote after that party. I first titled it "At the End of the Party," but later changed it to "The End of Politics." I'm not sure which title fits best.

The End of Politics

At the end of the party the chuck-will's-widow calls

from the edge of the wood

and over the sibilants of patio murmur

a barred owl hoots out its prey.

These are the certainties, like the changing of seasons

or the winter caw of the crow,

or the haunting melody of the white-throated sparrow

in a forest of tag alder and pine.

Listen, I want to say to the others,

the things that matter are these:

a glass of wine at the end of a day,

friendships that stand against time,

and the hand of a child curled trustingly in yours

like the beating heart of a fawn

waiting in the copse while its mother breathes deeply

the breeze from the zoysia lawn.

The words you speak now

you will certainly betray

in a moment you cannot foresee,

of passion or anger or sudden indifference

with the dark smell of blood on your hands.

Ideas are not certain; they are bathed in a light

of neither sun nor stars nor moon,

but of the flickering flames of lived experience

illuminating the walls of a cave.

Another glass of wine? A cigarette, perhaps?

A kiss on your shoulder or lips?

What will you remember in the dawn of some morning

between sleep and rising

and the onsetting dullness of day?

The words you have spoken with such sincerity

or the sharp scent of rosemary crushed 

between finger and thumb?

--Anita

The Republican Brain and The Righteous Mind

Up with Chris Hayes includes an episode in which Hayes discusses the science of ideology with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality, and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  Both of these authors have some very interesting things to say about political polarization in the United States. The episode is here: The May 5, 2012, episode of Up with Chris Hayes: The Psychology of Political Polarization." The episode serves as a brief introduction to the current research on politics and personality.

In his New York Times review of Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, William Saletan writes:

[Haidt] sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

However, there can be no interaction where one group is demonizing the other, and at this time, demonizing Democrats and liberals has become mainstream in the Republican Party [see Newt Gingrich's advice to call one's Democratic opponents "traitors"]. But I have also been repelled by the smugness I've often observed in liberals  (and that I have sometimes been guilty of myself).  Haidt's book can serve as a useful check on that smugness.

James Wilson reviews Haidt's book and Mooney's book in his Financial Times article : "Political Animals: How Psychology and Biology Can Help Explain the Conservative-Liberal Divide." He ends his review with this advice:

As psychology and biology encroach on politics, there is perhaps a danger that those on opposing sides will decide there is no point in attempting to overcome these intrinsic differences. Haidt and Mooney reject such pessimism: both end with impassioned pleas for tolerance and engagement, for a culture that values difference, recognises limits and learns to disagree more constructively. These are arguments with obvious relevance in a US election year, but they deserve a wide readership among all those who care about the quality and civility of our politics.

So say we all.

Reasons not to Vote Republican, Part 2a: Demonizing the Opposition

Reason #2a: Demonizing the Opposition
I'll talk policy in a later blog. For me, the extreme demonizing of the opposition and the refusal to disavow conspiracy theories get to the emotional heart of my viewing the current Republican Party as a party on the fringe of reason. * [update below]  Now, I understand that there is always going to be a bit of mudslinging in political races. I don't like it, but I get it. People are not truly rational; they are motivated by emotion. Candidates want to move the emotional meter in their favor, so they dredge up anything about the other candidate that might not be too shiny and besmear their opponent's image some more. However, the Republican Party and its advertising allies have taken this besmirching to new lows.  The now iconic Willie Horton ads of of George H.W. Bush's campaign against Michael Dukakis relied upon racial fear for their effectiveness, and that method has been used over and over again in campaigns since then: associate the opposition with some scary figure, with someone or some group that will activate racial or ethnic fears.

When we were living in Georgia (the first time), we witnessed Republican Saxby Chambliss's senate campaign against Democrat Max Cleland, a man who had lost both legs and one arm fighting in Vietnam. Chambliss's ads followed the pattern established by those Willie Horton ads. This time, the scary figure was Osama bin Laden. The personal attack ads began with bin Laden's photo ("scary Muslim"), followed by a photo of Max Cleland. The ads questioned Cleland's courage and leadership and distorted Cleland's voting record on Homeland Security. They also illustrate another tactic that I've seen over and over again in Republican ads: question the patriotism of the Democratic opponent. It was an irony evidently lost on a majority of Georgian voters that Chambliss, who received student and medical deferments to avoid the draft, was questioning the courage of a man whose limbs were blown off while fighting for his country.

Questioning the patriotism of an opponent descended to new lows in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (an ironic title if there ever was one) attack ads on the military career of John Kerry, in the 2000 presidential campaign. While the ads weren't official ads of the Republican Party and were heavily financed by a billionaire known for his financial support of Republican causes, Houston home builder Bob J. Perry, funding was also supplied by President Bush and Tom Delay. And George W. Bush and the Republican Party didn't repudiate the ads, did they? Again, the irony is that the one whose military career raised real questions was George W. Bush, who landed a cushy appointment with the Texas National Guard while John Kerry was fighting in Vietnam. But those attack ads, vicious and untrue as they were, worked: questions about Bush's military career were dropped while Kerry's military career was smeared.

And this is the way Republican campaign ads work: question the patriotism of the opposition, associate the opposition with people who arouse ethnic or racial fears, and label the opposition as "elitist" and "other." Barack Hussein Obama is a Republican campaign advertiser's dream: the Muslim name, the black father, the childhood spent in a foreign country, the Harvard degree. Have a Muslim name? You hate Christians. Not wearing a flag pin in your damn lapel? You hate your country. Have lived in a foreign country (even though as a child and your living situation wasn't of your choosing)? You hate your country. Have an Ivy League degree? You hate your fellow citizens. Have a dark face? You hate whitey.

In 1996, Newt Gingrich compiled a list of emotionally-laden words and provided that list to a conservative Republican group to distribute to Republicans for use in their campaigns. The title of his memo is revealing: "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Controlling whom? You, dear citizens. Us.

"Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party," Gingrich advised:

anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs; betray; bizarre; bosses; bureaucracy; cheat; coercion; 'compassion' is not enough; collapse(ing); consequences; corrupt; corruption; criminal rights; crisis; cynicism; decay; deeper; destroy; destructive; devour; disgrace; endanger; excuses; failure (fail); greed; hypocrisy; ideological; impose; incompetent; insecure; insensitive; intolerant; liberal; lie; limit(s); mandate(s); obsolete; pathetic; patronage; permissive attitude; pessimistic; punish (poor...); radical; red tape; self-serving; selfish; sensationalists; shallow; shame; sick; spend(ing); stagnation; status quo; steal; taxes; they/them; threaten; traitors; unionized; urgent(cy); waste; welfare. [my emphasis]

(Your homework: find a political speech by Newt Gingrich on You-Tube and see how many of these words and their derivatives he uses to describe Democrats or other opponents.)

I'm not advocating abolishing emotive words in campaign speeches. But when someone uses language to distort reality, to manipulate emotions so as to distort the truth, that's a serious problem. Demonizing the opposition (calling them "traitors," labeling them as anti-flag, anti-family, claiming they endanger life and decency) suggests to me an inability or unwillingness to grapple the serious issues of governing a democracy.

Update:
I mis-wrote here, I think, in saying the Republican Party is on the fringe of reason. Republican Party leaders are pandering to the unreasonable fringe within the party (more discussion in a later post) to gain power and are using language effectively to appeal to emotion in order to circumvent reason. Studies in neuroscience are showing us just how much emotion and the use of emotional code words affect our reason. Drew Westen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, discusses the results of such studies in his book The Political Brain: How We Make up Our Minds Without Using Our Heads. Folks need to be made aware of how they can be manipulated. Emotion AND reason are required to make good decisions (or so I think). A review of Westen's book is here: The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of a Nation, by Richard M. Waugaman.

More on this kind of stuff, if you're interested:

• "Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives," Andrea Kuszewski guest-posting on Chris Mooney's blog The Intersection on the Discover Magazine web site.
• [more to come--got to do some other stuff now]

Reasons not to vote Republican--Part 1: Uncompromising, Filibustering

Reason #1: Moving Goal Posts, Refusing to Compromise for the Good of the Country, and Taking Filibustering to Incredibly Belligerent Lengths

Especially in the last few years, Republicans have moved the goal posts over and over again as Democrats have sought compromise on issues. As Kevin Drum writes in a blog post today: "Is it any wonder that so many Democrats are no longer in any mood to appease the right?" 

Drum links to Matt Steinglass's May 1st post in The Economist, in which Steinglass writes that Democrats have moved toward (and past) the center and away from issues they pursued in the past: "gun control, defence budgets under 3% of GDP, banning oil exploration off America's Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a public option or single-payer solution to universal health insurance."

Steinglass continues:

Today these positions have all been abandoned. And we're talking about positions held under Bill Clinton, a "third way" leader who himself moved Democratic ideology dramatically to the right, the guy responsible for "ending welfare as we know it". Since then, Democrats have moved much further yet to the right, in the fruitless search for a compromise with a Republican Party that sees compromise itself as fundamentally evil. The obvious example is that the Democrats in 2010 literally passed the universal health-insurance reform that had been proposed by the GOP opposition in the Clinton administration, only to find today's GOP vilifying it as a form of Leninist socialist totalitarianism. [my emphasis]

The fight over the debt ceiling and Republican vilification of "Obamacare" were the final straws for me. I just quit taking the Republican party seriously as a party working for the good of the country. Though there are individual Republicans who think and act responsibly, the party as a whole has gone too far right and has become intransigent.

Republican leadership is fond of claiming that they have tried to work with the President, that they are open to compromise, but the claim is a lie. (There. I've written the word--lie) On the very evening that Barack Obama was celebrating his inauguration, Robert Draper records in his new book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives, a group of Republican leaders were meeting to map out a plan to stymie Obama's legislative leadership. (Newt Gingrich was present.) Kevin McCarthy (Republican Rep., Calif.) is quoted as saying, "We've gotta challenge them on every single bill and challenge them on every single campaign." 

As Draper says in an interview, this group of Republicans began to strategize, and what they ultimately came up with was a plan to attack the president's agenda, say no to everything and stick together." Now, of course each party should work to pass legislation it thinks is best for the country, but this is pigheadedness to the extreme, with a focus on one party's one-upmanship rather than on governing and doing the will of the people. 

Saying "no" to everything also means distorting the constitutional power of the majority in the Senate. As Thomas Geoghegan points out in his New York Times op-ed, "Mr. Smith Rewrites the Constitution," "the Constitution explicitly requires supermajorities only in a few special cases: ratifying treaties and constitutional amendments, overriding presidential vetoes, expelling members and for impeachments." However, in the last few years, and especially during the Obama administration, filibustering has increased exponentially in the Senate, with Republicans being the worst abusers of the filibuster. And supermajority vote has become the norm in passing legislation rather than the outlier.

Geoghegan writes that "[t]he filibuster votes, which once occurred perhaps seven or eight times a whole Congressional session, now happen more than 100 times a term. But this routine use of supermajority voting is, at worst, unconstitutional and, at best, at odds with the founders’ intent." [my emphasis]

He continues:

". . . we now have to take what a minority of an inherently unrepresentative body will give us. Forty-one senators from our 21 smallest states — just over 10 percent of our population — can block bills dealing not just with health care but with global warming and hazards that threaten the whole planet. Individual senators now use the filibuster, or the threat of it, as a kind of personal veto, and that power seems to have warped their behavior, encouraging grandstanding and worse.

Simple legislation or judicial appointments that should pass with a simple majority are now filibustered to the extreme by the minority party so that a supermajority is required to break the filibuster. (And Senators don't even have to be present to say they're filibustering; they can call in their "filibuster.") What is truly ironic about this unconstitutional use of filibuster votes is that Republicans are really big about holding up the Constitution and the intent of our founders as inerrant, yet they are the worst abusers in filibustering, thus bringing the work of the government to a grinding halt in order to force the political will of a MINORITY in the Senate. [See more statistics that show the rise in unconstitutional use of the filibuster vote here: The U. S. Senate's posted chart "Senate Actions on Cloture Motions."]

James Fallows has written extensively on his blog about the increasing use of the filibuster to circumvent majority rule in the Senate. His blog posts on the filibuster are here: Filibuster

Do Democrats use the filibuster vote? Yes, of course. But Republicans have carried that use to the extreme. And now, we might expect a future Democratic minority in the Senate to do the same because the procedure has become so commonplace.  

As Norman Orntein writes in  his article "Worst. Congress. Ever.,", in Foreign Policy:

Republicans, having been thrashed at all levels in 2008, did not respond to the voters' rebuke by cooperating with the majority or trying to find common ground. Instead, repeating a tactic employed with great political success by Republicans in 1993 and 1994 against a newly elected President Bill Clinton, they immediately united fiercely and unremittingly against all the Obama and Democratic congressional initiatives. In the Senate they used delay tactics -- the filibuster and the hold -- in an unprecedented fashion, to block a large number of Obama administration nominees for executive branch positions and draw out debate to clog the legislative process and make an already messy business even messier.

"House Republicans," Ornstein writes,

are adamant about refusing to compromise with the president, and are able in most instances to make good on the threat. When they are not able to maintain this unity, they are simply unwilling to bring up or pass measures that would lose significant GOP votes and require as many or more Democrats in support. This is a formula for gridlock, or worse is the Republicans are simply declining to govern.

[See also Thomas E. Mann's and Norman J. Ornstein's recent article in The Washington Post: "Let's Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem." ]

Republicans' admitted plan to say "NO" to everything, to "challenge every single bill," has not been good for the country. Why reward them by voting for them?

Growing Old

At fifty-four, I am past the mid-point of my life. If I am lucky enough to live as long as my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat, 48 years old was the mid-point of my life. My grandmother died in 2006 when she was 96, and I was 48 years old. My grandmother was 48 years old when I was born. If I were a numerologist, I might take comfort in those numbers. Since I am not, I have to take comfort elsewhere, beyond magical thinking. I keep a cut-out black and white image of my grandmother taped to the frame of my computer screen to remind me how to grow old gracefully, but I still wonder what growing old gracefully really means for me. For I am realizing that growing old gracefully is an individual experience and that not everyone will exhibit "grace" in the same way. I am on a journey to discover and to create my own way, and that way may be much like my grandmother's but different in some choices I make or behaviors I exhibit.

The topic of aging and how to approach one's physical and mental decline is on my mind because of an article I just read in Salon titled "Old Ladies who Didn't Love Me," by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. The writer is thirty-six years old, a mother of a 14-month old baby, and she is obsessed with growing old. She begins to recognize that all the dreams of her youth will never be realized, that as one ages, doors close behind one. In this, I sympathized with the writer. I, too, had my children relatively late in life, in my early to mid-thirties, and thus child-rearing came right in the middle of my career and at the beginning of that stage where one is still fully engaged with the world while at the same time beginning to see the first signs of aging. And one's lovely children hammer home the contrast between youth and age.

Children are expert observers. One morning when we were dressing for the day--I was blow-drying my hair while my son was playing around at my feet--my son looked up at me in surprise. "Mama," he said, "you have spider webs in your hair!"

I looked quickly at my image in the mirror and saw the glint of, not spider webs but, gray hairs. I laughed and told my son that my hair was graying. I was thirty-three years old.

Some years later my daughter would look at my hands and pull up the skin on the top of one hand, noticing how loose it was, how it puckered briefly before assuming its duty as covering for the bones and veins underneath. Then she pulled at the skin on her own hand; it was firm, returning immediately to its previous form. She was fascinated with this difference between my aging skin and the elasticity of her own youthful skin.

So, yes, I sympathize with the writer who sees in her own child her approaching old age. Poets and philosophers have sung this song for millennia:

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw night, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them..."(Ecclesiastes 12:1) So the old man tells the young man.

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/ Old Time is still a-flying,/ And this same flower that smiles today/ Tomorrow will be dying.... (Robert Herrick, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time")

But then the writer loses me in her self-absorption. She joins an exercise swim class, not a class of people her own age, but a class of women many years older than she. This is not an accident. She has watched these women from her vantage point in the gym, where she contrasts her own youthfulness with their age: "I knew the class was populated by old women; I had a view of them from my treadmill, where I’d exercised back when I was young and could run for my health, bounding like a deer toward a television that only played shows about the Kardashians. Beyond that TV were the old ladies, splashing and working out."

The old ladies. She joins this group because she wants to use the backdrop of the old ladies's  wrinkled necks and sagging bottoms to validate her own youthfulness: "I would take water aerobics and emerge feeling young, grateful for the plump of my skin, the relative tightness of my jowls. We’d all be buoyant in the water, but only I would remain so as we dried off."

She sizes up her competition: " My poolies, the ones at my gym, had necks that had long since defied definition. Massive freckled cleavage became neck became chin became face and so on. They wore bathing caps with plastic flowers and swim suits with pointy foam bra cups. Underneath, their hair was teased and thinning in shades of copper and yellow."

Yet despite this self-absorbed motivation and unkind, condescending comparison, the writer expects these women to embrace her immediately, to be her wise friends who will shew away her fears of aging as a grandmother would shew away a child's fear of the dark. She expects them to be as interested in her life as her grandmother was, to subsume their own desires to her desire to be loved: "I'd remind the old ladies of their daughters. They’d pass on wisdom. I would confide that I didn’t think I could wear a miniskirt anymore, at my age. They would snort and hoot and tell me what a child I am. I’d realize how silly I’ve been. I would learn that I had plenty of time."

In a culture where youth is worshiped, perhaps it's not surprising that the writer expects these old women to worship her, too. She compares the less-than-friendly greetings of these old women to her yoga class, "where people applauded when you just showed up."  She seems to be a victim of our culture's promotion of self-esteem above self-knowledge, in which everyone gets a trophy no matter the level of performance.

And so she is crushed when these old women do not live up to her self-centered expectations: they hoot with laughter at her inability to keep up with them in their exercise routine, they point out her own imperfections (the unshaven legs) even as she is silently cataloging theirs (the sagging skin), their teasing has a mean edge to it. To her credit, the writer, in retrospect, admits her embarrassment and shame, though it is accompanied by self-pity. She is embarrassed because she suspects the old women realize, at least partially, her motivations for attending that particular exercise class and refuse to be diminished by the comparisons she is making between her youthful appearance and their old age. She is also shamed by her own self-absorption, for expecting that any old woman would embrace her as her grandmother did, wholly, without reservations, with immediate love and self-abnegation:

They were old people and they were tired of being called cute by young people. They had become mean. No one was safe here. My grandmother’s friends had seemed so much kinder, so much more, I don’t know, grandmotherly. Had it all been a show? Had it been a front for grandmothers everywhere? I had come here to seek the gratuitous validation that only grandmothers can provide, and learned it was only my grandmother who would provide it.

In the end, the writer swims alone, "under the cover of late afternoon."

And here, perhaps, is where the writer approaches something close to wisdom: that aging is an individual experience. We cannot expect our culture to validate our existence as we age, and while some cultures are more accepting of the elderly, all struggle in one way or another to deal with how to view those whose aging bodies remind us of our own mortality.  Also, old age does not necessarily bring wisdom; some people do, indeed, grow mean and bitter. The trick is discovering how to age without bitterness and how to accept one's own sadness over one's impending mortality without projecting that sadness onto others.

I have discovered that, for me, moving outside of myself, beyond introspection to action, helps me cope with aging. Imagining, planning, and physically creating gardens provide me with activities that exercise my mind and my body without reinforcing the tendency to dwell on what I cannot do or on regret for what I did or did not do when I was younger. Working with my hands is therapeutic, whether it be with a hoe or a crochet hook or a paint brush. This is what I learned from my grandmother, who gardened until she could no longer walk outside by herself, which was just a few months before she died. She crocheted until she could no longer see to knot the stitches. She engaged with the grandchildren and great-grandchildren who visited her.

I also take photos to accompany haiku that I write in response to those photos. I have written poetry since I was in third grade, but haiku strips away poetic pretension or self-indulgence. Writing haiku-- traditional haiku--forces one to look at the thing itself and reflect on that object, perhaps to see connections between the object and oneself but not to wallow in the pool of one's self alone:

Basho's death poem:
   Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
   the withered fields.

Issa's dealing with his father's approaching death:
   Last time, I think,
I'll brush the flies
   from my father's face.

Issa's reflection on poverty:
   The holes in the wall
play the flute
   this autumn evening.

Haiku leave no room for self-pity.

Other people have different ways of coping with aging, of accepting the inevitable.

Once I asked my grandmother how it felt to grow old. She said that when she looked in the mirror, she didn't really recognize the face that stared back at her; she was still fifteen years old inside.

I look in the mirror and barely recognize the face staring back at me. The face that I remember as my own is captured in first-grade and seventh-grade photos of a young girl with an enigmatic smile. But this aging face IS mine. I acknowledge it and hope to shape those inevitable wrinkles into ones that exude grace and acceptance rather than bitterness and self-pity. Only time will tell.

Racial Stereotypes

Reading about the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia reminds me of a craft booth I saw yesterday in a local arts and crafts festival here in Louisiana on the Northshore of Lake Pontchartrain. The vendor, who was white, had created all these "Mammy" items and had them proudly displayed for sale. I don't know if anyone bought anything. I quickly walked past the display, startled and shocked--though I shouldn't have been shocked. Maybe I should have stopped and asked the vendor a few questions to try to discover her reasons for using such stereotypes in her craft or to discern whether or not she even realized these were racist stereotypes. But I just didn't have the heart at the time for any kind of confrontation.

If you're white, and especially if you're from the South, confronting racism in others dredges up so many uncomfortable memories and experiences. Suddenly you're confronted with your own racist past and with the struggle you might have had to try to get beyond it. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, a church whose hierarchy and congregations sided with the Confederacy in the Civil War. As a child, I thoroughly took to heart the hymn we sung about Jesus loving the little children...all the little children, and I struggled to harmonize the beauty of that belief with the reality of our worship. My childhood church had an all-white congregation; the only time African-Americans attended our church on the Gulf Coast of Texas was during Vacation Bible School or a community gathering at Thanksgiving. In 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to apologizing for its racist past, but by that time I had already left the church.  I might have left sooner had I not gone off to college and joined a large university church with a more liberal-minded pastor.

If you come from a family that didn't have much to pass down to succeeding generations, it's a little easier to wipe the memory slate clean concerning any racist past. All the bad stuff gets edited out in the oral stories of the family: until one day, someone lets slip that a great-grandfather fathered a child or children with an African-American woman--yes, I was recently told this, but I don't know the accuracy of the story--and suddenly you're questioning your family's past and whether or not one continues to be responsible for that past, for the actions of others long dead. Are there cousins the family didn't or won't acknowledge? Should you try to locate them? Would they want you to or care?

If you come from a Southern family that kept records in letters and memorabilia, however, it's more difficult to ignore those records that detail racist attitudes: the description of theatrical events where great-grandmother dressed in black face and wrote and recited poetry in a Southern black dialect; the high society programs describing the wait staff at such events as "sons  of Ethiopia"; the recipe booklet from a great-grandmother's collection with its "Mammy-shaped" cover.

What do you do if this is your family's past? If you are like me and my husband, you recognize and acknowledge that past. You cannot deny its existence and the corrosive power of the its values, but you repudiate those values. And you do your best to pass on different values to your children.

In his collection of items that reflect the Jim Crow era of the South, David Pilgrim reminds us that we are so very little removed from our racist past. It stares back at us every day, from the products on our supermarket shelves to the crafts on a table at a local festival.

In the Garden of My Memory

Years ago I created an art car on which I was inspired to paint and illustrate an original phrase that came to mind when I was thinking of my grandmother Margaret Cole Dugat and all the women who have to re-create their worlds when war, natural disasters, bad relationships, stunted aspirations, or a myriad of disappointments change their lives: "Because she remembered her grandmother's garden, she planted her own. Flower by flower she remade the world." This is now a phrase I live by. Actually,  that idea directed my life--often literally--before I was aware of it, for in all the moves we've made to improve our circumstances, the one thing that has remained constant is the energy we put into creating a garden immediately when we've settled.

As I noted in this post of January 17, I set for myself several art, craft, gardening and writing goals for the year to see me through the presidential election and beyond. The stupidity of the election cycle can be so astounding that any thinking person keeping up with the news has to find a way to balance illusion and fantasy with reality, venality with generosity, amoralism with ethics. Work helps, but I am unemployed since I left my last job a year ago to move to the state where my husband had begun some months previous to my moving a more monetarily-rewarding job than I could acquire. So sustained gardening,  craft, and writing do that balancing act for me now.

One of my projects is the altered art journal that I described briefly in that January 17th post. I keep all the materials on an antique table in my study and work on the journal as I find the time from other projects and as inspiration strikes. It's the work of an amateur, but it gives me joy. The journal has become not just a record of 2012--rendered in paint, collage, poems, even sewing, embroidery, and crochet--but a memoir. The journal entry of this week focused on gardening, and I created two tiny, hand-stitched booklets to place in seed-packet pockets that I glued to the pages. In each booklet I wrote an essay about the flowers of my childhood and my gardening memories.

This is one of those essays, with minor editorial changes:

My earliest memories of gardening have almost disappeared into some inaccessible compartment of my brain, but I remember hoeing weeds in our garden in Old River, Texas. Mostly, however, I remember my father working in the garden. When I was very young, he had a couple of plow animals that he used to cultivate his garden, donkeys he called Jenny and Jack. I remember standing barefoot on our front porch, watching Daddy hitch up the plow and head the donkey on a straight run through the garden to create a row for planting. Sometimes the donkey didn't comply, and Daddy would begin to curse. This is where I first learned curse words though I didn't use them myself until I was much older.

I also remember gathering okra and eating the fresh, raw pods as I delivered a batch to the kitchen for cooking. Our household was a traditional one, and we girls did most of the housework while my brother, six years younger than I, did many of the outdoor chores when he was old enough to take them on. I would have much preferred hoeing in the garden, I think, to washing and folding clothes. One summer when I was a teen, I decided that the grass growing around the cement blocks under our house was unsightly. We didn't have a weed-eater, and there were places a lawn mower couldn't reach. I spent several days in the hot Texas sun hoeing that grass away from the house. It was work I initiated and thus work that I liked.

One of the funniest and yet not-so-funny experiences from my teenage years occurred one day when I was picking field peas with my grandmother Ruby Scott Benton. Grandma Benton was a short, fat woman; she was in her sixties at the time and suffering from ailments associated with her weight. She could not lift her feet very high off the ground, and when she tried to step over a row of peas, she fell flat on her back in the sandy soil. I was horrified, but Grandma started laughing, and then I did, too. She looked like a June bug waving its limbs around, trying to roll over to right itself. Grandma Benton was a very even-tempered woman, easily moved to laughter, and it was easy to be happy in her presence.

The first garden of my own was one my husband and I planted when we were students at Texas A&M University at College Station. We were living in married student housing, and the university owned some undeveloped land behind the apartments which the administration designated as a gardening area for married students living in university housing. In the spring, someone would disk the property and divide the land into small garden lots. Married students could choose a plot to garden. 

Tom and I worked very hard in that first garden. Tom would load up our Ford Ranger with free chicken manure from the Ag Center, and we added that manure to our garden to amend the soil. We also weeded assiduously. I remember getting down on my hands and knees to weed, trying to make that garden as weed-free as possible. We were rewarded with such beautiful plants and bountiful vegetables that our gardening neighbors began to comment on the lushness of our garden. Some of them assumed--and told us--that we had "lucked out" in getting the best gardening spot. So one year someone beat us in choosing that patch which we had amended with manure, and we got one of the least desirable plots on the edge of the disked land. I have a photo of myself in that garden that Tom took. I am standing near a row of corn as high as my head, smiling triumphantly. We had proven, if only to ourselves, that our dedication and hard work could turn a plot of land that no one else wanted into a productive garden. 

That might have been the year that someone stole all our vegetables, leaving behind the knife with which he had done the deed.

When Tom and I went to Nova Scotia last September to visit the land where my ancestor Abraham Dugas (Dugast) had lived in the 1600s, we learned how the Acadians had turned marshy land into productive farm land by building dykes to drain the land. They also farmed all up and down the Annapolis Valley and the shore along the Bay of Fundy. Google search "best farmland in Nova Scotia" today, and web pages will pop up describing Kings County, Nova Scotia, as having the best agricultural land in the province.

But perhaps the Acadians were too successful in their farming and gardening. They, too, lost their produce to a neighbor--the British government, which confiscated all their property and exported them to other British colonies. Stripped of their farmland wealth, the impoverished Acadians had to start over in foreign lands. Some made their way to Louisiana, carrying with them a love and skill of gardening. 

Perhaps my Acadian/Cajun genes explain in part my own love of gardening. And a natural disposition to be wary of those in power and those envious of the success--however slight--of others.

Briefly....

So glad this guy's not going to be President: "Gingrich Walks out During Interview with Student Reporter," in Slate. I mean, really, petulance doesn't wear well in a leader. Imagine four years of stunts like this.

But here are the people who disagree with me: The Atlantic's video of the day. Bully for them.

As Kevin Drum says, not much of anything new was added to the George W. Bush and the National Guard story in Joe Hagen's article in the  May edition of the Texas Monthly , but, distilled, it does deliver some cautionary reminders:

• The rich, powerful, politically-connected are not like you and me, and don't forget it. If drafted, their children don't go to war, and they don't have to flee to Canada to avoid deploying. While someone less fortunate serves and dies in their place or lives the rest of his life in a foreign country, they get safe assignments and (finally) grow up to be President.
• Career politicians (often, and selectively, perhaps) look out for other politicians, even those in the competing party. This is how they bargain; this is how they accrue power.
• Powerfully rich and influential people can destroy lives or hinder the aspirations of others more admirable: Walter V. Robinson, Boston Globe reporter: "...the only [2004 presidential] candidate who ended up with a serious credibility problem about his military service was John Kerry, who had absolutely nothing to hide or be ashamed of."

Useful reminders.

Faith, Hope, and . . . . Anticipation

Nothing exemplifies faith and hope as much as a garden, I think. To begin gardening is a step into faith....faith that one can do the job, faith that the weather will be beneficial, faith that the outcome will bring pleasure or, at least, sustenance. One plants those dry little seeds hoping that they will sprout and that predators won't decimate the crop. Of course, one hopes a garden can generate charity, too: we all love our neighbors as ourselves when the cucumbers over-produce. On the other hand, charity withers when one spies a worm on a tomato leaf.

And oh...what anticipation as one daily observes the sprouts growing and bearing fruit.

Here are a few photos I took in the garden today that exemplify all of these emotions--and more.

Anticipating eating the Creole tomatoes

Nasturtiums for beauty and salads

This is how I feel in my gardens.

Thai basil sprouts (Queenette)

Uh oh....daily maintenance required

beautiful but not wanted

kumquat ripening

just-set satsuma fruits

sweet oranges

young sunflower sprouts

a dwarf gardenia

crooked-neck squash sprouts

more basil sprouts--lettuce leaf or Genovese

tiny arugula sprouts

Despite the pointed bamboo stakes, Persephone finds a shady spot.

The Worth of Physical Labor

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, temperatures and rainfall were much above normal here in Louisiana. Consequently, in February and March, I found myself working against weather to dig and to plant the flower and herb beds that I had planned during the winter. I spent most of March digging, weeding, planting, and embellishing the landscape, as illustrated by the accompanying photo of the bamboo backdrop I created for my Japanese lantern. The previous owner of this property planted a line of bamboo along the property line (more or less) at the back of the three lots that we have purchased, and I cut the bamboo to make this screen, an edging to a flower bed, and stakes for our tomatoes. My labor in the bamboo patch had dual purposes: to create material for my gardens and to remove what bamboo was leaning over and touching the roof of our workshop. The pest control guy told us that termites could travel from the overarching bamboo limbs and damage the wooden walls of the workshop. 

Unless I choose to create another flower or herb bed, the most laborious part of gardening is over for the season. Now I'm in maintenance mode: watering sprouts, protecting sprouts from birds, weeding (which I do a bit at a time every day), gathering the fruit when it's ripe, and enjoying the beauty of blooms. 

I relished the physical labor, for it got me out of the house, away from online commentary and the stupidity of the campaign season. One has less time to brood when one is working hard.

Legislators must have better pay to resist temptation, but teachers who are "called" will work for anything

I've pretty much given up on keeping tabs on stupid comments in this election cycle, but as a teacher from a family of teachers, I just had to record this claim from Alabama State Senator (Republican) Shadrack McGill:

State Sen. Shadrack McGill defended a pay raise his predecessors in the Legislature passed, but said doubling teacher pay could lead to less-qualified educators....[snip]

McGill, R-Woodville, said a 62 percent pay raise in 2007 - passed first by a controversial voice vote and later in an override of a veto by then-Gov. Bob Riley - better rewards lawmakers and makes them less susceptible to being swayed by lobbyists....[snip]

McGill said that by paying legislators more, they're less susceptible to taking bribes.

"He needs to make enough that he can say no, in regards to temptation. ... Teachers need to make the money that they need to make. There needs to be a balance there. If you double what you're paying education, you know what's going to happen? I've heard the comment many times, ‘Well, the quality of education's going to go up.' That's never proven to happen, guys.

"It's a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach.

"To go in and raise someone's child for eight hours a day, or many people's children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn't want to do it, OK?

"And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn't matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity."

David Clemons, "McGill: Consequences to Raising Teacher Pay," Times-Journal, 1 Feb. 2012

So--legislators must have better pay in order to resist the temptation of bribery, but teachers are going to teach even if they are paid little? Who elected this man to office?