Lost & found

What are weekends for, if not to clean the kitchen, make French-press coffee instead of Mr. Coffee, sweep the back room, scoop the ashes from the stove, bury them under the snow, and turn a few heliotropic plants to face in instead of out? But this is no ordinary weekend.

It snowed again, but it only took a few minutes with my trusty shovel to clear off the back walk once I had secured the broken handle with a long nail and some electrical tape. That and other chores left enough time to start a batch of bread, and by the time the dough was ready to knead and rise again, it was time for the drum circle at the rec center.

They say things can either go very well or very badly in the Year of the Iron Tiger. What elemental forces are at work in the natural world and in human society? I did a reading for the incoming lunar new year, and the Book of Changes, in a new translation by Alfred Huang, was as cryptic as ever. Whether 'splitting apart' like firewood, or 'peeling off' like a banana, or 'falling away' like the husk of a seed, the imagery still gives me something very abstruse to work with. Something solid is eroding, but seeds will sprout and push against tough resistance. Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?

I got to the drum circle late, as usual, and once I settled in, time passed all too quickly. Rhythm is not the same as time management. Ten or twelve drummers fed off each other's energy in 20-minute jams that just kept going, and a few steady hands knew when to bring it down to a close.

On the way home I stopped at the flower shop at Schrock and State and bought flowers for the three women in my life - my mother, my wife, and my daughter - and went home to knead the bread and build a fire. It isn't easy choosing just the right gift for someone important, someone with certain likes and dislikes, someone who sees everything as a symbol of something. It keeps it interesting. Then it's reassuring to do something you know how to do, something immediate and tangible.

While picking up an armload of firewood, I found my lost glasses under a big piece of split maple and put them in my pocket, possibly the same pocket they fell out of when I bent over while stacking wood back in October. Somehow I knew they would be there, it just took a while to use up that much wood. While the fire warmed up the den, I sat at my desk and bent the twisted right rim back into a shape that would hold the lens that popped out, cleaned the lenses, adjusted the nose pieces to sit on the bridge of my formidable nose, and put them on. They still fit better than the backup pair I've been using these past four months.

Now what? Plans A and B just didn't seem right, so we went to Cafe Istanbul for lamb with rice and okra, Turkish wine, and coffee. Yes, I think that's what weekends are for.

Just venting

The clothes dryer wasn't working because the heating coil quit Thursday night. I could tell, thanks to my keen powers of observation, when the cold, wet clothes I put in were still wet after tumbling around in a cold dryer for an hour and a half.

I consulted with my trusted sidekick Dr. Watson, who confirmed my suspicion that, yep, it's the heating coil alright. She did the real work of calling the repair shop, then calling the supply store to find out whether we could just buy a new coil and replace it ourselves, and finally getting it done by a professional from Apex for a reasonable amount of money.

The cause of the problem was unclear, but it might have had something to do with a clog in a low spot of the long and circuitous path that the hose took from the dryer to the vent outside the house. Venting warm, moist air in or underneath the house isn't recommended, and we don't need any moisture issues with our 120-year-old foundation.

So we chose to change the outgoing path of dryer air from the twisting, turning diagonal vent, made mostly of flexible tubing, that I cleverly devised when we moved in six years ago to a straight shot to the nearest exterior wall, as any rational person would have done in the first place. It took a while to determine which path to take from the back corner of an interior room to one of two outside walls, and my able assistant was very helpful in reducing the three possible options to the one obvious choice: straight back. Hamlet should have had her to help him cut through his endless deliberations.

While Dr. Ophelia Watson bought a couple of sheet metal vent pipes at the local Home Despot, doing our part to help Arthur Blank buy players for the Falcons and contribute campaign funds for Republicans in Georgia, I set to work making holes to vent through. Soliloquy (aside): Everyone has a special calling in life, and this is mine. Given enough practice, almost anyone can increase their skill at making holes in wood or a variety of other materials, and then going about the important work of venting hot air from their own chosen interior space to the relative safety of some nearby nontoxic exterior space. What can I say? It's what I do.

A little work with the jig saw succeeded in cutting a nearly round hole in the floorboards in the back corner of the laundry room, providing access to the shallow crawl space below. Meanwhile, there was enough of a break in the snowstorm for me to hunker down next to the back step outside and shine a light in the foot-square opening to the crawl space, piecing together exactly 13 feet of metal tubing (with an elbow), and feeding it in through the crawl space to the hole in the floor, in the snow, in the dark. You could cut the dramatic tension - and the duct tape - with a small utility knife.

To make a short story long - again, this is what I do; if you want snappy AP style, go read somebody else's boring blog - the vent hose from the dryer hooked right up with the upward-turned elbow just below the hole in the floor, and we dried a load of clothes that night, edified by the whole learning-by-doing experience.

Shoveling snow is much more therapeutic than fixing broken household devices, besides its obvious utilitarian value. So when the whole venting thing got frustrating, I would just take a break and shovel snow for a while and then felt better.

The next day Zelda came over for dinner, and the three of us watched the Superbowl together just like a regular Amerikan family. Actually two-thirds of us focused primarily on the badly crafted, unbelievably expensive and ill-conceived advertising that used the game as a carnival sideshow cum visual facade to sell snake oil to us rubes in the provinces. The other one-third of us watched very big, very fast men clad in armor bedecked in gang colors knocking each other down and preening for the crowd of like a hundred million consumers of goods and services.

Somewhere in that unlikely domestic scene, triggered by an ad for something - I don't know what - that referenced a YouTube clip about a little kid coming home still half-anaesthetized from the dentist, the three of us found ourselves in conversation about, how shall I say, our own youthful experiences under some form of medication. You can't plan that kind of parent-child disclosure, and it was good to get it out.

I am not Holden

So the moon is almost full, and I have a relatively minor birthday coming up in the rear-view mirror, and I'm feeling a nostalgic wave of emotion with the reappearance of a lost-lost friend through the fiendish magic of Facebook, and in the midst of the usual everyday ups and downs comes news of the death of a long-disappeared but still resonant literary hero. So I join just about everyone I know in celebrating the work and mourning the passing of J.D. Salinger.

I cannot think of a more poignant coming-of-age story than Catcher in the Rye, yet there is nothing I can say about it that hasn't already been said - and said badly - in a thousand freshman English papers. For starters, I'm betting Salinger would hate that word poignant, which I added in the second draft, and I'm using it anyway.

A literary critic on NPR praised Salinger for writing "with all his stars out," whatever that means. Actually I think I know what it means, but I can't tell you, and if you don't get it, well, never mind. It's a metaphor, damn it, a linguistic bridge from an obvious, so-called literal, statement to a truth beyond the literal, and either it speaks to you or it doesn't. It's something Salinger accomplished with remarkable, even breathtaking honesty. That's why Holden, that slightly snotty, sophisticated preppy antihero, hit home so well with so many less self-aware midwestern kids like me and every single one of my friends.

When I arrived in the rec center parking lot, I wanted to keep listening but I had to turn off the car radio because it was time for class to begin. One by one the students filtered in, and the circle in the middle of the room gradually expanded from three to four to eight, and the shakuhachi music in the background only made it more conducive to surrender to the lapping of the internal wave machine and to dedicate this evening's practice to an old man who valued privacy yet had contact with millions of fortunate readers.

There isn't much people can do for each other on a cold Thursday night in January in Ohio, but we can stand in a circle and try to keep each other from walking off a cliff. I had some time after class, so I went to the library just to see if there were any Salinger titles still on the shelves, and to my surprise found two copies of Franny and Zooey, so I checked one out, got a cup of coffee, read a few pages, and immediately fell back in love with the voice that so many young readers cut their reading teeth on. I wish I could write dialog like that.

What can you do? You go to your next meeting, where a few of the people in the circle are on the same page and some are not. You can listen respectfully and go home with the candle wax drying on your sleeve and answer the phone when it vibrates in your pocket. It's my parents on the phone, wishing me a happy birthday and disclosing, because I asked, the latest wrinkle in their ongoing struggle with the inevitable challenges of aging. Which I can relate to, but in comparison I have no idea, so there isn't much you can do but listen and bear witness.

Zelda came over for dinner the next night like a breath of fresh air on a cold night. She has read some, if not all, of Salinger's fiction, and she knows the characters well enough to correct my pronunciation of their names. So there is that. She and her brother are not Phoebe and Holden, but they have made their acquaintance and possibly gotten together for cocktails on occasion.

Haves 5, Have-nots 4

On the face of it, this week's Supreme Court decision allowing unlimited campaign spending is another major step toward institutionalized oligarchy. Or maybe it's just an open acknowledgment of what has long been the case in the United Estates of Amerika.

The myth that "our" democracy - of the people, by the people, and for the people - counts the votes and opinions of the rich and the poor equally has long been challenged by the practices of both major parties, by electoral irregularities, by lobbyists and fundraisers, and by selective news reporting. Nobody really believed that poor people, women, or people of color received equal treatment under the law or had equal access to the levers of power.

According to five old men in robes, the law of the land now confirms the widely held suspicion that person-like business entities with greater resources not just do but should have greater rights than others to shape policy and influence the composition of the public sector everywhere from dog catcher to Congress.

No one should be too upset by this officially validated state of affairs. You don't have to be a nineteenth-century Spencerian social Darwinist, a twentieth-century Ayn Rand egoist, or a gun-toting wilderness survivalist to know that the strong get to do things that the weak don't get to do. Although the degree and brazenness of their natural advantage has varied over the 250-odd years of Amerikan history, this disparity of power is built into the formal and informal structures and functions - the gesellschaft and gemeinschaft if you will - of this country.

By birthright or by the privilege of their position, rich white men founded the nation and directed its development into the military-industrial superpower in which we live. So it's no accident that rich white men have reaped the greatest benefits of a political economy set up to serve their interests. Despite the noble Jeffersonian rhetoric, the Framers did the self-serving Hamiltonian thing and made the new nation safe for bankers and merchants at the expense of common yeoman farmers.

Yet this is still the land of opportunity. The long list of exceptions in this historical materialist account has made it more interesting and open to fanciful interpretation by idealists of many stripes. De jure changes like the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts of the 1960s leveled the playing field on paper by granting equal rights to groups that had been disenfranchised by law.

Some were entitled to own property, to vote, and to have a lawyer's representation in court, and some are not. It hasn't been long since blacks and women were granted the status of human beings and gained the privileges of citizenship. And these legal reforms have had substantial de facto consequences, reflected in a more diverse ethnic and gender composition of local, state, and national government and culminating in the dramatic ascendance of Barack to the presidency. You've come a long way, maybe.

This inspiring triumphalist reading of Amerikan history is only one of many layers of text on a time line that also includes a series of wars fought largely by poor provincials on behalf of captains of industry; an Industrial Revolution that profited enterprising robber barons on the backs of immigrants and other exploited workers; income disparities that dwarf the aristocratic social hierarchies of Europe from which egalitarian Amerikans self-righteously distance themselves; health and social services that systemically exclude more of the population than any other so-called civilized nation. These things too make Amerika special. No, I'm not bitter. I'm just the last common yeoman farmer to wake up and smell the coffee.

Whining about the hypocrisy of judicial conservatives engaging in the heresy of judicial activism does little to address either the intention or the consequences of the Court's ruling on campaign spending. In theory, it equates dollars with free speech and corporations with persons, but the practical intent could be something akin to the Founders' compromises in 1789: to create a stable social order in which to do business, while hedging against the fickle desires and unreliable opinions of the ordinary rabble by placing real authority in the hands of those who know better and have the most to lose, should anything upset the applecart, and the most to gain by controlling the size, shape, location, contents, availability, and access to the applecart.

The consequences of the ruling are a little harder to discern, especially after the financial collapse of 2008 and the sense of denial with which the bailout and recovery have been managed by and for the parties who perpetrated the collapse in the first place. Rather than tamper with the very business practices that nearly brought down the system, while making them very wealthy, the oligarchs in New York and their minions in Washington bought themselves an escape hatch from accountability for large-scale mistakes, while increasing the accountability of the consumers, borrowers, and taxpayers who work for them. And yes, we all work for them.

Don't like it? Then move to Russia, where an authoritarian government in league with a small group of wealthy industrialists makes the rules that every Ivan and Nina has to abide by at their peril. Sound familiar? Or move to China, where a centralized ruling elite decides military, economic, and social policy while flouting the masses' civil liberties and access to information in the name of national security.

Clearly the differences in the material conditions of life in the three countries are significant, and the methods by which deals and made and authority is maintained are perhaps less blatant in the U.S. than in Russia and China. It's all done under the guise of due process and equal protection, and that gives patriotic Amerikans the right, by jingo, to call other countries corrupt. Our government is for sale, and it's all Constitutional and squeaky clean. Five old men in robes just said so.

A View with a Room

The upstairs studio becomes a bedroom; the downstairs bedroom becomes a living room; the downstairs living room becomes a studio. Everything has to be moved out of one room into another, so for a while, the only place to sit down was here at my desk while everything else was turned upside down. Most of the furniture that had to be shuffled around is at last in place, at least for now. We can sit down for a meal, and we can even watch TV in relative comfort.

The cable guy showed up late Saturday afternoon and connected the northeast corner with the internet and the southeast corner with the TV. He didn't balk at going into the crawl space during a snowstorm to drill a hole through the subfloor, and I got to use the new outdoor outlet. So the new living room is on the grid, and we've restored our connection with the outside world.

The changes in Om Shanty are making an amazing difference in our use of space. The sight lines are much improved, and suddenly looking from the dining room into the living room suggests connected spaces that you might want to inhabit. I can sit in the rocking chair watching TV and turn my head to see the fire in the den adjoining - which is still the best room in the house.

Going negative

It's winter. Get used to it.

On this planet, temperatures go up and down. Especially here in the middle latitudes, including central Swingstate where I live, the seasons come and go with remarkable variation, bringing wide fluctuations of warm and cold weather. So pardon my interruption of your January rant about how horrible it is to endure the harsh subfreezing gale outside, but hey, it's winter.

Or you could move in with Ken Lay down in the Cayman Islands, where it's nice and warm with all that oily money. Here in the relatively temperate Lower 48, it's not as tropical as Hawaii and not as arctic as Alaska, and there will be warmer months and colder months. Like yin times and yang times in the cycle of the year, they're not going away very soon.

Excuse me if I repeat myself, but in case you didn't get the memo, change happens. Sometimes change is wet and cold. Learn to live with it. The wet and cold stuff of January is good for the apple trees and other flora that grace this part of the country. Put on your mittens, fergoshsakes.

As much as you might object, it might get hotter than 72 F. in the summer, then you can complain that it's too hot. And as much as you hate the cold, the temperature might drop below 32 in the winter. Horrors! In our command-and-control culture, you can push all the buttons you want, and it doesn't change the fact of the ups and downs.

I say life is a garden, so dig it.

It's the same with human interaction. I respectfully disagree with the unwritten rule that when someone asks "How are you?" the appropriate response is the upbeat "Great!" or even "Fine, thank you." If they take the trouble to ask, I think you owe them an honest answer, even if it's "I feel like hell but I think I'll live."

I realize these are mixed messages. On the one hand, everyone should enjoy winter - as I do - and get all gung-ho about wearing wool, shoveling snow, and turning corners in a controlled slide. On the other hand, everyone should act as grumpy as they feel - like I do - and stop feigning a constant but perfunctory state of happiness.

In other words, enjoy the down side. We're not in any old recession, we're in a Great Recession. I'm not just in a bad mood, I'm mired in an acute state of existential malaise. But at least be present for the event.

Excuse me while I leave my cubicle to take a walk in an outdoor oval to breathe unrecirculated air.

Ink-Stained Wretch

Why do all my shirts have dark blue or black blotter-like stains on the cuffs below the elbow? Why do two of my favorite pairs of pants have small but impossible-to-ignore and hard-to-remove Rorschach tests on the seat? Should I start wearing plastic sleeve coverings like the bookkeeper or telegraph clerk in the old movies? Its an occupational hazard.

I've been scribbling since I can remember. Some of my early work was drawing on scrap paper my dad would bring home from the office; the writing of actual words and sentences probably came later, but the medium is the message, and the visual line, not the play, is the thing. Paper, pencil, pen, eye, hand, analog marks on a two-dimensional surface.

Early on, uniforms of sports teams and military units - real or imaginary - were a favorite subject. The typography of team names, logos, and players' numbers was fun too. Serif or sans serif, block or rounded, printed or cursive. Later came lists and maps of realigned baseball or football leagues with divisions reflecting geographical balance, maps of dreamed-up cities with street grids and government buildings, floor plans of unlikely houses. I spent a lot of time in my room and went through a lot of paper in the 1950s before anyone thought about saving trees.

The technology of the game changed in junior high school when I developed a personal relationship with the typewriter. I still wrote longhand of course; make new friends but keep the old, one is silver and the other gold. Mr. Fiocchi had a roomful of manual Royals in typing class, and I had access to a little blue Olivetti portable at home. Neural pathways connecting with the keyboard, smudges on the fingers from changing the ribbon, followed by crisp impressions on the paper. The round eraser with a little brush attached.

In high school we had a couple of IBM Selectrics in the journalism room, with the detachable golf-ball you could change to get a different typeface (we didn't call it a 'font') and a half-backspace key to justify lines. That was when I started to compose at the keyboard instead of doing a draft with a pen and then transcribing. But then, as now, it's all about revising, deleting, inserting, and transposing in a quest for the perfect lead, active verbs, and an editable inverted pyramid.

It's not always easy finding gainful employment when words on a page are your bricks and mortar, so I have found it expedient at times to do something else for a living. Then I would come home with dirt or dough under my fingernails instead of ink on my fingers. At times I had a hard time staying with a job in publishing, like the summer internship that convinced me I really didn't want to work at a newspaper, but that's another story.

Then there was the time I wanted to set type in the composing room instead of writing articles as a beat reporter, only to quit the night shift for a nine-to-five gig at the phone company doing business letters on an early A.B. Dick word-processing machine, circa 1978. Once you typed it in, the plastic magnetic cards stored the data electronically and printed out on command, very cutting edge.

When I decided to go back to college and get a degree in education, NOT journalism, the employment agency put me behind an IBM Selectric where I knocked out engineering syllabi, vitae, tests, and grant applications. When I changed schools and applied for financial aid, the administrators took one look at my record and put me to work on the faculty-staff newspaper. I thought I was in heaven, with my own office in the old stone theology building next to Asia House and facing Tappan Square, but as usual I didn't take full advantage of the opportunity. Was it the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time? I don't know, but I chose to go elsewhere and do other things.

Doing other things, of course, led me back behind a typewriter. I couldn't get away. After brief forays teaching kids, planting trees, selling trees, and landscaping trees - my karma after all that paper - I entered the digital age at a keyboard attached to a Mac, then a PC, then a Mac again.

It's only right to ponder, every once in a while, the possibility of another line of work, especially now that print is on its way out as the dominant publishing form. Yet half the people I know are connected in some way to printed pages and their digital offspring. In the meantime, anybody know a good stain remover? Out damn spot!

Champagne and Caveat

Happy New Year? Take a rain check.

Is it a new decade yet? I can never remember whether a decade officially begins or ends on the zero-numbered year? If it starts with a 1, then I guess we're a year away, but I have my own reasons to redraw the line. It's been exactly ten years since I began working at the Hill. As anniversaries go, it might not be much, but it's a record of professional longevity for me.

I interviewed with Michael and Marty for a staff job that went to someone else, but they called me back and offered me a project editor position. I told them I would think about it. After another interview with a small company that offered less money with less job security in worse working conditions, I consulted with my career counselor, Zelda Golly, who strongly recommended that I take the job at the Hill.

I called Marty to accept the offer, and she asked what salary I was looking for, so I pull an hourly figure out of the air that was slightly higher than what I made freelancing. She said they would pay me a little more than that, I said okay, and that was that. I reported for work the first Monday of 2000. Ruth showed me to my very own cubicle with my very own computer, phone, Web 10, and Herman Miller chair. Janet handed me my very own copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and I thought, hey, this might work. But would it last?

Flash forward ten years to the waning days of 2009, and my new supervisor in my new department in a newly constituted division of the Reorganized Corporation of the Latter-Day Hill calls a meeting to celebrate my ten-year anniversary. She even brought pie - apple, cherry, and blueberry! Since the date in question happened to fall during the week following Christmas, there were all of four people in the office to eat the delicious pies and help me celebrate. It was fun anyway.

With very little prompting, I described my brilliant career in publishing, starting with the high school newspaper, a summer at the Detroit News, through three undergraduate and one graduate institution, off-the-beaten-path sojourns in the UP, north Georgia, the composing room of a newspaper on the North Shore of Chicago, stints as a busdriver, landscaper, butcher, baker, and candlestick maker. Jaymee, Kim, Aaron, Sandra, and Valerie made me feel special, and that's what's important.

My dark secret was that my date of hire was in the last days of the last century, just before the dreaded apocalypse Y2K, but my first actual day at work was in the first days of 2000, after the would-be threat had passed. It was also in the early days of the opening of the new building at Polaris, so my new co-workers were just getting used to the space after moving up north from Eastwind Drive.

My tenth year ended with me and my new co-workers getting used to a new space at the Easton office, with new and transitioning people arriving every day. I'm going to pretend that today's impromptu lunch at Anemame was an unofficial celebration of that unofficial anniversary. The sushi, the atmosphere, and the company were excellent. Alas, no sake, since we were going back to work.

Almost in passing, the other anniversary last week, my thirty-first as a married man, was also just a half-bubble off center. Since Gven Golly and I had gone to Chicago last year to celebrate our thirtieth in style, we thought we would keep it simple this year, just go out to dinner, and maybe do something wild like paint the new baseboards. However, family events intervened, and we found ourselves driving south the morning of December 30 to attend a funeral.

We stopped off in central Tennessee to have dinner and stay overnight with my parents at their retirement place in Vol Halla. By happy accident, my brother and his wife and daughter were also there for dinner, so we got to spend some bonus time with Pete, Cindy, and Liz, swapping stories of home renovations, college applications, and musician offspring. In-depth discussions of plumbing, wiring, framing, and drywall are just as effective as anything else in bringing people together.

Early Thursday morning, Gven and I were on the dark, winding, rainy, foggy road across the ridge and down the mountain toward Atlanta, where we arrived in ample time for my niece's funeral. Such occasions are often a happy-sad opportunity to reconnect with distant family members, and this was no exception. I hadn't seen some members of the Bradley clan for many years, and now their kids, like my kids, are grown up, some with kids of their own, and I'm one of the old folks. Under the circumstances, I can enjoy that distinction. Cry, laugh, talk about old times, catch up on what's new, laugh, cry.

Since Sandra was a veteran of the first Gulf War, burial with military honors was at the National Cemetery outside Canton, Georgia, in an otherwise beautiful spot on top of a pine-covered and increasingly gravestone-covered mountain. After initially missing the turn-off from highway 20, we got there in time to witness the playing of "Taps" and the folding and presentation of the flag to my brother-in-law. Burt understandably looked a little the worse for wear, having buried two of his daughters in the last few months. Family members went back to my sister Jo Jo's house to eat, relax a bit, and begin the next phase of grieving, healing, adjusting. Clearly it is easier to do that among others who are doing the same.

Eventually Gven and I went to our motel, which was way out in Norcross but was very cheap and very adequate. Gven was tired, so she went to sleep early. I was wound up, so I stayed up. The superstition says the way you start the new year shows what kind of year it will be. Apparently 2010 will consist of multiple "The Thin Man" movies watched back to back over a local pale ale and a tangerine; doing a taiji form and sitting for half an hour with the last movie on mute; sleeping soundly with active dreams that I don't remember; eating the complimentary bagel and coffee while watching CNN in the lobby with visitors from India and Tennessee; and meeting Jo Jo for breakfast.

The days have totally run together, but I'm pretty sure it was New Year's Day in most time zones. We drove straight down Peachtree Road past our former neighborhood near the Brookhaven MARTA station, so we happened to pass a few familiar places, like Nuts & Berries, the natural food store we used to frequent when the kids were little. The IHOP in the heart of Buckhead was packed at noon, but we were seated within minutes. The country omelet was excellent, the service was even better, and the additional time with loved ones priceless.

When it was time to go, we head up Roswell Road for the nickel tour of Sandy Springs on our way out of town. Atlanta turns into Marietta, Calhoun, Chattanooga, Knoxville, Lake City, and London, Kentucky, where we stop at Frisch's Big Boy for a Brawny Lad (Sven) and an open-face roast beef sandwich (Gven). We phoned Zelda from Frisch's to check in with her, and she follows up with text messages updating us with the score of the Rose Bowl. Go Bucks. Lexington, Cincinnati, Grove City, and home in record time. I'm pretty sure there's a pretty good bottle of L. Mawby Consort sparkling wine in the fridge just waiting for a special occasion.

Binary Politics

There are four kinds of people in American politics today, and they can't be easily pigeonholed as either 'conservative' or 'liberal' or 'radical' or 'nut-case'. That by itself could automatically make the following distinctions far too complex for most people who claim an interest in matters of public policy, for whom heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys, Us and Them make it so much easier to assign credit and blame.

I haven't figured out what to call the four types yet, but surely some pundit is on the case. Sadly, because it frames a multitude of issues as a trade-off between foreign and domestic spending, this argument reinforces the notion that Barack Obama is a latter-day Lyndon Johnson figure. With LBJ the prevailing issues were 'Guns and Butter' - large federal expenditures on the war in Vietnam and/or the Great Society social programs. With BHO it could come down to 'Insurgents and Insurance' - whether to spend megabucks to bring a semblance of humane order to Afghanistan and/or to the health care industry.

To be more specific, the four types of people are really segments of the small percentage of folks who have actually given some thought to what they want to pay for with their taxes, not just what they want someone else to do something about. So we might be talking about five percent of registered voters. Which would make an interesting statistical sample in itself: How many poll respondents consider the cost/benefit of a program or policy when asked to support or oppose it, rather than scoring political points for the Good Guys (us) against the Bad Guys (them)?

Expanding the war in Afghanistan is one expensive policy that Americans can either support or oppose. It's binary; you're either fer it or agin' it, and it's gonna cost ya either way. National health insurance - whether you call it a "public option" or "nonprofit coops" or "Medicare buy-in" or some other euphemism - is another. It's big, it's expensive, you either support it or oppose it. Many boatloads of money will likely be spent on one or both of these large-scale projects, and the money has to come from somewhere. The rumor is that you and I will foot the bill.

Citizens, if you want the government to provide more services, you have to pay more taxes. The binary nature of yea or nay questions means the four groups in question would: a) spend the money needed to win the war in Central Asia but NOT to provide national health insurance; b) spend the money needed to provide national health insurance but NOT to win the war in Central Asia; c) spend the money BOTH to win the war AND provide insurance; d) do neither, save the money, and see what other consequences ensue.

There are some obvious problems. Options (a) and (c) beg the question of whether two years or ten years and many lost lives CAN win a war in Central Asia. Options (b) and (c) offer no guarantee that Congress can "fix" health insurance. Are you kidding? While this admittedly leaves out many complexities of policy making and its limitations, it also has the advantage of cutting through much of the nonsense spouted by those who want to have it both ways, waging endless wars, saving investment bankers from themselves, underwriting entire industries, deregulating other, all while cutting taxes.

End of rant. I have a friend who is fond of saying there are two kinds of people - those who believe there are two kinds of people and those who don't. That pretty much discredits everything I've said above. Or not.

Silvio e Sylvia

Sometimes the news is all the literature, theater, and plain old down-and-dirty comedy that one could ever want. When the news events in question occur in Italy, and in this case in Milan, the feeling of high drama is only intensified, as if the seat of government were transplanted onto the stage of La Scala and the curtain was raised on another scene in the grand opera of politics.

When the larger-than-life figure at the center of all the attention is the megalomaniacal head of state Silvio Berlusconi, owner of a media empire as well as the unchallenged plutocrat at the controls of Italy's government, and the reporter's voice on the radio belongs to NPR's inimitable Sylvia Poggioli, well, what can I say, it's journalistic heaven.

Take this terse summary (from an overcautious Slate):

At a rally in Milan yesterday, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was met by demonstrators who shouted insults while he gave a speech. Later, when he was signing autographs, a 42-year-old with a history of mental illness hit Berlusconi on the face with a model of the Duomo cathedral. The attack left Berlusconi bloodied with two broken teeth, a fractured nose, and cuts on his nose and cheeks. Berlusconi spent the night in the hospital with a severe headache, but doctors say he's doing well.

Spare us the timid account, Slate. Burlusconi runs the most influential news outlets in his country and arguably determines what information makes it onto front pages and TV screens from Torino to Palermo. One part Rupert Murdoch and one part Benito Mussolini, I'm guessing his people make sure the national news in Rome isn't too critical of the ruling party. And I mean party. Old Silvio has earned a reputation for romancing young women that American pro golfers might envy, except he unapologetically gets away with it.

Part of the NPR story that Slate omitted was the alleged Mafia connections that helped Signor Ministerio Primo get his start in real estate, from which entrepreneurial foundations he went on to dominate the tone and substance of the right wing in Italian politics. In the tradition of Mussolini, an arrogant kind of masculinity and swagger are expected in a leader. Il Duce liked women, weapons, and fast cars too, and he wasn't a fan of dissent.

His spiritual descendant Berlusconi has recently been accused of having ties to the Mafia, which he dismisses as a figment of the American movie-going imagination. What I loved in the news account was his denial of any connections with organized crime accompanied by a promise that if he got his hands on his accusers, he would personally strangle them. Then his nose is broken by a half-crazy man in a crowd throwing a stone model of a cathedral. You can't make this stuff up.

My people are from another European peninsular nation, also bold seafaring stock who ventured far from their ports, as did the Renaissance Italians, but this kind of thing doesn't happen in Oslo. On the other hand, I haven't heard a Norsk news correspondent with a smoking hot voice like Poggioli, who can write a factual straight-news piece for the radio and deliver it on the air like poetry, like a torch singer, like the muse of the news.

In the details

The time was Friday night, and she left her knitting at work and had to go back to the studio, it should only take ten minutes, do you want anything, okay a bottle of tonic, during which time the fire in the stove gradually grew, probably due to the green sticks I'm reduced to using for kindling, finally combusting a handful of wood chips, which consumed a miniature log cabin of thin split logs, which engulfed three or four full-sized pear branches that fill the house with a fruity aroma.

It all adds up, and then it all reduces down to almost nothing, you can see in a clean well-lighted room that it's not absolutely nada, as he nudges the air intake closed a half-inch to slow down the conflagration, a small adjustment that over the course of the next four hours affects the whole house.

The guacamole has been tightly sealed so it's still good after a few days in a ceramic bowl in the fridge, and smeared on half a slice of bagel, eaten between bites of brown rice and adzuki beans, heavy on the salsa which is heavy on the onions, and you've got a sweet, sour, salty, savory sense of the moment. The Chardonnay, the fine conundrum, make tonight a wonderful day.

It's about time

I took my time getting up, taking a shower, eating scrambled eggs and toast, and reading the paper on Saturday morning. By the time I had drunk a second cup of coffee and swept the floor, it was time for my appointment to go give blood. Oh, I also sewed on a couple of buttons in the meantime. A stitch in time, you know.

The Red Cross trailer was parked in front of Lowe's on Silver Drive just like it usually is. The little booth in back felt even more claustrophobic than usual, but the attendant was very professional and polished in the procedure. She had perfect skin. I don't think she smiled or frowned once during the entire 45 minutes. My blood pressure was 120/80. The otherwise too-loud radio played "Baba O'Reilly" too softly while they hooked me up and I squeezed and released the little rubber ball every five seconds.

I ate the entire bag of Cheez-Its while sitting in the parking lot before going to my next errand, saving the trail mix for later. Must maintain energy. The rec. center was not as close as I'd imagined when I made the appointment, thinking that Lowe's would be on the way, when in fact it was a few miles out of the way at the opposite end of Clintonville, an easy mistake to make if coming from Methodistville. The drive up High Street was not unpleasant if you like that kind of thing.

In the rec. center parking lot the midafternoon sun was slanting across the field as it does in winter, and it drew me to the three pine trees beside the softball diamond. I've always liked those three pine trees. Even facing into the wind it was a good time to do a little qigong, having just given blood, and when is it not a good time for some internal healing practice? I just hope the recipient of my pint appreciates the high-quality rum remaining in my system from a bit of Friday night celebrating.

A few drummers were already banging away when I entered the room, and a collective shout went up welcoming me back, because I hadn't been there in a few months, kind of like Norm walking into Cheers. It was great to see some familiar faces and another great source of healing to join in the rhythm-building, shape-shifting, bass and treble-making crescendo and diminuendo of the drum circle. After one particularly awesome jam, Mark remarked, "Was that specifically fun?" You had to be there.

I got home just before dark, so I put the new lights on my bike and went for a very short, very cold ride. I think my mistake was removing my gloves to fiddle around with the straps that attach the lights to the handlebars, thus starting out with cold hands, so my fleece gloves had no chance. After quickly turning back, I ran warm water over my frozen fingers, started a fire, and poured a glass of red wine to watch the Crimson Tide dominate the Gators.

The next day, right on schedule, I began to descend into my annual preholiday funk. Call it stress, call it seasonal affective disorder, call it uncertainty and change at work, or feel free to make up an interesting new name for it, whatever you call it, I am not making the transition into winter smoothly. Consequently, 'tis the season to humbug. At least that I know how to do. Some time around noon on December 24, I fully intend to become a nice person again, at least long enough to enjoy some lutefisk and lefse.

Like everyone else in this krazy krismas kulture, I have many preparations to make, and compared to most my preparations are minimal. Some of them involve ripping out a doorway, cutting through lath and plaster, and pulling nails, which can be satisfying in a cathartic sort of way. Then the hard part comes - putting the slightly enlarged doorway back together with a semblance of stability. Like any task worth doing right, it will take more time than it seems at first.

The good news is the weather was slightly warmer on Sunday, and while bread dough was rising I took the time to get out on le Trek Vert for a nice long ride down Alum Creek Trail. It was a successful test of helmet, tires, gloves, and matching le windbreaker vert, all of which handled the weather just fine. Best of all, I was not as exhausted and unfit as I feared, having neglected any aerobic training for far too long. At least one positive sign heading into the season of darkness, I won't need a pacemaker quite yet.