On Wisconsin (and a few other things)

Mother's Day 2011

2011-05-07T23:19:00.000-05:00

A lot of my friends this weekend seem particularly intent on demonstrating to everyone within cyberspace that they are brighter and better than the rest of us. Yep. They're all waving the flag of political right-onness. Mother's Day was started by a trio of women who were more interested in celebrating women's commitment to peace than their ability to appreciate flowers. Still, one might note, a flower was chosen as the symbol of this: a red carnation.

I value peace and justice. I value mothers. And though I can't actually verify this and don't actually care to even try, I do suspect it's true that those of us who know what it's like to raise a child, to value another life more than you do your own, are those who know better than anyone else the yearning for peace in the world. Few mothers, after all, outlast their children. Those who do feel no joy in this.

But I am so tired of the people I know who seem to think they are better than those outside our little intellectual circles on the political and artistic left. I was raised by people, well-meaning people, who were convinced they were better than almost everyone else in the world, and I'm done with that as much as I can be.

Send me flowers, take me to brunch, feed me chocolates, or plant gardens with me. There is no way you might propose to commemorate Mother's Day with me that I would not find wonderful and full of meaning. You don't have to make it politically right. Just smile at me and say you love me.

Five Minutes of Rain Ranting

2010-06-08T22:00:00.023-05:00

It's been raining without end. Things are feeling grim. The girls next door are actually beginning to tire of going outside under charming umbrellas after school; water rushing down the curbside gutters has begun to lose its appeal. I have not heard that needlessly optimistic line, "Well, at least we don't have to water the garden" for at least two days now. The dehumidifier in my basement is humming like the Fourth Tenor, all day and all night, minus the tuxedo. Last night it woke me up twice, just clearing its throat, apparently.

Me, I need sunshine. My whole being seems to shrink into a shell in a siege of dreariness like this. I don't care about getting wet. I just care about color and in order to have color you need to have light.How many shades of green can there be? Swarms of mosquitoes are rubbing their larval hands in glee at the prospect of blood ahead. The fish are not biting. The lakes are all roiled and muddy, and it's not really safe to go out in a boat. Great bloated bodies of preternaturally large carp loll near the shoreline of the beach behind my house.

This is not April. This is June. I attended a sermon on detachment this Sunday, but it's not helping me to let go of the deep seated disdain I feel for anyone who says with an inappropriate sense of brightness, "If you don't like the weather here, just wait five minutes." These are people who have never lived elsewhere. The weather here is as stolid as the denizens. It has been raining for days. Things do not change here. Winter is cold and too long. Summer is humid, almost to the hour. Rain hangs on for days. Fall is perfect sometimes.

Anyone who has lived here for more than 20 years should go somewhere far away. That means beyond Illinois or Iowa, Michigan or Minnesota.. At least once. And don't eat at any chain restaurants when you go, including the restaurant inside the Holiday Inn, even if they are serving prime rib as their special, maybe particularly if they're serving prime rib. Go. Go now.

Protecting Brains That Matter

2010-05-05T18:53:00.000-05:00

I have an incredible friend, a new friend really, though I've known her since we were both smart and generally winsome high school classmates in Appleton, Wisconsin. Today, we are still both smart and generally winsome, I think it's fairly safe and true to say, and we are lucky enough to have rediscovered each other, which I think will almost certainly be a help in getting through the second half-century of life both of us statistically have before us. My friend has indisputably done far more with her innate intelligence than I have; I'm a petty civil servant, and she's a nationally renown neuropathologist. If I dwelt on that statement, I might feel gloomy, so I shan't. Instead, I'd like to talk about what my great new/old friend is doing.

She is doing her best to save brains. You may have seen articles about her work, because it's gained a lot of media attention over the last two years. In fact, a few days ago, she e-mailed me to tell me she'd just finished meeting with the former Surgeon General and the Commissioner of Football, wondering why, given this undeniable achievement, she still felt like the Hometown Girl from Appleton. Yes, she's the one, pretty much the Original One, who's started everyone talking about what's happening to all those professional football players who disappear from the playing field, who get dropped from everyone's roster, after suffering a few too many concussions.

What's happening? Well, they're suffering. Their brains are damaged. You can read about it in the archives of Time and the New Yorker and the New York Times or see my friend interviewed on any one of several network news magazines; the story's been everywhere. It's a sad, sad story, well-told by my friend and dismayingly well-documented. As a result of her ground-breaking work, you can bet there will be changes in the world of professional football and, if we're really lucky, within the world of amateur and youth athletics, too. It had to start with the stars, I guess, because the stars are the ones who command media attention. But eventually, maybe our children will benefit; eventually, maybe we will even stop encouraging our soft-skulled children to play games that simulate violence.

I remember when my son was in grade school. He, along with all his miniscule, adorable friends in the privileged environment of a wealthy little town in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies, had been "playing" soccer and "competing" in gymnastics ever since they were all extra-miniscule, super-adorable toddlers. By "playing," I mean standing out in the middle of the soccer fields holding hands with beautiful Rachel, engaged in earnest conversation until an errant black and white ball came flying down the lawn and rolled into the oblivious duo. They looked at each other in wide-eyed wonder and then exulted, loudly enough for all the adoring adults on the sidelines of the abbreviated field to overhear, "We hit the ball!!!"

But in third grade things got serious. They, the boys at least, were deemed big enough and tough enough for YMCA football. Well, Ben wasn't; his nickname at the time was "Stick," due largely to his uncanny resemblance to a toothpick with a wide-mouthed grin pinned lopsidely on top. But his male classmates were, some of them, and soon there was a retinue of 40-pound wonders outfitted in all the regalia of the all-American game. Soon afterward, the mom of one of the new pigskin passers confided to me over regulation coffee, "Susan, I don't think I really like the football deal. The coaches yell at the boys. They shout at them and make them feel bad."

Turns out that wasn't the worst of it.Turns out the yelling is actually the least of what's wrong with having 8 year old boys tackling each other on the hard ground of a Colorado playground. Turns out those big, ugly helmets don't provide adequate protection for the brains we need to read the contracts we're signing and the exemption clauses in our Income Continuation stipulations and our health insurance policies. Turns out nobody really gave this much thought, until my friend the neurologist who loves football and the men who play it came along. She is pretty much their guardian angel it turns out, not just their biggest fan.

Thank you, my friend. Now if only the rest of us would do our part. Like telling our children to jump rope instead of playing football. Really, it's the least and the best we can do.

Talkin' 'Bout My Generation

2009-10-29T16:57:00.018-05:00

This week, my old friend Glenn Silber came back to town to premiere a brand new documentary, Labor Day, a film of last fall's Obama campaign as seen by the members of the SEIU labor union members. But before we sat down in the Barrymore Theatre to see what we wrought in the great year 2008, we got to indulge ourselves with a look backward at what we did forty years ago here, with a 30th year anniversary screening of Glenn's first major documentary, the Oscar nominated War At Home.

I almost didn't go. A few weeks ago, during the Wisconsin Book Festival, I went to hear the very mini-panel of Bernadine Dohrn and her husband Bill Ayers ostensibly addressing the subject of their newly published book, Race Course Against White Supremacy. Believe me, it wasn't the "catchy" title that lured me in; it was simply idle curiousity, combined with simple idleness on a pleasant evening in October. That event made me feel so uncomfortable with my generation that I wasn't sure I could suffer a second gathering of gray headed liberals. There's just something in me that gets indisputably fidgety when a large lecture hall in an elegant arts center is full of old white people nodding their heads in unison in a discussion about racism. My generation has not only become hyperopic in middle age, we are way too often dismayingly myopic. It is not a good combination if you seek to see anything at all clearly.

But the night of the film showing was a beautiful night, so I clamped a light on my handlebars and set off for the theater. Two hours later, with a fresh copy of the DVD tucked into my bag, I pedalled home. My mind was full. My spirit felt as fresh as a child's. To be spinning my pedals with one pants leg rolled up and my hair bunched in a messy ponytail only made me feel more joyful and young and full of a sense of potential.

To watch The War At Home again was to remember not only that I was some teeny little part of a genuine change in consciousness forty years ago but to realize that my participation in it was both smaller and more important than I ever before realized. I came into this movement late, right before we pulled our troops out of Southeast Asia. The events on the Madison campus that Glenn documented in his first major movie all happened before I came to live here, most of them before I was even in high school, some of them while I was still a scrawny, buck-toothed blonde girl in braids, going door to door in Appleton, Wisconsin handing out literature endorsing Barry Goldwater at my dad's behest. I became involved in the anti-war protests just in time to learn how tear gas burned, just in time to experience the fright and, yes, the thrill of being chased down dark streets on the first wet nights of fall, hiding behind bushes and hoping the lights of the squad cars and riot vans wouldn't find you.

I got to know all of this. It changed my life and my generation uneradicably and radically. And now we are, most of us who shared this experience, old and gray and slow; our bellies sling over our beltlines just a little; our beltlines are a little too high to ever be fashionable again. We are old, and the battle scene has changed to Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. Despite the little group of stalwart souls who stand mutely on street corners in college towns like Madison and Boulder once a week, dressed in black and holding up signs of steady antiwar protest, the movement is over. Wars are now religious rather than political, and we are slow and scared and uncertain, about almost everything except what we did as students at the tail end of the sixties. And I am jubilant riding my bike home tonight because finally I know who I am, finally I know what I believe.

Thirty/forty years ago, my peers and I were justified to protest. What we did was great, and we changed the world at an accelerated rate not usual to the course of history. But I didn't really know what I was doing. I was reacting. Looking for something, really anything, to replace the ruling tenets of my parents' lives. I'd lost my Christianity, and I needed something to believe in, some community that willingly enfolded me just as I was. The movement, and particularly its men, gladly embraced all comers, particularly perhaps young blondes who had successfully endured orthidonture.

What I didn't yet know was that beliefs could be rational and heartfelt and deep. I had been raised as a fundamentalist Protestant and fundamental to this is acceptance without questioning, without knowledge or proof. I made pretty much the perfect follower. But thirty years of life has a way of altering us. I am no longer such a good follower. In fact, I've been accused of being ornery, recalcitrant, and even snobby. I feel strong and calm about my values; they feel as much my own as my shadow, but more substantive.

And I can ride my bike in the middle of the night singing songs without worrying about what anyone will think of me, post blogs without caring how the world regards me. This is who I am. The movement of which I was a small part is a large part of me but not all of me. How nice to live long enough to feel this way.

I am a pacifist. I want everyone to get to live long enough and well enough to get to feel this way. And I ain't gonna study war no more.

We Are the Walrus

2009-10-25T09:51:00.005-05:00

As fall lurches in its irregular, irrevocable paces toward its grim successor, Sister Winter, I am spending doleful moments every morning staring bleakly at the contents of my drawers and closet. There are not enough warm clothes in the world to keep me warm through the coming season, I'm afraid. I wear so many clothes through the winter that those I meet during the next few months are invariably surprised in the summer when I finally reveal my real corporeal contours some. "Oh!" I've heard so many times it seems just a part of greeting summer, "I had no idea you were so slim!" In winter, I resemble those huge seals and sea lions lounging around under the long wharf in Santa Cruz harbor.

Not so most of the young women on campus, though. Where I have been dismayed all during these last warm months at the veritable acreage of naked female flesh that confronts me in every classroom and every stroll across the summer resort we call the UW, where I have occasionally found myself experiencing just the teeniest appreciation for Muslim women who don the burka, now finally one would hope that falling temperatures and increasing rainfall would compell something that might pass for modesty. Or at least prudence.

And yes, the short skirts that barely cover the buttocks are, by and large, gone, replaced by longish tunics that are stretched tightly over plump derrieres. The plunging necklines are, to my relief, now often camoflauged by scarves draped with attractive looseness but real functionality. Legs are almost routinely covered, in many cases by leggings that seem just a little tighter than the wearer's own skin. Jeans, too, are worn with something beyond simple snugness, with crammed-in flesh literally exploding where the low-rise "waistband" ends. I find myself looking with relief at the slobbiest girls, those who sluff around campus wearing sweatpants that drag through the wet leaves and suggest they have probably been slept in for at least several days.

Apparently, I've become a prude. Perhaps I always was, though I can remember (vaguely) several swimsuits that would indicate otherwise. I don't know exactly when this condition surfaced, but I suspect it was about the time youthful "fashions" began showing me first the younger generation's underwear, then eventually cracks and cleavages from all parts of their bodies that I really didn't want to confront at every street corner and right across my desk. Or perhaps this is a generational inevitability, given that my peers and I spent our own youth wearing washed out workshirts and flannels and jean jackets so shapeless that my own grandfather once looked in genuine puzzlement at my mom and asked in helpless confusion, "Isn't she a girl?"

I have nobly resisted, so far, the urge to yank up slouching pants and the more wicked companion impulse to yank them down. I have not scolded a single young woman for exposing breasts with as much nonchalance as I let show my crow's feet or the bags under my tired, old eyes. I have reminded myself innumerable times that every generation has its own way of irritating its elders. I have even tried to justify it intellectually, to persuade myself that there's a legitimacy to the argument which no one but myself has ever posed to me that we should not be distracted or distressed by our flesh; that like certain tribes in equatorial Africa, nakedness should not be construed as any kind of sexual intention.

But I have failed. Nakedness in the northern Midwest in our first world society is sexual. And more than that, it is overwhelming. It is overwhelming, in part, simply because we have so much more flesh than people in equatorial Africa; we are fat and we are crammed into clothing that is too small for us, and it is not that we cannot afford larger clothing, it's that we (and of course I use this plural rather figuratively here) have persuaded ourselves that this is fashionable. Yet I haven't seen a single ad promoting fatness and low cut clothing on the runway reveals nothing but ladders of rib bones.

Is it the fact that most of us can't be this skinny that resigns us to being fat? Breast size across the world is getting larger, even once we discount the fact that manufacturers of brassieres are changing their definitions of bra size to make women think they are larger than before. Girls are maturing a lot earlier and it seems that the accretion of body fat that begins at puberty now keeps increasing all the way through the child-bearing years. Is it our diet? Is it the hormones in our beef? Is it some sort of evolutionary advantage? Will women float better when global climate change forces us all back into the water of the sea? Are we heading toward becoming walruses and sea lionesses?

I am. Because I'm bundling up for winter and going shopping for more long sleeved thermals and turtlenecks and thick-knit sweaters, plus some socks that are so heavy I'll have to buy new shoes one full size larger. I'm the egg woman; I'm the walrus.

The Fall Lure of Memory

2009-10-24T09:25:00.013-05:00

This picture was taken a little less than a week ago. It was such a clear, sunny day that I took off from work and drove away from the city just to walk through the woods in the hills on a weekday, when the only other people in the big state park were a few elderly couples picnicking on the shore of the lake. Once I went further than 100 feet from the main parking lots, there was no one; the elderly have to content themselves with sights set close to their cars.

And so I walked through the woods. This may seem unworthy of note, unless you know how unwoodsly a person I am. Squirrels terrorize me. The thought of a bear out bumbling for berries is enough to freeze me in my tracks even at midsummer. Bear scat. Is that bear scat? Does a bear scat in the woods and to what jazzman's staccato rhythm? Even a scampering bunny can make me turn in another direction. "Oops. Excuse me. Sorry. Didn't know this path was taken." But on this gorgeous day, I was determined to remain undaunted, a feeling only periodically undermined when a leaf would flutter earthward, just out of the alert line of my ever-vigilant vision. You may find this hard to believe, but the sound of one leaf falling to the earth can actually seem as loud as an elephant's footfall to the heightened senses of the leary.

Fall. I suppose if you lived in some unfortunate place that had no preponderance of deciduous trees, "autumn" would suffice to name this season. "Fall," it's interesting to note, is not commonly used for the season anywhere but North America. Here in the Midwest, it's the only word that fits. Here, the falling leaves rule. The best childhoods have memories that combine the parental ritual of raking very vaguely in the background of gleefully jumping in the resultant leaf piles. Forty, fifty, sixty years later, the smell of leaves in the sunshine brings back a memory of leisure and play that not even the now assumed chore of raking can render weary. I know. I just came in from raking.

But now, as a grown-up, despite those delicious memories of carefree times and happiness, I know what fall truly is. It is the last dance. It is the end of playtime. It is the last chorus of birdsong, the last splurge of color; not even sunrise and sunset will dress as bravely come the cold of fast-approaching winter. Pallor is just around the corner; my own skin already has less tint. Last night the big tree in front of my house, the one with the fairy house tucked between its protruding roots, that tree in one night shed almost every single one of its leaves. I know. I just raked them.

Raked them carefully into as high a pile as I possibly could in the little square of ground that passes for my front yard, being careful to pull out any sticks that came with the fallen leaves, making sure no animal waste was raked into it...just in case some passing child has need of leaping into some random pile of irresistibly colored fall leaves.

Motherless Children Childrenless Mothers

2009-10-16T17:54:00.018-05:00

My friend Peter's mom died. She died of some horrid, messy cancer, not one of the ways anyone would ever select if given their choice of ways to leave earth, but still: At least the horrid, messy ways have a rather unsettling way of making death somehow seem a little less sinister, sometimes almost like someone you don't mind having show up at your table. And Peter got the news in a rather spectacular fashion, standing atop the highest vantage point on an island in the Pacific Northwest with the treetops and ocean below and the clouds all around, and the signal on his cell phone finally just strong enough to retrieve the message that was waiting for him from his sister: "Mom's gone." If you have to retrieve this sort of message, this may be the ideal place to be.

So you snap shut the cell phone and slip it back into your pocket. Now is not the moment to return the call. That call will be made soon enough. The urgency is gone. There is no more time question, no more waiting for the call. The clouds are caressing your calves like a cat who wants stroking. You clear your throat and it sounds softened by the moisture in the air. What remains to be said. You clear it again, though you have not a single word to say. Your mom's gone. Everything that will be said has been said. The words float away like wispy clouds, like smoke from a distant campfire, down in the canopy of trees. What remains unsaid once I love yous are done, once I'm sorry has been whispered. The ocean stretches out and seems without end. What is a horizon but a line. What is a line but an imaginary construct. A line goes to infinity, by definition. How far does a life go? Definitions are such fabrications and so comforting. What is a cloud. What's a mother.

Peter's mom died and my own is dying, too, and she called me last night soon after I had the news from Peter. I didn't tell her. I just told her I loved her, told her I missed her. Didn't tell her I was sorry for anything. One has to save something for the future. Here's a poem for all those moms, dying, because cruelly enough I still have words.

Mom, Dying
Doesn't there come a
day when the sunrise
is not sufficient, when
the trailed whistle of
some faraway train holds
no whisper of places
unseen, a day when you
will loosen the grip
of your boney fingers on
my pulse and just slip
into the night I have
pooled at your feet
with my ink? Do you
love me enough to
leave me lonely?

The Stormy Half of the Sky

2009-10-14T14:08:00.008-05:00

I've been distracted by books lately. First, the Wisconsin Book Festival, with its full slate of panels and poetry and pop prose stars, a long delicious weekend culminating with Wendell Berry pouring his wise words like real maple syrup over everything: this Sunday evening festival finale a sold-out house of some 2,000 devoted followers of one of the truest gentlemen remaining. Then, once the syrup was licked from the fingers and work resumed on a Monday void of both fiction and sunshine, the return to the book begun earlier last week, Nick Kristof's Half the Sky.

I am having trouble reading this book, even though it's written in true journalistic style: short sentences, short chapters, vocabulary fit for an middle schooler. I'm having trouble reading this book even though it's got tons of material that's interesting to me, women and Africa and Islam and public service, enough to justify running to my favorite indie bookstore here in town to snatch up a hardcover copy at $27.95 on the day of its release. Half the Sky is an accounting of the lives of women in the developing nations of the world, accounts of what women face in terms of an everyday epidemic of rape and mutilation and outright murder, of women left to die outside village walls, in the corridors of hospitals, in the deafening silence of their friends, families and the worldwide community.

I now know, if somewhat vaguely, what a fistula is. It is not a curiously interesting word to learn, not like "biltrum" or even "blastula." I derive no pleasure from adding it to my vocabulary. It is an ugly word for a dreadful condition most commonly and most horribly associated with the most violent instances of gang rape, the all too frequent travelling companion of genocide and ethnocentric or religious violence. "Religious violence." Huh. Now there's a pairing for you, a set of words I wish I could say was an oxymoron.

The cover of this book promises that it's about turning oppression into opportunity. Periodically, as I close the book on another gruesome, depressing chapter, I find myself staring at that subtitle as if to evoke life from it. So far it's not working. So far all these stories of horrible events befalling women in distant parts of the world, even when valiantly addressed by other women from cultures near and far, are all so truly terrible that I find myself fearing for us, so much more than I fear terrorism or conservatism or chemicals in my food or even hunger...for when a mother can place her daughter outside for the hyenas to eat, when she can stand by as her daughter's genitalia are sliced off without anesthesia or reason, when boy soldiers can report that raping girls of nine is their due...well, yes, I wonder who we are and really what the heck we are doing here thinking we're fit to rule birds and lions and mosquitoes, let alone nations.

The Hunger Within and Without

2009-09-26T08:09:00.012-05:00

Suddenly, everyone's talking about food, and here in Madison, Michael Pollan can draw so big a crowd that cops are called out to direct traffic around the basketball/hockey arena where he's speaking on the subject of nutrition. Yes, you heard correctly: Mobs are gathering to learn about food.

Well, Pollan's actually speaking sort of against nutrition, a sort of pro-food, anti-nutrition position that begins to make sense once you read his bestselling books or listen to him. I preferred listening. I have tried reading two of his best-selling books, first The Botany of Desire then The Omnivore's Dilemma, and I have to confess I not only didn't finish them; I barely made it to page 30 of either. I have no problem with his analysis or his writing; he's a good writer making good points about issues we should attend...I guess I just don't want to read about food.

There's a book, allegedly for children, written several decades ago by one of my favorite authors, an incredible woman named Margaret Wise Brown. Her middle name is no accident, I'm quite sure. And the book of hers that comes most often to my mind is neither of her best known books, the children's classic Goodnight Moon or its marketed companion, The Runaway Bunny. No. The book I love is called The Important Book.

This slim book brings representative components of life down to their truest significance, to their very essence. I don't know any other book that does it as well, or even dares to try, and that includes the writings of Socrates and Sartre and maybe Richard Gibbard, along with the whole crew of writers of the various gospels. It doesn't really go head to head with Darwin or Einstein, essence being immune to either mutation or relativity. It doesn't address food really, other than the apple, but if it did, I am quite sure what it would say, and it would be this: "The important thing about food is it ends hunger."

Pollan and everyone else writing about good, truly nutritious food and the sustainability of our food supply are all right. We could eat a lot better than we do, most of us, by far most of us. And yet we are hungry and so we eat what is in front of us. We eat Froot Loops, and we put yogurt in plastic tubes in our children's lunches, and we are reasonably certain that the carrots we put alongside the silly plastic tubes of fruity, sugared yogurt are tossed, still in their unrecyclable Ziploc bag into the lunchroom garbage. We stop at McDonald's now and then, although we have begun checking our rearview mirror to see if anyone we know is within sight of our dereliction. Because we are hungry, and we are hungry for more than nutrition, even for more than flavor.

We are hungry to have life be easier. We are hungry to be able to believe that it's going to somehow turn out all right, to believe that McDonald's has not been poisoning us all these years or our children, raised on Happy Meals. I ruefully remember taking my children along with my best friend and her children to McDonald's when the children were small and we were obliging. Tracy and her children were devoted vegetarians. They ordered cheeseburgers, hold the burger. Their Happy Meals were soft, white, perfectly round buns with a single 1/8" slice of American cheese on it. And we were all so happy to be there.

We are hungry not just for health and correctness. We are hungry for time, hence the Happy Meals. Hungry for trust, to believe that our farmers are shipping us the same food they will serve at the table to their children. Hungry for a world that does not poison us. We are hungry for life to be simpler, to come home after a long, exhausting day of work and not have to cook a potful of dried legumes for six hours, not have to skin tomatoes and seed peppers before we can stew them into a pasta sauce. So we reach for a jar of Prego; we pop open a vacuum-sealed container of lentil soup. And when we go to bed with every intention of reading at least one chapter in one of the three books we currently have going, the one we put aside is Pollan's...but at least we bought it.

In Indonesia, during Ramadan, the servants of the middle class and wealthy tend to leave their house of employment to return to their homes in the villages of their birth. The employers of these nearly unpaid domestic laborers are forced to cook their own food and put their own children to bed. It is so exhausting a good percentage of them simply pack up and go stay in Jakarta's hotels for the duration of the Muslim holiday. Which I mention so you know it's not just we spoiled Americans who have difficult doing the right thing.

Cooking good nutritious meals is expensive and time-consuming. Unfortunately for the planet, lots of us have neither time nor money.

Diminishing the spaces between us

2009-09-25T23:24:00.002-05:00

Today a wonderful young man named Enrique taught me how to greet the man I love when I meet him. I'll give you a hint. It did not involve a handshake. It did not involve a hearty hug either, no crushing anyone to the chest, no thudding anyone on the back. It involved a light touch of the hand to the hip, a light kiss to the cheek. Maybe two.

I'm not even romantically involved with Enrique, and I have to tell you it was wonderful. So, because it was so wonderful, I'm going to share it with you. I am hoping, you see, to start an inocuous and dumfounding epidemic of loveliness, a spate of undeserved contentment that has hitherto missed the Land of the Puritans and the Home of the Charlatans. I think this is just what our country needs right now. Because I'm serious: You could not greet anyone this way or be greeted this way and not feel somehow cherished. You might even get to remember what a blush feels like, a blush, which is itself a most wonderful phenomenon, a mixture of honor and humility expressed with that most human of paint: our rising blood. And to feel cherished is to feel content and to feel content is to quit picking on everyone around you. America needs this. I need this. My friends agree I need this.

So try this. Try it first with someone you already love or at least trust. Next time you see them, next time you spot him or her walking down the sidewalk grinning at you like a fool or dozing in a favorite reading chair with a mouth unattractively slung open or maybe waiting impatiently for you in the theatre lobby, pacing as curtain time ticks closer and closer---do this. Walk up slowly (rouse them if they're napping) but don't say anything, and when you are close enough to touch, reach out with your right hand and touch them lightly. If there is no romance between you, touch near the waist, just to connect your two persons. If you're romantically involved, touch more personally, maybe right at the vulnerable place where the curve of the hip bone melts into the hollow of the groin, don't press: just touch, not so anyone else can see, but just the two of you. And then you are close enough to lean over and kiss the left cheek once, lightly, don't dwell, just be gentle. If you feel continental, kiss left, then right. If you really love this now hushed friend of yours, kiss the left cheek twice. Don't rush it. This is a moment to savor.

Americans have a funny thing about space. We live in a country with more wide open space than nearly any other, and we are still fencing it in. We covet houses with acres of rolling green lawns and then we situate them in gated communities where no bare feet will ever feel their lushness. We not only keep more space between our houses than other cultures, we keep more space between our persons, whether we're friends or lovers or strangers. Our beds are bigger than most cultures' bedrooms. We keep each other at a distance. Distance is part of what is America. It has been part of what has accorded us power: the oceans that once separated us from Europe and Asia. We feel safe when we are isolated.

Oceans, however, don't really matter much anymore, and so here in North America we have somewhat awkwardly embraced hugging in the last five years or so. Hugging has become fashionable, almost de rigeur in certain circles, but it's so robust it's not even really personal. Handshakes are certainly not personal. But kissing, gentle kissing, this is personal. The curve of a waist or a hip is personal, whether you are stout or anorexic or obese or just plain old normal. Touch is personal.

Next time you meet a friend, someone you trust and love, don't hug, don't shake, don't slap on the back, reach out,touch them, kiss them. We could use an epidemic of intimacy. "And if you really like this person a lot," Coach Enrique tutors, with a knowing twinkle in his eyes, "you locate the kiss a little closer to the lips. The closer, the more you like. And if you kiss twice, you really like."

I really like the way they think south of the newly walled-in border.

The Happiness Ceiling is Falling

2009-09-21T22:49:00.015-05:00

OK, I'll come right out and say it: I'm depressed. Perhaps some of this has been showing through in recent blog posts, or perhaps my gloominess regarding current events seems so well warranted that it didn't occur to you that it was personal at all. But it is. Depression, depressingly enough, is almost always personal, unless we are talking economics, which can also be, well, depressing.

But no. I am sufficiently depressed that I am actually going to find time to find a therapist besides you, my unseen, unknown reader. I want to talk to someone who will always have a box of tissues on the client side of her desktop, within easy reach. My mom and dad used to fulfill this function, my mom with a (clean) tightly folded sheet of Kleenex tucked reliably into the band of her shirt or dress sleeve, my dad always, always, ALWAYS with a perfectly ironed handkerchief folded squarely into his back trouser pocket.

My parents undoubtedly still have their respective hankies tucked into their everyday clothing. I won't ask them, though, and I'll be doing my best not to even let them know I could start crying at any given moment of time, that a flood of uncontrolled sobbing is only as distant as the next kind smile or the next knit brow of disapproval. Be unexpectedly nice to me or unexpectedly surly: Anything can start me crying right now. And a lot of it has to do with my parents, which is precisely why I'm at my most valiant and cheerful when I'm with them, why I won't be asking them for their hankies, I hope.

My mom is dying, bravely but terribly, from ALS. I see her almost every weekend, and her muscles and abilities are disappearing almost more quickly than I can record or absorb. My dad, who never ever expected to outlive the woman he fell in love with sixty years ago, is doing his best to take care of her, but at 84 years old and having never before done household tasks like cleaning and cooking or dressing another person, his skills are understandably limited, if expanding. I see them almost every weekend, and I do my level best to bring not only physical strength into their lives but also to bring them what may ultimately be more important: good cheer.

But I am running out of cheer, it seems, hence my need to spill my sadness to you, here, and also to the therapist I hope to find this week. And I find myself noticing articles like Maureen Dowd's column in this last Sunday's NYT, entitled "Blue Is the New Black," about increasing levels of unhappiness among those we might call "post-feminist women," referencing a culture-wide growth of unhappiness among women, posts like Ariana Huffington's, "The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling."

What's the deal? Apparently, I'm not the only woman of my generation who is sensing a lowered ceiling to the sky. Apparently, the clouds have been gathering, while we were busy becoming mothers and executives, scholars and politicians, community leaders and volunteers. While we were busy raising our children, assessing their daycare, organizing their OM and DI groups and cheering their every soccer goal and homerun hit. While we were all worried about cracking our noggins on a glass ceiling. While we were so busy we never stopped to look down and inside ourselves and wonder who was taking care of us.

Men, it seems, have become happier. For the documentation of this, you can read Dowd's excellent column, referenced elsewhere, or Marcus Buckingham's book titled Find Your Strongest Life. And why would they not? They are no longer the sole breadwinners. We are helping pay for the kids' college; we are plunking our money into the retirement fund. And we are still doing the lioness's share of the housework, the childcare, the volunteer work, and the contact and maintenance of family ties with parents and with siblings. No wonder we women are becoming exhausted and live our present lives perpetually on the verge of tears.

It is the first full day of autumn. There is a new moon overhead in the sky, even if the cloud ceiling has lowered here in Madison today, and the glass ceiling remains a factor in our womanly endeavors. For me, it is time to get some help. For me, it's time to acknowledge that I am not the Superwoman I pretend to be around my dying, enfeebled parents or the effervescent free spirit and energetic creative intellect my friends and coworkers routinely expect me to be. I need some help, and I'm going to get some. I hope you will, too, if you recognize yourself in any of this.

For Dowd's column, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20dowd.html

Walking to School Through the Land Mines

2009-09-18T22:39:00.006-05:00

It began, I believe, with the Nike Foundation. "Invest in a girl and she will do the rest." The idea, to put it simply, is to spend a teeny bit of money enabling a girl from a underdeveloped nation to attend sufficient school that she attains literacy, then let her return to her familial duties and watch the improvements roll on in. This concept is based on the following observation: When women and girls earn income, they reinvest 90 percent of that income into their families; men reinvest only 30 to 40 percent.

Known now as "The Girl Effect," the amazing ripple effect of educating one single adolescent girl is now behind social and economic improvement movements in countries from China to Botswana and back up to Pakistan. Health, wealth and welfare all improve noticeably when girls are allowed to gain literacy. Population growth subsides. Infant and maternal mortality plummet. And if wars are society's cruel means of doing to men what childbirth does to women in areas without prenatal care and natal medical expertise, then perhaps we might even expect to see the grim statistics of war deaths slow somewhat, too.

Take a girl to school today. Give her a book and a notebook and a pencil. Better yet, give her an iMac notebook and a book and a good lunch. Give her a safe place to learn, a place where she can decide for herself whether or not she wants to wear a hijab. Leave the burkas at the door please; shoes are optional, except in wintry climates. The boys are either already at school or they're out in the fields learning to wield the heavy blade of a machete. Let the old men and women fix the lunches and watch the crops dry up in the fields for lack of rain. Send a girl to school today.

The Girl Effect is a very wonderful effect. Educated girls return to their families and communities and share their newfound knowledge. It spreads. Conditions improve. Other girls go to school and the ripples continue to spread. It's just about the best thing happening in un- and under-developed countries of the world today, especially if you take the time to stitch it loosely to some of the great work being done with mini-grants and cottage industries in parts of Africa, again, using women as economic producers. And yet you may have noticed a note of futility in my narrative voice today.

One, every time I think of this unknown adolescent girl heading off to school, I can't help but notice a shadowy shape leaning against the doorway of her home. It's a man, and there's a weapon slung over his shoulder or stuck in the waistband of his trousers. It's a soldier. And at some point he's going to rape our adolescent girl, right now heading off to school with a pocketful of hope and a little something to eat at lunchtime. And at some point he will kill someone and at some point some other soldier will kill him. Meanwhile, our slight girl, slight glimmer of hope, is walking lightly down the dusty road to school. If the Girl Effect is truly to take hold and spread, we need to get this man out of the doorway of her home, too. We need to stop the violence.

It seems a little unfair to leave the salvation of the world up to this slight figure in loose clothing heading down a faraway road with a song in her heart. Girls are great, no doubt about it, but it shouldn't be left up to them. The ripples of educating girls do spread over the pools of our interconnected lives. But in all this talk about the phenomenon of female motivation, I find another thought running like a river alongside this newer, stronger current, a babble I've been conscious of for as long as I can remember and then some, back into the rivers that flowed through my mother's veins and my grandmothers' and their mothers back in the Old Country: "A woman's work is never done..or appreciated...or paid for...or..."

It's time to take that weapon away from the man in the doorway. It's time to take away nuclear development options not only from North Korea and Iran, but from Russia and yes from ourselves. It's time to quit organizing men into armies as if they have nothing better to do. The women of this world wouldn't need their protection if they would only stop being soldiers. Then maybe a woman's work, a girl's effect, might be truly accomplished.

A Gate at the Celestial Stairs, With Armed Sentinels

2009-09-17T11:25:00.019-05:00

I just finished reading local author Lorrie Moore's newest novel, A Gate at the Stairs. It's an uneven novel that sometimes feels like a house that's had a few too many owners, a few too many additions, some of them well-made, others less so, even a few spaces that make you cringe some to enter. Happily, though, Gate.. finishes well, and you close the book with a feeling of satisfaction, tinged slightly with regret, as good books have a tendency to leave us. You also close the covers with a feeling of sadness, for it is not a joyful story and the culminating event of the narrative, the death of the narrator's teenaged brother in Afghanistan, is too close to our own moment to give us any scant comfort of distance. As I finished reading it, as the heroine was climbing into the coffin that held her younger brother's blown-apart remains, newspapers and blogs were full of the ongoing and reinvigorated debate over our military presence in that besieged nation.

Feelings on this run higher than usual in my family this round, as a very dear and special person who has been a part of our family circle just enlisted in the U.S. Army's Special Forces. The wind is knocked out of me by this; my heart feels bruised and tender. No one in my family has enlisted in any branch of any military since my father's stint as a Lieutenant in the Navy during WWII. My family in succeeding generations has changed. Most of us are no longer the kind of people who follow leaders very well. We're made up now of Democrats and Quakers and Unitarians, Jews and liberal Christians; our idea of military service is attending antiwar protests and prayer vigils, and we don't even do those very well. And now someone we know and love has voluntarily enlisted in a unit that is not only military but aggressively so, charged with often covert violent actions intended to protect US citizens, a secretive and undercover military organization which has as its very basis strict obediance regardless of violence, motive or intention.

It has stirred deep emotions, some of them rising in the middle of the night to stand like sabered sentinels at the gateway to sleep, forbidding entrance. It has made me wonder why he would do this, what attracted this bright and talented young man to years of unbreakable service in far away places doing untellable deeds at someone else's command? He is not a young man who needed to see the world; he is extremely well-read, well-travelled and even well-mannered. He is not a young man who needs income nor education nor career. He has everything our country, a loving and affluent family, and good genes can offer.

The Special Forces are what we used to call the Green Berets. I looked it up, and this is part of what Wikipedia offers: "The United States Army Special Forces, also known as Green Berets, is a Special Operations Force (SOF) of the United States Army tasked with five primary missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action, and counter-terrorism....Currently, Special Forces units are deployed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. They are also deployed with other SOCOM elements as one of the primary American military forces in the ongoing War in Afghanistan. As a special operations unit, Special Forces are not necessarily under the command authority of the ground commanders in those countries. Instead, while in theater, SF operators may report directly to United States Central Command, USSOCOM, or other command authorities."

This is not an issue I will resolve in one blog posting. There is no single pill I can toss down my throat to feel better. I have been asking so many questions, among them biggees like, "Do I want to feel that I, as an American citizen, am protected?" "Do I think we should have a standing army, let alone Special Forces?" You see, of course if I want "someone" to enlist, then I have to be able to accept that someone I love may enlist, but I'm not really so sure I want anyone to enlist. I'm not so sure about sending soldiers anywhere. I don't really understand why we don't just send teachers or food or power generators or running shoes or more flu shots. I'm not so sure the "Girl Effect" isn't more important than spreading democracy or enforcing democracy. I'm not even sure it isn't contradictory to think about "enforcing democracy." I'm not so sure we, with Joe Wilson's behavior so prominent, should even be touting democracy this week.

There will be more on this. There are enough people blogging about Joe Wilson and racism and the Obama administration right now. Me, I am left with the lines from the first 45RPM single record my older sister bought: Sgt Barry Sadler's Ballad of the Green Berets. "Fighting soldiers, from the sky. Fearless men, who jump and die... He'll be a man, they'll test one day: Have him win the Green Beret."

And I'm also left with the question of whether we should be sending more troops to Afghanistan.

The Real U.S. Open: Refereeing Congress

2009-09-13T21:32:00.004-05:00

Serena Williams is being fined $10,000 for yelling at a referee at a sporting event. The referee had just made a verifiably wrong call about a foot fault on a serve done by Ms. Williams in her final round of competition at the U.S. Open today. In addition, she was fined another $500 for racket abuse. She may, pending the result of the ongoing investigation, have to forfeit her entire winnings from the tournament and/or be banned from all further Grand Slam tournaments. These are the consequences for losing control of language in the heat of an adrenaline-fueled competition, in a field of endeavor--professional athletics--that routinely includes benches emptying for brawls, slug-outs on the ice, and coaches being jettisoned from the playing field. Tennis, of course, is a more refined sport than ice hockey, right?

Congressman Joe Wilson, R-SC, meanwhile, who dissed the President of the United States of America during a joint session of Congress last week, breaking the most basic rule of comportment of those august chambers of democratic debate, may be asked to apologize again, to amplify the muttered apology he delivered to the President's aide last week to the full floor of the House of Representatives. Mr. Wilson was empassioned and therefore not able to control his lips or his tongue. Thank god he didn't have a hockey stick. Thank god doubly he didn't have a gun.

There will be no fine. There will be no payment. There may not even be a public apology or sincere acknowledgement of wrongdoing. There have been no real consequences. This, after all, is the Arena of Advanced Argument. I am the referee; you are the referee. We approve or we censure with our votes and our commentaries.

Does anyone besides me find it ironic and somehow dismaying that a tennis player is held to higher standards of accountability than those who serve in our Congress?

Nine one one nine eleven 911

2009-09-11T18:54:00.003-05:00

Eight years it's been. Some of us have forgotten. Some of us lost no one when the towers came crashing down. Some of us lost friends, family, neighbors, enemies, innocence. Some of us lost careers, some only computers. Some of us lost our sense of safety. Only some of got it back since. Some of us were changed, changed utterly. Some of us shrugged it off, said "What'd ya think? That humans were good?" Some of us still believe humans are good. Some of us were changed utterly. Some of us still don't know what we lost; we're still wandering around in the ashes, scuffing our bare feet in the cold ashes of girders and mortar and gold fillings. Some of us said it was evil flying those planes through the clear September morning; some few of us said a prayer even for those souls that drove their own lives into the side of those tall tall towers, some very few.

Eight years and all is not well. No one's captured, no one's accountable, the world is not better off, airplane travel will never be anticipated eagerly by anyone over the age of six; eight years and we're still arguing about who we are looking for and in what country we are looking. Hide. Hide everything. Run stealthily.

Eight years and I am still full of unanswerable sadness and a sense of loss growing more profound with each passing day.

Hooligans in the House: Rednecks Above the Starched Collars

2009-09-10T19:13:00.006-05:00

What is wrong with Republicans? I mean, besides their politics...

Last night's behavior of those on the right side of the Congressional aisle catapulted us right back to where we were during the electoral campaigns last fall: dumfounded by the rudeness of those who claim to have a firm grasp on the American ideal.

Something happened, it seemed, when Republicans realized that they could not sustain a working majority just representing the rich. The percentage of those identifying with the rich had grown so uncomfortably small, you see, like the collar of a fat man, stiff and white and oh so tightly buttoned up, it was making the blood vessels threaten to burst on those Daddy Warbucks jowls. The Republicans needed to beef up their ranks. In fact of matter, they plain old needed a rank, a rank and file of Republicans.

So. Time to rip off that stiff white collar. Pull off that tie too. Southern rednecks would fill up the empty seats in the townhall meetings...good old plain Americans with good old reverence for the American greenback and a healthy disdain for that pesky and growing population that was filling the Democratic ranks so fluently: the wetbacks. No way Republicans were ever going to succeed in winning over significant numbers of the nation's rapidly growing Hispanic population, not with their stance on immigration. And the overwhelming preponderance of white faces in their ranks was doing little to convince African Americans that Republicans really represented their best interest.

And so they turned to the south, to the rancor of rednecks, which had never really healed from the Civil War and who still had enough good old American intolerance around to fill a spitoon to overflowing so why not a dying political party full of cranky old white men and a few well-coifed white women. Bring on the rednecks. Their values, after all, weren't really so far from those pasty old white men's, certainly not from Limbaugh's or O'Reilly's or anyone who spoke for the right from televised pulpits. The right had nodded at the idea of an uneducated, vindictive, and overtly misinformed and malicious Presidential candidate in Sarah Palin already; it was clear that neither intelligence or civility were assets valued by the Republican leadership any more.

And now the Republicans stand for bad manners and boorishness and outright incivility. I find it frightening. The importance of behaving with good manners is not about how many weeks you have to write a thank you note; it's about allowing discourse despite differences. You speak, I speak. We take turns. We don't shout each other out; we listen and respond with as much civility as we listen. And the halls of Congress, where our most important differences are addressed in order to form policy that effects each and every one of us, no matter what our opinion, ought to be the place where civility is best demonstrated.

Representative Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's address to the joint members of Congress last night was more than lamentable, it was pathetic and outrageous and worthy of censure from not only his peers in Congress both Democrats and Republicans, but from his constituents. South Carolinans, having barely weathered the scandalous behavior of a governor who can't keep his pants zipped, now stand represented by someone no more mature than a 9 year old heckler. He is unworthy of a seat in our Congress. A five year old interrupting a teacher with such an outburst would suffer consequences. There should be some firm consequences for Joe Wilson.

What have the Republicans proposed be done? Rush Limbaugh doesn't even think the rude man should have offered a token apology. Republicans are snickering in their antechambers, aiming at that old spitoon. They should be wondering just what kind of people they've invited to the party and what has become of their values. The politics of fear is now the politics of crude, rude belch-in-your-face-and- damned- if-I'll-apologize-for-anything. I'm starting to yearn for the days when Republicans just seemed snobby and rich and full of disdain for the rest of us.

What if a plane crashed and nobody remembered it: would it still exist

2009-08-23T17:21:00.004-05:00

Another week and another man let go while Aung San Suu Kyi is still imprisoned by the walls of her house, with another year and a half just added to the sentence that was about to expire when American John Yettaw decided to force himself upon her. John Yettaw has since been freed and allowed to return home to the US. This week's political release was someone found guilty of killing 288 people in 1988. Convicted by the Scottish judiciary system following the explosion and subsequent crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, Abdel Baset el-Megrahi was diagnosed in prison with prostate cancer. Now expected to live only months, he was released on so-called "compassionate grounds," allowed by Scottish law.

Nasty rumors are rampant. After the newly freed man was given a hero's welcome as he stepped off the plane in his home country of Libya, Libyan leaders loudly and profusely thanked the British government for freeing him, citing it as a welcome accomplishment of a oft-sought goal in trade negotiations between Libya and Britain. Britsh officials have, of course, roundly denied this preposterous idea. Whatever might possibly persuade any part of the waning British empire to consider freeing a man who their own judiciary found guilty of murdering hundreds of innocent civilians, most of them American?

Hmmm. Could it be that slimy old rascal who keeps appearing in all the trouble spots of the world, our old friend OIL? Why, as a matter of fact, Libya does just happen to have, as the British are wont to say in that lovely, melodic way they have of making English sound courtly still, "lots and lots and lots of" yessirree, oil. In fact, Prince Andrew was just preparing to leave on a special trade mission to Libya when all this unwelcome attention fell on the issues of Libyan/British relationships.

Compassion. I rather like compassion. I like it when kitties are rescued from trees, when traffic is held up by pedestrians to give an elderly woman more time to make a crossing, when a student who is genuinely ill is given a second chance to take a missed final examination. I don't mind it when prisoners are allowed to work away from prison or given conjugal visits in nice, private rooms or time to cuddle with their children. In many, many cases I wouldn't even mind it if an elderly prisoner was allowed to return home to die.

But not a mass murderer. Not someone whose disregard for life cost nearly three hundred people their lives and the thousands of people who loved those 288 people the long-lasting pain of sudden, unanticipated loss that leaves you hanging like a brown leaf from a burned out tree in the center of a battlefield. This is not compassion. This is disrespect. This is haunting, chilling, frightful disrespect.

And if it turns out in any way to be related to a favorable trade deal, may the spirits of those 288 dead haunt the British ministers into their own early graves.

Making the World Safe for...Mormons?

2009-08-15T11:25:00.003-05:00

It didn't take long. John Yettaw has been released from custody by the Myanmar regime. Apparently, even tyrants and jail guards are sick to death of listening to the unlikely story of Joseph White's rendez-vous with divinity and looking at John Yettaw's pathetically pale and flacid visage. He's on his way back to the good old USA. Aung San Suu Kyi, who did no wrong except to show compassion? She was let out on a leash for a meeting with American Senator Jim Webb, but now (whew! I felt so endangered for those 40 minutes!) she is back home and the world we live in is back to its usual complacent self. And just what will the delightful Mr. Yettaw be up to next? Will he try to rescue Daw Kyi a third time? I can hardly wait to see the movie.

I don't like to feel cynical, but this fills me with despair. Senator Webb should have offered a trade: The General gets to keep Mr. Yettaw; Aung San Suu Kyi gets sent home with Mr. Webb. Not that I'm sure she would go. Again, the wait for the movie. Maybe Gus Van Sant could do it?

Rescuing Innocents Abroad

2009-08-14T13:31:00.004-05:00

If I had readers other than my faithful few friends today's entry would be risky. I would like to express a mean and nasty sentiment, which in all my readings of newspapers, magazines and online commentaries, I have not yet seen articulated by anyone: that perhaps the two reporters rescued from the jurisdiction of North Korea by Bill Clinton should have been left to their fate there.

I know. I feel as nasty as Sarah Palin right now, as slimy as Newt, as despicable as the meanie rabblerousers at recent town meetings on health care. I am not being kind and generous. I am not even acknowledging that the two reporters convicted by North Korea of espionage are women, delicate looking women, with husbands and a child at home. Would I feel differently if the two of them were thick necked and hirsute, with knotty muscled biceps and triceps? If they were Republicans? If they were French?

I guess I don't know, though I suspect not. I feel like these two reporters should have been very well aware of the risks of what they were doing, scouting around the borders of the Koreas digging up information unfavorable to the regime on the other side of the borderline. They were, after all, studying and writing about Koreans. Was there something about the border they forgot? Was there something about Kim Jong-il's face they thought suggested leniency or tenderness?

I feel the same way about these two reporters that I do about the Mormon missionary who swam across the lake to violate Aung San Suu Kyi. His family members are saying, "How could he have known?" He knew. The reporters knew. We should be rescuing the innocent, not those who knowingly violate borders. There are plenty of innocents incarcerated if we are looking for people to rescue.

Our Trespasses

2009-08-11T14:16:00.005-05:00

Some days you want to bang your head against the nearest, padded cell wall.

Aung San Suu Kyi has had her house arrest extended by a year and a half because some American idiot heard God talking to him and forced himself upon her property, her life, her extenuating circumstances. He was out to save her. The American is always out to save someone. On a smaller than usual, yet still globally significant scale, we've invaded another territory where we had absolutely no business. And then, to compound the cruel irony, the woman who was stalked by this American loony was put on trial. And sentenced. For his transgression.

Why are we always trying to save people based on crazy notions of mission? Why do we always blame God? For some reason, perhaps it's the fact that this brave and exemplary woman, a model for her people and all people, is being sentenced to imprisonment because someone trespassed on her property, the solemn lines from the Lord's Prayer occur to me: "And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Aung San Suu Kyi took pity on the cold, weak man who swam across the lake and collapsed on her shores. She let her companions tend his needs.

It also reminds me of when my younger sister had an imaginary friend named Jiffy. Whenever Sandy was asked critical questions like, "Do you know who stuck their old chewing gum on the picnic table bench in the hot sunshine before Grandma sat down to enjoy an iced tea?" the answer, unfailingly, unblinkingly, was always, "Uh huh. Jiffy did it."

I'm sure Aung San Suu Kyi feels a whole lot better as her health fails and she is locked up in her own house for another 18 months to know that God willed it. I'll be watching to see how much of his own sentence the trespasser is actually made to serve.

Great Conclusions and Commencements

2009-05-26T19:23:00.009-05:00

I was back in Boulder two weeks ago for my daughter's graduation from the University of Colorado. Then I hustled back to my post at the University of Wisconsin in time to finish up finals and send a big batch of 2009 undergraduates off to the graduation ceremony here in Madison. So I've got commencements on the brain, or perhaps, as today's entry will tell you, sadly NOT on the brain, for graduation here completely ignored the cerebral hemispheres.

I have to say that I'm really disappointed in my alma mater. Disappointed, because this huge university really didn't do nearly enough to send its hardworking graduates out with a sense of profound pride anchored in self-respect and a sense of commitment to the global community in which we all live. Graduation ceremonies are a big deal. This is why parents and grandparents fly all the way across continents to attend. We want to send our young people out into the world with grins on their faces, wings on their feet, love in their hearts, intelligence in their brains, and, yes, with diplomas in their hands.

And this is not done when one of the largest and arguably better public universities in the country brings in a baseball administrator to address the graduating class of 2009. In Boulder, they at least brought in someone who tries to add intelligence to our world, John Roberts of the CNN morning news show. But here in Madison, at one of the largest universities in the nation, we got Bud Selig. His speech was minimally literate, though I think it's safe to say that Obama has not called him up to ask for the name of his speechwriter. A great university should bring in someone great to celebrate and charge its graduates. Commencement is not an athletic affair; it is a celebration of academic accomplishment. Check out who some other universities brought in to pay tribute, to inspire and to congratulate their grads this year:

University of North Carolina: Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmond Tutu
University of Portland: Author and environmental activist Paul Hawken (perhaps the best of the year's lot: Google it and read it for yourself)
Syracuse University: Vice President Joe Biden
Florida A&M: Former President Bill Clinton
Howard University Law School: Attorney General Eric Holder
Franklin & Marshall College: (What? Where IS it?) Former Secretary of State Colin Powell
Carnegie Mellon: Eric Schmidt (Google CEO)
New York University: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
University of California-Merced (that's right: Merced) First Lady Michelle Obama
and of course
Notre Dame: President Obama.

I mean, come on Wisconsin: Act like a real, grown-up school with real grown-up graduates. That, more than an alumnus who didn't even make the baseball team, will make these graduates loyal Badgers throughout their many-storied lives ahead. You should never settle for less before you try for more. Commencement should be the beginning of our graduates stepping up to the plate themselves, not cheering from the nosebleed section while they quaff another flat beer. A commencement speech should be worth every single graduate and every single parent and grandparent's full attention, worth each of them looking it up afterward on the internet to print up a copy for the scrapbook. Bud Selig's address? I had a heck of time finding it anywhere; apparently I wasn't the only one less than impressed with his wisdom and his eloquence.

Spring Porch Poem

2009-04-29T20:16:00.005-05:00

Today was the day the Spring poem went up on the front porch. This has nothing to do with anything, except the return of Spring, and this poem from Mary Oliver, which is only one of her poems that I love, so enjoy:

From The Book of Time
1.

I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk.
But it's spring,

and the thrush is in the woods,
somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing.

And so, now, I am standing by the open door.
And now I am stepping down onto the grass.

I am touching a few leaves.
I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies
move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field.

And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening
is the real work.

Maybe the word, without us,
is the real poem.

Ducks at the Door: April Rituals in the Wetlands

2009-04-26T07:23:00.009-05:00

I finally sent in my taxes right before April 15, taking a deep breath and closing my eyes and stabbing at the keyboard to send them off to the IRS. They've been done, in some fashion, since February, since the day right before another Deadline of Financial Dread: FAFSA Due Date, but since you don't have to actually submit your taxes for that filing, just to know the figures, I hung onto the cyber-1040 for another two months. To me, who has lived in dread of audit ever since my accountant/husband walked out on me, procrastinating filing is as natural and sensible a decision as putting off serving a jail sentence and, possibly, even the very same thing.

You see, I am one of these people, yes, "those people," who have absolutely no interest or skill or really any desire to gain either interest or skill in matters financial. It made my former husband crazy, it makes my department's benefits advisor crazy, it makes my taxes crazy. In the years since I lost my personal accountant, my taxes have varied like the temperatures of Colorado: I'll pay thousands one year, receive thousands back in refunds the next. Some years I have actually packed an overnight bag and kept it near the front door so when the IRS suits appear at my front door I am ready to go docilely to prison. There is no way on earth I could ever defend anything I have written on my tax forms. Going to prison would be much easier and probably a lot more interesting, too. Think of the reading and writing time you'd get! I have to assume they would allow me a pen, even if if it is mightier than a sword; they even allow them on airplanes despite their lethal potential. I wonder if the TSA people have considered this.

But I started this blog after darting out to pluck my Sunday Times out of the rain puddle below my front porch. If you scroll through the photos to the left on this page to the one of my house, you may notice that the front porch is ample, big enough for several bikes, a glider, a deck chair, a massed clutter of dead plants in ceramic pots, a cluster of shovels and rakes and ice picks, and even a cooler for the neighbors' milk delivery every Wednesday, since their porch didn't have room for it. You'd think the newspaper delivery man could get the newspaper onto this kind of porch, but apparently it is easier to target the puddle just below it, the one that is approximately two square feet in size. He reliably gets the paper exactly into the puddle and only when the puddle's dried up does the paper ever make it onto the porch. Whatever happened to newspaper carriers anyway? When did they turn into middle aged men who've long since lost their throwing arm?

I started this blog today because it is pouring again, and it poured all day yesterday, too, and the lakes and rivers are all up to their banks again or a little over, and the ducks are very happy with all this, but we humans are a little sick of ducks' pre-emptory attitude of entitlement at this time of year, crossing streets regardless of crosswalks, making cars come to complete stops in the middle of rush hour. And nesting, nesting everywhere. In backyards and brush piles. On porches, sometimes you'll see them, pecking like jackhammers until you open the door to them: "Quack, quack, now cut the small talk, girl. Don't pretend you don't know. Yes, the pond in your basement. We heard you called the Pump-It-Out Squad again last night, and we want in on it, too." This is not a time of year to mess with the ducks. They are all strutting around in pairs, the drab female waddling first, the green-headed male pacing a frantic zigzag course behind her, glaring at each and every comer with eyes malignant with hostility: "Don't mess with her, fella. She's mine, she's all mine." They are extremely territorial right now; when they show up at your front door and ask the way to the pond in your basement, you just step aside and wave them on in. Sort of like G-men in this, I imagine.

So,yes. Back to the G-men. Back to taxes. Back to the flooding that seems to go on here as a matter of fact every springtime now that global warming is a way of life. Last year, it was particularly bad; in fact the southern third of the state still bears its footprint, a footprint filled with water (several new lakes, that used to be low-lying farmland) or not (the absent Lake Delton, which emptied last year when a dam on the river broke loose). And apparently, the floods still exist in our financial memory, too; after hitting my SEND button and going off to work to brag about my improved sense of self-worth now that the miserable deed was done, my co-workers asked if I'd received the doubled education credit for college education costs.

What doubled education credit, I had to ask blankly, regretting already having so blithely hit ENTER when there were at least ten hours remaining til the deadline. Apparently, since we lived here during last spring's flooding, part of an official federal disaster recovery plan along with my personal disaster recovery plan, we get extra money credited to us for our dependent's college costs. I, of course, did not, but all the attentive, responsible, and erstwhile good people of the state did, which is the greater part of Wisconsin's population, and I am vaguely happy for them in their newfound, largely undeserved wealth. I just hope all those poor victims of Hurricane Katrina had some benefit like this when their lives were truly destroyed, because our lives were in fact, hardly affected at all by last spring's flooding, unless you consider things like the ducks at the door and the ponds in the basement, which are, after all, to be expected when you live in a place as soggy and full of lakes and rivers as is Wisconsin.

But April's nearly over. Baseball's begun. And the name of Madison's minor league team? Of course! The Mallards.

God's In Her World and All's Right With This Heaven

2009-04-24T18:38:00.007-05:00

There is absolutely no place on earth I'd rather be on a beautiful day like today than a college campus. You know, the old part of a college campus, the part that has grass in a quadrilateral shape among old buildings made of brick and stone, the assurance that knowledge really does pass from one generation to the next, is not blown away with an easy puff of whimsy or a vicious blast of fate. On the UW campus, it's Bascom Hill, and I have the privilege of working in a building right on top of that hill, my office overlooking Lake Mendota, my students overlooking my weak and warped sense of humor and my predilection for poppish music.

I love being here, there, on this campus that once did its best to educate me. When I was interviewed for the job I now hold last October, I left the second round of interviews on a gorgeous Fall day, perhaps the seasonal equivalent of today's Spring perfection, and vowed to myself that I would be forever happy if only I could walk up Bascom Hill every day. Arguably, I could have done so, I suppose, whether or not I got the job, but somehow the feat seems more likely when there's a reason to make the trek up the big hill. Because it is a big hill. And I have been happy every day when I walk up that steep hill; it has now been six months.

Tomorrow I get to run up that hill Tomorrow is Crazylegs, the biggest race in Madison's busy race season. I'm running in it for the second time, hoping to beat last year's time by at least a few minutes, which I think is very possible if my recent injury doesn't flare up again. This is Madison's closest approximation of Boulder's great 10K, the Memorial Day Bolder Boulder. The fact that Crazylegs is only an 8K is a fairly good comparison of the two events; Crazylegs is maybe 4/5 the race that the BB is: MAYBE. The two biggest things they have in common are wave starts and stadium endings. That, and thousands of runners.

And all this brings me back to the enormous beauty of this perfect Spring day, a day to make everyone happy, except the young man fron Nigeria who was in my office twice today, wearing long pants and a heavy sweater and both times perspiring profusely from his march up the difficult hill. You never want to be so maternal or personal as to suggest in a kind tone of voice, "You might feel better if you removed that heavy sweater, dear," especially when the person you're addressing is from a foreign culture; I mean, who knows on what customs or circumstances you're trouncing? But for everyone but him, today Madison was absolutely perfect. By the time I rode my bike home from work, all the restaurants had set up their outdoor dining areas for the season and they all were full of happy, sunburned people.

And it makes me think of Ann Patchett's fifth novel, "Run," which came out last year. I can't cite this exactly, because I promptly sent off my copy of the book to a friend I thought would like it and am still waiting for it to return to me, but there's this wonderful secondary character in the story, Father Sullivan, I believe was his name, who is at the end of a long and devoted ministry of Catholicism, about to face his own death after administering the Last Rites to many others. And he wonders if he was wrong. "What if this is Heaven, right now, right here?" he wonders, in effect (I can't be sure since I don't have the book any more). "What if I've missed the chance to enjoy Heaven right here because I was so focused on life in some hereafter?"

That is all paraphrased and probably not very accurate. But in the proper context and language of Patchett's book, the agony of the dying priest is acute and moving, and resonated loudly enough that I am still trying to quote it though I only read it once and perhaps never will have the book back to read again. This earth is heaven, for me at least, and on no day is it more clearly heaven than on a day like today, when the first fleet of sailboats zips across the white-capped lake, and earnest TAs are gathering their crops of young undergraduates around them in circles on the lawns next to all the classroom buildings, and everyone's in love and everyone feels sexy, and God is in this very heaven and all's, for this one moment on my son's twenty-first birthday, all's right with the world and with me.

The Good Earthday Birthday

2009-04-22T12:47:00.008-05:00

Earth Day. What a great day to celebrate. Why don't we celebrate it more? Many school districts in Wisconsin still let out students for Good Friday, but the best we get to honor the ground under our feet is a school assembly, perhaps, in some uncomfortable overheated gymnasium followed by a litter pick-up of the school yard. And this is in the state where the great Gaylord Nelson lived, the founder of Earth Day and one of the greatest political men to grace this century. Nelson is to Earth Day what Santa is to Christmas, what Jesus is to Easter, what Zorro is to Masked Champions of Justice Day, Al Gore is a small man next to Gaylord, and Al Gore is one heck of a big man by all earthly and ecological standards.

Why don't we have a real holiday on Earth Day? Couldn't we maybe combine Veteran's Day and Memorial Day into one super parade of soldiers day? No one really knows what to do on Veteran's Day, anyway. There are so many amazing ways every single one of us could celebrate a national holiday honoring our planet. You could even pick litter out of the hedgerow round the school yard if that really was what you thought important. Or you might plant your garden or your starter peat pots, depending on your climate. Go all day without using a motor. Go all day without using electricity. Hang your laundry outside and remember what it smells like to sleep between sun-kissed linens. Now there's a fantastic cure for insomnia!

It appalls me that Wisconisn schools quietly continue observing Good Friday as a holiday. Oh, they don't call it that, but it is, and sometimes, even here in the liberal hotbed of Madison, they sneak in something called Easter Monday, too. My neighbors, both educators and moms of grade school kids as well, told me that this year, when it struck me as odd that they all were at home on a Monday. Apparently, Madison, in true liberal style, vacillates on religion along with every other issue, using an every-other-year formula to schedule its Spring Break: one year following the University's irreligious calendar, the next the church calendar. Is this what is meant by the separation of church and state? And Easter apparently includes this day I've never heard of before: Easter Monday. I mean, what happened on Easter Monday? Is it sort of like Boxing Day? Do we pack up the schnibbles of green plastic Easter grass that have escaped from the baskets of Easter eggs and insinuated themselves not only into every corner of the house, but to the sleeve of every sweater we own as well? Easter Monday? It makes me think of a Jesus coming out of the grave, looking around, and seeing no one of particular interest, going back into the grave, giving us another month of winter. No one likes going back to work on Monday, not even the Savior, I guess.

So Happy Earthday Birthday. My son turns 21 in two more days, and when he was a first grader, we celebrated with an Earthday Birthday party. We played "Clean Up My Backyard" over a badminton net, with wads of old newspapers batted and flung over the net from side to side in a race to clean one team's lawn space completely. We played a variation of my childhood game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey by directing blindfolded children holding big sopping wet sponges toward an Evil Ecological Villian I'd painted on the wooden privacy fence in my backyard. We swung on "vines" draped off the crabapple tree branches over a small swimming pool filled with blue jello and crocodiles in danger of extinction. Oh we had fun and so could we all..if Earth Day were not a work day and Good Friday was left for religions to celebrate, not school children.

It is our Good Earth we should celebrate; our Good Earth we need to protect. Taking a day off on Good Friday does very little for Jesus, whose fate seems relatively decided already, but taking a day off could be amazing for the Earth, especially if we all declined to drive for a day or to use our dishwashers for a day or we prepared our gardens to grow vegetables that will feed us without chemicals this summer. Our earth. Our good earth.

Which brings to mind another great Wisconsinite: Edna Ferber, who went to high school in the same little northern city I did: Appleton. I'll have to write about Edna another time. More on Gaylord, too. Meanwhile, Happy Earth Day.

And thanks, Gaylord, if you're listening somehow.

Of Springboards and Seesaws Somehow

2009-04-21T12:24:00.005-05:00

Seems no matter where you live, the locals love to remind you, "Don't like the weather today? Wait until tomorrow!" Some day I'm going to visit sub-Saharan Africa, and if I find anyone who speaks any of the same languages I do, I'm going to complain about the weather, whining in passable yet somehow excruciating French, "La chaleur ici est vraiment insupportable!" and then bat my eyelashes winsomely from under the shroud of my hijab. Uncharmed, my guides will stare back at me evenly, and respond, in perfect English, "Don't like the weather today? Wait until tomorrow!" Frankly, I have never been entirely sure whether this response is meant as a threat or a consolation.

But here, in Wisconsin, in April, it's simply God's own truth. This Saturday, I spent the whole day outside. A long, tiring, exhilarating run through the incubator of conservatism (Appleton) which turned me into a full-blown youthful radical, a run in a seasonal first: running shorts and that hottest of enduring fashion items, the racing singlet. The rest of the day was spent cleaning up the lawn and gardens at my parents' home. The temperature reached seventy. I reached a pale nuance of amber, if you look closely between the freckles and mottlings of middle age.

The next day the temps plummeted thirty degrees and it rained all day. When I arrived at my own house, back in Madison, little Gemma from next door was splashing around in stylish red rainboots and a bright yellow slicker. Together, in the downpour, we managed to save the tree fairy's house on my terrace strip from flooding. Spring rain storms don't get much better than that, unless your parents are careless enough to let you play in the street gutters, blocking the water flow with dams beyond which all leaves inevitably float all the way to McElligot's pool. And if you don't remember McElligot's Pool, well, shame on you and go back to kindergarten: do not pass GO or collect $200. Some parts of childhood, like the appeal of shiny rubbery rain boots and Dr Seuss books, should never be forgotten.

And today it is snowing. Yep. Snowing. Not like they had in Colorado last week, reminding me all too sadly of the Spring Break trip to Italy that was cancelled one year when I lived back there, the tonnage of wet spring snow on the spires of the DIA terminal roof ripping under the pooled wet of a similar spring snowstorm. But still, it's snowing. I had to dig out my mittens again. And what do I say when a colleague complains of it? Like the truly reborn Wisconsinite I'm slowly becoming, I extricate the toothpick from the bite of my teeth, yawn widely and unabashedly, and mutter, in that hard to master speech of a population always reluctant to move their lips too much, "Just wait until tomorrow."

Cold Hard Facts About This Frozen Year

2009-01-17T07:46:00.003-06:00

Everyone's suffering from the cold this winter, it seems; my niece in North Carolina just wrote to me that it's in the twenties down there, causing the natives to think the end of the world has arrived on the steely wings of a sub-arctic front. Or are we just plain suffering this winter? A survey publicized in the media yesterday said that over half of all Americans now identify themselves as somehow struggling, up markedly from even the last several months. On a comforting note, I suppose, the same survey did not identify a similar increase in those identifying themselves as "suffering," the only category given as lower and less enviable than "struggling."

My sister, living even further north than I, near the Twin Cities of Minnesota, writes in her usual philosophic manner about the cold as she experienced it this week: "…the air is indeed as clean and clear as it probably ever gets in the 21st century, blown straight down from the Arctic and surprisingly unsoiled by our human exhalations. Every short walk in this cold, thin air is like stepping outside with a new pair of glasses – the edges of every object sharpened into clear focus, the light so bright, the tree branches etched so finely against the sky. It IS beautiful." Ministers, such as she, have an uncanny propensity to identify the good in what seems to the superficial, like me, the bad and ugly.

She's right, though. If you can bear to look up, it is beautiful, at least when the sky clears and finds its way to blue again. It is not easy to appreciate, though, when you walk with your coat collar turned up, and your muffler wound round your head like some amateurish woolen mummification, and your hat pulled down to your tensely tucked eyebrows; it's genuinely hard to see either beauty or desolation from underneath all this heavy clothing. Having your top and bottom eyelashes freeze together when you do something as seemingly innocuous as blinking makes it hard to perceive the true beauty of the frozen wasteland, too.

I came home from work yesterday evening and went to fill up the tea kettle. Nothing came out of the kitchen faucet. I turned it to the left. Turned it to the right. Went and checked the bathroom faucets. They worked fine. Returned to the kitchen and tried again, to the left, to the right. Nothing. It looked fine under the sink in the cabinet, which left me one basic choice. Watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer or go down in the basement (even colder than my drafty main floor) and check the water pipes. Since I didn't know what to look for among the many lines of overhead piping down there, I did the sensible thing and filled up the tea kettle in the bathroom, made a nice steaming toddy, and curled up to allow Jim and David and Mark and Gwen and all the rest make me feel intellectually deficit if well-informed from under a thick Mexican blanket in what is known as my Bonus Room.

It was a good choice. Even David Brooks is grinning like a kid at the prospect of Obama's Tuesday inauguration, and the story about the plane landing in the Hudson was just about the most positive news item that's hit the airwaves (or maybe the water waves?) in all of the last year. I was filled with a renewal of optimism, an audacity of hope, if you will. After the broadcast, armed with a flashlight and a hair dryer, I made my way boldly into the basement and not only succeeded in thawing out the plumbing without anything bursting but also changed the furnace filter.

Now if only I can bear to get out of my nice warm bed this morning, as snow swirls freshly outside my window, doing its best to look winsome. Maybe after I watch a good foreign movie here on my laptop computer... let's see.. "Beijing Bicycle?" "Babu Riba?"... what's on the nightstand here...

Christmas Letter

2008-12-19T08:27:00.000-06:00

Hello, Friends.

What a great morning to spend writing my end of year letter. It’s been snowing since late last night, and a full foot of fresh snow muffles the scraping of shovels on city sidewalks. Schools are closed, and there’s hardly any traffic on the roads except for the brash battalions of plows and valiant if lumbering buses. Ben is still sleeping, and Mady is hoping to make it into the Milwaukee airport by this evening and from there perhaps even to Madison. It isn’t entirely sure she’ll make it, but then air travel never seems reliable any more, does it.

What a lot of once taken-for-granted circumstances have changed over the course of this year; the debasement of air travel seems the least of them. Economic growth, retirement, and job security seem elements of the past, along with such once all-American standards as respect for personal liberties and political self-determination, respect for immigrants who remind me constantly that my own grandparents came over penniless and without anything but hope and determination in their pockets. The most fundamental tenets of our Constitution and the foundation blocks of our national history have been chiseled and eroded lately, stained and camouflaged and shrouded. The election of Barack Obama shines a light, yes it does, but the fog is thick, and the call of the foghorn sometimes seems lost or just plaintive among the high drama of prowling pirate ships, as forces of chaos clash with Western ideals of civilization. These are heady times. I am grateful for everyone of intelligence who is called to public service this year. I am particularly grateful there seems to be a full raft of them. I wish them all luck and health and wisdom. I’ll even do my best to tolerate an inaugural blessing delivered by Rick Warren, although I believe you couldn’t stop me from covering my ears.

It’s a time when it would be easy to slip into despair. I was unemployed for most of this year, without health insurance or income or much in the way of local references, having just returned to Wisconsin last fall. Generous, caring friends and family, along with my own obstinate hopefulness sustained me, and I am now finally working at a satisfying position within the University’s Department of Economics. Having glimpsed one wintry utility bill, I am hoping to stay here for the foreseeable, unknowable future. I already miss the freedom I did manage to enjoy during my long spell of unemployment, though; joblessness is far from being all bad, especially since my mom was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease this last February, and my unemployment not only allowed me to spend many lovely days with her and my dad, but also to raise nearly $16,000 in donations for research into the debilitating disease that is claiming her. It feels lately like everyone I know is losing someone they love, without any ability to prevent it or even to stall it. Our hours together are precious. I try not to waste too many of them, though I admit to hoarding a few hours every week for my runs, which seem nearly as important to me as breathing.

My two kids are great as ever. Mady is finishing up her work at CU in Environmental Engineering and working on various projects with NASA, the USGS, and Engineers Without Borders; she will graduate in May. Ben took a semester off from his political studies at Lewis & Clark to work for the combined campaign of Obama and Mark Udall in Colorado. They were both here for Thanksgiving, giving me particular reason for thankfulness and will both soon be here for Christmas as well, so I guess you could accurately say I’m among the happiest people in the universe.

I hope you are too. You are in my heart and my mind, along with so many good memories and fine hopes of seeing you again before too much time flies by us.

May 2009 find us all shoring up our selves with love and intelligence and sharing that wealth with the world.

My Favorite Thanksgiving Poem

2008-11-27T22:50:00.002-06:00

This isn't mine; it's W.S. Merwin's. I first discovered it about six years ago, when the fall of the Twin Towers was still as stunning a loss to our sheltered and complacent lives as the slaughter of the people of Mumbai must be today to the people of India -- or is no other population so sheltered from loss and risk as we Americans even now, even now that we know all so well that no nation is an island.

In any case, I share with you this poem. I find every word and every pulse of it true, and if I were reading it aloud to you my tempo would start slow and sonorous then quicken like steps down a forest path as the light fades (go faster, faster) until finally it all winds down and is done.

I don't know its title. I do know its meaning.

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water looking out
in different directions.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
in a culture up to its chin in shame
living in the stench it has chosen we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the back door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
with the crooks in office with the rich and the fashionable
unchanged we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
our lost feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us like the earth
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
we are saying thank you and waving
dark as it is

The Hand That Signs the Book and Shakes My Own Will be the President's

2008-11-17T17:39:00.007-06:00

My mom just returned a book to me, my rather beat-up paperback copy of Obama's Dreams of My Father. My mom, though she won't admit it, is pretty much a Republican. That is probably the surest way to identify a genuine Republican: their disavowal of party identity. To admit you are a party member is a little like admitting you are not an individualist.

Despite her longstanding practice of voting Republican, I had loaned Obama's memoir to her many months ago at the beginning of the long and anything-but-lonesome primary trail. It is, after all, a smooth and easy read, unencumbered by lofty analyses or intricate arguments, a memoir pure and simple and really quite nicely written, a story of a boy growing up in America without a set racial identity, without a lot of money, and without a father present, the story of a young man deciding to be somebody, somebody good. I gave it to her because even back then, my Republican mom had already begun dropping interesting tidbits like, "our future President," when referring to what I think of now as Phenomobama. I left my battered paperback on her coffee table. "You might enjoy this," I suggested oh so casually. "Keep it as long as you need. I've already read it.

A few months later, she confessed she'd given up reading it, but asked if she could loan it to a friend who was interested in Obama. Sure, I answered with only a minor sense of loss. Sure, why not.

Why not? Well, apparently my battered little book may be worth something more than a vote from some errant Republican in northeastern Wisconsin; my book, you see, bears the Obama autograph. Yep. And so does his second book, which I own in a more properly respectable hardcover, The Audacity of Hope. There it is, on the frontispiece of each, in big loopy letters that hardly look like the kind to represent the calligraphic identity of the most heralded and possibly powerful man on the planet: Barack Obama.

He signed these both for me when I was still living in Denver, on an author's tour shortly after he published the second book. Soon afterward, he would declare his candidacy. But on that day in October, when I stood in a long, sinuous line with hundreds and hundreds of other Coloradoans to have a chance to pass by his table in the Event Room of the great Tattered Cover Book Store in downtown Denver, we all knew he was something special, but none of us knew what he was ready to make of his specialness. But there was something in the air. Something that made us wait outside the book store well before it opened. Something that not only allowed us the hours of waiting in line before he would walk into the room, but to chat happily with total strangers, to feel a puzzling sense of sharing something special with everyone waiting in line with us.

It was a sense that would grow stronger and stronger, until it culminated on Election Night with exuberant celebrations in the parks and the downtown avenues of all the major American cities. And my mom's friend, when shown the President Elect's autograph in the book she was being lent, demurred. "She said she couldn't possibly take responsibility for borrowing a book this valuable," my mom explained as she placed the paperback into my hands. I rifled the pages, approving, as only a true book lover can, the suppleness of their movement, the evidence of their usage. I set it back onto the bookshelves, right next to Obama's Audacity.

I won't loan them out again. My mom's friend was right; they're too valuable. Even if these two books were worthless, I plan to keep them until either my brainwaves cease or my attention span forgets them. I'd keep them just to remember the spirit that filled that storeful of people waiting to pay homage to a slim African American Senator who'd written two books. I'd keep them to remember the sense of hope we felt for the first time that long day in line. This is a time to remember. Whatever happens in the Obama administration, this moment of hope must be remembered and cherished.

As for my mom? Who did she vote for? Ah. A true Republican never divulges their vote. It's private. Especially if she voted for a Democrat.

That said, I regret, at that book signing two years ago, my bone crushing grip of Obama's slim and oft-shaken hand. I'm sorry, Mr. President (Elect); I forgot how many handshakes you must endure in the course of one day with your admiring public.

New Deals and New Dealers

2008-11-08T13:22:00.011-06:00

We did it. Our jangled nerves have been solaced by at least one glorious night of jubilation, of dancing in the streets like I haven't seen since we pulled out of Vietnam. (I don't follow sports teams, obviously, nor their fans' celebrations.)

One glorious night of jubilation, followed by a day or two of Election Night Stories. Where were you, how good did you feel, did you laugh or cry or hug total strangers; who do you know who was in Grant Park on a Tuesday night in Chicago?

But now we're done with all that. The pace of life is crazy. Election Day seems like it was weeks ago,not just days. Somehow the change of clocks and its built-in time warp contributes to this sense of unreality, as does the abrupt change from the summery temperatures of November's first week. Winter barged through the screen door without knocking this week, and four feet of snow fell in the nation's midsection, along with a few flakes here in Madison. I kind of think the Not-So-Great Plains deserved this dumping, for being the only noticeable chunk of the nation to find Sarah Palin a fit choice for Vice President.

Abruptly, we are back at the present moment, no longer with our eyes on the prize but our eyes on the mess in the locker room. The economy is no longer something we will meet on some ideal day with a new administration's perfect mix of intelligence and care and ingenuity but rather something that confronts us right now, a snarling ogre standing toe-to-toe with us, breathing hotly into our faces the stench of decomposition and disease. A battalion of somber faced economists stands in a protective shield behind Obama as he holds his first conference as President-Elect. This is where we are. These are the new soldiers.

At the time of this writing, Obama has not yet designated his pick for Secretary of the Treasury, although the pressure for him to do so quickly is so intense that I pause to periodically recheck news sources. Understandably, at a time when even the experts seem to be scratching their heads for economic cures or even palliatives, we are hoping for someone more capable than those working for the present administration, those who have so deeply failed us. For this reason, it is deeply, deeply disappointing to see Obama so seriously considering someone out of the incriminated past: Larry Summers.

Summers, as you may know, held this same Cabinet post under President Clinton. He was an Alan Greenspan crony, a Good Ole Boy, an anti-regulation free market globalist. He still is, by all we know. He is, in other words, one of those who allowed this crisis to brew, one of those who kept turning up the heat of the economic burner. He is not what we need now. We need a Real New Deal. We need real change, President-Elect Obama, now as much as we did a week ago. We don't want to go backward. It is time to move forward.

There comes a point when it is not worthwhile to patch old pants. There comes a point when an old tree must come down. There comes a time when enough is enough, and it is time to stop stuffing money into the pockets of bankers and financiers and automakers who never cared about us in the first place. They have not demonstrated that they have learned anything from this present crisis any more than Larry Summers has. Don't give money to Ford and GM; give it to the entrepreneur who needs it to start making little electric cars in a big way. Don't give power to Summers; think Joseph Stieglitz perhaps.

Change, Mr. O. We didn't stop needing it at the moment you won the election.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow

2008-11-03T18:04:00.005-06:00

As the cover of this week's The Economist says, "It's time. America should take a chance and make Barack Obama the next leader of the free world." Yes.

Go vote for him. That's all I have to say until I can breathe again.

The Hallowed Eve of the Election

2008-10-30T16:40:00.009-05:00

It must be nearly Halloween. Leaves are rolling down the streets like little, rickety tumbrels. Squirrels are darting about in perpetual panic with large chunks of pumpkin engorging their cheeks. The sky seems permanently gray, and the windowpanes of my old house are rattling in a noticeably colder wind that makes even the young people walk with something of a old woman's hunched shoulders.

It's a frightening time, even though I am not scared of witches. My neighbors are probably witches, and they are some of the jolliest, friendliest and most kindly people I've met since I moved here. Last Halloween all four of them showed up at my door, four smiling and beautiful witches. That was the first time it occurred to me that they were really and truly witches. I've never asked them, but then I've never asked any of my neighbors about their religions and no one's ever asked me.

Halloween, for real witches, is the end of the old year, the beginning of the new. It's a celebration, most complete when commemorated with a large bonfire (aka "bone-fire") and a feast. And what holiest of feasts would ever be really and truly well-attended without setting a place or two for the dead: Oh my goodness, it's Elijah! Death roams the material world on this night, looking for those it may claim. Putting out food on your porch may help keep Old Man Samhain from knocking. He is not the one you want pulling out a chair at your table.

So light three candles and welcome the new year. This is the end of autumn, the beginning of the dark months, especially in the northern lands where the Celtic people lived, starting these ancient traditions. Light three more candles and add a Western tradition: Blow them out with one hearty puff and don't forget to make a wish. Make it a good wish, and none of that silly business about wishing for three more wishes. It's a scary moment in time, so make it a good wish.

Wish what? Wish for an Obama victory in four days' time. Wish for an Obama landslide, so we know he has a clear mandate. Wish for enough Democratic victories that some change will actually happen. Who cares whether you personally like Nancy Pelosi. We need change; we need real change. Wish for our future, for the sake of our children; for my friends' brand new baby who will enter this grand old world on just about the same day we count up our electoral tallies. Wish her a future; fill her bassinet with songs of hope and freedom.

Wish, and while you're at it, don't neglect to vote. This is not just about wishful thinking, not just about magic. But there is a little bit of magic hovering high in the air, so go ahead this Halloween: Make a wish and while you're at it, kiss a witch, for we are working here toward the elimination of the arrogance and intolerance of the global hatred that's accompanied an upsurge of religious fundamentalism. Make a wish that this will prove to be the beginning of a new year, one full of new intelligence.

This may be the scariest Halloween I've ever spent, not knowing the outcome of Tuesday's election. If you know any good spells, please let me know, keeping in mind that my pantry's low on eyes of newt and toes of frog. Maybe something with tofu?

BHO: The New Deal, Real Deal

2008-10-28T10:38:00.008-05:00

Last night, I was enjoying one of my usual wild nights--you know, curled up on the couch under a pile of afghans with a heavy stack of books and a cup of chai whose heat didn't even last the short steps from the kitchen to the living room--and I came across some quotes that I found particularly heartening and wonderful. (OK. I was reading Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. It's a little better, isn't it, than spending nights reading the phone book? A little less pathetic?)

I'd like to share them with you now. You know, spread the excitement. Pass the chai. Or maybe we could switch to wine now that there are two of us gathered here huddled over the big brown book.

"These unhappy times call for the building of plans ... that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." FDR, 1932

"The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little." FDR, 1937

"Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much." FDR, 1942

"It is not a tax bill but a tax relief bill providing relief not for the needy but for the greedy." FDR, veto message, 1944

Do any of these sound familiar, timely, relevant? Do they ring some bells? Somehow they bolstered me, lent me assurance that given sound and intelligent leadership maybe we will figure out a way to better times again.

One week until Election Day. I am still worried and working for Obama. As the little sign on my wall reminds me, "Pray like hell, then do something!"

In the Chute At Last

2008-10-27T09:11:00.003-05:00

When you're running in a race with a big field, the finish line is usually set up in what we call "chutes." These are basically lanes, which channel runners in neat order over the finish line. Now, seeing the finish line in any race provides a swell of energy, pride and happiness, but after a really long race, entering the chutes is, well, it is my vision of what nearing heaven must feel like.

You see, there's this point in a really long race, if you're giving it your utmost, when your legs turn to stone. And when flesh and blood petrify like this, something obviously happens to the neurovascular circuitry that allows brains to send messages to muscles, because it becomes increasingly difficult to even keep those limbs in motion, to order them forward. If you've climbed in the high mountains, where oxygen is depleted, you've probably also known this phenomenon. Legs, never mind their terminating feet, might as well be miles away from the command center of the brain for all that they respond to orders like "Keep going!" or, more foolishly, "Speed up!"

And then you see the archway of the finish line, and hope swells. You find yourself thinking with longing about abstract ideas like putting on a final burst of speed, dazzling the spectators, winning your age group. Not too much of that happens usually, if you've been giving your all throughout the long miles preceding, until the chute lines enfold you. And then, like Dorothy and her entourage crossing into the Land of Oz, color returns, pain disappears, music becomes audible, doubt is vanquished. The battle's won.

We are entering the chutes of this election, and in the chutes, some of the pain and hysteria is already beginning to recede. Soon we will be done hearing about wardrobe expenses and renegade ministers, wondering whether McCain really does suffer from PTSD or just looks like it, fretting about how an unmarried teenage girl and her dropout boyfriend became role models for our families. We're in the chute. Obama is starting to give summation speeches, and I wish I could be there to hear one in person, since he had to cancel his last scheduled appearance here in Madison last week. We're in the chute, and the pain and pettiness and squabbles will start to fade away, in preparation for McCain's concession speech late on the night a week from now, in which we can hope he will reach out across the aisle once again.

Why will it be McCain's concession speech rather than Obama's? Not because McCain abandoned the integrity which initially drew supporters his way. Not because his proposed Vice President is a shallow and uninformed redneck wearing Gucci and Dior. McCain is going to lose because he simply missed the message. When he pounds his fist on the podium in front of him and declaims, "Barack Obama wants to share the wealth!" he doesn't hear the voices inside the skulls of even those who support him, those persistent voices telling those of us who, unlike McCain and his fancy wife, constitute the declining middle class of America, "Yes. and I would like that; I would like to share in the wealth of those few wealthy Americans, those few who aren't hurting, those few whom the Republicans have favored with tax breaks and corporate incentives and social policies that have hurt me and my family."

He totally missed the fact, and Obama did not, that the gap between them and us is enormous and growing and divisive. Redistribute the wealth? You betcha.

Helping Each Other Down the Stairs

2008-10-20T20:08:00.009-05:00

Readers of the Wall Street Journal and other press-subscribing Republicans (mustn't take this for granted now that Joe the Plumber and Todd the Snowmobilist are the party's new standard bearers, replacing those disgraced investors) have long been familiar with Peggy Noonan, but I just made her acquaintance. I have to admit I never listened to the speeches she wrote for President Reagan. I didn't listen to any president's speeches back then. But lately, as I've struggled to understand what has become of the US and the global economy we've apparently driven into the ground, I've been paying attention to a lot of new voices. Right now, I'll accept wisdom from anyone, and I don't expect to find myself with a surfeit of it doing so!

Peggy Noonan has long written a column for the WSJ and recently she had a small new book published that for a week got a decent amount of attention. Patriotic Grace, it's titled, What It Is and Why We Need It Now. A plain-spoken, easily read book that is hardly bigger than a mass market paperback, it's her perspective on what we really need to be focusing on as Americans today, I mean, right after the banks get back to serving each other instead of us and oil prices start to bubble back up to unaffordable heights again. What is it Ms. Noonan would have us devote our best and brightest energies to addressing?

That old Republican gig: Armageddon. Yep. In one guise after another, whether it's a Rapture or Weapons of Mass Destruction, the Bomb in Iran or the Bomb in North Korea but heaven knows never the many bombs in our own arsenal, the right is always ranting about the last day, the ultimate destruction, the anthrax, the suitcase bomb, and oh yes the swine flu. I'm sorry, but I'm sick of hearing all this. Come what may, this is not what I will build my life around. I spent my grade school years covering my head with my skinny little arms, hiding in the coat racks of the elementary school corridors and under the little vinyl desks of the classroom, to save myself and my future progeny from the fallout of a nuclear bomb attack on America. I watched my neighbors dig an enormous hole in their backyard so they could survive the inevitable Russian attack. I am not going to live like that again, now that I'm an adult. It was strange enough to do so as a child.

Peggy Noonan's right about a lot of things, though; we will probably live to see another attack on us, probably on our own soil, probably every bit as horrible as the falling of the towers and the crashing of our innocent arrogance. And we are not prepared for it in terms of emergency procedures, and the Department of Homeland Security is a bumbling fool in a hall of mirrors. But she is wrong that this is what we should be concentrating on as a nation with one common purpose, one all-consuming patriotism. Forget the notion of building a sense of "Patriotic Grace" that will see us through a debilitating terrorist attack; let's start working instead on something altogether more encompassing: a sense of global grace. Let us start to work with other nations, and define ourselves and our mission not by how we respond to those who hate us but but how we respond to those who need us.

Noonan said her book was engendered at a moment when the Capitol rotunda was being abruptly and summarily evacuated because an errant plane had violated its protected airspace. In fleeing the building, she noticed an elderly woman in a wheelchair stranded atop the stairs until a pair of men picked her up, chair and all, and carried her down. In that, Ms. Noonan found such horror that she began to formulate this book, because "Before this is over, we'll all be helping each other down the stairs." But where Ms. Noonan finds that troublesome, I find it somehow comforting. As a Democrat, I readily confess that I've long had the hope that we will continue to find ways to take care of one another--perhaps to a Republican, that prospect is not as calming.

Change: One Vote, One Election, One Candidate at a Time

2008-10-18T10:31:00.014-05:00

At a tripartite talk last night by independent media darlings Bob McChesney, Jeremy Scahill and Amy Goodman, a packed theater of self-congratulatory Madison liberals, largely gray haired or beyond, applauded our apparently superior understanding of, well, almost everything. Though the event was held under the aegis of the seven-year-old Wisconsin Book Festival, it was really a fundraiser for two local media: WORT radio and WYOU television. Buckets were actually passed down the long rows of middle class activists; it was just like being back in church. I left feeling like the independence of the book festival had been somehow compromised, in sort of the same way Goodman spoke about the prevalence of private enterprise at both parties' national conventions this summer.

Now, I'm not out to trash Amy Goodman. I admire her enormously, and watching her long pale hands moving through the air like birds as she spoke, I was deeply moved by her unquestionable commitment, intelligence and integrity. If the left had more people like her, we would see less of people like Ms. Palin or Rush Limbaugh, less of the histrionics of Fox News and Ariana Huffington alike; we would have more understanding of the realities that impel political action in our world. The success of people like Palin and Limbaugh and media phenomenon like Fox rests upon ignorance; knowledge unseats them. And no one digs up knowledge as capably as Amy Goodman today.

Which makes me wonder what happened to her cohort, Mr. Scahill, whose talk was aimed at booting us off our computers and onto the streets. Perhaps it's his relative youth showing, but a lot of us have done the street thing; a lot of us in this particularly gray audience not only had plastic handcuffs clamped around our wrists, but had tear gas burn our eyes, truncheons pummel our shoulders. We don't run so well any more; frankly, we're better off writing these days. And indeed. How presumptuous to state that street action is the only way to really effect change. How traditional and how uncreative an approach is that! We have had street action varying from violent revolutionary action to silent sit-ins to marches large and small in all parts of the world, and this is still where we find ourselves today. Perhaps being on the streets, like being ensconced in a chair with a laptop, is insufficient.

Right now, we need to see the big picture, which is Obama's picture right now. We actually do need Obama to win the election in less than three weeks. We cannot endure Mr. McCain, the old man with PTSD and an anger issue backed up by little Ms. Voodoo with the Beehive. Yes, we don't want to exclude third party candidates, as young Mr. Scahill kept scolding us, but neither is this the historic moment to start building an addition in order to enlarge our living quarters! Everything these alternative media people said is technically correct, but they show no wisdom. Barack Obama is in the truest sense an African American. I don't think any of these speakers understand how big it is that he is about to win the presidency, maybe because they weren't part of the civil rights movement.

It is not time for the left to gather in halls and boo the shortsightedness of those who are working so hard to get Obama into office, to criticize them as being facile and cowardly and inadequate. The left, after all, could be there in masse at this night-time meeting because they had no meaningful political action on their schedule. Is it better to sit at a lecture given by speakers you have listened to regularly, to applaud them when they agree with you, even when they are advocating action and all you are doing is sitting on your butt in a nice old theatre? As we sat there, all across the country, thousands of earnest Obama volunteers and field organizers were still hard at work, calling voters, inviting them to talk, urging them to join the conversation American must have now and next January, when there's an administration ready to be part of it all. The gray hairs and young bloods are all too willing to criticize Obama for what he is not addressing; they don't really seem to care that we need him to get elected, because there is only one other imminent option, an utterly untenable option.

We must remember that Obama is an African American. Significantly, there were not many African Americans in the audience last night. There remains a different reality for African Americans. Obama cannot devote his campaign to talking about welfare and the poor, as these middle class, middle aged Prius drivers would have him. If he does, he is just another black man, someone to ignore, someone to brush off. To take his historic place, he has to be every inch a middle class man my parents might boast about when they call me up to say, "A black man joined our church this week. He seems very nice." These moments make us wince, perhaps, but we need to get through these moments, and bring the population with us. There are so many people out there who still don't want a black man as President. Sarah Palin can have a redneck, secessionist husband and an unwed, pregnant daughter and a prospective son-in-law who's dropping out of high school to work in the oil fields because she has the enormous privilege of being white. Obama doesn't have that. Obama has to be perfect.

And the alternative media, charged as they are with being the watchdogs of American government, as each of these speakers made clear, could better occupy themselves bringing us information instead of trying to tell us what to do with that information.

Impolitic Impoliteness and Impotent Impatience

2008-10-16T00:23:00.005-05:00

And another thing about the rudeness of Republicans in this campaign: Interrupting!

As both my children have told me many times over, people who interrupt are not really interested in listening; they are interested in telling. I've been working hard on being a better listener, which is a lot easier now that I live alone, I must confess.

But if either candidate is really to manifest the change they both profess to represent, they are going to need to listen, and after watching all the debates, I have to say that it's painfully clear that John McCain listens only long enough to find an opening for repudiation.

Interrupting another speaker is not a sign of importance, but impatience. Impatience is not a quality we seek in our leaders. On the website www.changingminds.org, "the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do," the experts on how to listen in order to influence others list the following two conditions atop their list of when NOT to interrupt: 1) When you think of something to say and 2) When they haven't finished.

Poor John McCain. He used to command respect. Now, he can't even hold on to his self-respect for the two minutes granted his opponent to reply, and his premature ejaculations from across the burnished table render him increasingly pitiful and certainly less presidential.

Rudeness and Self-Loathing on the Campaign Trail

2008-10-15T12:05:00.005-05:00

If you've read many of my recent blogs, you may realize my take on this campaign season is settling in around one issue, and it's not, as perhaps it should be, the economy. It's rudeness.

Now I know full well that our present economic disaster is what really demands our attention, and I have probably been working harder than most right-brained artistic sorts to gain sufficient understanding of investment finance and free market economics that I feel capable of voicing opinions and expressing them to my representatives in Washington. But I'd rather you read people like Paul Krugman or Dean Baker or Joseph Stiglitz. They are all much smarter than I on the issues and are actually quite understandable when they try to be. Or, better yet, watch "The News Hour" on PBS. Meanwhile, I want to talk about rudeness.

It started raising its ugly head at the Republican convention, most notably when Giuliani began speaking derisively of Obama's community organizing. By the time Sarah Palin claimed the podium, the crowds were well-primed and juiced. They have hardly stopped booing since. If this is not a sign of negative campaigning, I don't know what is. And it's gone way beyond the simplistic put-down of booing, way beyond. In fact, when I hear what people are shouting out in response to the Republican candidates' baitings, I feel even sadder for our country than I do when I look at the Dow Jones vacillations. What is it in McCain's following that makes them so much more apt than Obama's supporters to shout out hateful, negative slogans and epithets and even vile and vicious responses like "Kill him!," "Treason!" and "Off with his head!" (see Frank Rich's column in the 10/12 NYT). And why do McCain and Palin just stand up there and smile or offer only the most tepid of reprovals in response to this surge of hatred?

The best commentary I've seen yet on this was from an article by Bill Bishop in the 10/13 Slate.com. You should definitely check it out if you're interested. He documents very well what's been taking place at recent Republican rallies and opens the door to discussion of how homogeneity breeds hatred. I read it and remembered what I'd found in researching the ethnic diversity of Republican delegates to that convention a couple of months ago a diversity that was basically non-existent (see blog archive). I'd like to take Bishop's insights a little further. I went looking for additional information in the dusty reaches of my bookshelves.

There, I pulled down a dusty reader's copy of a book published in 2004 called The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. Though its title struck me as being quite the antithesis of what I've been thinking about crowds, I ran down the chapter titles and opened the book to the chapter entitled "The Difference Difference Makes." And there is was, right there in black and white in a book based on the premise that people in large groups arrive at better solutions than individuals do, "The key to this whole process is diversity."

Now I'll be fair. Surowiecki makes it clear that he is not talking about sociological factors when he cites diversity as being essential for good decision-making; he is talking, in his words, about diversity in a "conceptual and cognitive sense." Still. In a room full of white, middle class, fundamentalist and evangelist Christians, how much conceptual and cognitive diversity, seriously, are we going to find? In the McCain campaign itself, how many African Americans do we find at the top? How many Hispanics? If Joe Lieberman is McCain's claim to diversity, it is no wonder the campaign is so woefully lacking in the freshness of vision we as a nation need so desperately.

But hatred, which is what we are hearing arise from the crowds cheering in response to Sarah Palin's baiting use of words like "terrorist" or the Republican's deliberate mention of Obama's middle name (what other candidate can you think of whose middle name was ever used, except to distinguish W from Senior Bush?), is a great unifier. Tyrants and despots through time and across the globe have used hatred to hold together their supporters, virile hatred, hanging out hand-in-hand with its simpering fiancée, fear. "Common hatred," wrote Eric Hoffer in his landmark study The True Believer, "unites the most heterogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship."

And what does Hoffer say about the origin of these hatreds? "They are an expression of a desperate effort to suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self. Self-contempt is here transmuted into hatred of others... the most effective way of (masking this switch) is to find others, as many as possible who hate as we do." If my daughter was 17 and pregnant, and the father of her baby was dropping out of high school, you bet I would feel inadequate; I would feel that somehow, some way, I had failed my daughter as a parent. There are a lot of feelings of inadequacy out there, especially among people who haven't done too well in life. Why do you think that most of the people who are so keen for the Second Coming (and the Rapture!) are people who aren't doing too well economically?

It fills me with such sadness to see crowds of Republican supporters booing and jeering at good people like Obama and Biden, two men who have worked tirelessly to understand and to improve the stewardship of American values in the world and here at home. Neither fear nor hatred is an element of good health, whether you're talking about someone you love or a nation you love.

If You're Going to Be a Loser, Be a Good Loser

2008-10-07T10:12:00.007-05:00

What is with the Republicans and all their booing this year? Have they always been this sophomoric and somehow I didn't notice, or is this a new twist, the reduced vocabulary of a bankrupt policy? Perhaps, to a ticket that does seem to believe "When you've said 'Budweiser,' you've said it all," booing is all that remains of discourse. I mean, take a look at the gilded woman standing primly behind Senator McCain at all those speeches, Little Miss Cindy "I Got Rich Filling Your Gut With Cheap Beer." She doesn't speak, but she sure does dress nicely, and I can't help but notice that gold is her favorite color and wonder just why that might be.

You know, I enjoyed a good long stint of Soccer Momming myself, which I originally assumed was pretty much the same thing as being a Hockey Mom, but I'm rethinking that. Sarah Palin smiles from the podium when her admirers course with boos against Obama. She feeds them lies to fuel this booing. She actually thrives on the booing. That must be a Hockey Mom thing, and if I'm offending any Hockey Moms out there, well I think you should really be complaining to Ms. Palin instead of to me.

One thing we worked on with the little-boys-becoming-young-men on our soccer team through the years of its existence was sportsmanship. Sportsmanship may be kind of an advanced notion for people who think shooting animals who can't shoot back is fair game, I realize, but what it amounts to is this: Be nice. Don't push or elbow your opponents once you're off the field, don't brag if you're winning and don't whine if you're losing. And don't boo. Booing is for people who have no vocabulary. It's like swearing. It's what you do when you don't have any intelligence left.

Which may go a long way toward explaining why Governor Palin and her admirers find it such a perfect means of communicating their positions. And that's all I have to say today.

For Ambient Waves of Radio

2008-10-05T18:42:00.004-05:00

Since I moved back to Wisconsin last fall, I have spent a lot of my weekends driving around the state. My travel has for the most part been necessitated by family obligations and celebrations, but the drives have been as important as the destinations. At a time when I don't even use my car in town any more, I love to drive at my new, gas-conscious pace hundreds of miles at a stretch just to turn around in two days and drive back again. I know that long weekend drives may be one of those luxuries our children and eventual grandchildren will find as unthinkably old-fashioned as record players and typewriters and family meals that take precedence over soccer games and high school musicals, but we can hope one part of long weekend drives may endure: Public radio.

Public radio is the best part of driving, no matter what kind of vehicle you're steering. I love it in my old Honda Civic every bit as well as in my sister's Beamer, though I grant that the sound quality's a little better in the German car. Even when you have the great good fortune to live here, where roads (with the notable exception of billboard-blighted Highway 41) take you through landscapes so stunning that sentimental types sometimes have to pull off to absorb the full impact of gorgeousness, public radio is the best part of driving. Yes, even when they're in the middle of a fundraising campaign. Wisconsin Public Radio, DoubleupeeR as we who love it fondly refer to it, reaches nearly every part of our state. It is among the best public radio networks in the nation, a fact shown clearly by the large number of national radio shows that originate here, in studios that you'll usually found tucked away into inadequately or overly heated corners of university buildings no one else would consider occupying.

Indeed, I love WPR so much that I count myself fortunate that I only listen to radio when I'm driving. You see, I have a strict rule about talking on the phone when I'm driving. So, on afternoons like today's, when I'm driving down a highway I drive so often I not only know every speed trap and produce stand, but also how long it took the farmer at the Bethel Road intersection to sell his dying father's Ford truck versus the farmer up the road a piece to sell his enlisted son's ATV, I am invulnerable to the pleas for financial support from my beloved WPR hosts. I won't pull out my cell phone; I won't succumb to the chorus of "Yesses!" that answers each and every argument of my favorite moderators and commentators as they tell me exactly why I should spend three minutes of my drive time donating money today.

I will, of course, pay for this great all-American pleasure, and once a year, I will send in my WPR donation, but it will not be done in the heat of a moment's ardor on a back road winding among the hills of maple and oak trees overlooking round little lakes reflecting a blue sky overlain with brilliant sunshine and the unmistakeable wingspan of an eagle silhouetted up high. It will not be done from the shoulder of this two lane highway where I have paused to catch my breath along with the snatch of a poem that's been buzzing like a nectar-drunken bumblebee among the ragged blossoms of my end-of-summer mind. I will drive home and then I will do it, under the influence of things like mortgage payments and health insurance premiums and the fact that my car needs another oil change from too many drives in the countryside.

You should do it, too. Life without the intelligent discourse of public radio would be travel without roadside wildflowers waving their charming and ebullient heads as you pass, school lessons without recess or jungle gymns or maybe just without mental gymnastics, sleep without dreaming or clean pillowcases, coffee without cream and sugar. Some things must be had, like an occasional weekend drive in autumn no matter what the price of gas, as long as the radio's working. All things considered, this American life would be less worth singing without the broadcasts of public radio.

http://www.wpr.org/

Harvest 1424: Reaping What Is Sown

2008-10-02T08:23:00.012-05:00

Say a combine is rolling down the wheat fields. The combine uses an ungodly amount of gas and the exhaust it spews into the air is noxious, but hey, bread's good, especially freshly baked whole wheat spread with real Dairyland butter and dripping with sweet golden stickiness compliments of the mysteriously disappearing honeybee. The combine is rolling through the wheat fields.

But something goes wrong. Something's amok. The combine starts bucking like a rodeo horse, its powerful cutting tools gouging into the precious soil of our American farmland. It lurches across the rich loam of old Iowan riverbeds, the vast stretches of the Great Plains still alive with memories of the Dust Bowl, the arid eastern flatland of Colorado, where farmers are starting to think maybe windpower is what their land supports best, not corn for cattle or even corn chaff for ethanol. The combine grinds through the landscape of the heartland. The driver's thrown out and ends his life as another agricultural mortality. His wife, running to his aid, hearing his final lamentation piercing the roar of rogue machinery all the way into her kitchen, is also, we must regrettably note, chewed up by the wild and rampaging machine when she tries to extricate him. Sons, hired hands, daughters, brothers-in-law and kind and concerned neighbors: none can stop the machine it seems. It goes beyond the borders of this one farmer's land and continues wreaking its havoc in one neighboring field after another. Aghast, tired, and helpless, the community takes shelter and watches from porches, drinking cider on a early Fall evening.

But, behold. A lone rider comes over the horizon, riding the finest steed anyone on the porch has ever seen, chaps of finest leather, saddle studded with an uncanny amount of gemstones. "Help is on the way!"the tall, bald man shouts, waving a copy of a 3-page memorandum overhead. Soon enough, he is followed by a stampede of 435 men and women in suits. They come within sight of the rampaging combine, then throw up their hands, spin on their heels, and race back over the visible edge of the known world. The neighbors look to one another in uncomprehension. They bring out the harder cider, the one with the raised alcohol content. Hard times call for hard measures. Another posse draws near as the sunset begins to intimate the end of day here in the American heartland. Ninety nine members strong, they ride with a sense of majesty unimaginable to the representative gaggle that preceded them.

And what do they do? They fuel up the combine, shake hands all around, and ride away. The combine continues lurching its destructive path across the heartland. The people on the porch, having finished the cider, have now turned to moonshine.

I would like to thank Wisconsin's great Senator, Russ Feingold, for continuing to stand up for what is truly right, for valuing good decisions over fast decisions, for representing my children and me with such calm and intelligence. The bill passed yesterday by the U.S. Senate not only failed to address the causes of our crisis; it actually added to the debt load carried by American taxpayers and deepened our national credit crisis.

My choice of an agricultural metaphor/parable is not entirely arbitrary. One, this is a Wisconsin blog, after all, a little slice of life from the Midwest, so you must expect things like agriculture to surface from time to time, but there are interesting asides here, as everywhere, like the fact that forty-nine percent of farm accidents involved a discernible factor of haste. Does this sound relevant? Additionally, as the website www.calaged.org informed me this morning, "The high accident rate in agriculture is not an accident; it is rather the predictable consequence of specific management choices."

Familiarity: The Breeding of a President, 2008

2008-09-26T21:58:00.008-05:00

Remember the saying made famous (I believe) by Woody Allen: "I would never belong to a country club that would have me as a member?" That quip used to evoke laughter, a recognition of the powerful feelings of inadequacy that plaque not just scrawny men in oversized eyeglasses but also the rest of us. You know, those of us who aren't in any club, unless it be a poker club or bridge club or maybe a book club.

Today, we are sorting through the qualifications for office of applicants for the highest office in the land and arguably in the world. The applicants? Sarah and Barack and Joe. Oh. And McCain. Plus there was Hillary. Mustn't forget Hillary. And I find myself wondering when it was that we decided as a nation that we were on a first name basis with these people, as if we knew them personally, as if they were our family, our friends. I also find myself wondering why it is that Senator McCain has somehow missed the boat on this bonanza of familiarity. No one calls him John. I'm not even sure Cindy does. Of course, I'm not really sure she can talk, though she sure looks good standing behind him, sort of like a Barbie doll really, if you think about it.

I first realized this when I was visiting my parents, and in reference to another city, my dad commented, "Yep. Sarah's husband is going to be there." Now, I have a niece named Sarah who is engaged to be married, and so of course, given that I was in conversation with Sarah's grandfather, assumed he was already referring to Sarah's fiance as her husband. The two are, after all, already living together, a fact that fundamentalist Christians like my parents sometimes deal with by deeming them morally married. And so our conversation stumbled around for a few sentences while I tried to figure out just what the heck Sarah's Jason would be doing here in Wisconsin when he's a professor in North Carolina. Well, my dad, of course, was talking about Governor Palin. Sarah. Everywoman. The one who has the same problems it's presumed the rest of us do: the pregnant teenaged daughter, the baby with special needs, the sister with the ugly divorce proceedings, the husband with the drunk driving issues: Sarah. While we are not supposed to be talking about any of these components of Governor Palin's life anymore, since the woman has practically no substantial qualifications to be on a presidential ticket, we are left with these as the basis of her qualification. She is Everywoman and can apparently do Everything: run a marathon, skin a gigantic animal, see Russia with her own two eyes, stay tan through an Alaskan winter.

Everything, except to hold her own as a world leader. Even Laura Bush has acknowledged this. In fact, Governor Palin cannot even speak coherently to reporters, which is why the McCain campaign has kept reporters at bay for so long. Her media counterpart is probably Katie Couric, who was designated the CBS news anchor largely because of her appeal to the common folk, an audience it was hoped she'd bring with her in her transition from being a daytime talk show host. The two of them share a lot besides shapely legs, most notably a certain perkiness. Well, Katie Couric has learned the hard way that perkiness and a bright smile don't win respect or ratings. Now it's Ms. Palin's turn at bat. Ironically, one of those throwing the pitches her way is Ms. Couric, who doesn't even throw fast balls, just those high, lofting underhand tosses more characteristic of softball pitching. She even helped out Ms. Palin in her interview, when the woman who thinks she could lead our country through one of its most thoroughly challenging periods couldn't think of a word or an answer.

I listened last night to some of the follow-up in the wake of the first Presidential debate. One of the issues all the spinsters addressed was that of approachability, otherwise known as emotional appeal of the candidates or even as likability. On this account, despite the fact that McCain never once looked directly at either Obama or the camera (who was he addressing, anyway?) McCain apparently won. Nearly every commentator found Obama too professorial, too aloof. Maybe he was a little better than in previous debates, but still, he wasn't "warm." It reminded me all too much of the up-tick in Senator Clinton's popularity after she wept in public. Is this really what we are looking for in our President? Someone who's warm and cuddly, whom we know can weep and rage and rudely interrupt others as they're speaking? Someone who's just like us?

Not me. But perhaps you, dear imaginary reader, feel otherwise. Perhaps you feel someone just like you would make a good President to lead us. Me, I'm just glad there is someone better qualified than I and, that said, I leave now to go register young voters, hoping they'll have the good sense to vote for someone more intelligent and better educated than I.

Fighting Bob and the Bobbleheads

2008-09-21T23:18:00.002-05:00

Almost exactly 100 years ago, Robert M. LaFollette, then the Republican governor of Wisconsin, seeing what woes beset the good citizens of his state, commenced a concerted lifelong effort to apply the democratic ideas of Lincoln--government of, by, and for the people--to the course of state politics and in doing so launched the boat of Progressivism here in Madison. It was, without doubt, the best ship ever to be floated on our then pristine lakes, and by mid-century its decks were chockful of grateful survivors plucked from the churning waters of surging America industrialization.

The Good Ship Progressive sailed proudly here for three-quarters of a century, under several different pennants. "Fightin' Bob," as his political descendants like to call him, went from Madison to D.C., taking a trunkload of ideas and programmatic blueprints with him to the U.S. Senate and leaving the continuing care and welfare of his beloved Wisconsin workers in the able, willing hands of his first mate, son Philip. Between this extraordinary duo, Wisconsin led the nation in instituting reforms that would not be rivalled in scope by anything until FDR's programs of the Depression. Under the leadership of the LaFollette duo, which formalized itself as an independent political party under Philip's guidance, a civil service system was put in place to eliminate favoritism in hiring by the state. A horrifying incidence of industrial accidents was addressed by the creation of a Workmen's Compensation program. Campaign finance laws were set in place to make sure the vote of the people remained a vote of the common people, not just the owners of industry. A state income tax plan was pioneered here, and revenue sharing among local, county and state government was structured. Unemployment compensation began here under the guidance of the Progressives, too. But things happen. Today, here in Wisconsin as in too many other places, a governor feels fortunate and accomplished to even get an annual debt-dragging budget passed.

"All ebb and flow in the universe," wrote the Roman poet Ovid two millenia ago. "And every shape that's born bears in its womb the seeds of change." Change is everywhere. Children are different than their parents. The sapling under the parent oak is puny and misshapen. One puppy from the litter is adopted and thrives; another forages on the streets for food, and it is this dog who engenders more puppies. Change, as Ovid knew, is ubiquitous and inevitable. It means nothing to say one is an advocate for change; one may as well say one is an advocate of the sun or the wind or the sea. What matters is how one steers change, how one charts a ship's course through the tumultuous seas, what programs one proposes to advance our use of solar and wind power.

A hundred years ago, as the engines of industry roared roughshod down brand new railroad tracks across agricultural America, as immigrant families scrabbled to keep up with dizzying changes in their work prospects and their communities or maybe simply to avoid being run over, Wisconsin progressives stepped up to the challenges and held out a helping hand to the common person. Today, we seem to be holding out a helping hand to the very institutions that have misled and devastated our middle class citizens, and as we bail out the large corporations instead of the individual homeowners, we dare to say it is necessary in order to protect the common man, the taxpayer. The bobbleheads are all wagging, just like the crowds along the route of the Naked Emperor. "Bail out the profiteers now or face recession!" shout the bobbleheads.

Someone should really note, in plain language, that the common man isn't really protected by a government that supports and shores up the very institutions that have robbed him. We, the common man, the taxpayers without loopholes, the invisible men and women, are already suffering in a genuine recession. We need real change. We need new visions. We need Bob. Call us Main Street, if you will, but as the line goes: Call us! Barack, if it's you who answers to the name of Bob today, please speak up, because we're hoping to hear something. It's foggy out here on the seas of change and even the big long solid wail of a foghorn would be of service to us, give us some clue where the shore is, where the shoals. Speak the truth please, speak for us please, and give us some of that audacious hope you used to mention.

Shopping for Votes in the Homeland

2008-09-14T11:31:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I showed up in the Republican stronghold of Appleton, Wisconsin, to do my first ever round of door-to-door canvassing on behalf of a political candidate. Why I chose to drive 120 miles to walk from house to house in a steady drizzle of rain instead of doing it closer to home in my personal, progressive turf on the near-eastside of Madison is a combination of personal (my elderly, ailing parents live there) and political (there's a markedly smaller pool of Democratic volunteers there). How Republican is Appleton? Let me put it this way: Appleton is so deeply Republican, so truly Republican, that few there confess to actually being Republican. Here, in a small city that not only sounds like it's the Heartland/Homeland of America, but looks like it, too, independence, privacy and individualism are what is valued, and God above all. In other words, the perfect Petrie dish in which to drop a foreign body like myself. After all, it was this town that made me. I graduated from Appleton High School East in 1971 and fled the city limits just as soon as I could thereafter. That should be sufficient to confer a little immunity to me in this doorbell ringing business; I've already been inflicted with the local germs.

So there I was this Saturday, walking through the unrelenting rain with an armload of glossy flyers and a chest thrumming with anxiety. Why the anxiety? Well, the day before my 79-year-old mother had recounted how, when she told her bridge club I was coming up to canvass for Obama, the women had burst out giggling, "Well, I sure hope she doesn't come to my house!" Please bear in mind that these are old women who actually like me, for the most part, which means the white, middle class woman part of me, the part who likes her countertops clean and her shirts pressed, who keeps her shoes polished and her cup handles all facing the same way. Which is the part of me I'd been hoping to present up here to the good people of Appleton from the other side of their front doors, that most part, my presumed good part. But suddenly that part didn't feel adequate to the challenge of Appleton. To hear that even my mom's longtime bridge partners didn't want to see me through their screened doors increased my inbred apprehension about knocking on strangers' doors tenfold. I found myself wondering whether the pro-choice Obama sticker on my car was really such a good idea.

Frankly, I was nervous about this return to my own personal nightmare of a homeland. I mean, if I were asked to name the ugliest place I've ever been, I would name, without hesitation, Appleton. Despite its well-tended parks, despite its diligently swept streets and broad avenues, despite the neatly arranged pots of bright cerise geraniums and snappy red, white and blue banners bedecking porches painted right on schedule every five years to the day, Appleton manages to suck the soul out of the very concept of beauty. Lush gardens do not spill over walkways in Appleton; poets do not spill wisdom over the airways, and a sense of order can never fill the shoes of beauty, any more than Cinderella's stepsisters can cram their bunioned feet into her glass slipper. In the year since I renewed my Wisconsin residency, I've met several people who have told me that Appleton is a much more interesting and open community now than it was when I lived there, but it turns out all they really meant to say was that Appleton has a tapas restaurant now. Which, admittedly, is a good thing, for sure, but still somewhat woefully short of rendering Appleton "interesting and open."

It turned out my apprehensions were all for naught. No one was the least bit disturbed that an outside agitator was scouring these well-swept sidewalks looking for spare votes for Obama. Oh, not that homeowners welcomed me, not that I found the people on the other side of the door lintel open and receptive to political exchange and inquiry, not even that they turned out to be decent and friendly folk even if they did think they'd vote for McCain -- they just simply weren't home. On this cloudy, drizzly afternoon in mid-September, absolutely nobody was home except a few insane dogs who apparently found some kind of bizarre fulfillment in throwing themselves bodily at locked doors and ravaging the careful pleats of the tightly closed draperies.

What does everyone in a place like Appleton do on a Saturday afternoon when it's raining outside? After marking the last address on my soggy list NH (Not Home), I threw my clipboard into the backseat of my Civic and called it quits for the day. Driving by the big Fox River Mall on the way back to my parents' I did a doubletake; the parking lots around this indoor mall were full. Jammed. Like Christmas time in a good economy. Apparently, Appleton is the last place in the country where the middle class still feels secure enough to shop for a living and to work for the shopping. In Madison, the malls are fairly empty. The coffeeshops are full, but you could pretty much roll a bowling ball down most of the corridors of the city's malls and not hit anyone but the bored attendant at the sunglasses booth. But in Appleton, the middle class doesn't understand yet that they're an endangered specie; the parking lots are full of their Ford Explorers and Chrysler minivans, all idling.

My parents added another helpful bit of perspective. "Well, of course everyone's shopping!" they marvelled at my ignorance. "There's a Packer game on tomorrow afternoon after church!"

Oh yeah. The Packers. I think I'm going back to Madison before I learn anything else about the people I'm hoping will find something to appreciate about Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Hupp!

I Will Not Wear Purple, Yet

2008-09-10T17:37:00.012-05:00

There's this poem, a "greeting card poem," as I think of it, which has gained a certain popularity among Baby Boomer women, among my ostensible peers. In part, it goes like this:

"When I am an old woman, I will wear purple." It is, in case you've been one of the fortunate few to never have had it forwarded to you by e-mail ("Send this to your 20 closest friends, while wearing purple, of course!") or done up in flamboyant calligraphy and sent to you on a birthday card that might have said it much more succinctly ("You're old and pathetic, for sure now."), a verse touting the merits of unconventional behavior for the elderly. It is, you should also know, singlehandedly responsible for the battalions of gray haired women who travel in small mobs, all with elaborately festooned and markedly unstylish red hats. No show of "Menopause: The Musical" would be complete without at least one row full of these infamous red hats nor, for that matter, would "The Vagina Monologues."

But lately purple has taken on a new significance. Purple is in. The candidacies of Barack Obama and John McCain, one ostensibly Blue as Biden's pinstripes, the other Red as Sarah Palin's lipstick, have generated a new interest in purple. Need I explain? I think not, but just to make sure we're on the same page I'll give you three keywords: Beyond Partisan Politics. With Senator Obama seeming to represent a change from the Clinton era Democrats and McCain running as a Republican who condemns Republicans, the prospects for purple in this election year are indeed somewhat intriguing.

Tonight I listened to Washington Post columnist and veteran electoral politics observer David Broder speaking on the topic "The View From Washington: Best Prospects for Progress in Bridging Political Divides." Broder was the first speaker in a series grouped together by the theme: Getting to Purple: Beyond the Partisan Divide, presented by the venerable Wisconsin Academy here in Madison, Wisconsin. Broder spoke about why he feels that the stalemate and impasse of our current Blue/Red divisiveness may be on its way out of our political corps. His sense of impending Purpleness is based in large part on his perception of the way McCain and Obama straddle the Boomer generation, one right at the top/old end of the Boomer Gen , the other just a little bit too young. And both of them, Broder probably rightfully points out, are effectively put even a little further beyond Boomerdom than their birth years warrant, one by virtue of his military ethic, more reminiscent of those dating from the post WWII generation, the other because of his mixed race background and childhood spent out of the mainstream, continental U.S.

Broder's analysis rests upon a phenomenon that many have observed: the divisiveness that occurred to my generation, an inadvertent and enduring legacy of the rapid social change that emerged from the crucible of the sixties and early seventies. We, the Boomers, took sides. We asked that everyone take sides. We were strident, both pro and con, and what's more, we have not mellowed all that well as we've aged. Looking around at my friends and at the aging reflection in my mirror (surely it must be a defect in the mirror!), I would say he may be right. My kids do not have the same need to condemn that I feel. They are, one might say, more sensible, more practical, more moderate. More indifferent, maybe? That last one's uncertain.

But the fact remains. I don't want to be purple. I don't want to say that there's a middle ground on abortion. I don't want us to slowly exit Iraq; I want us out NOW! I don't want limited offshore drilling in delicate natural places; I want solar, wind and geothermal to be developed: NOW! I don't want moderation; the continued existence of so many people seems to depend on direct and radical intervention right now. I am a boomer. I crossed the line. And I don't think I'm stepping back over any time soon.

And I'm hoping Obama doesn't start wearing purple, either. Our parties should stand for something.
---------------------------
The cited poem is by Sandra Martz, by the way.

Choice May Not Be An Option Anymore

2008-09-07T10:38:00.001-05:00

The question of feminism is being brought up by some unusual interrogators lately, including several able media players, such as Cathy Young at the Wall Street Journal, writing, of course, in the aftermath of Cyclone Sarah. In her 9/15 column, she poses the question, "Can conservatives be feminists?" I would like to reframe the question a little, to something that to me seems a little less rhetorical and more urgent: "Can an anti-choice advocate/apostle be a leader of women?"

Canvassing for Obama last weekend, I had a long and interesting exchange on the porch of a thirty-something woman, a school teacher who had been supporting Ron Paul and now deeply interested in deciding which remaining candidate was best. At the end of our conversation, as we were shaking hands and I was preparing to open my umbrella and head back into the rain, she made one final comment. It was sufficient to stop me in my tracks. "I guess I'll probably decide on the basis of the abortion issue," she informed me. "I'm a thorough pro-life person," she smiled at me cheerily.

You know, I like to consider myself a pro-life person, too, really. As a lifelong pacifist, it's disconcerting to find that I have been robbed of that designation by people who don't really mean "pro-LIFE," but rather "pro-EMBRYO." I mean, if you are really pro-life, then you really need to be anti-war. If you are really pro-life, then you shouldn't advocate dropping bombs on babies in Baghdad or Kabul or supporting governments whose rule is based on the physical slaughter of their opposition. Slay them in debates, kill them with impeccable rationality, but please keep the guns and machetes in your pockets, boys.

When I was a young woman hewing my first pathway through the thickets of thorny issues and the insidious intellectual vines of contentious philosophies of individual rights and governance, I learned that if I was pregnant, badly injured in an accident, and taken, unconscious or incoherent to a local Catholic-run hospital, I might be left to die in favor of saving the fetus in my womb should a choice need to be made. That stunned me. It stuns me equally to hear both men and women rage against abortion while finding nothing wrong with supporting the wholesale slaughter of innocents in foreign countries or denying health care to poor people here at home, accounting for a dismaying difference in mortality rates between the rich and the poor. Yes, I am pro-life and anti-war and pro-choice, and neither Palin nor McCain are either.

A friend suggested to me recently that perhaps we will some day be rid of this controversy over when life begins due to our vastly changed abilities to read activity in the brain. Legal death is now defined by a loss of brain activity, not by heartbeat. Maybe soon we will be able to determine when life begins using this same criterion. In fact, I have to suspect that maybe we could do this sort of brain wave measurement already, if someone made it a priority. Not that I'm so naive to think this would quiet all the turmoil, but perhaps it would give us a legal starting point, just as Roe v. Wade is now our starting point, a place to stand in the thorny thicket.

Which is what I offered by way of perspective to the "thoroughly pro-life person" standing on her porch talking about the presidential candidates with me. Whomever is elected will enforce the law of the land, I reminded her. That is the function of the President. The law is Roe v. Wade. McCain will have to enforce that, just as certainly as Obama. As for the people panicking about the appointment of Supreme Court justices, well, perhaps it's time to remember that we do have a system of checks and balances.

Can an anti-choice candidate be a leader of women? Do women really want to hand over the ability to make their own decisions about their biological functions to anyone? Most of us don't even appreciate being told by someone else how to wear our hair or how much exercise we need; do we really want someone to dictate our what we must answer to one of life's most consequential decisions? Sarah Palin can believe whatever she wants about her own reproductive responsibilities and freedoms, and I will defend her right to do so as firmly as I will defend my own. But I will not willingly allow her to decide the matter for me nor for my daughter nor for the granddaughter I may be fortunate to have some day. And I will certainly not let any man decide what I can do to my own body!

Meanwhile, while I await November's verdict as to whether an anti-choice candidate can be elected the leader of American women, I'll be busy making this world a better, safer, place because you see, I'm a devoted pro-lifer.

The Damage in Utero & Other Feminist Issues

2008-09-06T16:19:00.000-05:00

The charges have been levied: Democrats are being sexist because we're wondering if the Hockey Mom is our best choice for Vice President. That would be Sarah Palin, Hockey Mom, and mother of a 4-month-old baby afflicted with Down's Syndrome. (Governor Palin, if you object to "afflicted" and have an urge to correct it to "blessed," I would politely ask you to refrain from doing so anywhere within 1,000 miles of me. You may feel blessed with your child, but Trig will one day want to hock his soul to have the lifestyle and the life expectancy of his brother and sisters.)

So. When we wonder aloud whether Baby Trig is being best-served by being handed from person to person under the bright lights and loud noises of the 2008 RNC, we are apparently being sexist, according to the Republicans. And who should know better what sexism is, right, than those who have for decades now protested the E.R.A., abortion rights, birth control rights, even, most recently, the rights of adolescent girls to be vaccinated against Human Papillomavirus? This alleged sexism is apparently a sin of omission, according to both the McCain campaign as well as the right wing talk shows; we have not posed the question of Obama: Can you take good care of your daughters while running for the presidency?

My oh my. How the Republicans twist, even now in the twenty-first century when they're the only ones on the dance floor still thinking this dance form is amusing. Obama is certainly taking good care of his two daughters by running for the Presidency. In fact, if Obama doesn't win this election, the prospects for his two little girls are really scary; John McCain and Sarah Palin, hand in hand and without any meaningful differences, would like to take away from the women of tomorrow anything close to reproductive rights. And yes, ladies and gentlemen of the electoral jury, that includes the right to use birth control, the right to any form of abortion, even the right to use in vitro fertilization. This is what the Right to Life has come to mean.

I just came out of a talk by Minnesota Congresswoman Betty McCollom, NARAL President Nancy Keenan, and actor David Eichenberg. If you wonder what Eichenberg is doing in this heady company, perhaps you can look to his five sisters or to the fact that he was, as he says, "damaged in utero" when his mother went through the pain and anguish of the JFK assassination while pregnant with him! These three wonderful people were out on one of the finest September days ever to breeze through the city of Madison to tell Madison feminists (including male feminists) how critical our involvement is to winning this election, to remind us how critical winning this election is to the fragile rights we've managed to gain, how endangered Roe v Wade is and what the ramifications will be if we lose its protection and freedom. Every thing they said today was right-on and motivating...until the Congresswoman asked us all NOT to go after Sarah Palin on a personal level, to leave Palin's pregnant daughter and her baby son out of the public debate. For me, to whom the personal IS political, for whom lifestyle and yes, even clothing (think of Cindy McCain's gold dress here, please!) is a statement about who we are and what we believe, that was awfully difficult to here, and I admit my applause was somewhat perfunctory and tepid.

But I will try. However, since I wrote most of this posting last night before I heard these intelligent and hard-working advocates for women speaking this fine morning, I decided I still get to post this, complete with my obviously personal commentary about obviously personal parts of the candidates' lives. The speakers were right, though, and the next time someone says something to me about Sarah Palin's baby or her daughter, I am going to do my best to reply with something like, "And how about the fact that she thinks it's fine that insurance companies pay for Viagra for men but not birth control for women?"

And the next time someone tells me that it's sexist to question whether Palin can be a good mother and a candidate, I am going to remind them that it's also sexist to say that Obama's lack of military service is any more a deficit for him as a man than for her as a woman.

The Co-optation of Broken Glass

2008-09-05T17:48:00.008-05:00

Lately, we've been hearing all kinds of illusions to a metaphorical glass ceiling. Apparently, everyone's got one, and they've all got a heck of a lot of cracks in them! When you stop to really think about this glass ceiling, apparently as ubiquitous as granite countertops in nicer homes these days, you might just wonder why no one is fixing this damaged ceiling...or is someone?

I'm going to get back to that idea one of these days -- the idea that someone has already summoned a glazier who is, as we sit here reading and writing, hard at work replacing it, perhaps with something a little better tempered. Meanwhile, I am thinking about the big panes of glass at the entrance to our downtown Urban Outfitters store. They're not ceilings, but walls, nonetheless I'm thinking about them because they are definitely cracked, with approximately the same 18 million cracks of that damned overhead pane! And in downtown Madison, cracked glass connotes one thing to anyone fifty or over: Political protest.

This blog is, in part, the story of coming home to Madison, Wisconsin after two decades in the American West. I was an undergraduate here at the UW when tear gas and patchouli occupied most of the spaces between blander molecules of oxygen and carbon. State Street, where Urban Outfitters and WinterSilks and Lands' End and Starbucks now dominate, linking then as it does now the liberal arts campus and the State Capitol, was a place where merchants who lived off student allowances regularly boarded up their storefront windows or suffered the certain consequence of shattered glass. Rocks were lobbed, as well as tear gas canisters; students were slammed into buildings by police in full riot gear, in a way journalists in St. Paul this week can vouch is still accepted law enforcement practice. Shattered glass was a common sight along that historic row of storefronts.

Now, 40 years after the historic demonstrations of 1968 across our nation, shattered glass ushers one into the hip environment of Urban Outfitters, and a woman who doesn't even believe a woman has the right to control her own biological destiny hopes to be the one whose hand, upraised in victory, brings the second highest glass ceiling in the land crashing down. Something is wrong here, and yes, I do need to protest once more. History is being rewritten here. You can buy pre-faded, pre-torn jeans at many of the priciest stores in 2008, and you can bring down the roof as well as the glass ceiling just by being a regular old hockey mom and going to all the PTA meetings because the meaning of this glass has been co-opted and corrupted. History is being rewritten by someone who dots her "i's" with smiley faces, hearts, and little daisies. A cheerleader is on one of our presidential tickets.

I was having coffee with a friend the other day, and she had a certain forlorn look in her eyes when she commented, "I have more qualifications for being Vice President than Sarah Palin." And she was right. Those 18 million cracks that Hilary Clinton noticed in the glass? They were created by the 18 million voters who recognized Senator Clinton's extraordinary strength and wisdom, experience and concern, and love and respect for our American democracy. They have nothing to do with a cheerleader for a man who recommended that his own wife compete in a bare-breasted beauty pageant. They have nothing to do with Sarah Palin.

The White Fields of Minnesota

2008-09-04T11:50:00.009-05:00

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with having white skin, except that it has a proclivity to get sunburned and a propensity to show blushes and flushes too easily. But when you see a convention floor packed with white faces, all flushed with nearly Pentecostal fervor, there is something terribly wrong, for this sea of whiteness is purporting to represent the best interestsof the whole American people. Fully 93 percent of the RNC delegates were white, a loss of ethnic diversity from previous conventions, while at this year's DNC, 65 percent was white, with Hispanic and Black delegates holding steady percentages from previous years.

Watching the RNC this week made me think all these florid-faced delegates had spent way too much time as spectators at collegiate football games, quaffing way too much weak and soulless beer (probably Bud Light, making Cindy McCain's fortune grow) and following the gymnastics of energetic, bouncy cheerleaders with altogether too much interest and acclaim. Am I the only casual observer who thinks it's notable that Republicans love booing so much? That they revel in mimicry and the mindless incantations of crowd chantings? Even as a college student deeply involved in the street marches of the antiwar protests, I remember feeling diminished intellectually by the expectation that I, along with thousands of my marching peers, was capable of chanting mindless slogans over and over and over. "Drill, Baby, Drill!" is not only mindless; it's sexist and downright frightening. I wonder what symbolic act of rape underlies the chant, or if any of the Republican women lustily chanting along, enraptured in the spell of Sarah Palin, are at all disturbed by the flagrantly male vision, the Great Mother Earth supine below their relentless drills.

Sarah Palin is the mistress of Big Oil. The checks she awarded to Alaskans were taken straight from the pockets of everyone in the lower 49 and the territories who has born the burden of the record-breaking profits recorded by the oil companies who rule Alaska, along with Palin's beloved pipelines. The white faced delegates at the RNC were berserk with happiness.

Me, my own white face is flushed with embarrassment at the spectacle of so many alleged adults shouting like beer-sotted frat boys.

Plundering New Orleans, Again.

2008-09-02T10:47:00.005-05:00

Three years ago, a Republican President fiddled as New Orleans drowned. I have still not forgotten the images of Hurricane Katrina refugees huddled in the stench and squalor of a doomed athletic stadium or the (sometimes erroneously) painted messages on the porches of abandoned houses, "Checked for bodies." Just several weeks ago, another body was found in one of those houses, another tic mark added to the terrible toll.

This week, as Hurricane Gustav rolled in, we had a chance to see what the Republicans of Washington DC along with Louisiana's Governor and New Orleans' mayor have learned from Katrina. On all three fronts of government involvement, apparently quite a lot was learned. New Orleans was evacuated well ahead of time. Evacuation was relatively complete and enforced; staying was not given as an option nor, for longer than residents wanted and eventually insisted, was returning. The National Guard was mobilized, and units across the country were on high alert to ship out down to the overwhelmed bayoux. President Bush set down his fiddle (he has no ear for music anyway--the fiddling was horribly out of tune) and picked up a shovel and a mop, cancelling his opening night speech at the Republican National Convention, along with his pit bull's, the one without lipstick, Dick Cheney's. The Republicans up in St. Paul heaved a sigh of relief so deep and many lunged it blew Gustav just a little bit westward, and New Orleans was by and large spared; at least its levees held.

The Republicans once again lucked out. They didn't have to suffer the ignominy of acknowledging GWB. and his Dick as two of their own and, just to be sure, they cancelled Day One of the RNC. I suspect they were afraid that the lure of the podium might have proven too much for an exiting President still hopeful of adding at least a thin coating of polish to his severely tarnished administration. I mean, there was really nothing for Senator McCain to do, no reason for the convention to be cancelled. It made absolutely no difference to the people of New Orleans or to the weather. John McCain has no special powers. He does not muster the troops. He does not grant aid. He does not wield a hammer or run a pumping station. To pretend that the cancellation of Day One of the Republican convention was anything other than an avoidance of having to host Bush and Cheney in person and to loan an appearance of power to McCain is insulting to the good people of New Orleans, who once again have been booted from their homes and saddled with debt and repair bills while John McCain seized the opportunity for a nap and George wondered how to tune his fiddle.

I'm glad Barack Obama maintained his speaking schedule this Monday and showed up to honor the voters who had changed their lives to make room for hearing him address their economic concerns on this Labor Day. He ended up speaking a lot about the need to help our Gulf Coast sisters and brothers, but he also addressed the 8-year-long storm assaulting not only the Gulf Coast, but every state except Sarah Palin's oil-rich Alaska: the economic storm that has ripped away our economic health and the security of our homes and families.

Palin: The Monster in Make-Up

2008-09-02T08:56:00.003-05:00

I have never felt worse about being a woman. I mean, when I was a stick-skinny adolescent tagged with the painfully appropriate nickname "Plywood Oshkosh" after a local producer of those flat sheets of pressed wood, I felt badly. When my flat chest suddenly burgeoned into enormous and fleshy mounds spouting milk like would-be Vesuvians, I felt so alienated from my body and sex I nearly regretted having a baby. Oh and then there have been all the constant, smaller humiliations of being a woman, of acknowledging on a daily basis that yes, there is at least one trait held in common with Britney and Paris and Ivanna and the Olson twins. But none of this compares with the pain of hearing that Sarah Palin is on the Republican ticket.

Why does she bring more pain? Doesn't her enthusiastic political activism as a woman remove her well beyond comparison to the apparently brainless and self-centered antics of fashion-conscious celebrities? Is it just that she's a Republican? Is it just that her upswept hair reminds me eerily of those beehive hairdos inflicted upon an earlier decade? No and no and no and hearty no. What makes Sarah Palin so utterly painful to acknowledge as a woman, her candidacy for John McCain's Vice Presidential spot so terrifying, her potential to claim a spot in history denied any other American woman so revulsive is just that: she might claim a spot in history denied Ferraro 24 years ago, denied Hillary Clinton just this summer and the first woman to win a chance to govern the most powerful nation on earth just might be a woman who denies women the right to control the destiny of their own body. To have an anti-choice woman as a serious Vice Presidential contender is such a serious event that it calls into question everything feminism has accomplished, everything that my age-mates and I fought for back in the seventies, everything that Congresswoman Ferraro and Senator Clinton represented so well: the fact that our bodies do not control our destiny.

If Sarah Palin can abandon her disabled baby and pregnant daughter to run for the vice presidency, I think every bit of my present nauseous tumult of anxiety is eminently reasonable. This is not a seriously thinking, doing woman; this is something of a self-gratifying monster.

Sympathy for the POW

2008-08-24T18:46:00.005-05:00

He was a prisoner of war. OK. I'll say straight out and with meaning, "That's very unfortunate, and I'm sorry to hear it. I wouldn't wish that experience on anyone."

He was a prisoner of war who shunned receiving an earlier release than his fellow prisoners. That leaves me speechless. I guess I've always had a hard time understanding blind loyalty. I mean, it's great for dogs, but I highly recommend intelligence as a basis for human decision-making processes in general.

Granted, there are a few circumstances in which primordial instinct overcomes any rational thought. Mothers, of nearly any species with brains bigger than acorns, defending their offspring. People under physical attack by nearly any species bigger than a squirrel. People reading consecutive anonymous mass-generated e-mails proclaiming 1) that Obama is a radical Muslim intent on overthowing Christendom and 2) Obama is a follower of a radical black Baptist separatist intent on overthrowing conservative white Baptists. Sometimes our instincts take over the habitual restraint of rationality.

Neither being a POW nor voluntarily remaining a POW seems to be to have anything to do with Presidential qualifications. What being a POW does mean is that one was captured and held in captivity by an enemy. What refusing early release means is that one prefers captivity to freedom. Yes, I know that sounds ruthless, but it's true. There may be reasons one prefers captivity, but still, one is preferring captivity. Being captured is no more assurance of Presidential fitness than being old is. Oh. Did I say McCain is too old?

He is too old and white and wealthy and his definition of loyalty apparently never extended to his wife. He doesn't want me to have health coverage, but he wants me to pay for his Medicare, which he collects even though he's a millionaire married to a millionaire and God forbid they should show us her tax forms or his medical forms. He was, after all, a POW, and he called Georgian President Saakashvili not only once, but several times during the armed conflict between Russia and the U.S. in South Ossetia. Oops. Did I say the U.S.? Meanwhile, Saakashvili was asking Senator Joe Biden to come to Georgia to aid in diplomatic dialogues. Or was that Vice Presidential candiate Joseph Biden?

John McCain was a POW. That doesn't mean a thing as far as his qualifications or readiness or appropriateness to assume the mantle of the U.S. presidency. Senator John Kerry was a soldier and the Republicans scorned his service record. Our present President managed to somehow dodge all verifiable service even in a peacetime National Guard stint. John McCain served. That's honorable. John McCain was a POW. I'm sorry for that, Senator McCain, but I'm deeply concerned that you seem to think that's proof of your readiness to sit in the great Oval Office. Tell me how I can afford to buy health insurance of my choice. Tell me how I can afford to go to the dentist or to insure the car I can't afford to fill with gas. But don't tell me about your sense of loyalty. I have a dog for loyalty. What I want from you is intelligence and leadership and a sense that you care about repairing the great divide that's widened in our country, between those like you, who have so many houses they can't count them, and people like me, who can't pay to heat the one house that they finally saved enough to buy. I want you to fix what's so broken. I want you to give me the thousands of dollars you collect in Medicare every year at one of your seven houses so maybe I can go to the doctor when I get sick.

Thanks for listening, John. And I really am sorry you were imprisoned all those years. Really.

Is It Over Yet?

2008-04-27T17:38:00.005-05:00

Wow. I think the winter may have finally ended. The lake beyond the windows of my second floor study, my aerie, is ice-free. Down at the park on the other big lake, the snow fencing is down, and where it stretched across the gently mounded lawn now college students loll, chasing Frisbees, sex with or without love, and dreams in varying progressions. The big blue barrels of sand at the street corners are gone, too. For most of the longest winter ever, a true record breaking season, they served little purpose but that of underachieving trash cans. Sand supplies could not keep up with this year's snow, more than twice the usual amount, and significantly more than on any other year of recorded weather statistics.

For me, the snow was the least of what made this winter challenging, since I drive so little and have such a minor length of sidewalk for shovelling. But my mom was diagnosed with Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis in January, more familiarly known if not any friendlier for the nicknaming: Lou Gehrig's Disease. In February, I lost my job, without warning or reason, and was left abruptly without either income or health insurance. And in March, I walked my beloved old dog to the vet's clinic one last time and carried him up the six steps, laying him down on the cold steel examining table from which he would never again rise. The snow was nothing, really, and still it broke all records.

It is now April. I wrote this poem for my mom. I haven't yet been able to compose one for the loss of my sense of self-worth or for the love of my dog. But here is this poem, for I hope to recover from this winter despite everything, maybe even because of everything.

Mom, Dying

Doesn't there come a
day when the sunrise
is not sufficient, when
the trailed whistle of
some faraway train holds
no whisper of places
unseen, a day when you
will loosen the grip
of your boney fingers on
my pulse and just slip
into the night I have
pooled at your feet
with my ink? Do you
love me enough to
leave me lonely?

Pennies From Heaven

2008-01-06T00:34:00.000-06:00

"Leave the pennies for the gleaners," my mom taught me, lightly slapping my hand when it began reaching for the coppery disc on the sidewalk. "Someone needs them."

I work in retail these days. I have done so for nearly ten years as a full fledged adult. Sometimes I even enjoy it. I have, after all, had the enormous good fortune for most of those years and various retail assignments of putting books into the hands of readers. There is hardly a greater pleasure that does not involve sex or deep love.

But here in Wisconsin, there are several discernible differences in retail. One: they still use cash here, including what I thought was obsolete, the personal check, scratches in ink on paper, torn out carefully and duly recorded in the register, before leaving the register, bien sur. But it is the cash aspect that really unhinges me, for here in Wisconsin, they not only pay with cash; Two: they count out pennies. They have coin purses, and they use them. It's unnerving. Haven't they seen the commercial where the shopper who offers cash holds up the long line of plastic payers,incurring widespread discain? Here, not even the checks are paid by plastic. One gets the unshakeable feeling that these customers, once home, remove the top from an old shoe box and rifle through the business envelopes, plain white, number ten size, lined up therein, where the budget is sorted and recorded, all in cash. These are people, ancient people, who drive to drop their paper check or paper money and metal coinage, into the drop box at the utility company rather than pay by either mail or plastic. These are the people who really don't understand that what they save in postage cannot possibly repay what they lose in gas by driving needlessly across town. These are the hopelessly middle class, no matter how well off they are. Where do they come from?

I hate them, these penny pinchers. The pennies, you may recall, are to be left for the gleaners. I despise these petty people. They will drive back home, all the way across town, if they forget the coupon they intended to use. They'll drive back again, coupon clutched in sweaty palm, to save money. They don't think about gas. It's all about the merchandise. You can't giftwrap gas, after all.

Let It Be Peace

2007-12-15T16:08:00.001-06:00

Let it snow
Since we've no place but
earth to go and
Let it snow
sitting by the fire's still
delightful
Let it snow.
Let it be
Let it be
Let it be
Now that I've
found you
Let it be me.
Let it snow
Let it be
Snow and
Words of
Wisdom
Let it be
Peace.

Christmas Bells Are Ringing

2007-12-09T18:44:00.000-06:00

Home Again Jig

One two three
Homes in one year: Rock,
Brick, and now this:
Water. One two three homes
Because I still say
That home is where the
Heart is, without reservation; home
Is where the love is, without
Conservation, and I am here
Now with all my heart, my old
Four chambered dwelling place.
I don't care who or what your
Love is, or mine. Now comes the
Water. Rain and dew and sleet and
Snow and what they call
Humidity, as if it's not
Just a deficit of oxygen or hyperbole
of hydrogen, and fog and early
Morning mist and the lakes them-
Selves big, loaded breasts full and heavy
And heaving, resplendant and tremulous. Oh,
There's water water everywhere, and
I, parched Dragon thirsty Sage, gulp deep
Draughts until milk runs in the ancient channels,
The creases of my aged chin. One two
Three homes in which the heart has been pounding
Some faltering beats, some steady, some
African rhythms, a little mambo, could
That be, yes, Aleutian, or just one
Single somber note pulsed by a muffled
Drumstick at intervals through the prolonged
Darkness. Can you Tango Maureen
Or just dance with me slowly now,
Now that I've come home, will you
Dance with me and let my head, my
Graying head, rest for just this one mo-
Ment on your chest, your breast, rest,
While our feet inch this way and
That but do not go any distance for
We are done moving; now that I am home? Oh a
One and a two and a three, oh a
Year. The rock did not allow my feet to
Set down roots nor to leave a set of
Footprints. The bricks did not let my de-
Flated veins gain purchase on dingy
Window ledges. Here, where prevailing
Northern damp makes my dry wit leary
And I am afraid of fungus and ap-
Prehensive of mold and my old dog
Dismays me with his delight in the smell of
Rot all around, my toes, once bound by
Brick once bound by granite, be-
Gin to uncurl in the loose, black loam, to
Stretch like the arteries of ivy that
Clung to the walls of my
Grandmother's house, here
I can be stronger than ever I knew
To be, stronger and with my
Blood roaring like a lava stream
Down the green avenues.

December 7, 2007

And It's Beginning to Snow!

2007-12-06T09:00:00.000-06:00

The first of December brought the first big snow; now it is winter. Now we understand the blue barrels standing sentinel, the wavering lines of feeble fence posts strung across lakeshore parks like the first battalion dispatched to hostile territory. Now we understand a little more about why so many people here are fat; I haven't gone on a run all week, and shivering is the only way besides shovelling I've burned significant calories. I now know why so many Northerners drink too much hard liquor; it burns on the way down, all the way down through one's core. We even understand a little about the Vikings and unpopular fashions in fur. I'm not kidding.

The storm started out in veils, lovely, gauzy veils. Walking down Willy Street on a cold Saturday morning with a bag of groceries hung from one mittened hand, a clutch of 8-foot metal strips draped more awkwardly from the other, I can't help but sing oh so softly "Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow," for the snow falling in big soft flakes is as pure and joy-evocative as a puppy slathering kisses on my cheeks. My neighbor is out scattering sand from Guardsman Blue Barrel over his sidewalk. "I have a theory that an underlayer of sand makes it easier to shovel when the ice comes," he explains. "Of course, I'm a Floridian. What do I know about snow?"

Indeed. No one knows much about how to cope with the snow we find ourselves facing when the gauzy veils and glittery raiments of this storm are ripped off later that day. It is a mean storm, a menacing storm, and one from which we are still doing our best to recover three days later as the next storm takes aim. By the time I come out of a matinee of "Rent" Saturday afternoon, it's sleeting, and every weather forecaster in the area is busy explaining the critical nuances of difference and pain between "sleet" and "freezing rain," both of which enter every forecast. I cancel my plans to stroll up and down State Street in the afterglow of the show and duck instead into the nearest inadequate bus shelter. Arriving home, I do one quick pass with the snow shovel down my small stretch of sidewalk. The earlier sanding, done under the approving eye of the Floridian, does absolutely nothing to mitigate the weight of the snow, now packed heavily with the wet weight of the continuing sleet. My plastic shovel, so perfect for the dry, powdery snow of Colorado, is barely adequate. By the next day, it will be useless.

Here, you need ice choppers and heavy metal shovels. Sand and salt, in abundance. Where I spurned and lamented salt last week for being unecological and bad for my dog's paws when well meaning neighbors sprinkled it on my porch steps, now I lust for it. I attack with a ski pole, the sharpest tool I have available. After clearing one narrow walkway of ice and snow, I retreat. Perhaps we are meant to stay indoors all winter. Eat, drink and grow fat. Read thick novels with a satisfying romanticism. Look up new recipes for beef stew on the internet. Call your mother. Call your children. "It's your mother. Where ARE you?"

The Ice Queen haunting our streets so early this year is a steely and forbidding spectre, outright nasty and downright vengeful at times, but so lovely one does succumb to her allures ; we go outside even in the most frigid temperatures just to gawk at her beauty. When back indoors in the warmth that's going to cost so much this year, still she calls and irresistibly one takes up a position just on the other side of the big front windows now encased in nearly invisible plastic sheeting, just to gaze upon her wintry wonderland. Her cape snaps behind her in a stiff wind off the lake, and the shoreline ices over in the roughness of waves halted in mid-breaking. There is a giggle and a glitter, and she's gone. It's quiet out there. The silence of a new snowfall is the only silence on earth that holds its own next to the silence of a military graveyard. Silence, I fully believe, comes only in white. Until the next enormous plow, the Queen's ungainly companion and loval mastiff, lumbers down the street, sparks flying. Give your dog a bone.

.

Somewhere My Love the Ice Cometh

2007-11-05T20:06:00.000-06:00

Once every week, my daily run follows the bike path from the lake behind my house to the lake on the other side of the isthmus. It's a very nice run of approximately 5 miles which I break into two with a few minutes of yoga out on a skinny spit of land extruding into Lake Mendota, a curled finger of a spit undoubtedly built for some purpose of marine navigation but suiting my terrestrial ends just fine. Living on the isthmus between the city's two bigger lakes, almost every one of my running routes is at least partially along lakeshore, but this is the only run that ends with me, solo, nearly surrounded by water.

On the way out here to my restoration point, I run down the leaf-strewn sidewalks of my residential neighborhood, where the great painted ladies of the Victorian age strut their intensely modern colors among the smaller, humbler clapboard houses that grew up in their shade in successive decades. Autumn has claimed its toll slowly this year, and many of the tallest trees are still boasting their summer head of foliage. Like old men with thinning hair, though, they are doomed to loss and exposure; tonight's wind is careening mercilessly down the dark, post-Halloweerie streets. The painted ladies giggle behind their fans and bat their eyelashes.

I run along the canal that connects the two lakes, where the new bike path sees few travellers at this hour, where the canoes and rowboats have all been hauled out of the water and berthed for the season. Dipping smoothly under the eight lanes of East Washington, the bike path on one side of the canal accommodates the purposeful, travellers with a sense of time and direction, while the clean, flat surface of the cement on the other side affords the homeless or simply directionless a shelter and a stopping place of sorts, at least a roof overhead. Sitting on a picnic table in the cold morning, a young man rocks back and forth, back and forth, gripping his knees tight to his chest. I've seen him on other runs, on other routes, doing the same rocking to the same unheard beat from perches on other picnic tables.

I run through Tenney Park, where I know ice skaters, would-be Olympians of pint sized dimension but gigantic determination will dominate in a couple more months, their blades flashing, clacking. "Lara's Theme" rises unbidden in my brain as I lope on by the inlet from the lake, the only tune that ever succeeeded in seducing me around more than one lap of any ice rink. It is not such a good tune for running; I soon discard it, send it skittering over the inlet's surface like a stone over water. To my surprised imagination it seems to clatter, though, as if water, upon the song's contact, turned immediately to ice on this November morning. I glance over my shoulder feeling like some Ice Queen's tapped me with her long nailed forefinger. "You hoo," she whispers. "I'm right behind you." I pick up my pace another notch.

And then there's the big lake in front of me. The beach is empty, the bathhouse boarded. The lifeguard's chair has been pulled to one side and its sign: "No Salvavida Presente" leans unnecessarily against its legs. Two weeks ago, I still saw the occasional pair of arms plying the calm and measured strokes of a strong and regular swimmer through the lake waters. No longer. Today the water is rough, tough, their darkness articulated by the sneering curl of white froth at their crashing crests. I am the only one out here today, and out on the spit it feels even colder and lonelier than on shore.

We are bracing now for winter. The blue sand barrels and the snow fences are standing, silent but connotative. Nature herself is less subtle. The waves today are roaring, like lions cornered and knowing capture is imminent, inescapable, the ferocity of freedom about to be broken. Winter is not a casual event here, not like it is in Colorado. Here, it rides in on the back of the ruthless North Wind. Here, one learns early about hunkering down. About the thickening of the blood. About why the squirrels have been so frantically, obsessively busy while you sat lazily in the sunshine on your front porch laughing at their antics with your neighbors. I have seen these lake waves frozen in their breaking crescendoes along these selfsame shorelines, violent as any tectonic shiftings of the American West.

But today out on the spit, the sky is deep dark blue, the wind clean and cold and knifelike, and my Sun Salutation evokes a poem one of my children learned in kindergarten and then brought home to share with me, by Byrd Baylor:

The way to start a day is this--
Go outside and face the east and greet the sun
with some sort of blessing or chant or song that
you made yourself and keep for early morning.
The way to make the song is this--
Don't try to think what words to use until you're
standing there alone.
When you feel the sun, you'll feel the song, too.
Just sing it.

But don't think you're the only one who ever
worked that magic.
Your caveman brothers knew what to do.
Your cavewoman sisters knew, too.
They sang to help the sun come up, and
lifted their hands to its power.
A morning needs to be sung to.

I will sing my song, the Earth fantastic. I will sing it shivering and trembling, but I will sing it loud and proud, too, to be heard over the crashing of these waves

Being and Smelliness

2007-10-25T11:15:00.000-05:00

I moved back here with my old, old dog. Verifiably fifteen years old, possibly, says the vet, as much as two years older. Translated by the popular equation to Human Years, he's 105 years old or maybe 119. When he pants heavily and his breath lunges my way, the foulness of the smell convinces me 119 is probably assessing his age on the young side. Doggie breath. There is absoutely no way on earth I'll subject him to the canine version of periodontics at this point in his life nor any way on earth I could possibly afford to pay for it.

My old, old dog seems quite content here in our new home, except for the fact, lamentable to me as well, that there are no young people living here with us. He can't make it up the stairs to the second story, but he does well enough with the six porch steps if he takes them slowly. His interests have dwindled a lot of late, but we still make it outside for two walks every day. Some mornings he just looks up at me as if to plead, "Do we really need to do this again?" but once he's out the door the smells of a Midwestern autumn are so ripe and rife they afford generous compensation for any ardors of four-legged walking. He barely makes it around the block some days, but that's only partially due to his arthritic limbs and weakening cardiovasculars; the smells here distract and detain him prodigiously. All around, the rich dank earth exudes olafactory evidence of decomposition. It's a medley of smells my old doggie finds utterly irresistible, possibly heavenly. It's probably the same smell other dogs pick up from him when they come up to sniff salutations. It's the smell of death, reborn, death, as alive and well among us every fall as birth is in spring. It's a smell with which I feel uncomfortably and increasingly familiar since moving back here.

Somehow I find it funny that people here in Madison have composting systems in their backyards. The whole of southcentral Wisconsin feels like an enormous compost bin to me, arrived from the dessicated soil and air of the Southwest. There, you practically needed to send out engraved invitations to lure out an earthworm; here, you just turn over any stone. My skin is softer than it was when I moved to Colorado back in my thirties. My hair feels more abundant and full of body. And my body smells like a whole new creature. A creature, I might add, I'm not so sure I actually like. This creature perspires, and sometimes reeks of effulgents we called as youth and completely without affection: BO. I sweat, therefore I am. Am a Wisconsinite. I find this very unsavory. It, this BO, this Body Odor, is nearly sufficient in itself to compel me back to Colorado. It makes my own body feel alien to me.

I suppose I always perspired, but truthfully, I didn't realize it . I lack any scientific knowledge of the process, but I imagine, when I ponder this now, that it must have evaporated immediately upon meeting the dry air during my prior existence as an arid dweller. I do know for a fact that the transevaporation rate approaches the incredulous in the southwest, that snow more often evaporates than melts. Soon after I moved to Colorado, we had a typical fall snowstorm. You know, a foot of snow in one day in October, similar to what they had just last week. The next day was sunny and dry and the children complaining that I made them wear sweaters to school. Once they were at school, I set about some fall gardening: digging holes for trees bought at the fall clearance sale. I thought the ground, after such a snow, would be dampened and softened for my shovel. And it was, for nearly two inches of depth. The moisture never went deeper because it evaporated into the air, explained my new neighbors, instead of melting into the ground. Ditto, apparently, for perspiration and its uncomely companion, Miss Malodor. Here in Wisconsin I am face to face and nostril to nostril with the unavoidable and unpleasant truth: I am damp and human and sometimes I smell as badly as my 119 year old dog. I am, it seems undeniable, every day mortal. Nuances of fecundity and rankness waft around me as though my familiars. My dog, deaf and nearly blind, recognizes me by scent, and I wonder if my friends do, too, now that I feel like something out of the compost bin.

I'm adjusting. I rummaged around in all the old toiletries I brought with me across the country and found a stick of antiperspirant, never used. I tried using it, but it seems antiperspirant not only turns hard and yellowy when aged, it also turns gluey, and my armpits not only perspired all day but stuck to my clothing. I have since gone organic, and it seems to be better. I may still be mortal, but unlike my dog, at least I don't smell like it any more.

The smell of dry leaves is a sweet part of fall, like pumpkin pie and hot cider. That is what I choose to remember, and the banks of brilliant foliage as I drive from Madison to Minnesota on a sunlit afternoon in October. I am not dwelling upon the layers of wet leaves compacting underfoot, relinquishing their scarlets and ochres and bronzes to the blackness of rich dirt beneath cloudier skies. But I'm fully aware of them, oh yes.

Today, I noticed the city has set up long lines of snow fences across the parks which border the major arterials. I shivered as I hurried by them in my running shorts and tee shirt.

Unbearable Niceness of Being

2007-10-14T02:05:00.000-05:00

My favorite card of this past year was a pale green birthday greeting with a small nosegay of daisies its only illustration, neatly drawn and pleasingly simple. "On your birthday," reads the cover, "remember: Smile and the world smiles with you." Opening, the admonition concludes, "Unless you smile too much. Then it's just creepy." I bought at least four copies of this card when I discovered it, knowing it would bring a laugh to several of my friends, young and old, mostly female.

I have a single card left, and I'm keeping it. Or maybe I'll be able to send it on its way after I expunge a few related thoughts from my system today. You see, I've been living here in Wisconsin for two months now, and I just have to say something about the way everyone is so invasively and instantaneously intimate. It's related to the card. It's related to phoniness. It's related to excess. And it has something to do with the fact that I've actually been hugged here by people to whom I was introduced with the basic and impersonal manly handshake just a brief half hour before. It's too much. There's an element of restraint amiss around here and a subsequent lack of respect. You don't invade other countries, and you don't invade other persons. You wait for an invitation or a (substantial and subtantiated) provocation.

I just started a new job, adding another fresh batch of strangers to the cookie dough of my life. On Day One, within minutes of our mutual supervisor leaving our presence, a seemingly reserved coworker told me all about a scandal that had forced him from his last job. Until then, he'd seemed relatively normal and I reasonably clear of any prejudice toward or against him. Another coworker, the next day, within mere hours of shaking my hand for the first time not only shaved my name to a diminutive as if we'd known each other since childhood but was fluently progressing from a detailed enumeration of his wife's ailments and health conditions to his own when I politely pleaded work on the other side of the building. Quite frankly, I was starting to fear I was soon going to be hearing about the size and consistency of their respective bowel movements, a little bit of personal knowledge I rather like to keep for a little later in a relationship, like right before divorce or death and also to reserve for those with whom I share either blood or bed.

Over familiarity seems incredibly pervasive here. On the many and labyrinthine bike paths of Madison, people routinely smile and wave as they pedal by in the opposite direction. At first I thought the difference was due to the fact that bicyclists here seem to favor upright handlebars to racing drops and hence came face to face more often. After a few more weeks' experience, I concluded that the upright pedaling was actually favored just to facilitate the inexorable smiling and greeting while riding! It may even be that it's one of the reasons bicycling is such a popular means of transportation here. It's a lot harder to interact personally with automotive passers-by. During running, too, it's fairly normal to greet people as you pass them: I've even seen it done in races. As for hugging, well, while it seems to be slightly out of control everywhere I've been in the last several years, here in the American Midwest, our ever-emulating children are hugging so much at the end of recess that a nice suburban school just banned it, as the "hug lines" were holding up classes!

Perhaps it's partly the fault of our language. Civilized languages have both a personal pronoun and a more formal and respectful pronoun, both connoting "you." It's nice. You acknowledge age, respect, relationships, prominence, intimacy or the desire for intimacy all in the pronoun and verb conjugations you use. You don't use the personal pronoun for "you" unless "you" agree or you are a child, basically. This allows relationships to grow and change and, what I like best, it allows us to keep a little distance until we no longer require it. Cold as it may be, I just don't really want to hug you until I like you, and I don't want you to smile and wave at me with good old Midwestern warmth as you pass me in the last tenth of a kilometer of a race. Especially not in the last tenth-kilometer.

Here in nice, friendly Madison, I'm acquiring the habit of locking my doors even during daylight hours, although I'm something of a fresh air fiend. I think I'm becoming more diligent about locking doors here than I was in Denver, where my neighborhood was actually vaguely dangerous, gangs and gunfire not totally unknown. Why lock my doors here? Because people have been entering my house uninvited! Not thieves, not salesmen, not even religious proselytizers: people I know. They knock. If there's no answer, do they go away? No. They try the door. If the front door is locked, they go around to the back door. There is no privacy here. They walk in. "Oh, there you are! I was knocking!" These are not my real friends. My real friends respect me enough to call before they come over. Stopovers are for family and next door neighbors, categories full of innocent people who are pretty much doomed to see you and your house sooner or later without your hair swept into a clip or your hairballs swept into a dustbin.

Yes. You've been knocking and hugging and smiling way too much, and I'm sorry, but it's creepy. Some day I would like to be awakened by you, maybe. Someday, it might bring a slow, soft smile to hear your footsteps entering the front hall while I'm tucked away writing upstairs. But these days would all be when we're close, when we matter to each other, when I've offered you the key to my house because I want you to walk in freely and without notice and to call me pet names like my family does. Right now, it all just pretty much freaks me out and makes me jumpy.

It may be true that we're all more interconnected that it seems and have more in common than we have differences, as most of the Presidential candidates seem intent on demonstrating as they all seek to consolidate one unanimous, indistinguishable, and meaningless position on everything, hence nothing. But does this really mean we have to instantly share the same interpersonal space? Even weak-kneed Democrats managed to sound distinct from the Republicans for a couple of months after last year's elections, when Pelosi first took the podium. But you, whom I just met, do you really automatically get to call me the same name my beloved grandfather did? Are you born with the right and desire to pull me to your ample chest and hold me there, just because we encountered each other in the checkout line? When I answer the door and say, waving my brush, "Oh, I'm busy painting," is it really altogether normal that you breeze on in, clamoring, "Let's see what colors you're using?" and charge up the staircase to the bedrooms?

The card's right. Remember. Smile and the world will smile with you. Be a friend to find a friend. But don't be an instantly intimate friend. It's sort of like coffee. What would you rather have? A cup brewed from boiling water drained slowly through aromatic and freshly ground beans, maybe with a little splash of half and half? Or a cup of microwaved instant, with Cremora? Intimacy is not meant to be instant, anymore than milk is meant to be made of coconut and palm oils and artificial scents and flavorings.

Post Season Play Offs

2007-10-06T09:08:00.000-05:00

The first week of October in my renewed home state in my renewed hometown. Safely past the unprecedented monsoons of late summer, we are, by and large, enjoying what used to be called Indian Summer. Temps in the eighties, abundant sunshine, old men with fragile bowed legs so white they look porcelain still tiptoeing out of the lake behind my house from their daily morning dip. I'm not sure what happened to the term Indian Summer; it seems to have been banished from the lexicon of weather forecasts. Perhaps it is somehow insulting, like tribal names for baseball teams. I mean, I really do understand why some of those team logos are insulting, but I am, you must know, a childhood Braves fan. Milwaukee Braves, that is. Hank and Tommy Aaron Braves, Warren Spahn Braves, Joe Torre and that ultimate heart-throb of heart-throbs among 8 year old girls in 1960's Milwaukee suburbs: Eddie Matthews. Ah, yes. Hank is still up there in my personal pantheon; Barry Bonds, meanwhile, is relegated to janitorial duty, sweeping up dustballs in the most remote corners of baseball history, with those preternatural muscles of his.
But back to Indian Summer, as it was. It is, of course, the MLB play-offs. Back in my recently relinquished home of Colorado, the Rockies are more astonishing than even Mr. Bonds' neck. They are, in short, behaving like champions. They are winning, and they're filling the end days of summer with champagne filtered sunshine out there at the foot of the Rockies where sunshine knows how to be its most resplendent self. Coloradans have waited long for this post season sunshine, fourteen years. When the Rockies first arrived back in 1993, we enjoyed a couple of years of full seating in the impeccable new stadium with the tainted name Coors Field, stands and hearts full of hope. My son, at 5 already an inveterate Yankee fan, occasionally experienced enough misgiving to don, for a day, a Rockies cap.

Here in Wisconsin, I feel the furthest echoes of the tumult of joy emanating from Coors Field, like the last visible rings from a rock dropped into water. My friends are ebullient. It makes me wish to be back there. There is nothing better than the end of summer in a pretty baseball field, the green grass so painstakingly mowed, the white lines, the brick and the iron and the lusty, swaying crowds. Even the hot dogs. I could be a vegetarian and still lust after ballfield hotdogs. Only hardware store hotdogs come close, another ancient American ritual, and one that makes home improvement projects nearly worthwhile.

This week I used what I feared might be the last absolutely dry and sunny day of the year to wash and wax my car. I have been here about six weeks, and a few days ago I was alarmed to notice the first speck of rust on my eight year old Civic. I cleaned that speck with diligence this week and dabbed on a spot of clear nail polish. It is not an advertised use of nail polish, but I have hopes of patenting the process if it works. Once I find a new mechanic who can switch the antifreeze from its presently wimpy freeze level to the subzero version recommended here, my little car will be as ready for a Wisconsin winter as I can make it. I wish I could do more. I wish I could do more for my drafty and thin skinned old house. I wish I could do more for me.

This week, big blue barrels appeared silently on the street corners, as if someone had pushed a button to make them rise from the cement. They are the sand barrels. For those of you who fail to comprehend, they are there so when your car is spinning its tires on sheets of slick ice or packed snow, you can use city-supplied sand to throw on the ice and provide some traction. The sight of these big blue barrels on the street corners makes me gulp and wonder what I've done here. In the distance, I hear the cheers of my friends from Coors Field.

Meanwhile, it's Indian Summer here, though, and I think I'll walk down to the beach now and wade out into the water of Lake Monona one more time today before the tall orange pennants are inserted into the tops of the fire hydrants. Yep. You guessed it. Marking the location of the hydrants in case the snow mounds hide them from the fire fighters this winter.

My local friends assure me winters here have become milder with indisputable global warming. They no longer count on cross country skiing on the city's golf courses in January. "We hardly get snow any more," they assure me. Still, there are the big blue barrels standing sentinel on the street corners and soon I anticipate the waving pennants on their thin and flexible sticks. At my neighborhood hardware store which doesn't sell hotdogs, I gather up armloads from the prominent display of plastic sheeting used to weatherproof windows. But once home, I fling open all the windows wide, because it is sunny and eighty today.

If it's insensitive or just plain wrong to call this Indian Summer, maybe we could just call it the Play-Off Season. The Rockies versus the Phillies, eventually (or maybe not!) the Yanks against the Sox, the Cubs disappearing again, as is their wont. The blue skies playing off against the blue barrels. The pennants of the teams waving with just a little more snappiness than those of the fire hydrants. It's the play-offs; it's the best, the moment of enhanced awareness of what we have enjoyed in summer and what we expect from the winter. On the fulcrum, waving wildly.

Homecoming 2007

2007-09-29T07:58:00.000-05:00

Whenever a person moves, especially when it's a largish move involving a very large truck with a even larger gas tank costing a phenomenally large amount to move one's dismally large collection of three rooms of furniture and nine rooms of absolute junk, one goes through "stuff." In my recent case, I went through the nine rooms of junk assiduously and managed to get rid of the equivalent of four of the monstrous new garbage cans currently dominating Madison streetscapes, mostly full of old papers. I also got rid of my charcoal grill and several CD racks. I have since regretted the CD racks. Oh. I also tossed out my bright red Badger sweatshirt.

You see, I was moving back here, to Badgerland. Living in Colorado, it was kind of nice to have a shockingly red Badger shirt or two, not to mention a discreet Bucky decal on the windshield of my car and a GO BADGERS license plate frame, too. On the highways, friendly blonde tourists would pass me, smiling and waving as only Midwesterners do, pointing to their own Bucky decals, shirts and hats and oh yes, also to the huge Packer flag streaming out from their Explorer's antenna. On the street, fellow alumni would invite me over for brats and beer just for wearing a sweatshirt. Being a Wisconsinite is seriously happy business.

And apparently very good business. I relinquished my own Bucky sweatshirt before returning here because it seems so unnecessary, here in Madison, to announce one's a Badger. I'm here, after all, and my Badgerdom seems self-evident. But apparently I'm missing something. Everyone here wears either the bright, screaming scarlet of the Wisconsin team or the deep, serious green of the Packers. Everyone. Even the radicals. Even the artists. There is more Badger paraphernalia in the University Book Store than books.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not just questioning Wisconsinites' choice of apparel. In Colorado, it was pretty much the same, only it was the blue and orange of the Broncos (I know: Boo, Broncos!) or the black and gold of the Buffaloes. Less of the black and gold lately, since the whole team's pretty much still under a black umbrella of suspicion from all the claims of sexual assault, abuse and discrimination. Maybe the red of the Badgers is just more salient. Or maybe it's actually, in fact, more prevalent.

Why is it we feel such an urge to affiliate ourselves with a team on which we will never, ever play? Wouldn't it be just a little more interesting if we wore sweatshirts saying something of interest, like "Atheist" or "Swimmer" or, my personal favorite, "Single?" I mean, what does one gain by advertising, here in Badgerland, that one's a Badger? Does one really feel more pride? Do we really need more pride? And even if we do need more pride, is it pride in a football team we really need? How about pride in clean water or in our willingness to shelter and feed those who need it? How about pride in the fact that Madison's public schools are crossing the majority minority line with test scores staying high? Is there a sweatshirt proclaiming pride in our school district?

Or perhaps it's all more fundamental than any of this. Maybe we just have no fashion sense or hate ironing or don't want to figure out what shirt really complements the pants we're wearing. A Badger goes so well with everything, such a highly attractive and friendly animal. I lied, you know. I tossed my red sweatshirt but then retrieved it. I was, after all, going home. On, Wisconsin!