Secrets

In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable--which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live...

Above is a passage from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. The narrator is a 77-year-old, dying minister who is writing a book to young son, and this is some of what he wants his son to hear when the son is an adult.

Don't You Be Making a List

It has occured to me that when I start getting judgemental about people, I'm kind of like Santa, making a list. How silly of me to butt in. Let Santa make the lists!

This Might Be True

Disappointment, embarrassment, and all the places where we cannot feel good are a sort of death. We've just lost our ground completely; we are unable to hold it together and feel that we're on top of things. Rather than realizing that it takes death for there to be birth, we just fight against the fear of death.

From Comfortable with Uncertainty by Pema Chödrön.

I Don't Believe in Astrology Either

My horoscope for this week according to freewill astrology:
At Salon.com's forum "Table Talk," participants were urged to come up with a six-word sentence that captured the essence of their lives. One person wrote, "Broke. Payday. Broke. Payday. Broke. Payday." Another said, "Oh, no, not again. Again. Again." But the testimony I really wanted to call your attention to is this: "I never learned how to swashbuckle." Why is this pertinent for you? Because I believe that if you have a similar regret -- that you've never mastered the art of swashbuckling -- you will have an excellent chance to fix that problem in the coming months. In fact, I'm tempted to name 2009 as the Year of the Swashbuckle for you Libras. If I could give you a symbolic holiday gift to get you started, it might be a superhero's costume created by a top fashion designer. Happy Holy Daze!

Six Word Speech

The guys at the NY Times Freakonomics blog asked this question: "If Barack Obama’s inaugural address could be just six words long, how would it read?" The winning answer was “Our worst critics prefer to stay.”

Right versus Wrong and Right versus Right

The world, unfortunately, faces plenty of right-versus-wrong questions. From cheating on taxes to lying under oath, from running red lights to inflating the expense account, from buying under-twelve movie tickets for your fourteen-year-old to overstating the damage done to your car for insurance purposes—the world abounds with instances that, however commonplace, are widely understood to be wrong. But right-versus-wrong choices are very different from right-versus-right ones. The latter reach inward to our most profound and central values, setting one against the other in ways that will never be resolved simply by pretending that one is “wrong”. Right-versus-wrong choices, by contrast, offer no such depth: The closer you get to them, the more they begin to smell. Two shorthand terms capture the differences: If we can call right-versus-right choices “ethical dilemmas”, we can reserve the phrase “moral temptations” for the right-versus-wrong ones…[Right versus right dilemmas] are genuine dilemmas precisely because each side is firmly rooted in one of our basic, core values. Four such dilemmas are so common to our experience that they stand as models, patterns, or paradigms. They are:
• Truth versus loyalty
• Individual versus community
• Short-term versus long-term
• Justice versus mercy

The above passage is from How Good People Make Tough Choices by Rushworth Kidder.

Plastic--Yuk!

Last week a friend sent me a PowerPoint about the evils of plastic. I tried to attach it here, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. However, today I stumbled across this blog with the ridiculous name of "Fake Plastic Fish." It's by a woman trying to get rid of plastic in her life and studying the problem. Probably everything the PowerPoint said is at her site too. I haven't had time to read much of it, but it's intriguing.

Slow Cars

The three paragraphs below are from an editorial by Elizabeth Kolbert in the December 8, 2008 issue of The New Yorker. Be sure to read through to the punch line in paragraph three.

The Secretary of Transportation’s report to Congress begins on a dark note. “Over the past year, the domestic auto industry has experienced sharply reduced sales and profitability, large indefinite layoffs, and increased market penetration by imports,” it states. “The shift in consumer preferences towards smaller, more fuel-efficient passenger cars and light trucks . . . appears to be permanent, and the industry will spend massive amounts of money to retool to produce the motor vehicles that the public now wants.” The revenue to pay for this retooling, though, will have to come from sales of just the sort of cars that the public is no longer buying—a situation, the report observes, bound to produce “financial strain.”

“To improve the overall future prospects for the domestic motor vehicle manufacturers, a quality and price competitive motor vehicle must be produced,” the report warns. “If this is not accomplished, the long term outlook for the industry is bleak.”

The Secretary’s report was delivered to Congress in 1980, a year after what may soon become known as the first Chrysler bailout. Depending on how you look at things, the report was either wrong—three years later, Chrysler returned to profitability—or prescient....

He Talks Good

Obama's Use of Complete Sentences Stirs Controversy
Stunning Break with Last Eight Years

In the first two weeks since the election, President-elect Barack Obama has broken with a tradition established over the past eight years through his controversial use of complete sentences, political observers say. Millions of Americans who watched Mr. Obama's appearance on CBS' "Sixty Minutes" on Sunday witnessed the president-elect's unorthodox verbal tick, which had Mr. Obama employing grammatically correct sentences virtually every time he opened his mouth. But Mr. Obama's decision to use complete sentences in his public pronouncements carries with it certain risks, since after the last eight years many Americans may find his odd speaking style jarring. According to presidential historian Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota, some Americans might find it "alienating" to have a President who speaks English as if it were his first language. "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement," says Mr. Logsdon. "If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist." The historian said that if Mr. Obama insists on using complete sentences in his speeches, the public may find itself saying, "Okay, subject, predicate, subject predicate - we get it, stop showing off."

The President-elect's stubborn insistence on using complete sentences has already attracted a rebuke from one of his harshest critics, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. "Talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also," she said.

from Andy Borowitz, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-borowitz/obamas-use-of-complete-se_b_144642.html

Taxes Again

The article below if from Hendrick Herzberg. I have enjoyed his essays in the New Yorker, and was happy to discover his blog at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/?xrail


Since writing “Like, Socialism,” in which I had some fun juxtaposing Sarah Palin’s boast that Alaskans “share in the wealth” via “collectively” owning their state’s oil to her attacks on Obama for proposing to “spread the wealth” via higher marginal taxes on the rich, I’ve seen numerous e-mails along these lines: "I may not be Karl the Marxist (whoever that is), but even I can easily see the distinction (which evades Mr. Hertzberg) between sharing the proceeds of a common asset, like a state’s mineral rights, and spreading the wealth by confiscating (i.e., taxing) part of what some individuals have produced and giving it to others. The proceeds of government leases of drilling prospects are quite different from Hertzberg’s paycheck. If he can’t see that, why not share his entire paycheck with us?"

I see the distinction, too, but I don’t see much of a difference. What I dispute is the flat characterization of personal income as “what some individuals have produced.” Part of my gross income reflects my individual efforts, of course, but part of it reflects the social and political arrangements that make it possible for me to have a paycheck to begin with. That’s the part that’s withheld for taxes. I don’t regard this as “confiscation,” any more than I regard my other monthly bills that way.

In a democratic society, government is as much a “common asset” as the oil under the tundra. We all “share the proceeds,” such as roads, police protection, the Smithsonian Institution, and not getting conquered by foreign armies. And all taxes redistribute the wealth from some individuals to others, whether the others are defense contractors, firefighters, chicken inspectors, destitute mothers, or Chinese (and, lately, American) bankers.

It is fervently to be hoped that market idolatry—the belief that the market is the only truly valuable institution of society and everything else is a parasite on it—is on the way out. “Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society,” Mr. Justice Holmes is said to have said. “Freedom ain’t free,” sing the poets of Nashville. Right they are. And neither is civilization.

In Defense of Liberals

The excerpt below is from a local op-ed piece by Bob Conway in the South Bend Tribune(6/12/08):

I love that bumper sticker that reads: "Organized Labor--the folks who brought you the weekend." Too many of us take things like weekends off, vacations, the 40-hour work week, overtime, sick pay and the minimum wage for granted these days--forgetting that only a few generations ago virtually no American worker had them. The reason we have these benefits today is not that American corporations suddenly decided one day, all on their own, to be magnanimous. Workers have these things now because the liberal labor leaders of my parents' generation organized and fought beside American workers to wrest these now commonplace perks from the bitter, reluctant, stingy, avaricious hands of employers who treated wage workers like lower forms of life.

My Next Pilgrimage

I received an email suggestion that the location on this video could be my next pilgrimage destination. However, the camino del rey is not a pilgrimage, merely a camino--a path. However, I found the video fascinating, so went to Wikipedia for information about this treacherous walk:

In 1901 it was obvious that the workers of the Chorro Falls and Gaitanejo Falls needed a walkway to cross between the falls, to provide transport of materials, vigilance and maintenance of the channel. Construction of the walkway took four years; it was finished in 1905...

The walkway has now gone many years without maintenance, and is in a highly deteriorated and dangerous state. It is one meter (3 feet) in width, and is over 200 meters (700 feet) above the river. Nearly all of the path has no handrail. Some parts of the concrete walkway have completely collapsed and all that is remaining is the steel beam originally in place to hold it up and the wire that follows most the path. One can latch onto the wire to keep from falling. Many people have lost their lives on the walkway in recent years. After four people died in two accidents in 1999 and 2000, the local government closed the entrances; however, adventurous tourists still find their way into the walkway.

Primary Voting Day in Indiana

I received this email this morning from an African American colleague:
"I can’t resist. If you go for the most qualified candidate…it’s Hillary for President and you know it!!"

Why should it be surprising that so many of do vote on the "content of character" criteria and not whether the candidate looks like us?

Bringing Democracy

I saw this poem on a colleague’s door, so I Googled it and here it is. I hope that’s okay with Donald Hall and the HMCo.

WE BRING DEMOCRACY TO THE FISH
by Donald Hall, from White Apples and the Taste of Stone

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

© Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007

What Is Your Dictionary?

Two quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Life is our dictionary,” and “My garden is my dictionary.”

Barack Obama and Race

The passage below from the recent speech by Barack Obama, bluntly titled “Barack Obama's Speech on Race” addresses a topic that we, as a rule, avoid speaking about. Obama has, I think, done a reasoned, articulate, and compassionate job of speaking of the race divide in this country, and while some, like me, are impressed and heartened by the speech, it has also earned him much criticism. No wonder we don’t talk about it. I hope Omaba’s speech does open up the topic despite the acrimony.

Here are a few of Obama’s words: And occasionally [African American anger] finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity within the African-American community in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience — as far as they're concerned, no one handed them anything. They built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pensions dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and they feel their dreams slipping away. And in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Listen here or read here.

YouTube Standouts

Darlene sent this link this week--just what I needed: Leonard Cohen-"Dance Me to the End of Love."

"What a Mom Says" is cute.

And Mateo's favorite is "Rabbit in My Rucksack"
And 6/17/08, Mateo's new favorite Jerry Needs No Help...

About Travel

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.—Pico Iyer

Style

Style is something to be used up. Part of its significance is that it will lose significance.--Sturart Ewen

"We are destroying deep time," says Sven Birkerts

Sven Birkerts (in The Gutenburg Elegies) says there is no wisdom without resonance. He says, "Resonance is a natural phenomenon, the shadow of import alongside the body of fact, and it cannot flourish except in deep time. Where time has been commodified, flattened, turned into yet another thing measured, there is no chance that any piece of information can unfold its potential significance. We are destroying this deep time...No deep time, no resonance; no resonance, no wisdom. The only remaining oases are churches (for those who still worship) and the offices of therapists."

Split in Two

Barbara Mellix writes about her experience of going to collgege after being out of high school for sixteen years, and I think, describes it beautifully. Talking about her papers in her first writing class, she writes, "There is a poverty of language in these sentences." Later she says, "I had the sensation of being split in two, part of me going into a future the other part didn't believe possible." She concludes the article with this: "Writing and rewriting, practicing, experimenting, I came to comprehend more fully the generative power of language. I discovered--with the help of some especially sensitive teachers--that through writing one can continually bring new selves into being, each with new responsibilities and difficulties, but also with new possibilities. Remarkable power, indeed. I write and continually give birth to myself."

Escapists?

The United States of America proclaims itself a land of immigrants. It would not want to be known as a "land of esscapists," yet many did just that: escape from the intolerable conditions of the Old World for the promises of the New.

From YiFu Tuan' book, Escapism.