Ok, I published a new post on Monday but this came in this morning from the Center for Constitutional Rights, and I wanted those who read this blog to see it too.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
Last year, you may recall, there was a lot of angst about putting "Christ back in Christmas," especially on the Fox Network. I don't know if the anxiety has been as high this Christmas, but the presence of Christ in the season is not in doubt, whether we say "Happy Holidays" or "Seasons Greetings" or something more "religious."
One way to read the incarnation is that the divine, or the elemental life force that animates the universe, is manifest in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. The story of the birth of Jesus is clearly a myth designed to show us how we are children of this elemental force and that our arrival is an occasion of hope and joy. Jesus stands in for each of us, as do his beleaguered parents and the poor and rich alike who seek enlightenment. The star is not out there but within. We can re-enact the birth scene, as St. Francis did (and as we imitate each year in pageants and creches), but we are limiting our understanding of incarnation if we insist on the historical "truth" of this birth story. Too many details are simply wrong; the story is not consistently told. But the myth is powerful because it gives us hope in our own future. And that has value in our difficult times.
In the United States, the Christmas story is one of economic success. For most retailers--and publishers, as I well know from my own work history--without Christmas there is no profit. If we did not have Christmas, we would have to invent another holiday that encourages people to buy. Christmas is the engine of our economy, one could argue. In that sense, the holiday is wholly (and holy) one of the Christ event, in which the incarnation finds its ultimate validity by disappearing into our secular lives. The near disappearance of overt Christian observance in Europe and in the UK is a sign of the complete success of the incarnation. We can no longer tell the difference between secular and spiritual life. They are one.
In other words, the season is not about god coming in and taking over.
The devout might protest that the secular has taken over, that the spiritual is gone. But that is a perspective that claims for the spiritual a separate sphere and meaning. By the myth of the birth of Jesus we in fact are shown the opposite: that the spiritual inheres in the secular and the less we insist on separating the two, the better off we will be.
But be careful: the message is not that theocracy is the answer. We have seen too often that theocracy is a death-delivering system that crushes human spirit and creativity. I am talking about secularism, humanism, whatever word you want to use, in which the sacred is part of and subservient to daily life. The arrival of Jesus, as the myth clearly shows, is about how the elemental force of life that drives all things is not a Ruler. It opens a way and steps aside.
Do I like the commercialism of the season? No. In fact, we aren't buying gifts this year. But we actually take this time, even in spending sprees that are meaningless, to say the words that express the deepest longings of our hearts: that we might have peace, that we might be good to one another, that we might be free of our fears. It might take a new HDTV to make those wishes manifest. The makers of the televisions receive their wages, as do the workers who sell them. When the Wise Men in one version of the myth show up with gifts, no one complains, even though as gifts they are on a par with that tie you'll never wear.
As my parents always said, and probably meant, "it's the thought that counts." Having thoughts of comfort and joy at a given moment of every year is good, even if we do not explicitly connect them with mythic events or a religion that often seems out of touch with what's really going on.
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
PS: Last week I identified some trees in Oregon as Birches, thereby showing my east coast roots and ignorance of local flora. A friend wrote to say that I probably saw Alders. I know that Frost writes in his poem, "Birches," that boys might have been swinging on them; I think boys could swing from Alders too. It might be worth a try.
One way to read the incarnation is that the divine, or the elemental life force that animates the universe, is manifest in our daily lives, whether we recognize it or not. The story of the birth of Jesus is clearly a myth designed to show us how we are children of this elemental force and that our arrival is an occasion of hope and joy. Jesus stands in for each of us, as do his beleaguered parents and the poor and rich alike who seek enlightenment. The star is not out there but within. We can re-enact the birth scene, as St. Francis did (and as we imitate each year in pageants and creches), but we are limiting our understanding of incarnation if we insist on the historical "truth" of this birth story. Too many details are simply wrong; the story is not consistently told. But the myth is powerful because it gives us hope in our own future. And that has value in our difficult times.
In the United States, the Christmas story is one of economic success. For most retailers--and publishers, as I well know from my own work history--without Christmas there is no profit. If we did not have Christmas, we would have to invent another holiday that encourages people to buy. Christmas is the engine of our economy, one could argue. In that sense, the holiday is wholly (and holy) one of the Christ event, in which the incarnation finds its ultimate validity by disappearing into our secular lives. The near disappearance of overt Christian observance in Europe and in the UK is a sign of the complete success of the incarnation. We can no longer tell the difference between secular and spiritual life. They are one.
In other words, the season is not about god coming in and taking over.
The devout might protest that the secular has taken over, that the spiritual is gone. But that is a perspective that claims for the spiritual a separate sphere and meaning. By the myth of the birth of Jesus we in fact are shown the opposite: that the spiritual inheres in the secular and the less we insist on separating the two, the better off we will be.
But be careful: the message is not that theocracy is the answer. We have seen too often that theocracy is a death-delivering system that crushes human spirit and creativity. I am talking about secularism, humanism, whatever word you want to use, in which the sacred is part of and subservient to daily life. The arrival of Jesus, as the myth clearly shows, is about how the elemental force of life that drives all things is not a Ruler. It opens a way and steps aside.
Do I like the commercialism of the season? No. In fact, we aren't buying gifts this year. But we actually take this time, even in spending sprees that are meaningless, to say the words that express the deepest longings of our hearts: that we might have peace, that we might be good to one another, that we might be free of our fears. It might take a new HDTV to make those wishes manifest. The makers of the televisions receive their wages, as do the workers who sell them. When the Wise Men in one version of the myth show up with gifts, no one complains, even though as gifts they are on a par with that tie you'll never wear.
As my parents always said, and probably meant, "it's the thought that counts." Having thoughts of comfort and joy at a given moment of every year is good, even if we do not explicitly connect them with mythic events or a religion that often seems out of touch with what's really going on.
Merry Christmas. Seriously.
PS: Last week I identified some trees in Oregon as Birches, thereby showing my east coast roots and ignorance of local flora. A friend wrote to say that I probably saw Alders. I know that Frost writes in his poem, "Birches," that boys might have been swinging on them; I think boys could swing from Alders too. It might be worth a try.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
To the Beach
My daughter Ruth is visiting for a few days, glad to be in the northwest instead of Philadelphia where, as in the rest of the northeast, the weather is at best cold and sloppy. Yesterday, we drove to Cannon Beach, a town on the ocean whose main attraction is Haystack Rock, which juts out of the surf like a bishop's mitre. Several of these startling behemoths guard the Oregon shore. They are lava formations (our major mountains--Hood, Adams, St. Helens, and Ranier--are volcanoes, one not as dormant as the others). The temperature was in the mid-forties and, despite forecasts, the sun was shining or at least visible through a light cloud cover while we were in Cannon Beach.
Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."
Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.
During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."
Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."
Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.
Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.
A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."
After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."
Light rain was falling as we left Portland, and it stayed with us for about fifty miles. When we got to the ocean side of the coastal range, we encountered the first signs of wreckage left by the fierce storms of two weeks ago. At first there were just some downed trees, not unusual in the forest of mostly spruce and cedar that covers the range. Stands of birch among the conifers surprised us, ghostly gatherings in the shadows. Another variety of tree--and I admit here to my ignorance of what grows in the northest--was leafless and covered with a reddish fuzzy moss. Ruth asked me what was covering the trees--it looked like an affliction--and I said it was the tree Elvis Presley was referring to in "I'm All Shook Up," when he sings, "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree."
Then the number of downed trees increased dramatically, chaotic piles of debris that had undoubtedly once blocked the road. Huge root systems yanked out of the ground, stacks of tangled trunks. Bent birches (not because, as Robert Frost wrote of New England birches, "some boy's been swinging on them") and others broken at the ground disrupted the upright certainty of clustered white stalks. I saw as we rounded a curve the denuded hump of a hill to the south which, as we got closer to it, was covered with trunks that had been topped by the vicious winds that blasted through at a hundred miles an hour. After that first hill, there were others also savaged, the snapped-off tops of trees littering the landscape among the headless trunks, like an army ambushed. We saw only two houses on which fallen trunks still lay.
During lunch we heard a waitress talking about the storm. "You could hear the trees exploding," she said, and it was almost more frightening than the ninety-mile-an-hour winds along the coast that continued for hours. "We thought they would never stop, the winds, and then there was this calm and it was sixty-five degrees and sunny, and we thought, uh-oh, it's going to start again."
Outside the restaurant window, we could see Haystack Rock and a roiling surf that began a few hundred yards out and broke and tumbled chaotically to the flat sand where only a few were walking. And then where we were walking. Peace had settled over the shore. Last summer, Haystack Rock was harried by the multiple varieties of seabirds that nest there. Yesterday, we could see one solitary gull against the rock's dark face. "He's thinking about last summer," I said, "remembering the good times with all the other gulls."
Ruth was snapping shots of the rock with my cellphone camera. A phalanx of walking gulls looked like gangsters with their hunched shoulders. I picked up a small dead fish and tossed it into the air. A gull was on it the moment it landed, tilted back his head, swallowed it whole.
Driving back, I was transfixed by the disaster that had befallen the trees, trying to imagine what it must have been like to fear the wind spraying treetrunks across the hills, the few people who live among them huddled in the dark.
A friend who dropped by to see us after we returned home said, when I talked about the damage caused by the storm, "Yeah, in the coastal range, that happens every year."
After dinner we exchanged gifts and played "Trivial Pursuit."
Sunday, December 9, 2007
GodTubed
A friend of mine whose job it is to keep up with the world of the weird told me about GodTube last week. It is the "Christian" equivalent of YouTube, featuring videos with supposedly uplifting, mostly evangelical content. "Broadcast Him" is the tag line. There are music videos as well as playlettes showcasing the dangers of sin. And of course advertisements, one for Liberty University right at the top of the landing page. See it for yourself: www.godtube.com.
After a week in which Mitt Romney appeared on television to affirm his Christian credentials for Iowan Republican Evangelicals, it seems a kind of GodTube was everywhere. Those of you who watch TV probably saw endless replays of what he had to say, interminable discussions of what it means that a major candidate has to explain his religion, reruns of JFK defending his Catholicism, talking religious heads, etc. Religion was big last week. It will stay big throughout the election year, I think, because everyone running for office feels s/he has to pander to the Christian Right in one form or another. And you cannot be other than Christian if you want to be president. Imagine a Muslim trying to address the nation and concluding with a phrase other than God bless America. Allah, anyone? Or an observant Jew declining to mention the name of the Holy One at all.
The fact is, Romney really has nothing to say about religion. I am content that he is a practicing Mormon down to his underwear and that if he is elected president (he won't be, of course) he will behave no more badly than our current leader. He could hardly be worse. As governor of Massachusetts, he left the state about as liberal as he found it. Listening to him pontificate about his faith must be ten times more painful than reading his words. I hope the others don't follow suit. I don't want to hear Clinton talk about being a Methodist, nor Huckabee tell me about his personal relationship with the Savior and Redeemer of the World.
It is rhetorical nonsense. I was struck that some commentators were concerned that Romney did not argue for the inclusion of nonbelievers in the American civic landscape. Nonbelievers are doing just fine, thank you. The voice of Christopher Hitchens was heard, strident as always, last week in an article condemning, of all things, Hanukkah as a primitive throwback that Jews should repudiate. I also found an image of Santa on the Cross, which Landover Baptist Church (http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/33515) puts on t-shirts and mugs as a pro-Christian (put Christ back in Christmas) statement. The image here also decorates a thong on their website. These are some pretty rad Baptists.
Religion is dished up to us daily in a variety of repulsive forms. One of the most offensive is currently running in movie theaters. Perhaps you've seen it. The video is an advertisement for the National Guard. It features a band on a hillside singing with that breathy sincere sound while soldiers, in Iraq and our own Revolutionary War, rescue children and promise to be there whenever we need them. It is a religious message in every sense of the term, offering salvation, security, and really bad music to true believers (in the American military way). It is exactly the kind of music featured on GodTube, except it extols the citizen soldier instead of Jesus. Both of course are redeemers.
If you haven't already been subjected to the video at a movie theater, you can download the MP3 file and listen to it at http://www.1800goguard.com/movie/index2.php. When we first heard it a couple of weeks ago here in Portland, the audience began hissing before it finished playing. It's one of the reasons we like living here.
What's my point this week? We could use some serious, and less noisy, faith practice in this country (not more religion--we have too much of that). What we have now is a parody of faith: marketing, manipulation, and unbridled ego. Another example of religion as parody, and I'll finish with this one, is from the Episcopal Church, my favorite institution. A diocese in California has officially voted itself out of the church because it, the diocese, knows itself to be purer than those of us who sup with gays and take communion from women priests. The bishop in this diocese sounds just like Romney or any of our political candidates: unctuous, full of himself, and lacking in credibility. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
After a week in which Mitt Romney appeared on television to affirm his Christian credentials for Iowan Republican Evangelicals, it seems a kind of GodTube was everywhere. Those of you who watch TV probably saw endless replays of what he had to say, interminable discussions of what it means that a major candidate has to explain his religion, reruns of JFK defending his Catholicism, talking religious heads, etc. Religion was big last week. It will stay big throughout the election year, I think, because everyone running for office feels s/he has to pander to the Christian Right in one form or another. And you cannot be other than Christian if you want to be president. Imagine a Muslim trying to address the nation and concluding with a phrase other than God bless America. Allah, anyone? Or an observant Jew declining to mention the name of the Holy One at all.
The fact is, Romney really has nothing to say about religion. I am content that he is a practicing Mormon down to his underwear and that if he is elected president (he won't be, of course) he will behave no more badly than our current leader. He could hardly be worse. As governor of Massachusetts, he left the state about as liberal as he found it. Listening to him pontificate about his faith must be ten times more painful than reading his words. I hope the others don't follow suit. I don't want to hear Clinton talk about being a Methodist, nor Huckabee tell me about his personal relationship with the Savior and Redeemer of the World.
It is rhetorical nonsense. I was struck that some commentators were concerned that Romney did not argue for the inclusion of nonbelievers in the American civic landscape. Nonbelievers are doing just fine, thank you. The voice of Christopher Hitchens was heard, strident as always, last week in an article condemning, of all things, Hanukkah as a primitive throwback that Jews should repudiate. I also found an image of Santa on the Cross, which Landover Baptist Church (http://www.cafepress.com/landoverbaptist/33515) puts on t-shirts and mugs as a pro-Christian (put Christ back in Christmas) statement. The image here also decorates a thong on their website. These are some pretty rad Baptists.
Religion is dished up to us daily in a variety of repulsive forms. One of the most offensive is currently running in movie theaters. Perhaps you've seen it. The video is an advertisement for the National Guard. It features a band on a hillside singing with that breathy sincere sound while soldiers, in Iraq and our own Revolutionary War, rescue children and promise to be there whenever we need them. It is a religious message in every sense of the term, offering salvation, security, and really bad music to true believers (in the American military way). It is exactly the kind of music featured on GodTube, except it extols the citizen soldier instead of Jesus. Both of course are redeemers.
If you haven't already been subjected to the video at a movie theater, you can download the MP3 file and listen to it at http://www.1800goguard.com/movie/index2.php. When we first heard it a couple of weeks ago here in Portland, the audience began hissing before it finished playing. It's one of the reasons we like living here.
What's my point this week? We could use some serious, and less noisy, faith practice in this country (not more religion--we have too much of that). What we have now is a parody of faith: marketing, manipulation, and unbridled ego. Another example of religion as parody, and I'll finish with this one, is from the Episcopal Church, my favorite institution. A diocese in California has officially voted itself out of the church because it, the diocese, knows itself to be purer than those of us who sup with gays and take communion from women priests. The bishop in this diocese sounds just like Romney or any of our political candidates: unctuous, full of himself, and lacking in credibility. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom
A friend wrote to me this morning asking if were building an ark. Given the news about the weather in the northwest these past few days, his inquiry was not without merit. It has rained. But the suffering caused by a convergence of Pacific storms has not afflicted us much here in Portland. We are a hundred miles from the Pacific, and there is a coastal range between us and most of the furor. One town, Vernonia, just thirty-five miles away to the northwest was isolated by mudslides and residents had to be evacuated by the National Guard. Some people have died. So the fact that we were mostly spared in Portland is not the story.
It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)
We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.
In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.
A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?
That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.
At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.
But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.
We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.
Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.
Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?
It is odd to be so close to so much mayhem and know little to nothing about it. We gave up television when we moved west from New York City, a grand experiment. We rely on the newspapers, including the New York Times on Sunday, and the internet. What we do not see is the televised hysteria that accompanies every twist of natural or national fate. We are aware that there has been a drumbeat for war against Iran, but we have not watched Wolf Blitzer posting minute-by-minute bulletins, nor had to listen to our Commander in Chief bloviate about the threat to "Amurica by the tarrists." We were somewhat relieved to read this morning that the Iranian threat may have been overstated--but the lack of a threat did not stop the US going into Iraq and probably will not stop our government leaders from launching another war against someone. At least tonight, we do not have to listen to the administration explain how no Iranian threat is actually an increased Iranian threat. (Or how peace is about to break out in the Middle East once again because an American president decided to make it so.)
We do not have to watch television to know that reality shows trump reality or that the candidates for president are almost uniformly dreary, talking endlessly about the nonessentials. The Republicans are busily showing how tough they can be on illegal aliens; the Democrats are trying to show they can be believably tough about anything at all. We are at least spared having to listen to their voices.
In this election everyone believes in god and wants to be sure that we all know it. It is mostly meaningless, this constant reiteration of our national creed. In politics, we believe in power and money--and that's about it. We do not need a television to tell us that has not changed.
A couple of months ago we took a quiz about the political campaign in which we indicated our positions on certain "hot-button" issues. The quiz results told us which candidate most nearly represents what we think. Both Connie and I found ourselves squarely in the Kucinich camp--the only candidate to publicly ask why we are not impeaching George Bush. (The silliness about UFOs is a perfect example of why one can safely avoid television.) Not only that, the candidates most likely to be nominated--Clinton, Edwards, and Obama--were quite far down our list (and of course way ahead of Guiliani, Romney, and Huckacainthompsonbeefritzbottom, although for awhile we liked his lapel pin). What's a citizen to do?
That's exactly the question, isn't it? How many of us will come close to voting for someone we actually trust, admire, and agree with? We said to ourselves: We can't support Kucinich. He won't win. Duh.
At a dinner party a few nights ago, someone said that the government is building camps for dissidents--those who will oppose the coup that is coming in the next year (so that Buscheny will not have to leave office). Someone else said the atmosphere feels like Germany in 1933, the end of a party and the beginning of terror--not the terror caused by imagined jihadists, but the terror caused by our own government, our own society, by Blackwater mercenaries. I have not seen any evidence that the government is building camps for me and my liberal friends.
But I also have seen nothing of the devastation over the mountains to the west, where storms have been raging and people have been swept away by forces over which they have no control. It happens.
We watch these events on television and are told how to feel about them--when to be afraid, angry, distraught. When to pray fervently for the return of the last missing white girlchild. When to pray for the safety of the soldiers we have needlessly put into harm's way. I think Americans will probably watch the coup on television and not realize that something has happened. It will seem all too ordinary by then.
Connie and I will miss the coup if we continue to try to live without cable. I hope some one out there will let us know when things get hot, so that we can call Comcast and get hooked up before the excitement's over. Or take a train to Canada.
Did I mention that the sun is shining today in Portland and that the temperature is around 50 degrees? Perhaps there were no mudslides, no torrential downpours, no deaths, no dramatic rescues on the Pacific coast. Who really knows anything?
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